Lucy looked up at him from under her lowered brow. "h.e.l.lo, Detective Sam."

"h.e.l.lo." He had that look again, like he half thought the child would leap out and bite him. "How come you're not a princess anymore?"

"Because." Lucy looked away.

"Did something happen, and you decided not to be a princess anymore?"

Lucy nodded and tucked herself tighter against Carey. "I got afraid," she said in the tiniest of voices.

"You got afraid," Kovac repeated, as serious as if he were interviewing a witness. "It's okay to be afraid. Your mom gets afraid. I get afraid."

"You get afraid?" Lucy asked, looking dubious. She thought about it and finally p.r.o.nounced: "Then you're not a princess either."

"Well, no, I'm not."

"We're pretending we're having a sleepover," Lucy told him. "You can stay with us if you want."

Kovac hid his laugh behind his hand. "No, I can't," he said. "But thanks for asking. I really should be going. I just came over to check up on you and your mom. And to bring you some doughnuts."

Lucy caught sight of the plate and lit up. "Doughnuts!"

"One," Carey instructed. She unfolded herself from the couch and followed Kovac back out to the hall.

"Thank you, Sam," she said quietly. "For coming over. For the doughnuts. For everything."

Kovac shrugged into his coat. "All in a day's . . ."

"No. Above and beyond."

"You've got my numbers," he said. "If you need me, call me. I'll be here before you can hang up the phone."

Carey nodded.

He turned toward the door and started to open it.

"And what if I don't need you?" she asked. "Can I call you anyway?"

Kovac blushed a little, looked everywhere but at her, struggled to fight off a smile.

"Yeah," he said at last. "Like I said--I'll be here before you can hang up the phone."

70.

THE TASK FORCEmet the following day just before the change of shift to go over the case, which had become multiple cases. Like cancer, the evil had grown, metastasized, and touched too many lives.

"We've cleared the death of Stan Dempsey," Lieutenant Dawes said. "There will be no further action with that."

"What's going to happen with his body?" Kovac asked. "Is his daughter coming back to make arrangements?"

"No. She said to take money from Stan's bank account to--her words--take care of it."

Tippen gave a low whistle. "How sharper than a serpent's tooth it is to have an ungrateful child."

"Hey, that was my line!" Elwood complained.

"The Bard is part of the public domain, my friend. Free to one and all."

"That's not right," Kovac said, ignoring them. "Dempsey was one of us. Sure, he went nuts in the end, but he was one of us. We should take care of him. We were his family."

Dawes nodded. "I agree. I'll see what we can do. I can tell you the bra.s.s isn't going to authorize anything, in light of what happened. Talk to your PBA rep. Maybe the union can help out."

"We'll pa.s.s the hat," Kovac said. "Leave the union out of it. We'll do this for Stan like the friends we never were."

Nods and murmurs went around the table. Kovac figured everyone who had ever worked with Stan Dempsey or ignored Stan Dempsey or made fun of Stan Dempsey observed a moment of guilty silence.

Dawes then said, "Nikki, have you heard anything on Wayne Haas regarding the official cause of death?"

"Toxicology hasn't come back yet," Liska said. "The tentative COD is heart failure, but Bobby Haas goes into quite a lot of detail in his journal about poisoning his dad with selenium. Imagine he was going to be a doctor. Yikes."

"Imagine how many Bobby Haases have already graduated from med school," Tippen said. "And law school, and business school. Studies have shown that many heads of Fortune Five Hundred companies are sociopaths."

"This kid almost pulled off the perfect murders," Kovac said. "Karl Dahl would have gone to prison for crimes he didn't actually commit. And the kid would have gone on his merry way."

"Nikki, have you gone back in the case file to see what Stan Dempsey had to say about Bobby Haas?" Dawes asked.

"Bobby Haas was interviewed. He gave an alibi. It looks to me like n.o.body followed up," Liska said. "Stan was hot on Karl Dahl. Bobby was just sixteen, a good student, polite kid, never in trouble, seemingly despondent over the deaths. . . ."

"He slipped through the cracks," Dawes said.

"Yeah."

"Where are we with David Moore?" Kovac asked.

Dawes shrugged. "We're nowhere. He's been cleared of his wife's a.s.sault. He had nothing to do with her abduction. I'm sure a forensic accountant will have a field day digging through Moore's financial records for the divorce proceedings, but he's off the hook otherwise. We don't have anything to hold him for or charge him with."

Kovac scowled. "I don't get it. If he's so innocent, why did he lawyer up so fast?"

