Dust to Dust Read online

  “This the kind of shit you leave around for my kids to see?”

  “Your kids,” she muttered, snatching the photograph out of his hand. “Like you did anything but provide the raw materials—and only half of that. How is it they’re never your kids when they’re sick or need new clothes or they’re having trouble?”

  “Do I need to hear this?” he asked, making a face.

  “You came to my house. You hear whatever I want to say.”

  “Dad!”

  R.J. was across the room before the exclamation died. He flung himself at his father, wrapping his arms around Speed’s legs. Liska scrambled to put down the ASP and pull the newspaper over it and the Fallon Polaroids, even though no one was paying the least attention to her.

  “R.J., my man!” Speed grinned and high-fived his youngest, pulling free of the boy’s embrace to squat down in front of him.

  “I wanna be called Rocket now,” R.J. said, rubbing the sleep from one eye. His blond hair stood up in little tufts at the crown of his head. His Minnesota Vikings pajamas, inherited from Kyle, were too big for him. “I wanna have a nickname like you, Dad.”

  “Rocket. I like it,” Speed declared. “Seriously cool, little man.”

  The hand puppet was discovered and the two males went into a five-minute riff on South Park. Liska’s fuse grew shorter and shorter.

  “R.J., it’s really late,” she said, hating to do it and hating Speed for making her into the bad guy with his mere presence. He breezed in and out of the boys’ lives as he chose, all excitement and fun and adventure. As custodial parent, Liska felt she provided little of that and all of the discipline and drudgery. “You have school tomorrow.”

  Her son looked up at her with duplicates of her own blue eyes, angry and disappointed. “But Dad just got here!”

  “Then be mad at Dad. He’s the one who thought it’d be a great idea to come over in the middle of the night when everyone’s supposed to be sleeping.”

  “You’re not sleeping,” R.J. pointed out.

  “I’m not ten either. When you get to be thirty-two you can stay up half the night working and taking Tagamet too. So you’ve got that to look forward to.”

  “I’m gonna work undercover and be a narc like Dad.”

  “You’re gonna be undercover in bed in two minutes, mister.”

  R.J. and Speed exchanged a look that locked Liska out of the loop. Speed shrugged. “I’m outranked, Rocket. Better call it a night.”

  “Can I take Cartman with me?”

  “Sure.” He ruffled the boy’s hair, his attention already shifting from his son to his ex.

  Liska bent down to brush a kiss to R.J.’s cheek, but he ducked away and retreated down the hall, talking to the puppet in a cartoon voice and making farting noises. When he was out of sight and earshot, she glared at Speed.

  “You are such a shit,” she hissed, straining to keep her voice down when she wanted to rail at him. “You didn’t come here to see R.J.—”

  “Rocket.”

  “—or Kyle. Now you’ve got R.J. all wound up. He won’t sleep half the night.”

  “Sorry.”

  “No, you’re not. You never are,” she said bitterly. “What do you want, Speed? I’ll bet it isn’t to pay me the money you owe me.”

  He pulled in a big breath. “Next week. I promise,” he said with well-rehearsed contrition. “I’m in the middle of something right now, but next week—”

  “Save it. Pack up the act and make it a road show, why don’t you,” Liska said, flipping the paper off the Polaroids. She gathered the pictures into a stack. “It’s been a very long day. I’d like to go to bed now, if you don’t mind.”

  Speed said nothing for a minute, then reached out and tapped a finger against the top photograph.

  “Anyone I know?” he asked quietly. “I heard one of yours offed himself. Is this him?”

  “Looks that way. An IA guy. You wouldn’t know him.”

  They had both started out in uniforms in St. Paul; Speed had stayed but she had gone across the river to Minneapolis. He knew a lot of Minneapolis cops—mainly the narcs and some of the homicide dicks—but he had no reason to know Andy Fallon. No one went out of their way to meet the people from Internal Affairs.

  He slipped the picture out of her hand and examined it closely. “Hell of a way to check out. I guess IA guys don’t know how to shoot a gun, huh?”

  “Who knows what goes on in people’s heads,” Liska said.

