The Bitter Season (39 page)

“Sure,” she said, automatically, as if it was that simple. She looked down at herself. Her hands and clothes were covered in the dead man’s blood. Her hands were trembling. She had gone to him as he lay on the floor, dying. He had bled out before the SWAT team even made it up the stairs. There was nothing left for the paramedics to do but cart his corpse to the morgue.

“He must have hit an artery,” she murmured. “It happened so fast.”

Kovac wrapped an arm around her shoulders and gave her a brotherly squeeze. “Let’s get you out of here, Wonder Woman. You’ve got a date with a shitload of paperwork downtown.”

Nikki leaned into him, grateful for his presence and his friendship. “You always know just what to say to a girl. And here I was thinking you didn’t care anymore.”

His mouth turned up on one corner in his trademark sardonic smile. “I wouldn’t let you off that easy, Tinker Bell. Let’s go,” he said, turning her toward the door. “I’ll even buy the coffee.”

“I never hated him,”
Evi said quietly. “I’ve always been ashamed of that.”

They sat in a private meeting room at the Hennepin County Medical Center, a drab gray room with drab gray modern furniture, and a wall of glass that overlooked a courtyard several stories below, where snow was accumulating on the trees and bushes. Just down the hall in the ICU, Eric lay sleeping. His condition was stable.

“I shouldn’t need to tell you it wasn’t your fault,” Detective Liska said gently. “You were a child. He was an authority figure. Consent was moot.”

“It was nobody’s fault,” Evi said, knowing her colleagues would have pounced on her for her answer.

Ted Duffy took advantage of a vulnerable girl; the culpability was his. That was true. Of all the people who should have known that, he was at the top of the list. The decorated Sex Crimes detective had committed a sex crime against a child in his care. She should have hated him. Anyone would have vilified him, crucified him, sent him straight to hell.

Evi knew, though, that hell was a place of one’s own making, and both she and Ted Duffy had served time there for their own reasons. He was dead because of her, because of what he’d done, and while that may indeed have been justice, all Evi saw when she thought of him was a broken man, ruined by his life, begging her forgiveness,
sobbing with his head in his hands. What use was there in hating him? She had hated herself enough to know it didn’t serve any purpose.

Her emotions at the time had been so tangled and confused. She had made an uneasy friendship with Ted Duffy as she did the Duffy laundry in the basement and he sat at his workbench sipping his whiskey. He asked her about her days at school. He gave her advice about boys. He was kind. She felt sorry for him. She had never had a friendship with a man. She had never had a father figure. She didn’t know how those relationships were supposed to work. She didn’t understand how or where to draw boundaries.

If she had asked for love, then she didn’t have the right to say no, did she? If she believed she could trust, then she had to accept betrayal of that trust, right? That was what she believed because she didn’t know any better. How could she have been expected to know what love was and what love wasn’t when her only example of love was a woman so tormented by life that she had ended her own?

“He wasn’t a terrible man,” she said. “He did a terrible thing.”

“Did you tell Barbie?” Liska asked.

“Only when she found out I was pregnant,” she said with a sad smile. “She called me a liar, said no one would ever believe me. It would be my word against his—against hers.

“And you didn’t try to tell another adult? A guidance counselor, a teacher?”

“Why would they believe me? I was just a foster kid. I hadn’t been in that school half a year.”

“You didn’t trust anybody.”

“Why would I?”

She looked to the other end of the room, where Eric’s mother sat reading quietly to Mia in an oversize chair by the window. Her daughter’s only physical scar from their ordeal would be the mark on her throat where Charles Chamberlain cut her as a threat. Emotionally, the damage would go deeper than a surface wound, and the guilt
Evi felt for that was choking. But Mia would always be surrounded by people who loved her, people who would do their best to protect her and care for her. She would never know that terrible yawning emptiness that Evi had lived with for most of her life.

She reached up and brushed a tear from her cheek. She had that family now. Eric’s parents loved her unconditionally, without judgment. Even with their son lying in the ICU hooked to tubes and monitors because of her, they loved her. It was difficult for her to believe she deserved that, but they helped her work at it every day.

She felt that she had so much to make up for. She had never trusted Eric with the details of her time with the Duffys, and the product of her time there had appeared in their lives like a monster from a nightmare and nearly killed him.

The doctors estimated he had lost a third of his blood supply the night of the attack. The paramedics had brought him back from cardiac arrest in the ambulance. The ER staff revived him a second time. He had lost an eye. The wound to his face would require multiple plastic surgeries. The cut across his back, which had sliced through his heavy jacket, required more than a hundred stitches to close.

And yet, the first thing he said when he opened his eyes and saw her was, “I love you.” And when she told him the terrible truth she had kept to herself all these years, the first thing he said when she finished was, “I love you.” And that would make all the difference in both their lives and in the life of their child.

