Prior Bad Acts

34

KARL KNEW HE couldn’t stay in the park all night. He had been there for a long time as it was, though no one had paid him any mind. But the city didn’t allow overnight parking in the lot.

He had spent the afternoon wandering from park bench to park bench. The day had been so pretty, people had stayed in the park to have cookouts, to watch the sun set, to squeak out every drop of good weather. The smell of meat grilling had made Karl’s stomach growl. But now the warm day had given way to a chilly evening that was nipping right through his brown cashmere poncho and sneaking up under his skirt. It was time to move to a warmer hiding spot.

He stared across the street at Carey Moore’s house. One set of windows upstairs and one set downstairs glowed with lamplight.

In the afternoon, Karl had spotted her briefly as a black Mercedes sedan had rolled out of the garage. She was in the passenger’s seat. A police officer was driving. A small head of unruly dark hair had bounced up and down in the backseat. Carey Moore’s child.

Karl closed his eyes and imagined her heavy with child. A beautiful sight. A Madonna. His angel. He wondered what she might be doing right at that very moment.

At one point earlier in the evening, a man got out of a sedan parked behind the police cruiser, went to the driver’s side of the car, and said something to the officers inside, then walked up into the yard and stood near the lighted downstairs windows. Another cop. Plainclothes.

Time had stretched by and nothing happened.

As he contemplated this peculiar turn of events, the Moores ’ garage door rose and the same black sedan rolled out with only the driver inside. A man, he reckoned, by the size of him. The husband, he supposed. He drove away fast, like maybe he was mad about something. Another sedan had slid away from the curb to follow him. The plainclothes cop had followed moments later.

The important thing to Karl was that the husband was gone.

Soon it would be time for him to speak to Carey Moore. To thank her for her kindness to him. To explain to her his feelings for her and how much she meant to him. In his whole life hardly anyone had ever taken his side in anything. She had risked her life to take his side in this trial.

He imagined kneeling at her feet, pouring his heart out to her. He imagined her expressing her understanding to him. In his imagination she was lit from behind with a golden light, and she stood with her arms opened, looking just like a statue of the Virgin Mary his mother had kept on her dresser. It was a beautiful dream.

Karl looked up at the stars in the clear night sky-what stars a man could see with a city all around him-and thought this might become the most perfect night of his life.

After a while, he got up and straightened his skirt and walked back to the parking lot and Christine Neal’s Volvo.

Stan Dempsey drove through Carey Moore’s neighborhood, but not past her home. He knew the officers in the radio car out front would be making note of the plate numbers of every vehicle that cruised by and immediately running them through the system, looking to get a hit on a possible suspect.

Instead, he cruised up the next block, toward the Moore home, then turned in at the driveway of a dark house near the end of the street and sat there, watching.

A dark sedan backed out of the garage fast and drove toward him in a hurry. Seconds later, an unmarked car followed. Shortly after that, a second unmarked car. As it passed under the streetlight, Stan thought it might be Sam Kovac behind the wheel.

Kovac was a good cop, a straight shooter, probably the best detective on the squad. It would be difficult to pull off anything under Kovac’s nose. But now he had gone from Carey Moore’s house and from her neighborhood, and Stan could see a window of opportunity cracking open.

He didn’t mean to get away with anything. He meant only to finish his job. When his job was finished, he would be honored to have Sam Kovac close the case.

When his job was finished…