The Bitter Season

by Tami Hoag

  Nikki didn’t try to argue. She had already stumbled over these same ruts. Her whole point in being here, talking to Ted Duffy’s eldest child, was to find new ground. She sat back and took a sip of her coffee.

  “Was he a good dad when he had the chance?”

  “He was tired,” she said with a weariness of her own. “He had bad moods. We were always being told not to bother him. Daddy has a hard job, Mom would always say. I could never understand why he didn’t just get a different job so he wouldn’t be so unhappy all the time.”

  Nikki tried to imagine her at nine. She would have been one of those pretty, ladylike little girls. It wasn’t hard to picture her in her green plaid Catholic school uniform and black patent leather Mary Janes, her hair in two neat braids with bows. Quiet, Nikki thought, shy, even. She might have had her mother’s looks, but she didn’t have her mother’s edge. She seemed more delicate, internally fragile.

  When she spoke, Nikki could hear the echo of loneliness in her voice, the confusion and rejection of a child pushed to the side. Every little girl wanted her daddy’s love and attention. Jennifer Duffy hadn’t gotten much of either from her father, by the sound of it. Those were the emotions she didn’t want to have to relive every time another cop came calling with the promise of solving her father’s case.

  “I have two boys,” Nikki said. “Their dad and I are both cops. We’re divorced now, but we had our years like that, too. He was gone, working undercover narcotics. I was gone working my shift. When he was home there was always tension. Even though I was a cop, too, he thought I couldn’t really understand his world. I know it’s the same way with the Sex Crimes detectives. What they’re exposed to on a daily basis is so filthy and so foul. Even if it was possible for their spouse or their family to comprehend it, the cops don’t want to share it. They don’t want it polluting everyone’s lives. That isolation takes a toll on the family.”

  Jennifer Duffy nodded almost imperceptibly as she looked down at her coffee.

  “My dad was a cop, too,” Nikki went on. “He worked patrol his whole career. Old school. Never talked about the job. Never. And we weren’t supposed to ask him. If he had a bad day on the job, how would we know? He wouldn’t tell us, and we couldn’t ask. How were we supposed to know he wasn’t mad at us? Kids think everything is about them.”

  “You end up feeling like he’s just a man who sometimes stays overnight,” Jennifer murmured, the memory pressing down on her.

  “It’s hard.”

  “But you became a cop yourself.”

  “Yes. I suppose in part to feel closer to him,” Nikki admitted. She took another sip of her coffee. “Or maybe to make up for what he lacked as a parent. I’m very close to my boys. I don’t ever want them to feel separate from me the way I felt from my old man.

  “Even so, it’s not easy being a cop’s kid,” she continued. “It makes you different. It sets you a little apart from the other kids.”

  “Yes, it does,” Ted Duffy’s daughter murmured, as she stirred her coffee with a stick of rock sugar.

  “I read in the file that you were in your room reading when your dad was shot.”

  “He was chopping wood,” she said quietly. “I could hear him chopping wood. He did that when he was upset.”

  “Did you hear the shots?”

  “I suppose I did, but I didn’t realize it.”

  Nikki pictured the scene in her mind: Jennifer Duffy propped up by pillows on the bed as she lost her loneliness in the pages of a book. The distant crack of the axe striking the wood. The distant crack of a rifle shot. A nine-year-old child wouldn’t have known the difference. And even if she had been looking out the window the instant it happened, she never could have seen into the gathering gloom of the woods where the shot had come from.

  “Then it was quiet,” Jennifer said. “It was quiet for a long time. I just kept reading. I thought he must have come inside, but he was lying out there, dying.”

  The mother in her made Nikki want to put her arms around the young girl in the memory. Jennifer blamed herself in the way children did because they believed their worlds revolved around them. In the active imagination of Jennifer Duffy’s nine-year-old mind, she might have been able to save her father if only she had known he was out there wounded. If only she had realized something was wrong. Instead, her father had bled out lying on the ground beneath her bedroom window.

