Prior Bad Acts by Tami Hoag

would be fodder anyway. The department hadn’t fired Stan Dempsey because they would have looked bad in the media and because they were afraid Dempsey would sue. Poor old Stan was screwed no matter what.
    “Jesus,” Kovac muttered, rubbing his hands over his face and back through his hair. “I don’t like it.”
    “Since when is this job about what we like?” Liska asked.
    “I mean, talk to him, yes. Nobody knows the players in the Dahl case better than Stan.”
    “We have to look at him, Sam, and you have to be the one to do it,” Liska said. “You know him. He’s old-school. He’ll take it better from you.”
    Kovac heaved a sigh, pushing himself up out of his chair. “All right. But you get Mutt and Jeff and their alibi. Looks to me like they both need a mother figure anyway.”
    Liska rolled her eyes. “Yeah, that’s me. Mother Earth packing heat. I’m a B movie from the fifties.”
    She got up from her chair and stretched, her sweater rising up above the waistband of her slacks to show the Glock 9mm she wore on a belt holster. “I’m outta here, Kojak. I’ll see you in the morning.”
    “It already is morning.”
    “Don’t tell me that. I’m gone.”
    Kovac prowled around the office for a while after she’d gone. He was always restless on the front end of a case. He wanted to work around the clock. Get on it. Get after it.
    Homicide cops in the Minneapolis PD had a window of about three days on a murder before the next murder or assault case came along and the last one got shuffled to a back burner. Or maybe he was that way because there was no need for him to be any other way. The job was his life. He had nothing to go home for.
    He put his coat on and walked out of the building to stand on the wide front steps that led up the big Gothic stone building that was the color of raw liver. He wanted a smoke, but he didn’t take it. The one he’d had on the Haas front porch had been for effect.
    The streets were mostly empty on this end of downtown. All the Friday-night excitement would be at the other end, where bars and clubs crowded around the Target Center, home of the NBA Timberwolves. Night life. There was a concept.
    Kovac walked down to the parking ramp where he left his car every day. The facility had been named for a cop who had been murdered back in the late eighties for no other reason than that he wore the uniform. Sitting in a pizza parlor, the guy had been minding his own business, probably thinking about the fact that he was about to retire, when some gang punk pulled a piece and shot him dead in front of a dozen witnesses.
    The guy had lived with the potential and real dangers of being a cop every day he was on the job, survived to retirement, only to be gunned down, off duty, having a pizza.
    No one planned on becoming a victim.
    Marlene Haas hadn’t gotten up on that fateful day thinking of the horrors that would take place in her home in a matter of hours.
    Carey Moore had been headed home, thinking of her little daughter, maybe thinking of the absentee husband, maybe thinking about the shitstorm she had just unleashed with her decision on Karl Dahl’s prior bad acts. And bam, out of nowhere, some mutt knocked her flat and beat the crap out of her.
    Kovac scowled at the bent his thoughts were taking—poor Carey Moore. He didn’t want to think of her as a person with problems and issues and emotions. Still, when he drove out of the ramp onto the street, he didn’t head for home. He turned the opposite direction and drove toward Lake of the Isles.

12

    CAREY LAY IN BED, half-awake, desperately longing to sleep, pain keeping her from shutting down. It hurt to take more than a shallow breath, because of her ribs. Her head was pounding and felt swollen to the point that she wished she could open her skull and let the pressure out. She was still dressed, having refused to let Anka help her out of the gray pin-striped suit, not because of modesty but because the least movement set