  There had been a time in their marriage when they had shared details of cases and helped each other work things through. She thought of those as the Golden Moments, that brief period of time before infidelity and professional rivalry pulled apart the fabric of their relationship.

  “Maybe it wasn’t his choice,” she said.

  “Jesus, you homicide dicks.” He tossed the picture back down on the coffee table. “It’s a no-brainer, Nikki. Why torment yourself looking at these? The guy did himself. Hanging is suicide or an accident, not murder. Write it off and move on.”

  “When the ME says let it go, I’ll let it go. Not before,” she said, as much to be stubborn as anything. “That’s my job. That’s the way I am.”

  “Yeah. Well, you don’t need to bring it home with you.”

  “Don’t accuse me of corrupting your children,” she said sourly. “You heard R.J. He wants to be a narc. Can’t get much lower than that.”

  “Sure he could. He could be IA. Look how they wind up.”

  Liska didn’t look at the photo as he held it up. She didn’t have to. “All right. Enough pleasant chitchat for one evening. It’s been . . . the usual. You know where the door is.”

  Speed didn’t move. He put on his yes-I-can-be-an-adult face. Liska sighed.

  “You know, I came over here to see how you were doing,” he confessed. “I heard you caught this one, Nikki. I thought it might be tough—because he was a cop, because he was IA. Because of your old man and all.”

  “My father didn’t kill himself,” Liska said too quickly, too defensively. The mistake left her feeling vulnerable.

  “I know that, but the whole IA thing . . .”

  “This has nothing to do with that,” she said flatly.

  Speed considered his options. She could see him thinking, trying to figure how to play it. How to play her.

  He spread his hands. The friend, just offering a suggestion. “Still . . . Well, you can dump it as soon as the ME says suicide. Or you could pass it off now. A case like this hardly needs two detectives. Dump it on Kojak.”

  Wrong tack. Liska bristled at the implication that she wasn’t tough enough to handle it. “What’s it to you? I caught the case and I’ll work it till it’s over.”

  “Fine. I just . . .” He blew out a long-suffering sigh and dragged a hand back over his head. “I still care about you, Nikki, that’s all. We have a history. That means something . . . even to an asshole like me.”

  Liska said nothing. She trusted neither her voice nor the tangle of emotions knotting together inside her. His concern was unexpected and she was unprepared for the way it made her feel—vulnerable, needy. Not words she wanted associated with herself.

  Speed reached inside his jacket, dug out a cigarette, and dangled it from his lip.

  “Well,” he said softly, lifting a hand to touch her cheek. “Don’t say I never tried to do anything for you.”

  Liska stepped aside, turned her face away.

  “Yeah,” he said, letting his hand fall. “I know where the door is. See you around, Nikki.”

  He had his hand on the doorknob before she could make herself speak.

  “Uh . . . Speed . . . thanks for your concern. But I’m fine. I can handle it. It’s just another case.”

  “Sure. Whatever. You’ll be off it in a day and a half.”

  He gave her one last long look, and Liska had the feeling he wanted to say something more. But he didn’t. And then he was gone.

  She locked the dead bolt behind hi
m and turned out the lights. She gathered up the photographs of Andy Fallon and went to her bedroom to secure them in her briefcase. Then she checked on the boys, who were both pretending to be asleep, brushed her teeth, changed into an oversize T-shirt from the FBI National Academy, and went to bed so she could stare at the ceiling and watch the past whirl around in her memory like a carousel.

  The junior high father-daughter dance. She was thirteen and mortified. Embarrassed. Guilt sat in her stomach like a huge, jagged rock because of the other emotions. Her father stood stiffly beside her, eyes downcast, as ashamed as she was to have people see him. A stocky man with piercing blue eyes, the left side of his face slack and drooping, as if all the nerves had been snipped with scissors. People staring at them—not only because of her father’s face but because of the stories they’d heard: the implications of corruption in the police department, cops stealing drug money, an Internal Affairs investigation . . .

