The Bitter Season (Kovac and Liska)

by Tami Hoag

  “It’s safe to assume this brother isn’t living on a cop’s salary,” Seley remarked.

  “No. He owns Big D Sports.”

  “He’s Big Duff? From the commercials?”

  “The one and only.”

  The Big D Sports commercials were local favorites featuring Big Duff dressed in Elmer Fudd hunting garb, and a guy in a silly, cheap moose costume: Melvin D. Moose. It was the kind of goofy humor that made guys guffaw. Speed and R.J. loved them and mimicked them, making each other fall down laughing.

  “He had just started his first store around the time of Ted Duffy’s death,” Nikki said. “Twenty-five years later, he’s got stores all over the upper Midwest.”

  Stores that specialized in hunting equipment, including guns, she reminded herself. But at the time of his brother’s death, Big Duff had allegedly been two hours away, at his cabin near Rice Lake, Wisconsin, getting the place ready for a Thanksgiving weekend party. Ted and some buddies had been set to join him for a few days of deer hunting and hanging out. Pre–cell phone, a family friend had driven to the cabin to break the news in person. Big Duff had reportedly been inconsolable over the death of his twin.

  Two years later, he had married his dead brother’s wife.

  One big happy.

  The heavy door swung open as they approached.

  “Mrs. Duffy, I’m—”

  “I know who you are,” Barbie Duffy said impatiently.

  Nikki’s first thought was that Barbie Duffy did not look sixty. Her hair, which hung just past her shoulders, had been artistically streaked ash blonde and carefully coiffed to look like it hadn’t been done at all—which undoubtedly cost extra at the salon. She’d had work done, but done well—a little lift here, a little filler there, a spot of Botox, a boob job. Dressed in leggings and a yoga top, she had a figure that would have been coveted by most women in their forties.

  She had worked as an ER nurse when she was married to Ted Duffy. She had traded up a few economic levels with Ted’s brother. No doubt she had plenty of time to devote herself to all the latest exercise crazes. She probably spun, Zumba’d, and Pilates’d herself that flat stomach and those skinny legs, and CrossFitted herself a pair of toned arms.

  Nikki’s second thought was that Barbie Duffy was not happy to see them.

  “I don’t see why we couldn’t have done this over the phone,” she said as she led them through the foyer. “I have a barre class at five. I have to be out of here by quarter to.”

  It was four o’clock. She was allowing forty-five minutes for the discussion of her first husband’s unsolved murder.

  “We’ll try not to take up too much of your time . . .”

  . . . trying to figure out who murdered the father of your children.

  “What a beautiful home you have,” Seley said, looking around at some designer’s idea of Northwoods chic: exposed timbers, chandeliers fashioned from the antlers of a herd of elk, bronze sculptures of wild animals. “This should be in a magazine.”

  “It has been,” Barbie said with the fake smile of a popular girl. “Several times.”

  She showed them to a living room with furniture made for giants—huge sofas and armchairs covered in leather and textiles that might have been handwoven by native people in some far-flung corner of the world. Nikki felt like a little kid taking a seat in one of the armchairs. She had to perch on the edge of the cushion or her feet couldn’t touch the floor.

  “As you know,” she began, “your husband’s case has been chosen for review by the new Cold Case unit.”

  “Yes, I know that. Gene Grider called me days before you did. I don’t understand why he isn’t in charge.” Barbie Duffy sat on the edge of a leather chair, her back ramrod straight, lower legs twisted together elegantly. A stack of bangles rattled on her wrist as she made a gesture. Her manicure was immaculate, her nails painted a perfect fall crimson. “He’s worked on Ted’s case all these years—”

  “And the case has never been solved. Why would you want a man who hasn’t solved the case in twenty-five years to be in charge of trying to solve it now?” Nikki asked with a little edge to her voice. “Do you not want the case closed, Mrs. Duffy?”

  She expected a burst of outrage, real or manufactured. What she got was more complex.

  “Honestly?” Barbie Duffy asked, chin up. “Honestly, I want it to be over. Do you know how many times we’ve been dragged through this over the years—opening and reopening the wounds? And for nothing. It’s like being victimized again and again.”

  “You don’t want your husband’s murderer brought to justice?”

  “Is that even possible?” she asked. “I don’t think so. Would it be worth what we have to go through? I don’t think so. Will it bring Ted back? No, it won’t,” she said, blinking back tears. “Nothing will ever bring Ted back. That’s my bottom line. So why go through all this—”

  She paused for a moment to compose herself, then started again.

  “Our phones have been ringing off the hook since the announcement yesterday. We’ve been deluged by our friends, and family, and all of their emotions. And reporters—literally dozens of reporters. Can they come to the house? They want to do a feature on us. Would we be willing to go back to the old house and shoot it in the backyard where Ted died?”

  She blinked her eyes hard as if in amazement. “Do I want to go back to the scene of my husband’s murder so they can capture my grief and pain for the ten o’clock news? Would you want to do that?”

  “I don’t know,” Nikki admitted. “I do know the families of most murder victims would beg for that kind of publicity. My phone’s been ringing off the hook, too, with the families of dozens of murder victims who want to know why their loved one’s case isn’t a priority. I think they might jump at that chance.”

