“What does that mean?”
She made a little fluttering movement of frustration and confusion with her hands. “I-I have a nice life now. I didn’t always.”
“Did you recognize the voice?”
“No.”
“Male or female?”
“I couldn’t really tell. They whispered.”
“Did you tell your husband about this?”
“No. I don’t like to worry him. I mean, it wasn’t really a threat, was it? Just— It all worked out. I don’t even know why I’m so afraid.”
“Because some faceless creep is reaching into your life without so much as introducing themselves,” Nikki said. “That’s scary. Knowing that you have a past, knowing that you work with at-risk women—that ups the ante considerably.”
“That’s not why you’re here, though, is it?” Evi said, trying to steer the conversation elsewhere.
Maybe, Nikki thought, but she didn’t say it. Jeremy Nilsen had left the army on a psych discharge. Maybe he wasn’t so happy life had finally smiled on the girl he had known as Angie Jeager. And Donald Nilsen had as much as said he blamed her for some imagined downfall of his family. Who knew where he had been in the middle of the night? He had nothing but time on his hands. He might have seen Evi’s face in the newspaper article about the Chrysalis Center and recognized her. Nikki kept those thoughts to herself for the moment.
She pulled the photograph of Gordon Krauss out of her portfolio and put it on the table. “Do you recognize this man?”
“He’s the one you’re looking for—for those murders. I saw the picture on television,” Evi said, looking confused. “I don’t understand. Why would I know him?”
“He’s calling himself Gordon Krauss. A search of his room turned up Jeremy Nilsen’s ID. Could he be Jeremy Nilsen?”
Evi looked more closely at the photo, not touching it, frowning. “I haven’t seen Jeremy in twenty-five years. He was a teenage boy.”
“Imagine him without the beard,” Nikki said. “What was he like back then? Was he troubled? Was he angry? Could he be violent?”
She stared at the picture. Her color worsened as she considered the questions and her answers to them, answers she chose to keep to herself.
“He seemed like a nice boy,” she said so softly Nikki almost had to strain to hear her. She looked as fragile as spun glass.
“Was he ever in trouble?”
“Not that I know of.” Her hands were shaking. She sat back and put them in her lap.
“Were you involved with Jeremy Nilsen, Evi? Did his father know about it?”
“No. I told you, we were just acquaintances.”
Nikki reached into the leather portfolio again and pulled out the photographs she had taken from Jeremy Nilsen’s bedroom and put them on the table. “Then why would I find these in Jeremy’s bedroom? They were hidden under the mattress. All these years.”
Evi Burke’s eyes widened at the sight of herself, sixteen and shy, her vulnerability captured by a school portrait photographer.
“I don’t know,” she whispered, blinking against tears.
Nikki sat back and sighed. “You have to tell me, Evi. You need this to be over.”
“I think you should go now,” Evi said. “I’m not feeling well. I need to lie down.”
“Jennifer Duffy tried to kill herself last night.”
Evi’s face dropped. “Oh my God. That’s terrible. Is she all right? Will she be all right?”
Nikki shrugged. “The family seems to think the conversation I had with her about her father’s murder prompted her to do it. She’s in the hospital.”
“I’m so sorry,” Evi whispered, closing her eyes and pressing a hand to her forehead as if feeling for a fever. Nikki wondered if she was speaking in general or specifically apologizing to Jennifer Duffy . . . for what?
“Evi, what could Jennifer have known that would have upset her to the point of trying to end her own life?”
“I don’t know. I wasn’t there.”
“You weren’t there the night Ted Duffy was murdered. But what about any other night?”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“What was going on in that house, Evi? The Duffys have closed ranks around Jennifer. Whatever she knows about her father’s death is staying in that circle. Why?”
“I wouldn’t know.”
“You lived there,” Nikki said, frustrated.
“Please go now.”
Nikki sighed but made no move to get up. She could feel Evi Burke teetering on the edge. The harder it felt to hold the secret, the more tempting revealing the truth became.
“There’s no reason not to tell me, Evi,” she said gently. “You were a child. You didn’t have any control over what happened.”
Evi looked out the window at the cold gray day as if she was staring into her past. She looked utterly alone. Nikki wanted to reach out to her, but that wasn’t her job, and it wouldn’t get her the answers she needed.
Not finding an answer to an impossible internal question, Evi finally shook her head.
“I can’t help you,” she said at last. She pushed the photographs back across the table. “I don’t know who that man is. I’m sorry.”