The Bitter Season (Kovac and Liska, #5)(28)

She expected a burst of outrage, real or manufactured. What she got was more complex.

“Honestly?” Barbie Duffy asked, chin up. “Honestly, I want it to be over. Do you know how many times we’ve been dragged through this over the years—opening and reopening the wounds? And for nothing. It’s like being victimized again and again.”

“You don’t want your husband’s murderer brought to justice?”

“Is that even possible?” she asked. “I don’t think so. Would it be worth what we have to go through? I don’t think so. Will it bring Ted back? No, it won’t,” she said, blinking back tears. “Nothing will ever bring Ted back. That’s my bottom line. So why go through all this—”

She paused for a moment to compose herself, then started again.

“Our phones have been ringing off the hook since the announcement yesterday. We’ve been deluged by our friends, and family, and all of their emotions. And reporters—literally dozens of reporters. Can they come to the house? They want to do a feature on us. Would we be willing to go back to the old house and shoot it in the backyard where Ted died?”

She blinked her eyes hard as if in amazement. “Do I want to go back to the scene of my husband’s murder so they can capture my grief and pain for the ten o’clock news? Would you want to do that?”

“I don’t know,” Nikki admitted. “I do know the families of most murder victims would beg for that kind of publicity. My phone’s been ringing off the hook, too, with the families of dozens of murder victims who want to know why their loved one’s case isn’t a priority. I think they might jump at that chance.”

“Would they? Then feel free to open their lives up so they can relive their worst nightmare,” Barbie said. “I’m tired of it. You will be, too, soon enough. You’ve already said you don’t think it can be solved. Gene told me. So why don’t we just skip the dance? You won’t have to go through the motions, and I won’t have to go through the rest of it.”

Nikki wanted to go find Gene Grider and kick him in the shin. What an *, telling Barbie Duffy she had fought against choosing this case in the first place. No matter that it was true. The victim’s family didn’t need to hear about her misgivings. By telling Barbie Duffy, Grider had sabotaged Nikki’s chances at a clean start on the case.

“Mrs. Duffy, let me be perfectly clear with you on this,” she said. “I think your husband’s case is a difficult one. I believe we have a lot of other cases pending that are more solvable. But this is the case I’ve been assigned. It was assigned to me specifically because I have no history with it. I have no preconceived ideas about anyone involved. That will allow me to pick up on things a detective who has been over this ground many times may have overlooked. And now that the case is mine, I will dig at it like a terrier. If there’s anything to be found, I’m going to find it. If it’s even remotely possible to get my hands on the person who killed your husband, I will.”

Barbie Duffy clapped her hands slowly, a sardonic smile twitching up one corner of her perfectly painted mouth.

“Points for a passionate speech,” she said. “You should have saved that for a camera.”

Nikki wanted to call her a bitch for the remark, but she wouldn’t. She had dealt with hundreds of family members of homicide victims over the years. No two reacted exactly the same way. No two had exactly the same experience. And she had been at the center of a number of high-profile cases where the pressure of the media was so intense and abrasive, and the public scrutiny so harsh, that it was crushing.

Still, she couldn’t imagine losing a loved one and just letting go of the fact that someone had ended that person’s life with malice aforethought. As many times as she had wanted to kill Speed with her bare hands over the years, she would have gone to the ends of the earth to track down someone who had killed him. He was the father of her boys. She owed them that much.

“Does your husband feel the same way?” Seley asked Barbie Duffy, breaking the silence. “We were told this morning he’s willing to up the reward for information leading to an arrest.”

Barbie Duffy closed her eyes and sighed, shaking her head. “Of course he is. Duff wants it solved. It nearly destroyed him when Ted died. Ted was his little brother by twelve minutes. Duff went through depression, alcohol abuse . . . He was so angry. It took a long time for him to come to some kind of resolution. But every time you people come around trying to peddle hope, he buys a load of it and then is crushed all over again when nothing happens.”

“I’m sorry you feel that way,” Nikki said, “because the first thing I learned when I started working Homicide is that I work first for the victim, and my obligation to the victim is to get them justice. It can’t matter to me if you want to do this or not. I have to ask the questions and dig through this. I’m sorry.”

“I doubt that you are,” Barbie returned. “Being the one to solve Ted’s case would be a nice feather in your cap, wouldn’t it, Detective?”

“Why are you trying to make me your enemy?” Nikki asked.

“It’s not personal. I don’t know you. I don’t care to know you. I just don’t want to do this again.”

“So you think you might as well make a bad situation worse by being difficult? You should consider going back to school. You’d make a hell of a lawyer.”