Prior Bad Acts (36 page)

Liska ducked away from him, darted to the side. She stuck her hand into her coat pocket and came out with her tactical baton.

With a quick, practiced move, she snapped it out to its full length and swung it like a baseball bat as hard as she could into Bobby Haas’s ribs just as he pulled his arm back for another blow.

She felt a couple of his ribs give way, and he doubled over, dropping the hammer.

The second blow was a hard, downward overhand that hit his left shoulder and fractured his collarbone.

Screaming in pain, the boy dropped to his knees and elbows on the floor, fell sideways, and curled into a fetal position, crying like the child he should have been.

“Flat on your face, you little shit!” Liska shouted, the adrenaline roaring through her.

“It hurts!”

“It damn well better hurt, you rotten little bastard! On your face, now, or I’ll give you something to cry about!”

Sobbing, he moved in slow motion to his hands and knees. Furious and scared, Liska put a foot into his back and shoved him flat. She read him his rights even as she pulled her cell phone out to call for backup.

67

“I CAN’T LEAVE
you alone for a minute,” Kovac crabbed, walking across the lawn to the Haas garage. “You owe me dinner.”

“Excuse me? The Son of Satan just tried to kill me with a hammer!”

“And your point would be . . . ?”

Liska scowled at him. “Don’t make fun of me, Sam. I’ve never been so freaked-out in my life!”

Kovac gave her shoulder a squeeze. “I can see that, Tinks. I just thought a little obnoxious levity might be in order.”

“How would that be different from how you usually are?”

“Smart-ass.”

To have Liska admit to being afraid took a lot. Now she would get pissy, because she had let someone see that she wasn’t really as tough as she pretended to be.

“You should have seen him, Sam. When he turned around and came at me with that hammer . . .” She shivered and pretended she was cold, rubbing her hands up and down her arms. “What I saw in that kid’s eyes . . . I’ve never seen before. And I don’t want to see it again.”

Bobby Haas had been hauled out on a gurney and taken away in an ambulance. And still she was more shaken than Kovac had ever seen her. She scowled down at the ground, uncomfortable with the uniforms and the forensics team crawling all over the place, lest they see through her act too.

Kovac took off his trench coat and put it around her. She could have drowned in it, she was so little. With an arm around her shoulders, he guided her to the Haases’ front porch, and they sat on the edge of it. She leaned into him.

“Slow it all down, kiddo,” he said. “Slow it all down.”

She took a deep breath and let it out.

“I asked the unis to get Wayne Haas,” she said. “I’m not telling him this. I can’t. You have to.”

“All the lights and sirens, and he hasn’t come out on his own?”

“Bobby told me he went to bed early because he wasn’t feeling well.”

“I should sleep so hard,” Kovac said. “If my neighbor doesn’t stop banging on his roof in the mornings, I’ll take a hammer to him.”

Liska wasn’t listening to him. She looked up at the sky and shook her head. “Oh, God . . .”

“It’s because he’s a kid,” Kovac said quietly. “That’s too close to home.”

“You know, I really wanted to feel sorry for him,” she said. “I
did
feel sorry for him. The poor, motherless child.”

“I don’t know if Bobby Haas was ever a child.”

“Maybe that was the problem.”

“And maybe he had three sixes branded on the back of his head,” Kovac said. “Don’t try to figure it out, Tinks. There’s a reason that’s not our job.”

They couldn’t do it. The toll was too heavy emotionally, and emotion took away objectivity, and one thing a detective absolutely had to be was objective.

Hypocrite,
he thought.

One of the forensics people stuck her head out of the garage. “Detectives, I think you need to come see this.

“Becker took the stuff out of the briefcase to inventory,” she explained. “This is pretty scary.”

Inside the garage, Kovac looked over the items that had been spread across the workbench—Carey’s files having to do with
The State v. Karl Dahl
. The papers she had been taking home to look at over the weekend. All of it was wet and stinking.

“Jesus, he pissed on it!” he said with disgust.

Liska had moved on to the rest of it. “Oh, my God . . .” she whispered. “Sam . . .”

