The Bitter Season Read online

  She had gotten up early to read more of the Duffy file, and thought about it now as she cleaned up the kitchen. She would start at ground zero, go to the scene and get the feel of the place. Although Duffy’s wife had eventually remarried and moved out of the house where the tragedy took place, Nikki hoped some of the neighbors had remained. Still, twenty-five years was a long time. People moved away, got old, lost their memories, died. There had been nothing significant in any of the neighbors’ statements given at the time. It was doubtful any of them would have much to say about it now, even if they could be found for an interview. Still, Candra Seley was already working on trying to locate Duffy’s family, friends, and neighbors.

  According to the weather and traffic reports, the roads would be clear by noon. The bad weather of the night before had given way to a day with a bright sky and warming temperatures, a brief respite until the next system of bleak gray and damp cold rolled in.

  By one o’clock the boys were antsy and off to hang out with their friends. Nikki picked Seley up at City Hall, and they headed to Ted Duffy’s old neighborhood.

  “I’m so excited to get out of the office, I can’t stand it!” Seley said, looking around like a woman just let out of prison, dark brown eyes bright and wide and a big smile lighting up her oval face. “I’m no good at sitting still.”

  “Seems an odd choice then that you work at a computer all day,” Nikki observed.

  “Yeah, it’s not my nature,” she confessed on a sigh. “I loved working patrol. That was where I started. That was my thing. Every day is new and different on the streets. But it made my husband a nervous wreck, then Hunter and Brandy came along, and I had to realize my life wasn’t just about me. I worked Special Crimes for a while—Crimes Against Children. I couldn’t take that. I wanted to kill someone every day. Then I went to Community Initiatives.”

  “Did you work with Grider there?”

  “Well, I didn’t so much work with Gene Grider as work around him. He probably doesn’t even remember I was there. He’s one of those guys that seems not to see or hear women if he can help it—which was fine by me.”

  “I’ve dealt with my share of those over the years,” Nikki said. “I can’t help myself, though. I have to get in their faces. I used to keep a giant dildo in my desk, and I would take it out and smack guys with it when they were trying to shut me out. I’d get it right under their noses and shake it and say ‘Look at that, asshole! I’ve got the biggest dick here, so back off!’”

  They both laughed at the mental image.

  “Nikki, you’re something else. If you were as tall as me, you would take over the world.”

  “Forget that. If I were as tall as you, I wouldn’t have to climb on my kitchen counters to reach the high shelves.”

  “That is a definite benefit to being five-eleven.”

  “So, how did you end up in Business and Technology?”

  “I took a nasty fall off a horse and hurt my back. I had to go on desk duty. They had an opening in B and T, and I’m good with computers.” She made a little shrug and looked out the window. “It’s okay. Rex, my husband, is happy.”

  “And what about you?”

  “I’m hoping Cold Case gets funded permanently,” she confessed. “It’s the perfect compromise. How about you? You miss Homicide?”

  Nikki groaned. “Yes. Even as we speak, my old partner is working the scene of a double murder—respectable couple in a respectable neighborhood, possibly killed by a sword-wielding maniac. I admit it gets my adrenaline running. But, on the other hand, I had a great breakfast with my boys this morning, and I won’t be pulling thirty-six hours straight while they fall into juvenile delinquency from lack of parental interest.”

  “This is the place,” Seley said, pointing to a square white two-story house on a block of similar houses.

  Nikki parked at the curb, and they got out of the car.

  “The property has changed hands four times since the Duffys lived here,” Seley went on. “I called the current owner and warned him we’d be stopping by to have a look. He’s at work. He said to feel free.”

  From the front, the place didn’t look much different from the photos taken twenty-five years ago. Someone had added blue shutters. The landscaping had been updated. A newer, taller privacy fence cordoned off the backyard.

  They let themselves in through an unlocked gate. The tall fence blocked ground-level views into the yard on two sides. But at the back of the property, a simple post-and-rail fence allowed the homeowners a beautiful view of a wooded park beyond.

