Free Prior Bad Acts by Tami Hoag

him and the doors to the ambulance bay drew his weapon.
    The ER was full of staff and patients and people waiting in chairs; people shouting, screaming, a baby wailing. If the deputy discharged his weapon . . .
    Ducking below the inmate’s line of sight, Liska dashed toward him and swung her baton. She felt the satisfying jolt of contact. She hit the floor and rolled. The inmate dropped to one knee, howling. A deputy barreled into him from behind, hit the backboard, and they both went sprawling.
    The deputy with the gun rushed in and jammed the nose of it against the inmate’s temple. Every guy in a uniform was screaming, “Down on the ground! Freeze, motherfucker!”
    Kathleen Casey rushed in as one of the deputies pinned the inmate’s arm against the floor. Liska winced as she watched the needle jab into a bulging, pulsing blue vein.
    The inmate was crying and howling. “My leg! Oh, God! Goddammit! It’s broke! Get off! Jesus Christ!”
    Casey stepped back, syringe still in hand. Liska got to her feet and straightened her blazer.
    “Men are such wimps,” the nurse said with a sniff.
    “Yeah,” Liska said. “Men drool, short chicks rule.”
    She tapped the end of her baton against the floor, and it released and fell back into itself as she raised her hand. The deputies were rolling their monster over onto his back. He was quieting now as his heart pumped the Valium through him.
    One of the ER docs dropped down beside the man, cut the bloody leg of the orange jumpsuit to reveal a jagged shard of shinbone sticking out through the skin.
    “Shit,” Liska muttered, shoulders slumping. “Paperwork.”
    Casey shook her head. “You don’t know your own strength, girlfriend.”
    “Where’s Dahl?”
    Liska’s head snapped toward the deputy who had asked the question. He was already moving toward the gurney down the hall.
    “Dahl?” she asked, hustling toward the bed, her heart rate picking up.
    One of the other deputies ran past her and down the hall, weapon drawn. Behind her she could hear someone get on a radio and call for backup.
    “Dahl?” she said again, with more urgency. “Karl Dahl?”
    The deputy near the gurney was cursing. It was empty, abandoned, the white sheet rumpled and stained with blood where its occupant’s head had lain. “Shit! Fucking shit! He’s gone!”

9

    NO ONE HAD WANTED to go near the Haas home on the north side of Minneapolis since the murders. Kids rode past it slowly on their bikes during the day, morbidly fascinated with the place and the idea of something as evil as murder. They dared each other to go up to the windows and look inside, especially the basement windows. Every once in a while some kid would take the challenge. More often, they all spooked and ran.
    No one wanted to go near the Haas home, which was why Wayne Haas and his son from his first marriage still lived in it. The “For Sale” sign had been standing in the front yard for more than a year. No takers. The only people who looked, looked out of the same morbid fascination as the children who sat on their bikes out in front on the street.
    No one wanted to buy a home where a woman and two children had been tortured and murdered, their bodies desecrated in sickening, unspeakable ways.
    If any place should have been haunted, it should have been that house. The evil that had lived inside it that terrible day surely must have permeated the place—the walls, the floors, the ceilings, the foundation—the same way smoke from a fire could permeate, and never leave.
    Wayne Haas was not a man of means. He worked in a meat-packing plant, hanging carcasses and loading trucks. He made a decent living, but he couldn’t afford to buy a different house without selling the one he had. And nobody wanted the house he had.
    Kovac and Liska pulled into the cracked concrete driveway, which led to a detached garage. Erratic lights flashed in the front window of the otherwise dark house, indicating someone inside was watching