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 Dahl 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.
