The Bitter Season

by Tami Hoag

  In one of the many revisitations to the investigation several years after the fact, a harder look had been taken at Big Duff (by a detective not named Gene Grider) after he and his brother’s widow got hitched. Still, nothing in the way of evidence had been found to implicate him in his brother’s death. But there was plenty of speculation to be made.

  Barbie Duffy collected a considerable sum of life insurance on her husband’s death. Big Duff did as well. Ted had invested as a partner in his brother’s first store. The partners had been insured. It was safe to assume that at least some of that money went into the expansion of Big D Sports, and the second Mr. and Mrs. Duffy ended up rich and living in a house that was photographed for magazines. Happily ever after.

  Nikki wondered if anyone had spoken to the neighbor, Donald Nilsen, the self-appointed neighborhood morality police, about whether Ted Duffy’s brother ever visited when his twin was not at home. If they asked that question, she couldn’t find any record of it.

  Nilsen had been interviewed many times over the years. He hadn’t seen anything. He hadn’t heard anything. He had been working in his home office. His wife had been making dinner. His son had been attending a basketball game at school.

  In the one and only interview with Renee Nilsen, she had little to say. The Nilsens’ son, Jeremy, had also been interviewed just once. It didn’t look like anyone had tried to learn about the Duffy household through him, even though he had mown their yard and shoveled their sidewalk, and had probably gone to school with the teenage girls living with the Duffys at the time.

  As the mother of a son the same age, Nikki could state with certainty that if Jeremy Nilsen was straight, he would have been very aware of the “tarts” next door. And those girls would have been very aware of him. He was a good-looking kid—and the quiet type, according to Barbie. There was no animal on the face of the earth more irresistible to a teenage girl than a handsome boy who had nothing to say. A man of mystery! They would have spun tales in their heads about why he was so quiet. They would have fantasized about being the one person he would open up to and trust with all his secrets.

  She wondered if Jeremy Nilsen had secrets about what his father was up to when Ted Duffy was being murdered. Unfortunately, Jeremy Nilsen was dead. Whatever secrets he might have had had gone with him to his grave. Nikki kept seeing the trophy buck hanging over Donald Nilsen’s electric fireplace. Unless he had bought that thing at a flea market, he owned guns and was a crack shot. He didn’t make it a secret that he hadn’t liked the Duffys. He had paid far too much attention to the goings-on at the house next door. Ted Duffy had confronted him and leveled a thinly veiled threat at him for ogling the girls.

  She went to her whiteboard on the wall across from her desk and made three columns headed “Barbie Duffy,” “Thomas Duffy,” and “Donald Nilsen.” Beneath each name, she jotted notes in black, and questions in red.

  Of the Duffys’ children, only Jennifer, who was nine at the time, had been interviewed. She was in her bedroom upstairs at the time of the shooting. Her room overlooked the backyard. She said she had been reading a book and hadn’t seen anything. The younger two Duffy children were in the family room at the front of the house playing while the younger foster child, Penny Williams, watched and did homework. The older foster girl, Angie Jeager, had been at a school function, not returning home until around nine thirty. The same basketball game Jeremy Nilsen was attending? Nikki wondered.

  To the far right on the whiteboard, she wrote, “TBI” (for To Be Interviewed), and beneath it, the names Renee Nilsen, Penny Williams, and Angie Jeager.

  What were the odds of finding any of them? Nilsen claimed to have no idea where his ex-wife was. Barbie Duffy hadn’t maintained a relationship with the two girls she had taken in as slave labor and then sent back to the foster care system like stray dogs to the pound. Twenty-five years after the fact, it was doubtful any of them still had the same last name.

  “And that’s why they call you a detective, Nikki,” she murmured to herself.

  * * *

  SOMEONE HAD ALREADY ORDERED IN PIZZA by the time Kovac and Taylor returned to the office. It was past eight o’clock, but Mascherino was still there, having a slice with the guys. An incongruous picture, Kovac thought: the petite and proper fifty-something lieutenant in her smart maroon suit standing in the break room with the rest of the hooligans, eating pizza off a paper plate. He gave her credit for the effort.

