by Tami Hoag
“Get the gun, Evangeline,” he said. “Get it and bring it over here.”
Evi pushed herself to her feet. She was trembling visibly. She looked at Nikki with desperation in her eyes.
“Get the gun!” he shouted. “I’ll cut her again! I swear to God! I don’t care any more about this child than you ever cared about me.”
“Do what he says,” Nikki told her. “It’ll be all right.”
How could she even say something so stupid? What part of this was all right? But she kept her voice calm and strong.
“Do what he says.”
She watched Evi pick the gun up like it was a dead rat, distaste and fear twisting her face. Her hands were shaking so badly she could barely hold on to it.
“Stay calm, Evi,” Nikki murmured to her. “It’s going to be all right. Just stay calm.”
* * *
EVI LOOKED AT THE GUN in her hands. Stay calm? Every cell in her body was trembling. She had never been so terrified in her life. It felt as if her nerves were wrapped around her throat, growing tighter and tighter. She could hardly breathe.
“Bring the gun over here,” he ordered.
She looked at the weapon in her hands, then at the stranger holding a knife to the throat of her daughter. Both of them her children. His father had died because of him. Now her daughter might die by his hand. None of it should have happened. Her mother shouldn’t have died of an overdose. She should never have put Evi in a position to be taken advantage of by a man she should have been able to trust. Ted Duffy shouldn’t have come to her room that night. Evi shouldn’t have leaned on him. So many decisions by so many people had brought them to this moment, and the result was this battered animal holding a knife to Mia’s throat, a madman with an agenda only he could understand.
Evi walked toward him, holding the gun in front of her like some kind of offering.
“Put it to my head,” he ordered.
“What?”
“Put it to my head,” he said again.
“I don’t understand.”
“It’s time to close the circle, Jeager, Evangeline Grace,” he said. “I came here to close the circle. It started with you. It ends with you. I didn’t come here to kill you. I came here for you to kill me.”
* * *
SHE HAD BROUGHT HIM into the world. She would take him out of it. That was the circle, Charlie thought. She had given him to the cycle of madness that had been his family. He had ended their lives: The father who had tormented them, who would have disowned them. The mother who had never protected them, never nurtured them. Diana. He couldn’t leave her to self-destruct or to be destroyed by a man who only wanted to use her. Charlie had always loved her best. He had always protected her. He had been protecting her even as he cut her throat with the wakizashi he had taken from their father’s collection, the knife he now held to the throat of the child. A quick, painless death. A kiss to take her to the afterlife.
All that was left was for him to die.
That was the circle.
He had begun his search for his birth mother with no clear picture of what he wanted from her. He had known only that he had to find her, the woman who had brought him into the world and given him away like a puppy to the first stranger who would take him. Or maybe she had done it for money. Maybe that was what their father had meant when he used to say, “You’re more trouble than you’re worth.”
As the other pieces fell into place, his purpose for finding her had become clear. She could do this one thing for him, this one kindness. It would be their one perfect moment as mother and son. She had given him life and now she could give him the essence of life in death.
This was how it was supposed to end. He would be gone, and she would live with the memory of him forever.
He could hear a helicopter getting close. More police. It didn’t matter. It would all be over soon.
“Do it,” he said.
She looked back at the policewoman.
“Do what he says, Evi,” the cop said. “Stand to the side of him. Put the gun to his temple.”
“No. No,” his mother said, crying. “Oh my God . . .”
“It’s all right, Evi. Just do what I tell you,” the cop said. “Stand to the side of him. Put the gun to his temple.”
“No. Please! I can’t!”
“Do it,” he said. “Do it!”
He tightened his hold on the child as he shouted, scaring the girl. She wailed for her mother. For their mother.
Evi raised the gun, her hands shaking so badly he thought she would strike him with it before she could put it to his head.
“Do it,” he said.
“I can’t!” she sobbed.
“Do it or I’ll kill her!”
