The Bitter Season (20 page)

“Can I help you?” she asked in a perfect librarian tone, a polite smile on her face.

“Jennifer Duffy?”

The smile immediately faded. “Yes.”

“I’m Sergeant Liska. I’m a detective—”

“I know who you are,” the woman said, frowning at the ID Nikki held up. She glanced around surreptitiously, clearly worried that someone might notice she was talking to a cop. “My mother told me you’d be calling,” she whispered. “I don’t have anything to say to you. I was nine years old.”

“I understand that,” Nikki said. “I just want to have a conversation with you. I promise I won’t take up much of your time.”

“I don’t see the point. I don’t have any information for you.”

“You don’t know what questions I have.”

“You have the same questions as every other detective.”

“From what I’ve read in the reports, no one ever bothered to ask you much of anything.”

“Because they knew I don’t have anything to say!”

She spoke too emphatically, drawing the attention of several people browsing the stacks. A tall elderly gentleman in a fisherman’s sweater took it upon himself to butt in, stepping toward the desk.

“Is everything all right, Jennifer?” he whispered, giving Nikki the eye.

Jennifer Duffy’s cheeks turned red. “Yes, Mr. Weisman, I’m fine. Thank you.”

He drifted back toward the shelves reluctantly.

“I’m not going away, Miss Duffy,” Nikki whispered. “Just sit down with me for fifteen minutes. Then I can write my report and cross you off the list, and I will never bother you again. Please. I’m just trying to do my job.”

She still wanted to say no, but she didn’t turn away.

“Look, I don’t want to make a problem for you,” Nikki pressed. “But my loyalty in this is to your father. He doesn’t get to ask you to help. I have to do it for him. And I will be like a dog with a bone, so you might as well sit down with me and get it over with.”

Looking annoyed and worried, Jennifer Duffy huffed a sigh. She turned and said something quietly to another librarian working behind the desk, then turned back.

“Not in here,” she said. “I’ll get my coat.”

They walked in silence through the drizzle to a mostly empty coffeehouse within sight of the library. They ordered at the counter and then sat down at the farthest table, next to the window, away from curious ears. Nikki took the corner seat out of habit, so she could have the best view of the room and the people in it. Jennifer Duffy sat across from her, huddled in her raincoat, looking sullen.

“I don’t need everyone at work knowing my business,” she said.

“I understand.”

“If you understood, you wouldn’t be here.”

Nikki sighed. “Why do I seem to care more about finding your father’s killer than everyone else in your family combined?”

“Because you haven’t lived with it for practically your entire life,” she said. “It’s new to you. It’s like a shiny new toy,” she said bitterly. “That’s the way it always is, every time someone thinks they’re going to be the person to crack the case and nothing ever comes of it, and we’re all left to deal with our feelings all over again.”

She had a point. Nikki had yet to become disillusioned with the attempt to solve Ted Duffy’s case. Jennifer Duffy had been disillusioned again and again.

“It’s like having someone ransack your house over and over,” Jennifer Duffy said. “They never stay to put it all back together.”

“I’m sorry no one has ever been able to give you closure on this,” Nikki said. “I sincerely hope this will be the last time.”

“I hope so, too,” she said, though she had clearly run out of hope for that a while ago.

The waiter brought them their coffees. When he had walked away, Nikki said, “Your mom told me it was especially hard on you when your dad died. You were close to him?”

“No. I don’t have that many memories of him, to be honest. He was working all the time. So was my mom. One was gone or the other one was gone.”

“How was it when the family was all together? Did your parents seem happy?”

“I’m not going to trash my parents’ marriage,” she said. “I’m not going to tell you my mother was having an affair with Big Duff or anyone else. Or that my dad was doing something he wasn’t supposed to be doing. That’s the bush you’re beating around, isn’t it? I wouldn’t know the answer. I was a child.”

Nikki didn’t try to argue. She had already stumbled over these
same ruts. Her whole point in being here, talking to Ted Duffy’s eldest child, was to find new ground. She sat back and took a sip of her coffee.

