Prior Bad Acts (2 page)

Scott bobbed and nodded. “Yes, ma’am.”

“Don’t call me ma’am.”

“No. I’m sorry, Your Honor. I meant no disrespect.”

“Please leave.”

“Yes, ma— Of course.”

He held up his hands as if to concede his stupidity, then fumbled to grab his briefcase and nearly tripped himself on his way out the door.

Logan remained for a moment but didn’t say a word. He didn’t need to. Carey knew exactly what was going through his mind. Then he huffed a sigh and walked out like a man with a purpose.

The bottle of scotch in his bottom right-hand desk drawer.

“Have one for me,” she muttered.

2

THE BEST TIME
for a controlled release of bad news to the public is Friday afternoon. Taxes are going up, the economy is going down, more troops are being deployed to some third world hot spot—the announcements are made on Friday afternoon. People are busy ending their workweek, getting ready for a few days of freedom, getting out of wherever early for a weekend at a lake. There’s a good chance a lot of attention will be anywhere but on the news.

Detective Stan Dempsey knew how the world of politics worked. He’d been on the shit end of it much of his life, in the army, on the police force. He had a great loathing for the people who held those positions of power. People who were able to wave a hand, shrug a shoulder, raise an eyebrow, and alter the lives of those beneath them without a care or afterthought. People like Judge Carey Moore.

It was difficult for him to think of her as being in a position of authority, holding sway over cases he had built. She seemed too young, looked too pretty. His soul was as old as dirt. He had been wearing a police uniform when she was a child.

He had dealt with Carey Moore when she had been working her way up through the county attorney’s office. A good prosecutor. Tough. Demanding. Despite the big blue eyes and turned-up nose, she had never been anyone’s patsy or pawn.

Dempsey didn’t know what had happened to her since she’d become a judge. Cops had believed they would have someone on the bench who wouldn’t take any crap from defense attorneys, wouldn’t have any time for the dirtbags on trial before her. They had practically expected automatic convictions—Do not pass Go, Go directly to jail.

That wasn’t what had happened at all. She had become a different person on the bench, entertaining ridiculous defense motions, allowing the work of the police force she had once relied on to be questioned and ridiculed. As far as sentences went, if she had a book, she sure as hell wasn’t throwing it at anybody.

And so Stan Dempsey shouldn’t have been surprised that Friday afternoon when the news broke. Court wasn’t even in session. The meeting had gone down in Judge Moore’s chambers.

With nothing better to do, he had left the desk job, where he’d been stuck for all these months, and walked across the street to the Hennepin County Government Center.

The department brass had worried he wasn’t stable enough to be on the streets after the Haas murder investigation. They had worried he was a liability risk, that he might go off at any time on anyone the way he’d gone off on Karl Dahl in the interview room the night Dahl had been arrested.

In his own heart, Dempsey didn’t know that he wouldn’t. He was a different person now. In the twenty-eight years of his career, he had been an exemplary cop—in a uniform and in a suit. Never a complaint filed against him. The Haas murders had changed who he was. He’d gone into that house that summer evening in the eerie calm between thunderstorms, and hours later he had come back out a different man.

The department had sent him to a shrink, but beyond his official report and his statements to Logan in the prosecutor’s office, he had never talked about what he had seen. He had never spoken to anyone about what he felt. Twice a week he had gone to the shrink’s office, stretched out on the couch, and stared at the wall for forty-five minutes, saying nothing.

The truth was, he was too damned scared to say anything. If anyone had known the kind of thoughts that filled his head, he would have gotten shipped off to a secure mental facility. Images of the crime scene were lodged in his brain like pieces of jagged glass. At any given moment a blinding spotlight could hit any one of the images, transporting him back there. He could smell the mildew of the basement and the unmistakable stench of violent death. The sour, acrid smell of terror.

