Prior Bad Acts

27

DAVID MOORE, the brilliant filmmaker who hadn’t made a film in years, had a Web site devoted to himself. Arrogant prick.

Back at his desk, Kovac looked it over. It wasn’t a cheap deal. Sharp graphics, great color, a little slide-show montage of his work. A lot of self-aggrandizing crap about his credentials and awards he had won in the past. He certainly made himself sound like a genius.

Kovac wondered if he ever got a call off this site to produce anything or if it was just for ego. He knew nothing about the making of documentary films, except that when he watched one on PBS, they always seemed to be funded by grants from big oil companies and private trusts for the endowment of the arts. The latter of which was apparently where Edmund Ivors came into the game.

He didn’t know what kind of a living a man could make doing what David Moore did. Seemed to him that if the guy only got one film made in a decade, either he made a boatload of money doing it or he was leeching off his wife.

Kovac suspected choice B. David Moore was all talk and no walk. His most recent work had been producing the occasional commercial for local television.

The best thing Kovac could see about Moore ’s Web site was that the jerk had included numerous photographs of himself. Photographs of him hard at work and twenty pounds thinner. Photographs of him in black tie at some awards bash.

Carey was with him in that one. She looked happier then, with a brilliant smile, her hand on her husband’s arm. A knockout dress that flashed a little skin. She would have been a prosecutor at the time, trying to make a name for herself in the county attorney’s office. And Husband had been at the top of his game, the man of the hour.

Cut from the same inferior materials as Liska’s ex, Kovac thought. Big mouth, fragile ego. What had Carey said? That her husband resented her.

With guys like that around, it was a pure damn wonder that women bothered to associate with men at all. Not that he’d been any great catch himself, Kovac admitted. At least he couldn’t say he had ever resented either of his wives when he’d been married to them. Afterward was a whole other matter.

The four-star Marquette Hotel had been designed as part of the central complex of the IDS Center, a soaring fifty-plus dramatic stories of dark glass. The hotel connected to the main office tower via the Crystal Court-a glass-enclosed 23,000-square-foot urban park with a glass ceiling 121 feet above the ground and a 105-foot cascading water fountain at its center.

The complex connected to the rest of the city by the skyway system-enclosed second-story sidewalks that linked most of the major buildings downtown. The skyways allowed you to travel by foot all over downtown without ever setting a toe outdoors, a great thing when winter temperatures dropped well below zero and the winds howled through the concrete canyons of the city.

At the front desk, Kovac showed his badge to a young clerk, who immediately went and fetched the manager, a rail-thin red-haired man with a very serious face. Brendan Whitman, his name tag said. Kovac went through the introduction business again, then showed Whitman the photograph of David Moore he had printed from the Web site.

“Mr. Whitman, do you recognize the man in this picture?”

“Yes. That’s Mr. Greer,” he said without hesitation.

Mr. Greer. David Moore had chosen his father-in-law’s name to use when checking into hotels to cheat on his namesake’s daughter. Passive-aggressive prick.

“Can you tell me if Mr. Greer was checked into the hotel yesterday?”

Whitman looked at him, suspicious. “What’s this about?”

“This is about a police investigation into an assault last night. I’m sure you wouldn’t want the good name of your hotel to be associated with an assault if there was no need.”

“Of course not.”

“So let’s try this again. Did Mr. Greer check into the hotel yesterday?”

“Yes. I checked him in myself.”

“What time was that?”

Whitman thought about it. “Around three in the afternoon, as usual.”

“He’s a regular?”

“Every other week. He’s from Los Angeles. Does something in the movie industry. Was Mr. Greer injured in the assault?”

“Not yet,” Kovac muttered under his breath. “Is he usually with a lady when he comes in?”

“No. Always by himself.”

“Have you ever seen him here with a woman?”

“Yes. I’ve seen him several times with a woman in the bar.”

“What did she look like?”

Whitman squinted as he thought about it. “Ummm… medium height, slender, blond.”

“Do you keep records on your guests?” Kovac asked. “Could you, say, type Mr. Greer’s name into your computer and bring up a list of his stays at the hotel?”

“Yes, but you’ll need a warrant for that,” Whitman said. “If we just gave out that kind of information, it would open the hotel to lawsuits. If we can show we were compelled by the authorities to give over the information…”

“I understand,” Kovac said, though he didn’t like it.

There was no chance of his getting a warrant for David Moore’s hotel records, or for his financials, which Kovac would have loved to get his hands on. To get a warrant, he had to show reasonable cause for the specific items or information he wanted. As he had been told by more than one prosecutor, Carey Moore among them, if what he wanted was a fishing license, he would have to get it from the state Department of Natural Resources.

Moore ’s hotel stays would be pertinent in divorce court, not criminal court. The investigation was about Carey Moore’s assault, and David Moore’s alibi held. Unless Kovac could come up with something that connected Moore to the actual perpetrator of the crime, he was out of luck.

Liska would have been all over him if she’d known he was even asking the questions he had asked Brendan Whitman. She already thought the warning flags were up, which irritated him. For Christ’s sake, couldn’t he feel sorry for Carey Moore without falling in love with her overnight? He couldn’t simply dislike her husband for cheating on her?

