Prior Bad Acts (28 page)

48

GINNIE BIRD’S
brother.

Well, why not keep it all in the family?
Kovac thought as he sped back toward the Moore house. David Moore wanted his wife out of the way, Ginnie Bird wanted Carey Moore out of the way, and she happened to have a brother willing to do the job for twenty-five thousand dollars. Neat and tidy. What a pack of mutts—David Moore, his junkie whore girlfriend, and her brother the hit man.

Donny Bergen was slender, with shoulder-length blond hair. The cops on surveillance had seen the nanny’s Saab come out of the garage Saturday night with the slender blond nanny in it. The car had backed out of the garage in the morning with a slender blonde behind the wheel and driven away from them. They hadn’t thought anything of it.

Moore would have given him the security code, which explained how Bergen gained entrance to the house without setting off the alarm.

Now the question of what might have happened to the nanny took on a more ominous tone. If Donny Bergen was willing to kill Carey, Anka Jorgenson might have been his first target. He might have killed her to get her car, to gain access to the Moore house via the garage.

One hand on the wheel, one on his cell phone, Kovac speed-dialed Liska. She answered on the second ring.

“What’s up?”

“Are you at the station?”

“Yeah. Why?”

“I need you to run a couple of names through the system for me. Virginia Bergen and Donny or Donald Bergen.”

“Donny Bergen is the guy on the tape from the hotel bar,” she said.

“I know. How do you know?”

“Tippen recognized him. He has a frighteningly extensive store of knowledge about the porn industry.”

“Porn?”
Kovac said, confused. “What are you talking about?”

“Long Donny Bergen, porn star extraordinaire. What are you talking about?”

“He’s Ginnie Bird’s brother.”

“Their mother must be so proud. Now what?”

“Send someone to his apartment. If he’s there—which I doubt—pick him up for questioning.”

He gave her the address he had badgered out of Ginnie Bird.

“I’ll send Tippen,” Liska said. “He can get an autograph from his hero.”

Kovac could feel his blood pressure rising again. His head began to pound like a bass drum.

David Moore, you motherfucking son of a bitch.

David Moore, his junkie whore girlfriend, and her brother the
porn star
hit man. How much deeper into the shit could this creep go?

He didn’t delve into Moore’s connections to the porn industry. At the moment, he didn’t care. His immediate fantasy was to drag Moore into a small room and beat the answers out of him, then beat him some more just on principle.

That fantasy played over and over in his mind, making him angrier and angrier as he drove back to the Moore house. By the time he pulled into the Moores’ driveway, he was breathing hard, and his neck felt hot.

News vans had descended on the block again as news of Carey Moore’s disappearance had leaked. A mob with cameras, all of them shouting at once. They sounded like a cloud of locusts swarming. Kovac ignored them, stalking past the uniforms who stood guard at the door.

Inside the house, he turned and went straight for the den, where he could see David Moore standing in front of the fireplace. Logan stood with his back to the door. A third man was talking to Logan. Moore’s eyes widened as Kovac came into the room, striding straight for him.

“You spineless piece of shit!” Kovac shouted, jabbing an accusatory finger at Moore. “You fucking spineless piece of shit! You and your junkie whore girlfriend and her porn star brother are going to rot in prison till the day you die!”

Moore jumped back, knocking over the fireplace tools and tripping on them, falling against the wall.

Logan yelled, lunged, and grabbed Kovac, banding his arms around Kovac’s shoulders.

The third man ran backward out of the way.

Kovac kept on shouting, kept trying to move forward, struggled to break free of Logan’s hold. “I’ll fucking nail your ass to the wall! You are done! You are over!”

“Kovac!” Logan shouted in his ear.

“I don’t know what he’s talking about!” David Moore shouted.

“Kovac!” Lieutenant Dawes rushed into the room with two uniforms behind her.

The uniforms joined Logan in dragging and shoving Kovac back across the room toward the hall.

Dawes was shouting in his face. Kovac was so angry, he couldn’t make sense of her words.

Out of the room, Logan pushed him back against a wall.

“What the hell’s the matter with you?” he shouted in Kovac’s face.

Kovac shoved him back. “This is all him!” he shouted, pointing at the now-closed doors to the den. “She’s gonna die because he didn’t have the balls to stand up and walk out—”

“That’s enough!” Dawes shouted at him. “Not another word!”

Kovac held his hands up, forcing himself to lock down the fury. He was breathing hard, sweating like a horse. Logan stepped back, doing the same.

Dawes glared at Kovac. “What is this about?”

“The girlfriend’s brother,” he said. “The third guy at the bar was the girlfriend’s brother, a porn actor.”

“I don’t care if he was the devil himself,” Dawes said. “What’s the matter with you, coming in here like that? What were you going to do? Beat David Moore to death in front of his attorney? You’re out of control, Detective.”

Kovac walked around in a little circle, rubbing his hands over his face. He was shaking as the rush of adrenaline recycled itself.

“Go home,” Dawes said.

Kovac looked at her.

“Go home,” she said again.

“This is my case.”

“You need to step back, Sam. Now.”

He held up a hand, still pacing. “I’m all right. I was out of line.”

“You were
way
out of line. I can’t have you threatening people. You’ll be lucky if Moore’s attorney doesn’t demand you go before the civilian review board.”

“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
I’m
the one in trouble. Yeah, that’s how the system should work.”

“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.”