“Was he a good dad when he had the chance?”

“He was tired,” she said with a weariness of her own. “He had bad moods. We were always being told not to bother him. Daddy has a hard job, Mom would always say. I could never understand why he didn’t just get a different job so he wouldn’t be so unhappy all the time.”

Nikki tried to imagine her at nine. She would have been one of those pretty, ladylike little girls. It wasn’t hard to picture her in her green plaid Catholic school uniform and black patent leather Mary Janes, her hair in two neat braids with bows. Quiet, Nikki thought, shy, even. She might have had her mother’s looks, but she didn’t have her mother’s edge. She seemed more delicate, internally fragile.

When she spoke, Nikki could hear the echo of loneliness in her voice, the confusion and rejection of a child pushed to the side. Every little girl wanted her daddy’s love and attention. Jennifer Duffy hadn’t gotten much of either from her father, by the sound of it. Those were the emotions she didn’t want to have to relive every time another cop came calling with the promise of solving her father’s case.

“I have two boys,” Nikki said. “Their dad and I are both cops. We’re divorced now, but we had our years like that, too. He was gone, working undercover narcotics. I was gone working my shift. When he was home there was always tension. Even though I was a cop, too, he thought I couldn’t really understand his world. I know it’s the same way with the Sex Crimes detectives. What they’re exposed to on a daily basis is so filthy and so foul. Even if it was possible for their spouse or their family to comprehend it, the cops don’t want to share it. They don’t want it polluting everyone’s lives. That isolation takes a toll on the family.”

Jennifer Duffy nodded almost imperceptibly as she looked down at her coffee.

“My dad was a cop, too,” Nikki went on. “He worked patrol his whole career. Old school. Never talked about the job. Never. And we weren’t supposed to ask him. If he had a bad day on the job, how would we know? He wouldn’t tell us, and we couldn’t ask. How were we supposed to know he wasn’t mad at us? Kids think everything is about them.”

“You end up feeling like he’s just a man who sometimes stays overnight,” Jennifer murmured, the memory pressing down on her.

“It’s hard.”

“But you became a cop yourself.”

“Yes. I suppose in part to feel closer to him,” Nikki admitted. She took another sip of her coffee. “Or maybe to make up for what he lacked as a parent. I’m very close to my boys. I don’t ever want them to feel separate from me the way I felt from my old man.

“Even so, it’s not easy being a cop’s kid,” she continued. “It makes you different. It sets you a little apart from the other kids.”

“Yes, it does,” Ted Duffy’s daughter murmured, as she stirred her coffee with a stick of rock sugar.

“I read in the file that you were in your room reading when your dad was shot.”

“He was chopping wood,” she said quietly. “I could hear him chopping wood. He did that when he was upset.”

“Did you hear the shots?”

“I suppose I did, but I didn’t realize it.”

Nikki pictured the scene in her mind: Jennifer Duffy propped up by pillows on the bed as she lost her loneliness in the pages of a book. The distant
crack
of the axe striking the wood. The distant
crack
of a rifle shot. A nine-year-old child wouldn’t have known the difference. And even if she had been looking out the window the instant it happened, she never could have seen into the gathering gloom of the woods where the shot had come from.

“Then it was quiet,” Jennifer said. “It was quiet for a long time.
I just kept reading. I thought he must have come inside, but he was lying out there, dying.”

The mother in her made Nikki want to put her arms around the young girl in the memory. Jennifer blamed herself in the way children did because they believed their worlds revolved around them. In the active imagination of Jennifer Duffy’s nine-year-old mind, she might have been able to save her father if only she had known he was out there wounded. If only she had realized something was wrong. Instead, her father had bled out lying on the ground beneath her bedroom window.

“He was killed instantly, you know,” Nikki said softly. “There was nothing you could have done.”

She made that slight nod again, but she was still far away in her mind. “That’s what they said,” she whispered.