The deaths of that woman and the two children had been horrible. The tortures they had endured, unspeakable. For the very first time in his career, Stan Dempsey had committed the cardinal sin of letting a case get under his skin. He had allowed himself to imagine the last, terrifying hours of the victims’ lives, to feel their fear, their helplessness.

Those emotions had burrowed down into the core of his brain like some kind of weevil. A sense of toxicity had filled him. He had difficulty sleeping, mostly because he feared the violent dreams of vengeance that plagued him. The dreams had become particularly strong recently, as the trial of Karl Dahl drew near.

His lieutenant had been more disturbed than perturbed by the reports from the shrink regarding his twice-weekly lack of cooperation. That was because his lieutenant was a woman, and women always wanted to open up the heads of men and drag their thoughts out into the light like a tangled mess of string to be sorted out and rolled up neatly.

She herself had tried to get him to talk. She had expressed concern for his well-being. She had tried to find out if he had a wife or a family member she could talk to in an attempt to end his stubborn silence.

But Stan didn’t have anyone anymore. People he had been close to over the years had drifted away from him. His wife had divorced him because he was so emotionally closed off, and she needed someone who took an interest in her and in what she needed.

His daughter lived in Portland, Oregon, with her “life partner.” She called on Christmas and Father’s Day. He hadn’t known how to keep her close. He didn’t have the tools, as the shrink told him. He wasn’t open or demonstrative or communicative. He only had the job. And now he barely had that.

The powers that loomed over him had pressed for him to take his retirement and go. They didn’t see that any use he had left in him was worth the risk of having him around. If he snapped one day and beat some skell to death, or drew his weapon and fired into a crowd, he would cost them millions in lawsuits.

Bastards. He was that close to his thirty years and full retirement benefits. He had served the department well and faithfully. And now they wanted to screw him over on his pension because he had suddenly become an inconvenience to them.

No. He would sit at that goddamn desk, go to their shrink and stare at her wall, and time would crawl by, and his career would die on schedule, and he would take his full pension and . . . and . . . Nothing.

The thing that kept him going these days was his focus on the Haas case, the pending trial of Karl Dahl. And so he got up from his desk and went across the street and went into the criminal courts side of the building. He positioned himself where he would see the attorneys coming away from Judge Moore’s chambers.

Word was she would rule as to whether or not Karl Dahl’s prior bad acts could be entered into evidence at trial. Logan would fight hard for it. They didn’t have a hell of a lot of direct physical evidence against Dahl. The case was largely circumstantial—knowing that Dahl had been in the Haas home, that he had been there that day, that an eyewitness had seen him enter the house, that he had left a fingerprint on the telephone, that a neighbor had made a complaint about him to the police just days prior to the murders.

But he was the guy, Stan had no doubt, and the murders were something Dahl had been working toward for a long time. He had probably been living that fantasy in his head for years, planning what he would do, inuring himself to any extreme emotional reaction that would come during the commission of the act so that he wouldn’t make mistakes. Stan Dempsey believed that down to the marrow of his bones.

He sat on a bench, crossed his legs, and wished he could smoke a cigarette. A person could hardly smoke anywhere these days. There was even a movement to make it illegal to smoke outdoors in public spaces. Just another little bit of personal individuality being chipped away.

People came and went up and down the hall. No one paid any attention to him. He was unremarkable in his homeliness, a thin gray man in a baggy brown suit. Sad eyes that stared at nothing.

Kenny Scott, the public defender assigned to represent Karl Dahl, burst into the hall, looking like a man whose execution had been stayed.

Logan followed him a moment later. Logan was a force of nature—big, commanding, full of fury. His brows slashed down over his eyes. His mouth was set in a grim line. He leaned forward as if he were walking into a stiff headwind.

Dempsey stood up. “Mr. Logan?”

For an instant, Logan glared at him, then slowed his march and veered toward him. “Detective.”

“I heard maybe a ruling was coming down on Karl Dahl.”

Logan glanced away and frowned. His tie was jerked loose at the throat, collar undone. He pushed his coat open and jammed his hands at his waist.