"Well, it might have had something to do with the way you and Chris Logan were trying to railroad him into jail," the lieutenant said dryly.

Still, Kovac didn't like it. "I want to know about the mysterious twenty-five grand, and why it had looked so clearly like Moore was up to something with Ginnie Bird's brother."

"Maybe he had been," Elwood said. "Maybe they had a plan to get Judge Moore out of the way, but Bobby Haas beat Bergen to the punch."

"Even if that was the case," Dawes said, "conspiracy charges are a tough sell. If there's no underlying felony charge, the case will never make it off the ground. And the fact remains, David Moore hasn't done anything illegal--that we know of."

Liska gave him an elbow. "We can't just throw him in the clink because you think he's an a.s.shole, Kojak."

"The world would be a better place," he grumbled.

Whether David Moore had committed a crime or not, Kovac was going to get to the bottom of that cesspool, if for no other reason than the personal satisfaction of making Moore's life a misery. He suspected Moore had a ton of money stashed somewhere from his sojourn into the hard-core p.o.r.n business. Maybe he could find a charge in there somewhere. Like Logan said: Follow the money.

"What do you know about his movies, Tip?" he asked.

Liska put her hands over her ears and began to hum.

"They're too hard-core for me," Tippen said. "Violent. Sadom.a.s.o.c.h.i.s.tic. If his films are anything to judge him by, David Moore aka David M. Greer is one sick puppy, a puppy protected by the First Amendment. We might find his work socially and morally reprehensible, but he's not breaking any laws."

Kovac frowned heavily.

"All right, people," Dawes said on a long, end-of-the-day sigh. "Let's wrap it up and move on. If n.o.body has anything else--"

They were all half out of their chairs when Liska spoke up.

"Wait!" she said, wide-eyed, bringing everyone to attention. "Look at Kovac! Is that a-a--new brown suit?"

The oohs and aahs made him blush.

Kovac rolled his eyes. "Oh, for G.o.d's sake. Don't make a big deal. I buy one every decade, whether I need it or not."

He stood in front of the mirror in the men's room, trying to decide if he needed to shave again. Better not to. He would undoubtedly cut himself and show up at dinner with toilet paper on his face.

Liska walked in as he put on a fresh shirt. He scowled at her in the mirror.

"You have to stop coming in here, Tinks."

"Don't spoil my fun. This is all the action I get these days."

"Jesus."

"Where's your patch?" she asked. "You haven't given up already."

"I quit."

"Sam, you make me crazy! If you get lung cancer and die--"

"No. I mean I quit. Smoking."

The look of stunned disbelief would have made him laugh if he hadn't been so G.o.dd.a.m.n nervous.

"Wow. Just like that?"

"Just like that. It's time I started paying attention, before I end up like Stan Dempsey, living alone with an a.r.s.enal and one lawn chair in the backyard."

Liska sniffed the air. "Do I smell a midlife crisis coming on?"

"You're in the men's toilet. Chances are good you're smelling something else," he said, fumbling with his brand-new amber necktie, which a very gay salesman in the menswear store had told him brought out the whisky tones in his eyes.

Jesus H.

Liska batted his clumsy hands out of the way and tied the thing herself.

"Nice tie," she said. "It brings out your eyes."

Kovac scowled.

"So where are you off to in such a hurry, mister? Got a hot date?"

"Dinner," he mumbled, his eyes darting away from her.

"A dinnerdate ?"

"Dinner."

"With anyone I know?"

"None of your business, Tinker Bell," he said irritably, adjusting the knot at his throat so that he didn't feel like he was going to choke to death.

"Well, that makes it entirely my business," Liska said with a mischievous twinkle in her eyes.

"I'm having dinner with Judge Moore," he confessed.

Liska's brows went up. "Judge Moore."

"Yes."

"Carey," she said.

Kovac huffed out a sigh. "Carey."

Liska laughed and clapped her hands. "Oh, you total liar! You're going on a date. You cad. The hubby's a.s.s is still stinging from the door hitting him on the way out."

"It's not like that," he grumbled. "It's just a little thank-you dinner. With her five-year-old daughter. It's nothing more than that."

"Give it up, Kojak," she said. "I was wise to you a long time ago. You don't buy a new suit to have dinner with a five-year-old child."

Kovac didn't say anything. He didn't know what he could have said. He didn't want to make too much of Carey's inviting him over. It was too soon after everything had happened. She was traumatized. That had to be the only reason she had asked him; she wasn't in her right mind.