Now, as she put the pieces of Jennifer Duffy’s answers together, Nikki could see why she had been the one to take her father’s death the hardest. He had never been the father she wanted, and her hope for that to change had died with him. Her father hadn’t seen her off on her first date, hadn’t seen her graduate, would never walk her down the aisle—and somewhere deep down inside there was still a tiny remnant of that nine-year-old girl that believed she was somehow responsible.

“So you grew up to be a librarian,” Nikki said, to move her memory away from the dark corner of her father’s death. “Were books a refuge for you as a kid?”

“You can go anywhere in a book,” she answered, smiling slightly. “Be anyone. And life has to make sense in a book. Real life doesn’t have to make sense. In real life, good people can turn out to be bad people, and bad people can get away with murder . . . and worse. I’ll take a good book over that any day.”

She used both hands to lift her cup to her lips. It rattled on the saucer as she set it down.

“My oldest boy is an artist,” Nikki said. “He draws his own comic books. That’s his escape. He says the same thing. In comic books, the bad guy always gets it in the end. There’s a lot of comfort in that.”

Jennifer Duffy stared out the window, her mind years away, in a place where a nine-year-old girl had to hide away from a bad reality. Her father’s death? Her parents’ struggling marriage? Their unhappy family? Her own unjustified guilt . . .

“Can you tell me about the girls who were living with you at that time?” Nikki asked. “Angie and Penny?”

Jennifer Duffy looked at her, confused. “Why? What could you think they would have to do with anything? They were teenagers.”

“I’m fishing,” Nikki confessed. “I spoke with your old neighbor Mr. Nilsen. He said the girls were kind of wild. Maybe one of them had a bad boyfriend or got in trouble with people in the drug culture. Or maybe they had someone in their family background who was unhappy with them being in the foster care system,” Nikki suggested. “Or someone who didn’t want them talking to a police detective.”

“That sounds like a movie,” Duffy said. “They were just teenage girls. I don’t think anybody cared about either of them.”

“Did you like having them around? It had to be kind of like having instant big sisters, huh?”

“I never liked Penny. She was mean when she babysat for us. And she was a liar and a thief. I wasn’t sad to see her go.”

“And Angie? She was the older one?”

“I liked her. She was quiet, and she was nice to us. She liked to read, too,” she recalled. “She would read to me sometimes,” she admitted, smiling a little at that one small fond memory. “I loved to be read to, but I was supposedly too big to be read to, so I never asked my mom to do it. She didn’t have time anyway. I was the one who read to my little sister and brother at night.”

“And then Angie would read to you?”

“She would sneak into my room, or I would sneak into hers, and we would curl up in bed and take turns reading out loud.”

Her expression changed slowly as she looked inward. A happy memory was slowly overtaken by one not so pleasant, like a cloud passing over the sun.

“Anyway . . . I should be getting back to work,” she said, pulling herself away from the dark thought.

“Angie wasn’t there when your father was shot,” Nikki said, pressing forward. “Do you remember where she was?”

“No,” she said, gathering her purse and pushing her chair back. “Something at school. Really, I need to get back to work.”

“I’ll walk with you,” Nikki said. “I’m parked on Marshall.”

Jennifer Duffy didn’t look happy about having to spend another three minutes with her. They went back out into the damp. The librarian set a brisk pace.

“It must have been hard for you,” Nikki said. “Losing your dad and then losing your surrogate big sister. Did you stay in touch with Angie after she left?”

“No. I never knew where she went. No one would tell me.”

“Do you remember the kid that lived next door? Jeremy Nilsen? He mowed your grass.”

“He was in high school.”

“I know. So was Angie. They must have known one another. Were they friends?”

“I wouldn’t know,” she said curtly as she pulled open the library’s outer door. “And I really don’t see the point of this. How could it matter? I have to go back to work. Thank you for the coffee.”

“Thank you for your time,” Nikki said as the glass door closed in front of her. “And you
would
know,” she murmured, watching Jennifer Duffy disappear into the library. “That
is
the point.”

“I don’t understand why I can’t come in,”
Charlie Chamberlain said stubbornly.

