She would be up all night reading about a case that had already happened and had long gone stale, making notes on her own whiteboard in her own little office at home. At least the coffee was better.
At the time of Ted Duffy’s death he had half a dozen cases going at work. No one had been able to connect any of those cases to his murder. Considerable time had been spent tracking down guys Duffy had sent to prison over the years who had subsequently been released in the right timeframe. Of those known to be in the vicinity, some had alibis, some didn’t, but no one could put any of them in that park behind the Duffy house with a rifle on the day in question.
The hottest prospect they’d had at the time was a rapist, a repeat offender who’d screamed at Duffy in the courtroom that he would get him. He had been released from prison just a week prior to the shooting. After three days of an intensive search in the Twin Cities and surrounding area, it was discovered that the guy had been arrested in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, three days after his release from the prison in Moose Lake, where many of Minnesota’s hard-core sex offenders were sent to be rehabilitated. He had gotten out of prison, taken a bus to Wisconsin, and promptly tried to assault a waitress leaving her workplace late at night.
“I guess that rehab didn’t take,” Nikki mumbled, setting those reports aside.
She thought a little about the weapon that had been used to kill Ted Duffy: a small-caliber hunting rifle, a .243. It was described as a gun suitable for smaller hunters because of the lighter recoil. One of the comments she had read online regarding this caliber of weapon for hunters: “A nice rifle for a woman.”
Barbie Duffy had allegedly been out grocery shopping the day of her husband’s death. She came home with groceries, but who could prove when she had bought them? There was no store receipt on file, and no mention of any store surveillance tape showing her buying groceries at the time in question. The detectives—Grider being one of them—cut her slack in small ways they might not have had they not known her and her husband. If Barbie said she had been shopping, then she must have been shopping. The grocery bags were probably still sitting on the kitchen counter when the detectives showed up.
Had the Duffys owned a .243 hunting rifle? Ted had been going to join his brother deer hunting in Wisconsin that weekend. But Ted Duffy was a big guy. He would have used a big gun, not one written up as being “A nice rifle for a woman.” Nikki made a note to ask Barbie Duffy if she had ever gone deer hunting. But even if Ted Duffy didn’t own a .243, his twin had access to every gun there was.
Big D Sports was best known for hunting and camping gear, including guns. Big Duff had allegedly been in Rice Lake, Wisconsin, opening his cabin for the weekend’s hunting when his brother was killed. That was where he had been found by the family friend who drove the two hours to deliver the news of Ted’s death in person. But that was several hours after the discovery of Ted Duffy’s body. Big Duff would have had more than enough time to kill his brother and drive back to Rice Lake. He had been seen in a convenience store near his cabin earlier in the day, but most of his afternoon was unaccounted for.
Whose idea had it been to send the friend to Rice Lake to deliver the news to Big Duff? The cabin had no telephone, but they could have called the local sheriff’s office and sent a unit out to inform Duff of his brother’s demise. They would have gotten to him much closer to the time of Ted’s death—or they might have gotten to an empty cabin, as Thomas Duffy was still making his way back from killing his brother.
If the crime had taken place a week ago, or a year ago, or even ten years ago, they would have been able to track Thomas Duffy’s movements via the cell towers his phone had pinged off. But at the time of his brother’s death, cell phones were less common, and used differently. Back then, a cell phone was something to have for emergencies.
In one of the many revisitations to the investigation several years after the fact, a harder look had been taken at Big Duff (by a detective not named Gene Grider) after he and his brother’s widow got hitched. Still, nothing in the way of evidence had been found to implicate him in his brother’s death. But there was plenty of speculation to be made.
Barbie Duffy collected a considerable sum of life insurance on her husband’s death. Big Duff did as well. Ted had invested as a partner in his brother’s first store. The partners had been insured. It was safe to assume that at least some of that money went into the expansion of Big D Sports, and the second Mr. and Mrs. Duffy ended up rich and living in a house that was photographed for magazines. Happily ever after.