Kovac had told the doctor if he had to give up all that, he might as well eat his gun, because he wouldn’t have anything left to live for.
The men’s room door swung in and Nikki Liska stepped inside.
“Jesus, the least you could do is go into a stall,” she said.
Kovac scowled at her. “Very funny. What the hell are you doing in here? This is the men’s room, for Christ’s sake!”
“So where are they?” Liska challenged, crossing her arms over her chest. “The least I could get out of this is a sneak peek at a little throbbing manhood.”
Kovac felt his cheeks heat. Liska had been his partner for enough years that he should have been immune to her mouth, but she never ceased to outdo herself. Her personality was her loudest, largest feature. The rest of her was five-five with big blue eyes and a white-blond pixie haircut. To the unsuspecting, she looked sweet and perky. But the last guy to call her that had gone home from the party with a limp.
Her eyes narrowed. “I don’t believe it.”
“Don’t make a big deal,” Kovac warned.
“You, Sam Kovac, are an optimist.”
“No, I’m not.”
“Yes, you are.”
“I’m a pragmatist.”
“You’re full of shit,” Liska said, marching into the room. She walked right up to him and smacked him on the arm. “The patch!”
“Ouch!”
“Don’t be such a baby.”
She admired the fresh nicotine patch affixed to his upper arm. Kovac pulled his shirt back on and started doing the buttons, grumbling under his breath.
Liska leaned back against the counter. “I thought you told the doctor to take a hike.”
“I told him I have shoes older than he is,” Kovac groused. “It’s got nothing to do with him. You know I try to quit once a year. It’s an annual event. It’s like a holiday.”
He had only tried quitting more times than he could count. It never lasted more than a few weeks, a month at the outside. Something always happened that made him think he should just enjoy himself, because in any given moment he could become a statistic. He was a homicide cop. A sunny outlook didn’t come with the job.
“Nothing to do with Tim Metzger having a heart attack last week,” Liska said.
Kovac didn’t answer her. He focused on tying his tie. It was hard enough to face mortality on his own terms. If he had to share his feelings with Liska-or anyone else-he would sooner have thrown himself in front of a bus.
Liska looked up at him, speculating. “Are you seeing someone and not spilling all the details to me?”
Scowling, Kovac straightened the knot in his tie and snugged it up against his collar. “Did you come in here for some other reason than trying to see a dick?”
“We’re up,” she said.
“That’s what I get for hanging around to do my paperwork. What is it?”
“Assault,” she said. “In the government center parking ramp. Get this. Our vic is none other than the Honorable Judge Moore.”
“ Moore?” Kovac said with disgust. “Can’t we just leave her for dead?”
5
FRIDAY NIGHT IN the Hennepin County Medical Center ER could resemble a violent punk rock Halloween party, but the evening was young. The ghouls and gangbangers were still home, primping their nose rings and polishing their tattoos.
“Sam Kovac! Fuck me sideways!”
“He can do that?” Liska asked. “A man of hidden talents, our Sam.”
Kathleen Casey, trauma nurse and ER pit bull, waved a hand in dismissal as she marched up to them. “The hell if I know. But I’d rather find out than deal with these people.”
She rolled her eyes toward the waiting area, where reporters and camera crews were perched on the furniture like a flock of vultures. “God save us from the media. Give me your average street scum any night.”
As if on cue, several of them spotted Kovac and started toward him.
“Kovac!”
“Detective!”
“Do you have any leads-”
“Do you know what prompted the attack-”
“Did this have anything to do with the ruling on the Dahl case?”
The usual cacophony. Rapid-fire questions they knew damn well he wouldn’t answer. Kovac held up a hand to ward them off. “No comment.”
Casey took an aggressive step toward them and shooed them with her hands. “Back to the chairs with you before I break out my Taser.”
Casey had been through the wars. Kovac called her the Iron Leprechaun. Five feet nothing, with a hedge of maroon hair and a sweet-Irish-mother kind of a face that drew people to her so they could confide in her, then implode in some spectacular way.
Kovac had known her forever. She was a longtime veteran of HCMC, with a brief stint at a small-town ER in the Minnesota hinterland, also known by Kovac as Outer Mongolia. He tried never to venture south of the airport, east of the river, west of the 494 freeway, or north of downtown.
“So what’s the story with our vic?” he asked as they started down a side hall at a quick clip.
“Resident Pain-in-the-Ass will want to fill you in ad nauseam,” she said. “Quick and dirty: Someone beat the ever-living-crap out of her.”
“Sexual assault?” Liska asked.
“No.”
“She’s conscious?”
“Yes, but she hasn’t had a lot to say.”
“I wish we could have said that earlier in the day,” Kovac muttered.
They had all heard about Judge Moore’s ruling on Karl Dahl’s past criminal record. Carey Moore had been a kick-ass prosecutor, but on the bench she had earned the motto “ Moore is less,” giving perps a benefit of the doubt no cop in town believed they deserved, and they felt betrayed because of it.
The resident making notes in Judge Moore’s chart looked like she had probably been the president of the science club in high school-last year. Drowning in her lab coat, stringy brown hair scraped back into a ponytail, and black plastic rectangular glasses.
Liska shoved a badge in her face and got aggressive. “So? Spill it, sweetie. I want to get home before menopause sets in.”
It was always fun to set young doctors back on their heels before their egos could metastasize and take over their humanity.
This one used a lot of fifty-dollar words to explain that their victim had a mild concussion, a couple of cracked ribs, and a lot of nasty bruises and abrasions.
The uniformed cop who had answered the initial 911 call had filled in Kovac and Liska on the details of the assault as they had walked the crime scene. Moore had been on her way to her car in the parking ramp adjacent to the government center. The assailant had hit her from behind, knocked her down, smacked her around. Apparent motive: robbery. If anything more had been on the agenda, there hadn’t been time. Moore ’s car alarm had gone off, and the mutt had run away with her wallet.
Kovac looked over the top of the doctor’s head and into the examination room. Carey Moore was propped up on a hospital bed, looking like she’d gone five rounds with one big, badass dude. The bruises hadn’t turned blue yet, but Kovac had seen more than enough victims of beatings to read the damage and predict what would greet
