Prior Bad Acts

54

CAREY STARED AT Karl Dahl-the bald head, bruised and scabbed over on one side where he appeared to have been struck with something; the garish makeup; the jagged edge of the bleeding wound in his cheek, moving in and out as he breathed through his mouth. The whites of his eyes were bloodred. He was dressed as a woman, in a calf-length brown skirt and low-heeled boots.

Behind him, maybe twenty yards behind him and off to his right, was a huge old burned-out brick building. Two stories high, charred black, it looked to have been abandoned for a very long time. All the windows were dark, gaping holes. She could see sunlight inside where sections of the roof had either burned through or fallen in.

Karl Dahl meant to drag her inside that building. Carey pulled back, but he held fast to her arm, his grip tight and hard.

“You don’t need to be afraid of me, Carey,” he said calmly.

The way he said her name was like the stroke of a lover’s hand. She didn’t like it.

“You should call me Judge Moore, Karl,” she said, her voice almost unrecognizable to her. A dry, hoarse rasping from her aching throat. Her larynx felt the size of a fist. She had wanted to sound strong and calm as she tried to establish herself in his mind as a person to be respected.

He smiled and shook his head. “No. We’re past that. You’re the only one’s been kind to me. You understand them things I did before wasn’t bad, really.”

Karl Dahl’s criminal record showed arrests and time served for a variety of crimes-criminal trespass, window peeping, indecent exposure, breaking and entering. Nothing violent. No kidnap, no assault, no rape, no-

But he was on trial for the brutal murders of a woman and two children from a family who had been nothing but kind to him.

Chris Logan’s words from Friday afternoon came back to her.

“It’s an escalating pattern of behavior. That’s what these pervs do. They start small and work their way up.”

He was right. Carey knew as much about the Karl Dahls of the world as Logan did. The Boston Strangler had started out as a Peeping Tom.

As a prosecutor she had been able to knit a defendant’s criminal life together that way when preparing for trial, bridging one step up to the next on the criminal evolutionary scale. And she would try like hell to get it all past the presiding judge.

Now she was the judge. And as a judge, she had to adhere to a different standard.

“I don’t know very much about you, Karl,” she said, her breath hitching in her throat.

She looked past his left shoulder and saw the car. Anka’s car. Panic stabbed through her. She had spoken to Anka as the girl had gone out Saturday night to get a movie. Lost in thought, she hadn’t paid any attention when Anka came home. She vaguely remembered hearing the kitchen door open. In her peripheral vision she had been aware of a blonde walking through the hall and going up the stairs.

That the blonde might have been Karl Dahl made her skin crawl. How long had he been in her home? What had he done there while she had been in the den, discovering the depravity to which her husband had lowered himself? Had he been upstairs when she had come up and fallen onto her bed without bothering to undress? Had he been in her room? Had he been in Lucy’s room?

For the briefest of seconds, the crime scene photo of the Haas foster children flashed through her head.

“Oh, me,” Karl said shyly, “there ain’t that much to know.”

“Sure there is,” Carey said, her voice shaking. “Everybody has a story.”

“I’d sure like to hear yours,” he said. “Let’s go inside. I have everything ready for you.”

“What does that mean, Karl?”

He smiled a secretive smile made sinister by the clownish makeup and the still-bleeding gash in his face, which he seemed not to notice. “You’ll see soon enough.”

He started toward the building, pulling Carey in tow. Everything in her told her not to go into the building with him. At least if they were outside, someone might drive by, and she would have a chance to escape. The odds of that happening diminished with every step he dragged her.

“C-can’t we just s-stay out here for a while, Karl?” she asked. “I’m not f-feeling very well. Could I just have some fresh air for a while?”

It wasn’t a lie. Even as she said it, she felt her stomach twist, and she dropped down on her knees again and vomited in the weeds. Karl held on to her hand like a lover would to comfort her.

“You need to lie down is what you need,” he said gently, squatting down beside her. “You’ve just got yourself all stirred up.”

“N-no. Could we please j-just sit here for a minute? I’m very dizzy.”

“That’s from that person beating on you in that parking garage, isn’t it?” he asked. “On account of me. I seen all about it on television this morning. And I read about it in the Star Tribune. I like a good newspaper. You get more of the story.

“I’m sorry for what that man done to you,” he said. “I seen that story, and I knew right then you was my angel.”

Carey shivered as she sat back on her heels. “I’m not an angel, Karl. I’m a person. I have a family. I h-have a l-little girl. I’m a judge. I was just doing my job.”

“You’re cold,” Karl declared. “Let’s go inside. I’ve made a fire.”

He hooked an arm under hers and lifted her with him when he stood.

“What is this place?” she asked. “Where are we?”

“My secret place. I’ve stayed here many times, and no one ever bothers me.”

“I mean the building,” Carey said, trying not to dwell on what he had just told her. “Where are we? What did it used to be?”

“It used to be a munitions dump back in the war times. WW Two. There’s still some parts of shells and stuff in there, but don’t nobody seem to care about it. You think they would take it away what with the terrorists and all. You know one of them Nine-Eleven boys was learning to fly a jet airplane right here in Minneapolis.”

Carey was at a loss for words. The surrealism of the scene was too much for her. She had been abducted by a triple murderer, and he was calmly going on about Homeland Security.

As she stared at him, the putrid smell of sulfur came on the breeze. A refinery. She couldn’t see it, but it was nearby.

“Watch your step here, Carey,” he said, helping her up the worn, crumbling concrete steps and into the building.

It was a ruin. There was no ceiling, only partial walls here and there. He took her down what might have been a hallway once, turning here and turning there, working their way farther and farther from the door they had come in.

The floors were filthy and strewn with garbage and debris-broken bottles, beer cans, discarded fast-food wrappers. Bits and pieces of grit and crumbled brick bit into the soles of her bare feet.

“Where are we going, Karl?” she asked.

“You’ll see,” he said, a strange, boyish excitement creeping into his voice. “I’m real proud of it.”

He led her around the corner of a brick wall and into his hiding place, where no one had ever bothered him.

There was more roof over this part of the building. And no windows. No sunlight. Karl had made up for the darkness by lighting candles all around.

In the flickering yellow light, Carey saw what Karl was so proud of, and a chill washed over her like a wave.

Karl Dahl had created a little nest with pillows and blankets. A small fire burned in a hibachi grill. Overturned fruit crates served as tables. There was a bottle of champagne in an ice bucket, wineglasses standing to one side. He even had framed photographs of someone’s family.

Carey’s gaze lingered on the photographs, realization dawning slowly. An eight-by-ten black-and-white photo from a graduation. A silver-framed photo of a baby.

Photographs of a family.

Her family.