  None of it was true, Nikki knew. She seemed to believe that more strongly than her father did, which made her angry. He was innocent. Why wouldn’t he fight harder to prove it? Why wouldn’t he spit in their faces? Deny, defy, take action. Instead, he went around in public with his head down in order to shield both his shame and the Bell’s palsy the stress had induced. Words like weak and spineless drifted through his daughter’s mind like dirt in a dust-bowl breeze. As each one crossed her mind, the feeling of guilt deepened and the resentment sharpened.

  The investigation had dragged on for nearly eighteen months, petering out to nothing in the end. No charges had been brought. Everyone was supposed to forget and forgive. By then, Thomas Liska’s health had begun to seriously deteriorate. Two years later he died of pancreatic cancer.

  It was a very long night.

  8

  CHAPTER

  THE BODY HAS been discovered.

  Suicide. Accident. Tragedy.

  The word murder has not been mentioned.

  Is it really murder if dictated by necessity, if accompanied by remorse?

  Sorry . . .

  There is a sense of unease from knowing other people are now aware, even though they don’t suspect. As if strangers are invading what should have remained private. The intimacy of death had been shared by just the two of them. The aftermath would be a public event.

  That somehow cheapens the experience.

  Andy Fallon stares out from the photograph, the last spark of life dying in the half-opened eyes, tongue coming out through the parted lips. The expression seems to take on an accusatory quality.

  Sorry . . .

  The photograph, cradled in one hand, is raised to the lips, the image of the death mask kissed.

  Sorry . . .

  But even as the apology is offered, the excitement rises.

  9

  CHAPTER

  LISKA STORMED INTO the cubicle, her face pinched with temper, cheeks pink with cold. Kovac watched her with dread because he knew the look and what it meant for the quality of his day. Still, he didn’t move as she bore down on him. She slugged his left upper arm as hard as she could. It was like being hit with a ball peen hammer.

  “Ouch!”

  “That was for ditching me last night,” she announced. “I waited for you, and because I waited for you, Leonard cornered me and gave me the third degree about the Nixon assault and how Jamal Jackson couldn’t be tied to it in any way. Now he’s got it in his head that Jackson can somehow claim false arrest and use it in his suit against the department.”

  “What suit?” he asked, rubbing the sore spot.

  “The suit Jackson’s threatening. Brutality. Against me.”

  Kovac rolled his eyes. “Oh, for Christ’s sake. We’ve got the video of him beaning me. Let him try to sue. If Leonard thinks Jackson has a case, he’s got his head so far up his ass we should call the people at Guinness. It’s gotta be some kind of record.”

  “I know,” Liska said, calming. She tossed her purse in a deep desk drawer and dropped her briefcase in her chair. “I’m sorry I belted you. I had a rotten night. Speed came by. I didn’t get much sleep.”

  “Oh, jeez. I’m not gonna have to hear about sex, am I?”

  Liska’s face went dark again, and she lunged across the cubicle and popped him a second time in exactly the same spot.

  “Ouch!”

  Elwood stuck his huge head around the side of the half-wall. “Do I need to call the police?”

  “Why?” Liska demanded, shrugging out of her coat. “Is being a knothead a crime now?”

  Kovac rubbed his arm. “I guess I said the wrong thing.”

  “Again,” Elwood added. “Did she do that to your nose?”

  Kovac tried to catch his reflection in the dark screen of his computer monitor, though he already knew how it looked: puffy and red and lumpy as an old drunk’s. At least it wasn’t broken for the umpteenth time.

  “Physical abuse of men by women,” Elwood said. “One of society’s great taboos. Victim Services can probably hook you up with a support group, Sam. Should I call Kate Conlan?”

  Kovac threw a pen at him. “Why don’t you go take a flying leap?”

  Liska settled into her chair and swiveled toward him, looking sullen and maybe just a little contrite. “I didn’t get any sleep because my brain preferred to remain awake, dwelling on what an asshole my ex is, among other fine topics. What happened to your nose? Iron Mike didn’t want to hear his son was into kinky sex?”

  “It was an accident,” Kovac said. “He took the news hard. He and Andy had had a split, probably about a month ago when Andy decided to tell him he preferred DC to AC. That’s not an easy thing for a father to face, I guess. What’d you get from IA?”

