The Bitter Season

Also by Tami Hoag

N
OVELS

Cold Cold Heart

The 9th Girl

Down the Darkest Road

Secrets to the Grave

Deeper Than the Dead

The Alibi Man

Prior Bad Acts

Kill the Messenger

Dark Horse

Dust to Dust

Ashes to Ashes

A Thin Dark Line

Guilty as Sin

Night Sins

Dark Paradise

Cry Wolf

Still Waters

Lucky’s Lady

Sarah’s Sin

Magic

S
HORT
W
ORKS

The 1st Victim

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LIBRARY OF C
ONGRESS CATALOGING-I
N-PUBLICATION DATA

Names: Hoag, Tami, author.

Title: The bitter season / Tami Hoag.

Description: First edition. | New York : Dutton, [2016] | Series: Kovac and Liska | Description based on print version record and CIP data provided by publisher; resource not viewed.

Identifiers: LCCN 2015041131 (print) | LCCN 2015040462 (ebook) | ISBN 9780698190832 (ebook) | ISBN 9780525954552 (hardcover)

Subjects: LCSH: Police—Minnesota—Minneapolis—Fiction. | Cold cases (Criminal investigation)—Fiction. | Murder—Investigation—Fiction. | BISAC: FICTION / Mystery & Detective / Police Procedural. | FICTION / Suspense. | GSAFD: Mystery fiction. | Suspense fiction.

Classification: LCC PS3558.O333 (print) | LCC PS3558.O333 B58 2016 (ebook) | DDC 813/.54—dc23

LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015041131

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

November

Minneapolis, MN

Twenty-five years ago

Ted Duffy loved to swing the axe.
He loved the motion—pulling back, stretching his body taut like a crossbow, then releasing the power in his muscles. He probably put more into it than was necessary to get the job done. He didn’t care. This was his workout, his therapy, his outlet for the toxic emotions that built up inside him all week.

Swing, crack! Swing, crack!

There was a rhythm to it he found soothing, and a violence he found satisfying.

Day in and day out he dealt with people he would sooner have sent to hell: the dregs of society, sickos and perverts. The things he’d seen would have made the average citizen vomit and given them nightmares. He lived in a horror story, fighting a losing battle with no end in sight.

He’d been working Sex Crimes for seven years now. His initial efforts to remain detached from the grime of it had gradually worn him out. His plan to do a brief turn in the unit and then use it as a springboard to a more prestigious position in another department had eventually crumbled and collapsed in on itself.

Turned out he was damned good at the job that sucked him into the filthy gutter of human depravity. And the longer he did it, the better he became. And the better he became, the harder it was to escape. The harder it was to escape, the bigger the stain on the very fabric of his soul. The deeper the stain soaked in, the greater his understanding of the minds of the predators he hunted. The greater his understanding, the more his idealistic self was chipped away, the more the filth soaked into him until the only thing he recognized of his original self was the face in the mirror every morning—and even that was eroding.

He had always been a good-looking guy, with chiseled features and smooth skin and a thick head of jet-black hair. The face that stared back at him these days as he shaved had aged twice as fast in half as much time as his twin brother’s. Every day, the lines seemed deeper, the eyes emptier, the hair thinner and grayer. He was becoming something he didn’t want to recognize, inside and out.

So he chopped wood on the stump of an elm tree out behind his house.

Swing, crack! Swing, crack!

He lived in an older neighborhood of square two-story clapboard houses with front porches that had mostly been closed in against the brutal Minnesota winters, and yards separated by tall, weathered privacy fences. His property backed onto a large, rambling park that surrounded one of the city’s many lakes. The park let him have the illusion of living in the woods.

Mr. Lumberjack, living in the woods, swinging his axe.

Swing, crack! Swing, crack!

Despite the cold, wet weather, he was sweating inside the layers of clothing he wore: thermal underwear, a flannel shirt, a down-filled vest. He hated this time of year. Every day was shorter than the last. Night began to fall in late afternoon. Winter could arrive on any given day and stay until April. They had had an ice storm on Halloween and a blizzard on Veterans Day, followed by three
days of rain that had caused flash flooding in low-lying areas. The odd day of stunning, electric blue skies and a paltry few lingering fall colors couldn’t make up for the stretches of bleak gray or the damp cold that knifed to the bone. It buried its blade between his shoulders as he wiped the moisture from his face on the sleeve of his shirt and hoisted the axe again.

Swing, crack!

The temperature was dropping quickly. The intermittent spitting rain that had been falling off and on all afternoon was giving way to a pelting snow that cut like tiny shards of glass, stinging his ruddy cheeks.

Every winter he bitched about the Minnesota weather and vowed to move to Florida the day he retired from the police department. But if he moved to Florida, he wouldn’t have any reason to split wood. What would he do for his sanity then?

Like he stood any chance of getting away from here anyway, he thought, looking up at the house, where lights had come on in the kitchen and in one bedroom upstairs. His family all lived in Bloomington. Barbie the Ball Buster’s family was entrenched in the southern suburbs. The kids had all their cousins and friends here.

Maybe he should go alone. Maybe everyone would be happier if he did.

He sighed and picked up another chunk of wood, set it on its end on the stump, stepped back, and swung the axe.

Mr. Lumberjack. Mr. Sex Crimes Detective of the Year. Featured speaker at conferences all over the Midwest. Expert on the subject of human degradation.

Swing, crack! Swing, crack!

He tried to concentrate on the silence between the small explosions of the axe striking the wood. He sucked cold air into his smoke-blackened lungs. His heart pounded too hard from the effort. The muscles in his shoulders cramped. He felt like he might have a heart attack at any moment.

Barbie would revive him and kill him again with her bare hands, furious to be left with the kids and the mortgage and the Catholic school tuitions.

Theirs was a marriage in the way of many couples: a partnership of paychecks that didn’t stretch far enough, intimacy a thing of memory, the future a projected image at the far end of a treadmill that ran too fast.

More and more all he wanted was off.

They resented each other more days than not. His wife had ceased to think of him as a man. He was a paycheck, a roommate, a pain in the ass. He had sought validation and comfort elsewhere. It wasn’t hard to get. Consequently, it didn’t mean anything. And the spiral of his life went down and down. He didn’t like what his marriage had become. He didn’t like what
he
had become.

His grandmother had always warned him about purgatory. Hell’s waiting room, she used to call it. Purgatory had become his life.

Sometimes he wondered if death could be so much worse.

Swing, crack! Swing, crack!

Crack! Crack!

The final two sounds seemed to come from far away, like an echo.

Ted Duffy was dead before he could wonder why.

The first bullet hit him between the shoulder blades as he held the axe high over his head. It shattered bone and deflated a lung, and tore through a major artery. The second bullet struck him in the head, entering above the right ear, exiting below the left eye.

He dropped face-first to the ground at the base of the tree stump, his eyes open but seeing nothing, blood pooling beneath his cheek and seeping into the new-fallen snow.