“She didn’t dismiss the case,” he said.

“There was a chance of that?”

“Look, Stan, you and I both know Dahl butchered that family, but we don’t have a hell of a lot to prove it. His lawyer has to move to dismiss—that’s his job.”

“What about Dahl’s record?”

Logan shook his head. He was clearly pissed off. “Judge Moore seems to think it’s inflammatory and prejudicial.”

“Being on trial for a triple murder isn’t?” Stan said. “A lot of folks figure if he’s sitting in that chair, he must be guilty.”

“It’s a game, Stan,” Logan said bitterly. “It’s not about right or wrong. It’s about rules and fairness, and making sure no one has the common sense to form an opinion.”

“Can you appeal?”

Logan shrugged, impatient. “We’ll see. Look, Stan, I’ve got to go,” he said, reaching out with one big hand to pat Dempsey’s shoulder. “Hang in there. We’ll get the son of a bitch.”

Dempsey watched him go, feeling defeated. He looked back down the hall toward Judge Moore’s chambers. He wanted to go in there and talk to her. He thought he would tell her in great detail the things he had seen, and the terrible waves of emotion that bombarded him all day, every day, and all night, every night.

He could see her sitting behind her desk, looking cool and calm, the desk acting as a buffer between them. He would politely introduce himself (because he never expected anyone to remember him). He would tell her how disappointed he was in her ruling.

But then he saw himself exploding, raging, storming behind the desk. Eyes huge with shock, she bolted, tripping as she scrambled to get out of her chair and run. He trapped her in the corner, her back against a cabinet, and screamed in her face.

He wanted her to feel the kind of terror Marlene Haas must have felt that day when Karl Dahl had come into her home and tortured her and her two children over the course of several hours before he had butchered her.

Rage built and built inside him like a fire, searing his organs, melting the edges of his brain. He felt huge and violent and monstrous inside. He saw himself wrapping his stubby hands around her beautiful white throat, choking her, shaking her.

But no one passing by Stan Dempsey saw anything but a bony man, with a heavily lined, expressionless face, loitering at the end of the hall.

He cleared the images from his mind and left the building to have a cigarette.

3

6:27 P.M.

I’m a coward,
Carey Moore thought, staring at the clock on her desk. Not for the ruling she had made but for hiding from it.

After Logan and Scott had left her office, she had instructed her clerk to tell all callers she had gone for the day. She didn’t have the energy to deal with reporters, and even though it was Friday afternoon, she knew they would be lying in wait. The case of
The State v. Karl Dahl
was too big a story to blow off for an early weekend.

She wanted to close her eyes and, when she opened them again, magically be home with her daughter. They would cook dinner together and have a “girls’ night in” evening of manicures and storybook reading.

David had left a message that he had a dinner meeting with a potential backer for a documentary comparing the gangsters who had run amok in the Twin Cities area in the thirties and the gangs that ran the streets in the new millennium. Once upon a time Carey would have been disappointed to lose him for an evening. These days it was a relief to have him gone.

All day, she carried the weight of her work on her shoulders, the Dahl case being the heaviest thing she had ever been called on to handle. And every evening David was home, the tension of their relationship made Carey feel as if she were living in a highly pressurized chamber and that the pressure was such that everything inside her wanted to collapse. There was no downtime, no release.

Over the decade of their marriage, their once-good ability to communicate had slowly eroded away. Neither of them was happy now, and neither of them wanted to talk about it. They both hid in their work, and only truly came together for their daughter, Lucy, who was five and oblivious to the tension between them.

Carey walked around her office, arms crossed, and looked out the window at the city below. Traffic still clogged the streets of downtown Minneapolis. Headlights and taillights glowing. The occasional honk of a horn.

If this had been New York, the horns would have been blaring in a cacophony of sound, but even with constant growth and an influx of people from other parts of the country and other parts of the world, this was still the Midwest, and manners and courtesy were still important.