  “Would they? Then feel free to open their lives up so they can relive their worst nightmare,” Barbie said. “I’m tired of it. You will be, too, soon enough. You’ve already said you don’t think it can be solved. Gene told me. So why don’t we just skip the dance? You won’t have to go through the motions, and I won’t have to go through the rest of it.”

  Nikki wanted to go find Gene Grider and kick him in the shin. What an asshole, telling Barbie Duffy she had fought against choosing this case in the first place. No matter that it was true. The victim’s family didn’t need to hear about her misgivings. By telling Barbie Duffy, Grider had sabotaged Nikki’s chances at a clean start on the case.

  “Mrs. Duffy, let me be perfectly clear with you on this,” she said. “I think your husband’s case is a difficult one. I believe we have a lot of other cases pending that are more solvable. But this is the case I’ve been assigned. It was assigned to me specifically because I have no history with it. I have no preconceived ideas about anyone involved. That will allow me to pick up on things a detective who has been over this ground many times may have overlooked. And now that the case is mine, I will dig at it like a terrier. If there’s anything to be found, I’m going to find it. If it’s even remotely possible to get my hands on the person who killed your husband, I will.”

  Barbie Duffy clapped her hands slowly, a sardonic smile twitching up one corner of her perfectly painted mouth.

  “Points for a passionate speech,” she said. “You should have saved that for a camera.”

  Nikki wanted to call her a bitch for the remark, but she wouldn’t. She had dealt with hundreds of family members of homicide victims over the years. No two reacted exactly the same way. No two had exactly the same experience. And she had been at the center of a number of high-profile cases where the pressure of the media was so intense and abrasive, and the public scrutiny so harsh, that it was crushing.

  Still, she couldn’t imagine losing a loved one and just letting go of the fact that someone had ended that person’s life with malice aforethought. As many times as she had wanted to kill Speed with her bare hands over the years, she would have gone to the ends of the earth to track down someone who
had killed him. He was the father of her boys. She owed them that much.

  “Does your husband feel the same way?” Seley asked Barbie Duffy, breaking the silence. “We were told this morning he’s willing to up the reward for information leading to an arrest.”

  Barbie Duffy closed her eyes and sighed, shaking her head. “Of course he is. Duff wants it solved. It nearly destroyed him when Ted died. Ted was his little brother by twelve minutes. Duff went through depression, alcohol abuse . . . He was so angry. It took a long time for him to come to some kind of resolution. But every time you people come around trying to peddle hope, he buys a load of it and then is crushed all over again when nothing happens.”

  “I’m sorry you feel that way,” Nikki said, “because the first thing I learned when I started working Homicide is that I work first for the victim, and my obligation to the victim is to get them justice. It can’t matter to me if you want to do this or not. I have to ask the questions and dig through this. I’m sorry.”

  “I doubt that you are,” Barbie returned. “Being the one to solve Ted’s case would be a nice feather in your cap, wouldn’t it, Detective?”

  “Why are you trying to make me your enemy?” Nikki asked.

  “It’s not personal. I don’t know you. I don’t care to know you. I just don’t want to do this again.”

  “So you think you might as well make a bad situation worse by being difficult? You should consider going back to school. You’d make a hell of a lawyer.”

  Barbie laughed at that. “Don’t forget I know exactly how much of an insult that was. I was married to a cop.”

  “And how was your marriage in the months leading up to your husband’s murder?”

  She arched a brow. “Oh, you’re going straight for the jugular. You forget, I’ve been asked these questions a thousand times. You aren’t going to shock me or surprise me.”

  “Good. Then we can skip over the niceties. How was your marriage in the weeks leading up to your husband’s death?”

  “It was very ordinary for people married ten years with three kids and not quite enough money. It was a partnership. Ted had his job, I had mine. When we had time together, we were too exhausted for sex, so we argued about money instead. Occasionally we both got enough sleep to wake up and remember how much we used to like each other.”

  “Were either of you dissatisfied with that arrangement?”

  “I think both of us were dissatisfied with that arrangement, but that’s life. At that stage of the game, I didn’t know any couples that were entirely happy. Are you married, Detective?”

  “Divorced.”

  “Kids?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you have enough time for everything? Is there ever enough money? You dumped your husband for a reason—or he dumped you.”

  “I dumped him for a reason, all right,” Nikki said. “What about Ted? Was he the kind of guy who fooled around? And remember: I am a cop, and I know cops. My ex was a cop. I know that animal.”

  “I don’t know if Ted was fooling around,” she said, glancing down at the arm of her chair, pretending to pick at a piece of lint. “I was too tired to care at the time.”

  “So you wouldn’t know if there was a jealous husband or boyfriend who might have wanted to eliminate the competition?”

  “No.”

  “How was Ted acting around that time? Up? Down? Distracted?”

  “Well . . . he was either the most generous, caring guy you’d ever met, or the biggest prick on the face of the earth. It depended on what kind of case he was working. The sicker and more depraved the case, the darker and angrier he was.”

  “Did he talk about his cases with you?”

