The Bitter Season (Kovac and Liska, #5)(80)

The lieutenant arched an eyebrow. “Was that your reasoning for arresting him? To get your warrant?”

“Partly,” Nikki confessed. “He was going to make a big stink either way. I figured I had better have a paper trail documenting his behavior, even if the county attorney’s office doesn’t prosecute the charge.”

“Which they won’t.”

“That’s on them.”

Mascherino sighed the sigh of a long-suffering mother. “Why do I get the uncomfortable feeling you’re already familiar with this particular defense?”

Nikki shrugged. “The best defense is a good offense. I’ve got Seley digging hard on Nilsen’s past. Ted Duffy gave him a warning for taking too much interest in their teenage foster girls. I think Duffy might not have been the first person to look sideways at this guy. If Nilsen felt threatened enough, could he be violent? Absolutely.”

“Was he a serious suspect when the murder occurred?”

“At the time, he had an alibi witness. He got looked at later on, but no one thought he had sufficient motive. I disagree. I think there’s something there. Before, the focus was on bad guys Duffy had put away, or was trying to, or it was on the brother and the wife—and that’s certainly a viable theory. I’m not discounting that one at all. Both the wife and the brother made money off Ted Duffy’s death, and lived happily ever after together. But in all this time no one has cracked their story.

“Meanwhile, I think Nilsen is hiding something. He lied to me about his son being dead. What’s the point of that?”

“What would his son have to do with this?”

“He was a senior in high school when the murder happened. He used to mow the Duffys’ grass and shovel their sidewalk. He might have been friends with the girls next door. He was at a school event when the murder took place, so I don’t know what his role in this might be, but the old man lied to us about him, and I want to know why. The son would have been well aware of the bad blood between his father and Ted Duffy. Barbie Duffy said he came to the funeral with his mother. Then Mom disappears and Junior gets shipped off to boot camp.”

“Have you found the son?”

“No. Nilsen claims he hasn’t seen his son in years. There’s bad blood there. Why?”

“Have you spoken with the Duffys’ foster daughters? Did they make any accusations against Donald Nilsen at the time?”

“Nothing on the record. The one is dead,” Nikki said. “She was found raped and strangled about six months after the Duffy murder. The crime was never solved. The case file was actually already in the stack on my desk.

“Seley just got an address for the older girl. She’s my age now. I’ll talk to her tonight—unless I’m executing my search warrant,” she said, raising her brows hopefully.

“Go talk to the woman,” Mascherino said. “I’ll call Logan and see what we can do.”

“Awesome. Thanks, LT,” Nikki said, getting up to leave. “And I want to execute the search tonight. If he gets released, the first thing he’s going to do is go home and get rid of that rifle.”

Mascherino gave her a look. “Anything else? A red carpet to the front door?”

Nikki grinned. “Naw, that’ll do.”

“Please try not to strong-arm anyone else tonight,” the lieutenant said. “You’re turning my roots gray, and I don’t have time to get them done. Please take Seley with you. So you have a witness.”


*



“NILSEN HAS NEVER BEEN CHARGED WITH ANYTHING,” Seley said as they left the office. “You would think if Ted Duffy had anything on him with regard to some kind of sexual assault charge, he would have done something with it.”

“Maybe he didn’t get the chance,” Nikki said. “How long were these girls with the Duffy family?”

“Less than a year. They got placed there in June. The murder took place at Thanksgiving time.”

“Tomorrow I want you to call Nilsen’s former employer and see what they have to say about him.”

“I can’t imagine anyone who was there twenty-five years ago is still around.”

“It’s doubtful, but there should at least still be people there from his last years with the company. He can’t have been retired for that long. If he’s the kind of creeper who’s looking at teenage girls, some client along the way might have complained. That behavior isn’t something men outgrow or retire from.”

They got in the car and headed south, merging into the still-heavy traffic on 35W. The pavement glistened wet under the headlights. A steady drizzle was still falling.

Nikki wanted to be snug and warm at home. That had been the whole point of going to Cold Case: regular hours. Instead, she drove past the exit that would have taken her to her neighborhood. If this former foster child of the Duffys’ had something to contribute to the conversation about Donald Nilsen, that could be the piece of information that locked in her search warrant for the Nilsen house. And there would go the rest of the evening . . . But she couldn’t take a chance on Nilsen’s posting bail and going home to get rid of any souvenir he might have hung on to from all those years ago.

“If we get this search warrant for Nilsen’s house, he’d better have his dead wife in a barrel in the basement,” she grumbled.