There was an order to things here, and a logic to that order. Stability. Life made sense. Which made something like the Haas murders all the more horrific. No one could make sense of such brutality. Random acts of violence undermined the foundation of what Minnesotans believed about their society.

The office door opened and Chris Logan filled the space, looking like an avenging angel.

Carey stared at him, her outer calm belying the jolt of unpleasant surprise that shot through her. “You’ve just dispelled my theory that Minnesotans are still polite and mannerly.”

“Everyone’s gone,” Logan said, as if the lack of a monitor in the outer office excused his behavior.

“I’m just leaving myself,” she said, opening the closet where she had hung her coat.

“I can’t believe you’re doing this, Carey.”

“You shouldn’t be here, Chris,” she said firmly. “I’m not having an ex parte discussion with you about this case. If you leave now, I won’t report you to the disciplinary committee.”

“Don’t try to throw your weight around with me,” Logan snapped. “That so pisses me off, and you know it.”

“I don’t have to
try,
” she pointed out. “I’m a judge, and you’re a prosecutor with a case before me. It’s improper for you to come in here and question my decisions.”

“I’ve already questioned them outside on the courthouse steps.”

“I’m sure you have. You wore your good suit. The rumpled hair and the tie askew are a nice touch. You’ll probably get marriage proposals called in to the television stations after they run the piece on the news.”

“Don’t play that card with me, Carey,” he warned. “This isn’t about politics. This is about what’s right.”

“A fair trial is right.”

“Putting away the sick son of a bitch who killed that family is right.”

“Yes,” Carey agreed. “That’s your job. Make the case good enough to stick. If you really think the outcome of this trial hangs in the balance of this one issue, then I’m inclined to agree with Kenny Scott—you barely have enough to sustain the indictment.”

“You want me to make my prima facie case right here, right now?” Logan challenged. Anger slashed red along his cheekbones. It was never difficult to read him. If the glare in his eyes didn’t give him away, his pale Irish complexion did.

“No,” Carey said. “I’m just warning you, Chris. If you rush this before a jury to soothe the public outcry, and you lose—”

“I have enough to convict him.”

“Then why are you here?” she demanded. “Would you barge into Judge Olson’s chambers? Or Judge Denholm’s? No. You’re here because you think you should have special privileges, that I should knuckle under and bend to your will because we used to be colleagues and because I’m a woman. If I were a man—”

“I never would have slept with you.” Logan completed the sentence.

Carey stepped back as if he’d slapped her. He might as well have. During the years they had worked together, there had always been something between them, an attraction both had felt but neither had acted on, with the exception of one night.

They had been putting in long hours, preparing for a trial—her last before her appointment to the bench, as it had happened. Carey had been drained of energy from fighting with David about her long hours, about her lack of support for his career.

With David every issue was turned around until it was about him. Her career was interfering with his spotlight. Never mind that when he was working on a project she sometimes didn’t see him at all for weeks at a time, and it was only on a rare occasion that he included her in any part of the process. It never failed that when she needed his support—as she had on that last case—he was never there for her.

But there Chris Logan had been, understanding and sharing the pressure of the upcoming trial, strong and passionate. . . .

“You’ll leave this office now,” she said, her voice hard and tight with emotion. “Or I’ll call a deputy and you can deal with the consequences.”

She went to the door and yanked it open, stared at Logan with eyes as fierce as his.

He looked away and down. “Carey, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that.”

“No, you shouldn’t have. And you will
never
say it again.”

“No. I’m sorry,” he backpedaled. “It’s this case. It’s just getting to me,” he said, shaking his head, raking a hand back through his thick hair.

“Don’t try to give me an excuse,” Carey snapped. “There is no excuse. You’re pissed off and you’re trying to undermine my authority, and I won’t stand for it. If you come within a yard of that line again, I’ll have you removed from this case, and think about what that would do for your public image. Get out.”