  “He was killed instantly, you know,” Nikki said softly. “There was nothing you could have done.”

  She made that slight nod again, but she was still far away in her mind. “That’s what they said,” she whispered.

  Now, as she put the pieces of Jennifer Duffy’s answers together, Nikki could see why she had been the one to take her father’s death the hardest. He had never been the father she wanted, and her hope for that to change had died with him. Her father hadn’t seen her off on her first date, hadn’t seen her graduate, would never walk her down the aisle—and somewhere deep down inside there was still a tiny remnant of that nine-year-old girl that believed she was somehow responsible.

  “So you grew up to be a librarian,” Nikki said, to move her memory away from the dark corner of her father’s death. “Were books a refuge for you as a kid?”

  “You can go anywhere in a book,” she answered, smiling slightly. “Be anyone. And life has to make sense in a book. Real life doesn’t have to make sense. In real life, good people can turn out to be bad people, and bad people can get away with murder . . . and worse. I’ll take a good book over that any day.”

  She used both hands to lift her cup to her lips. It rattled on the saucer as she set it down.

  “My oldest boy is an artist,” Nikki said. “He draws his own comic books. That’s his escape. He says the same thing. In comic books, the bad guy always gets it in the end. There’s a lot of comfort in that.”

  Jennifer Duffy stared out the window, her mind years away, in a place where a nine-year-old girl had to hide away from a bad reality. Her father’s death? Her parents’ struggling marriage? Their unhappy family? Her own unjustified guilt . . .

  “Can you tell me about the girls who were living with you at that time?” Nikki asked. “Angie and Penny?”

  Jennifer Duffy looked at her, confused. “Why? What could you think they would have to do with anything? They were teenagers.”

  “I’m fishing,” Nikki confessed. “I spoke with your old neighbor Mr. Nilsen. He said the girls were kind of wild. Maybe one of them had a bad boyfriend or got in trouble with people in the drug culture. Or maybe they had someone in their family background who was unhappy with them being in the foster care system,” Nikki suggested. “Or someone who didn’t want them talking to a police detective.”

  “That sounds like a movie,” Duffy said. “They were just teenage girls. I don’t think anybody cared about either of them.”

  “Did you like having them around? It had to be kind of like having instant big sisters, huh?”

  “I never liked Penny. She was mean when she babysat for us. And she was a liar and a thief. I wasn’t sad to see her go.”

  “And Angie? She was the older one?”

  “I liked her. She was quiet, and she was nice to us. She liked to read, too,” she recalled. “She would read to me sometimes,” she admitted, smiling a little at that one small fond memory. “I loved to be read to, but I was supposedly too big to be read to, so I never asked my mom to do it. She didn’t have time anyway. I was the one who read to my little sister and brother at night.”

  “And then Angie would read to you?”

  “She would sneak into my room, or I would sneak into hers, and we would curl up in bed and take turns reading out loud.”

  Her expression changed slowly as she looked inward. A happy memory was slowly overtaken by one not so pleasant, like a cloud passing over the sun.

  “Anyway . . . I should be getting back to work,” she said, pulling herself away from the dark thought.

  “Angie wasn’t the
re when your father was shot,” Nikki said, pressing forward. “Do you remember where she was?”

  “No,” she said, gathering her purse and pushing her chair back. “Something at school. Really, I need to get back to work.”

  “I’ll walk with you,” Nikki said. “I’m parked on Marshall.”

  Jennifer Duffy didn’t look happy about having to spend another three minutes with her. They went back out into the damp. The librarian set a brisk pace.

  “It must have been hard for you,” Nikki said. “Losing your dad and then losing your surrogate big sister. Did you stay in touch with Angie after she left?”

  “No. I never knew where she went. No one would tell me.”

  “Do you remember the kid that lived next door? Jeremy Nilsen? He mowed your grass.”

  “He was in high school.”

  “I know. So was Angie. They must have known one another. Were they friends?”