“Mommy!” the child wailed.
“DO IT!”
* * *
NIKKI HEARD THE CHOPPER coming closer. Whop, whop, whop. From the corner of her eye, she could see the spotlight sweeping back and forth. She kept her focus on the bizarre tableau in front of her.
Evi Burke was sobbing, her hands trembling violently as she held the barrel of the Glock to the temple of the man who held a knife to her daughter’s throat, the man who might have murdered her husband for the sole purpose of getting her to blow his brains out.
Nikki calculated her odds of being able to get her second weapon out of her ankle holster in the split second she would have when he realized the gun to his head wouldn’t fire. She had set the safety.
“Do it!” he screamed. “I’ll kill her!”
“Mommy!”
Evi closed her eyes and braced herself.
WHOP, WHOP, WHOP, WHOP.
The police chopper swung in close and flooded the room with stark white light that struck the assailant in the face, blinding him.
“Evi! Run!”
Head down, Nikki exploded forward. With her left hand she shoved Mia Burke to the side as she brought her right knee up into her tormentor’s face. Momentum carried her forward. She ducked a shoulder and rolled, coming back up to her feet in a crouch, ready to block his attack.
He grabbed the knife off the floor as he turned over and came up onto his knees again, blood gushing from his broken nose.
Expecting him to come at her, Nikki went for the gun strapped to her ankle.
She pulled it free and brought it up, shouting, “Drop the knife! Drop it!”
He didn’t drop the knife.
He didn’t come at her.
He plunged the blade into his own stomach, screaming.
* * *
“JESUS H. CHRIST, TINKS. I let you out of my sight for five minutes and suddenly you’re freaking Rambo. Or is it Rambette?”
Kovac. Nikki looked up as he came into the bedroom, parting the sea of SWAT uniforms milling around the doorway like some kind of film noir Moses in a trench coat and fedora. Taylor followed him, his handsome face set in stern lines as he scanned the room, zeroing in on the dead guy lying on the floor in a pool of blood.
“That’ll be Wonder Woman to you, Kojak,” Nikki said, ridiculously relieved to see him. It made no sense for him to be here, but she didn’t care.
Her head was spinning. Everything had gone in fast-forward from the moment she moved on the assailant. He had plunged the knife into his stomach and collapsed to the floor, and then SWAT was charging in, and paramedics, and the room was filled with light and noise, and commotion.
“You leave my squad, hijack my suspect, and solve a one-man crime wave while saving a mom and her kid,” Kovac said. “Wonder Woman it is.”
He looked down at the dead man and sighed.
“Your suspect?” Nikki asked, confused. “Who is he?”
“Charlie Chamberlain,” Taylor said, squatting down beside the body.
“He came here to die,” Nikki said. “He wanted Evi Burke to kill him. I don’t understand any of it.”
She heard a little tremor in her voice. The aftermath of the adrenaline dump. Clear as a bell in the midst of the crisis, now she
felt the delayed surge of confusion and fear. So many things could have gone wrong. Mia Burke could have been killed. Evi Burke could have been killed. She could have been killed.
“But you’re okay?” Kovac asked.
“Sure,” she said, automatically, as if it was that simple. She looked down at herself. Her hands and clothes were covered in the dead man’s blood. Her hands were trembling. She had gone to him as he lay on the floor, dying. He had bled out before the SWAT team even made it up the stairs. There was nothing left for the paramedics to do but cart his corpse to the morgue.
“He must have hit an artery,” she murmured. “It happened so fast.”
Kovac wrapped an arm around her shoulders and gave her a brotherly squeeze. “Let’s get you out of here, Wonder Woman. You’ve got a date with a shitload of paperwork downtown.”
Nikki leaned into him, grateful for his presence and his friendship. “You always know just what to say to a girl. And here I was thinking you didn’t care anymore.”
