The Bitter Season (13 page)

“Next of kin,” Taylor said. “Do you have any uncles, aunts, grandparents in the area?”

“No.”

“You’re it, then. You and your sister.”

“The bodies are at the medical examiner’s office, pending autopsy,” Kovac said. “Five thirty Chicago Avenue. Someone will have to come downtown and make the official ID.”

“Are you kidding me?” Chamberlain asked, horrified. “We have to come
look at them
?”

“It’s an unpleasant formality,” Kovac said. “They’ll let you do the viewing on a monitor.”

Chamberlain looked away, shaking his head. He didn’t want to be a part of any of this. He didn’t seem to want to be a part of his family at all. He had gone to that disastrous birthday dinner out of a sense of duty. Now duty would drag him to the morgue.

“We can take you down there and bring you back,” Kovac said.

“Now?” the kid asked, incredulous.

“Tomorrow is soon enough.” Kovac took a card out of his pocket and handed it to him. “We’ll be in touch. Sorry for your loss.”

*   *   *

“T
HE FAMILIES
I’
VE SEEN 
. . .” Kovac started as they left the apartment building. “Makes being divorced twice seem not so bad.”

Even as he said it, he thought of Tinks and her boys. They did well as a family—as long as that asshole she had been married to stayed in line or out of the picture.

Kovac had started his own family once. Or so he had thought. His second wife gave birth and then promptly divorced him, took the kid, and moved to Seattle, where she remarried with suspicious
haste. It all happened so fast and so long ago, it seemed like some weird bad dream now. He doubted the kid was even his. Kovac had been a convenient source of health insurance, that was all.

“The Yelp review is still up,” Taylor said.

“How bad is it?”

“He called the workmen incompetent, ignorant, filthy, and foul-mouthed, and said that was apparently company policy as evidenced by the behavior and attitude of the manager over the phone. Thirteen people have found the review useful. Three thought it was funny.”

“Funny?”

Taylor shrugged. “Thirteen ‘useful’ is thirteen customers lost, to say nothing of the people who read the review but didn’t comment. That’s dollars lost to a small business, plus a bad reputation in a good neighborhood.”

“See what you can find out about the business. Let’s pay a visit to the manager. For now, let’s go back to the office. I want to get the war room set up. There’s so many people that hated this professor, I already need a program to keep track of them.”

*   *   *

C
HARLIE
C
HAMBERLAIN SAT ON HIS SOFA
for a long time after the detectives had left. He sat with perfect posture, staring into the middle distance, images and arguments tumbling through his mind. Pandora’s box had opened wide, and all the memories came spilling out, one running into the next, and into the next.

Him at five in short pants and a bow tie, with knobby skinned knees, and tears on his cheeks. His mother’s drunken, angry face; her mouth twisted open like a gash in her face. His father’s cold stare.

He saw himself at nine, at twelve, at fourteen. He heard the voices.

Stupid boy . . .

I told you never . . .

. . . so disappointed . . .

Get out of my sight . . .

Worthless . . .

. . . mistake . . .

He saw the hand striking, the belt swinging.

He saw his sister and heard her crying.

He felt the helplessness of a child.

“Such a perfect family,” everyone used to say. They didn’t know, and wouldn’t suspect. Appearances were all that mattered. Appearances, accolades, money, the right car, the perfect dinner party. Two children brought out on cue and promptly put away.

Seen not heard.

Don’t cause a problem.

Don’t say a word.

He didn’t know how much time passed as he sat there. Years passed through his head. He might have sat there an hour or all night, lost in a trance, in emotional limbo. So many feelings tore through him and collided that they canceled each other out until he was numb.

What was he supposed to feel?

The doorbell brought him back into the moment. He had no idea of the time. Maybe the detectives had come back to take him to the morgue to identify the bodies.

He put an eye to the peephole and took in the distorted view of his sister—hair disheveled, eyes red, face swollen.

“Di,” he said as he opened the door.

“They’re dead, Charlie,” she said, her face twisting in anguish. “Oh my God, they’re dead!”

She threw herself against him and began to sob. He put his arms around her and held her. They had only ever had each other.

“They’re dead,” she mumbled through her tears. “We’re free . . .”

