Prior Bad Acts

56

THE BOTTOM DROPPED out of Carey’s stomach. She felt the blood drain from her head to her feet.

Lucy’s baby photo in the silver frame. The black-and-white picture of Carey’s graduation from law school, her father gazing at her with unmistakable pride. These were the photographs she kept on the nightstand beside her bed at home.

She looked around the room again, slowly, recognition dawning with a sickening surety. Her champagne bucket. Her wineglasses. Her pillows. Her blankets. Karl Dahl had looted her home, taking things he thought she might want to have with her.

God help me.

“I even brung you some clothes,” Karl said, pointing to where he had hung them on an old hook sticking out of a crumbling wall. Dresses. Lingerie.

He meant for her to stay. He seemed to think she should be happy and grateful for the honor.

“You’re cold,” Karl said. “You should have a wrap.”

The perfect host. The scene was so incredibly surreal, it was difficult to believe it was really happening. Karl Dahl stood before her, blood all over the left side of his face and neck, bald-headed, wearing women’s makeup, wearing women’s clothes. He hadn’t said one word about what she had done to his face. It was almost as if he didn’t notice it.

The gold chenille throw had come from the love seat in her den. David had used it for a blanket Friday night. It smelled like cigar smoke and gin and a woman’s cloying perfume. Carey wanted to throw it away from her as if it were a snake, but Karl wrapped it carefully around her shoulders.

“Please, sit down,” he said, guiding her toward the only chair in the room, a cheap plastic lawn chair that had seen better days a decade past.

The chair was rusted and filthy; it was difficult to tell what color the plastic tubing might have been back when. It was the kind of chair she remembered from her teen years. She and all her girlfriends had had the lounge version, because you could make it lie completely flat, making it perfect for sunbathing.

In a brief flash she saw herself and Sandy Butler flat on their bellies on the chairs in her backyard, the radio blasting. They had been so innocent.

“I really should go, Karl,” she said. “Not that I don’t appreciate all you’ve done, but I need to go home for my daughter. She’ll be afraid, wondering where I’ve gone.”

Karl frowned at that, but he didn’t say anything as he dug through a couple of grocery bags, pulling out food that had probably come from Carey’s kitchen.

“She’s all right, isn’t she, Karl?” Carey asked, almost more afraid of knowing than not knowing.

He didn’t answer. His brow furrowed as he opened a box of Triscuits.

“Please, tell me she’s all right, Karl.”

Without even glancing at her, he got out a summer sausage that already had a third of it missing, and a knife that had come from the block on the counter just to the right of her stove.

The sense of dread in Carey’s chest was so heavy she could hardly breathe.

“Please, Karl…” she said, unable to keep the anxiety from her voice.

Karl stood suddenly and pointed at her with the knife. “You don’t have her no more,” he said angrily. “You’re with me now.”

Carey felt everything crumble inside her. She put her hands over her face and began to cry as silently as she could. He had killed her daughter. Her sweet, innocent child, who would never have been able to identify him even if she had seen him.

What had he done to her?

Again the Haas murder scene flashed through her memory.

It was too much. She rested her elbows on her thighs and rocked herself as she began to sob.

Her daughter was dead because of her, because of this lunatic killer who believed she had championed his cause. She wanted to die. She wanted Karl Dahl to come to her and slit her throat and be done with it. She rocked herself harder, keening.

“I didn’t mean that,” Karl said irritably. “I didn’t mean she’s dead.”

He came and knelt beside the chair, putting a hand on her arm.

“Please don’t cry so, Carey,” he said softly. “I didn’t mean for you to cry. You’re my angel.”

“Oh, my God,” Carey mumbled behind her hands.

“It’s just that you’re with me now,” he explained. “You’re with me. You’re my angel.”

“Please stop saying that,” Carey said, her voice trembling. “The police will be looking for me, you know.”

“That don’t matter,” Karl said, matter-of-fact. “They got no idea where you are.”

“You’ll go to prison for the rest of your life if you hurt me. If you let me go-”

“They gotta catch me first,” Karl snapped. “And if they catch me, I’ll go to prison for the rest of my sorry life no matter what. Now, I don’t want to hear no more about it.”

