The Bitter Season (19 page)

“What can I do for you, Gorgeous?”

“Can I have a few minutes?”

“You can have as many minutes as you need,” he said, motioning toward the interview room he had earmarked for his nap. “What’s up? How’s it going at Chrysalis? I saw the piece in the paper. Nice write-up.”

He had first known Kate as a victim/witness advocate for the county, a job she left when she and the profiler started their family. She came back to the same field, but in the private sector, working part time for the Chrysalis Center as a liaison with law enforcement and the county attorney’s office.

“Seeing how there’s no end to human depravity, poverty, and cruelty, we’re doing a booming business,” she said, taking a seat. “We’re up to our ears in victims of the sex trade, homeless teenagers who’ve aged out of the foster care system, young women trying to transition out of rehab to make a life.

“It’s rewarding,” she confessed. “I wish I could give them more hours than I do.”

“So what brings you here?”

“One of our social workers got this note in her personal mail yesterday,” she said, handing him a plastic bag with a note inside. “She doesn’t have any idea where it came from, but she’s working
with a client who came out of a sex trafficking situation. The pimp is a very bad guy called Drago. He’s at large. Meanwhile, the girl has ratted out her eldest brother for molesting her, and it turns out the family is part of some scary religious cult.”

“Has anybody else at the center been threatened?”

“Grace Underhill gets threatened on a semiregular basis because she’s the face of the place, but she hasn’t gotten anything similar to this or anything specific to the Hope Anders case.”

Kovac turned the note over. “There’s nothing on here that refers to anyone in particular. What makes you think it’s to do with the girl?”

Kate shrugged. “Nothing. It’s just the only answer we could come up with for why anybody would target Evi. She’s the sweetest thing on the planet. She lives a quiet life. There’s no reason anyone should want to threaten her—except that she’s working with this girl who’s going to eventually end up testifying against several bad people in court.”

Kovac glanced at the note again.

I KNOW WHO YOU ARE

I KNOW WHERE YOU LIVE

“It’s not much, as threats go,” he said.

“I realize that. Which is why I’m coming to you.”

“You didn’t just miss me?”

“Of course I miss you,” she said. “How many Sundays have I invited you over for football? And do you ever come? No.”

“Yeah, well . . .”

“Yeah, well, there’s that whole having-to-interact-with-people-who-aren’t-cops thing . . .”

“So what do you want me to do about this?” he asked, handing the note back to her. “There’s been no crime.”

“You know everybody worth knowing in the department. Can
you reach out to someone and get a few extra patrols past her house? Let them know there’s a potential stalker situation. Evi’s husband is a firefighter. He’s gone for twenty-four hours at a time. She’s home alone at night with her five-year-old daughter.”

Kovac looked at the address. A neat, unremarkable neighborhood full of houses built in the 1940s and ’50s. A mix of blue-collar workers and young professionals starting families.

“Sure,” he said. “I’ll make a phone call. No problem. Anything for you, Red.”

“Thank you, Sam,” she said, standing. She leaned over and gave him a peck on the cheek. “You’re the best.”

“Yeah, that’s what all the ladies say,” he said sardonically as he saw her to the door.

Giving up on the idea of sleep, he headed back to his desk to make that phone call.

“I wish you wouldn’t go,”
Charlie said.

“Why? Are you afraid I’m going to take something?” Diana asked. “Mommy would have given her jewelry to me, not to you.”

“I don’t care about the stupid jewelry,” he said, shoveling scrambled eggs onto two plates on the breakfast bar. He pushed one of the plates toward her. “Here, eat this. There probably isn’t any jewelry left to go through anyway. It was a robbery.”

“Then what’s your problem?”

“It’s just . . .” How to put it into words that wouldn’t set her off? A conversation with Diana was like traversing a minefield. “I just . . . I don’t want them to misconstrue something you might say.”

“And what do you think I might say, Charlie?” she asked, sitting up straighter, setting her fork aside.

He cringed inwardly. He could see the storm building in her eyes. “I don’t know. They’re cops. You know they can twist what you say. It’s just better to stand back and let them do their jobs.”

“Do you think I did it?” she asked, her voice clipped, angry.

“Diana . . .”

“Do you?”

“No.”

“Do you?” she asked again, sliding off her stool. “Look at me!”

“No!”

“Do you think I killed our parents?” She picked up the plate and
flung it at him, eggs spraying everywhere. “Fuck you, Charlie! You hated them, too! Daddy treated you like shit, too!”