  “I wouldn’t know,” she said curtly as she pulled open the library’s outer door. “And I really don’t see the point of this. How could it matter? I have to go back to work. Thank you for the coffee.”

  “Thank you for your time,” Nikki said as the glass door closed in front of her. “And you would know,” she murmured, watching Jennifer Duffy disappear into the library. “That is the point.”

  20

  “I don’t understand why I can’t come in,” Charlie Chamberlain said stubbornly.

  They stood in the drizzle on the front walk of the house: Charlie, Diana, Ken Sato, Kovac, and Taylor. Kovac had purposely made sure that Charlie knew the time they would be meeting, in the hope he would turn up, despite the fact he had been told not to come. Kovac did so for the express purpose of literally shutting the kid out. If Charlie Chamberlain didn’t want his sister left alone with the cops, it was worth messing with him to find out why.

  “I told you, kid,” Kovac said curtly. “I can’t have people wandering around the crime scene. We’re here for two reasons. One, so I can walk through the collection with Professor Sato, and two, so your sister can look over your mother’s jewelry with my partner. I don’t need a third wheel here.”

  “I have a DVD of the collection,” Chamberlain said, pulling a plastic DVD case out of the patch pocket of his rain jacket. Mr. Helpful. “I stopped by the attorney’s office to talk about making funeral arrangements, and I remembered he had a copy—”

  Kovac took the case and handed it to Taylor like he couldn’t be bothered with it. “Thanks, that’s great. You can go now.”

  “This is my home,” Chamberlain argued. “I have as much right to be in it as anyone.”

  “No,” Kovac snapped. “This is my crime scene until I say it isn’t, and you don’t have any rights here until I say you do. That’s how this works. Now, I’d like to get out of this filthy weather before pneumonia sets in, so . . .”

  “It’s fine, Charlie,” Sato said. “It’s all fine.”

  Sato went to put a hand on the kid’s shoulder. Charlie Chamberlain shrugged him off, shooting Sato a look that could have cut glass. “Nothing is fine. No part of any of this is fine, Ken.”

  “Oh my God, Charlie,” Diana said impatiently. “Why don’t you just shut the fuck up and go do whatever it is you do when you’re not butting into my life.”

  “Oh yeah, this is all about you, Diana,” Charlie bit back. “Our parents are dead.”

  She rolled her eyes like a teenager.

  Kovac resisted the urge to raise his eyebrows. Something had shifted in the dynamic between the siblings since that morning, when they clung to each other, crying over their mutual grief. He caught Taylor’s eye and knew he was making note of it as well.

  “And unless you know something the rest of us don’t,” Kovac said, “Detective Taylor and I are in charge of solving their murders. Do you have something to contribute to that conversation, Charlie?”

  The kid huffed and looked away and back, shoving his clenched fists into his jacket pockets as he struggled with his temper. “No. I would just like to see for myself the state of the house.”

  “We’re not pocketing the silverware, if that’s what you think.”

  “I’ll video,” Diana said and walked up the steps, dismissing him.

  Kovac made a show of relenting. “Look, kid, go sit in your car if you’ve got time. I’ll walk you through when we’re done.”

  They left him standing on the sidewalk looking like an unhappy wet puppy.

  Inside the front door, they shed their dripping coats, hanging them on an iron coat tree. Taylor handed out booties for everyone to cover their shoes.

  The house still carried a hint of the smell of spilled blood and the faint stink of cigarettes. While no one was allowed to smoke in a house being processed as a crime scene, plenty of the people on the job ducked outside for a break during the hours it took to do the job, bringing the smell of smoke back inside with them.

  “Where were they killed?” Diana Chamberlain asked. True to her word, she held up her phone and took a video of the foyer and the staircase.

  “The dining room,” Taylor said. “We won’t be going in there.”

  “I think I should.”

  Sato gave her a disapproving look. “Di, no.”

  “I should,” she insisted, turning to him with her bravest and most earnest expression. “It’s the last place their souls were,” she said with all the drama of a soap opera actress. “That’s where I should say good-bye to them.”

