The Bitter Season (Kovac and Liska, #5)(123)

Baby Boy Jeager. Father unknown.

Son of Ted Duffy, come to avenge a father he didn’t even know. The father who had died because of him.

She had gone to great lengths to bury those truths so deep inside she would never find them again. She had lost herself on the streets, and had been plunged into a terrible purgatory of degradation, drugs, sex, and despair. It had somehow seemed fitting to try to forget one nightmare by living in another, losing herself in the process. But here she was, all these years later, with that past staring her in the eye, ready to cut her throat.

You can’t escape who you are, he’d said. You can’t escape what you did.

She said the first thing that made any sense to say: “I’m sorry.”

“No, you’re not,” he said. “You’re sorry I’m here now. It all worked out for you. Here you are with your nice little life and your nice little family. It all worked out for you.”

She wanted to ask him his name, but she didn’t dare. She hadn’t given him a name when he was born. If she’d given the baby a name, it would have been harder to try to forget. She saw him once after giving birth, then he had been whisked away to a better life than she could have given him, to parents who had no memory of his conception or of what had transpired because of it.

Even as she remembered, the smell of whiskey and smoke and man filled her head. Her mother had died. She felt so alone, so empty. She wanted comfort. She needed connection. He came to her room to check on her. He held her while she cried. It was late. The house was quiet. He’d had too much to drink. The job was draining the humanity from him. He refilled himself with whiskey to dull the pain.

She didn’t understand what she shouldn’t want. She knew what she felt, and she knew what she didn’t want to feel: alone, abandoned. He kissed her. He touched her. She couldn’t think. She didn’t want to. Was this what it had been like for her mother giving herself over to a man? A welcome escape from the pain and emptiness of her life?

He didn’t force her. She didn’t fight him.

He cried afterward. He sat on the edge of her bed with his head in his hands and sobbed, ashamed, apologetic. She looked past him to see Jennifer’s small face, wide-eyed as she peered out of her hiding place in the closet. And then the shame was Evi’s . . .

She couldn’t tell this man any of that. This man, her own child, who had come here to kill her.

“I couldn’t keep you,” she said. “I was seventeen. I didn’t have a home. I didn’t have a family. I couldn’t give you anything but a better chance.”

“You don’t know anything about what you gave me,” he said.

“I gave you more than I had.”

She hadn’t hated the baby she carried. She’d hated the circumstances that had created him, and the tragedy that followed. She blamed herself for needing things that had never been meant for her—comfort, safety, love—but she gave the child a chance to have those things. It never occurred to her that he might grow up to hate her for it. Not in her worst nightmares did she ever foresee this.

“You gave me to a nightmare!” he shouted, lunging at her, pressing the sword to her throat.

Evi swallowed hard. She felt the blade scrape against her skin. Tears blurred her vision and spilled down her cheeks.

“I’m here to give it back,” he said. “I’m done with it. It’s time to close the circle.”





46


Nikki entered the house through the open back door, weapon drawn. She had charged the first uniformed officers to come up the alley with keeping Eric Burke alive until the ambulance arrived. One was keeping pressure on his neck wound while the other started chest compressions as he began to slip away.

The lights were on in the laundry room/mud room, a cheery white space splashed with Eric Burke’s blood. The spatter arced across the room on the ceiling, on the wall, on the washing machine, on the floor. What the hell was this assailant fighting with? Burke’s face had been laid open like the belly of a gutted fish—sliced too cleanly for the weapon to have been an axe or a hatchet. If it was a knife, the blade was long.

She thought of Kovac’s samurai-sword murders. What the hell was wrong with people?

Drops of blood pooled on the kitchen floor where the attacker had paused for a moment.

Where was Evi? Where was little Mia?

A faint cry of “Mommy!” from overhead cut along Nikki’s nerve endings like a razor. Her blood pressure spiked so hard she could hear her blood rushing across her eardrums. At least the child was alive. Was she crying over her mother’s dead body? Was the assailant still in the house?

Leading with her weapon, she moved into the dining room. There was no sign of a struggle, save for the drops of blood on the hardwood floor that led the way into the living room and up the stairs to the bedrooms.

The patrol sergeant in the backyard had argued for her to wait for a SWAT unit. Nikki refused. What were they supposed to do? Sit around on the deck waiting while Evi Burke and her daughter were raped and slaughtered inside the house? No.

The sound of voices upstairs rose and fell. She couldn’t make out how many or what they were saying.

From where she stood at the bottom of the stairs, she could see nothing. She would be a sitting duck if there were a bad guy in the hallway.

The child’s voice wailed, the sound piercing Nikki’s ear like a needle. “Mommy! Mommy!”