The Bitter Season (7 page)

“Sondra Chamberlain,” Culbertson said. “Fifty-eight years of age, and her husband, Professor Lucien Chamberlain, forever fifty-three. They were just starting to go into rigor when I got here. So I’d say they were probably killed between one
A.M.
and two thirty. Obviously, they died right where they are. You can see what happened to the wife. The husband was bludgeoned, strangled, and stabbed in the back—probably postmortem. Toss-up on cause of death. He took a hellacious beating with the handle end of the nunchucks.”

“Nunchucks?” Kovac repeated.

“Surprised a thief?” Taylor speculated.

Kovac gave him the eye. “How many burglars carry nunchucks around with them?”

“We’ll get to that,” Culbertson said. “Looks like this patio door was the point of entry.”

“No security system?” Taylor asked.

Culbertson shrugged. “Maybe it wasn’t on. My mother is eighty-two and she refuses to turn her alarm on.”

The professor lay facedown, head pointing in the opposite direction of his wife’s, beaten down in his pajamas and bathrobe. Something about that struck Kovac as extra sad. He guessed the professor had probably been a fussy little man who had creases pressed into his pajama bottoms. He had gotten up in the night and put on his bathrobe and slippers to meet the Grim Reaper.

Kovac picked his way around the bodies to find a place he could hunker down and get a better look at the damage done to the man’s head. The left side of the skull had been caved in with terrible force, like a hardboiled egg that had been smashed with a hammer. Shards of bone spiked the exposed brain. The left eyeball hung out of the shattered socket, lolling against the man’s bloody, broken cheek.

Lying on the bloodstained Oriental rug a foot or so from the
dead man’s hand was the apparent murder weapon: wood-handled nunchucks covered in blood, strands of the victim’s salt-and-pepper hair sticking to the ends.

“Ever see anything like this before?” Kovac asked Taylor as he straightened.

“Yeah,” Taylor said quietly. “I have. But not in this country.”

“Looks to me like whoever did this enjoyed himself,” Culbertson said.

“So, we’ve got a sword-wielding maniac running around the city,” Kovac declared. “Great. A fucking wack job.”

“He left his weapons here,” Taylor pointed out.

“I don’t think he brought them to the party,” Culbertson said. “These were weapons of opportunity. Come see.”

They followed a trail of bloody footprints out of the dining room and to a study full of dark furniture and a darker collection. Weapons lined the walls—swords, daggers, knives, Chinese throwing stars, stuff Kovac had seen only in movies. Glass cases displayed iron helmets and painted face masks from ages past. Several of the cases had been shattered, the contents taken.

“Safe to assume our assailant helped himself to the weaponry,” Culbertson said. “It’s a homicidal maniac’s wet dream.”

Kovac put his reading glasses on and took a closer look at the deadly beauty of the weapons: swords impressed with intricate carvings in the handles, etchings on the blades. Small plaques beneath each piece gave a description, a date, and a place of origin.

“So,” Taylor said, “the question is did he know the weapons would be here, or were they a bonus once he got in the house?”

“That’s for you guys to figure out,” Culbertson said. “I’m going to go do my job. I’ve got a bus coming to transport the bodies as soon as you give the go-ahead, Sam.”

“Okay. Thanks, Steve.”

“This one has to be worth a couple of rounds at Patrick’s tonight, don’t you think?”

“At least. You buying?”

“Shit, no. The noob’s buying, right?”

Taylor looked confused. “Why am I buying?”

“Because you’re celebrating your first scene working with me,” Culbertson said on his way out. “Kids these days. No appreciation for tradition.”

Kovac rested his hands on his hips and looked around the study. A couple of desk drawers that had probably been locked had been forced open and rummaged through. Books had been cleared from shelves and lay scattered on the floor. Someone had been looking for a safe, most likely. There were a number of empty spaces in the wall display where only the small plaque beneath described the pieces that had been there.

“So, maybe this mutt came looking to steal specific items,” Kovac speculated. “A collector with a bad attitude? Who would know this stuff is here?”

“Family, friends, colleagues, maybe other collectors. His students, maybe.”

Kovac scratched a hand back through his hair and sighed as he thought about the other recent burglaries in the neighborhood. No violence, the officer had said. No violence, no witnesses. There probably hadn’t been nunchucks or samurai swords at the other houses, either. Sometimes the only difference between a thief and a murderer was opportunity.