  The shots that killed Ted Duffy had come from that park, from up the hill or in a tree, judging by the trajectory of the bullets. He was shot at a downward angle with a small-caliber hunting rifle, probably from no more than fifty yards away. The visibility that day had been poor, with intermittent spitting rain mixed with snow. The crime took place late in the day, when darkness would have been gathering. Duffy had been chopping wood at the time. One bullet struck him in the upper back. The second shot hit him in the back of the head as he fell. Despite an extensive search of the area it was believed the shots had come from, no shell casings had been found.

  “He was standing about here when he was shot,” Nikki said, spreading her arms.

  The stump Duffy had been using as he split firewood was gone. Nikki had used the garage windows to estimate the spot based on her memory from the crime scene photos.

  “Come stand here,” she said to Seley. “He was about your height, a couple of inches taller.”

  Seley took her place on the spot, her back to the woods. Nikki stepped back a few feet, imagining where the first bullet would have struck Duffy, and then looked toward the park, up the wooded slope. There would have been few people in the park at that time of day, certainly not back here, where there were no trails and nothing to see but the backside of an ordinary neighborhood.

  This was deer hunting season, but there was no hunting allowed within city limits; nor were rifles allowed for hunting deer in this part of the state anyway. That wasn’t to say no one in the city owned rifles. Plenty of Minnesotans took them across the St. Croix River to hunt in Wisconsin. But Ted Duffy, a man chopping wood in his backyard, had not been mistaken for a deer. He had been deliberately killed. Someone had come hunting him.

  Duffy’s three children, ages five to nine, had been in the house at the time, along with a thirteen-year-old foster child. Two days before Thanksgiving, his wife, Barbara, had been grocery shopping. A second foster child had been at a school event.

  “Sad way to go,” Seley said. “Back here in the dark, in the rain, all alone.”

  “As far as I’ve seen, they’re all sad ways to go,” Nikki said.

  “My grandmother passed away in her own home surrounded by people who loved her. That’s how I want to go.”

  “I want to go in my sleep,” Nikki said, “dreaming that I’m having wild hot sex with Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson.”

  “Hey there!” a man’s voice called out sharply. “What are you doing back there?”

  Nikki looked around, then up and next door. A man, heavyset, red-faced, salt-and-pepper crew cut, leaned out a second-story window. She put him in his late sixties.

  “Mr. Nilsen!” Seley called, stepping out of her role as substitute Duffy. “I’m Sergeant Seley! We spoke on the phone earlier today. This is Sergeant Liska.”

  He looked less than impressed.

  “Can we come over and have a word with you, Mr. Nilsen?” Nikki asked.

  He didn’t look thrilled about that, either. He pulled his head inside and shut the window.

  “Pleasant sort,” Nikki remarked, starting for the gate.

  “He’s the only neighbor I found who was living here at the time of the murder,” Seley said as they left the backyard and headed next door. “He was home, but says he didn’t see anything, and he doesn’t see why he should have to talk to us.”

  Nikki rang Nilsen’s doorbell.

  “I didn’t se
e anything,” the old man said irritably as he opened the door. “I’ve told you people that from the get-go.”

  “Can we come in for a few minutes?” Nikki asked, pressing forward. He stepped back automatically. “I’d like to ask you a few questions about what was going on around here at the time. Get your general impressions. I’m sure living here—how many years?—makes you the expert on this neighborhood.”

  “I’ve lived in this house thirty-seven years,” he said.

  “That’s impressive.”

  “Why?” he demanded. “Because I’m too damn stubborn to move? I’ll stay in this house ’til the day I die. I don’t care what anyone thinks.”

  He let them into the entryway and then stood with his arms crossed over his medicine ball belly, barring them from going any farther into his living room, where the television was still playing coverage from the scene of Kovac’s double homicide.

