The Bitter Season (12 page)

“Lucien didn’t know. He would have misconstrued the relationship.”

“And gotten your ass fired?” Kovac asked. “I have to think the university frowns on professors and students being special friends.”

“I wouldn’t get fired,” Sato said with confidence, like he had someone on the inside greasing the wheels for him.

“But you wouldn’t get that promotion, either, would you?” Kovac asked. “If Lucien Chamberlain made some claim of impropriety against you, whether or not you were guilty, it wouldn’t look good, would it?”

Sato looked at him as the implication sank in, his dark eyes steady. “I wouldn’t kill for it, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

“When did you last see Professor Chamberlain?” Taylor asked.

“Yesterday at work.”

“And where were you last night?”

“At home.”

“Can anyone vouch for that?”

He cut another quick glance at the bedroom door. What would be worse: to have an uncorroborated alibi, or to say he was in bed with the dead man’s daughter? He was a suspect either way. So was she.

“I was alone.”

Kovac raised his eyebrows just to mess with the guy.
That’s the answer you picked? Huh.

“Okay,” he said, getting to his feet. “We’ll be in touch about the weaponry.”

Sato walked with them to the door. “Anything I can do to help.”

“We’ll need you both to come in and get fingerprinted for elimination purposes.”

“Me?” Sato said, surprised. “I haven’t been in that house in a year or more.”

Kovac smiled at him. “Better safe than sorry. I can’t just assume they have the world’s greatest cleaning lady. It’s no big deal, really. It takes two minutes.”

“Yeah, sure,” Sato said with no conviction.

“We understand Professor Chamberlain’s collection is valuable,” Taylor said.

“It’s incredible.”

“How could he afford that on a professor’s salary?”

“They’ve always had money. Sondra’s family was connected to some chemical-pharmaceutical fortune. Lucien made sure people knew. He liked people to think he taught for higher reasons—like his ego.”

“You didn’t like him,” Kovac said.

“Nobody liked Lucien. He wasn’t a likeable man. People respected him, or they envied him for what he had: his position, his possessions—”

“His collection?” Taylor said. “Something someone would kill to have?”

Sato frowned. “I hope not.”

“I hope so,” Kovac said. “Because if someone killed those two people the way they killed them just for the hell of it . . .”

He let that hang as he handed Sato a business card. “We’ll be in touch,” he said.

Ken Sato saw them the ten feet to the door and locked the deadbolt as soon as they were on the other side.

“That’s some messed-up shit right there,” Taylor said softly, glancing back over his shoulder as they went down the hall to the apartment house’s front door. “The daughter sleeping with Dad’s rival for the big promotion. I can’t wait to meet the son.”

“What’d I tell you?” Kovac said. “The all-American family. It’s Norman Fucking Rockwell on acid.”

*   *   *

S
ATO TAPPED ON THE BE
DROOM DOOR
. “Diana?”

No answer. No sound. She might have fallen asleep. She might have slit her wrists. Either was possible in her current state of mind. He opened the door and slipped inside.

The bedside lamps were on. She was naked, kneeling on the bed, touching herself, her eyes already glazed, her mouth wet and open. Her body was beautiful, lithe and subtly muscular. Her nipples were pierced with small silver rings. A ruby studded her navel.

She grabbed him by the waist of his jeans and pulled him closer.

“Diana.” He breathed her name as she undid his pants and took him in her mouth.

The sex with her was crazy and hot, as addictive as crystal meth. She went to a dark, desperate place in her mind he didn’t want to know about, but he willingly went along for the ride.

She rode him hard, sweating, gasping, crying, and when the end came for her, she pounded her fist against his tattooed chest over and over and over, like she had a knife in her hand.

Then, exhausted, she collapsed on top of him and drifted into unconsciousness on an anguished whispered word:
“Daddy . . .”

“You’re here about my parents,”
Charles Chamberlain said as he opened the door to his apartment, his expression grave, his voice quiet and a little unsteady. Nerves. Emotions. Both. He was pale, though whether that was natural or caused by the circumstances, Kovac couldn’t guess.

He appeared to be a modest, unremarkable young man—early twenties, medium height, medium build, medium brown hair cut in a medium-length, conservative Everyman style. He wore nerdy glasses, and was neatly dressed in khaki pants and a button-down shirt, tucked in.

