Prior Bad Acts by Tami Hoag

nothing. Kovac took a peek under the coat to make sure she hadn’t expired. She hadn’t, but she looked like she might welcome death soon. Her skin was gray, her face pasty with sweat. She looked like she was maybe going to be sick again.
    “Hang in there,” Kovac said, his eyes on the reluctant migration of the media. As he waited for the reporters to retreat, he took a moment to check out the judge’s digs.
    Her home was a well-lit, impressive redbrick colonial with a couple of white columns flanking the front door. Kovac figured his whole house and garage combined was maybe half the size. The shrubbery was clipped, the leaves had been raked, a trio of uncarved pumpkins sat beside the glossy black front door. A tasteful wrought-iron gate kept the riffraff from going up the walk.
    It was the kind of place where a person would want to go in and expect to feel warm and welcome. Kovac would go home to a dark, square box that needed paint.
    He put the car in gear, pulled up into the driveway at an angle to minimize the view of the passenger’s side. He went around to open the door and helped Carey Moore out of the car, keeping her coat pulled up high around her face. With an arm around her shoulders to support her, he shielded her as they went through the side gate and up to the front door.
    As they stepped up onto the stoop, the judge rang the doorbell and leaned against the sidelight, peering into the house.
    “Where are your keys?”
    “I don’t know,” she confessed.
    “You had them with you before the attack?”
    “In my purse.”
    “You’ll change these locks tomorrow. First thing.”
    “Yes.”
    “And you’ll have a radio car sitting out front until that happens,” he told her. “What else did you lose that you haven’t told me about?”
    “Nothing,” she said, but he knew she was lying. The perp probably had her phone numbers, her mother’s maiden name, and half her credit cards. He would get a list of the cards and alert the credit card companies. If the perp was using them, he was leaving an electronic trail.
    The door swung open and a gorgeous blond twenty-something in a pink velour tracksuit looked wide-eyed at the judge. She said something in what Kovac figured was Swedish or Norwegian or something else from one of those Scandinavian places where everyone looks like they’ve been designed by computer as models for the master race.
    “Oh, my God, Mrs. Moore!”
    “It looks worse than it is,” Carey said quietly. “Please don’t make a fuss, Anka. Is Lucy asleep?”
    “Ya. Just a little while ago,” the nanny said.
    Kovac helped the judge with her coat, and the nanny took it from him, but she never took her worried eyes off her boss. “But she is worried about you. She didn’t want to go to bed. And she made me leave on the light on the side table.”
    The judge slid down onto an antique carved chair and closed her eyes for a moment. Kovac introduced himself to the nanny, Anka Jorgenson.
    “You’ve been here all evening?” he asked.
    “Ya.”
    “Have there been any strange phone calls? Hang-up calls?”
    “No. There was a wrong number,” Anka said as an afterthought. “About an hour ago.”
    “Who did the person ask for?”
    “Marlene. I told him there was no such person here.”
    The judge opened her eyes at that and looked at Kovac. If she could have gotten any paler, she would have.
    Marlene, as in Marlene Haas? Kovac thought. The woman Karl Dahl had opened up from throat to groin. He had planted fresh-cut daisies in the gaping wound as if she had been some strange and macabre sculpture in a surrealist gallery. Carey Moore was probably thinking the same thing.
    “Was the caller a man or a woman?” Kovac asked.
    “A man. He was very polite,” the nanny said as if that meant he couldn’t have been a bad person. “He apologized for the mistake.”
    “Has anyone come to the door this evening?”
    “No.”
    “Have you heard any strange noises outside?”
    The nanny’s