Even as he tried to comfort her, he knew that wasn’t true. They weren’t free. The future might be clear ahead, but the past was something no one could escape but the dead. There was irony. They would always be damaged by their pasts and by the choices other people had made. The only ones free in this story were lying on slabs at the county morgue.

But he said nothing as he held his sister, and they cried together.

Nikki read files
until her eyes burned and her vision blurred. So much for the idea of no late hours working cold cases. While there may have been no outward sense of urgency in solving a case that had been gathering dust in the archives for a quarter of a century, that didn’t change who she was. She was still going to dig and scratch and poke and prod with the focus of a terrier.

At least she got to do it at home.

She had gotten home in time to make a nice dinner for herself and the boys, and had taken an hour to watch some TV with them. Every commercial break included a promo for the local news:
More on the story of the double homicide of a university professor and his wife! Tune in at ten!

The big news of the new cold case squad and the unsolved murder of Detective Ted Duffy hadn’t even managed a twenty-four-hour cycle in the media. Everyone in the metro area was now captivated by the bigger, fresher, more gruesome crime.

She had caught the coverage of the press conference on the six o’clock edition. The mayor, the chief of police, Deputy Chief Kasselmann, and Lieutenant Mascherino, all looking suitably grave as they gave their statements. No Kovac. No surprise. Sam loathed press conferences. He would have been out doing his job, sure not to pick up the message that his presence was required in front of a news camera.

She wanted to call him, to find out what was going on, if they had any leads, but she wouldn’t let herself. He was busy, and it was none of her business. He was probably setting up the war room, scribbling all over the whiteboard with his terrible handwriting. Tippen was in on the case, and Elwood would be as well. They’d be up all night drinking bad coffee and eating pizza out of cardboard boxes.

She would be up all night reading about a case that had already happened and had long gone stale, making notes on her own whiteboard in her own little office at home. At least the coffee was better.

At the time of Ted Duffy’s death he had half a dozen cases going at work. No one had been able to connect any of those cases to his murder. Considerable time had been spent tracking down guys Duffy had sent to prison over the years who had subsequently been released in the right timeframe. Of those known to be in the vicinity, some had alibis, some didn’t, but no one could put any of them in that park behind the Duffy house with a rifle on the day in question.

The hottest prospect they’d had at the time was a rapist, a repeat offender who’d screamed at Duffy in the courtroom that he would get him. He had been released from prison just a week prior to the shooting. After three days of an intensive search in the Twin Cities and surrounding area, it was discovered that the guy had been arrested in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, three days after his release from the prison in Moose Lake, where many of Minnesota’s hard-core sex offenders were sent to be rehabilitated. He had gotten out of prison, taken a bus to Wisconsin, and promptly tried to assault a waitress leaving her workplace late at night.

“I guess that rehab didn’t take,” Nikki mumbled, setting those reports aside.

She thought a little about the weapon that had been used to kill Ted Duffy: a small-caliber hunting rifle, a .243. It was described as a gun suitable for smaller hunters because of the lighter recoil. One of the comments she had read online regarding this caliber of weapon for hunters: “A nice rifle for a woman.”

Barbie Duffy had allegedly been out grocery shopping the day of her husband’s death. She came home with groceries, but who could prove when she had bought them? There was no store receipt on file, and no mention of any store surveillance tape showing her buying groceries at the time in question. The detectives—Grider being one of them—cut her slack in small ways they might not have had they not known her and her husband. If Barbie said she had been shopping, then she must have been shopping. The grocery bags were probably still sitting on the kitchen counter when the detectives showed up.

Had the Duffys owned a .243 hunting rifle? Ted had been going to join his brother deer hunting in Wisconsin that weekend. But Ted Duffy was a big guy. He would have used a big gun, not one written up as being “A nice rifle for a woman.” Nikki made a note to ask Barbie Duffy if she had ever gone deer hunting. But even if Ted Duffy didn’t own a .243, his twin had access to every gun there was.

