“I don’t know anything,” she said. “I can’t believe this is happening.”
“They don’t have crime in Sweden?”
“Not like here. It’s crazy, evil, what that man did to that family, to those children. And now you say this other man, a detective with the police department, wants to hurt Mrs. Moore or Lucy?”
“It’s pretty scary stuff,” Kovac conceded. “Judge Moore is in a position that attracts a lot of attention, not all of it good.”
Anka looked away, clearly upset.
“Anka, I’m going to ask you something very personal,” Kovac said. “And I need you to answer me honestly. It’s very important that I have a clear picture of what’s going on. Do you understand what I’m saying?”
“Yes,” she answered, nervous, anxious.
“Do you have something going on with Mr. Moore?”
Kovac watched her expression carefully. Shock and offense.
“I don’t know what you mean,” she said. “Mr. Moore is my employer.”
“He’s not more than that to you?”
“No. Of course not.”
The answer was a beat too slow, and she didn’t quite meet his eyes.
“You’re not sleeping with him?”
She gave a little gasp. “No! I’m going upstairs now. I have nothing more to say to you. Good day.”
Indignation. Outrage.
But she still didn’t quite meet his eyes.
21
KARL GOT OFF the bus at Calhoun Square in a trendy area of Minneapolis known as Uptown even though it was actually south of downtown. The neighborhood was full of nicely redone older homes, lovely yards, and established trees on the boulevard. It was an area of young upwardly mobile families, upwardly mobile gay couples, comfortably well-off retirees.
There weren’t a lot of people looking the way Karl was looking, but he planned to remedy that quickly.
He went into the Calhoun Square shopping mall, a collection of boutiques and restaurants tucked into an old brick building that had been converted from blue-collar beginnings. A bored girl at a kiosk on the first floor watched him approach, with a mix of disgust and trepidation. As he neared her, Karl thought she might run, but he held out a twenty-dollar bill and told her he needed a cap.
She eyed the twenty, and her greed got the better of her. She sold him a plain khaki ball cap and offered back no change.
As he went toward the men’s room, Karl looked over his shoulder and saw her stick the bill in her purse. The dishonesty of people in general made him shake his head.
He took the cap and went into the men’s room to discard the ragman’s hair and knit cap.
Because it was early, he had the place to himself, and decided he would take the opportunity to wash his face and head.
Removal of the cap was a painful process. The wool had knitted into the bloody head wound he’d gotten when Snake was pounding him into the cell bars. As he peeled the cap away bit by bit, the wound opened in several places and began to bleed again. He stared at himself in the mirror, thinking he looked like something out of a horror movie, a red-eyed demon up from hell. His lip was throbbing something fierce. Grotesquely swollen and red, it reminded him in a way of the folds of tender flesh between a woman’s legs.
For the briefest of moments, he imagined he could smell the musky scent of a woman who was ready for sex. He enjoyed that moment. Then he pulled his bridge out of his pants pocket, rinsed it off in the sink, and put it back in his mouth. There probably weren’t many people in this part of town who went around without teeth.
The ball cap went on with the sunglasses.
He neatly rolled the sleeves of his shirt halfway up his forearms. There wasn’t anything he could do about the filthy pants except roll the cuffs up. He took off his shoes and socks, threw the socks in the trash, and put the shoes back on. This would do for the moment.
Pulling the brim of the ball cap down low, he exited the bathroom, the building, and walked away into the neighborhood. Hands in his pockets, he strolled down the sidewalk like a man without a care in the world. Maybe he was just walking home from Starbucks. Maybe he’d been doing yard work, and that was why his pants were dirty.
As he walked, Karl scoped out the houses on this side of the block. Bikes on the front porch meant more than one person in the household. A couple or a family. He looked for the smaller homes-single story, or story and a half. The ones with large flower beds, now dead from the cold, told him perhaps the people, or person, who lived there had a lot of spare time. Older, retired maybe.
A small Cape Cod type of a house caught his eye. Blue with white shutters, and a picket fence around the front yard. A country-crafty wooden welcome sign hung beside the front door: “Grandma Lives Here.” Karl turned the corner, then turned again down the alley.
Privacy fences blocked off the view into the backyards of most of the houses. Grandma Lives Here had a fence made of wide vertical cedar planks that had been allowed to weather to a silvery gray.
Karl slipped between that fence and the neighbor’s, testing for loose boards as he worked his way to the back of the one-car garage. There were none. There was, however, a window on the side of the house, at the back, which was blocked from view from the street by a big lilac bush.
In the garage, a car started. Karl watched through the lilac bush as a late-model Volvo backed down the driveway. He couldn’t make out the driver’s face. A woman, he thought, based on her cautious maneuvering as she backed the car out into the street.
Grandma was leaving. Karl wondered if there was a Grandpa still inside. He looked in the side window of the garage and, judging from the absence of power tools, concluded there probably was no man of the house.
The window at the back side of the house had been left open partway to let in the fresh air this lovely fall morning. Winter was coming, and once it hit, no one would open a window for the next five months.
Several large, heavy plant pots with dead plants in them had been parked alongside the garage, between the garage and the privacy fence. Waiting to be cleaned out and put away for the winter. Karl rolled the largest across the narrow space, tipped it upside down, and used it for a step stool.
A little work with the ragman’s steak knife, and Karl was able to peel the screen away enough for him to crawl inside. When he was in, he carefully pulled the screen back down and into place.
He had expected the house to be littered with Grandma stuff-porcelain poodles and old china and fussy furniture with flowered fabric and lace doilies. Instead, the space looked like something from a decorating magazine, with sage-colored walls and dark, modern furnishings.
In the kitchen Karl found the story of Grandma Lives Here. Her refrigerator was covered with photos of her with other people-friends, family, grandchildren. So many smiling, happy faces.
According to unopened mail on the counter, Grandma’s name was Christine Neal.
Christine Neal was in her late fifties, trim and athletic. She ran in marathons. Went on vacations to exotic places. In several photographs, she was as bald as Karl was. A banner at one of her races called for support for a local breast cancer survivors group.
Karl pulled the refrigerator open and helped himself to an orange. It was cold and juicy and refreshing. When he had finished and thrown the peel in the trash, he wiped the handle of the refrigerator with a towel and went in search of a bathroom.
There was only one downstairs, adjacent to what must be Christine Neal’s bedroom. White and immaculate, it smelled of lavender.
In the medicine cabinet, he found mint-flavored dental floss, tore a string off for himself, and set to cleaning all the bits out from between his teeth-the orange he had just eaten, the piece of pork chop he had found in the garbage earlier. He took the toothbrush from the holder, helped himself to toothpaste, and brushed his teeth with vigor. He pulled his bridge out of his mouth, brushed it, and re-placed it.