This was exactly why he didn’t want her going to the house with the detectives, not without him. Kovac was right: He had spent his whole life running interference for her. Her temper was volatile at the best of times, but now she was emotional and tired, and probably off her medication. She might say anything just to say it, just to be difficult.

“They’re going to start asking questions about insurance,” he said, “and who inherits what, and—”

“And I don’t know anything about any of that!” she shouted.

“No, but you already told them you want a piece of jewelry,” he said. “You told them that Mother would have given you her jewelry—”

“She would have!”

“That’s not the point! Do you not hear how that sounds? Do you not hear how that must sound to detectives who are looking to put these murders on someone?”

“You think I’m stupid,” she snapped. “You always think I’m stupid!”

“I do not!”

“I’m the one getting my master’s!”

“I’m the one who studied the law!”

“You’re a fucking clerk! No wonder Daddy was always disappointed in you,” she said, eyes narrowed like a snake’s.

The remark cut as sharp as any of the swords in their father’s collection.

“You’re such a bitch, Diana! I’m trying to help you, and that’s what you say to me?” he said, his voice cracking. “Jesus! I’ve always tried to protect you!”

“Well, you never have done a very good job of that, have you?” she said bitterly, coldly, glaring at him.

Tears rose in his eyes and burned like acid. He turned away from
her and stood staring out the narrow window that overlooked the parking lot. He couldn’t look at her, not now, not after that.

He heard the door slam. He didn’t go after her. He leaned his forehead against the cool of the window and started to cry. Through the blur of his tears and the rain on the window, he watched her get into her car and drive away. Then he slid down to the floor with his back to the wall, hugging his knees and burying his face, wishing he had never been born.

The scene was surreal:
Big Thomas Duffy dressed like a cartoon lumberjack in a red plaid flannel shirt over old-fashioned long johns, with hunting boots and an Elmer Fudd–style cap with earflaps. His sidekick: the Method actor from hell. A man in a moose costume, who insisted on speaking in his character’s goofy voice without cease.

They stood in front of a Northwoods set with cardboard pine trees against a painting of a lake and a full array of camping gear on display like a prize package on a game show.

This Big D Sports camping package can be all yours, Nikki Liska! Or would you rather have a BRAND-NEW CAR?!!

I’d take the car, she thought. Camping was one of the few things Speed did well with regard to his boys. Nikki’s idea of roughing it was a hotel room with no mint on the pillow at bedtime.

Crowding around Duffy and his moose pal was the crew, there to shoot a Big D commercial wherein Duffy would take ad time to talk about his brother’s case. And gathering around that crowd was the KTWN news crew, shooting the footage of the production in order to use pieces of it in their news segment. Crowding around all the cameras were the lunch-hour shoppers at Big D Sports, as goggle-eyed to see their local celebs, Big Duff and Melvin D. Moose, as they would have been to see actual movie stars. Nikki wanted to pull an arrow out of the quiver in the display beside her and stab herself in the eye.

The point of the ad, and the news segment they would be shooting, would be for Big Duff to announce the increased reward money for information leading to the arrest of his brother’s killer. A good idea on paper, but the reality of a big reward on a cold case was usually a lot of false leads that tied up investigators’ time and yielded nothing. If no one had come up with a viable lead for fifty thousand dollars in the last twenty-five years, chances were not good of anything real materializing now.

Still, Nikki knew that any publicity for the renewed effort at solving the crime held some slim chance of reaching the ear of the right person with the right piece of information. She had to take the opportunity no matter the odds. She should have been glad Thomas Duffy was willing to spend his company’s money and ad time asking for information from the public. This wouldn’t be just a sixty-second segment on the news that people might blink and miss while they were passing the potatoes at the supper table. People loved Big Duff and Melvin D. Moose. They would pay attention to the ads. Still, it rubbed her the wrong way. It was still a commercial for Big D Sports with a “By the way, if you happen to know anything about my brother’s murder . . .” thrown in; a “Hey, we’re offering this big-ass reward . . . and THE LOWEST PRICES IN THE TWIN CITIES!” kind of a thing.

She watched the show, standing at the edge of it, her arms crossed, foot tapping, her expression set in stone—a stark contrast to the delighted faces of the shoppers around her. They were loving it. Take after take after take. The moose kept messing up and then falling into comic antics that had the crowd in stitches. Nikki wanted to step in and beat him like a cheap piñata.

Finally the set was restaged for the interview. They all sat on camp stools around a fake campfire, looking like characters in a piney woods Fellini film: the news reporter and Nikki in business attire, Big Duff still in costume, and the stupid fucking moose. Theater of the absurd, Minnesota style.