She had often wondered what her life would have been like if she had had that kind of love as a child. Now she couldn’t help but wonder what a difference it would have made in the life of the child she had given up. What kind of horrible pain had he carried within to do the things he had done? She had given him the only thing she could: a chance at something better, never imagining that chance could become a nightmare.

“Tell me about Jeremy Nilsen.”

Jeremy, her first real crush. She had been his first girlfriend, a
secret from his father. And he had been her secret from the Duffys. Romeo and Juliet.

“He was a sweet boy. He had a difficult relationship with his father, trying to live up to his father’s idea of what a man should be. I suppose that was where the trouble started.

“When I found out I was pregnant, I was so afraid. I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know what would happen to me. I was afraid they would send me away. I told Jeremy what had happened.

“He was so angry. He wanted to do something. He wanted to confront Mr. Duffy. He wanted to have him arrested. I told him we couldn’t do any of those things. I told him they’d send me away. He wouldn’t let it go. He wanted to be my hero. He thought he should defend my honor.”

She put her hands over her face and leaned against the table.

“He said he would kill Mr. Duffy for what he’d done. I didn’t believe he’d really do it.”

“But he did.”

“I tried to find him after school,” she said. “I couldn’t find him.”

She started to tremble, remembering her growing panic as the afternoon darkened. She remembered how she had stood outside the Nilsen house, afraid to knock on the door, afraid Mr. Nilsen would answer. She could hear Mr. Duffy chopping wood next door.

“We used to meet in the park and walk on the trails in the woods. It was the place we could be together without anyone knowing. I thought maybe he had gone there to think. It was almost dark.”

She remembered the bitter day, damp and cold. A spitting, freezing rain pelleted her face like tiny shards of glass. It was changing to snow as she hurried down the trail. She was crying, afraid, filled with dread. What had she done? Why had she told him?

“And then I heard the shots,” she said, and an overwhelming sadness filled her. It filled her now, and she wanted to cry for everything that was lost in that moment. Their lives had just been set on a path over which they would have no control, and any hope for
their budding love would be dashed, all because a troubled boy had done the wrong thing for all the right reasons.

*   *   *

“
. . . THEY CAME UP WITH THE S
TORY OF HAVING
been at school at the basketball game,” Nikki said.

They sat in Logan’s office in the government center: Nikki, Candra Seley, Logan, and Mascherino. Logan’s desk phone was lighting up like a pinball machine. He ignored it. The news media had gone rabid for details of Charlie Chamberlain and his wake of death.

“Any other week, there would have been a game on Tuesday night. No one bothered to check,” she went on. “No one really questioned them. They were just kids. Everybody thought Ted Duffy was killed by someone he had put away, or that Barbie and Big Duff had pulled it off. There were so many more realistic possibilities. If Barbie had any suspicions, she kept them to herself rather than risk the world finding out her husband, Mr. Sex Crimes Detective of the Year, had raped their sixteen-year-old foster child. She and Big Duff closed ranks around the family, and she sent the foster girls back into the system. Jeremy Nilsen turned eighteen and joined the army.”

“Do you think Donald Nilsen knew?” Mascherino asked.

Nikki looked away. “Can I plead the Fifth on that?”

“Off the record, then,” Logan said.

“Jeremy Nilsen was an honor student,” she said. “He had already been accepted to several universities. How many parents would let that kind of son drop out of high school to join the army?”

“You think it was the father’s idea?” Logan asked.

“Do you have kids, Logan?” she asked him.

He shook his head.

“I think Donald Nilsen is a sad old man who did what he could to protect his only child for killing a man who raped a teenage girl. I can’t say I wouldn’t do the same,” she confessed. “I think he
packed his son off to the army and hoped for the best. That wasn’t what he got, but I think that was his intent. And I think his wife probably left him over it.

“Do you want to pursue any of that?” she asked.

“Do you think Ted Duffy doesn’t deserve justice?”

“I think life dealt out crueler justice than any of these people had coming,” Nikki said, the sadness of that truth heavy on her shoulders. She tried to shrug it off. “But I’m just a cop. I do what I’m told.”

Mascherino arched an eyebrow, but made no comment.

“Where’s the son?” Logan asked.

“His dental records are a match for a John Doe death last summer,” Seley said. “A body found snagged under some branches in the Mississippi. A probable homicide victim. His ID was found in possession of Gordon Krauss, a man who has been identified as having committed assault on a homeless man near the river in June.”

Logan sighed and swiveled his chair. He had jerked his tie loose at the end of the day. His shirtsleeves were rolled up as if he had been doing physical labor. “So what you’re saying is you’ve got nothing for me to prosecute.”

“Who’s left?” Nikki asked. “Evi Burke? The then teenage rape victim of a celebrated detective? Do you want to open that can of worms? What do you try to pin on her? Conspiracy? Accessory after the fact? What’s the point? I think if you talk to the Duffy family, they won’t want you to pursue this. They didn’t want the case reopened in the first place.”

