The Bitter Season (26 page)

“Thank you.”

Evi Burke followed them to the front door and locked it behind them. As they hustled through the drizzle to the car, a police cruiser rolled slowly past.

“Filthy weather,” Nikki muttered, starting the car and turning on the defrosters.

“Not a pretty picture of the Duffy family,” Seley said. “They were coming apart at the seams. I’d love to know where Barbie was going every time she left those kids alone with her personal house slaves.”

“Yeah, and I’d like to know what Ted Duffy threatened Donald Nilsen with.”

“Something worth killing over?”

Nikki put the car in gear and pulled away from the curb. “Let’s go see if we can find out.”

Evi closed the door
and turned the locks. She was trembling, and angry with herself for it. It had been so many years since she’d talked about that time in her life. Angie Jeager was someone she used to know, not someone she wanted to acknowledge still lived inside her. She had to think of it that way—that that girl was someone different from the girl who had lived on the streets, and the girl who had done terrible things to survive on the streets was not the young woman who had finished college or the woman she was today. She tried to keep each version of herself in its own box, and kept all the boxes closed and locked as well as she could manage.

Two detectives had just pried the lid off one box and allowed the contents to spill out.

Evi knew from experience that every version of herself would come crawling out tonight in her dreams. She would see them, one looking accusingly at the next, all of them stalking the woman she had fought to become, doing their best to tear her down. Who did she think she was, having a nice life? Why did she think she deserved to succeed? She could call herself whatever she wanted, but beneath the façade of her too-perfect life she was still just Evangeline Grace Jeager, the abused, abandoned daughter of a drug addict. No matter what she did with her life, she couldn’t change what had been done to her life. She couldn’t change who she had been or the things she had done to save herself.

All those other versions of her had dreamed of the life she had now, and had seen it as a life not meant to be, nothing but the foolish wish of a lonely child. Now she had that life, and she did her best every day to believe it was real, that she wouldn’t wake up as Angie Jeager, living in a filthy hotel room, smoking dope to dull the pain of her reality.

She went to the kitchen and busied herself cleaning up. She had just started the supper dishes when the doorbell had rung. Now she had to drain the cold water and start over. As the sink filled and the soap bubbled up, she stared out the window at the black emptiness of the backyard.

The memories rolled through her mind. She could see the chaos of the Duffy house—toys everywhere, the piles of half-read newspapers, the stacks of mail, the dirty dishes in the kitchen, the piles of dirty clothes in the laundry area in the basement.

The smell of the basement came back to her with the memory: vaguely musty and moldy. It was always just a little damp down there. Most of the basement was unfinished and dark. With the exception of the finished laundry/workbench area, the only light in the rest of the space was supplied by a couple of bare-bulb fixtures screwed to the floor joists overhead.

She had always hated going down there. She didn’t do well in dark, creepy places where early memories could crawl out of the corners like snakes on the floor.

She had spent three days in a dirty old basement when she was little more than Mia’s age, with nothing to eat but junk food and soda her mother had left in a grocery bag, and only some blankets and pillows, and her dolls for comfort. Meanwhile, her mother had partied upstairs. Three days of drugs so she could do what she had to do to make enough money to pay the rent. Evi had stayed in the basement, trying not to cry loud enough for anyone to come looking for her. The men who came to see her mother frightened her more than the dark and the bogeyman.

When Anna Jeager finally came off her high and sobered up enough to realize what she had done, she spent two hours sobbing and apologizing, holding Evi so tight she could hardly breathe. When the emotion subsided, her mother had calmly called Child Services to report herself, and then locked herself in the bathroom and tried to slit her own wrists, not the first of many suicide attempts.

Evi suffered through that memory every time she went into the Duffy basement to do their laundry, going down the old stairs into the dim maze of open stud walls dividing the space into potential rooms. Only the area with the laundry and Mr. Duffy’s workbench was finished and well lit, a strange oasis in the dank and dark, like a stage set for a play.

Some nights, Mr. Duffy would come downstairs to sit at his workbench and clean his guns, which unnerved her. Growing up, she had learned early on not to trust men, and most especially not to trust men who drank. She would watch him from the corner of her eye as she rushed to do her work. He would sit at his workbench ten feet away, slowly taking a gun apart, carefully cleaning each piece as he smoked a cigarette and sipped at a glass of whiskey while old rock music played on the radio.