  “Sam, Michael,” she said as they came into the room to grab their dinner. “Get something to eat and bring it to my office. I want an update.”

  The three of them went to her office and Kovac filled her in, chowing down on his dinner between segments of the afternoon’s events.

  “So, basically,” he said, “Professor Chamberlain never met a person he didn’t annoy. Nobody had anything bad to say about the wife, other than that she named her children Charles and Diana, after the royals, and she liked to drink a bit in the evenings.”

  “Do you think the murders were personal?”

  Kovac gave a halfhearted shrug.

  “The robbery looked legit,” Taylor said. “Not staged. The key rooms were hit for stuff that could be carried and sold: small electronics, cash, credit cards, jewelry—”

  “The weapons taken from the professor’s collection raise the question of whether our bad guy went there specifically targeting the collection or just hit the jackpot finding that stuff,” Kovac said. “Sato, the colleague-slash-rival, is going to go through it with us. We’ll find out the significance of the pieces that are missing.

  “That in itself should be interesting,” he continued. “The head of the department told us Sato had a pretty serious hard-on for the collection. He wants the same job Chamberlain wanted. He’s banging the daughter. That’s a lot of checks in his column.”

  “But the burglary aspect looks like several others in the area,” Mascherino said.

  “I put Tippen and Elwood on that.”

  “I spoke to them already. There are two cases that could very well be connected to this one—similar method of entry, neat and efficient burglary. The difference being no one was home at the time.”

  “All the more reason for the Chamberlains to have had their security system armed,” Taylor pointed out.

  “I’ve spoken with the security company,” the lieutenant said. “According to their computer, the Chamberlains’ system was armed last night a little after seven, and disarmed around twelve thirty. Of course, they can’t tell us who disarmed it or why. Disarming the system with the pass code doesn’t raise any red flags with the company.”

  “The code number was on a label on the keypad in the kitchen,” Taylor said. “I took a picture of it.”

  “The electronic-age version of leaving the key under the doormat,” Mascherino said, shaking her head.

  “People accidentally set the alarm off, they panic and can’t remember the code,” Taylor said. “It’s not hard to imagine that happening with Mrs. Chamberlain’s drinking habit. Next thing, the cops are there. And if that happens a couple of times, they’re getting fined.”

  “That wouldn’t have gone over well with the tyrant,” Kovac said.

  “So she made a little label and put it on the keypad,” Taylor said. “People do it all the time. They write the number down on a notepad on the counter. They write it on the corner of their message board by the kitchen phone.”

  “They’re afraid of the people they don’t know,” Kovac said. “They think danger comes only from outside their world, not from their own circle of acquaintances.”

  “So the perpetrator broke in through the French doors,” the lieutenant said. “They had no glass-break detectors. Professor Chamberlain felt they were an unnecessary expense, since all the openings were wired. No motion sensors, either. No video cameras. He bought a good basic package and left it at that.

  “After the bad guy was inside, he had thirty seconds to get to the keypad and disarm the alarm before it went
off,” Mascherino went on. “So he had the alarm code, but not a key to the house.”

  “Anyone who has been in the house could have had that code,” Kovac said. “The cleaning lady, the handyman with the grudge. We’re on to that angle next. The professor had a beef with a handyman service. He trashed them online and got into it with the owner of the company, according to the son. They were scheduled to come back to the house and redo some work a couple of days ago.”

  “Handy Dandy Home Services,” Taylor said. “They’ve got all their paperwork: registered, licensed, insured, etcetera. They’ve had a few complaints against them on the various websites that rate these businesses. Nothing violent. No big red flags. From what I’ve read, they rank somewhere in the middle of the pack for price and quality.”

  “In keeping with the professor’s penny-pinching,” the lieutenant said.

  “We’re on our way to talk to the owner,” Kovac said. “Who knows where he gets his workers. Some of those companies are on the up-and-up, and all their workers are on the books. Others—not so much. Guys that work that kind of job can be transient.