They stood in the drizzle on the front walk of the house: Charlie, Diana, Ken Sato, Kovac, and Taylor. Kovac had purposely made sure that Charlie knew the time they would be meeting, in the hope he would turn up, despite the fact he had been told not to come. Kovac did so for the express purpose of literally shutting the kid out. If Charlie Chamberlain didn’t want his sister left alone with the cops, it was worth messing with him to find out why.

“I told you, kid,” Kovac said curtly. “I can’t have people wandering around the crime scene. We’re here for two reasons. One, so I can walk through the collection with Professor Sato, and two, so your sister can look over your mother’s jewelry with my partner. I don’t need a third wheel here.”

“I have a DVD of the collection,” Chamberlain said, pulling a plastic DVD case out of the patch pocket of his rain jacket. Mr. Helpful. “I stopped by the attorney’s office to talk about making funeral arrangements, and I remembered he had a copy—”

Kovac took the case and handed it to Taylor like he couldn’t be bothered with it. “Thanks, that’s great. You can go now.”

“This is my home,” Chamberlain argued. “I have as much right to be in it as anyone.”

“No,” Kovac snapped. “This is
my
crime scene until I say it isn’t,
and you don’t have any rights here until I say you do. That’s how this works. Now, I’d like to get out of this filthy weather before pneumonia sets in, so . . .”

“It’s fine, Charlie,” Sato said. “It’s all fine.”

Sato went to put a hand on the kid’s shoulder. Charlie Chamberlain shrugged him off, shooting Sato a look that could have cut glass. “Nothing is
fine
. No part of any of this is
fine,
Ken.”

“Oh my God, Charlie,” Diana said impatiently. “Why don’t you just shut the fuck up and go do whatever it is you do when you’re not butting into my life.”

“Oh yeah, this is all about
you,
Diana,” Charlie bit back. “
Our
parents are dead.”

She rolled her eyes like a teenager.

Kovac resisted the urge to raise his eyebrows. Something had shifted in the dynamic between the siblings since that morning, when they clung to each other, crying over their mutual grief. He caught Taylor’s eye and knew he was making note of it as well.

“And unless you know something the rest of us don’t,” Kovac said, “Detective Taylor and I are in charge of solving their murders. Do you have something to contribute to that conversation, Charlie?”

The kid huffed and looked away and back, shoving his clenched fists into his jacket pockets as he struggled with his temper. “No. I would just like to see for myself the state of the house.”

“We’re not pocketing the silverware, if that’s what you think.”

“I’ll video,” Diana said and walked up the steps, dismissing him.

Kovac made a show of relenting. “Look, kid, go sit in your car if you’ve got time. I’ll walk you through when we’re done.”

They left him standing on the sidewalk looking like an unhappy wet puppy.

Inside the front door, they shed their dripping coats, hanging them on an iron coat tree. Taylor handed out booties for everyone to cover their shoes.

The house still carried a hint of the smell of spilled blood and the faint stink of cigarettes. While no one was allowed to smoke in a house being processed as a crime scene, plenty of the people on the job ducked outside for a break during the hours it took to do the job, bringing the smell of smoke back inside with them.

“Where were they killed?” Diana Chamberlain asked. True to her word, she held up her phone and took a video of the foyer and the staircase.

“The dining room,” Taylor said. “We won’t be going in there.”

“I think I should.”

Sato gave her a disapproving look. “Di, no.”

“I should,” she insisted, turning to him with her bravest and most earnest expression. “It’s the last place their souls were,” she said with all the drama of a soap opera actress. “That’s where I should say good-bye to them.”

“We really can’t have people in there,” Kovac said. “We need you to go upstairs with Detective Taylor and look through your mother’s things.”

He turned to Sato. “Professor, you and I are going to the professor’s study.”

He didn’t look any more like a professor today than he had the day before. He was in black jeans and a black hoodie with several glossy black Japanese characters running down the left side of his chest.

“Do you have some kind of history with the boy?” Kovac asked. “He doesn’t seem too happy to see you.”

“Charlie thinks I’m an anarchist because I don’t fit in any of his neat little boxes.”

“What the hell does that mean?”