  The house smelled of mothballs, old man, and boiled kielbasa sausage. A deer’s head stared at them from the wall above the electric fireplace on the far side of the living room.

  “I’ll see some ID,” Nilsen snapped.

  Each produced her identification. Nilsen looked through smudged reading glasses and sniffed in disapproval. “I remember when women were meter maids.”

  “Yeah? Now they let us have guns. Crazy, huh?” Nikki said. “How well did you know the Duffy family?”

  He scowled harder. “I’ve answered all these damned questions a hundred times.”

  “Well, it’s all new to me. I have to investigate this case as if it happened yesterday. So, please bear with me because I haven’t heard your answers before, Mr. Nilsen.”

  “The police don’t keep records of these things?”

  “How well did you know the Duffy family?” she asked again.

  “As well as I cared to.”

  “You didn’t like them?”

  “Too many kids, too little discipline, too much noise. You would have thought they were Italian.”

  “Did you know Ted Duffy personally?”

  “I knew him to say hello. I didn’t care for him. He let his wife run the show. But he was a decorated police officer. He worked hard. I had to respect him for that. Now, if the wife had stayed home and taken charge of those kids—but no, she had to have her little job on the side . . .”

  “Mrs. Duffy was an emergency room nurse,” Seley pointed out.

  Nilsen just looked at her, underwhelmed by the excuse. “She had three small children. She should have been home with them, but he didn’t make enough money, she said. Then she brought those foster kids in for babysitters. That was clever, I suppose, if they hadn’t been a couple of little tarts.”

  “What did you do for a living, Mr. Nilsen?” Nikki asked.

  “I sold life insurance.”

  “Did you ever sell any to the Duffys?”

  “He was covered by the city. This has all got to be in a file somewhere,” he complained, looking frustrated.

  Nikki glanced around the room as he went on, her gaze settling on old family photos on the wall above a small cabinet cluttered with mail and keys and a bulging old wallet. Nilsen had the same unpleasant expression in his family portrait from twenty-some years past: that of a man in constant pain. Despite his expression, he had been handsome in a rugged way. He hadn’t aged well.

  “Is your wife around, Mr. Nilsen?” Seley asked.

  “No!” he barked. “She left. I haven’t seen her in years.”

  The wife had been an attractive woman with a shy, pretty smile, Nikki noted, never failing to marvel that women routinely married less than they deserved—herself included.

  “Does she still live in the area?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “And your son?” she asked. “Was he living here at the time?”

  “What’s the matter with you?” Nilsen snapped. “You don’t like my answers? You want to talk to people until you find someone who will tell you what you want to hear?”

  “Not at all. But when it comes to potential witnesses in a cold case investigation, the more the merrier. We need all the help we can get to put the picture together.”

  “Where’s the last detective who investigated this?” he demanded. “He at least knew what he was doing.”

  “He had gender reassignment surgery and left the force,” Nikki said.

  Seley doubled over, coughing to cover her laughter.

  “What the hell?” Nilsen looked horrified at what Nikki had said. Seley could have fallen and died at his feet for all he cared.

  “Excuse me!” Seley said hoarsely, a hand at her throat, eyes wet. “I just need to step outside.”

  No one paid attention to her as she went out the front door.

  “How old was your son at the time of Ted Duffy’s murder?” Nikki pressed on.

  “He wasn’t here when it happened.”

  “I know that, but did he know the Duffy kids or the foster kids? Looks like he might have been in high school at the time. If he knew them, they might have spoken to him about the family.”

  In his high school senior picture, Young Nilsen was a lean, more refined version of his father, but with the same unhappy expression. Nikki didn’t remember seeing any mention of the boy among the interviews in the Duffy files. Kids sometimes got overlooked or discounted in investigations, as if they were invisible.

  “He had some sports event that day. I’ve said it a hundred times. I was home, my wife was home, and I didn’t see anything.”

