Prior Bad Acts

“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,