The Bitter Season (27 page)

“You’ve got your search warrant,”
Mascherino said. “Or, more accurately, I’ve got your warrant. Because of the situation between you and Mr. Nilsen, Chris Logan and I agreed it would be best from a legal perspective if I went with you on this.”

Nikki nodded, itching to go. “I’m cool with that. You, me, Seley, and two uniforms. Let’s do it.”

“Not so fast,” the lieutenant said, stopping Nikki mid-turn as she went to exit the office. “We can search for the rifle and for ammunition for the rifle, and that’s all. That’s the scope of the warrant.”

“I can live with that. All I want is the gun. Where’s Nilsen right now?”

“He’s still in custody, but he won’t be staying long.”

“Then let’s get on it so we can get this accomplished without him ranting and raving in the background,” Nikki said. “The sooner we’re at it, the sooner we’re done. I’d like to get home before my boys go to bed.”

“Are they home alone?” Mascherino asked as they left the office.

“God, no. Maybe I’ll leave them unsupervised when they’re out of college,” Nikki said. “I’m renting out the other half of my duplex to a cousin of mine who’s going through a divorce. He’s a private tutor. He works right there. His clients come to him. He’s happy to check on the boys and hang out with them if I’m hung up on a case. The kids love him.”

She had always been clever and lucky arranging backup and babysitters for the boys. Her last tenant had been a graphic designer who worked from home. Marysue Zaytoun had become a great friend as well. Nikki had hated to see her go, when she got married and moved on with her life. Then Cousin Matt announced the end of his marriage, and the other side of the Liska duplex seemed the perfect solution for all concerned.

“I had hoped I wouldn’t have to call on him much with the move to Cold Case,” Nikki said. “But here I am.”

Mascherino gave her a look, a knowing smile turning her lips. “If you wanted a nine-to-five, you wouldn’t have put on a badge.”

“I know.”

“We didn’t pick an easy ladder to climb, but that’s what makes us who we are.”

“You have kids, too.”

“A boy and a girl. They’re grown, with kids of their own now.”

“So, they didn’t grow up to be serial killers,” Nikki said. “They’re not racking up hours on the therapist’s couch because their mom is a cop.”

“They turned out just fine,” the lieutenant said. “Yours will, too. The fact that you worry about it tells me that much.”

“I don’t know,” Nikki said, scraping together a bit of humor. “I still think Kyle and R.J. will exact their revenge on me when I’m old and decrepit.”

“Oh, they won’t wait that long,” Mascherino said as they went out the doors of City Hall and into the damp cold. “They’ll sic their toddlers on you.”

They met Seley at the car and hit the road once more for Donald Nilsen’s neighborhood. The rain had dissipated into a thick mist that slicked the windshield on the outside as the defroster struggled to clear the fog on the inside of the glass.

A radio car was waiting at the curb when they arrived. Nikki looked next door, at the house the Duffys had lived in, catching a glimpse
of Bruce Larson as he stood in the front room of the house with a coffee mug in one hand, gesturing with the other as he spoke and laughed with someone out of sight. He would be thrilled to know the police were next door, setting the stage for a fresh episode of
Dateline.

They went into the Nilsen house, leaving one of the uniformed officers to stand guard at the front door. The other paired with Seley to begin the search of the main level. Nikki and Mascherino climbed the stairs to the second floor. They went from room to room, methodically searching closets and drawers, looking under beds and behind dressers—anywhere that could conceivably hide a small rifle or a box of bullets.

There were three bedrooms and a bath on the second floor. Donald Nilsen’s bedroom looked just as it probably had when Mrs. Nilsen was in residence: lace curtains and a floral bedspread, wall-to-wall carpeting so old the traffic patterns were worn like trails in the dingy beige pile. Nilsen had made a halfhearted attempt to make the bed, pulling the bedspread up and over the lumpy shapes of pillows. A few articles of clothing were draped over a chair, but other than that, the room was relatively neat. The furniture was a matching suite that had probably been purchased in a store with the word
Mart
or
Barn
in the name—a dresser with a mirror attached, a chest of drawers, a pair of nightstands, a four-poster bed, all made of inexpensive wood stained to resemble mahogany.

