The Bitter Season (Kovac and Liska, #5)(64)

“I don’t see the point. I don’t have any information for you.”

“You don’t know what questions I have.”

“You have the same questions as every other detective.”

“From what I’ve read in the reports, no one ever bothered to ask you much of anything.”

“Because they knew I don’t have anything to say!”

She spoke too emphatically, drawing the attention of several people browsing the stacks. A tall elderly gentleman in a fisherman’s sweater took it upon himself to butt in, stepping toward the desk.

“Is everything all right, Jennifer?” he whispered, giving Nikki the eye.

Jennifer Duffy’s cheeks turned red. “Yes, Mr. Weisman, I’m fine. Thank you.”

He drifted back toward the shelves reluctantly.

“I’m not going away, Miss Duffy,” Nikki whispered. “Just sit down with me for fifteen minutes. Then I can write my report and cross you off the list, and I will never bother you again. Please. I’m just trying to do my job.”

She still wanted to say no, but she didn’t turn away.

“Look, I don’t want to make a problem for you,” Nikki pressed. “But my loyalty in this is to your father. He doesn’t get to ask you to help. I have to do it for him. And I will be like a dog with a bone, so you might as well sit down with me and get it over with.”

Looking annoyed and worried, Jennifer Duffy huffed a sigh. She turned and said something quietly to another librarian working behind the desk, then turned back.

“Not in here,” she said. “I’ll get my coat.”

They walked in silence through the drizzle to a mostly empty coffeehouse within sight of the library. They ordered at the counter and then sat down at the farthest table, next to the window, away from curious ears. Nikki took the corner seat out of habit, so she could have the best view of the room and the people in it. Jennifer Duffy sat across from her, huddled in her raincoat, looking sullen.

“I don’t need everyone at work knowing my business,” she said.

“I understand.”

“If you understood, you wouldn’t be here.”

Nikki sighed. “Why do I seem to care more about finding your father’s killer than everyone else in your family combined?”

“Because you haven’t lived with it for practically your entire life,” she said. “It’s new to you. It’s like a shiny new toy,” she said bitterly. “That’s the way it always is, every time someone thinks they’re going to be the person to crack the case and nothing ever comes of it, and we’re all left to deal with our feelings all over again.”

She had a point. Nikki had yet to become disillusioned with the attempt to solve Ted Duffy’s case. Jennifer Duffy had been disillusioned again and again.

“It’s like having someone ransack your house over and over,” Jennifer Duffy said. “They never stay to put it all back together.”

“I’m sorry no one has ever been able to give you closure on this,” Nikki said. “I sincerely hope this will be the last time.”

“I hope so, too,” she said, though she had clearly run out of hope for that a while ago.

The waiter brought them their coffees. When he had walked away, Nikki said, “Your mom told me it was especially hard on you when your dad died. You were close to him?”

“No. I don’t have that many memories of him, to be honest. He was working all the time. So was my mom. One was gone or the other one was gone.”

“How was it when the family was all together? Did your parents seem happy?”

“I’m not going to trash my parents’ marriage,” she said. “I’m not going to tell you my mother was having an affair with Big Duff or anyone else. Or that my dad was doing something he wasn’t supposed to be doing. That’s the bush you’re beating around, isn’t it? I wouldn’t know the answer. I was a child.”

Nikki didn’t try to argue. She had already stumbled over these same ruts. Her whole point in being here, talking to Ted Duffy’s eldest child, was to find new ground. She sat back and took a sip of her coffee.

“Was he a good dad when he had the chance?”

“He was tired,” she said with a weariness of her own. “He had bad moods. We were always being told not to bother him. Daddy has a hard job, Mom would always say. I could never understand why he didn’t just get a different job so he wouldn’t be so unhappy all the time.”

Nikki tried to imagine her at nine. She would have been one of those pretty, ladylike little girls. It wasn’t hard to picture her in her green plaid Catholic school uniform and black patent leather Mary Janes, her hair in two neat braids with bows. Quiet, Nikki thought, shy, even. She might have had her mother’s looks, but she didn’t have her mother’s edge. She seemed more delicate, internally fragile.

When she spoke, Nikki could hear the echo of loneliness in her voice, the confusion and rejection of a child pushed to the side. Every little girl wanted her daddy’s love and attention. Jennifer Duffy hadn’t gotten much of either from her father, by the sound of it. Those were the emotions she didn’t want to have to relive every time another cop came calling with the promise of solving her father’s case.

“I have two boys,” Nikki said. “Their dad and I are both cops. We’re divorced now, but we had our years like that, too. He was gone, working undercover narcotics. I was gone working my shift. When he was home there was always tension. Even though I was a cop, too, he thought I couldn’t really understand his world. I know it’s the same way with the Sex Crimes detectives. What they’re exposed to on a daily basis is so filthy and so foul. Even if it was possible for their spouse or their family to comprehend it, the cops don’t want to share it. They don’t want it polluting everyone’s lives. That isolation takes a toll on the family.”