The Bitter Season (Kovac and Liska, #5)(114)

Donald Nilsen had been working from home. Ted Duffy had been chopping wood in his backyard. Jennifer Duffy had been in her bedroom, reading. Angie Jeager and Jeremy Nilsen had been at school, attending a basketball game.

The teenagers weren’t really accounted for at the time. Their individual stories had been accepted as irrelevant facts. What motive would either of them have had for killing Ted Duffy? Was he trying to keep them apart? If that was an issue, surely Barbie Duffy would have mentioned it. Besides, star-crossed lovers ran off together; they didn’t murder people. And if Angie got pregnant, Barbie Duffy would have, no question, brought that up. She had no love lost for the foster daughters she treated with all the compassion of Cinderella’s stepmother.

If Angie Jeager caused a problem that led to the murder of Barbie’s husband, Barbie would have been the first to say so, particularly when she herself had come under such intense scrutiny as a possible coconspirator in her husband’s death.

Barbie had remarked that Jeremy—who had been so irrelevant to her that she had never even used his name in their conversation—attended Ted’s funeral with his mother, and offered his condolences. Donald Nilsen had been conspicuously absent.

The puzzle was as intricate as a Gordian knot, so many strands interwoven and twisting around and around. Nikki’s head was beginning to throb from attempting to untangle it all. She went back into the kitchen and scrounged around for a bite of something chocolate. If she was going to be frustrated, she might as well get fat doing it. Her secret hiding place in the vegetable crisper yielded half a Twix.

She sat back down at the island and ate her candy bar and had some more red wine. She wondered what her life would have been like if Speed had been murdered instead of just an *. She wondered if they were all having fun at the wrestling match. She wondered if the perky blonde had any clue what a heel her new boyfriend was.

Despite her ex-husband’s less-than-stellar character, Nikki knew without a doubt that if someone killed him, she would, even now, be at the head of the line to hunt down his murderer. It was one thing for her to complain about his shortcomings and want to strangle him; having someone else do it was a declaration of war on her family.

Why wouldn’t Barbie Duffy feel the same way? Ted was the father of her children, the father of the damaged daughter she now guarded like a tigress.

She thought again of the way Jennifer Duffy’s expression had changed as she looked back on that memory of sneaking into Angie Jeager’s room to read to her after bedtime . . .

Something Jennifer had said came back to her now, ominous and enigmatic: In real life, good people can turn out to be bad people, and bad people can get away with murder . . . and worse . . .

Someone had gotten away with her father’s murder, and what could be worse than that?

Nikki looked across the room to the big whiteboard calendar on the wall. In less than a week it would be twenty-five years to the day since Ted Duffy was killed. Her calendar was a crazy mess of scribbled-in appointments, color-coded for each of them. Kyle was blue, R.J. was purple, she was hot pink. Appointments for doctors, dentists, lessons, sporting events, social events. Kyle had drawn a cartoon turkey on the date for Thanksgiving.

Add three more kids and a second adult, and the Duffys’ calendar would have looked like an explosion at a crayon factory.

The Liska-Hatcher calendar week for Thanksgiving was double the usual chaos. Kyle got out of school Tuesday, R.J. on Wednesday. Regularly scheduled weeknight events had been canceled or moved because of the holiday. R.J.’s normal night for wrestling was Tuesday, but there would be no meet the Tuesday before Thanksgiving.

She thought back on her own high school years—when this crime had taken place. Boys’ sporting events had been held Tuesday and Friday nights. Girls’ events had been held Monday and Thursday.

Ted Duffy had been killed the Tuesday before Thanksgiving.

Nikki paged through the witness statements, looking for the name of the high school Angie Jeager and Jeremy Nilsen had attended, and then went to her office, sat down at her desk, and brought her computer to life with a move of the mouse. She typed in the name of the school and, once on the school website, brought up the calendar for the month of November. The Tuesday night before Thanksgiving was marked NO EVENTS.

There was no way of looking up the school calendar from twenty-five years in the past from this site, but the information was out there in the ether someplace. She would put Seley on it. If there was no basketball game on the night in question, then Angie’s and Jeremy’s alibi went out the window.

But why would they lie? Where had they been? Why had nobody really cared? If two teenagers had anything to do with the death of Ted Duffy, why would the people under the most pressure as suspects, Barbie and Big Duff, not have turned and pointed the finger at them?

It didn’t make sense, but Jennifer Duffy and Angie and Jeremy were loose threads in the fabric of the story, and Nikki couldn’t stand a loose thread. She would worry at it and tug at it to see where it led, and if the whole sweater unraveled in the process, so be it.

Of her three loose threads, she had access to only one: Evi Burke. Evi Burke, who didn’t want her husband to know about this chapter of her past—which made little sense, because she had been through far worse, far darker chapters that were common knowledge.

It all worked out for you . . . a faceless voice on the telephone had said to Evi. The idea that her beautiful life was now somehow under threat had Evi Burke terrified.