Prior Bad Acts

2

THE BEST TIME for a controlled release of bad news to the public is Friday afternoon. Taxes are going up, the economy is going down, more troops are being deployed to some third world hot spot-the announcements are made on Friday afternoon. People are busy ending their workweek, getting ready for a few days of freedom, getting out of wherever early for a weekend at a lake. There’s a good chance a lot of attention will be anywhere but on the news.

Detective Stan Dempsey knew how the world of politics worked. He’d been on the shit end of it much of his life, in the army, on the police force. He had a great loathing for the people who held those positions of power. People who were able to wave a hand, shrug a shoulder, raise an eyebrow, and alter the lives of those beneath them without a care or afterthought. People like Judge Carey Moore.

It was difficult for him to think of her as being in a position of authority, holding sway over cases he had built. She seemed too young, looked too pretty. His soul was as old as dirt. He had been wearing a police uniform when she was a child.

He had dealt with Carey Moore when she had been working her way up through the county attorney’s office. A good prosecutor. Tough. Demanding. Despite the big blue eyes and turned-up nose, she had never been anyone’s patsy or pawn.

Dempsey didn’t know what had happened to her since she’d become a judge. Cops had believed they would have someone on the bench who wouldn’t take any crap from defense attorneys, wouldn’t have any time for the dirtbags on trial before her. They had practically expected automatic convictions-Do not pass Go, Go directly to jail.

That wasn’t what had happened at all. She had become a different person on the bench, entertaining ridiculous defense motions, allowing the work of the police force she had once relied on to be questioned and ridiculed. As far as sentences went, if she had a book, she sure as hell wasn’t throwing it at anybody.

And so Stan Dempsey shouldn’t have been surprised that Friday afternoon when the news broke. Court wasn’t even in session. The meeting had gone down in Judge Moore’s chambers.

With nothing better to do, he had left the desk job, where he’d been stuck for all these months, and walked across the street to the Hennepin County Government Center.

The department brass had worried he wasn’t stable enough to be on the streets after the Haas murder investigation. They had worried he was a liability risk, that he might go off at any time on anyone the way he’d gone off on Karl Dahl in the interview room the night Dahl had been arrested.

In his own heart, Dempsey didn’t know that he wouldn’t. He was a different person now. In the twenty-eight years of his career, he had been an exemplary cop-in a uniform and in a suit. Never a complaint filed against him. The Haas murders had changed who he was. He’d gone into that house that summer evening in the eerie calm between thunderstorms, and hours later he had come back out a different man.

The department had sent him to a shrink, but beyond his official report and his statements to Logan in the prosecutor’s office, he had never talked about what he had seen. He had never spoken to anyone about what he felt. Twice a week he had gone to the shrink’s office, stretched out on the couch, and stared at the wall for forty-five minutes, saying nothing.

The truth was, he was too damned scared to say anything. If anyone had known the kind of thoughts that filled his head, he would have gotten shipped off to a secure mental facility. Images of the crime scene were lodged in his brain like pieces of jagged glass. At any given moment a blinding spotlight could hit any one of the images, transporting him back there. He could smell the mildew of the basement and the unmistakable stench of violent death. The sour, acrid smell of terror.

The deaths of that woman and the two children had been horrible. The tortures they had endured, unspeakable. For the very first time in his career, Stan Dempsey had committed the cardinal sin of letting a case get under his skin. He had allowed himself to imagine the last, terrifying hours of the victims’ lives, to feel their fear, their helplessness.

Those emotions had burrowed down into the core of his brain like some kind of weevil. A sense of toxicity had filled him. He had difficulty sleeping, mostly because he feared the violent dreams of vengeance that plagued him. The dreams had become particularly strong recently, as the trial of Karl Dahl drew near.

His lieutenant had been more disturbed than perturbed by the reports from the shrink regarding his twice-weekly lack of cooperation. That was because his lieutenant was a woman, and women always wanted to open up the heads of men and drag their thoughts out into the light like a tangled mess of string to be sorted out and rolled up neatly.

She herself had tried to get him to talk. She had expressed concern for his well-being. She had tried to find out if he had a wife or a family member she could talk to in an attempt to end his stubborn silence.

But Stan didn’t have anyone anymore. People he had been close to over the years had drifted away from him. His wife had divorced him because he was so emotionally closed off, and she needed someone who took an interest in her and in what she needed.

His daughter lived in Portland, Oregon, with her “life partner.” She called on Christmas and Father’s Day. He hadn’t known how to keep her close. He didn’t have the tools, as the shrink told him. He wasn’t open or demonstrative or communicative. He only had the job. And now he barely had that.

