Up Against It - M. J. Locke [71]
“Kovak was not an emotional guy,” Wilkes said. “That’s why she noticed him to begin with.”
“She heard one of the kids ask him if he was going to be joining them soon,” Duran continued, “and he told them yes, but the neighbor said he was close to tears and she was convinced he was lying.”
Sean shook his head. “So?”
Wilkes said, “The official story was that his marriage partners ran off with the kids while he was at work, and that he only discovered they were gone when he got home from work that evening. But clearly, he knew before they left.”
Duran added, “The neighbor told us she never bought the official story, but thought he was trying to protect the kids from a custody battle.”
“Maybe he was,” Sean said.
“Maybe. But there are other oddities,” Wilkes said. “We sicced an investigative sapient on his background and turned up some interesting facts. Kovak comes from Vesta, did you know?”
Sean shook his head.
“According to our research,” Duran said, “he had some wild years during his youth—got mixed up with a bad crowd, got into vandalism, and so on. He was never arrested but a couple of times he ran errands for a Vestan mob boss. The Vestan mob is closely tied to the Ogilvies.”
“Son of a bitch!” Sean felt his temper rising again.
“Kovak was never a made man, though,” Duran went on. “At most he was an errand boy. He got himself straightened out, according to the InSap report. His penchant for tagging turned into tube art, and it got him some notice. The attention seemed to be what he needed. He broke his old ties, cleaned up, and started pursuing an art career, while supporting himself with skilled trade work.
“His wife and husband—I guess I should say, his exes,” Wilkes said, “are artists, too. They invited him to join their marriage. Since complex marriages are illegal on Vesta they migrated here, about eight years ago. He’s had a clean record ever since.”
Sean had been brought up in a strict, devoutly Neo-Methodist community, in the Christian Federation of American States. Anything but one-man-one-woman monogamy gave him the jeebs. But he had been through a lot of upheaval during the six decades that he had been in the armed forces. His best commander bar none had been a lesbian, a Colonel Janice Albright. When the citizen Gene Purges started, Albright was too well liked and well placed to be dislodged by the hardliners in the government, but too high profile and successful to ignore. She was like sand in their swimming trunks with her brilliance, savvy, and integrity.
Eventually she became too big a threat. Sean’s prior outspokenness against gays probably made him seem like a natural ally to those who opposed her. He had been ordered to falsify evidence and arrest her, and was promised a promotion into a prominent role in the Pentagon in return. Instead, he had tipped her off. She and her wife escaped to Federal Africa, and he had been court-martialed on a trumped-up charge.
One dishonorable discharge and six years in a military prison later, he used the last of their savings to buy tickets for himself and his wife to Phocaea. Good riddance to Earth.
Sean still kept a picture of Colonel Albright in his wallet. He had lost touch with her after getting out of prison, but often thought about her. He took out his wallet now, and rubbed his thumb over the picture. It was a reminder to him. Live and let live. Focus on the actions, not the beliefs.
But Kovak was still a monster.
“What about the spouses? Have they been notified?”
Duran gave him a gallows grin. “And that’s another oddity. They boarded a passenger cruiser about six weeks ago, Cheerful Pomegranate, headed for Mars. We presume they arrived without incident—we found a record of their entering