Big D Sports was best known for hunting and camping gear, including guns. Big Duff had allegedly been in Rice Lake, Wisconsin, opening his cabin for the weekend’s hunting when his brother was killed. That was where he had been found by the family friend who drove the two hours to deliver the news of Ted’s death in person. But that was several hours after the discovery of Ted Duffy’s body. Big Duff would have had more than enough time to kill his brother and drive back to Rice Lake. He had been seen in a convenience store near his cabin earlier in the day, but most of his afternoon was unaccounted for.

Whose idea had it been to send the friend to Rice Lake to deliver the news to Big Duff? The cabin had no telephone, but they could have called the local sheriff’s office and sent a unit out to inform Duff of his brother’s demise. They would have gotten to him much closer to the time of Ted’s death—or they might have gotten to an empty cabin, as Thomas Duffy was still making his way back from killing his brother.

If the crime had taken place a week ago, or a year ago, or even ten years ago, they would have been able to track Thomas Duffy’s movements via the cell towers his phone had pinged off. But at the time of his brother’s death, cell phones were less common, and used differently. Back then, a cell phone was something to have for emergencies.

In one of the many revisitations to the investigation several years after the fact, a harder look had been taken at Big Duff (by a detective
not
named Gene Grider) after he and his brother’s widow got hitched. Still, nothing in the way of evidence had been found to implicate him in his brother’s death. But there was plenty of speculation to be made.

Barbie Duffy collected a considerable sum of life insurance on her husband’s death. Big Duff did as well. Ted had invested as a partner in his brother’s first store. The partners had been insured. It was safe to assume that at least some of that money went into the expansion of Big D Sports, and the second Mr. and Mrs. Duffy ended up rich and living in a house that was photographed for magazines. Happily ever after.

Nikki wondered if anyone had spoken to the neighbor, Donald Nilsen, the self-appointed neighborhood morality police, about whether Ted Duffy’s brother ever visited when his twin was not at home. If they asked that question, she couldn’t find any record of it.

Nilsen had been interviewed many times over the years. He hadn’t seen anything. He hadn’t heard anything. He had been working in his home office. His wife had been making dinner. His son had been attending a basketball game at school.

In the one and only interview with Renee Nilsen, she had little to say. The Nilsens’ son, Jeremy, had also been interviewed just once. It didn’t look like anyone had tried to learn about the Duffy household through him, even though he had mown their yard and shoveled their sidewalk, and had probably gone to school with the teenage girls living with the Duffys at the time.

As the mother of a son the same age, Nikki could state with certainty that if Jeremy Nilsen was straight, he would have been very aware of the “tarts” next door. And those girls would have been very aware of him. He was a good-looking kid—and the quiet type, according to Barbie. There was no animal on the face of the earth more irresistible to a teenage girl than a handsome boy who had nothing to say. A man of mystery! They would have spun tales in their heads about why he was so quiet. They would have fantasized about being the one person he would open up to and trust with all his secrets.

She wondered if Jeremy Nilsen had secrets about what his father was up to when Ted Duffy was being murdered. Unfortunately, Jeremy Nilsen was dead. Whatever secrets he might have had had gone with him to his grave. Nikki kept seeing the trophy buck hanging over Donald Nilsen’s electric fireplace. Unless he had bought that thing at a flea market, he owned guns and was a crack shot. He didn’t make it a secret that he hadn’t liked the Duffys. He had paid far too much attention to the goings-on at the house next door. Ted Duffy had confronted him and leveled a thinly veiled threat at him for ogling the girls.

She went to her whiteboard on the wall across from her desk and made three columns headed “Barbie Duffy,” “Thomas Duffy,” and “Donald Nilsen.” Beneath each name, she jotted notes in black, and questions in red.

Of the Duffys’ children, only Jennifer, who was nine at the time, had been interviewed. She was in her bedroom upstairs at the time of the shooting. Her room overlooked the backyard. She said she had been reading a book and hadn’t seen anything. The younger two Duffy children were in the family room at the front of the house playing while the younger foster child, Penny Williams, watched and did homework. The older foster girl, Angie Jeager, had been at a school function, not returning home until around nine thirty. The same basketball game Jeremy Nilsen was attending? Nikki wondered.

To the far right on the whiteboard, she wrote, “TBI” (for To Be Interviewed), and beneath it, the names Renee Nilsen, Penny Williams, and Angie Jeager.