He had probably been handsome when he was younger, Evi thought at the time—which now seemed ridiculous to her as she stood in her kitchen washing dishes. She was older now than Ted Duffy was at the time of his death. He had been in his late thirties, but he looked older, harder, worn out by his life. Gray threaded through his black hair. Lines dug deep around his mouth and across his forehead.

“I’m just trying to escape,” he said one night a month or so after she had moved in. “I’m not here to scare you.”

“I’m not scared,” she said, too quickly.

He gave her a look. “You realize I get paid to know when people are lying, right?”

He smiled a little to himself when she didn’t answer. His eyes were blue and sad behind the amusement. He had seen a lot, she supposed, doing what he did. He knew all about women like her mother. He knew all about girls like her.

“We’re all just inmates, sweetheart,” he said, taking a sip of his whiskey. “Trying to make it through our stretch.”

She folded a T-shirt on the counter and set it aside. She would have taken the clothes upstairs to fold, but Mrs. Duffy got mad when the clothes were wrinkled from being thrown in the basket warm from the dryer.

“You could just leave,” she said. “If you don’t want to be here.”

She didn’t mean the basement. She had seen and felt the tension between him and his wife. She had heard the way Mrs. Duffy spoke to him, always critical, usually angry. He shot back with sarcasm. They were like snipers in a street war. Full-on battles were loud and nasty. But more often than not, he disengaged and stormed off to his office or to the backyard, where he chopped wood with vicious intent.

“Could I?” He lit a fresh cigarette and blew the smoke up at the ceiling. “Naw . . . You can run from your problems, but you can’t run from yourself. I just try to escape for a while. In here,” he said, tapping a finger to his temple. “Down here,” he said, gesturing to the half-finished space around them.

The basement was one of the ongoing fights between him and his wife. Barbie wanted the space finished with a big family room, an out-of-her-hair place to corral the kids and their friends. So far, all that had been finished was this area. “So far” had been going on for several years. But if the space remained unfinished, it could remain Ted Duffy’s refuge. If he finished the space, it became something else.

“You know that’s what your mom’s doing when she takes drugs, right?” he said. “She’s trying to escape. She can’t deal with the reality of her life, and so she tries to escape. But we can’t escape who we are. That’s the thing. We can’t ever really escape. We can just go to the basement for a while.”

“Do you know my mom?” she asked cautiously, watching him from under her lashes as she folded another T-shirt.

“No.” He picked a fleck of tobacco off his tongue and flicked it away. “I know a hundred women like your mom,” he said, his voice tired and rough with a rasp of liquor and smoke. “And a thousand men like me.

“We’re a cautionary tale,” he said with a sarcastic half smile. He lifted his glass in a small toast, then tossed back the last of his drink. “Find something to do with your life that doesn’t make you hate the world, Evangeline.”

She had, but not before she had seen the worst the world had to offer. Not before she hated the world and everyone in it—herself most of all.

She wasn’t afraid of Ted Duffy after that night. She just felt sorry for him. He was a sad man with a sad life who, in the end, died a sad death.

The water in the sink had gone cold again.

Evi pulled the drain plug and turned away, grabbing a towel to dry her hands. The weight of her past had exhausted her. She went and sat down in the dining room, elbows on the table, her head in her hands. That past seemed so long ago—three lifetimes at least. But one knock on the door, and here it was again, twenty-five years later, like it was yesterday.

She picked up the business card the detective had left on the table and stared at the name of the woman who had pried loose the hinges of that box in her memory, setting all those faces free in her mind.

SERGEANT NIKKI LISKA, DETECTIVE

CRIMINAL INVESTIGATIVE DIVISION, HOMICIDE

Twenty-five years later someone had finally come to ask her what she knew about the death of Ted Duffy.

Evi closed her eyes against the tumult of memories and emotions, and thought,
Everything
.

And when she opened her eyes and looked around at the life she had fought so hard to get, she knew she would do everything in her power to keep her perfect present from being tainted by a past she couldn’t change.

“Diana Chamberlain did twenty-eight days
at Rising Wings a year ago,” Tippen announced. “The straight and narrow is hard to walk when you’re high on cocaine.”

“There’s no arrest on her record from last year,” Taylor said, looking disturbed that he might have missed something. He pulled a file from the stack on the table and started flipping through the pages.

“That’s because there was no arrest.”