Many a killer began his career by accident—in the heat of passion, in a moment of self-defense, in a split-second’s rage when a weapon was within reach. He struck out and killed—and then came the rush of adrenaline, the surge of power as he realized what he’d done. Few things were more intoxicating to a person with no conscience than the omnipotent control over life and death.

Absorbed in that thought, Kovac retraced the killer’s footsteps to the dining room, where the crime scene people were marking evidence and measuring distances. He stood in the doorway
imagining the possible scenario: rushing at the professor with the nunchucks, swinging his arm, crushing the man’s skull. If that was how it had happened, the killer had gone back to the study to get the sword and then had waited for the wife to come looking for her husband.

One death hadn’t been enough. The overkill spoke to frenzy—either a wave of rage or a sick euphoria. The sword that pinned Mrs. Chamberlain to the floor like a bug in a collector’s display case was a statement, an artist’s signature.

“What are you thinking?” Taylor asked.

He was thinking they had better hope someone had hated these people enough to do this terrible thing, because the alternative was a monster on the loose whose thirst for blood was not likely to fade.

“I’m thinking you were right,” he said soberly. “About that feng shui business. They should have hung that mirror over the door before their luck ran out.”

“. . . here in this beautiful,
normally quiet neighborhood, now the apparent scene of a brutal double homicide. While there has been no official statement from the police as to the names of the victims, the home belongs to Professor and Mrs. Lucien Chamberlain.”

“Way to notify the next of kin, asshole,” Nikki muttered at the television on the kitchen counter.

“Who’s an asshole?” R.J. asked.

“You are,” Kyle muttered, helping himself to more bacon.

“Don’t say ‘asshole,’” Nikki corrected halfheartedly.

“You do.”

“I’m the Mother of Dragons. I can use bad language if I want.”

“Can I get a dragon tattoo?”

“When you’re thirty-five. Now shush. I’m trying to listen to this.”

With school canceled because of the treacherous road conditions, the boys had slept in. With Nikki working Cold Case, there was no urgent need for her to go in to the office. She had brought a stack of files from the Duffy case home with her to review, anyway. This was just the kind of scenario she had imagined when she first thought of leaving Homicide: being able to take a snow day with the boys and fix them a big breakfast instead of the usual hastily grabbed bowl of cereal or toaster waffles.

But now, with the local news reporting live for half the morning from the scene of a double murder, she was feeling jittery, wanting
to know more—from inside the yellow tape. She wanted to be in on it.

“Chamberlain is listed on the university’s roster as a professor of East Asian history,” the reporter went on, looking suitably grim. He was standing in the street with the background of an old established, well-off neighborhood crawling with police and crime scene investigators. “Reports of an attack by a sword-wielding assailant are unconfirmed at this point . . .”

“Maybe they were attacked by one of the Knights Templar!” R.J. said excitedly. He jumped from his stool at the kitchen island and began to pretend he was fighting with a sword of his own.

“You’re such a dork,” Kyle commented.

“You’re a nerd.”

“Mom, Master Gracie says he’s getting a new instructor who teaches
escrima.
Can I sign up?”

“Me, too!” R.J. exclaimed.

“What’s
escrima
?”

“Filipino fighting sticks.”

Nikki gave him a look. “Right. That’s all I need: the two of you beating each other with sticks. No.”

“But, Mom—”

She held up a finger to stave off his argument, her eyes fixed on the TV. Kovac and his new partner, Taylor, were in the shot, behind the reporter. They stood in front of a lovely brick house, deep in conversation with Lieutenant Mascherino and Deputy Chief Kasselmann.

The double homicide of a U of M professor and his wife in their own home would bring out the brass and local political muckety-mucks—at least for the first few days of the investigation. Sam would hate that. To his way of thinking, they would be nothing but in the way and underfoot. They served no useful purpose at best and fucked things up at worst. Kovac liked to keep a tight rein on his investigations, and that meant keeping a tight rein on the flow
of information to the media. A well-placed leak to the newsies could be a valuable tool. Information vomited out by a politician with an agenda never failed to make the detectives’ jobs more difficult.

Nikki thought of her own case, and how the media attention could only have helped her. But now the attention of the press and the public would all be on the sensational slaying of a respectable couple in their lovely home, and the long-cold case of Ted Duffy, a Sex Crimes detective shot to death in his backyard twenty-five years ago would literally be yesterday’s news.

