Prior Bad Acts

49

HER BODY HAD BEEN folded into the trunk of a late-model dark blue Volvo. She looked like a broken doll lying there, legs bent, her eyes wide-open, her head turned at an odd angle.

She was wearing a brown velour Juicy Couture tracksuit and a pair of pink Puma running shoes. Dressed for a Saturday night at home, kicking back to watch a movie and eat some popcorn.

“I-I didn’t have anything to do with that.”

Kovac looked at the guy, annoyed.

Bruce Green. Twenty-seven. Pasty white wimp with a mop of blond frizz that looked like he’d stolen it off the dead body of Harpo Marx. Bell-bottoms and a black and yellow rugby shirt. He dabbed a bloody handkerchief under his nose. His forehead was growing a big goose egg.

“I-I just glanced down,” Green went on nervously. “I-I dropped my BlackBerry, and-and when I reached for it, I knocked over my latte, and-and it spilled-”

“Shut up,” Kovac said sharply. He turned back to the uniform who had been first on the scene, Hovney, a woman built like the corner mailbox, with a face like the flat side of an anvil.

“He rear-ended the Volvo,” she said, “which was parked here at the curb. The trunk popped. The rest is history.”

Green’s car, a butt-ugly pea green square box Honda something-or-other, had suffered front-end damage. Pieces made from plastic had shattered and lay on the street.

The street had been cordoned off. Half a dozen squad cars sat at angles on either end of the accident scene.

Kovac pulled on a pair of gloves and tried to turn the nanny’s head. The body was in rigor. The second-shift surveillance team had reported the girl had left the Moore house around ten-thirty. She hadn’t lived long past that time. Rigor mortis would have begun to set in two to four hours after death. Full rigor was achieved eight to twelve hours after death.

The car was parked on the side street around the corner from the 7-Eleven, where Anka had supposedly gone to pick out a movie and buy some snacks, just past the alley that ran behind the store. The killer had probably initially parked in the alley, out of view. He had nabbed the girl, pulled her into the alley, killed her, put the body in the trunk, driven out of the alley, and parked at the curb. Then he had gotten behind the wheel of the nanny’s Saab and calmly driven back to the Moore house.

The car would have been equipped with a garage door opener. The keys to the house were probably on the same key ring as the keys to the Saab. He could have forced the nanny to give up the security code to the house system before he killed her. Or, as Kovac had speculated earlier, David Moore had simply given it to him, along with the twenty-five thousand dollars.

“I guess we can rule out the nanny as a suspect,” Liska said.

Hovney went on. “The plates come back to a Saab-”

“He swapped the plates,” Kovac said. Which meant the call that had gone out to be on the lookout for the nanny’s car had included the wrong plate numbers. “Whose car is this?”

“The VIN number connects the car to a Christine Neal,” Dawes said.

“Has anyone tried to contact this woman?” Kovac asked.

“No answer,” Dawes said. “I’ve sent a unit to her home.”

Kovac shook his head, pissed off at the unnecessary loss of life. If Anka hadn’t been involved in the plan against Carey-which she clearly hadn’t been-she had been nothing more than collateral damage, just one more person to get out of the way so the plan to nab Carey could go forward as planned.

If Donny Bergen was the doer, it didn’t make sense that he would kill someone to get a car. Too risky. He wouldn’t have used his own vehicle, for the obvious reasons. But it wasn’t that difficult to boost a car without bothering a soul.

“Was the car reported as stolen?” he asked.

“No.”

Kovac nodded. “Well, let’s hope Ms. Neal is on vacation.”