  “Still, I’d like to talk to him.”

  “Good luck with that. He’s dead,” he said coldly. “Now get out of my house. You’re an idiot! I don’t have anything more to say to you. If you people haven’t solved this crime in all these years, stop wasting our tax dollars and do something about the crime rate now. People are being murdered in their own homes by sword-wielding maniacs, for Christ’s sake!”

  * * *

  “MISOGYNISTIC PRICK,” Nikki muttered as she descended Nilsen’s front steps.

  “That’s redundant,” Seley pointed out.

  “For emphasis,” Nikki said as they walked back to the car.

  “Could we have some kind of signal for when you’re about to say something outrageous?” Seley asked. “I almost peed my pants!”

  “A signal would require premeditation on my part. I just open my mouth and stuff comes out.”

  “The mental image was too much for me. I instantly saw Grider in drag. I’ll never be able to look at him the same way again.”

  “And you just know he’s hairy everywhere,” Nikki said as they got in the car. “A plunging neckline is not going to be a pretty look.”

  She shuddered at the thought, and looked at Nilsen’s house. The old man was standing in the doorway, staring at them, a cell phone pressed to his ear. He was probably calling the department to complain that detectives packing vaginas had come to his house.

  His original statement given at the time of Ted Duffy’s murder had been less than a page long. He didn’t know anything. He hadn’t seen anything. Nikki was puzzled: He was the kind of neighbor with his nose in everyone’s business—by his own admission, he had been bothered by the noise from the Duffy household in general—but he had not stuck his head out a window at the relentless sound of Duffy splitting wood or at the sound of two gunshots. He had spied her and Seley in the Duffy yard quickly enough, but he hadn’t seen Ted Duffy lying dead on the ground. Duffy’s body had been discovered by his wife at around six o’clock in the evening.

  “See if you can find his ex-wife,” Nikki said. “I want to know more about the Nilsens.”

  “Will do. What next?”

  “We meet the Widow Duffy.”

  9

  “I don’t know what to say.”

  Forrest Foster, chair of the History Department, had turned the color of chalk. He sank down into the chair behind his desk looking like he might pass out. He was a rail-thin man in his fifties, dressed like a history professor from
Central Casting: shirt and bow tie, burgundy sweater vest, tweed jacket, horn-rimmed glasses. His hands were trembling as he placed them on the desktop.

  Located in Heller Hall on the U of M’s West Bank campus, Foster’s office was small, with a tall, narrow window that allowed him a view of the next brick building.

  “I knew when Lucien didn’t show up for the meeting this morning something had to be wrong,” he said quietly. “I thought an illness, maybe, or a car accident. With the way the roads were . . . But then when Sondra didn’t answer her phone, either, or the house phone . . .”

  The Chamberlains’ landline had been cut. The fact that the wife had not called 911 on her cell phone suggested the murder of her husband had been as quick and efficient as it was brutal. Chargers had been found on the nightstands in the master bedroom, but no phones. No laptop computers. No iPads or tablets of any kind. The wallets of both Professor and Mrs. Chamberlain had been cleaned out of cash and credit cards. Jewelry boxes had been raided. A lockbox in the master bedroom closet had been forced open and left on the floor. Anything in it that might have been valuable was gone.

  A nice slick burglary with an unexpected side of murder.

  “What was the nature of the meeting?” Taylor asked.

  Foster blinked like a man waking from a nightmare, relieved for the distraction of a mundane question. “A very generous alumnus has donated a substantial amount of money to the university to be used to expand our programs in East Asian history and art history. It’s very exciting,” he said with no excitement at all. “We’ll be adding two faculty positions, and will be naming a head of East Asia studies. Lucien was one of our final four candidates.”

  “Does this new job carry a lot of prestige?” Kovac asked.

  “Our Asian studies program has always been small but well regarded,” said Foster. “With this new influx of money, and expansion, yes, the title will carry cachet in the academic world.”