The Bitter Season (Kovac and Liska, #5)(98)

He’d had the means to shoot Ted Duffy. He’d had the opportunity to shoot Ted Duffy—if they discounted the statement of his long-missing wife. He wasn’t lacking motive. The two had had run-ins. The discovery of the pictures hidden under Jeremy Nilsen’s mattress, however, may have added a new dimension to the picture.

In her confrontation with Nilsen on his front lawn, she had thrown out the idea that Angie Jeager had somehow ruined or tainted his son. She’d done it just to get a rise out of him, but the more she thought about it, the more the idea appealed to her as an extra layer of motive.

Murder was a solution arrived at by different means, depending on the motive. In the heat of passion or rage, there was no forethought. It was an act triggered from a part of the brain where emotion and instinct lived. In other cases, the motivation for murder was built one step, one transgression, one insult at a time, layer by layer, until the mind could make an argument for a violent solution to an untenable situation.

Donald Nilsen didn’t get along with his neighbors. By his reasoning, they encroached on his privacy and trampled on his personal world order. He was the kind of man who would keep score, remembering every little affront. He had deemed the Duffys’ foster daughters a threat to his sense of decency. Ted Duffy had gone head to head with him on the subject of the girls. If Nilsen had found out Angie Jeager was tempting his son, or even that his son had a crush on her, that could have been the last straw. It only had to make sense to Donald Nilsen.

In need of movement and coffee, Nikki left her office and crept up the stairs to check on the boys. They had all been asleep in the living room when she got home—Kyle, R.J., and her cousin Matt—sprawled on the sofa and the floor like gunshot victims. One by one, she woke them and sent them off to their respective beds.

Kyle, her artist, had painted the door of his room red, black, and white, with a life-size samurai warrior—a fierce mask, a raised sword—warning the faint-of-heart not to cross this threshold. She cracked the door open and peeked in at him, sleeping soundly. He was her quiet one. He had broken up with his first girlfriend before Nikki even knew he had one.

She imagined Jeremy Nilsen the same way: quietly living his own life beneath his father’s radar. Donald Nilsen would not have been an understanding parent. Knowing that, and knowing how he felt about his son now, would Donald Nilsen have killed someone because of his son?

Seley had been calling homeless shelters, looking for Jeremy Nilsen, hoping against hope that they would find him and that he would be able to fill in the blanks of the story. So far, he seemed to have dropped off the face of the earth after leaving the VA hospital.

Nikki couldn’t imagine not knowing where her boys were, let alone not caring. She would have dug up every corner of the earth to find them, would have sacrificed everything she had to save them.

She closed Kyle’s door softly and went back downstairs to the kitchen for a fresh cup of coffee—decaf, to begin to wind down. She was tired. Her head was swimming with everything that had gone on that day. Too tired to think straight, she admitted as she went to her office.

She sat back against the desk to look at her whiteboard and the notes she had made. She had put a call in to Jennifer Duffy, requesting a call back. No call had been forthcoming. She wasn’t surprised. There was a reason Jennifer didn’t want to go back to those memories, a reason she had struggled over the years with depression and whatever her other demons were.

Nikki thought back to the moment the dark cloud passed over Jennifer Duffy’s memories as she spoke about sneaking into Angie’s room to snuggle and read at night.

What did she know about Angie and Jeremy Nilsen? Angie had been like a big sister to a lonely little girl. Jennifer would have hung on her every word, would have wanted to imitate her, would have wanted to know about everything that went on in Angie’s life—including whether Jeremy Nilsen was her boyfriend.

Why wouldn’t she just say so?

And what did the answer have to do with Ted Duffy’s death?

Nikki’s follow-up call to Evi Burke had also gone unanswered. Evi Burke, who had been through two or three kinds of hell growing up but had managed to come out the other side and build a nice life, a meaningful life. It was no wonder she would rather pass on the opportunity to go back and dig up unhappy times.

“Sorry, Evi,” Nikki murmured as she stared at the time line of Ted Duffy’s death. “I’m taking you back there whether you like it or not. I think you might be my lynchpin in this.”





31


The dream took her back to a place she didn’t want to go, to a time she didn’t want to remember. Even in the memory, she felt so empty and so alone, the emotions creating a physical pain inside her.

She was alone in the world. She had no one. Her mother was gone. Gone for good, not gone to a rehab or gone to a hospital or gone on a bender. She was dead. She was gone and never coming back. As damaged as she had always been, as inadequate as her capabilities as a parent had been, she had been Evi’s only relative, the only person to which she truly belonged—and vice versa.

It had come as a surprise, how hard it was to lose her. Evi had seen her sporadically as a teenager in and out of foster care. In many ways they had been little more than acquaintances and occasional roommates. Evi had done as much caretaking of her mother over the years as her mother had of her—probably more. Yet the loss felt as if a giant hole had been torn open inside her, and there was nothing to fill it. That emptiness had terrified her.