Stan Dempsey.
“Your good friend Karl Dahl isn’t coming back in.”
“He’s not my friend,” Carey said.
“Not anymore. You can’t help him anymore.”
“I never wanted to help him in the first place.”
“You just don’t get it, do you? You’re supposed to hand out justice. The guilty have to pay. Actions have consequences.”
Carey knew better than to argue or try to explain.
“Is he dead?” she asked.
“I have special plans for him,” Dempsey said cryptically.
“How did you find this place?”
“Simple police work: I followed the car,” he said.
“You were watching my house.”
“Have been off and on for some time now. I haven’t had much else to do with myself this past year,” he said. “I know a lot about your life, Judge Moore. Where you live, what your schedule is, where your little girl goes to school.
“I know who comes and goes from your house, and what cars they drive. When that car came past me this morning, I knew that wasn’t your nanny driving.”
“Did you know it was Dahl?” Carey asked.
“We’ve talked enough now. Get up,” he said, pulling on her arm. “Judge Moore, you’re under arrest for crimes against humanity. You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you…”
62
“I DON’T THINK I can stand up,” Carey said. “I’m tied to some kind of weight.”
Dempsey huffed his impatience, snatched at the gold chenille throw that covered her feet, and tossed the end farther up her legs. He kept the gun in his right hand, and with his left he pulled a hunting knife with a wide, vicious-looking serrated blade from a leather sleeve on his belt. With two flicks of his wrist the cable ties were history. He holstered the knife.
“Now, get up.”
The throw crumpled around Carey as she sat up. But with the fingers of her right hand, she managed to hold on to a piece of it to cover the knife.
“What are you going to do to me?” she asked as she pushed herself up to her knees.
“You’ll have a trial. I’ll pronounce sentence and determine your punishment. Same as I did with that lawyer.”
He sounded perfectly sane as he said it. He had decided that this was his job, and he was going to do it, and that was that.
“Kenny Scott?”
“Yeah, him. He got exactly what he deserved. So will you.”
Carey had no idea what he might have done to Karl Dahl’s attorney, but she didn’t ask. She would find out soon enough, if Stan Dempsey had his way.
“You’re a cop,” she said. “You’re a good cop. You’ve worked your whole life to protect and serve. How can you do this?”
He looked at her as if he couldn’t believe she didn’t know. “Because somebody has to.”
“But you’re breaking the law,” Carey said. “How can you do that and talk about justice?”
“I don’t see it that way,” Dempsey said, the gun still trained on her in an almost casual way.
“You’ll go to prison, Detective,” she said, hoping in vain that using his rank might jar something in his conscience.
“No, I won’t.”
Carey weighed the idea of telling him Kovac was on his way. But she didn’t think the information would change his course of action, except that he might feel compelled to kill her sooner rather than later.
“How long have you been a cop?” she asked. “Twenty years? More? None of it will mean anything if you do this. This is how you’ll be remembered, how you’ll be judged.”
His wide mouth curled in a sneer. “You don’t know anything. You sit up on the bench in your robes,” he said with disdain. “It’s just a big game with the lawyers, and you’re a referee. The victims don’t mean anything to you people.”
“That’s not true.”
“Look how you treated Marlene Haas. She was a decent woman just trying to raise a family. Do you want to know the kind of hell Karl Dahl put her through?”
“I know what he did.”
“Yet you give that son of a bitch every break you can. Maybe you can’t know what it is to be a victim until you are one. Get up.”
Carey couldn’t wait for rescue any longer. When she rose to her feet, Dempsey would make her drop the throw. Either she would have to drop the knife with it, or he would take it away from her.
“Get up,” he said again, angrier.
A rumbling sound rolled over the building. Dempsey turned his head and looked up. Quickly, Carey worked her fingertips down the handle of the knife to the blade, drawing it up under the too-long sleeve of her black shirt inch by inch. She rose as Dempsey turned back to her.
“Storm coming in,” he said, as if she would care.
He motioned her out of the room with the barrel of the gun.
Debris bit into the soles of her bare feet. Carey tried not to make a sound. It would probably make him angrier that she could complain about stepping on rocks and broken glass when Marlene Haas had been forced to endure unimaginable torture.
Stan Dempsey would have no sympathy for her. Justice, sure and swift, was what he had in mind. And Carey feared it would be a terrible brand of justice.
She would have to act soon. If she could do it as they came out of the building…
To even have a thought in her head of pushing a knife into another human being was appalling to her. She’d spent her career fighting against violence. In her entire life, she had never committed a violent act against another human being, or any other form of life, for that matter.
She didn’t know if she could do it. What she held in her hand wasn’t a piece of plastic that would do little damage. It was a boning knife as sharp as a razor. She tried to imagine what it was going to feel like to push the tip of it through someone’s skin, through muscle, into organs. The idea made her feel sick. She was trembling to her very core.
She had no way of knowing how near or far away help might be. If Stan Dempsey put her in a vehicle and started driving…
Carey had prosecuted and presided over enough cases of rape and murder to know that once a woman got into a car with a man bent on violence, she as good as sentenced herself to death.
As they neared the doorway where she and Karl had entered the building, she could see that the brilliant sun that had blinded her when Dahl had opened the trunk hours earlier was gone. Heavy gray clouds had rolled in, their bellies sagging low overhead, giving the light an eerie cast as it struggled to penetrate them.
Another volley of thunder rumbled overhead.
Slowly, Carey began to let the knife slip down through her hand inch by cautious inch.
As they stepped out, Dempsey turned her to the left, and she gasped.
Karl Dahl had been handcuffed to the old iron railing on the stairs and hung limp from the cuffs, unconscious- or dead-his head covered in blood.