  “And I want to take a harder look at the family and the professor’s associates, too,” he said. “The daughter is a trip. We know she and the dad were at odds.”

  “But could you see her beating her father’s head in?” Mascherino asked. “That beating was brutal. Does she seem like she could be that strong?”

  “She’s athletic,” Kovac said. “And she’s tall. Bigger than her father. And the brother says she’s bipolar. Maybe she just snapped.”

  “Bipolar is not the same as psychotic,” Taylor pointed out.

  “But bipolar people can be violent.”

  “Violent people can be bipolar,” Taylor corrected him. “Contrary to what the movies and TV would have us believe, the overwhelming majority of people with mental illness are not violent. Statistically, they’re more apt to become victims.”

  “We’re not talking about statistical probabilities,” Kovac argued. “We’re talking about Diana Chamberlain. Is she or is she not a weird chick?”

  “She’s a weird chick,” Taylor agreed. “And she’s sleeping with the enemy. But could she hack up her mother with a sword? If she attacked her father with nunchucks in a blind rage, and hacked her mother up with a samurai sword, could she just turn that rage off and coldly stage a burglary as slick and professional as this? Not likely. Either she snapped and went ape shit crazy or she didn’t. No one can turn that on and off like a faucet.”

  Kovac blew out a breath and sat back in his chair, already regretting the pizza. Now he was getting too fucking old to eat pepperoni.

  “The daughter’s apartment was a pigsty, but at a crime scene she’s meticulous?” Taylor went on. He shook his head. “The burglary points to a pro.”

  “And the other professor?” Mascherino asked. “The one the daughter is sleeping with?”

  “Ken Sato. It’s easy to argue motive for him,” Kovac said. “Eliminating the competition for a big promotion.”

  “But with Diana messing up her father’s chances, bringing a complaint against him with the Office for Conflict Resolution, you could argue Sato already had pretty clear sailing for that job,” Taylor said.

  “He could have done it for love, I suppose,” Kovac offered. “She hated her father—not without reason, by the sound of it. But is Sato a professor by day and a ninja cat burglar by night?”

  “Find out,” the lieutenant said. “What about the son?”

  “Smart, quiet, nerdy kid. He’s a paralegal for a law firm. His alibi kind of sucks,” Kovac said. “He was home alone, working.”

  “But we can check his computer,” Taylor said, “and confirm what Wi-Fi network he was using. We can check his cell phone records and see what towers it was pinging off.”

  “He seemed pretty shaken up by what happened,” Kovac said. “With the sister being a flake, the responsibility for the aftermath is falling on him. We’re bringing him to the ME’s office for the official ID tomorrow morning.”

  “Any hits on the Chamberlains’ credit cards?” Mascherino asked.

  Kovac shook his head. “No action on their cell phones, either.”

  It was the lieutenant’s turn to sigh. “I’m sure I don’t have to tell you this case is front and center until it’s solved. You’ve got Tippen and Elwood full time, and you can borrow anyone else available if you need to.”

  “The overtime is approved?”

  “Yes. Whatever you need. I want this case solved before it can be used as a political football.”

  “Isn’t it too late for that already?” Kovac asked. “I heard the press conference was belly-to-butt with brass and suits. The local stations are running the story practically nonstop.”

  “The union and the politicians aligning with the union are going to use this case as an example of what’s wrong with the force,” she said. “Not enough officers, not enough money.”

  “And I’m supposed to be against that?” Kovac asked. “It’s the truth.”

  “Do you want the public panicking, believing no one is safe in their own home?” Mascherino asked. “Do you want them thinking we’re not doing our jobs, that we’re using a high-profile case—the horrible deaths of these innocent people—to extort money from the city?”

  “No.”

  “That’s the flip side,” she said. “The mayor starts beating his drum about the no-good, dirty police union. Then what?”

