The Bitter Season (Kovac and Liska, #5)(62)

“Mr. Duffy,” she started as the news crew packed up and the moose went to the customer service area to sign autographs. “I need to speak with you privately—”

“Yeah, sure.” He didn’t look at her. “Thanks, Melvin!” he called out, waving to his cohort. “Kids! Be sure to get your picture with Melvin!”

“Mr. Duffy,” Nikki started again.

“Great ad, don’t you think?” he said, still more interested in his customers than in her. “I think we might get something off that.”

She wanted to ask if he meant sales or information. “It’s possible—”

“People love that damn moose! They’ll pay attention because of that damn moose!” He laughed, amused at his stroke of genius in creating the character of Melvin.

Nikki wanted to kick him in the balls to get his attention on her. He was her least favorite kind of man: the kind who only talked, and who never listened to a woman. A woman’s part in a conversation with this Neanderthal was as a placeholder, a blah-blah-blah while he thought of the next brilliant thing he wanted to say.

He chuckled to himself. “That goddamn moose!”

Nikki waved a hand in front of his face. “I don’t give a shit about the f*cking moose,” she said, loud enough that several shoppers in line for autographs turned with expressions of shock and disapproval.

Duffy looked down at her as if she had just sprung up out of the ground like an unpleasant little forest gnome in his surreal camp scene.

He frowned at her. “I heard you had an attitude.”

Nikki forced an unpleasant smile. “I can’t imagine where you heard that. Do you have an office we can go to, Mr. Duffy?”

He led the way to the back of the store, pulling his hat off to reveal thinning black hair shot through with gray. They passed the restrooms and the employee break room, which smelled of reheated chili and microwave popcorn. At the end of a hallway, Duffy opened a door and walked into the office ahead of her.

“I’ve told this story a hundred times to a dozen different cops,” he said, rounding his messy desk to drop into the well-worn leather executive’s chair.

The store was the Big D flagship off 494, near the Mall of America, a bright, modern building, but the office chair looked like it had been with him from the early days. The wall behind him was dominated by a stuffed blue marlin and a poster of a pair of scantily clad sex kittens posing with hunting rifles.

Nikki sat down across from him. He was a big man, on the flabby side, his face heavy with the beginnings of jowls. With the goofy cap off, the makeup he was wearing for the television camera stood out: clownish red rouge, eyebrow pencil and mascara, black powder to darken his five o’clock shadow.

“And now we have to start all over again with you,” he said, none too pleased about it.

“I continue to be confused by the low standard everyone involved in this case seems to have,” she said.

He gave her a look that said she should know better. “It’s been twenty-five years.”

“You think the case can’t be solved? Is that why you doubled the reward? Because you don’t believe you’ll ever have to cough up a hundred thousand dollars?”

“Every detective in the city was on this case when Ted was killed,” he said. “Are you better on a cold case than every detective in the city on a fresh case put together?”

“You don’t know that I’m not,” she said, “despite what Gene Grider might have told you over your Corn Flakes this morning at Cheap Charlie’s.”

He sat up a little at that, frowning at the idea that he might have underestimated her. Clearly Grider hadn’t gotten through to him with the news that she had seen the two of them together.

“I keep hearing how close you were to your brother,” she said.

“I loved my brother. He was my best friend every day of my life since before we were born. And every year, at this shitty time of year, I get reminded that someone killed him and he’s never going to be in my life again. And that sucks like nothing else I’ll ever know.”

“Then you ought to be rooting for me.”

“I don’t have any reason to believe you can do what nobody else has done in twenty-five years,” he said. “All you’re going to do is upset my wife and family. You’re just going to ask the same damn questions and get the same damn answers every other cop has.

“Isn’t that what you came in here to do?” he asked. “Where was I the day my brother died? Was I having an affair with Barbie? Did we kill him for the insurance money? Blah, blah, blah. The same f*cking five questions over and over. Excuse me for not being excited about that or excited about you.”

Nikki considered what he said as she looked at the calendar of UFC ring girls hanging on the wall above a tall filing cabinet. Thanksgiving weekend was X’d out for his annual hunting trip.

Nothing changed. Every year was another year his brother was dead with no resolution to his murder. Every year on the same weekend in November he went to Wisconsin to hunt. Every year he and his buddies probably sat around the fire at the cabin and toasted his absent twin. And every time his brother’s case got dragged back out, the same questions and the same theories were raised, with no result.

If Thomas Duffy had been telling the truth all these years, he had nothing new to offer. If he had been lying all these years, why would he stop now?