Prior Bad Acts

19

“THE BRASS ARE pulling out all the stops on this.”

Homicide lieutenant Juanita Dawes sat back against the front edge of her desk. She was in full on-camera dress: hair done, makeup done, a smart navy blue suit with the perfect accessories. The press conference would start in the chief’s office in half an hour.

Dawes had jumped up the PD food chain by leaps and bounds. She was forty-one. Liska knew this because every time Dawes’s name appeared in the newspaper, her age was always mentioned as if it were actually a part of her name. Lieutenant Juanita Dawes Forty-one.

Liska’s theory was that the brass thought they were getting an equal-opportunity publicity triple whammy with Juanita Dawes-a black Hispanic woman. It wouldn’t matter to them that Juanita was not actually Hispanic. What the chief and everyone else in his stratosphere cared about most was appearance.

Not that Dawes wasn’t qualified. Liska felt she was the best lieutenant they’d had in a long time. And however she had climbed the ladder, more power to her.

Liska had dragged herself out of bed early to go through the same pregame ritual as Dawes: hair, makeup, a steel gray suit that accentuated the blue of her eyes, simple black pearl earrings, and a fine silver chain necklace threaded through a single black pearl.

She looked like a million damn dollars. Maybe she would get marriage proposals after the press conference aired on every television in the Twin Cities.

“We’ve got someone going over the video from the parking garage. With luck you’ll have an enhanced version to look at shortly,” Dawes went on. “I’ve pulled in Elwood and Tippen. They’ll be compiling information on any recently released cons who had Judge Moore preside over their cases. They’re already talking with the judge’s clerk to find out if she’s had any hate mail.”

“We’ll need phone records too,” Liska said. “We’ve got the number the calls last night came from. It’s untraceable, but at least we can establish a pattern or a time line.”

“That’s already happening,” Dawes said. “And you’ll need to track down the father of the foster kids who were killed in the Haas massacre. Has there been any activity on the judge’s credit cards?”

“Not yet,” Liska said. “I guess I get to be the one to call attention to the elephant in the room.”

Dawes frowned. “Stan Dempsey.”

“He has to be at the top of the hit list in light of what Sam found this morning.”

Dawes looked genuinely sad. “I hate to have to think in that direction, but it looks like we’ve got a very real possibility in Dempsey. Kovac said he all but openly admitted he wants to make Judge Moore pay for ruling in Dahl’s favor.”

“But here’s what doesn’t make sense to me,” Liska said. “If Dempsey attacked Judge Moore last night, why wouldn’t he take the credit on the tape he made this morning? I mean, why play coy about it? According to Sam, he wasn’t shy on the tape talking about what he’s planning to do next.”

“That’s a good point,” Dawes said. “If he attacked the judge in his self-appointed role of avenging angel of justice, why wouldn’t he say so? Why wouldn’t he say something like ‘I’m going to finish what I started’ or ‘I gave that bitch what she deserved’?”

“Of course, the guy’s gone nuts,” Liska said. “Who’s to say what’s going on in his head?”

“I’d like to get a professional’s opinion on that. I’ll talk to the chief about calling in the shrink Dempsey’s been seeing.”

“She’ll cry privilege.”

“She can cry all she wants,” Dawes said. “But if Dempsey told her about his plans to commit a crime, she’s obligated to report that to us.”

“I can’t see Stan Dempsey pouring his heart out to anyone about anything,” Liska said. “In all the time I’ve been in Homicide, I don’t think I’ve heard the guy say ten words.”

“I know. He’s one strange homely little duck, our Stan,” Dawes said. “I feel sorry for him. Let’s try to give him the benefit of the doubt here for a moment. Who else have you talked to about last night?”

“Wayne Haas, his son, the son’s buddy.”

“And?”

“We don’t like Wayne Haas for it,” Liska said. “The son could be a candidate. He and his friend admitted being downtown late afternoon, and he knew about Judge Moore’s ruling. He certainly has plenty of reasons to be pissed off at her.”

“And Sam spoke with the judge’s husband?”

“Yeah. He doesn’t like the guy. Says he’s a prick.”

Dawes made a face. “Kovac doesn’t like anybody. He would give his own mother the third degree.”

“He’s looking into David Moore’s alibi today.”

Dawes looked at her watch and sighed. “We’d better go up there,” she said. “Chief’ll chew my ass if we’re late. You know what to say when they start asking you questions?”

“We can’t speculate on or discuss the facts of an ongoing investigation.”

“You got it,” Dawes said as she pulled open the door to her office. She tipped her head as Liska went past. “Great suit, Detective.”

“Back at you, Boss.”

The press conference was the usual circus of muckety-mucks who knew nothing and reporters who wanted to know everything. Liska wondered how many of either group would have shown up if Carey Moore had been a single mother who worked two jobs to make ends meet. Carey Moore rated the mayor, the county attorney, the chief of police, the assistant chief, the captain of the investigative division, Lieutenant Dawes, and herself.

The lights for the television people were harsh, white, and made her squint, which was going to confuse her possible fiancés in the viewing audience, she thought, needing a little humor to offset the seriousness of the situation. She probably looked like a Chinese woman with bleached hair. Chinese Punk Woman. Her male prospects were going to skew to Asian bad boys.

