The Bitter Season (Kovac and Liska, #5)(90)

Nikki felt a pang of sympathy. It couldn’t have been easy to be the son of Donald Nilsen, a man hated by the entire neighborhood. It would have been especially hard for a quiet boy with nice manners, as Jeremy had been described. She thought of her own quiet boy, Kyle, always internally at odds with his brash and boisterous father. She wondered if Jeremy’s mother had given him the sort of refuge a sensitive boy needed, or if she had been too overwhelmed by her husband to try.

Mascherino checked out the closet. Nikki searched through the dresser drawers. A small desk occupied one corner of the room, with pens and pencils in a Minnesota Twins cup. A U of M pennant was tacked to the bulletin board on the wall above. There was nothing but dust bunnies under the twin bed.

Knowing her own son, and his penchant for secreting things away, she slipped a hand between the mattress and box spring, her fingertips brushing across papers. No, she thought, not paper. Something slicker. Half expecting to find pornography, she lifted the mattress to find a small glimpse of Jeremy Nilsen’s private life: two photographs. A chill ran through her.

“We’re looking for a gun and bullets,” Mascherino reminded her. “That’s not a gun.”

“Isn’t it?” Nikki murmured, picking the pictures up with one hand and lowering the mattress back into place with the other.

The two photos were of a slender teenage girl with long brown hair, smiling shyly for the camera of a school photographer; a pretty girl with sad eyes that had seen too much in her short life. Nikki would have put her at about sixteen.

“Do you know who she is?” the lieutenant asked.

“Yes.”

The friend who wasn’t really a friend.

The girl next door.

Angie Jeager . . . Evi Burke.

A shriek of brakes and tires skidding on wet pavement broke Nikki’s concentration. Mascherino went to the window that looked out on the street as a car door slammed.

“Here we go,” the lieutenant muttered, her game face firmly in place as she turned and started for the door. She looked at Nikki. “Let me handle him.”

“I need to ask him about these pictures.”

“That can wait.”

They hustled down the stairs, a commotion on the front steps of the house rising to nearly drown out their footfalls. Donald Nilsen had been released.

“. . . my house, and I’ll damn well go inside!”

“I’m sorry, sir, I can’t let you go in while the search is under way—”

“I’ll have your badge! I’m suing this department and everyone to do with this! This is an outrage! I’m a law-abiding taxpayer. You can’t just come into my house—”

“I have a valid warrant, signed by a judge,” Mascherino said firmly as she stepped into the fray. “This has all been explained to you thoroughly, Mr. Nilsen. You will not be allowed inside the house while the search is being conducted, so you might as well calm down and sit down out there, or go sit in your car—”

“Mr. Nilsen would like to contest the validity of the search warrant,” Nilsen’s attorney said, out of breath as he arrived at the front steps. He looked to be about Nilsen’s vintage, but twice his girth, a morbidly obese man with a neck so large he couldn’t button the top two buttons of his shirt.

“I’m sure Mr. Nilsen would like a lot of things,” Mascherino said. “But he won’t get that one.”

Nilsen’s face was purple. Spittle gathered at the corners of his mouth like a rabid dog as he shouted at her. “I want the name of your captain! I’ll put an end to your career!”

Mascherino stood firm, the warrant in her purple-gloved hand, her Mother Superior posture ramrod straight. “I’ll put an end to your freedom for the evening, Mr. Nilsen,” she said. “If you insist on trying to interfere with the execution of this warrant, I’ll have this officer read you your rights and take you straight back downtown. Do you understand me?”

Nilsen sputtered, shrugging off the hand his attorney tried to lay on his shoulder. He peered over the top of Mascherino’s head, his gaze fixing on Nikki.

“That one has it in for me,” he said. “She’s probably in there planting evidence.”

“She’s doing no such thing,” Mascherino said.

Nikki let his insult roll off. He was a man in a panic. His insular little world was being touched and handled by strangers, his past being dug up like a garden that had been left to the weeds for twenty-five years. Like a cornered animal, he was going to lash out any way he could.

“I’ll come out of the house if that makes you feel any better, Mr. Nilsen,” she offered calmly, surreptitiously slipping the two photographs she had found into her coat pocket.

Nilsen looked at Mascherino. “I don’t want that little bitch in my house.”

“It’s okay, LT,” Nikki said, slipping past her superior. “I’ll wait outside. It’s fine.”

The lieutenant gave her a flat look, her suspicion carefully hidden. Nilsen took a grudging half step to the side to let her out and then followed her down the steps and onto the sidewalk. Mascherino went back to the search, and the uniformed officer resumed his post at the door.

“I’m sure you’ll find this hard to believe,” Nikki said as Nilsen and his attorney descended from the porch. “But I’m very good at my job, Mr. Nilsen. My only focus is solving the crime. I’ll do whatever I need to do to make that happen. If that means I wait out here so the search can be done in an expedient manner, then I wait out here.”