Nikki went to Mrs. Nilsen’s dresser. Her perfume bottles still sat on a mirrored tray. An assortment of inexpensive jewelry boxes clustered together on the far right, a few pieces of costume jewelry scattered near them. A small dish held odd buttons, a thimble, a needle and thread.

It looked as if Donald Nilsen hadn’t touched any of it in twenty-five years. Nikki wondered if he had left it in anticipation of his wife’s return or out of apathy for the loss of her. Either way, it struck her as odd. She wouldn’t have pegged him for a sentimental
man. She would have expected him to get rid of this stuff, to clear out all traces of the woman who had allegedly left him. But the dresser’s drawers still held a woman’s lingerie and neat stacks of sweaters—all of it smelling vaguely stale, as if the drawers had not been opened, their contents left untouched for all that time.

“Not under the bed,” Mascherino said.

Nikki glanced over at her. “The rifle or the wife?”

“Neither.”

“When Speed moved out of our house, I threw half his stuff out on the lawn and the other half in the trash. I couldn’t clean out our bedroom fast enough,” she said. “This guy just pretends nothing is different.”

“Maybe it’s just easier that way.”

“It’s making my skin crawl. If she left him, she didn’t take much with her. The drawers are full, the closet has women’s clothing in it.”

“Add another unsolved mystery to your stack of cases,” the lieutenant said.

“He never even reported her missing,” Nikki said. “No one did.”

They moved from the master bedroom to a guest room Nikki couldn’t imagine had ever been used. Who would go out of their way to visit Donald Nilsen? He was no one’s kindly uncle. The bed was piled with old clothes. Nilsen’s hunting coats and caps crowded the closet, but this was not where he kept his guns.

The third bedroom had belonged to Jeremy Nilsen. Just like his wife’s portion of the master, Donald Nilsen had left this room just as it was the day his son left for basic training. A thick layer of dust coated the dresser. The bed was neatly made. A modest collection of sports awards was proudly displayed on a little shelf. A poster of Bruce Lee decorated one wall, Bruce Springsteen another.

Nikki felt a pang of sympathy. It couldn’t have been easy to be the son of Donald Nilsen, a man hated by the entire neighborhood. It would have been especially hard for a quiet boy with nice
manners, as Jeremy had been described. She thought of her own quiet boy, Kyle, always internally at odds with his brash and boisterous father. She wondered if Jeremy’s mother had given him the sort of refuge a sensitive boy needed, or if she had been too overwhelmed by her husband to try.

Mascherino checked out the closet. Nikki searched through the dresser drawers. A small desk occupied one corner of the room, with pens and pencils in a Minnesota Twins cup. A U of M pennant was tacked to the bulletin board on the wall above. There was nothing but dust bunnies under the twin bed.

Knowing her own son, and his penchant for secreting things away, she slipped a hand between the mattress and box spring, her fingertips brushing across papers. No, she thought, not paper. Something slicker. Half expecting to find pornography, she lifted the mattress to find a small glimpse of Jeremy Nilsen’s private life: two photographs. A chill ran through her.

“We’re looking for a gun and bullets,” Mascherino reminded her. “That’s not a gun.”

“Isn’t it?” Nikki murmured, picking the pictures up with one hand and lowering the mattress back into place with the other.

The two photos were of a slender teenage girl with long brown hair, smiling shyly for the camera of a school photographer; a pretty girl with sad eyes that had seen too much in her short life. Nikki would have put her at about sixteen.

“Do you know who she is?” the lieutenant asked.

“Yes.”

The friend who wasn’t really a friend.

The girl next door.

Angie Jeager . . . Evi Burke.

A shriek of brakes and tires skidding on wet pavement broke Nikki’s concentration. Mascherino went to the window that looked out on the street as a car door slammed.

“Here we go,” the lieutenant muttered, her game face firmly in
place as she turned and started for the door. She looked at Nikki. “Let me handle him.”

“I need to ask him about these pictures.”

“That can wait.”

They hustled down the stairs, a commotion on the front steps of the house rising to nearly drown out their footfalls. Donald Nilsen had been released.

“. . . my house, and I’ll damn well go inside!”

