Nikki bit her tongue. Great. She had a mouth like a sailor on holiday, and a schoolmarm for a lieutenant.
They sat at a round white melamine table in a war room commandeered from Homicide. Round tables were supposed to foster feelings of equality and cooperation, according to the industrial and organizational psychology expert the department had wasted taxpayer dollars on during the last remodeling of the offices. The same expert had recommended painting the office walls mauve, and had told them they needed to remove the U bolts from the walls and floors in the interview rooms, so they had nowhere to cuff violent offenders if the need arose, because the threat of physical restraint might be deemed “intimidating.”
Nikki could still see the look on her partner Kovac’s face as they listened to the presentation. Nobody had a better “Are you fucking kidding me?” face than Kovac.
Weeks later a suspect had yanked a useless decorative shelf off the wall of an interview room and cracked Kovac in the head with it. He still had a little scar. Nikki had kneecapped the suspect with her tactical baton before he could do worse. Thank God Kovac had a head like granite.
Mascherino exchanged a look with Chris Logan, the chief assistant county attorney. Logan was a big, handsome man in an expensive suit, tall and athletic with a thick shock of Black Irish hair streaked with gray. Fiftyish. Brash. Aggressive. Intimidating in the courtroom or in a conversation.
Logan’s role in this meeting was to give his blessing to cases he thought might have the potential to be prosecuted successfully. The Duffy case offered nothing for him to sink his teeth into as a prosecutor. He would want witnesses, evidence, forensics—at the very least, a viable suspect at this stage of the game. Yet, he didn’t jump in to dismiss Grider’s sales pitch.
Logan was certainly aware of the contract tensions between the city and the police union, recently made worse by the mayor’s threats of deep budget cuts and layoffs. But if any of that concerned him, he wasn’t going to show it. He had to be a hell of a poker player.
He rubbed a hand along his jaw as he weighed the pros and cons.
“We owe Duff one more try,” Grider pressed. “All we need is for one person to talk. That’s all it takes to crack a case like this.”
“After twenty-five years, why would anyone talk?” Nikki asked.
“Maybe they got a conscience,” Grider said, “or found Jesus, or now hate the person they were protecting back then.”
But none of that seemed likely, and even if someone talked, there was still no physical evidence to speak of. They couldn’t go to trial with nothing but hearsay or uncorroborated accomplice testimony. Nikki sighed.
The cold case she had pulled as her number one candidate was the 2001 rape and murder of a young mother. There were two solid suspects. They needed only a couple of puzzle pieces and a little luck to make the case. The victim’s mother had already been in touch with her to lobby on her daughter’s behalf.
“Have you read the entire Duffy murder book?” Logan asked her.
“Enough to know there isn’t—”
“That’s a no,” he said. “Maybe you need to take a closer look.”
“I’ve personally read through sixty-seven other cases that are more promising.”
Logan didn’t blink.
“Re-interviewing friends, family, co-workers. Going through the file with a fresh eye,” he said. “That’s not a huge investment of time. A few days. A week at the most. If nothing turns up, at least we gave it a shot.”
“It’s a good case for the media,” Grider said, sweetening the deal. “The twenty-fifth anniversary of the murder of one of the city’s finest. The news coverage might shake something loose.”
And there was nothing a politically ambitious prosecutor liked more than a free media spotlight. It was no secret the current county attorney was considering running for the U.S. Senate. Everyone assumed Logan was next in line to take over as top dog for Hennepin County. If he decided to champion the Duffy case, he could get that initial news exposure that would come at the launch of the new unit, and curry favor with the police union at the same time. Two birds, one stone. To the cops, he would look like a hero for reopening the case, and if, after the media had moved on to other news, the case didn’t get solved, that would be the fault of the investigators. No downside for Logan.
Nikki sat back in her chair and crossed her arms over her chest. She wouldn’t admit defeat, but she would have to accept it. Fine. Let Grider have his one case. It would keep him out of her hair while she devoted herself to her dead young mother.
Unlike Homicide, where the detectives worked together, and had multiple cases going at the same time, in Cold Case each of them would be working one case at a time, until it was either solved or all hope had been exhausted, and then they would move on to the next one.