“It means he can’t control me, and control is everything to Charlie. Control the emotions. Control the situation. Move the chess pieces around on the board to create the best defense.”

“Defense against what?”

“Life,” he said, looking around as they went into a fussy formal sitting room that was lined with dark wood bookcases crowded with leather-bound tomes and framed family photos.

“These aren’t the best circumstances, but he seems pretty uptight for a twenty-four-year-old kid.”

“You would be, too, if Lucien were your father,” Sato said. “Charlie always tried to be the peacemaker. Given the personalities involved, that’s a stressful role. He’s a sensitive kid.”

“He’s very protective of his sister.”

Sato didn’t comment. He stood in the center of the room with his hands on his hips and looked around. “It’s strange to be in here knowing Lucien and Sondra are gone.”

“Did you come here often?” Kovac asked.

He laughed. “No. Lucien invited me once a year to their annual Chinese New Year party, so I could see what a successful life he had.”

“And you don’t have a successful life? You’re a professor, too. You’re in line for the same promotion.”

“I’m not married to money.”

“You could be,” Kovac said, watching him carefully. “Now you could get the girl, get the job, get the money. It’s clear sailing. You’d probably end up with the collection, too. Half of it, anyway.”

Sato’s expression hardened. “You brought me here to accuse me of murder?”

“I’m not accusing you of anything. Just pointing out the obvious.”

“Am I seriously a person of interest?”

“Did you seriously think you wouldn’t be?” Kovac asked, giving him a look like
Come on
. “Everyone connected to the Chamberlains is a person of interest until I’m satisfied they’re not.”

“What about this manhunt for some drug addict carpenter I heard about on the news?”

“He’s someone we need to have a conversation with,” Kovac
answered, peeved that the media was running away with that story. Dan Franken would probably threaten to sue the department before the day was out. The fact that his illegal employee was being hunted in connection with a murder investigation would be bad for business. “We have to consider all possibilities.”

“The fact that this guy is on the run says enough to me,” Sato said. “Innocent people don’t flee the police.”

“He could be guilty of something. That doesn’t make him guilty of this,” Kovac said. “Anyway, why don’t you enlighten me about some of this stuff?”

Sato gestured to the painting over the fireplace, a fearsome-looking elaborately dressed warrior of some kind, sword drawn. The colors were bold and solid—black, dark blue, bright white. The matting and frame probably cost a week’s pay.

“It’s a late-nineteenth-century
ukiyo-e—
a Japanese woodblock print.”

“Is it valuable?”

“No, not very. It’s in pristine condition, and it’s a beautiful example of the art, but they’re not rare. After Japan opened up during the Meiji Restoration in 1868, tons of these came west. Japan and all things Japanese were all the rage in Europe and in the States.”

“So this collection of Chamberlain’s is just a bunch of tourist trinkets from back when?”

“Oh no. We haven’t gotten to the good stuff yet.”

“How about any of the stuff on these shelves?” Kovac asked, more interested himself in the family photos: a wedding picture of the professor and his bride; photographs of Lucien Chamberlain receiving various awards, of him traveling in far-flung corners of the world. Photos of the professor outnumbered the rest of the family three to one.

“I don’t know that much about the art objects,” Sato said. “That’s not my area of expertise.”

“I guess Stuart Kaufman would have been the one to help us with that,” Kovac remarked.

From the corner of his eye he could see Sato bristle.

“Do you think I killed him, too?”

“I don’t know that anybody killed him. But it would make me a little nervous if the candidates for the job I wanted were dropping like flies.”

“Stuart got sick and died. People do. I don’t see that one death has anything to do with the other. It’s an unfortunate coincidence.”

Kovac bobbed his eyebrows and made a noncommittal humming sound as he looked at a photograph of the Chamberlain children dressed up in their white karate outfits, standing ramrod straight, bare feet wide apart, arms crossed, their expressions grave. They must have been around eight and ten, he thought. Even then Diana towered over her brother.

“Did you know Diana when she was in and out of rehab?” he asked.