“I’m sorry, sir, I can’t let you go in while the search is under way—”

“I’ll have your badge! I’m suing this department and everyone to do with this! This is an outrage! I’m a law-abiding taxpayer. You can’t just come into my house—”

“I have a valid warrant, signed by a judge,” Mascherino said firmly as she stepped into the fray. “This has all been explained to you thoroughly, Mr. Nilsen. You will not be allowed inside the house while the search is being conducted, so you might as well calm down and sit down out there, or go sit in your car—”

“Mr. Nilsen would like to contest the validity of the search warrant,” Nilsen’s attorney said, out of breath as he arrived at the front steps. He looked to be about Nilsen’s vintage, but twice his girth, a morbidly obese man with a neck so large he couldn’t button the top two buttons of his shirt.

“I’m sure Mr. Nilsen would like a lot of things,” Mascherino said. “But he won’t get that one.”

Nilsen’s face was purple. Spittle gathered at the corners of his mouth like a rabid dog as he shouted at her. “I want the name of your captain! I’ll put an end to your career!”

Mascherino stood firm, the warrant in her purple-gloved hand, her Mother Superior posture ramrod straight. “I’ll put an end to your freedom for the evening, Mr. Nilsen,” she said. “If you insist on trying to interfere with the execution of this warrant, I’ll have
this officer read you your rights and take you straight back downtown. Do you understand me?”

Nilsen sputtered, shrugging off the hand his attorney tried to lay on his shoulder. He peered over the top of Mascherino’s head, his gaze fixing on Nikki.

“That one has it in for me,” he said. “She’s probably in there planting evidence.”

“She’s doing no such thing,” Mascherino said.

Nikki let his insult roll off. He was a man in a panic. His insular little world was being touched and handled by strangers, his past being dug up like a garden that had been left to the weeds for twenty-five years. Like a cornered animal, he was going to lash out any way he could.

“I’ll come out of the house if that makes you feel any better, Mr. Nilsen,” she offered calmly, surreptitiously slipping the two photographs she had found into her coat pocket.

Nilsen looked at Mascherino. “I don’t want that little bitch in my house.”

“It’s okay, LT,” Nikki said, slipping past her superior. “I’ll wait outside. It’s fine.”

The lieutenant gave her a flat look, her suspicion carefully hidden. Nilsen took a grudging half step to the side to let her out and then followed her down the steps and onto the sidewalk. Mascherino went back to the search, and the uniformed officer resumed his post at the door.

“I’m sure you’ll find this hard to believe,” Nikki said as Nilsen and his attorney descended from the porch. “But I’m very good at my job, Mr. Nilsen. My only focus is solving the crime. I’ll do whatever I need to do to make that happen. If that means I wait out here so the search can be done in an expedient manner, then I wait out here.”

He walked past her without so much as acknowledging that she had spoken.

Nikki stood with her hands in her pockets, shoulders hunched against the damp cold, watching while Nilsen dispatched his attorney. The two men stood arguing at the nose of a black Lincoln parked at the curb. The lawyer finally threw his hands up, got in the car, and drove away.

Nilsen came back up the sidewalk, stopping just short of the steps and glaring up at the officer blocking the way into his home. He was breathing hard from aggravation, his face mottled red. He didn’t want them in his house. There had to be a good reason for that.

Nikki stood on the lawn just a few feet from him, the damp soaking into her shoes. Hands in her coat pockets, she fingered the photographs of Angie Jeager. Just how angry would Donald Nilsen have been to know that his son had a crush on the tart next door?

“Your son, Jeremy, went to school with the Duffys’ foster daughters, didn’t he?”

Nilsen ignored her. She could see his pulse in a big vein on the side of his neck.

“Jennifer, the oldest Duffy girl, told me your son and Angie Jeager were friends. That must have been awkward, considering the names you called those girls.”

“That’s a lie,” he snapped, unable to leave the bait alone.

“Really?” Nikki said. “Why would she lie about something like that?”

He didn’t answer. He shook a finger at the house. “If there’s one thing missing out of that house, I’ll sue.”

“We’re only looking for the .243 and ammunition for it. We don’t have any interest in the rest of your things, though I find it strange that your wife left so much behind when she took off. She must have been in some big hurry.”

Nilsen glared at her, directing his finger her way. “If you touched her things—”

Nikki held a hand up. “I know, I know, you’ll sue,” she said on a long sigh. “So, did Jeremy try to keep it a secret that he was seeing Angie? Or was he one of those kids that just wanted something to throw in your face?”