“Innocent?”
Stan felt the rage rise up inside him like a column of fire. “He butchered that woman. He violated those children and hung them from the ceiling. I was there. I saw them. I smelled their deaths. Do you have any idea what that’s like, Counselor? Have you ever been to a death scene?”
Scott didn’t answer him. Of course he didn’t know what it was like to stand in the place where a violent death had occurred. He had never experienced the unsettling feeling of evil lingering in the air, mingling with the last vibrations of terror. He didn’t know what it was like to feel as if he could almost still hear the screams of the victims as their lives were being torn out of their bodies.
“You look for loopholes to get these scumbags off,” Stan said bitterly. “You’re as guilty as Karl Dahl. And you’re going to pay for that.”
He put his foot into Kenny Scott’s back and pushed. The lawyer went headfirst down the final few steps and landed on the concrete floor with a dull thump like a bag of wet cement.
Stan stepped over the groaning lawyer and went to a workbench built up against one wall. The duffel bag went on the bench. Stan unzipped the bag, looked inside, trying to decide what appealed to him most for this situation.
“You’re going on trial, Mr. Scott,” Stan said, pulling his choice from the bag. “And nobody is going to try to get you acquitted.”
27
DAVID MOORE, the brilliant filmmaker who hadn’t made a film in years, had a Web site devoted to himself. Arrogant prick.
Back at his desk, Kovac looked it over. It wasn’t a cheap deal. Sharp graphics, great color, a little slide-show montage of his work. A lot of self-aggrandizing crap about his credentials and awards he had won in the past. He certainly made himself sound like a genius.
Kovac wondered if he ever got a call off this site to produce anything or if it was just for ego. He knew nothing about the making of documentary films, except that when he watched one on PBS, they always seemed to be funded by grants from big oil companies and private trusts for the endowment of the arts. The latter of which was apparently where Edmund Ivors came into the game.
He didn’t know what kind of a living a man could make doing what David Moore did. Seemed to him that if the guy only got one film made in a decade, either he made a boatload of money doing it or he was leeching off his wife.
Kovac suspected choice B. David Moore was all talk and no walk. His most recent work had been producing the occasional commercial for local television.
The best thing Kovac could see about Moore ’s Web site was that the jerk had included numerous photographs of himself. Photographs of him hard at work and twenty pounds thinner. Photographs of him in black tie at some awards bash.
Carey was with him in that one. She looked happier then, with a brilliant smile, her hand on her husband’s arm. A knockout dress that flashed a little skin. She would have been a prosecutor at the time, trying to make a name for herself in the county attorney’s office. And Husband had been at the top of his game, the man of the hour.
Cut from the same inferior materials as Liska’s ex, Kovac thought. Big mouth, fragile ego. What had Carey said? That her husband resented her.
With guys like that around, it was a pure damn wonder that women bothered to associate with men at all. Not that he’d been any great catch himself, Kovac admitted. At least he couldn’t say he had ever resented either of his wives when he’d been married to them. Afterward was a whole other matter.
The four-star Marquette Hotel had been designed as part of the central complex of the IDS Center, a soaring fifty-plus dramatic stories of dark glass. The hotel connected to the main office tower via the Crystal Court-a glass-enclosed 23,000-square-foot urban park with a glass ceiling 121 feet above the ground and a 105-foot cascading water fountain at its center.
The complex connected to the rest of the city by the skyway system-enclosed second-story sidewalks that linked most of the major buildings downtown. The skyways allowed you to travel by foot all over downtown without ever setting a toe outdoors, a great thing when winter temperatures dropped well below zero and the winds howled through the concrete canyons of the city.
At the front desk, Kovac showed his badge to a young clerk, who immediately went and fetched the manager, a rail-thin red-haired man with a very serious face. Brendan Whitman, his name tag said. Kovac went through the introduction business again, then showed Whitman the photograph of David Moore he had printed from the Web site.
“Mr. Whitman, do you recognize the man in this picture?”
“Yes. That’s Mr. Greer,” he said without hesitation.
Mr. Greer. David Moore had chosen his father-in-law’s name to use when checking into hotels to cheat on his namesake’s daughter. Passive-aggressive prick.
“Can you tell me if Mr. Greer was checked into the hotel yesterday?”
Whitman looked at him, suspicious. “What’s this about?”
“This is about a police investigation into an assault last night. I’m sure you wouldn’t want the good name of your hotel to be associated with an assault if there was no need.”
“Of course not.”
“So let’s try this again. Did Mr. Greer check into the hotel yesterday?”
“Yes. I checked him in myself.”
“What time was that?”
Whitman thought about it. “Around three in the afternoon, as usual.”
“He’s a regular?”
“Every other week. He’s from Los Angeles. Does something in the movie industry. Was Mr. Greer injured in the assault?”
“Not yet,” Kovac muttered under his breath. “Is he usually with a lady when he comes in?”
“No. Always by himself.”
“Have you ever seen him here with a woman?”
“Yes. I’ve seen him several times with a woman in the bar.”
“What did she look like?”
Whitman squinted as he thought about it. “Ummm… medium height, slender, blond.”
“Do you keep records on your guests?” Kovac asked. “Could you, say, type Mr. Greer’s name into your computer and bring up a list of his stays at the hotel?”
“Yes, but you’ll need a warrant for that,” Whitman said. “If we just gave out that kind of information, it would open the hotel to lawsuits. If we can show we were compelled by the authorities to give over the information…”
“I understand,” Kovac said, though he didn’t like it.
There was no chance of his getting a warrant for David Moore’s hotel records, or for his financials, which Kovac would have loved to get his hands on. To get a warrant, he had to show reasonable cause for the specific items or information he wanted. As he had been told by more than one prosecutor, Carey Moore among them, if what he wanted was a fishing license, he would have to get it from the state Department of Natural Resources.
Moore ’s hotel stays would be pertinent in divorce court, not criminal court. The investigation was about Carey Moore’s assault, and David Moore’s alibi held. Unless Kovac could come up with something that connected Moore to the actual perpetrator of the crime, he was out of luck.
Liska would have been all over him if she’d known he was even asking the questions he had asked Brendan Whitman. She already thought the warning flags were up, which irritated him. For Christ’s sake, couldn’t he feel
