Prior Bad Acts

47

LISKA WALKED INTO the war room, feeling troubled and anxious. She had called in a BOLO for Bobby Haas and Jerome Walden and for Wayne Haas’s Chrysler. There wasn’t much else she could do on that front. She couldn’t figure the boys for the abduction of Judge Moore. That had pro written all over it. But she kept moving the puzzle pieces of Bobby Haas’s life around and around in her mind, not liking any of the pictures she came up with.

The women in Bobby’s life hadn’t fared well. His mother had killed herself in front of him. The first Mrs. Haas had fallen to her death. The second Mrs. Haas had been murdered. Judge Moore had been assaulted, would probably have been killed if not for the car alarm scaring off the perpetrator. And now she was gone, vanished.

The idea of the boy’s being involved in any of that made Liska’s skin crawl. He looked so sweet, seemed so polite, so vulnerable. The fact that he had had so much sadness and tragedy in his life tripped the Mother switch in her and made her want to put an arm around him and comfort him. He wasn’t much older than Kyle, her firstborn. It was difficult for her not to look at Bobby Haas and see Kyle, and want to protect him.

He had told her Rebecca Haas had died of cancer.

The lie was like a stone in her shoe-small but irritating, something she couldn’t stop thinking about.

Why would he have lied?

Because he thought telling the truth to a cop would arouse suspicion?

Or was it just as Marcella Otis had said, that maybe Bobby didn’t want to think about his first foster mother’s violent demise? Lieutenant Dawes had suggested the boy might have felt like less of a freak saying his mom had died of cancer than being known as the kid with multiple violent deaths in his life.

“You’re just in time for the movie,” Tippen said.

Liska joined him, sitting on the end of the table as Elwood stuck a videotape in the VCR and turned the television on.

“Why so glum?” Tippen asked.

She shrugged. “Oh, I don’t know. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that every day of my life is about death and depravity and the decline of a once-great civilization.”

“Oh, stop whining,” Tippen said. “It could be worse. You could be the sheriff’s deputy who didn’t cuff Karl Dahl to the gurney.”

“Any word on him, Dahl?”

“Nada. He’ll probably resurface years from now, found to be working as director of a shelter for homeless women and children in Milwaukee. Credited with orchestrating the decline in the numbers of street people.”

“Well, that cheered me up,” Liska said. “Excuse me while I go slit my wrists.”

Elwood hit the play button, and the television screen filled with black-and-white snow, then a bird’s-eye view of the lobby bar in the Marquette Hotel, date and time superimposed in the upper right-hand corner of the screen. The tape was clean, the picture sharp enough to easily make out faces. He hit fast-forward, racing through the tape to the time in question.

“There’s David Moore and his amour,” Tippen said, using a laser pointer to touch the screen.

“Eeww!” Liska said, wrinkling her nose at the sight of Moore ’s junkie whore girlfriend crawling all over him. “Get a room!”

Elwood goosed the tape ahead until Edmund Ivors joined the party, then goosed it a little more.

“Here he comes,” Liska said.

Slender guy on the small side, dressed in black, fine blond hair almost to his shoulders. He could definitely have passed as a woman, from a distance.

He walked up to the table, leaned down, and shook David Moore’s hand, presenting his profile.

Tippen sat up straighter. “I know that guy! That’s Long Donny. Long Donny Bergen.”

“Who’s Long Donny Bergen and why do they call him that?” Liska asked.

“He’s a porn star.”

“Oh, gross!” Liska jumped off the table and looked at Tippen with disgust. “Don’t tell me you’re a fan! I don’t want that in my head!”

“What?” Tippen asked, shrugging his shoulders. “The man is a star in his own right.”

“Oh, yuck! And here I thought I already knew too much about you!”

“We know why you know him, Tip,” Elwood said. “The question is: Why does David Moore know him?”