The Bitter Season (Kovac and Liska, #5)(100)

Only one seat was moving. The other was still.

A big oak tree took up one corner of the yard. Most of its leaves were gone, but the thick trunk still offered a hiding place. Near the tree was Mia’s playhouse, which Eric had built for her birthday this year. They kept it locked. No one could get inside . . . but they could hide behind it.

Funny how something so sweet and pretty in the daylight could become so dark and sinister at night. Was that the shadow of a figure in the window? She held her breath and waited for it to move.

Her mind went back to the conversation she had had with the detectives, to the questions they had asked about why someone would be stalking her. She had assumed it might have to do with Hope Anders, but as Detective Liska had pointed out, Evi was no one of any real consequence in that case. She was a liaison. She gave the girls her counsel once a week. She had nothing to do with any of the investigations. She wasn’t the figurehead of Chrysalis. She was a social worker. Why would anyone stalk a social worker?

Why would anyone stalk her at all?

Had someone seen her picture in the newspaper article and become fixated on her for reasons only a sick mind could know?

The sensations from her nightmares came back to her—the panic, the darkness, the feeling that she couldn’t breathe or move. The shadows from her past stalked her every night. Had one of them come calling in person?

Liska had asked her if she’d kept in touch with Jeremy. She had not. She had been removed from the Duffy house and taken to a group home that seemed to have existed in another world. She never tried to contact him, did her best to put him out of her mind. Eventually, she succeeded. Years later. Just as she put his father out of her mind, and Ted Duffy, and the rest of them.

The ringing of the telephone tore through the silence, and Evi jumped and ran to answer it. A phone call in the middle of the night was never a good thing to a firefighter’s wife. Her heart was hammering as she picked up the handset from the nightstand in her room.

“Hello?”

Her mind was already racing. Eric was hurt. She would throw on clothes and scoop up Mia. Would she remember how to get to whatever hospital he had been taken to?

“Hello?” she said again, realizing no one had spoken on the other end of the line.

“Hello? Who is this?” she asked, trying not to sound as frightened as she was.

“It all worked out for you.”

The voice was soft, barely more than a whisper. She couldn’t tell if it was a man or a woman.

“Who is this?” she asked again, her voice trembling.

There was no answer. The caller was gone.

Evi tried to put the phone down, her hand shaking so badly she couldn’t get it back in the stand, and it tumbled to the floor.

“Uh-oh, Mommy!”

Mia had come into the room, teddy bear tucked under her arm, her sandy curls tousled.

“It’s okay, Mommy,” she said as she rounded the end of the bed. “It didn’t break. You don’t have to cry.”

Evi scooped her child up into her arms and held her tight, choking back the sobs of sheer panic that clogged her throat. Holding on to her future as she tried to forget her past.

It all worked out for you . . .





32


“You got home really late last night,” Kyle said as he got the orange juice out of the refrigerator.

“We had to execute a search warrant,” Nikki said, stirring the eggs. “It couldn’t wait.”

“You said that wouldn’t happen anymore.”

“It won’t happen very often.”

“You missed jiu-jitsu,” R.J. said, putting the plates on the island. “Matt took us.”

“I know. I’m sorry. I’ll be there next week. I promise.”

“No classes next week,” Kyle said. “It’s Thanksgiving. No classes Wednesday or Thursday.”

Thanksgiving? God, how had that happened? Nikki kept the question to herself. She meant for their lives to be on a more normal track now. She didn’t want them thinking she would forget holidays and important things like jiu-jitsu.

“I don’t have wrestling, either, next Tuesday,” R.J. reminded her.

“I get out of school Tuesday,” Kyle added.

“Make sure all of this is on the calendar, please,” Nikki said, dishing up their eggs. She cut a glance across the room to the whiteboard calendar that was awash in a rainbow of colored marker for this school function and that activity.

“You’re not gonna forget to buy a turkey, are you?” R.J. asked.

“No, I’m not gonna forget to buy a turkey.”

Mental note: Order a fresh turkey at Lund’s.

“You’re a turkey,” Kyle said, flicking scrambled eggs at his brother.

“You’re a dork,” R.J. shot back.

“You’re both going to be late for school,” Nikki said. “Eat up and hit the road.”


*



SHE MADE PHONE CALLS from the car before pulling out of the driveway and heading downtown. Evi Burke: No answer. Jennifer Duffy: No answer. Donald Nilsen: No answer. No surprise.

Wanting to know the minute he came back from wherever he had stormed off to, she had put a unit on Nilsen’s house the night before. She wished she could have put a tail on him the minute he left the property, but Mascherino had nixed the idea. Nilsen’s itchy trigger finger for lawsuits had bought him his freedom for the evening.