Prior Bad Acts

looked to the larger of the two, a strapping twenty-something guy.

“Kick it in.”

“Shouldn’t we have a warrant?” the young guy asked.

“We’ve got exigent circumstances,” Kovac said. “Kick it in!”

The officer put his shoe to the door once, twice. On the third kick, the frame splintered and the door swung in, carrying the entire dead bolt mechanism with it.

The house alarm began to shriek.

The door into the laundry room was unlocked. Kovac went through into the kitchen and began calling.

“Carey? Judge Moore? Are you here? Is anyone here?”

Silence.

Kovac drew his weapon and went through the downstairs, calling, looking, finding nothing.

A sick feeling churned in his gut as he went up the stairs.

“Carey? Judge Moore?”

He knocked on the door to the nanny’s room. No answer. He pushed the door open. No one. The bed was unmade. He checked the closet. No one.

“Carey! Anka!” he shouted.

The uniforms stood at the top of the stairs. Kovac ran past them, down the hall to Carey’s bedroom. The door was open; the bed had been stripped to the mattress. Carey was gone.

“Check the basement,” he shouted at the officers.

He thought of Kenny Scott bound to a chair, the word GUILTY branded into his forehead. He thought of the Haas family, of the two children left hanging in the basement.

Lucy.

Oh, Jesus.

A feeling washed over him he so rarely experienced that it took him a moment to name it.

Panic.

The little painted fairy on Lucy’s door smiled at him. The things that Stan Dempsey had said on the video played through his head.

“I wonder how differently she would feel if her daughter were raped and sodomized and hung up from the ceiling like a slaughtered lamb…”

Kovac felt like he was going to puke. He braced himself for the worst and pushed the door open.

Lucy’s bed was empty, the covers messy. No blood. That registered right away. There was no blood. There was no body.

“Lucy?” Kovac called. “Lucy, are you in here? It’s me, Detective Sam.”

He went to the closet and opened the door. Nothing.

He got down on his hands and knees, lifted the ruffled bed skirt, and peered under the bed, his heart breaking at the sight of the little girl. She was shaking and crying and trying very hard not to make a sound.

“Come on, sweetheart,” Kovac said gently. “You can come out now. You’re safe. I won’t let anything bad happen to you.”

Slowly she inched her way toward him, crying openly now, her breath hitching, her nose running. Kovac reached out to help her, and her little hand grabbed hold of his fingers and squeezed for dear life.

When she popped out from under the bed, she threw herself into his arms, threw her whole small trembling body against him, wrapped her arms around his neck, and sobbed, “Where’s my mommy?”

Kovac held her tight and thought, I wish I knew.

39

CAREY DIDN’T KNOW how long she had been unconscious. She came out of it layer by layer, first becoming aware that she was breathing, then moving an arm, a leg. Still, she wasn’t sure that she wasn’t dead. She lay curled in a fetal position, disoriented, dizzy. Then she opened her eyes and saw nothing but blackness.

Panic hit instantly.

Was she blind?

She brought her hands up to her face to feel for a blindfold, even though she knew there wasn’t one.

Her heart was racing. Her breathing was too quick and too shallow. She felt as if she wasn’t getting any air at all.

Raw fear raked through her.

Instinctively she lashed out, pushed her hands out in front of her, and hit something solid. She tried to straighten her legs, but there wasn’t enough space.

She turned onto her back and did the same thing again, with the same result.

Her first thought was that she was inside a coffin.

Memories of old horror stories flashed through her brain. Stories of people being buried alive.

As a prosecutor, she had once worked a case where a woman had been left for dead, buried in a shallow grave. She had been stabbed multiple times, but when the ME determined cause of death, it was asphyxia. The woman had breathed in dirt particles after she had been buried. Her nose and mouth had been full of freshly turned earth.

Carey tried frantically to push at the lid of her coffin. It didn’t move.

She called for help, the sound seeming to come back at her instead of traveling beyond her small, dark prison. Even so, she cried out again and again, until her throat was raw.

No one came.

Tears trailed from the outer corners of her eyes into her hair as she lay on her back, wondering, waiting. Time lost all meaning.

Periodically, she kicked at the lid of her box. Realizing she had no water and that her mouth was already dry, she stopped trying to call out.

The power of fear was like an animal inside her, trying to escape.

She couldn’t breathe.

She felt faint.

If she hadn’t already, she was going to die.

Lucy.

She had to keep thinking of Lucy.

Was she nearby? Had the abductor taken her daughter as well?

Carey thought about what Kovac had told her. About Stan Dempsey, about what he had said on his videotape.

“I wonder how differently she would feel if her daughter were raped and sodomized and hung up from the ceiling like a slaughtered lamb.”

Tears filled her eyes once more. The idea of someone’s hurting Lucy, torturing Lucy, hanging her by the neck, made Carey’s stomach turn and her heart feel as if it were being torn from her chest.

She had seen the photos from the Haas murders. She had been as horrified as anyone-more so, considering she had a child of her own and considering that the fate of the man accused of committing those crimes hung in the balance in her own courtroom.

Was that going to be her fate, the fate of her daughter? To die as Marlene Haas and her foster children had died? Or had Lucy already been killed? Was she lying in her bed at home with her throat slit to prevent her from identifying the perpetrator?

And what about Anka? An innocent in the dramas that Carey found herself in. Whatever someone might have had against her, Carey hated to think that one of the few loyal, trustworthy people she knew would be made to pay for her imagined sins.

The voice on the phone late Friday night echoed in her mind over and over: “I’m coming to get you, bitch.”

A man’s voice.