Prior Bad Acts Read online

  He had his own cell on the suicide-watch row. Still, he didn’t feel safe. Jail was only meant to keep the common folk safe from criminals. On the inside, nobody gave a shit if a man lived or died, especially a man like Karl himself.

  At least he had an attorney who was trying to do a good job for him. Knowing his lawyer would come from a pool of public defenders, Karl had expected the worst-to get some bored and bitter underachiever who would so hate the idea of defending him that he would all but hand him over to the Department of Corrections.

  Kenny Scott was a decent enough guy. Karl thought Scott almost wanted to believe he was innocent.

  A guard with a buzz cut and no neck opened the door to the interview room. “Time’s up, Dahl. Let’s go.”

  Karl thanked his attorney, shook his hand, and rose from his chair. Scott had come to fill him in on the particulars of Judge Moore’s ruling and what would happen next.

  “Let’s go,” the guard said in a stronger tone.

  Karl shuffled out into the hall, his gaze on the floor so as to avoid eye contact. Like wild predators, the guards took eye contact as a sign of aggression and retaliated accordingly.

  “You know, it’s not gonna make any difference,” the guard said. “You got lucky pulling Judge Moore, but no jury in this state is gonna let you off.”

  Karl said nothing so he couldn’t be accused of giving lip.

  “It’s just a damn shame we don’t have the death penalty,” the guard went on. “Bunch of goddamn liberals in the state government. You go outside the Twin Cities and ask the average person on the street, they’re gonna say you should be hanged in public. And you should be tortured first. Let Wayne Haas have an hour with you in a locked room.”

  The guard punched a code into a security panel beside the door that led them back into the cells. A loud buzzer sounded. A red light flashed. The steel door unlatched with an audible clank. The guard opened it and Karl walked through ahead of him. The eyes of the inmates were on him instantly.

  “Hey, you sick fuck!” one of them shouted.

  “Put him in here with us, Bull! We’ll deal with that piece of shit,” said the cell mate, an angry-looking black man with a hundred zigzag braids in his hair. The rolled-up sleeves of his jail-issue jumpsuit revealed numerous gang tattoos up and down his arms.

  Another inmate was walking ahead of Karl, being escorted to his cell by another guard. He walked with a swagger, even in shackles his head held high, defiant, arrogant. He was tall and heavy, a white guy with a tattoo of a snake crawling up the back of his bald head. A biker. He glanced back over his shoulder at Karl. A swastika had been inked onto his cheekbone. Prison tat. Aryan Nation.

  “Hey, you Nazi limp-dick!” Zigzag called. “Here’s your honey. A chil’ rapist, just like you, you fuckin’ pervert. Master race, my ass! Why don’t y’all just fuck each other!”

  Snake looked at the inmate but said nothing. He never even broke stride. In the next step, he swung his hands sideways, caught his guard just under the chin, and clotheslined him, the blow yanking him off his feet and knocking him backward into Bull. Bull stumbled back into the bars of a cell, and a roar went through the place. The inmates were cheering and shouting.

  Karl froze for a precious instant as Snake came at him, eyes bugging, chains rattling. Too late, he turned to try to lunge toward the door.

  Snake’s clenched fists came down before his eyes, arms closing on either side of his neck. The links of the handcuffs caught Karl just above his Adam’s apple, and he made a raw, retching sound as Snake yanked him backward off his feet.

  Black lace crept in on the edge of Karl Dahl’s vision. He couldn’t breathe. As he tried to raise his hands to claw at the hold on his throat, Snake slammed him sideways into the bars of Zigzag’s cell. His temple cracked against the iron once, twice, three times, and blood ran down through his right eye.

  The black gangster spat in his face. Karl could no longer hear the shouting, only a loud, whooshing roar inside his head. He seemed to have no command of his arms or legs, flailing like the limbs of a rag doll in the mouth of a rabid dog. His body was nothing but limp weight, hanging him on the bracelets of his killer.

  He was vaguely conscious of the red light flashing over the door to the outside hall, the door swinging open.

  Snake beat his head against the bars again and again.