It was Logan’s choice. As the county attorney’s number one, he had prosecutorial discretion, the power to pick and choose cases. But he was a realist and a politician, and there was nothing to be salvaged from this sad mess of a case. He nodded and smiled, conceding defeat graciously. “Happy Thanksgiving, Detective Liska. Close the case. Pick a winner off the pile when you come back from the holiday.”

“Man, that’s cold,”
Tippen said as they stared at the computer screen.

The photographs had been pulled off Charlie Chamberlain’s cell phone: One close-up of Lucien Chamberlain’s crushed, bloody skull, eyeball dangling from the socket. And one taken from slightly farther away to include the murder weapon, the nunchucks that lay within reach of the professor’s hand, as if he had done this to himself.

In a way, he had, Kovac thought. He had spent twenty-four years breaking down the psyche of the son who had turned on him.

They were in the war room, putting the case to rest. The whiteboards had been erased, the paperwork filed and boxed up. The case that had consumed their every waking moment for days was officially over, but they rehashed the details as they wound down, trying to make sense of it all as the adrenaline receded. As if there was any sense to be made of the dark twists and turns taken by the human mind and heart.

Diana Chamberlain, so fond of shooting spontaneous videos on her phone, had been recording her father’s birthday dinner when the argument began. They started with potshots at one another, she and Lucien, taking aim like snipers. Then a quick show of their mother’s nervous disapproval, and Charlie scowling at the camera even as he tried to play diplomat.

Bit by bit, the foundation of civility eroded away beneath them.
Lucien berated Diana for making the complaint to the Office for Conflict Resolution. He called her names, questioned her intelligence, and speculated about her true parentage, since she clearly was no daughter of his.

She struck back with “I’m fucking Ken Sato.”

As family fights went, it was as nasty a verbal bloodbath as Kovac had seen in a while. There were few cutting instruments on the earth as razor-sharp as an articulate tongue fueled by bitterness and alcohol. The words cut to the bone and lacerated the heart.

Diana had tried to drag Charlie onto her side of the argument. He tried to remain the voice of reason. She lashed out at him like a viper. The pain in his expression was more eloquent than words.

“He killed them for her, though,” Taylor said. “He stole his mother’s cell phone that night so he could access the security system through the app. The call from Sondra’s phone to Charlie’s phone the night of the murders pinged off the tower nearest Charlie’s apartment.”

“He got plenty of satisfaction out of it, though,” Kovac said, gesturing to the images on the computer screen. “He probably fantasized about it for years. He took the pictures so he could relive the thrill.”

Liska had told them that during the standoff in the Burke house, Charlie spoke repeatedly of “closing the circle.” He killed the father who had constantly belittled him, and the mother who had allowed that to happen. He slit the throat of the sister he loved too much, and then tracked down his birth mother to end it all.

John Quinn, Kate’s husband, a renowned criminal profiler, told Kovac that Charlie Chamberlain ticked off many of the boxes of a type of killer known as a family annihilator. Abused as a child, feeling inadequate and powerless, having the need to exert strict control over as many aspects of his life as possible. While he had undoubtedly killed his parents in retribution for their abuse, he could very well have killed his sister out of a twisted sense of love and protection. He had tried to protect her all his life; how could
he leave her to the world to be destroyed without him there to defend her?

If Gordon Krauss was to be believed, Diana Chamberlain had tried to solicit him to murder her parents more than a week before they were killed. Had Charlie been a part of that plan? Had Diana’s death always been a part of Charlie’s plan? They would probably never know. They did know, from searching Charlie’s computer at work, that he began methodically searching for the truth of his parentage in the spring, and knew about Evi Burke since late summer.

“Shakespeare would have had a freaking field day with these people,” Kovac declared.

“‘The gods are just, and of our pleasant vices make instruments to plague us,’” Elwood quoted. “‘The dark and vicious place where thee he got cost him his eyes.

“‘Thou hast spoken right, ’tis true. The wheel is come full circle . . .’”

“Oh talk Shakespeare to me, baby,” Liska said, walking into the room, her hands tucked in the pockets of her coat, ready to leave for the day. “I miss you, Elwood.”

“What?” Kovac asked, getting up from his chair. “Gene Grider doesn’t do poetry readings in the broom closet?”

“Gene Grider is noticeably absent from the broom closet following the closing of the sad case of Ted Duffy. Poor guy,” she said. “I feel sorry for him, to be honest. None of that panned out the way he thought it would.”

“Another hero bites the dust,” Tippen said as he shut down the computer.

“No heroes in this story,” Liska said. “Just humans, good, bad, and otherwise.”

“The world’s overrun with them,” Kovac said, shrugging into his overcoat and grabbing his hat. “It’s our job to sort them out.”

“Yeah, well,” Liska said, backing toward the door. “Before we have to do it all again, let’s go drink a toast to the survivors.”