“Professor Foster called and broke the news. He said you’d be contacting me. I didn’t know if I should call the police department or go downtown or go to the house, or what,” he said. “How does anyone know what to do when something like this happens?”

“They don’t,” Kovac said. “Everybody gets the crash course.”

“We’re sorry for your loss, Mr. Chamberlain,” Taylor said.

“Thank you.”

“I know this is a tough time,” Kovac said, “but we need to ask you some questions. It’s important that we get as much information as we can as fast as we can.”

“I understand.” He stepped back from the door, inviting them in. “Professor Foster said it was probably a burglary, that someone might have targeted them—maybe for my father’s collection. Is that true?”

“There appear to be elements of a burglary,” Taylor said. “There have been a couple of burglaries in the area recently. But we don’t know anything for sure at this point.”

“How could someone break in? What happened to their alarm system?”

“We don’t know yet. Were they good about arming it?”

“Yes, every night after dinner. It was part of my mother’s routine. She took the dishes to the kitchen, set the alarm on the back door keypad, then started cleaning up.”

“What time did she start drinking?” Kovac asked bluntly.

The kid gave him a look, like he wanted to express outrage and denial, but in the end he said, “She liked a glass of wine with dinner . . . and maybe another after dinner. So what? She wasn’t a falling-down drunk, if that’s what someone told you.”

“Did you speak to her last night?” Taylor asked.

“No. I was working. I turned my phone off. I have a deadline,” he said. His brows knit and his eyes filled. “I had a message from her when I turned it back on this morning. Just wanting to talk. She gets lonely. I guess by the time I picked up the message . . .”

By the time he picked up the message, his mother was already dead on the dining room floor. He was seeing some version of that in his head now.

“Try not to beat yourself up, kid,” Kovac said. “We can’t foresee bad stuff coming; otherwise we’d stop it from happening.”

He was regretting not taking the chance to have had one last conversation with his mother. People always did. They wanted to believe they would have had some incredible moment of clarity about how much they loved that person they were unknowingly about to lose; how whatever petty arguments and angry words they held against one another would have magically dissolved, and they would have had the most beautiful, meaningful conversation of their lives.

The truth was if Charles Chamberlain had answered that call from his mother, he would have been irritated because she was
interrupting his work when he had a deadline. He would have heard the lonely, wine-soaked self-pity in his mother’s voice and thought, Here we go again. They probably would have had unpleasant words about his father or his sister. And he would now be feeling guilty for that conversation because he hadn’t been patient, and he hadn’t consoled her, and now she was dead and he hadn’t told her he loved her.

The kid showed them to his living area, just to the left of the front door, and they all sat down. Like his sister’s place, most of the apartment could be seen at a glance: a tiny kitchen, a counter to eat at, a living room, a hall that led to a bedroom and a bath. Unlike his sister’s place, Charles Chamberlain’s small home was modest, not cheap, and neat as a pin. There were no dirty dishes visible. It didn’t smell of weed. The furniture might have been from the fifties or sixties—or at least made to look that way—low and clean, with straight lines and no frills. Jazz music played softly in the background from fist-size speakers beside a twenty-three-inch flat-screen TV on a console made from some kind of industrial serving cart. A laptop computer sat open on a small desk in one corner, two filing cabinets with a slab of glass for a top.

“I don’t know what to say,” the kid murmured, almost to himself. His hands were trembling as he rested them on his knees. “It’s surreal. I keep thinking there must be some mistake. Who would want to kill my parents? And then I turned on the television when I got home, and there was the house on the news. It’s crazy! They were killed with a sword?”

He looked straight at Kovac, clearly wanting a denial that was not forthcoming.

“Oh my God.”

He had that haunted look in his blue eyes, like someone who had seen something unspeakable. He shook his head as if he might be able to shake the images out of his brain.

“Who could do something like that?” he whispered, a shudder passing through him.

“Can you think of anyone who might have had a grudge against one or both of them?” Taylor asked.

Chamberlain laughed abruptly, in the way people do when they’re shocked. “Sure. But they’re professors who think my father is an ass. They’re not people who go around committing murder! My mother has her charities. She goes to her book club. Who could she possibly offend?”

