The Bitter Season (Kovac and Liska, #5)(21)

“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 see 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.