“She put that behind her several years ago.”

“Has she ever talked about any of the rehabs she went to?”

“No. You don’t think she could be connected to this handyman suspect, do you? He came out of a drug rehab, right?”

Kovac didn’t answer.

“She doesn’t hang with any of those people.”

“That’s not to say someone couldn’t remember her, and think her family is loaded,” Kovac said. “You see?”

He led the way down the hall to Lucien Chamberlain’s study. “Watch your step. The crime scene unit has already processed the scene, but I still don’t like to mess up bloodstains and footprints if I can help it.”

Sato tiptoed around the dried bloody shoe prints like a cat.

“Charlie tells us Diana is bipolar,” Kovac said. “Do you know if she’s on medication?”

“You’d have to ask her,” the professor said, his voice chilly. He was about done with the subject of Diana. He looked pointedly at his watch. “Can we get on with this? I have an appointment in an hour.”

“Sure,” Kovac said. “We’ll get the insurance report on the values, but I want you to look at what was taken and tell me if you think the thief knew the significance of what he was stealing.”

“Okay. Let’s start here,” Sato said, gesturing to an empty display case. The glass had been shattered. A brass plaque described the missing item as
SAMURAI MEMPO—JAPA
N—CIR. 1800.
“
Mempo
was the mask worn by the samurai in battle,” he said. “This one covered the entire face and was made from leather with a detachable iron nosepiece. It’s lacquered white on the outside with red accenting the lines of the face, and lacquered bright red on the inside. The hallmark of these masks is a terrible grimacing facial expression, meant to intimidate the enemy. The missing one also had a horsehair mustache. They added those so that decapitated heads on the field of battle wouldn’t be mistaken for women’s heads and discarded.”

“There were women on the battlefield?”

“More than you would think. There were actually female warriors—
onna-bugeisha
. They participated in battles a lot more than the history books say. The remains of a hundred and five bodies at the Battle of Senbon Matsubaru in 1580 were recently DNA tested. It turned out thirty-five of them were women.”

He shook his head at a memory. “Lucien and I actually argued about it. Misogynist that he was, he tried to find every alternate explanation he could to diminish the significance of the
onna-bugeisha.
And yet, he has their weapon of choice in his collection—the
naginata.
Fucking hypocrite,” he muttered.

Kovac looked up at the wall to a thing that appeared to be a spear on one end and a curved sword on the other, and imagined a pack of angry women armed with them.

“He also chose to adamantly ignore the samurai practice of
wakashudo,
” he said with disgust. “Ridiculous homophobic dinosaur.”

Kovac raised an eyebrow. “There were gay samurai?”

“They didn’t label people that way. Like the Spartans, they accepted and actively encouraged relationships among the warriors.
Wakashudo
literally means ‘the way of the young men.’ It was a normal part of a mentor-student relationship among warriors. It wasn’t until Westerners and Christian missionaries came to Japan that homophobic attitudes were imposed on the society.

“Opening to the West was the demise of samurai culture in every way,” he continued. “And the Victorian attitudes of Westerners kept details like the
onna-bugeisha
and
wakashudo
—truths they didn’t approve of—out of the history books.

“That’s where Lucien’s soul lived—in Victorian times,” he went on. “He was rigid, judgmental, sexually repressed. The irony, of course, is that the Victorians were secretly some of the most sexually deviant, fucked-up people ever.”

“Do you think Chamberlain was that, too?” Kovac asked. “Deviant? Some of what I see in Diana’s behavior makes me wonder if there’s a history of abuse.”

“I wouldn’t know,” Sato said, but he looked away as he said it. “Anyway, back to the mask—I recently saw one for sale that was not quite as old or quite as nice as this one. The guy wanted three grand for it.”

“Is there a black market for this kind of stuff?”

“Sure, for the ultra-rare pieces. Men all over the world are enamored of the samurai and their culture. Wealthy men like expensive toys. But the average bozo thinks samurai and ninja are cool, too. So, a common thief might take that mask or a sword or dagger just because it excites him, not because he understands the historical or monetary value.”