Some things were every bit as bad as they seemed.
Some things were even worse.
5
It was midmorning before Kovac dragged his sorry ass home. He lived in a quiet, older neighborhood that had gone a bit shabby over the years. Huge old oak and maple trees lined the boulevards, their roots busting up the sidewalks. Built in the forties and fifties, the houses were square and plain, of no discernable architectural style. These blocks would never be in any danger of restoration by the upwardly mobile. Some of the bigger, uglier houses had been cut up into duplexes and apartments. Most were single-family homes. His neighbors were working-class people and working-class retirees. It was a boring place, which suited him fine.
He trudged up the sidewalk, his eyes going, as always, to his neighbor’s yard, which was crowded with a mad mix of Christmas decorations the old fart started putting up every year around Halloween. Santa Claus figures swarmed over the property like commandoes, creeping out of the bushes, climbing on the roof and into the chimney, skulking around the Nativity scene. Giant plywood toy soldiers stood sentry on either side of the manger. All of it was lit up at night with so much juice it had to be visible from space.
Fucking madness. Kovac particularly hated it on a day like this, when he was coming home from scraping a dead girl off the pavement. What the hell was there to be festive about in a world where young women were murdered and chucked out onto the road like garbage?
His brain superimposed the images onto his neighbor’s lawn: Rose Ellen Reiser, aka New Year’s Doe, lying in front of Frosty the Snowman, her face beaten to a bloody pulp with a hammer; their new Jane Doe flung like a broken rag doll at the feet of the three wise men, half her face burned away by Christ knew what. Zombie Doe.
He went into the house, toed his shoes off at the door, dumped his coat on the sofa, and went straight upstairs. He cranked the shower on as hot as he could stand it, stripped, and just stood under the water for he didn’t even know or care how long. He felt grimy and sweaty from the too-hot office, yet his feet seemed not to have thawed out from the hours at the scene in subfreezing temperatures.
From the shower he went straight to bed, falling naked on top of the tangle of sheets. He stared up at the ceiling, willing his mind to go just as blank.
He had been up for thirty-three hours. After Liska had left the office, he had stayed, staring at his computer screen, going through missing persons reports, hunting for any missing women who might fit with his case. He’d spent so much time in the last year looking at missing persons websites, he knew many of the cases by heart. The sad fact was a lot of those cases would never be closed. Young women went missing—many by choice, others not. There weren’t a lot of happy endings to be had.
The National Crime Information Center reported more than eighty-five thousand active missing persons records on file. How many lives did those eighty-five-thousand-plus touch? Parents, spouses, siblings, children, friends . . . the cops who worked their cases . . .
He had printed out pages on half a dozen missing women in a five-state area as possibilities. None were from the Twin Cities area. But then, if this case was linked to Doc Holiday, their victim wouldn’t be from here. She would have been snatched in Illinois or Missouri or Wisconsin or someplace else. She would have gone missing a couple of days ago. The last two days of her life would have been spent as his captive, being raped and tortured and finally killed.
Kovac couldn’t decide which would be worse: if their girl was a victim of Doc Holiday or if someone else had come up with the list of depraved shit that had been done to her.
He’d been a homicide cop for a lot of years. He’d seen firsthand that people’s cruelty to one another knew no bounds. The fact that it still disturbed him five layers down under the thick hide the job had grown on him was both a blessing and a curse.
He was still human. He could still feel pain and sadness and despair and disgust. He could still dread holidays and hate coming home to an empty house.
It was always times like this when the darker emotions washed over him. Thirty-three hours without sleep, a brutal homicide, the knowledge that he didn’t have enough manpower or resources to devote to solving the case quickly. Christ knew how long it would be before they could get a confirmed ID on their vic, let alone develop a suspect list. Who the hell wouldn’t be depressed over that? Who wouldn’t look at that poor dead girl and think, What if that was my kid?
He’d had too much cause to have thoughts like that in the last year.
When asked, Sam always said he had no children. He had raised no children. He got no cards on Father’s Day. He paid no child support. The truth was more complicated than that.
He had a daughter in Seattle—or so he’d been led to believe a couple of lifetimes ago. She had been born here in Minneapolis shortly before the divorce became final. His soon-to-be-ex had already moved on with her life plans. She was in love with someone else, wanted out, wanted to start over, wanted nothing more to do with him. He had signed away his rights and she had headed west.
He had never seen the girl since. He had no idea what she looked like, if she favored him—God help her. He had spent a lot of time telling himself the kid had probably not been his at all, that his ex had stuck it out with him for his insurance coverage. But he had never entirely convinced himself of that. And so, during cases like this one, the thoughts came back to him—that he had a daughter, that he had lost a daughter, that she could have been dead for all he knew and for all he would ever know.
What a fucking mess you are, Kojak.
Twice married, twice divorced, no prospects. Lying in bed alone on New Year’s Day, with a dead girl foremost in his thoughts.
The phone rang as if his loneliness had reached across the country and tapped his last near miss on the shoulder. Her name came up on the caller ID: Carey. He stared at it as the ringing of the phone raked over raw nerve endings. He let it go to voice mail. What would she have to say that she hadn’t said a hundred times already? That she missed him. That she had to take the job with the Department of Justice because . . . excuse, excuse, excuse.
He didn’t want to hear it. What good did it do to talk about it? She had made her choice for her own reasons, all of them more important than he was.
He shouldn’t have let it bother him as much as he did. She had been through a lot of rough shit. An attempt on her life over a ruling she had made as the judge on a high-profile murder case. Kidnapped by a homicidal lunatic. Kovac still believed her ex-husband had plotted to have her killed, though the attempt had never actually been made, and Kovac had never been able to make the case for conspiracy to commit. All of that, then her father had died, and suddenly there were just too many painful memories.
She had needed a change of scenery. She’d been offered the position with the DOJ. Why wouldn’t she take it? Why wouldn’t she take her young daughter and go? Start over, start fresh, no ties to the past.
They hadn’t been much more than friends, really . . .
She had been gone now nearly a year and a half. When she came back to visit, he wasn’t available. When she called, he didn’t answer.
When he fell asleep, he still saw her in his dreams.