The press was in a feeding frenzy. First over Karl Dahl’s escape, then over Judge Moore’s attack. The Hennepin County sheriff had to be the whipping boy for losing Dahl. As far as Liska was concerned, there was no explanation for what had happened that didn’t include the words “cluster fuck.”

He promised that every available deputy was out looking for Dahl. He promised that Dahl was absolutely his priority and the priority of everyone in the sheriff’s office. The Minneapolis branch of the FBI had been called in to assist. His promises didn’t carry much weight, seeing as how it was the sheriff’s office that had been in charge of Dahl in the first place.

The PD brass focused on the need to restore public confidence in law enforcement. The top detectives in the department were on the case, determined to bring to justice the man who had struck at the very heart of our judicial system.

When Liska was called upon to answer questions, she repeated her lines perfectly. “We can’t speculate on or discuss the facts of an ongoing investigation.”

Her first stop after the press conference was the women’s prison to speak with Amber Franken, mother of the two foster children who had been killed at the Haas home.

Amber Franken was a skinny, ratty-looking dishwater blonde with a pasty complexion. Her skin was so thin Liska could see the blue tracery of veins in her throat. She had rolled up the sleeves of her shirt to show off sinewy arms lined with tattoos and old needle track marks. She was twenty-two. Which meant she had started popping out kids at the tender age of fourteen. The two children who had been murdered had been ages seven and five at the time of their deaths. A two-year-old girl had been placed by social services with a different family.

She swaggered into the interview room with a sour look on her face and dropped into a chair across the table from Liska.

“Amber, I’m Detective Liska from Homicide division.”

“I’m suing the police department for what happened to my kids,” she said, sneering.

“Yeah?” Liska said, uninterested. “Good luck with that.”

“And I’m suing social services too. They put my kids in an unsafe environment.”

Liska wanted to ask Amber what kind of environment she, a junkie whore, had provided for her children. But she needed the woman’s cooperation, and that required her to rein in her usually smart mouth.

Good luck with that, Nikki.

“Have you had any contact with your kids’ dad lately?”

Amber laughed. “That piece of shit? I haven’t had ‘contact’ with him since the last time he knocked me up.”

“Then why is he on the visitors’ log for having been here ten days ago?”

“Probably here to see one of his other sluts.”

Liska leaned forward, elbows on the table, and sighed. “Look, Amber, you don’t want to talk to me, I don’t want to talk to you. But we’re gonna sit here and enjoy each other’s company until you give me a straight answer.”

Again with the sneer and a snotty shake of her head. “I got nothing but time.”

“That’s true. But you can stay in this place for more time or less time.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means if you waste my time, jerk me around, piss me off, and refuse to cooperate with a police investigation, that’s not gonna look very good on your record when you come up for parole.”

The girl pulled back in her chair, her face mottling, eyes bugging out a little. “Are you threatening me?”

“I’m telling you the plain truth, Amber,” Liska said without emotion. “I’m doing you a favor telling you. If you don’t straighten up and at least pretend to be a good citizen, the parole board is not going to be all that anxious to kick you back out into the real world. That’s how it is.

“You’re pulling real time here. This isn’t county jail, where they’re happy to watch your ass walk out the door because they need the bed,” Liska said. “Unlike a lot of other places, the State of Minnesota has plenty of prison cells to go around.

“Am I getting through to you here? I don’t want to make things hard for you, Amber. I really don’t. I don’t even want to be here right now. I’ve got two kids of my own. I’d like to be spending time with them.

“I’m sure, as a mother, you can understand that. You remember what it was like. Your kids look up to you like you’ve got the key to the world. That love is like no other. That bond is stronger than anything.”

Amber Franken’s eyes welled with tears. She looked away, arms crossed tight, as if she was trying to hold herself together.

“You miss them, don’t you?” Liska said softly.

It didn’t matter how unfit a mother this chick had been; absence had erased the bad memories and left her with sweet, sentimental images of time with her children. Children she would never see again.

“I can only imagine what that must feel like, knowing that they’re gone. Knowing what they went through before they died…”

Amber began to cry in earnest. She put her hands over her face and sobbed, “I miss them so much!”

Genuinely feeling sorry for the girl, Liska sat patiently as the worst of the storm wore itself out. There couldn’t be anything worse in the world than to think of your children being tortured by a sadist.

After a few minutes, Amber pulled up the tail of her shirt and wiped her face and nose with it.

Liska tried again. “Why was Ethan Pratt here to see you ten days ago?”

Amber drew in a shuddering breath. “To talk about the lawsuits. He wants in on them, the rotten son of a bitch. Like he was ever anything more than a sperm donor. Fucking leech. I told him to hire his own damn lawyer.”

“Did he say anything about Karl Dahl’s trial coming up?”

She wiped her nose again, this time with the back of her hand, which she then wiped on the leg of her pants. “He said he’d want Judge Moore next time he got arrested, ’cause she cares more about the guy on trial than the victims.”

“Did he seem angry about that?”

“He called her a fucking cunt, if that’s what you mean.”

“That’s what I mean,” Liska said.