wearing a shirt.
The car rolled to a halt.
She had no weapon. Her physical strength, even with adrenaline fueling it, would be no match for a man bent on harming her. The car rocked as the driver got out.
Her breath held tight in her lungs as she waited for the trunk to unlock, waited for the sudden blinding light as the lid opened, waited to finally see the face of her captor.
But the trunk didn’t open.
A car door opened again, but no one got in.
Carey wondered where the hell she was. There was no traffic noise at all. No sound of human voices. All she could hear was the very faint squawking of geese flying south for the winter. She wished for their freedom, and thanked God that at least she wasn’t hearing the sound of a shovel digging a shallow grave.
51
CHRISTINE NEAL’S COTTAGE would have looked just as at home if it had been found somewhere on Nantucket Island. The small garage was empty. The front door of the house was locked, but a little hand-painted sign bade visitors welcome and announced, “Grandma Lives Here.”
The uniformed officers had rung the doorbell and looked in the windows but had seen no sign of Christine Neal.
Dawes gave the signal. “Break it in.”
The house was quiet and smelled fresh, as if it had just been cleaned.
“Well, this is weird right off the bat,” Liska said.
“What?” Kovac asked.
“Look at this place,” she said. “It’s so-so-
At Kovac’s request, she had met them at the Neal home. They were both good detectives in their own right, but Kovac liked the way they worked a scene together. They complemented each other in the way they saw things, in the feelings they picked up, in the way they processed what they took in.
“Not everyone shares your enlightened view of organization,” Kovac said as they walked around the living room, looking for any sign of something wrong.
He had sent one of the uniforms to the backyard and one to the basement. Dawes stood just inside the front door, deep in conversation with the chief of detectives, trying to explain the debacle at the Moore house.
“Not everyone has two boys and a homicide cop in the family,” Liska said. “Look at the pattern in this carpet. Freshly vacuumed. I’m lucky I can
“Mmmm… You should tell Speed he can work off some of his delinquent child support tidying your house once a week.”
“Ha. Two boys, a homicide cop, and an asshole. I would have the same house, but it would smell like sweat socks, cigarettes, and bad Mexican food.”
They went into the kitchen, finding it equally immaculate.
“The boys with him this weekend?” Kovac asked.
“Yeah. I can’t wait to find out what useful skill he’s taught them this time,” Liska said. “The last time they were with him, he taught them how to pat down a hype without getting stuck with a dirty needle.”
Kovac looked out the window over the sink, into the fenced backyard. A happy scarecrow hung on a post in a vegetable garden studded with orange pumpkins.
“That’s Speed, always the model father,” he said.
“He’s the only one they’ve got,” Liska said. “Hey, look at this. She’s a breast cancer survivor.”
She stood in front of the refrigerator, looking at a collage of photographs. The life and times of Christine Neal.
“I hope to God she’s visiting those grandkids,” Kovac said.
The officer came up from the basement and said, “Nothing down there but wet laundry in the washing machine.”
Kovac turned down the hall, checked out the bathroom-spotless-and continued on to what he thought might be a bedroom.
The vacuum had been run in this room as well, right up to the white eyelet dust ruffle of the queen-sized bed.
Kovac looked around the room. Nothing had been overturned or disturbed.
He went down on one knee beside the bed and lifted the fabric.
Christine Neal stared at him with sightless eyes.
52
“I DON’T GET IT, ”Kovac said. “Why kill this woman? Just to take her car?”
“Maybe he knew her,” Liska suggested. “Maybe she could ID him.”
“You think Christine Neal was into porn? Is there a whole over-fifty porn movie industry out there I don’t know about?”
“I don’t want to know. I’m still reeling from Tippen.”
Kovac huffed. “Please. Like you didn’t already think he was watching porn.”
“Yeah, but hearing it from the horse’s mouth was too much.”
They stood in the front yard, near Christine Neal’s house, waiting for the ME’s people to roll out the victim, cloaked in the anonymous black body bag. It would be the last private moment for Christine Neal.
By day’s end the cops and the media would be dragging out the details of her life like entrails from a carcass. By the end of the next day, everyone with a television or a newspaper subscription in the metro area would know how old she was, who her family was, what her neighbors knew about her, how her coworkers felt about her.
Kovac lit a cigarette, giving Liska a warning glare. She held her hands up in surrender.
“Maybe the doer wasn’t Donny Bergen,” Lieutenant Dawes said.
“It was,” Kovac snapped.
“Why? Because you want to pin the plan on David Moore?”
“It all fits,” he insisted. “The assault Friday night, Bergen showing up at the hotel bar dressed in black like the guy on the tape from the parking garage. Moore wanted out of the marriage, but he didn’t want to lose anything. Carey is kidnapped, murdered, and he’s the grieving husband, the devoted single father, inherits everything via Lucy.”
Dawes’s phone rang. She sighed and took the call, walking away.
Liska shifted her weight to her right foot, effectively moving closer to her partner. They stood at right angles, facing the house, their backs to the gathering mob of media and curious onlookers.
Kovac stared at the house, raised his cigarette to his lips, knowing she could see the slight trembling of his hand. Their killer had murdered twice, senselessly. There was no reason to think he wouldn’t do it again. Especially if he’d been paid to do it.
Christine Neal and the nanny had been just for sport. He could have stolen either car without harming anyone. Wear a mask, tie the women up, tape their mouths shut. They hadn’t needed to see him.
“Sam, there are other possibilities,” Liska said.
“Maybe there are,” he conceded. “But are any of them good, Tinks? You think this is going to have a happy ending? You know as well as I do more kidnap victims are murdered within the first few hours of the abduction than not. And those are the ones snatched for ransom. There’s no ransom involved here. There hasn’t been a call. There’s not going to be a call.
“Let’s say it’s not Donny Bergen,” he suggested. “Who’s up next? Stan Dempsey? Your boy Bobby? You think