  “The cold shoulder. Lieutenant Ice Bitch gave me a lot of attitude and no information. She claims she doesn’t want to compromise an IA investigation. Someone’s career might get damaged.”

  “I thought that was their goal.”

  Liska shrugged. “She was at Fallon’s home Sunday night between eight and nine-thirty, discussing a case he was unhappy about. She says he seemed fine when she left. She did tell me he’d been depressed. She hadn’t ordered him to see the shrink, but she’d suggested he do it.”

  “Do we know if he took her up on it?”

  “Confidential information.”

  “No one’s gonna talk until the ME’s done,” Kovac said. “They’re all holding out to hear suicide, and then they won’t have to talk at all, and to hell with anyone who wants to know why this kid killed himself. If that’s what he did.”

  Liska picked up a fat pen with a plastic bloodshot eyeball glued to one end. One of many odd treasures in their cubicle. They bought them for each other as a running joke. Kovac’s most prized possession was a very realistic fake finger that looked as if it had been separated from its hand with a hacksaw. He liked to surprise people with it, leaving it in file folders, booby-trapping desks with it. It was the strangest thing a woman had ever given him—and, oddly, it brought him the most simple enjoyment. Two failed marriages to “normal” women, and he got the biggest kick out of a chick who gave him imitation severed body parts. What did that say?

  “You going to the autopsy?” Liska asked.

  “What’s the point? Bad enough seeing the kid dead. I don’t need to watch him get carved up for no good reason. His brother told me Andy came to see him about a month ago. He was coming out of the closet. He’d told Mike, and it hadn’t gone well.”

  “That timing would coincide with his apparent depression.”

  “Yeah. It sure smells like suicide,” he said. “The crime scene guys didn’t come up with anything unusual that I’ve heard about.”

  “No, they didn’t, but the grapevine says otherwise,” Liska said. “Tippen told me it was the hot gossip at Patrick’s last night. That they came up with all kinds of sex toys and gay pornography. Now, where do you think a rumor like that might have started?”

  Kovac scowled. “With the Three Stooges in uniform. Where’d you
see Tippen this early?”

  “Caribou Coffee. He has a really ugly double espresso habit.”

  “Real cops are supposed to drink the sludge in the break room pot. It’s tradition.”

  “Christmas is a tradition,” Liska corrected him. “Bad coffee is avoidable.

  “The thing that bothers me with the whole sex angle is this,” she went on. “What if Andy Fallon was into S and M? Let’s say he and a pal are playing around with erotic rope tricks and something goes wrong. Fallon dies. The partner panics and leaves the scene. That’s a crime in my book. Man two: depraved indifference. At least.”

  “I’ve been thinking about that too,” Kovac said. “I went to see Steve Pierce last night. He seems like a man with something heavy on his chest.”

  “What’d he have to say?”

  “Nothing much. We were interrupted by his fiancée: the lovely Ms. Jocelyn Daring, attorney-at-law.”

  Liska’s brows went up under her bangs. “Daring as in Daring-Landis?”

  “I made that assumption. No one corrected me.”

  Liska gave a low whistle. “There’s an interesting twist. Anything back yet from latent prints?”

  “No, but we can expect to find Pierce’s prints. They were friends.”

  Liska’s phone rang and she turned to answer it.

  Kovac turned back to his computer and hit the power switch. He figured he’d get a jump on the preliminary report on Andy Fallon’s death. A week or so after the autopsy they would get the ME’s reports. He would call the morgue sooner than that to hear about the tox screens and to try to speed the report process along.

  Lieutenant Leonard appeared suddenly at the cubicle. “Kovac. My office. Now.”

  Liska kept her head down as she spoke on the phone, avoiding eye contact. Kovac bit back a big sigh and followed Leonard.

  One wall of the lieutenant’s office was dominated by a huge calendar dotted with round colored stickers. Red for open homicides, black for when the case cleared. Orange for open assaults, blue for when they closed. Color-coordinated crime fighting. Neat and tidy. The shit they taught these guys in management class.