“. . . and how do you feel about Big Duff’s efforts to promote the case, Detective?” the reporter asked.

“Anything that might bring attention to the search for Ted Duffy’s killer—”

“That’s right!” Big Duff interrupted, trampling over Nikki’s airtime. “We want people to remember! My brother was a decorated police detective! If anyone can remember any detail about that day, call the hotline! The reward for information leading to a conviction of my brother’s killer is up to one hundred thousand dollars!
One hundred thousand dollars!
”

By the time the fiasco was over, Nikki’s head was throbbing to the point that she wanted to grab a camping hatchet and put herself out of her misery.

“Mr. Duffy,” she started as the news crew packed up and the moose went to the customer service area to sign autographs. “I need to speak with you privately—”

“Yeah, sure.” He didn’t look at her. “Thanks, Melvin!” he called out, waving to his cohort. “Kids! Be sure to get your picture with Melvin!”

“Mr. Duffy,” Nikki started again.

“Great ad, don’t you think?” he said, still more interested in his customers than in her. “I think we might get something off that.”

She wanted to ask if he meant sales or information. “It’s possible—”

“People love that damn moose! They’ll pay attention because of that damn moose!” He laughed, amused at his stroke of genius in creating the character of Melvin.

Nikki wanted to kick him in the balls to get his attention on her. He was her least favorite kind of man: the kind who only talked, and who never listened to a woman. A woman’s part in a conversation with this Neanderthal was as a placeholder, a blah-blah-blah while he thought of the next brilliant thing he wanted to say.

He chuckled to himself. “That goddamn moose!”

Nikki waved a hand in front of his face. “I don’t give a shit about the fucking moose,” she said, loud enough that several shoppers in line for autographs turned with expressions of shock and disapproval.

Duffy looked down at her as if she had just sprung up out of the ground like an unpleasant little forest gnome in his surreal camp scene.

He frowned at her. “I heard you had an attitude.”

Nikki forced an unpleasant smile. “I can’t imagine where you heard that. Do you have an office we can go to, Mr. Duffy?”

He led the way to the back of the store, pulling his hat off to reveal thinning black hair shot through with gray. They passed the restrooms and the employee break room, which smelled of reheated chili and microwave popcorn. At the end of a hallway, Duffy opened a door and walked into the office ahead of her.

“I’ve told this story a hundred times to a dozen different cops,” he said, rounding his messy desk to drop into the well-worn leather executive’s chair.

The store was the Big D flagship off 494, near the Mall of America, a bright, modern building, but the office chair looked like it had been with him from the early days. The wall behind him was dominated by a stuffed blue marlin and a poster of a pair of scantily clad sex kittens posing with hunting rifles.

Nikki sat down across from him. He was a big man, on the flabby side, his face heavy with the beginnings of jowls. With the goofy cap off, the makeup he was wearing for the television camera stood out: clownish red rouge, eyebrow pencil and mascara, black powder to darken his five o’clock shadow.

“And now we have to start all over again with you,” he said, none too pleased about it.

“I continue to be confused by the low standard everyone involved in this case seems to have,” she said.

He gave her a look that said she should know better. “It’s been twenty-five years.”

“You think the case can’t be solved? Is that why you doubled the reward? Because you don’t believe you’ll ever have to cough up a hundred thousand dollars?”

“Every detective in the city was on this case when Ted was killed,” he said. “Are you better on a cold case than every detective in the city on a fresh case put together?”

“You don’t know that I’m not,” she said, “despite what Gene Grider might have told you over your Corn Flakes this morning at Cheap Charlie’s.”

He sat up a little at that, frowning at the idea that he might have underestimated her. Clearly Grider hadn’t gotten through to him with the news that she had seen the two of them together.

“I keep hearing how close you were to your brother,” she said.

“I loved my brother. He was my best friend every day of my life since before we were born. And every year, at this shitty time of year, I get reminded that someone killed him and he’s never going to be in my life again. And that sucks like nothing else I’ll ever know.”

“Then you ought to be rooting for me.”

“I don’t have any reason to believe you can do what nobody else has done in twenty-five years,” he said. “All you’re going to do is upset my wife and family. You’re just going to ask the same damn questions and get the same damn answers every other cop has.

“Isn’t that what you came in here to do?” he asked. “Where was I the day my brother died? Was I having an affair with Barbie? Did we kill him for the insurance money? Blah, blah, blah. The same fucking five questions over and over. Excuse me for not being excited about that or excited about you.”