All neatly contained in Ziploc bags: a journal; two clear four-pocket plastic sheets holding photos of Bobby with his father—playing catch, fishing, being happy; half a dozen large Ziploc plastic bags with newspaper clippings in them, organized by month.

MINNEAPOLIS MASSACRE
GRUESOME HOMICIDES SHAKE QUIET NEIGHBORHOOD
CRIME SCENE
“
A BLOODBATH
”
ACCORDING TO DETECTIVES
DRIFTER ACCUSED IN BRUTAL SLAYINGS

Kovac found the clippings only slightly weird and creepy. It wasn’t unheard of for loved ones of homicide victims to keep track of the case in the media.

Then came the final, smaller plastic bag.

The bottom dropped out of his stomach, and a sudden cold sweat misted his skin.

“Holy God . . .”

Liska looked over at him. “What is it?”

In a case like the Haas murders, the detectives often kept certain details of the crime secret from the public, details only the killer would know. It helped them weed out the crackpots who always came out of the woodwork to confess to heinous crimes in a sick attempt to gain attention.

Kovac held that secret up to the light.

“Oh, Jesus!”

Perfectly preserved, vacuum sealed on a single sheet together, side by side by side—largest to smallest—the right thumbs of Marlene Haas, and Brittany and Ashton Pratt.

“Jesus H.,” Kovac breathed. “Karl Dahl didn’t do it.”

The irony was bitter. Stan Dempsey had ruined his career and his sanity trying to see Karl Dahl convicted of the Haas homicides. He had been so convinced of Dahl’s guilt. Everyone had. The strange drifter with a record of sexually oriented crimes—relatively minor crimes, but just the same . . . He’d known the victims. He’d been seen going into the victims’ home on the day of the murders. He’d had no alibi. When he’d been arrested, Karl Dahl had been in possession of a necklace that belonged to Marlene Haas.

It had to be Dahl. No one wanted to think their neighbor or their mailman or their meter reader could be capable of the atrocities committed on Marlene and her foster children. No one would even have considered the boy next door.

The killer had had to be Karl Dahl. Dahl had been arrested, indicted, would likely have been convicted. Case closed.

Instead, Dahl’s arrest had triggered a terrible series of events. Dahl had escaped jail, murdered two women, and abducted a third. Carey Moore had been forced to kill Stan Dempsey out of fear for her life.

Karl Dahl, as it turned out, had indeed been a murderer, but he hadn’t been guilty of the crimes he had been accused of committing.

Kovac put down the vacuum-sealed bag. No one said anything. There was too much—and nothing—to say.

“Detective Liska?” One of the officers Liska had sent into the house filled the doorway.

She didn’t turn her head away from the things laid out in front of them.

“Your guy in the house?” the officer said. “He’s dead. Looks like maybe he had a heart attack.”

“I’m sure it does,” Liska murmured. “I’m sure it does.”

68

THE JOURNAL OF
Bobby Haas read like a Stephen King novel. The first entry was dated a couple of weeks prior to the murders. The boy had written about his anger over his parents’ discussions about possibly trying to adopt the “two little worms,” as he called them.

He wrote at length about his feelings of betrayal and rejection. Everything had been fine when it had just been the three of them. He had felt important. He’d had the undivided attention of his parents, particularly of his dad. Then Marlene had, in his mind, turned on him, rejected him. She had wanted something more—more children,
other
children. He wasn’t good enough for her.

Just like before,
he had written.

Women didn’t love him. In his mind, every woman in his life had rejected him—his mother, the first Mrs. Haas, Marlene Haas. His vitriol directed at Marlene Haas jumped off the page. Women were selfish bitches—and worse—who ultimately became bored with him. Like a girl with a favorite doll, Marlene had tired of him and moved on to other, newer toys.

He hated her. He loved his dad. Marlene had been trying to pull Wayne’s attention from Bobby, trying to ruin their father-son bond, which had clearly been the most important relationship in Bobby’s life.

