Prior Bad Acts

57

CAREY HELD EVERY muscle in her body tight against the violent trembling shuddering through her. She closed her eyes and pretended to sleep while Karl Dahl continued to stroke her hair and whisper to her, “You are my perfect angel,” over… and over… and over.

She had no idea how much time passed. An hour that seemed like minutes. Minutes that seemed like an hour.

Questions of who his last angel had been played through her mind, the possibilities all bad. Men like Karl didn’t come from loving homes with doting parents. They came from unhappy childhoods. Absent or abusive father. A mother who either blamed the child for everything wrong in her life or clung to the son because of her abusive husband. The child learned the power of violence, and his only example of a man’s relationship with a woman was a terrible, distorted story laced with hate and self-loathing.

Some people would have pitied the Karl Dahls of the world. She pitied Karl the child, but a sad story was not license to commit murder. Carey knew plenty of people with similar backgrounds-cops, lawyers, social workers-who had suffered a Karl Dahl childhood but raised themselves above it, instead of succumbing to it.

But then she was a prosecutor by nature, and prosecutors tended to think in black-and-white. Good or Evil. Innocent or Guilty.

And as a judge, she was supposed to operate with a blindfold on.

She wondered about Karl’s last angel and what had happened to her. Did he consider his mother his angel, and had she died of old age or disease or her husband’s brutality? Had his angel been his teenage love? Or his first victim? Or his last victim?

Marlene Haas had been kind to him, had offered him work, had offered him food. He had returned her kindness with horror. Karl Dahl was not a man destined for happy endings.

Based on a store of terrible knowledge, Carey projected what would happen to her if she couldn’t escape. Karl would play out his little fantasy of loving and caring for her, but he would tire of it or feel the need to move on. Or she would do something to anger him, and that anger would be a trigger to his rage, and in his rage he would kill her.

“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…

“It’s just best to move on.”

He couldn’t take her with him. She would slow him down and draw people’s attention to him. He would see only one practical and expedient solution to the situation.

Carey opened her eyes a crack. She could see the knife he had stolen from her home, lying on the makeshift table maybe six feet away.

She could feel the shape of her cell phone in her pants pocket.

Karl moved away from her, easing her head down on one of the pillows. He spoke to her in the softest of whispers, as if he believed her subconscious could hear him.

“Now, I have to step outside to relieve myself, angel. I’m sorry, but I’m having to make sure you don’t try to leave me.”

Carey lay very still as he moved to her feet. He slipped a plastic cable tie around one ankle and then the other, looping the second through the first, hobbling her. Then used more cable ties to attach the hobble to a concrete block. She probably wouldn’t be able to stand up, let alone run.

She listened to him move around the little room; then she couldn’t hear him anymore. She counted to twenty, afraid if she opened her eyes sooner he would be standing in the doorway, watching her; but he was gone.

Shaking like a palsy victim, Carey sat up, fished the phone out of her pocket, and pressed the button to turn it on. She held it against her breast to muffle the little tune it played as it came to life, and she watched the screen anxiously as it told her it was searching for a signal.

“Come on, come on,” she whispered. She was shaking so badly, she was afraid she would drop the thing.

One bar lit up on the signal indicator, then two. The battery icon in the lower right-hand corner showed only a sliver of power left.

“Come on, come on…”

A third signal bar lit, and the brand name of the phone service appeared across the top of the screen. She had a connection.

Carey punched Kovac’s number, listened to his phone ring on the end of the call.

“Come on, Sam…”