His mouth turned up on one corner in his trademark sardonic smile. “I wouldn’t let you off that easy, Tinker Bell. Let’s go,” he said, turning her toward the door. “I’ll even buy the coffee.”
48
“I never hated him,” Evi said quietly. “I’ve always been ashamed of that.”
They sat in a private meeting room at the Hennepin County Medical Center, a drab gray room with drab gray modern furniture, and a wall of glass that overlooked a courtyard several stories below, where snow was accumulating on the trees and bushes. Just down the hall in the ICU, Eric lay sleeping. His condition was stable.
“I shouldn’t need to tell you it wasn’t your fault,” Detective Liska said gently. “You were a child. He was an authority figure. Consent was moot.”
“It was nobody’s fault,” Evi said, knowing her colleagues would have pounced on her for her answer.
Ted Duffy took advantage of a vulnerable girl; the culpability was his. That was true. Of all the people who should have known that, he was at the top of the list. The decorated Sex Crimes detective had committed a sex crime against a child in his care. She should have hated him. Anyone would have vilified him, crucified him, sent him straight to hell.
Evi knew, though, that hell was a place of one’s own making, and both she and Ted Duffy had served time there for their own reasons. He was dead because of her, because of what he’d done, and while that may indeed have been justice, all Evi saw when she thought of him was a broken man, ruined by his life, begging her forgiveness, sobbing with his head in his hands. What use was there in hating him? She had hated herself enough to know it didn’t serve any purpose.
Her emotions at the time had been so tangled and confused. She had made an uneasy friendship with Ted Duffy as she did the Duffy laundry in the basement and he sat at his workbench sipping his whiskey. He asked her about her days at school. He gave her advice about boys. He was kind. She felt sorry for him. She had never had a friendship with a man. She had never had a father figure. She didn’t know how those relationships were supposed to work. She didn’t understand how or where to draw boundaries.
If she had asked for love, then she didn’t have the right to say no, did she? If she believed she could trust, then she had to accept betrayal of that trust, right? That was what she believed because she didn’t know any better. How could she have been expected to know what love was and what love wasn’t when her only example of love was a woman so tormented by life that she had ended her own?
“He wasn’t a terrible man,” she said. “He did a terrible thing.”
“Did you tell Barbie?” Liska asked.
“Only when she found out I was pregnant,” she said with a sad smile. “She called me a liar, said no one would ever believe me. It would be my word against his—against hers.
“And you didn’t try to tell another adult? A guidance counselor, a teacher?”
“Why would they believe me? I was just a foster kid. I hadn’t been in that school half a year.”
“You didn’t trust anybody.”
“Why would I?”
She looked to the other end of the room, where Eric’s mother sat reading quietly to Mia in an oversize chair by the window. Her daughter’s only physical scar from their ordeal would be the mark on her throat where Charles Chamberlain cut her as a threat. Emotionally, the damage would go deeper than a surface wound, and the guilt Evi felt for that was choking. But Mia would always be surrounded by people who loved her, people who would do their best to protect her and care for her. She would never know that terrible yawning emptiness that Evi had lived with for most of her life.
She reached up and brushed a tear from her cheek. She had that family now. Eric’s parents loved her unconditionally, without judgment. Even with their son lying in the ICU hooked to tubes and monitors because of her, they loved her. It was difficult for her to believe she deserved that, but they helped her work at it every day.
She felt that she had so much to make up for. She had never trusted Eric with the details of her time with the Duffys, and the product of her time there had appeared in their lives like a monster from a nightmare and nearly killed him.
The doctors estimated he had lost a third of his blood supply the night of the attack. The paramedics had brought him back from cardiac arrest in the ambulance. The ER staff revived him a second time. He had lost an eye. The wound to his face would require multiple plastic surgeries. The cut across his back, which had sliced through his heavy jacket, required more than a hundred stitches to close.
