The Bitter Season (Kovac and Liska, #5)(78)

He stepped back, stunned to silence for the few seconds it took Nikki to slip past him into his entry hall.

“I’ll report you,” he threatened, slamming the door shut behind her.

“You do that,” she said. “I could use a vacation. Meanwhile, until I get suspended, I’ll get a search warrant and go through every piece of crap in this house on the grounds that you have a history of making terroristic threats to your neighbors, and because I believe you to be in possession of a rifle of the same caliber used to kill Ted Duffy. How about that? You want to try to trump that?”

“I had an alibi—”

“Had being the important word there. Your wife, who hasn’t been seen or heard from since shortly after the murder.”

He didn’t deny it. He went on the attack instead. “I’ll sue!”

“Well, everybody in prison needs a hobby, I suppose.”

“You don’t have any grounds to arrest me!” he protested, as if saying it again and saying it louder made it so. “I’m a law-abiding taxpayer!”

“Really?” Nikki said. “Let’s start with hindering a police investigation. You lied to me, Mr. Nilsen. You told me your son is dead. Your son isn’t dead, is he?”

“He’s dead to me,” the old man snapped, looking to his living room, where electric logs were glowing orange in the fireplace, and Fox News was playing on the television.

“That’s not the same thing as actually being dead, now, is it?” Nikki said.

She glanced up at the wall over the small cabinet in the entry, at the senior-year photo of Jeremy Nilsen. He was a handsome kid, looking very serious in a suit and tie. A quiet boy, according to Barbie Duffy. Polite. He must have taken after his mother, she thought.

There was no photograph of him in uniform, which struck her as odd. She would have thought Donald Nilsen the type to be loud and proud to have a son serving his country.

“So the neighbor you didn’t get along with gets murdered, and within two months, your wife disappears and your kid drops out of school and joins the army,” she said. “Is there a reason nobody wanted to stick around for you, Mr. Nilsen?”

“He wanted to be a soldier,” Nilsen said. “He turned eighteen and signed up. I couldn’t stop him, and why would I? Saved me having to pay for college.”

“And maybe you gave him a little push out of the nest,” Nikki said. “Maybe that’s why you’re lying to us now. You don’t want us talking to him about what happened to Ted Duffy.”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“So what’s your problem, anyway?” she asked. “Your son served his country. You should be proud of that. What kind of father isn’t proud of that?”

Nilsen made a bitter face and tried to turn away, waving a hand at her, as if to make her disappear.

Nikki put herself in front of him again. “Are you ashamed of him because of the psych discharge?”

“He’s weak,” he grumbled. “Like his mother. He always was.”

“He joined the army,” Nikki said. “He served in combat. That sounds like the opposite of weak to me.”

“You don’t know anything about it!”

“You’re pissed off at him because war wounded his mind?”

“He’s an embarrassment! He always was.”

“No. I see who the embarrassment in this family is,” Nikki muttered.

Nilsen wheeled on her like a wild animal, coming at her, screaming in her face, “You don’t know anything! Get out of my house! Get the f*ck out of my house!”

Nikki stumbled backward and banged hard into the small cabinet, knocking a pile of junk mail to the floor and tipping over the small lamp. Nilsen drew his fist back as if he meant to strike her. Nikki drew her gun and pointed it in his face.

“You need to seriously rethink your attitude, Mr. Nilsen,” she said calmly. “Back off. Now.”

He took a step back, huffing and puffing, his eyes still bulging in his red face. “You provoked me—”

“Shut the f*ck up!” Nikki snapped, lowering the weapon. “I’d ask if you’re senile, but according to the Duffys, you were an * twenty-five years ago, so I have to assume nothing has changed.”

He started to grumble something else. She cut him off with a look.

“I should haul you in right now,” she said. “You’re damn lucky I didn’t pull the trigger. If I made decisions the way you do, you’d have a hole in your head the size of Iowa right now.”

Her brain was already rushing ahead to the hassle of taking him in and charging him with attempted assault. It wouldn’t be worth the paperwork. He would be seriously inconvenienced, but so would she, and at the end of the day he would get kicked loose anyway because he was an elderly taxpaying citizen no one would consider anything more than a harmless old nuisance who hadn’t actually laid a hand on her.

She would miss dinner with the boys.

“Where’s your son?” she asked.

“I don’t know.”

“I swear to God, Mr. Nilsen—”

“I don’t know!” he shouted. “I don’t want to know.”

“Where was he the last you knew?”