Nikki considered what he said as she looked at the calendar of UFC ring girls hanging on the wall above a tall filing cabinet. Thanksgiving weekend was X’d out for his annual hunting trip.

Nothing changed. Every year was another year his brother was dead with no resolution to his murder. Every year on the same weekend in November he went to Wisconsin to hunt. Every year he
and his buddies probably sat around the fire at the cabin and toasted his absent twin. And every time his brother’s case got dragged back out, the same questions and the same theories were raised, with no result.

If Thomas Duffy had been telling the truth all these years, he had nothing new to offer. If he had been lying all these years, why would he stop now?

“You know, you’re right,” she conceded. “There’s no point in me asking you the same questions every other detective has already asked you over and over. You’re not going to tell me anything you didn’t tell anyone else. And the same answers aren’t going to get this case solved. It’s Einstein’s definition of insanity, right? Doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.

“So I’m not going to ask if you killed your twin brother to collect on the insurance so you could sink the money into the business,” she said. “Or if you killed him because you were fucking his wife. Or both. You wouldn’t tell me if you did.”

“I didn’t.” The desk chair groaned as he leaned back and spread his hands. “So, what’s the point of you being here?”

“I like to know exactly who I’m dealing with,” she said. “And I want you to know exactly who you’re dealing with.”

“Am I supposed to feel threatened or something?”

“Not unless you’ve done something wrong.”

“I’ve got some parking tickets I haven’t paid,” he said with a self-amused smirk. “You probably know some meter maids. Maybe you can take care of that for me.”

“Boy, those meter maid jokes never get old,” Nikki said, putting the thinnest veneer of amusement over a pained smile. “Feel free to call me if you come up with any more of those gems.”

She stood up, took a business card out of her coat pocket, and placed it on the blotter in front of him.

“In the meantime, I’m going to do everything I can to solve your brother’s murder. I’m going to look for things nobody else thought
to look for. I’m going to talk to people nobody else bothered talking to. Because those are the people who see things—the ones nobody notices. And maybe they haven’t talked before because nobody asked them, or maybe they haven’t talked because they didn’t realize they had anything relevant to say.

“That’s who’s going to solve this case,” she said. “Me, and someone nobody ever thought about—a clerk at a convenience store, a neighbor looking out a window, a child nobody paid any attention to.”

“Yeah?” Duffy said, clearly bored with her. He picked up her card and tossed it on a pile of junk mail. “Well, you be sure to call me when that happens.”

“You’ll be the first to know. Maybe you can give the reward to that person here in the store, give them one of those giant checks. They can get their picture taken with the moose. Great publicity.”

He made a face that looked like he had a toothache.

“You have a nice day, Mr. Duffy,” Nikki said. “Don’t forget about those parking tickets. They have a way of coming back to bite you in the ass. The past always does.”

*   *   *

T
ED
D
UFFY
’
S ELDEST DAUGHTER
, Jennifer, now thirty-four, worked as a librarian at the Pierre Bottineau Library, five minutes northeast and across the Mississippi from downtown Minneapolis. Single, she lived in an apartment within walking distance of her job.

Seley’s research had returned nothing remarkable on Jennifer Duffy. She had graduated in the middle of her class in high school and in the middle of her class in college. She had never done anything to make herself stand out in any way. Her mother had talked about her extensive history of therapy, to deal with the aftermath of her father’s death, but if she had ever taken her troubles in the direction of drugs or alcohol, she had done so quietly. She had no police record of any kind.

A pair of the beige brick-and-stone Victorian buildings on the campus of the old Grain Belt brewery complex had been beautifully renovated to house the library. When the brewery was in operation, the neighborhoods around it were populated largely by working-class people of Eastern European descent. In recent years, urban renewal had brought an influx of young professionals and artists. Other brewery buildings, warehouses, and old bank buildings had been converted to apartments, offices, studios, galleries, restaurants, and taprooms.

In good weather the area was an interesting place to explore. In the constant cold drizzle, Broadway and Marshall was just another busy intersection as would-be shoppers and diners passed by on their way elsewhere.

Nikki parked on Marshall and walked through the archway and up the brick path to the library. All warm wood and floor-to-ceiling windows, the place had a cozy feel, full of nooks and crannies and private alcoves for reading or surfing the Internet.

Jennifer Duffy emerged from an office on the other side of the main desk. She was a younger version of her mother: blonde, slender, pretty; smartly dressed in a mid-calf green wool skirt with tall brown boots and a brown sweater set with a pretty silk scarf cleverly tied around her throat.