The powers that loomed over him had pressed for him to take his retirement and go. They didn’t see that any use he had left in him was worth the risk of having him around. If he snapped one day and beat some skell to death, or drew his weapon and fired into a crowd, he would cost them millions in lawsuits.

Bastards. He was that close to his thirty years and full retirement benefits. He had served the department well and faithfully. And now they wanted to screw him over on his pension because he had suddenly become an inconvenience to them.

No. He would sit at that goddamn desk, go to their shrink and stare at her wall, and time would crawl by, and his career would die on schedule, and he would take his full pension and… and… Nothing.

The thing that kept him going these days was his focus on the Haas case, the pending trial of Karl Dahl. And so he got up from his desk and went across the street and went into the criminal courts side of the building. He positioned himself where he would see the attorneys coming away from Judge Moore’s chambers.

Word was she would rule as to whether or not Karl Dahl’s prior bad acts could be entered into evidence at trial. Logan would fight hard for it. They didn’t have a hell of a lot of direct physical evidence against Dahl. The case was largely circumstantial-knowing that Dahl had been in the Haas home, that he had been there that day, that an eyewitness had seen him enter the house, that he had left a fingerprint on the telephone, that a neighbor had made a complaint about him to the police just days prior to the murders.

But he was the guy, Stan had no doubt, and the murders were something Dahl had been working toward for a long time. He had probably been living that fantasy in his head for years, planning what he would do, inuring himself to any extreme emotional reaction that would come during the commission of the act so that he wouldn’t make mistakes. Stan Dempsey believed that down to the marrow of his bones.

He sat on a bench, crossed his legs, and wished he could smoke a cigarette. A person could hardly smoke anywhere these days. There was even a movement to make it illegal to smoke outdoors in public spaces. Just another little bit of personal individuality being chipped away.

People came and went up and down the hall. No one paid any attention to him. He was unremarkable in his homeliness, a thin gray man in a baggy brown suit. Sad eyes that stared at nothing.

Kenny Scott, the public defender assigned to represent Karl Dahl, burst into the hall, looking like a man whose execution had been stayed.

Logan followed him a moment later. Logan was a force of nature-big, commanding, full of fury. His brows slashed down over his eyes. His mouth was set in a grim line. He leaned forward as if he were walking into a stiff headwind.

Dempsey stood up. “Mr. Logan?”

For an instant, Logan glared at him, then slowed his march and veered toward him. “Detective.”

“I heard maybe a ruling was coming down on Karl Dahl.”

Logan glanced away and frowned. His tie was jerked loose at the throat, collar undone. He pushed his coat open and jammed his hands at his waist.

“She didn’t dismiss the case,” he said.

“There was a chance of that?”

“Look, Stan, you and I both know Dahl butchered that family, but we don’t have a hell of a lot to prove it. His lawyer has to move to dismiss-that’s his job.”

“What about Dahl’s record?”

Logan shook his head. He was clearly pissed off. “Judge Moore seems to think it’s inflammatory and prejudicial.”

“Being on trial for a triple murder isn’t?” Stan said. “A lot of folks figure if he’s sitting in that chair, he must be guilty.”

“It’s a game, Stan,” Logan said bitterly. “It’s not about right or wrong. It’s about rules and fairness, and making sure no one has the common sense to form an opinion.”

“Can you appeal?”

Logan shrugged, impatient. “We’ll see. Look, Stan, I’ve got to go,” he said, reaching out with one big hand to pat Dempsey’s shoulder. “Hang in there. We’ll get the son of a bitch.”

Dempsey watched him go, feeling defeated. He looked back down the hall toward Judge Moore’s chambers. He wanted to go in there and talk to her. He thought he would tell her in great detail the things he had seen, and the terrible waves of emotion that bombarded him all day, every day, and all night, every night.

He could see her sitting behind her desk, looking cool and calm, the desk acting as a buffer between them. He would politely introduce himself (because he never expected anyone to remember him). He would tell her how disappointed he was in her ruling.

But then he saw himself exploding, raging, storming behind the desk. Eyes huge with shock, she bolted, tripping as she scrambled to get out of her chair and run. He trapped her in the corner, her back against a cabinet, and screamed in her face.

He wanted her to feel the kind of terror Marlene Haas must have felt that day when Karl Dahl had come into her home and tortured her and her two children over the course of several hours before he had butchered her.

Rage built and built inside him like a fire, searing his organs, melting the edges of his brain. He felt huge and violent and monstrous inside. He saw himself wrapping his stubby hands around her beautiful white throat, choking her, shaking her.

But no one passing by Stan Dempsey saw anything but a bony man, with a heavily lined, expressionless face, loitering at the end of the hall.

He cleared the images from his mind and left the building to have a cigarette.