It wasn’t like he fell for women at the drop of a hat. For the most part, he’d sworn off relationships. They never worked out for him. He wasn’t exactly sure why. He was a decent guy, treated women with respect. He knew the job had taken its toll on his marriages. The hours, the grimness, the stress. His better qualities apparently weren’t enough to offset that.

He was a cop. It wasn’t what he did; it was who he was. He could no more change that than he could change the color of his eyes, so he just didn’t think about it… most of the time. The one woman he’d fallen for who would have understood that, because she had been a cop herself, had committed suicide right in front of him.

He still thought about her, still felt pain at the loss. He still second-guessed himself sometimes late at night when the nightmare of that scene woke him. If only he’d known the depth of her pain… If only he had unraveled the mystery of her an hour sooner… If only he could have reached her before she fired the gun…

Pointless to think about it, he knew. What happened, happened. No one could change that. It hadn’t been in the cards for him to save Amanda Savard.

“She’s another damsel in distress who needs rescuing… ”Liska’s words whispered in his ear. Kovac shut them out and closed the door on the whole topic.

The lobby bar was empty except for the bartender, who was busy checking bottles. Kovac pulled out a stool and sat down.

“Sorry, sir,” the bartender said. “We don’t open till four.”

“Good. I’ll be out of here before I’m tempted to drink on duty.”

The bartender looked over her shoulder, raising an eyebrow at the badge. She was a little thing, but tough as nails. He could see it in the fine lines around her eyes, the set of her mouth. Forty-something, he figured, dark hair scraped back into a ponytail for convenience, not cuteness. Patty, according to her name tag.

“I can make an exception for a badge,” she said in a two-pack-a-day voice.

“Don’t tempt me.”

He put the picture of David Moore down on the bar.

“Oh, yeah,” she said, rolling her eyes. “What’s he wanted for? Have they finally made being an asshole a crime?”

“We’d have to build jails on the moon,” Kovac said.

Patty laughed at that, a harsh cackle that would have been more at home in some American Legion post bar than in a swank hotel.

“You see a lot of him?” Kovac asked.

“Enough to know he’s a cheap son of a bitch. Buys himself a label, buys the working girl house booze.”

“Working girl?”

“Skirt up to her ass, neckline down to her navel ring? She ain’t no schoolgirl, unless the guy pays extra, if you know what I’m talking about.”

“Medium height, blond, thin?”

“Expensive tits? That’s the one.”

“They were in here last night?”

“They were in here around six, six-fifteen. I was trying to watch the news,” Patty complained. “Hey, what’s up with that psycho Dahl? Have you caught him?”

“I don’t know,” Kovac said. “Not my case.”

“What kind of retards do they have running that jail? Jesus.”

Kovac let the question ride. “So they were in here, just the two of them?”

“For a while,” Patty said. “She’s all over him. The postgame cozies, if you know what I mean. If I didn’t think he paid for it, I’d say she’s in love with the clown. She’s got the big cow eyes. She’s all ‘Oh, David’ this and ‘Oh, David’ that,” she said in a higher, breathier voice, batting her eyelashes. In the next second, she made a face like she’d tasted something rotten.

“Made me wanna puke,” she said. “Then, around seven, this older guy comes in and joins them. Real neat, kind of prissy-looking. Expensive suit, little beard trimmed just so.”

She curled her lip and shook her head, disgusted. “He had that look like maybe he likes to watch, if you get my drift. At least he was a good tipper.”

Patty poured two fingers of Johnnie Walker Red and set it in front of him.

“On the house,” she confided. “Don’t worry about it. I’ll overcharge the next big asshole.”

Kovac thanked her and took a long sip of the scotch and savored the smooth warmth as it went down. Just one moment of quiet pleasure. Now, if he had a smoke…

“And then this other guy came and joined them,” Patty said, helping herself to one of the nut dishes. “But he didn’t stay long.”

Kovac’s alarm bells went off. “Another guy?”

“Yeah. Thirty. On the small side. Longish blond hair. Kind of foxy-looking. Wiry, sharp features, narrow eyes.”

“How was he dressed?”

“Dark jeans, black jacket, black T-shirt.”

“And he didn’t stay long,” Kovac said.

“Ten, fifteen minutes. I couldn’t say for sure. It had started getting pretty busy in here. Predinner crowd. But I know he wasn’t here as long as they were.”

Long enough to say the job was done, Kovac thought. Long enough to pick up his payoff.

David Moore, you son of a bitch.

A rush of electricity went through him, the way it always did when a piece of the puzzle fell into place. He wanted to run right out and haul Moore downtown for questioning, but he knew he wasn’t quite there, didn’t quite have enough. He needed to put a name to the foxy-faced guy dressed in black. The guy who had shown up here between seven and seven-thirty, a time frame that easily could have allowed him to be in that parking ramp when Carey Moore was being attacked.

To get that name, he needed to go back to the weakest link in the trio, Ginnie Bird. If he could get her alone, she’d break fast.

The fantasy was cut short by the ringing of his cell phone.

“Kovac.”

“Detective. Judge Moore is leaving her house. We thought you’d want to know.”