He didn’t look at her. She wanted to think he was too embarrassed by his own behavior, but that probably wasn’t the case. He was regrouping, switching tracks to a wiser course of action. Logan’s passion for his work was a thing to behold in the courtroom. Defense attorneys of no small caliber were routinely blown out of the water and crushed. But he had never learned to completely control it when he needed to, and so his strongest asset was also his Achilles’ heel.

“You’ve seen the crime scene photographs,” he said quietly. “You know what was done to that woman, to those two little kids, foster kids. They didn’t even belong there, really. It was just the luck of the draw that they ended up at that house.

“I look at those photos every day. Can’t get them out of my head. I dream about them at night. I’ve never had a case affect me the way this one has.”

“Then you should stop looking at the pictures,” Carey said, despite what she had been thinking about the photographs herself. “There’s no point in it. You can’t make a trial be about your own personal obsession, Chris. You’ll lose your perspective; you’ll make mistakes. Like this one. Go. Now.”

He sighed and nodded, then met her gaze with genuine apology in his eyes. “I am sorry.”

Carey said nothing. He turned and walked out, shoving his hands in his pants pockets, the wide shoulders slumping a bit. If this had been a movie, she would have run after him and forgiven him, and they would have ended up in each other’s arms in a mad embrace. But it wasn’t a movie; this was the real world. She had a job to do, she had a husband, she had a child. She couldn’t have Chris Logan, and she knew better than to want him.

What she really wanted was someone strong to hold her, support her, shelter her. But she didn’t have that. As lonely as it was, she’d learned a long time ago to handle her battles and her insecurities on her own.

Carey put her coat on, slung her purse over one shoulder, and picked up the large old leather briefcase her father had carried when he had sat on the bench as a judge in this same building. She wished she could have gone to him for advice, as she had for most of her life. But Alzheimer’s had stolen her father away from her in the last few years. He no longer recognized her, and so all she had of him were things, his gavel, his briefcase, photographs, and memories.

Feeling hollow and beaten, she left the office. The press would still be waiting outside, hoping in vain that she would come out the main doors.

Instead, she took the skyway across the street to the garage where she parked her car. Afraid to lose the impressive background shot of the Hennepin County Government Center, none of the television people had decamped to find her elsewhere. She braced herself for confrontation with a newspaper reporter, but the skyway was empty, and most of the cars were gone from the level where Carey had parked.

She would have to consider a uniformed escort now that the news of her ruling had broken. And she felt even more of a coward for thinking it, because she pictured herself hiding behind a deputy, trying to avoid the fallout of her own decision.

Lost in her thoughts, she fumbled to dig her keys out of her purse, while her Palm Pilot and a lipstick tumbled out. She sighed heavily, set down the briefcase, and bent awkwardly to scoop up the things she had dropped.

As she began to straighten, something hit her hard across the back, stunning her, knocking her breath from her. A second blow sent her sprawling forward.

The rough concrete tore at the palms of her hands. Her knees hit the surface like a pair of hammerheads. She tried to draw breath to scream, but couldn’t. Her purse flew out ahead of her, its contents spewing out, skidding and rolling.

Her assailant swung at her again, just missing her head as Carey shoved herself to the right, one hand outstretched to try to snag her keys. Some kind of club. She couldn’t really see it, was just aware of the sound as it struck the concrete. Her assailant cursed.

“You fucking bitch! You fucking cunt!” Not shouting, but a harsh, hoarse, rasping sound full of venom.

He fell on her, bouncing her head into the floor like a basketball. Did he mean to kill her? Rape her?

Carey flailed at the car keys, breaking a nail, scraping her fingers, catching hold.

Her attacker grabbed her by the hair, yanked her head back.

Did he have a knife? Would he slit her throat?

She fumbled with the key to her BMW, frantically pushing the buttons. The car’s alarm screamed, and the lights began to flash.

The voice behind her swore again. He slammed her head down. What little breath she had regained huffed out of her as he kicked her hard in the side.

Then everything went terrifyingly black.