“You were
“Fucking slimebag,” Kovac muttered. “What rock did he crawl out from under?”
“It’s Anthony Costello,” Logan said. “He crawled out from under a very expensive rock.”
Kovac shook his head. “Great. David Moore can have his wife kidnapped and murdered. Tony Costello can soak up Carey’s money to defend the asshole. And
“You’re making this personal, Sam,” Dawes said. “You know better.”
Kovac sat down on the stairs, put his head in his hands, and let go a shuddering sigh. “I’m fine.”
“You need to take a break.”
“No.”
“Sam-”
“Don’t send me home, LT,” he said, looking up at her. “I won’t go. This is my case. Carey Moore is my responsibility. I won’t walk away from that. Don’t try to make me.”
He looked at Logan, standing near the front door. Logan was watching him with eagle eyes.
Dawes’s cell phone rang. She took the call, walking away.
“Twenty-five grand to a hit man,” Kovac said. “That should buy him twenty-five to life, right?”
“Can you connect Moore to the hitter through the money?” Logan asked. “Assuming that’s what’s going on.”
“I don’t know. We need to crack open Moore ’s books.”
“You think he’s mixed up in the porn business?”
“Looks like. Has to be how he hooked up with these people. Ginnie Bird, the brother. Ivors is involved in the movie business. Moore is in Ivors’s pocket. Fucking creep. Documentary films my ass.”
He stared at the floor and blew out a breath. His heart was still pounding like a trip-hammer. It was all he could do to keep himself seated on the steps.
“You’ve had worse cases than this,” Logan said.
Kovac looked at him sharply. “So?”
“So what’s with the big blowup? You know Carey that well?”
“I know she’s my vic,” Kovac said defensively. “I know she’s my responsibility. And I’m pretty damn sure that asshole in the other room made her disappear. Do I need something more than that? I’m supposed to care less because Carey Moore hasn’t been raped and eviscerated and set on fire yet?”
Logan held up his hands. “No. I just…
“Never mind,” he said, turning toward Lieutenant Dawes as she came back from her phone call. Her face was grave as she looked from one of them to the other.
“We’ve found the nanny.”
49
HER BODY HAD BEEN folded into the trunk of a late-model dark blue Volvo. She looked like a broken doll lying there, legs bent, her eyes wide-open, her head turned at an odd angle.
She was wearing a brown velour Juicy Couture tracksuit and a pair of pink Puma running shoes. Dressed for a Saturday night at home, kicking back to watch a movie and eat some popcorn.
“I-I didn’t have anything to do with that.”
Kovac looked at the guy, annoyed.
Bruce Green. Twenty-seven. Pasty white wimp with a mop of blond frizz that looked like he’d stolen it off the dead body of Harpo Marx. Bell-bottoms and a black and yellow rugby shirt. He dabbed a bloody handkerchief under his nose. His forehead was growing a big goose egg.
“I-I just glanced down,” Green went on nervously. “I-I dropped my BlackBerry, and-and when I reached for it, I knocked over my latte, and-and it spilled-”
“Shut up,” Kovac said sharply. He turned back to the uniform who had been first on the scene, Hovney, a woman built like the corner mailbox, with a face like the flat side of an anvil.
“He rear-ended the Volvo,” she said, “which was parked here at the curb. The trunk popped. The rest is history.”
Green’s car, a butt-ugly pea green square box Honda something-or-other, had suffered front-end damage. Pieces made from plastic had shattered and lay on the street.
The street had been cordoned off. Half a dozen squad cars sat at angles on either end of the accident scene.
Kovac pulled on a pair of gloves and tried to turn the nanny’s head. The body was in rigor. The second-shift surveillance team had reported the girl had left the Moore house around ten-thirty. She hadn’t lived long past that time. Rigor mortis would have begun to set in two to four hours after death. Full rigor was achieved eight to twelve hours after death.
The car was parked on the side street around the corner from the 7-Eleven, where Anka had supposedly gone to pick out a movie and buy some snacks, just past the alley that ran behind the store. The killer had probably initially parked in the alley, out of view. He had nabbed the girl, pulled her into the alley, killed her, put the body in the trunk, driven out of the alley, and parked at the curb. Then he had gotten behind the wheel of the nanny’s Saab and calmly driven back to the Moore house.
The car would have been equipped with a garage door opener. The keys to the house were probably on the same key ring as the keys to the Saab. He could have forced the nanny to give up the security code to the house system before he killed her. Or, as Kovac had speculated earlier, David Moore had simply given it to him, along with the twenty-five thousand dollars.
“I guess we can rule out the nanny as a suspect,” Liska said.
Hovney went on. “The plates come back to a Saab-”
“He swapped the plates,” Kovac said. Which meant the call that had gone out to be on the lookout for the nanny’s car had included the wrong plate numbers. “Whose car is this?”
“The VIN number connects the car to a Christine Neal,” Dawes said.
“Has anyone tried to contact this woman?” Kovac asked.
“No answer,” Dawes said. “I’ve sent a unit to her home.”
Kovac shook his head, pissed off at the unnecessary loss of life. If Anka hadn’t been involved in the plan against Carey-which she clearly hadn’t been-she had been nothing more than collateral damage, just one more person to get out of the way so the plan to nab Carey could go forward as planned.
If Donny Bergen was the doer, it didn’t make sense that he would kill someone to get a car. Too risky. He wouldn’t have used his own vehicle, for the obvious reasons. But it wasn’t that difficult to boost a car without bothering a soul.
“Was the car reported as stolen?” he asked.
“No.”
Kovac nodded. “Well, let’s hope Ms. Neal is on vacation.”
50
THE CAR SLOWED down and turned. Gravel crunched beneath the tires, and Carey’s heart began to pound hard at the base of her throat. No one was ever taken to a remote area against their will for any good reason.
She tried the phone again, but still she had no signal, and her battery was starting to run low. The case of the phone had cracked when she had broken the plastic light cover. Hands shaking, she turned it off and stuck it into the front pocket of her jeans once more. The tail of her shirt would hide the outline of it… as long as she was