  “No. He said the things he had to deal with were too horrible to bring home. He didn’t want it touching the kids,” she said. “He’d been glum. He always hated this time of year—the shorter days, the rotten weather. He always complained that everything died in November. I always thought he had that seasonal disorder. But the Duffy men are just prone to their moods. That Black Irish thing, you know.”

  “Had there been any strange calls to the house?” Seley asked. “Was he acting secretive?”

  Barbie Duffy rolled her eyes. “Do you know how many people have asked me these questions in the last two and a half decades?” she asked impatiently, checking her watch. “You have to have all these answers in a file somewhere.”

  “Yes, but see, we’re here right now,” Nikki said. “So we can ask you in person, and that’s always better. You might arch an eyebrow, or tip your chin, or look down to the left, and all of that means something.”

  “That sounds like you think I’m a suspect.”

  “Why would we think that? You were at the supermarket when it happened.”

  “There were people who found it suspicious that Big Duff and I ended up together,” she said. “You probably do, too. Some people thought we must have conspired to kill Ted so we could be together.”

  “Did you?” Nikki asked, just to see her response.

  She didn’t bite.

  “Of course not. We didn’t even like each other before Ted died.”

  “You’ve been married a long time,” Seley said.

  “Yes. That all seems like a lifetime ago. I guess it was,” she said quietly as she glanced at her watch again. Then she took a deep breath to conjure up more energy. “Anyway, I was at the supermarket buying cranberry sauce, and Big Duff was in Wisconsin, so no, we didn’t kill Ted.”

  “We’ll need to speak with your kids,” Nikki said, knowing they were running out of time.

  “They won’t have anything to say that they haven’t already said. They were little then—five, seven, and nine.”

  “Still, we’ll need contact info.”

  Barbie Duffy huffed a sigh. “They’ve lived their whole lives with this investigation. The children of a murdered cop. Jennifer had to see a therapist off and on for years, she was so traumatized by the aftermath of Ted’s death. Thank God for insurance.”

  “And you had a couple of foster kids living with you at the time?”

  “Yes,” she said coolly. “I’m sure you have their names somewhere. They’re probably in jail or dead.”

  “They were difficult?”

  “They were teenage girls from broken homes with drug-addicted mothers and their mothers’ abusive boyfriends. They had a lot of issues. I sent them back after Ted was killed. I had enough to deal with. I couldn’t cope with their problems, too.”

  “Your neighbor made a comment to us about the girls being”—she looked to Seley—“what’s the word he used?”

  “Tarts.”

  “Tarts.”

  “What neighbor said that?”

  “Donald Nilsen.”

  Barbie Duffy rolled her eyes. “Dirty old man. Maybe he should have spent less time looking in our windows and more time minding his own damn business.”

  “Do you mean that literally?” Seley asked. “He was looking in your windows?”

  “He would complain to Ted about the way the girls dressed. Their shorts were too short. Their skirts were too short. Their tops were too short. He was worried they would tempt his perfect son. It was like living next door to the Taliban. Ted told him to stop staring at the crotches of teenage girls or someone might get the wrong idea and call the cops on him.”

  “How did Nilsen react to that?”

  “He blew a gasket, but he didn’t complain again after that.”

  “What was the son like?”

  “He was quiet. He minded his own business—unlike his father. He mowed our lawn in the summer and shoveled the sidewalk in the winter. He never said anything more than ‘yes, ma’am,’ ‘no, ma’am,’ and ‘thank you, ma’am.’ I found him a little odd, but why wouldn’t he be, with those parents?”

  “Was he ‘distracted’ by the girls?”

  “Not that I ever noticed. He mostly looked at the ground.”

  “Do you know how he died?”

 
“He died? I had no idea. It must have been after we moved away. I remember him giving his condolences at the funeral.”

  “There must have been a thousand people at that funeral,” Nikki remarked.

  “Yes, there were. But I remember because his father wasn’t there. The son and the mother came.”

  “What about Nilsen’s wife?” Nikki asked. “Did you know her?”

  “Not really. I had a job and five kids. I didn’t have time for coffee with the housewife next door. I hardly ever saw her. What difference does it make, anyway?” she asked, glancing at her watch again. “Do you think Susie Homemaker killed Ted?”

  “Just getting a feel for the neighborhood,” Nikki said. “So you didn’t keep in touch with her after she left the husband?”

  “I didn’t even know that she left the husband,” she said, standing up. “Good for her. And speaking of leaving, I have to go. I’m going to be late.”

  “I’ll have more questions,” Nikki said, following her to the front door.

  “I’m sure you will,” she said, opening the door to show them out. “But don’t be surprised if I’m difficult to contact. I’ve moved on with my life. It’s time the police department does, too. What’s done is done.”

  * * *

  “THAT’S AN INTERESTING ATTITUDE SHE HAS,” Nikki said as they got back in the car. “There’s no statute of limitations on murder. Apparently the same can’t be said for Barbie Duffy’s feelings for the former love of her life.”

  “It’s been a quarter of a century,” Seley pointed out. “That’s probably longer than she and her husband even knew each other. I agree, it doesn’t make her seem like the most compassionate person, but she’s had to live through all of it. We haven’t.”