She had gotten up early to read more of the Duffy file, and thought about it now as she cleaned up the kitchen. She would start at ground zero, go to the scene and get the feel of the place. Although Duffy’s wife had eventually remarried and moved out of the house where the tragedy took place, Nikki hoped some of the neighbors had remained. Still, twenty-five years was a long time. People moved away, got old, lost their memories, died. There had been nothing significant in any of the neighbors’ statements given at the time. It was doubtful any of them would have much to say about it now, even if they could be found for an interview. Still, Candra Seley was already working on trying to locate Duffy’s family, friends, and neighbors.

According to the weather and traffic reports, the roads would be clear by noon. The bad weather of the night before had given way to a day with a bright sky and warming temperatures, a brief respite until the next system of bleak gray and damp cold rolled in.

By one o’clock the boys were antsy and off to hang out with their friends. Nikki picked Seley up at City Hall, and they headed to Ted Duffy’s old neighborhood.

“I’m so excited to get out of the office, I can’t stand it!” Seley said, looking around like a woman just let out of prison, dark brown eyes bright and wide and a big smile lighting up her oval face. “I’m no good at sitting still.”

“Seems an odd choice then that you work at a computer all day,” Nikki observed.

“Yeah, it’s not my nature,” she confessed on a sigh. “I loved working patrol. That was where I started. That was my thing. Every day is new and different on the streets. But it made my husband a nervous wreck, then Hunter and Brandy came along, and I had to realize my life wasn’t just about me. I worked Special Crimes for a while—Crimes Against Children. I couldn’t take that. I wanted to kill someone every day. Then I went to Community Initiatives.”

“Did you work with Grider there?”

“Well, I didn’t so much work
with
Gene Grider as work
around
him. He probably doesn’t even remember I was there. He’s one of those guys that seems not to see or hear women if he can help it—which was fine by me.”

“I’ve dealt with my share of those over the years,” Nikki said. “I can’t help myself, though. I have to get in their faces. I used to keep a giant dildo in my desk, and I would take it out and smack guys with it when they were trying to shut me out. I’d get it right under their noses and shake it and say ‘Look at that, asshole! I’ve got the biggest dick here, so back off!’”

They both laughed at the mental image.

“Nikki, you’re something else. If you were as tall as me, you would take over the world.”

“Forget that. If I were as tall as you, I wouldn’t have to climb on my kitchen counters to reach the high shelves.”

“That is a definite benefit to being five-eleven.”

“So, how did you end up in Business and Technology?”

“I took a nasty fall off a horse and hurt my back. I had to go on desk duty. They had an opening in B and T, and I’m good with computers.” She made a little shrug and looked out the window. “It’s okay. Rex, my husband, is happy.”

“And what about you?”

“I’m hoping Cold Case gets funded permanently,” she confessed. “It’s the perfect compromise. How about you? You miss Homicide?”

Nikki groaned. “Yes. Even as we speak, my old partner is working the scene of a double murder—respectable couple in a respectable neighborhood, possibly killed by a sword-wielding maniac. I admit it gets my adrenaline running. But, on the other hand, I had a great breakfast with my boys this morning, and I won’t be pulling thirty-six hours straight while they fall into juvenile delinquency from lack of parental interest.”

“This is the place,” Seley said, pointing to a square white two-story house on a block of similar houses.

Nikki parked at the curb, and they got out of the car.

“The property has changed hands four times since the Duffys lived here,” Seley went on. “I called the current owner and warned him we’d be stopping by to have a look. He’s at work. He said to feel free.”

From the front, the place didn’t look much different from the photos taken twenty-five years ago. Someone had added blue shutters. The landscaping had been updated. A newer, taller privacy fence cordoned off the backyard.

They let themselves in through an unlocked gate. The tall fence blocked ground-level views into the yard on two sides. But at the back of the property, a simple post-and-rail fence allowed the homeowners a beautiful view of a wooded park beyond.

The shots that killed Ted Duffy had come from that park, from up the hill or in a tree, judging by the trajectory of the bullets. He was shot at a downward angle with a small-caliber hunting rifle, probably from no more than fifty yards away. The visibility that day had been poor, with intermittent spitting rain mixed with snow. The crime took place late in the day, when darkness would have been gathering. Duffy had been chopping wood at the time. One bullet struck him in the upper back. The second shot hit him in the back of the head as he fell. Despite an extensive search of the area it was believed the shots had come from, no shell casings had been found.

“He was standing about here when he was shot,” Nikki said, spreading her arms.

The stump Duffy had been using as he split firewood was gone. Nikki had used the garage windows to estimate the spot based on her memory from the crime scene photos.