“She went voluntarily?” Taylor asked with disbelief. “Was she hot for one of the counselors?”

“Only the ones with penises. Substances are not her only addiction,” Tippen said. “She was working as a research assistant for one of her father’s cronies that summer while Dad was off communing with the Shaolin monks in the Songshang Mountains of China. She came to work high one day. He called her on it. She begged him not to tell her father. He said only if she went to rehab.”

“Who volunteered all this information?” Kovac asked, digging a fork into a carton of Mongolian beef. He felt slightly more human after a couple of hours of sleep, a shower, and a fresh shirt.

“She listed the professor as a contact on the paperwork the rehab administrator wouldn’t hand over. I have an uncanny ability to read upside down, you know. One of my many hidden talents.”

“Most of which should remain hidden,” Kovac remarked. “Did you talk to the professor?”

“Professor Roland Landers,” Elwood said, sniffing the aromas as he perused the open cartons on the table. “He’s writing a biography of Millard Fillmore. The girl was supposed to be helping gather and organize his research.”

“Jesus,” Kovac grumbled. “I’d be doing cocaine, too.”

“Fillmore’s wife, Abigail, had the first bathtub with running water installed in the White House.”

“Fascinating.”

“Landers was happy to fill us in,” Tippen said. “With Professor Chamberlain dead, he didn’t feel any need to be loyal to the daughter.”

“So the bottom line here is that Diana Chamberlain could possibly know Gordon Krauss,” Taylor said. “You searched his room?”

“No ninja weapons, no samurai swords, no bloody clothing. He did have about twenty-five hundred dollars in a sock stuffed into the toe of a boot, and half a dozen different IDs—none of which belong to a Gordon Krauss,” he said. “He could be James Gilliam. He could be Clyde Dodson. He could be Jeremy Nilsen—”

“So we don’t even know who this guy really is.”

“We lifted fingerprints from the room,” Elwood said. “Hopefully he’s in the system.”

“If he’s a vet, he’s in the system,” Taylor said.

“There’s probably a better chance of him being a criminal than being a veteran,” Kovac said. “And if Diana knows this guy, then there’s a connection through her for Sato or the brother, or any combination of all of them to hire this mutt as a hitman. They all benefit one way or another from Lucien Chamberlain’s death.”

“But we don’t know that Diana knew Krauss was working for Handy Dandy, or that she knew anything about her mother calling Handy Dandy to do the repairs. That could be a coincidence,” Taylor said.

Tippen and Elwood winced and howled like they were about to witness a car crash in an action movie.

“There’s no such thing as coincidence,” Kovac growled. “Never,
never
overlook anything in an investigation based on the assumption that it might be a coincidence. Assume every person of interest is, deep down, stinking rotten to the core,” he said, stabbing his fork in the air for emphasis. “And always believe they all have the potential to be in cahoots with one another.”

“Yes, sir,” Taylor said.

Kovac gave him the stink eye, in case he was being a smart-ass. “What did you come up with in the phone records?”

Taylor went to a large portable dry-erase board he had filled with columns—dates, times, names—all in meticulous printing with a different color marker for each person.

“Starting Sunday night we have multiple calls from the Chamberlain landline to Diana’s cell phone. None of them lasts longer than thirty seconds.”

“Straight to voice mail,” Tippen ventured.

“They had the big blowout at dinner,” Kovac said. “That’s probably Mom trying to connect, maybe trying to mend fences.”

“There’s one longer call to Charlie’s cell.”

“Mom crying on the kid’s shoulder,” Kovac speculated. “He’s had to function as the adult in the family all along, watching out for his sister, keeping the peace between the parents.”

“Charlie calls Diana. Again, it doesn’t look like she probably answered,” Taylor said. “They connect Monday at twelve seventeen
P.M.
and speak for forty-three minutes. Charlie then calls the professor’s cell number, and they speak for eight minutes. It looks like Mrs. Chamberlain tries throughout the day to get through to Diana, but she also calls the number for Handy Dandy Home Services at one-o-seven in the afternoon, and that call lasts twelve minutes.”

“Where the hell are you? Why haven’t you fixed the whatever? Get your worthless asses over here and blah, blah, blah,” Kovac
said. He looked to Elwood and Tippen again. “What about the other handyman? Verzano?”

“We’ve got nothing on him other than the fact that he’s been in the Chamberlains’ house, and that the professor wasn’t happy with the job,” Tippen said.