  Kovac was silent for a moment. “You’re a smart cookie, Lieutenant,” he said, his mouth kicking up at one corner. “I think I might like you.”

  Mascherino smiled like the Mona Lisa. “Yes, I am, and thank you. Now go do your jobs. We’ve got a case to solve.”

  14

  “You can’t possibly think I did it.”

  Dan Franken was thirty-six, six feet tall, and thick bodied. He had a bony, hawkish blade of a nose, and his dark eyes sat back in deep sockets. They had a tendency to dart from side to side, from Kovac to Taylor and back again. His mouth turned downward by nature, a lipless horseshoe centered on planes of heavy five o’clock shadow.

  Kovac and Taylor stood silent, Kovac propping himself up against a tall filing cabinet, Taylor looking all military: legs straight, feet apart, hands clasped behind his back. A human guard dog on alert.

  “I mean, I didn’t get along with the guy, but the wife seemed nice enough. I felt bad for her, having to be married to an asshole like that,” Franken said. His voice was rough with half a lifetime’s worth of cigarettes. He shook one out of a pack now and lit up, blowing the smoke up at the low yellowed acoustic-tile ceiling. “I heard on the radio someone hacked them up with a samurai sword. That’s nuts, man! What the fuck?”

  Franken ran his business out of a tiny, cluttered wood-paneled office in an old commercial park on the North Side. The low buildings made of corrugated steel were part of a U-Store-It complex, and housed an odd variety of businesses: It’s a Party! party planning; Faux Flora, silk plants; B&D Auto Body; the offices of an outpatient drug rehab called Rising Wings; Iron Neck Gym. Franken looked like he might have spent his free time at the last one, Kovac thought. His hands, clenched in loose fists at his sides, were the size of five-pound hammerheads.

  “Professor Chamberlain wasn’t very happy with your work,” Taylor said. “We read his review. His son said the two of you got into it.”

  “I never met the son,” Franken said. “I didn’t even know he had a son.”

  “Did you argue with Professor Chamberlain?”

  “Hell, yeah. I argued with him the day it happened, and I argued with him again when I found out about the Yelp review,” he admitted. “That was a shitty review. People look at those things, you know, especially young professionals. That’s a big part of my market.”

  He sat back against his desk and tapped his cigarette ash off into an ashtray heaped with butts that testified to an evening spent slogging through paperwork. “He should have given us the chance t
o take care of the problems. But no, he had to be a prick and go online and run his mouth. I had other jobs lined up in that neighborhood. I lost two of them because he called the people up and ragged on about how terrible my guys were and what a shit job they did.”

  “So you were pretty pissed.”

  “Yeah, I was pissed! Of course I was pissed! Do you know how hard it is to get a new business going in this town? I’ve got plenty of contracting experience, but I don’t have the name or the kind of bucks it takes to get into new construction. This is my way in: Handy Dandy. I trademarked the name. My brother-in-law thinks I might be able to franchise it if things go well. I’ve spent the last three years trying to build a reputation.”

  “Chamberlain cost you business,” Kovac said. “He cost you time, he cost you money. He set you back—who knows how far?”

  “So I went to his house in the middle of the night and killed him and his wife so I can lose everything I’ve worked for and spend the rest of my life in prison?” Franken said. “You’re out of your mind.”

  “What kind of work did you do for them that they were so unhappy about?” Taylor asked.

  “Cleaned the gutters, put on storm windows. Cheap fucker. The guy has that kind of money and doesn’t replace those old windows. A couple of them got broken. He flipped his shit. Of course we would have fixed them right away, that day. He throws a hissy fit and kicks the guys off the property then bitches all over the neighborhood that he doesn’t have storms on half his windows.”

  “Did you do any work inside the house?”

  “They fixed a couple of wonky cupboard doors in the kitchen.”

  Taylor glanced at Kovac. The security code was on the keypad on the wall near the kitchen door.

  “Did you go back and finish the job?” Taylor asked.

  Franken set his jaw like a petulant teenager. “I told him if he took the review down, we’d finish the job and not charge him.”