There were three bedrooms and a bath on the second floor. Donald Nilsen’s bedroom looked just as it probably had when Mrs. Nilsen was in residence: lace curtains and a floral bedspread, wall-to-wall carpeting so old the traffic patterns were worn like trails in the dingy beige pile. Nilsen had made a halfhearted attempt to make the bed, pulling the bedspread up and over the lumpy shapes of pillows. A few articles of clothing were draped over a chair, but other than that, the room was relatively neat. The furniture was a matching suite that had probably been purchased in a store with the word Mart or Barn in the name—a dresser with a mirror attached, a chest of drawers, a pair of nightstands, a four-poster bed, all made of inexpensive wood stained to resemble mahogany.
Nikki went to Mrs. Nilsen’s dresser. Her perfume bottles still sat on a mirrored tray. An assortment of inexpensive jewelry boxes clustered together on the far right, a few pieces of costume jewelry scattered near them. A small dish held odd buttons, a thimble, a needle and thread.
It looked as if Donald Nilsen hadn’t touched any of it in twenty-five years. Nikki wondered if he had left it in anticipation of his wife’s return or out of apathy for the loss of her. Either way, it struck her as odd. She wouldn’t have pegged him for a sentimental man. She would have expected him to get rid of this stuff, to clear out all traces of the woman who had allegedly left him. But the dresser’s drawers still held a woman’s lingerie and neat stacks of sweaters—all of it smelling vaguely stale, as if the drawers had not been opened, their contents left untouched for all that time.
“Not under the bed,” Mascherino said.
Nikki glanced over at her. “The rifle or the wife?”
“Neither.”
“When Speed moved out of our house, I threw half his stuff out on the lawn and the other half in the trash. I couldn’t clean out our bedroom fast enough,” she said. “This guy just pretends nothing is different.”
“Maybe it’s just easier that way.”
“It’s making my skin crawl. If she left him, she didn’t take much with her. The drawers are full, the closet has women’s clothing in it.”
“Add another unsolved mystery to your stack of cases,” the lieutenant said.
“He never even reported her missing,” Nikki said. “No one did.”
They moved from the master bedroom to a guest room Nikki couldn’t imagine had ever been used. Who would go out of their way to visit Donald Nilsen? He was no one’s kindly uncle. The bed was piled with old clothes. Nilsen’s hunting coats and caps crowded the closet, but this was not where he kept his guns.
The third bedroom had belonged to Jeremy Nilsen. Just like his wife’s portion of the master, Donald Nilsen had left this room just as it was the day his son left for basic training. A thick layer of dust coated the dresser. The bed was neatly made. A modest collection of sports awards was proudly displayed on a little shelf. A poster of Bruce Lee decorated one wall, Bruce Springsteen another.
Nikki felt a pang of sympathy. It couldn’t have been easy to be the son of Donald Nilsen, a man hated by the entire neighborhood. It would have been especially hard for a quiet boy with nice manners, as Jeremy had been described. She thought of her own quiet boy, Kyle, always internally at odds with his brash and boisterous father. She wondered if Jeremy’s mother had given him the sort of refuge a sensitive boy needed, or if she had been too overwhelmed by her husband to try.
Mascherino checked out the closet. Nikki searched through the dresser drawers. A small desk occupied one corner of the room, with pens and pencils in a Minnesota Twins cup. A U of M pennant was tacked to the bulletin board on the wall above. There was nothing but dust bunnies under the twin bed.
Knowing her own son, and his penchant for secreting things away, she slipped a hand between the mattress and box spring, her fingertips brushing across papers. No, she thought, not paper. Something slicker. Half expecting to find pornography, she lifted the mattress to find a small glimpse of Jeremy Nilsen’s private life: two photographs. A chill ran through her.
“We’re looking for a gun and bullets,” Mascherino reminded her. “That’s not a gun.”
“Isn’t it?” Nikki murmured, picking the pictures up with one hand and lowering the mattress back into place with the other.
The two photos were of a slender teenage girl with long brown hair, smiling shyly for the camera of a school photographer; a pretty girl with sad eyes that had seen too much in her short life. Nikki would have put her at about sixteen.
“Do you know who she is?” the lieutenant asked.
“Yes.”
The friend who wasn’t really a friend.
The girl next door.
Angie Jeager . . . Evi Burke.
A shriek of brakes and tires skidding on wet pavement broke Nikki’s concentration. Mascherino went to the window that looked out on the street as a car door slammed.
“Here we go,” the lieutenant muttered, her game face firmly in place as she turned and started for the door. She looked at Nikki. “Let me handle him.”
“I need to ask him about these pictures.”
“That can wait.”
They hustled down the stairs, a commotion on the front steps of the house rising to nearly drown out their footfalls. Donald Nilsen had been released.
“. . . my house, and I’ll damn well go inside!”
“I’m sorry, sir, I can’t let you go in while the search is under way—”