“Come stand here,” she said to Seley. “He was about your height, a couple of inches taller.”

Seley took her place on the spot, her back to the woods. Nikki stepped back a few feet, imagining where the first bullet would have struck Duffy, and then looked toward the park, up the wooded slope. There would have been few people in the park at that time of day, certainly not back here, where there were no trails and nothing to see but the backside of an ordinary neighborhood.

This was deer hunting season, but there was no hunting allowed within city limits; nor were rifles allowed for hunting deer in this part of the state anyway. That wasn’t to say no one in the city owned rifles. Plenty of Minnesotans took them across the St. Croix River to hunt in Wisconsin. But Ted Duffy, a man chopping wood in his backyard, had not been mistaken for a deer. He had been deliberately killed. Someone had come hunting him.

Duffy’s three children, ages five to nine, had been in the house at the time, along with a thirteen-year-old foster child. Two days before Thanksgiving, his wife, Barbara, had been grocery shopping. A second foster child had been at a school event.

“Sad way to go,” Seley said. “Back here in the dark, in the rain, all alone.”

“As far as I’ve seen, they’re all sad ways to go,” Nikki said.

“My grandmother passed away in her own home surrounded by people who loved her. That’s how I want to go.”

“I want to go in my sleep,” Nikki said, “dreaming that I’m having wild hot sex with Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson.”

“Hey there!” a man’s voice called out sharply. “What are you doing back there?”

Nikki looked around, then up and next door. A man, heavyset, red-faced, salt-and-pepper crew cut, leaned out a second-story window. She put him in his late sixties.

“Mr. Nilsen!” Seley called, stepping out of her role as substitute Duffy. “I’m Sergeant Seley! We spoke on the phone earlier today. This is Sergeant Liska.”

He looked less than impressed.

“Can we come over and have a word with you, Mr. Nilsen?” Nikki asked.

He didn’t look thrilled about that, either. He pulled his head inside and shut the window.

“Pleasant sort,” Nikki remarked, starting for the gate.

“He’s the only neighbor I found who was living here at the time of the murder,” Seley said as they left the backyard and headed next door. “He was home, but says he didn’t see anything, and he doesn’t see why he should have to talk to us.”

Nikki rang Nilsen’s doorbell.

“I didn’t see anything,” the old man said irritably as he opened the door. “I’ve told you people that from the get-go.”

“Can we come in for a few minutes?” Nikki asked, pressing forward. He stepped back automatically. “I’d like to ask you a few questions about what was going on around here at the time. Get your general impressions. I’m sure living here—how many years?—makes you the expert on this neighborhood.”

“I’ve lived in this house thirty-seven years,” he said.

“That’s impressive.”

“Why?” he demanded. “Because I’m too damn stubborn to move? I’ll stay in this house ’til the day I die. I don’t care what anyone thinks.”

He let them into the entryway and then stood with his arms crossed over his medicine ball belly, barring them from going any farther into his living room, where the television was still playing coverage from the scene of Kovac’s double homicide.

The house smelled of mothballs, old man, and boiled kielbasa sausage. A deer’s head stared at them from the wall above the electric fireplace on the far side of the living room.

“I’ll see some ID,” Nilsen snapped.

Each produced her identification. Nilsen looked through smudged reading glasses and sniffed in disapproval. “I remember when women were meter maids.”

“Yeah? Now they let us have guns. Crazy, huh?” Nikki said. “How well did you know the Duffy family?”

He scowled harder. “I’ve answered all these damned questions a hundred times.”

“Well, it’s all new to me. I have to investigate this case as if it happened yesterday. So, please bear with me because I haven’t heard your answers before, Mr. Nilsen.”

“The police don’t keep records of these things?”

“How well did you know the Duffy family?” she asked again.

“As well as I cared to.”

“You didn’t like them?”

“Too many kids, too little discipline, too much noise. You would have thought they were Italian.”

“Did you know Ted Duffy personally?”

“I knew him to say hello. I didn’t care for him. He let his wife run the show. But he was a decorated police officer. He worked hard. I had to respect him for that. Now, if the wife had stayed home and taken charge of those kids—but no, she had to have her little job on the side . . .”

“Mrs. Duffy was an emergency room nurse,” Seley pointed out.

Nilsen just looked at her, underwhelmed by the excuse. “She had three small children. She should have been home with them, but he didn’t make enough money, she said. Then she brought those foster kids in for babysitters. That was clever, I suppose, if they hadn’t been a couple of little tarts.”