He went to another grocery bag and pulled out one of David’s exotic beers.

For Christmas the year before, Carey had signed him up for the Beer of the Month Club. That was the only thing she’d given him he hadn’t had some complaint about.

The memory of a better Christmas was the two of them the second Christmas after they had married. They were having a party. Mistletoe had made the rounds, courtesy of one of their friends. She saw David laughing, trim and fit and handsome; herself laughing too, leaning against him with her hand on the flat of his belly. He was holding a poinsettia over his head and had told her that the poinsettia-being that much larger than mistletoe-meant they had to go upstairs and make a baby. And so they had, after their guests had gone home. They had been so happy.

“You want something to drink?” Karl asked.

Carey just stared at him.

He brought her a bottle of Fiji water and a couple of Triscuits with summer sausage. Hors d’oeuvres. She took a sip of the water. It went down like a rock in her aching throat. She shook her head at the food.

She probably should have eaten it. She hadn’t had a decent meal in three days. She needed strength if she was going to get out of this mess. But the idea of food made her want to gag.

She pulled the chenille throw around herself, shivered, and coughed.

“You should have a lie-down,” Karl said. “I know you wasn’t comfortable in that trunk. I’m sorry about that. And I’m sorry I had to choke you like I did. I had to do that so you wouldn’t make a fuss.”

He sat on a box, eating his lunch, as if this were a perfectly normal situation for him. Maybe it was.

“Where are you from, Karl?” she asked.

“ Kansas. But I ain’t been back there in a long time.”

“Why is that?”

He pretended not to have heard her, his little trick for avoiding a topic.

“What brought you to Minneapolis?”

“A train,” he said, and laughed and laughed.

“You like moving around from town to town?”

“It suits me,” he said, nodding. “Can’t stay in one place too long.”

“Why is that?”

His face darkened as he looked down at the knife he’d used to cut the sausage, a nine-inch boning knife Carey knew to be sharp enough to cut paper. “It’s just best to move on.”

Because he went from town to town murdering innocent people? The system had coughed up a record on Karl Dahl, but there was no way of knowing what he might have done and gotten away with. He was one of those people who drifted along below the radar.

No one wanted to pay any attention to men like Karl, the strange, the quiet, the disenfranchised. All the ordinary citizens, with jobs and mortgages and kids, wanted nothing more than for the Karl Dahls of the world to pass through and keep on going.

Karl might have quietly left a string of homicides in his wake as he’d moved from place to place. He could have been invisible, blending into the background, calling no attention to himself.

If not for the neighbor stupidly stepping out of his house to videotape the tornado bearing down on the city that fateful day, Karl Dahl might have walked away from the Haas massacre into the mists, hopped another train, and gone on to another state, and the Haas murders would have gone unsolved.

“Come on,” he said.

He abandoned his lunch and approached her again.

Carey sat very still, like a small prey animal afraid to move or breathe. He put a hand around her wrist and pulled her up out of the chair. Not roughly, but firmly.

“I made this nice bed for you,” he said. “I want you to lie down on it.”

She wouldn’t have thought it possible, but the sense of dread became heavier, more oppressive. She knew too much about what had been done to Marlene Haas.

Had it started like this? Karl fixating on the woman, deciding she was his angel because she had helped him out, then wanting to possess her physically and sexually, flying into a rage when she tried to reject him. The rage unleashing the demons that lived in his soul. The demons spinning themselves into a frenzy.

“Lie down now,” Karl ordered her as she stepped to the edge of the nest he had made for her. The idea of his touching her, forcing himself on her, was beyond revolting.

Afraid to antagonize him, Carey lowered herself to the floor, lay down on her side, curled into the fetal position. Karl sat down and put her head in his lap and stroked her hair.

“You sleep now, angel. We have all the time in the world.”

For what? she wondered. Did he think she would become his willing traveling companion? Or did he think that in death her soul would become his forever?

“You’re with me now. I haven’t had an angel in a long, long time.”

“You had an angel once?” she asked in a hushed voice. “What was her name?”

He didn’t answer the question. Finally, he said very softly, “I had an angel once.”

“What happened to her?” Carey asked.

Karl looked down into her face, expressionless. “She went to heaven… like angels do.”