  The guard called Bull was coming at him, swinging a baton.

  Blood sprayed through the air as the baton connected with something-someone.

  Karl fell to the floor, tangled in the arms and legs of his attacker, still choking.

  The last thing he remembered thinking was that his father would have just stood there and shaken his head and said he should have done it himself years ago.

  8

  “YOU THINK SOMEBODY tried to kill her?”

  “I can’t comment at this time. It’s not my job to speculate.”

  Kathleen Casey made a loud raspberry.

  Liska looked at the nurse sideways as she took a long drink from a can of Red Bull, raised her free hand, and lazily raised her middle finger.

  Casey gave a weary chuckle. The press had cleared out as soon as they had realized they were never going to see or hear from Judge Moore. Liska and Casey had slipped into the lounge for a moment’s solitude.

  “I hate the press,” Liska said. “It’s always like trying to explain to a group of four-year-old children why the sky is blue.”

  “Because it is,” Casey said.

  “But why?”

  “Because God made it that way.”

  “But why?”

  “So he can weed out all the bad children who say ‘But why’ and send them to hell.”

  Liska cocked an eyebrow. “Do I have to send Children and Family Services to your house, Casey?”

  “Too late. I already got rid of the bodies,” the nurse said, then winced. “Bad joke, all things considered.”

  An ambulance siren wailed in the distance.

  Liska pushed her drink aside on the table and shook her head. “I think about what that Karl Dahl did to those children, and I can’t help but think of my own boys when they were that age. They were so innocent, so trusting. So vulnerable.”

  She still thought of them that way, as far as that went. Kyle, her serious one, was almost thirteen, as he liked to point out every third day of the week. Almost a teenager, which still qualified him as a child, Liska reminded him.

  R.J., her youngest, was still a little boy. He had inherited his father’s charming but frustrating Peter Pan qualities. It was a good bet he would be a boy until he was toothless and living in a rest home.

  Nikki was fiercely protective of them both. If something were to happen to them…

  “I’d go insane,” she said. “Stark raving.”

  “Think about Wayne Haas,” Casey said. “How he must have felt hearing about Moore ’s ruling today.”

  Wayne Haas would be one of their first calls, Liska thought. Kovac would handle him, mano a mano. He would side with Haas against Judge Moore. Damned liberal judge. He would try to be Wayne Haas’s pal, all in the attempt to get Haas to say something self-incriminating.

  Liska would take the son, Bobby, seventeen. She would ask the question “Where were you between six-thirty and seven?” As if they hadn’t been put through enough. Now they would be questioned as possible suspects. They would be angry, feel insulted. Who could blame them?

  But it couldn’t matter to her or to Kovac. Carey Moore was their victim. And Wayne Haas and his son had the biggest ax to grind with Carey Moore.

  The siren was coming closer.

  Liska looked at her watch. Kovac should be calling soon. They still had a long night ahead of them. All she wanted was to go home and hug her boys.

  “Do you think Dahl will get off?” Casey asked. She was already moving out of her chair in anticipation of what the siren would bring.

  “Not a chance in hell, Judge Moore or no Judge Moore. The only way Karl Dah
l has out of this is to be beamed up by aliens.”

  “We just sent a guy up to the psych ward who could probably arrange that.”

  The sudden explosion of sound beyond the employee lounge jolted Liska out of her chair.

  A bloodcurdling roar sounded, followed by someone shouting at the top of their lungs, “Hold him down, goddammit! Get on his chest!”

  Casey nodded toward the door. “They’re singing my song.”

  Liska followed the nurse into the work lanes of the ER. People were everywhere, rushing, shouting. Red-faced deputies, docs in green scrubs, EMT crews wheeling gurneys in from the ambulance bay. Liska grabbed one of the deputies by the arm and shoved her badge in his face.

  “What’s going on?”

  “Riot at the jail.”

  An orderly yelled for them to get out of the way. Liska jumped back against the wall as a gurney zipped by, its passenger in an orange jail jumpsuit. Another gurney rolled in behind it, its passenger spraying the room with a fountain of arterial blood.