The details of his planning the murders were chilling. The accounts of the murders themselves were horrific. He told about feeling powerful and invincible as he watched the realization of what was about to happen to her and her “precious little worms” dawn across Marlene’s face.

In the more recent entries, he had written about his attempt to kill Carey Moore, and his growing frustration that his father was paying more attention to Marlene and the foster children now than when they had been alive, and less and less attention to him. That wasn’t what the plan had been.

He doesn’t want to be alive. I’ll be doing us both a favor. . . .

He had written pages about selenium poisoning, which conveniently mimicked the symptoms of a heart attack and wouldn’t show up in the standard basic toxicology screen.

How ironic that Bobby had turned around and done the very same thing he had accused Marlene Haas of. He had tired of their presence—Marlene, the foster kids, and finally Wayne, the father he had so desperately wanted all his life. They had worn out their usefulness to him, so he had broken them and cast them aside.

The diary of a budding serial killer.

Kovac knew the journal would be valuable to the profilers and the psychologists, who were always looking for more insight into the minds of murderers. But if not for them, he would have thrown the thing in an incinerator. The book was tainted with the evil that lived in Bobby Haas, and he, for one, wanted to put it somewhere that evil could never escape.

Processing the Haas scene had gone well into the next day. By five o’clock that morning, the story had broken locally, then hit the news networks. By eight, the media feeding frenzy was on.

The chief and Lieutenant Dawes, along with Chris Logan, had handled the press conference. Kovac and Liska had gone to their respective homes for a few hours of much-needed sleep. Not even his neighbor’s hammering had stirred Kovac.

He’d never felt so exhausted in his life. The job was sometimes, but not often, physically demanding. But it was the emotional exhaustion that left him feeling drained of all energy.

Why did it seem like the only time he spent with his emotions was during a crisis?

Because after the crisis had passed, he didn’t want to feel very much at all. It seemed the safest way to be. And the easiest. If he didn’t want to expend emotional energy interacting with people, it was easy for him to retreat. Being single had a great many advantages that way, compared to being married—at least compared to being married to the two wives he’d had.

Love just never worked out for him. His last wife had not only left him; she’d left the state, left the Midwest. At the time, she had only recently given birth to their first child, a daughter. But the marriage had been over long before the baby was born. Heartbroken, he had relinquished custody and had never seen his child again.

It wasn’t often he allowed himself to think about it, and he never spoke of it. What was the point?

It was only when he got a little too close to other people’s happy lives that he acknowledged the emptiness of his own.

His thoughts drifted to Carey. To Carey and Lucy, and what it would be like to be a family with them—something David Moore had stupidly thrown away with both hands. But he cut the thought short, because that wasn’t his reality.

Around nine in the evening, he dragged himself from bed, showered, put on some old sweats, and went downstairs to forage for something to eat. He sat down in the living room with nuked leftover pizza and turned on the Travel Channel so he could take a vacation without leaving his sofa.

Cabo San Lucas was looking pretty good. Of course, the show had been shot at a fabulous five-star resort. Kovac pictured himself crashed in a chair on the beach under a big umbrella, listening to the surf, bikini-clad señoritas bringing him exotic drinks all day long.

He had turned off his cell phone as soon as he had arrived home that afternoon, so as not to be disturbed. According to the voice mail woman, he had twelve new messages. He started to play each, deleting most of them before the message ended. Reporter, reporter, reporter. How they always managed to weasel out his phone number was beyond him. He had the number changed after every high-profile case, and still they managed to find him.

The PR person from the chief’s office called to tell him how he should dress while the world had its cameras trained on the department.

Note to self: Sell car. Buy Armani suit.

Jesus.

“Sam, it’s Carey.”

The final message. Kovac sat up straighter. Cabo faded into the background.

“I just wanted to check in with you.”

She sounded tired and sad.

“I saw the news. . . . Just when I think this sordid case can’t get any worse, it does.

“Anyway . . . I’m home,” she said. “And I don’t know what to do with myself. Are you sure there isn’t a
Victim for Dummies
book out there somewhere?”

She tried to laugh, but failed miserably.

He played the message three times.

Just to hear the sound of her voice.