What were the odds of finding any of them? Nilsen claimed to have no idea where his ex-wife was. Barbie Duffy hadn’t maintained a relationship with the two girls she had taken in as slave labor and then sent back to the foster care system like stray dogs to the pound. Twenty-five years after the fact, it was doubtful any of them still had the same last name.

“And that’s why they call you a detective, Nikki,” she murmured to herself.

*   *   *

S
OMEONE HAD ALREADY ORDERE
D IN PIZZA
by the time Kovac and Taylor returned to the office. It was past eight o’clock, but Mascherino was still there, having a slice with the guys. An incongruous picture, Kovac thought: the petite and proper fifty-something lieutenant in her smart maroon suit standing in the break room with the rest of the hooligans, eating pizza off a paper plate. He gave her credit for the effort.

“Sam, Michael,” she said as they came into the room to grab their dinner. “Get something to eat and bring it to my office. I want an update.”

The three of them went to her office and Kovac filled her in, chowing down on his dinner between segments of the afternoon’s events.

“So, basically,” he said, “Professor Chamberlain never met a person he didn’t annoy. Nobody had anything bad to say about the wife, other than that she named her children Charles and Diana, after the royals, and she liked to drink a bit in the evenings.”

“Do you think the murders were personal?”

Kovac gave a halfhearted shrug.

“The robbery looked legit,” Taylor said. “Not staged. The key
rooms were hit for stuff that could be carried and sold: small electronics, cash, credit cards, jewelry—”

“The weapons taken from the professor’s collection raise the question of whether our bad guy went there specifically targeting the collection or just hit the jackpot finding that stuff,” Kovac said. “Sato, the colleague-slash-rival, is going to go through it with us. We’ll find out the significance of the pieces that are missing.

“That in itself should be interesting,” he continued. “The head of the department told us Sato had a pretty serious hard-on for the collection. He wants the same job Chamberlain wanted. He’s banging the daughter. That’s a lot of checks in his column.”

“But the burglary aspect looks like several others in the area,” Mascherino said.

“I put Tippen and Elwood on that.”

“I spoke to them already. There are two cases that could very well be connected to this one—similar method of entry, neat and efficient burglary. The difference being no one was home at the time.”

“All the more reason for the Chamberlains to have had their security system armed,” Taylor pointed out.

“I’ve spoken with the security company,” the lieutenant said. “According to their computer, the Chamberlains’ system was armed last night a little after seven, and disarmed around twelve thirty. Of course, they can’t tell us who disarmed it or why. Disarming the system with the pass code doesn’t raise any red flags with the company.”

“The code number was on a label on the keypad in the kitchen,” Taylor said. “I took a picture of it.”

“The electronic-age version of leaving the key under the doormat,” Mascherino said, shaking her head.

“People accidentally set the alarm off, they panic and can’t remember the code,” Taylor said. “It’s not hard to imagine that happening with Mrs. Chamberlain’s drinking habit. Next thing, the
cops are there. And if that happens a couple of times, they’re getting fined.”

“That wouldn’t have gone over well with the tyrant,” Kovac said.

“So she made a little label and put it on the keypad,” Taylor said. “People do it all the time. They write the number down on a notepad on the counter. They write it on the corner of their message board by the kitchen phone.”

“They’re afraid of the people they don’t know,” Kovac said. “They think danger comes only from outside their world, not from their own circle of acquaintances.”

“So the perpetrator broke in through the French doors,” the lieutenant said. “They had no glass-break detectors. Professor Chamberlain felt they were an unnecessary expense, since all the openings were wired. No motion sensors, either. No video cameras. He bought a good basic package and left it at that.

“After the bad guy was inside, he had thirty seconds to get to the keypad and disarm the alarm before it went off,” Mascherino went on. “So he had the alarm code, but not a key to the house.”

“Anyone who has been in the house could have had that code,” Kovac said. “The cleaning lady, the handyman with the grudge. We’re on to that angle next. The professor had a beef with a handyman service. He trashed them online and got into it with the owner of the company, according to the son. They were scheduled to come back to the house and redo some work a couple of days ago.”