  A third gurney sagged beneath the weight of an inmate the size of a walrus. He was strapped to a backboard with a deputy sprawled on top of him, trying to hold him down. Both of them had bloodied heads and faces. The inmate was bellowing like a madman.

  A doc was calling for security, further restraints, IV Valium. Casey moved toward the big guy, with a syringe in hand. The inmate was bucking hard against the restraints and against the deputy. The gurney skidded sideways and slammed into a cartload of supplies. Momentum unseated the deputy, and he fell hard to the floor.

  The inmate let loose another roar, and Liska saw a leg restraint pop like a string, and a boot the length of her forearm drop over the side of the cart.

  Liska pulled her tactical baton from the pocket of her blazer and extended it with a snap of her wrist. Before she could decide whether to move in or stand back, the inmate flipped himself, backboard and all, off the gurney, landing on top of the deputy.

  “Grab his arm!” Casey shouted, trying to move in with the needle.

  Even as another deputy descended on the inmate, the inmate got his feet under him and came up, twisting and struggling against the remaining restraints. He had one arm free and used a fist the size of a five-pound sledgehammer to backhand the deputy, knocking him on his ass and sending blood spraying from his nose.

  Liska couldn’t get close. The guy was staggering around with the backboard on him, like Frankenstein’s monster in a rage. A deputy standing between him and the doors to the ambulance bay drew his weapon.

  The ER was full of staff and patients and people waiting in chairs; people shouting, screaming, a baby wailing. If the deputy discharged his weapon…

  Ducking below the inmate’s line of sight, Liska dashed toward him and swung her baton. She felt the satisfying jolt of contact. She hit the floor and rolled. The inmate dropped to one knee, howling. A deputy barreled into him from behind, hit the backboard, and they both went sprawling.

  The deputy with the gun rushed in and jammed the nose of it against the inmate’s temple. Every guy in a uniform was screaming, “Down on the ground! Freeze, motherfucker!”

  Kathleen Casey rushed in as one of the deputies pinned the inmate’s arm against the floor. Liska winced as she watched the needle jab into a bulging, pulsing blue vein.

  The inmate was crying and howling. “My leg! Oh, God! Goddammit! It’s broke! Get off! Jesus Christ!”

  Casey stepped back, syringe still in hand. Liska got to her feet and straightened her blazer.

  “Men are such wimps,” the nurse said with a sniff.

  “Yeah,” Liska said. “Men drool, short chicks rule.”

  She tapped the end of her baton against the floor, and it released and fell back into itself as she raised her hand. The deputies were rolling their monster over onto his back. He was quieting now as his heart pumped the Valium through him.

  One of the ER docs dropped down beside the man, cut the bloody leg of the orange jumpsuit to reveal a jagged shard of shinbone sticking out through the skin.

  “Shit,” Liska muttered, shoulders slumping. “Paperwork.”

  Casey shook her head. “You don’t know your own strength, girlfriend.”

  “Where’s Dahl?”

  Liska’s head snapped toward the deputy who had asked the question. He was already moving toward the gurney down the hall.

  “Dahl?” she asked, hustling toward the bed, her heart rate picking up.

  One of the other deputies ran past her and down the hall, weapon drawn. Behind her she could hear someone get on a radio and call for backup.

  “Dahl?” she said again, with more urgency. “Karl Dahl?”

  The deputy near the gurney was cursing. It was empty, abandoned, the white sheet rumpled and stained with blood where its occupant’s head had lain. “Shit! Fucking shit! He’s gone!”

  9

  NO ONE HAD WANTED to go near the Haas home on the north side of Minneapolis since the murders. Kids rode past it slowly on their bikes during the day, morbidly fascinated with the place and the idea of something as evil as murder. They dared each other to go up to the windows and look inside, especially the basement windows. Every once in a while some kid would take the challenge. More often, they all spooked and ran.

  No one wanted to go near the Haas home, which was why Wayne Haas and his son from his first marriage still lived in it. The “For Sale” sign had been standing in the front yard for more than a year. No takers. The only people who looked, looked out of the same morbid fascination as the children who sat on their bikes out in front on the street.