And yet, the first thing he said when he opened his eyes and saw her was, “I love you.” And when she told him the terrible truth she had kept to herself all these years, the first thing he said when she finished was, “I love you.” And that would make all the difference in both their lives and in the life of their child.
She had often wondered what her life would have been like if she had had that kind of love as a child. Now she couldn’t help but wonder what a difference it would have made in the life of the child she had given up. What kind of horrible pain had he carried within to do the things he had done? She had given him the only thing she could: a chance at something better, never imagining that chance could become a nightmare.
“Tell me about Jeremy Nilsen.”
Jeremy, her first real crush. She had been his first girlfriend, a secret from his father. And he had been her secret from the Duffys. Romeo and Juliet.
“He was a sweet boy. He had a difficult relationship with his father, trying to live up to his father’s idea of what a man should be. I suppose that was where the trouble started.
“When I found out I was pregnant, I was so afraid. I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know what would happen to me. I was afraid they would send me away. I told Jeremy what had happened.
“He was so angry. He wanted to do something. He wanted to confront Mr. Duffy. He wanted to have him arrested. I told him we couldn’t do any of those things. I told him they’d send me away. He wouldn’t let it go. He wanted to be my hero. He thought he should defend my honor.”
She put her hands over her face and leaned against the table.
“He said he would kill Mr. Duffy for what he’d done. I didn’t believe he’d really do it.”
“But he did.”
“I tried to find him after school,” she said. “I couldn’t find him.”
She started to tremble, remembering her growing panic as the afternoon darkened. She remembered how she had stood outside the Nilsen house, afraid to knock on the door, afraid Mr. Nilsen would answer. She could hear Mr. Duffy chopping wood next door.
“We used to meet in the park and walk on the trails in the woods. It was the place we could be together without anyone knowing. I thought maybe he had gone there to think. It was almost dark.”
She remembered the bitter day, damp and cold. A spitting, freezing rain pelleted her face like tiny shards of glass. It was changing to snow as she hurried down the trail. She was crying
, afraid, filled with dread. What had she done? Why had she told him?
“And then I heard the shots,” she said, and an overwhelming sadness filled her. It filled her now, and she wanted to cry for everything that was lost in that moment. Their lives had just been set on a path over which they would have no control, and any hope for their budding love would be dashed, all because a troubled boy had done the wrong thing for all the right reasons.
* * *
“. . . THEY CAME UP WITH THE STORY OF HAVING been at school at the basketball game,” Nikki said.
They sat in Logan’s office in the government center: Nikki, Candra Seley, Logan, and Mascherino. Logan’s desk phone was lighting up like a pinball machine. He ignored it. The news media had gone rabid for details of Charlie Chamberlain and his wake of death.
“Any other week, there would have been a game on Tuesday night. No one bothered to check,” she went on. “No one really questioned them. They were just kids. Everybody thought Ted Duffy was killed by someone he had put away, or that Barbie and Big Duff had pulled it off. There were so many more realistic possibilities. If Barbie had any suspicions, she kept them to herself rather than risk the world finding out her husband, Mr. Sex Crimes Detective of the Year, had raped their sixteen-year-old foster child. She and Big Duff closed ranks around the family, and she sent the foster girls back into the system. Jeremy Nilsen turned eighteen and joined the army.”
“Do you think Donald Nilsen knew?” Mascherino asked.
Nikki looked away. “Can I plead the Fifth on that?”
“Off the record, then,” Logan said.
“Jeremy Nilsen was an honor student,” she said. “He had already been accepted to several universities. How many parents would let that kind of son drop out of high school to join the army?”
“You think it was the father’s idea?” Logan asked.
“Do you have kids, Logan?” she asked him.
He shook his head.
“I think Donald Nilsen is a sad old man who did what he could to protect his only child for killing a man who raped a teenage girl. I can’t say I wouldn’t do the same,” she confessed. “I think he packed his son off to the army and hoped for the best. That wasn’t what he got, but I think that was his intent. And I think his wife probably left him over it.