“He denies any involvement. He says he doesn’t know where Krauss is, that he doesn’t hang out with the guy, that he’s worked with him only a few times,” Elwood added.

“He did hint that he thought Krauss was a bit of a twitch,” Tippen added.

“Oh yeah, sure,” Kovac grumbled. “The missing guy is conveniently the twitch.”

“We took his prints,” Elwood said. “He objected to that, citing his Third Amendment rights.”

Kovac rolled his eyes. “A freaking constitutional scholar.”

“He seemed confused when I explained to him that our taking his fingerprints for elimination purposes had nothing to do with the quartering of soldiers in private homes.”

Elwood chose a carton of stir-fried vegetables and chopsticks and sat down to eat, his brow furrowed beneath the short brim of his porkpie hat. “He could have theoretically made a Fourth Amendment argument. He would have lost, of course, but still . . .” He sighed. “I find it deeply disturbing that the average citizen isn’t better informed.”

“The average citizen knows more about Kim Kardashian’s ass than the Constitution,” Tippen cracked. “For that matter, half the politicians running for president know more about Kim Kardashian’s ass than the Constitution.”

“Can we discuss the decline of civilization later?” Kovac asked. “You got his prints, and . . . ?”

“They’re being processed now. His prints might legitimately be in the kitchen of the Chamberlain house,” Tippen said. “But they won’t legitimately be in the professor’s study or in the dining room.”

Kovac looked to Taylor again. “Go on.”

“There are no calls from Diana to Rising Wings, or from Diana, Sato, or Charlie to Handy Dandy or to Dan Franken or Gary Verzano,” Taylor said. “There are still a couple of numbers from Diana’s phone, and from Sato’s phone, I’ve got to run down.

“This doesn’t show the professor’s call to his attorney or the call to the insurance agent regarding a new appraisal of his collection,” he went on. “He probably made the calls from his office phone. We can get those records if need be, but because it’s the university, there’s extra red tape.”

“Did you speak to Forrest Foster?” Kovac asked.

“Yes. He had no idea Chamberlain was planning to give the collection to the university. They hadn’t spoken about it. But he did say Chamberlain made a cryptic remark the day before about having an announcement to make at the meeting on Wednesday morning. It didn’t mean anything to Foster at the time.”

“Yeah,” Kovac nodded. “Chamberlain made that decision during or after the fight at dinner Sunday. That’s my guess. He was getting set to put himself in the catbird seat for that promotion. Was there any indication of communication between Chamberlain and the daughter or between Chamberlain and Sato?”

“No. None. There were calls between Diana and Sato, but neither of them contacted or were contacted by Lucien Chamberlain.”

“Since we can only speculate as to the contents of any of these conversations, what else is interesting here?” Tippen asked. “Is there anything odd or out of place?”

“Yes,” Taylor said, tapping his finger beside a call noted in pink marker. “Sondra Chamberlain didn’t use her cell phone at all from Sunday evening until Tuesday evening, when she called Charlie. He told us she’d left a message for him, which he didn’t listen to until the next day, after his parents had already been killed.”

Tippen shrugged. “So?”

“So that’s the anomaly,” Taylor said. “If she made all her other
calls in that time period from the landline—including a call to Diana just minutes
after
the call to Charlie—why did she call Charlie on her cell?”

“Maybe she’d misplaced the phone and had just found it again,” Elwood offered. “My mother has never gotten the hang of having a cell phone. She loses it, she forgets to charge it.”

“Maybe. But why switch back to the landline right after?” Taylor shrugged. “I don’t know what it means. It’s just the odd thing. Looking back on the rest of the month, she made or received a few calls a day on the cell. There were no long gaps with her not using the phone.”

“Do you think the kid lied about the call?” Kovac asked. “Why would he? I mean, there it is right there.”

“I don’t know. He didn’t have to say anything about it at all, so there wouldn’t seem to be a point to lying about it. And he seemed genuinely upset about not having taken the call,” Taylor said. “That just makes it stick out all the more.”

Tippen’s cell phone rang. He pulled it from his pocket and stepped away. Kovac watched him, taking another bite of his Mongolian beef and chewing slowly.

“Dan Franken will have to change the name of his business to Handy Dandy Home Invasion,” Tippen said as he ended the call. “Greg Verzano’s prints were on Lucien Chamberlain’s desk,
and
Mr. Verzano has a record.”