  No one wanted to buy a home where a woman and two children had been tortured and murdered, their bodies desecrated in sickening, unspeakable ways.

  If any place should have been haunted, it should have been that house. The evil that had lived inside it that terrible day surely must have permeated the place-the walls, the floors, the ceilings, the foundation-the same way smoke from a fire could permeate, and never leave.

  Wayne Haas was not a man of means. He worked in a meat-packing plant, hanging carcasses and loading trucks. He made a decent living, but he couldn’t afford to buy a different house without selling the one he had. And nobody wanted the house he had.

  Kovac and Liska pulled into the cracked concrete driveway, which led to a detached garage. Erratic lights flashed in the front window of the otherwise dark house, indicating someone inside was watching television. Still, the place had a weird, vacant quality to it. The yard was bad, weedy and bald in spots. There once had been a big oak tree in the front, but the tornado that had come on that same fateful summer afternoon as the murders had torn it up by the roots, leaving the lawn naked and the house exposed. A photograph of the scene had taken up half the front page of the newspaper the next day.

  “I couldn’t live in this house,” Liska said. “I don’t even want to go inside.”

  “I’d live in a garbage Dumpster behind a fish market before I’d live here,” Kovac said.

  He mostly didn’t believe in superstitions, but even he drew the line at living in murder scenes.

  For one thing, in all his twenty-plus years on the job, he had never gotten used to the smell of death. There was nothing else like it. It hung in the air at a death scene, so thick and heavy that it was a presence. And though he knew logically that the smell would disappear shortly after the corpses had been removed and the cleaning crew had come through, he believed the memory of it never left and that every time he returned to the place, the stench would fill his head and turn his stomach.

  Kovac’s second wife had never allowed him into the house wearing the suits he had worn to murder scenes. His “corpse clothes,” she had called them. He had had to take them off in the garage and leave them there and walk through the house in his underwear to get to the shower. Then, instead of sending the clothes to the cleaners or throwing them into the trash, she would box them up and take them to Goodwill. Like the disadvantaged people of Minneapolis didn’t ha
ve enough going against them, they had to go around smelling of corpses.

  After the disappearance of three suits, he had wised up and kept a change of clothes at the station and made friends with the guy who ran the dry cleaners down the street.

  Liska sighed. “Let’s get it over with so I can go home and lie awake all night feeling guilty that I had to question these people.”

  Wayne Haas came to the front door looking like he wanted to hit somebody. He was a rawboned man with big hands and big shoulders from moving beef carcasses and slabs of meat. Stress and grief and anger had cut such deep lines in his ruddy face that it looked as if it had been carved of redwood.

  “What the hell kind of show are you people running?” he demanded, glancing at the ID Liska held up for him to see. “It’s all over the TV. That murdering son of a bitch is running loose. How the hell could you let this happen?”

  “I can imagine how you must feel, Mr. Haas,” Kovac started.

  “The hell you can! You’re not the one walked into this house and found half his family butchered! And now the bastard is running around loose, free to kill-”

  “Every cop in the city is looking for him,” Kovac said.

  “That’s supposed to make me feel better? You people lost him in the first place!”

  Kovac didn’t bother to tell him it was the sheriff’s office that had lost Karl Dahl, not the police department. Wayne Haas wouldn’t appreciate the difference. The only thing that mattered to him was the end result.

  “You’re right,” Kovac said instead. “I’m pissed off about it too. It was the cluster fuck of the century. Believe me, my partner and I sure as hell didn’t want to come here tonight and tell you Karl Dahl escaped. We didn’t even want to come here to tell you about Judge Moore’s ruling on that evidentiary hearing.”

  Haas shook his head and stepped back a little from the door. Kovac took advantage and moved inside. Liska, who was the size of a minute, slipped in behind him and around him and did a quick survey of the place.

  “What’s wrong with that woman?” Haas asked. “How could she say what Dahl did in the past didn’t have anything to do with this? It just proves what a sick bastard he is. The jury should hear about it.”