Nikki wondered if anyone had spoken to the neighbor, Donald Nilsen, the self-appointed neighborhood morality police, about whether Ted Duffy’s brother ever visited when his twin was not at home. If they asked that question, she couldn’t find any record of it.
Nilsen had been interviewed many times over the years. He hadn’t seen anything. He hadn’t heard anything. He had been working in his home office. His wife had been making dinner. His son had been attending a basketball game at school.
In the one and only interview with Renee Nilsen, she had little to say. The Nilsens’ son, Jeremy, had also been interviewed just once. It didn’t look like anyone had tried to learn about the Duffy household through him, even though he had mown their yard and shoveled their sidewalk, and had probably gone to school with the teenage girls living with the Duffys at the time.
As the mother of a son the same age, Nikki could state with certainty that if Jeremy Nilsen was straight, he would have been very aware of the “tarts” next door. And those girls would have been very aware of him. He was a good-looking kid—and the quiet type, according to Barbie. There was no animal on the face of the earth more irresistible to a teenage girl than a handsome boy who had nothing to say. A man of mystery! They would have spun tales in their heads about why he was so quiet. They would have fantasized about being the one person he would open up to and trust with all his secrets.
She wondered if Jeremy Nilsen had secrets about what his father was up to when Ted Duffy was being murdered. Unfortunately, Jeremy Nilsen was dead. Whatever secrets he might have had had gone with him to his grave. Nikki kept seeing the trophy buck hanging over Donald Nilsen’s electric fireplace. Unless he had bought that thing at a flea market, he owned guns and was a crack shot. He didn’t make it a secret that he hadn’t liked the Duffys. He had paid far too much attention to the goings-on at the house next door. Ted Duffy had confronted him and leveled a thinly veiled threat at him for ogling the girls.
She went to her whiteboard on the wall across from her desk and made three columns headed “Barbie Duffy,” “Thomas Duffy,” and “Donald Nilsen.” Beneath each name, she jotted notes in black, and questions in red.
Of the Duffys’ children, only Jennifer, who was nine at the time, had been interviewed. She was in her bedroom upstairs at the time of the shooting. Her room overlooked the backyard. She said she had been reading a book and hadn’t seen anything. The younger two Duffy children were in the family room at the front of the house playing while the younger foster child, Penny Williams, watched and did homework. The older foster girl, Angie Jeager, had been at a school function, not returning home until around nine thirty. The same basketball game Jeremy Nilsen was attending? Nikki wondered.
To the far right on the whiteboard, she wrote, “TBI” (for To Be Interviewed), and beneath it, the names Renee Nilsen, Penny Williams, and Angie Jeager.
What were the odds of finding any of them? Nilsen claimed to have no idea where his ex-wife was. Barbie Duffy hadn’t maintained a relationship with the two girls she had taken in as slave labor and then sent back to the foster care system like stray dogs to the pound. Twenty-five years after the fact, it was doubtful any of them still had the same last name.
“And that’s why they call you a detective, Nikki,” she murmured to herself.
*
SOMEONE HAD ALREADY ORDERED IN PIZZA by the time Kovac and Taylor returned to the office. It was past eight o’clock, but Mascherino was still there, having a slice with the guys. An incongruous picture, Kovac thought: the petite and proper fifty-something lieutenant in her smart maroon suit standing in the break room with the rest of the hooligans, eating pizza off a paper plate. He gave her credit for the effort.
“Sam, Michael,” she said as they came into the room to grab their dinner. “Get something to eat and bring it to my office. I want an update.”
The three of them went to her office and Kovac filled her in, chowing down on his dinner between segments of the afternoon’s events.
“So, basically,” he said, “Professor Chamberlain never met a person he didn’t annoy. Nobody had anything bad to say about the wife, other than that she named her children Charles and Diana, after the royals, and she liked to drink a bit in the evenings.”
“Do you think the murders were personal?”
Kovac gave a halfhearted shrug.
“The robbery looked legit,” Taylor said. “Not staged. The key rooms were hit for stuff that could be carried and sold: small electronics, cash, credit cards, jewelry—”
“The weapons taken from the professor’s collection raise the question of whether our bad guy went there specifically targeting the collection or just hit the jackpot finding that stuff,” Kovac said. “Sato, the colleague-slash-rival, is going to go through it with us. We’ll find out the significance of the pieces that are missing.