  “We really can’t have people in there,” Kovac said. “We need you to go upstairs with Detective Taylor and look through your mother’s things.”

  He turned to Sato. “Professor, you and I are going to the professor’s study.”

  He didn’t look any more like a professor today than he had the day before. He was in black jeans and a black hoodie with several glossy black Japanese characters running down the left side of his chest.

  “Do you have some kind of history with the boy?” Kovac asked. “He doesn’t seem too happy to see you.”

  “Charlie thinks I’m an anarchist because I don’t fit in any of his neat little boxes.”

  “What the hell does that mean?”

  “It means he can’t control me, and control is everything to Charlie. Control the emotions. Control the situation. Move the chess pieces around on the board to create the best defense.”

  “Defense against what?”

  “Life,” he said, looking around as they went into a fussy formal sitting room that was lined with dark wood bookcases crowded with leather-bound tomes and framed family photos.

  “These aren’t the best circumstances, but he seems pretty uptight for a twenty-four-year-old kid.”

  “You would be, too, if Lucien were your father,” Sato said. “Charlie always tried to be the peacemaker. Given the personalities involved, that’s a stressful role. He’s a sensitive kid.”

  “He’s very protective of his sister.”

  Sato didn’t comment. He stood in the center of the room with his hands on his hips and looked around. “It’s strange to be in here knowing Lucien and Sondra are gone.”

  “Did you come here often?” Kovac asked.

  He laughed. “No. Lucien invited me once a year to their annual Chinese New Year party, so I could see what a successful life he had.”

  “And you don’t have a successful life? You’re a professor, too. You’re in line for the same promotion.”

  “I’m not married to money.”

  “You could be,” Kovac said, watching him carefully. “Now you could get the girl, get the job, get the money. It’s clear sailing. You’d probably end up with the collection, too. Half of it, anyway.”

  Sato’s expression hardened. “You brought me here to accuse me of murder?”

  “I’m not accusing you of anything. Just pointing out the obvious.”

  “Am I seriously a person of interest?”

  “Did you seriously think you wouldn’t be?” Kovac asked, giving him a look like Come o
n. “Everyone connected to the Chamberlains is a person of interest until I’m satisfied they’re not.”

  “What about this manhunt for some drug addict carpenter I heard about on the news?”

  “He’s someone we need to have a conversation with,” Kovac answered, peeved that the media was running away with that story. Dan Franken would probably threaten to sue the department before the day was out. The fact that his illegal employee was being hunted in connection with a murder investigation would be bad for business. “We have to consider all possibilities.”

  “The fact that this guy is on the run says enough to me,” Sato said. “Innocent people don’t flee the police.”

  “He could be guilty of something. That doesn’t make him guilty of this,” Kovac said. “Anyway, why don’t you enlighten me about some of this stuff?”

  Sato gestured to the painting over the fireplace, a fearsome-looking elaborately dressed warrior of some kind, sword drawn. The colors were bold and solid—black, dark blue, bright white. The matting and frame probably cost a week’s pay.

  “It’s a late-nineteenth-century ukiyo-e—a Japanese woodblock print.”

  “Is it valuable?”

  “No, not very. It’s in pristine condition, and it’s a beautiful example of the art, but they’re not rare. After Japan opened up during the Meiji Restoration in 1868, tons of these came west. Japan and all things Japanese were all the rage in Europe and in the States.”

  “So this collection of Chamberlain’s is just a bunch of tourist trinkets from back when?”

  “Oh no. We haven’t gotten to the good stuff yet.”

  “How about any of the stuff on these shelves?” Kovac asked, more interested himself in the family photos: a wedding picture of the professor and his bride; photographs of Lucien Chamberlain receiving various awards, of him traveling in far-flung corners of the world. Photos of the professor outnumbered the rest of the family three to one.

  “I don’t know that much about the art objects,” Sato said. “That’s not my area of expertise.”

  “I guess Stuart Kaufman would have been the one to help us with that,” Kovac remarked.