Prior Bad Acts

Karl backed out of the garage and put the garage door down with the remote. With luck no one would come looking to visit Christine Neal over the weekend. But even if someone did, they would simply find her gone. No Christine, no car, no handbag. She was out. Shopping, maybe, or at a movie. If she worked somewhere, she wouldn’t be missed until Monday at the earliest. If she didn’t work, it could be days before someone noticed she wasn’t around.

Days and days of freedom to use Christine’s car, to do what he wanted, to go where he pleased.

He turned down the street and headed out on the next leg of his quest: to find the place that would please him most-the home of his champion, Carey Moore.

22

“NO USABLE PRINTS on the judge’s handbag. At least half a dozen people touched the car. So far none of those prints have come back with a rap sheet,” Tippen said.

He paced back and forth at the end of the conference table, tall and thin, with a long caricature of a face, all angles and hollows, craggy brow, bristly salt-and-pepper mustache. He had been a detective with the sheriff’s department for years before making the move to work Homicide with the city cops.

As a sheriff’s detective, Tippen had first teamed with Kovac and Liska on a multiagency task force to solve the Cremator murders-a killer who had targeted primarily prostitutes, tortured and killed them, then set their bodies on fire in a public park. They had worked well as a team and had become drinking buddies after.

“Judge Moore gets more than her fair share of hate mail.” Elwood Knutson, another of the Cremator task force. A man roughly the size of a small brown bear, Elwood was their philosopher in a too-small porkpie hat.

“That’s hard to believe,” Liska said sarcastically.

Kovac said nothing.

“Her clerk has it separated by degrees: crazy, crazier, and certifiable.”

“Threats?” Kovac asked.

“Veiled and not so veiled. Anything she gets that looks legitimately scary goes to the sheriff’s detectives.” Elwood glanced at Tippen and said, “Really, it’s a wonder she wasn’t killed a long time ago, considering.”

“Don’t look at me!” Tippen said. “In case you hadn’t noticed, I changed teams.”

“Then why hasn’t the quality of their work improved?” Liska asked.

Tippen fired a chocolate-covered coffee bean at her. He had recently acquired an addiction to them, despite the fact that he was the last guy in the department in need of caffeine to wire himself up.

“I had all the letters copied and brought them over,” Elwood went on, tipping a big hand in the direction of the file folders stacked in front of him. “A little bedtime reading, if anyone’s interested.”

“What about ex-cons?” Kovac asked. “Any bad guys recently released who might think they have a big ax to grind?”

“I’ve tracked some of the more obvious candidates through their parole officers,” Liska said. “So far I don’t like any of them for the assault. Despite all efforts by the Department of Corrections, it seems several of them have actually reformed, and can be accounted for by their bosses at the time of the judge’s attack.

“But,” she continued, “I do have a hot prospect in Ethan Pratt, the father of the foster kids who were murdered.”

Tippen arched a shaggy brow. “He’s been out of the picture since conception, but now he cares so much he assaults a judge?”

“He’s of a type,” Liska said. “One of those guys who only wants to be around to make the big, dramatic scene.”

“An asshole,” Kovac declared.

“Pratt’s done jail time for minor assault. He punched out a guy in a sports bar for being a Dallas Cowboys fan-”

“That’s a crime?” Elwood asked.

“-knocked around a girlfriend. Big temper, small brain,” Liska said. “He made the news when Karl Dahl was arrested, giving a loud, obnoxious statement outside the courthouse after the arraignment. Demanded the death penalty. It somehow escaped his notice that we don’t have the death penalty in this state.”

“I saw that,” Elwood said. “Fu Manchu mustache and a blow-dried mullet.”

Liska nodded. “The perennial favorite hot look for the white trash set.”

“You ever have a mullet, Sam?” Elwood asked.

Kovac scowled at him. “Jesus Christ.”

“He had the mustache,” Liska said with mischief in her eyes. “I’ve seen the photographs.”

“It was the eighties,” Kovac defended himself. “Every cop with balls had a Fu Manchu.”

“Yeah? I don’t think I was born yet.”

Kovac gave her a look across the table and tried not to laugh. “Don’t make me come over there, Tinker Bell.”

“What’re you gonna do?” Liska teased. “Beat me with your walker?”

“You’re just begging for a full day of misogynist PMS jokes.”

“Ha! You’re the one asking for it, Kojak. As you well know, you are no match for my mouth.”

“I’m not touching that,” Tippen announced. “It’s too easy.”

It felt good to open the pressure valve and release some of the job stress, Kovac admitted. They were merciless with each other, and a lot of their humor would be considered shocking, rude, and in very poor taste by normal human beings. But it was how they coped with a job that showed them the worst kind of human cruelty and depravity on a regular basis.

Lieutenant Dawes cleared her throat loudly, reining them in. “Ethan Pratt…?”

Liska had the grace to look sheepish. “He’s on probation. But he’s not at his last known, he didn’t show up for work last night, and he didn’t check in with his PO yesterday. And Amber Franken told me he was going off on the judge the last time he visited, ten days ago. She said he called Moore a fucking cunt.”

“A popular phrase with the mullet faction,” Tippen said.

“Practically an endearment,” Elwood concurred.

“You should add that to your repertoire, Elwood,” Liska suggested. “Girls go wild for that kind of talk.”

“So, he’s not accounted for, he has a temper, he called Judge Moore the same thing her assailant did,” Dawes said. “We need to find this guy and have a sit-down.”

“It’s out there,” Liska said. “Be on the lookout for an asshole with a mullet.”

“I’ll put someone on that specifically,” Dawes said. “There has to be someone out there who knows where this guy is.”

“Even assholes have friends,” Elwood said.

“Any word on Stan Dempsey?” Kovac asked.

He knew there was a BOLO out for Dempsey in all agencies in the entire metro area, but no one wanted to talk about it.

“He’s the one running around armed to the teeth and promising justice,” Kovac said dryly.

Dawes shook her head. “We have a call in to his daughter in Portland, Oregon, but she hasn’t called back.”

“Dempsey has a daughter?” Elwood said with disbelief.

“Dempsey had sex with a woman?” Tippen said. “Stan, we hardly knew ye.”

“Well, that’s a problem, isn’t it?” Dawes said. “We don’t know him. We can’t find anyone who knows him. We don’t know where he’d go to hide. We don’t know what he does outside the job.”

“He used to do some fishing,” Kovac said. “And there was a photograph in his house of him and the ex ballroom dancing.”

Nobody knew what to say to that. They couldn’t have looked more puzzled if Kovac had jumped up on the table and did the tarantella.

“Check with the county registrar,” Kovac said. “Maybe he’s got a shack on one of the lakes. And we should try