The Bitter Season (Kovac and Liska, #5)(13)

“Using half a million dollars in federal grant money, the Minneapolis Police Department, in conjunction with the Hennepin County Attorney’s Office, will launch a dedicated cold case unit this week . . .”

The unit’s first case would be the unsolved murder of decorated sex crimes detective Ted Duffy.

Eric looked from Evi to the TV and back. “What? Do you know that guy?”

“No,” she lied, setting her knitting aside. She turned back to her husband with a smile. “A dedicated cold case unit will be a godsend for a lot of victims’ families from back when. Kate Quinn will be knocking on the door of that unit first thing tomorrow.”

“While we sleep in,” Eric said, getting up from the couch. He held his hand out to her and pulled her up and into his arms. “Let’s go back to bed, Mrs. Burke. We’ve got some serious snuggling to do.”

Evi pressed her cheek into his shoulder and hugged him tight. “That’s the only place I want to be.”

In the here and now with the man of her dreams. But when she closed her eyes, she saw only the faces of her past.





6


Sleet began to pelt the windows at around one thirty in the morning. The sound woke Professor Lucien Chamberlain from a shallow sleep. He fumbled for his glasses on the nightstand and checked the time on his phone.

Beside him, his wife slept on, undisturbed by the rapid tic tac tic tac of the ice pellets striking the glass. Of course, she had taken to wearing earplugs to bed because she claimed he snored. Ridiculous. He didn’t snore. She snored. She snored especially when she had been drinking, and she had been drinking more than usual lately.

She thought he didn’t notice. She thought she had become so adept at hiding it over the years that she could fool him. The truth was he didn’t care anymore. As long as she didn’t embarrass him in public or in front of his peers or their neighbors, he ignored her.

That was, and had been, the state of their marriage: tolerance and cohabitation. He had no interest in her as a woman any longer. He never really had. His life was about his career. She had her committees and charities. They were companions for social events.

She had never been a beautiful woman, he thought as he looked at her in the dim light from the bathroom. She had started leaving a nightlight on after stumbling into the shower stall by mistake one night, injuring herself badly enough that she had needed to go to the emergency room.

The hospital staff had jumped to the conclusion that Lucien had beaten her, and had called the police. It still made him furious to remember how shabbily the police treated him, and how the neighbors reacted when Sondra’s eye blackened and her bruises ripened—the surreptitious stares and quickly averted eyes. As if they could believe he, a highly respected member of the faculty at the University of Minnesota, would ever have been so stupid and brutish as to punch a woman in the face.

He had resented Sondra for putting him in the position to be judged and gossiped about. Her overly eager attempts to explain away the bruises had only made him seem all the more guilty. And the more irritated he became, the more obsequious she became, until he questioned the logic of ever having married her in the first place.

No, she was not a beautiful woman, and at fifty-eight her plainness was giving way to a heavy, matronly look he didn’t like at all. He told her to diet and exercise. It didn’t help. He believed she secretly ate sweets and hid the evidence. He once went through her dresser drawers when she was away visiting her mother, but had found nothing incriminating, only a vast collection of foundation garments she never appeared to wear.

He had married her for her family connections and, to a lesser degree, her money—better, more logical reasons than looks or lust. They had been together nearly thirty years.

He watched her sleep now, envious. He had always been a light sleeper. His brain was always working. Now he would lie here, driven mad by the incessant tic tac tic tac while his mind worried at the day-to-day annoyances of academia, and the power struggle going on in the History Department.

He fretted because he hadn’t published anything recently. And that thought automatically brought the rush of bitterness that he had never been able to sell his book on the comparative similarities and differences in the warrior cultures of medieval China and Japan, his masterwork.

He should already have been named head of East Asia studies, not be fighting for the title. If he had a published book that was well received by his peers, the university would not have been able to deny him. He would have been the clear front-runner. Instead, he was in competition with Ken Sato and some Vietnamese woman from UCLA.

Sato, who never failed to irritate with his unconventional lifestyle and his unconventional teaching methods. Lucien suspected Sato was being considered for the job largely because he was Japanese, and the chosen star of that pompous ass and committee member, Hiroshi Ito. Lucien had considered suing on the basis of racial discrimination if Sato—or the Vietnamese woman, for that matter—were to get the position. He was far more deserving. Then again, he worried what a lawsuit would do to his reputation. Reputation was everything in academia.

If Sondra’s father had still been alive, his influence at the university would have negated all other issues. What terrible luck that he had died of a heart attack nearly a year past. Lucien was beginning to feel that the powers of the universe were against him. And now, to further complicate his life, was this ridiculous business with Diana and the Office for Conflict Resolution. The mere thought of it infuriated him. The conniving little bitch—jeopardizing his promotion, forcing him to take the actions he was about to put in motion . . .