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.
2
November
Minneapolis, MN
Present Day
“Duffy was a great guy.”
“That’s not one of the criteria for picking a cold case,” Nikki Liska argued.
Gene Grider narrowed his eyes. He had a face like a bulldog, and breath to match. “What the hell is wrong with you? Do you need a Midol or something?”
She wrinkled her nose at him. “What decade did you crawl up out of, Grider? Smells like 1955.”
Grider had worked Homicide before her time, but not that long before her time. He had put in thirty years, doing stints in Homicide, Robbery, and Sex Crimes. His last few years on the job had been spent working special community initiatives—jobs Nikki would have thought required a lot more charm than Grider could scrape together on his best day.
“It’s twenty-five years since Duff was gunned down,” he said, slamming his hand down on the table. “Twenty-five years this month! It’s a disgrace that this case has never been solved. This is what I’m coming out of retirement for. We’re finally getting a dedicated cold case unit. This case should be front and center!”
“It’s not like nobody’s worked the case,” Liska said. “People have worked the case all along.”
“On the side, with no money,” Grider complained.
Which was exactly how the majority of cold cases were worked all over the country—piecemeal, if at all. Cold case units were far more common on television than in reality. In the real world, police departments operated on taxpayer dollars, funding that was continually being cut to the bone. Homicide detectives all had their old unsolved cases that they continued to chip away at when they could, and passed them on to other detectives when they transferred or retired. It was a wonder any of the cases got solved, considering.
“The same as all these cases,” Nikki pointed out.
She had spent the last two months going half blind reviewing cold cases dating back to the mid-seventies. Of the two hundred cases she had evaluated, she had pulled sixty-seven for the final round of reviews. Grider had looked through another two hundred and pulled fifty-nine. They had whittled the list down to a hundred, and now had to prioritize. They would be lucky if the federal grant money being used to set up the unit got them through half the cases on their short list.
“This isn’t the same thing,” Grider snapped. “Duff was one of us. Where the hell is your loyalty?”
“This isn’t about loyalty,” Nikki said. “It can’t matter that Duffy was a cop—”
“Nice to know what you think of your peers,” Grider said, sneering.
“Oh, get off your high horse,” she snapped. “It’s about solvability. We’ve got a limited budget. We have to go after the cases we have a hope in hell of closing. You couldn’t close Duffy’s case in twenty-five years for a reason: There’s jack shit to go on. He was shot from a distance. There were no witnesses, no fingerprints, no DNA, no trace evidence of any value,” she said, ticking the points off on her fingers.