He pulled his glasses off and rubbed a hand across his face. His fingernails were bitten to the quick. He picked at a cuticle as he breathed in and out with purpose, trying to pull himself together.

“It had to be some kind of thug or a homicidal maniac or something, right?” he asked, glancing up with that light of desperate hope in his expression that Kovac had seen so many times. When it came to violent crime, everyone wanted to believe in the bogeyman. No one wanted to think they might know a killer.

“We have to consider all possibilities,” Kovac said. “Right now we’re just trying to get a picture of your parents’ life and the people in it. Had they mentioned having a problem with anyone? A neighbor, someone doing work on the house, anything like that?”

“The one neighbor, the Abrams, have already gone to Arizona for the winter. They’ve lived next door forever. My mother and Mrs. Abrams are friends. The house on the other side of them is vacant. It was sold over the summer. The new owners are renovating,” he said. “My father complained about the noise on the weekend.”

Kovac would set Taylor to the task of checking out the construction crew. Maybe someone had a record. Maybe someone had a temper, or a screw loose, or both.

“Had your parents had any work done on their own house recently?”

“Oh, well, there was the Yelp incident,” he said, as if they should know what that meant.

“What’s that?”

“My mother hired a handyman service to do some work around the house. My father didn’t like the job they did, and he went on Yelp and wrote a nasty review. I guess he and the guy running the business got into it over the phone a couple of times. But people don’t kill people over bad Yelp reviews.”

“You’d be surprised,” Kovac said. “You run into the wrong person, they’ll kill you for having blue eyes. That’s why we need to know anything at all that might fit into the picture. Even if it seems insignificant to you.”

Taylor stared intently at his phone, flipping through the photographs he had taken earlier. He stopped on one, enlarged it with his thumb and forefinger, and shot a look at Kovac.

“Handy Dandy Home Services. There was a notation on the calendar in the kitchen for last Friday.”

“The guy had offered to come back and do some work for free if my father took the bad review down,” Chamberlain said.

“Do you know if that happened?”

“I don’t know. My father said he wouldn’t take it down until he was satisfied with the follow-up work.”

“I’ll look it up,” Taylor said, tapping the screen of his phone.

“When did you last see your folks?” Kovac asked.

“Sunday. My father’s birthday dinner.”

“And how was that?”

He bobbed his eyebrows, looked away, and sighed. “It was the usual family gathering.”

“What does that mean?”

He didn’t want to say. He stared down at his hands and picked at the loose piece of cuticle.

“We’ve already spoken to your sister,” Kovac prompted. “You might as well give us your version.”

Another sigh as he considered what to say.

“My mother tried too hard to be festive. My father played the
role of tyrant, my sister got belligerent, and we all ended up screaming at each other.”

“That’s the usual?”

“It is for us. In case no one’s told you, my father is a raging narcissist, and my sister is bipolar. It’s not a good mix. Our mother drinks to take the edge off.”

“And what do you do?”

“I try to keep my head down.”

“Have you spoken to your sister today?”

He shook his head and gave in to the nervous urge to bite off the offending loose cuticle. “She won’t pick up. She isn’t answering text messages, either. She’s punishing me for not taking her side Sunday. I didn’t take his side, either. But she didn’t care. You’re either for Di or you’re against her. She doesn’t believe in neutrality.”

“Who’s the oldest?” Kovac asked.

“She is.”

“But she’s still a student?”

“She had some . . .
interruptions
along the way.”

“Are you a student, too?”

“No. I’m a paralegal at Obern and Phipps. Family law.”

“Decided not to follow in the old man’s footsteps?”

“There’s more call for paralegals in the workplace than for scholars of ancient Asian history,” the kid said. “I didn’t have any desire to go into his field and be his rival.”

“But your sister felt differently?”

“We’re different people. She still has some idea that if she pleases him, he’ll be proud of her. The thing is it’s virtually impossible to please him.”

“So, you became a paralegal, and you don’t have to live up to your old man’s reputation or expectations?”

“I wouldn’t say that,” he mumbled. “He doesn’t limit his criticism to his own field of expertise. But I don’t care,” he declared in
a way that made it clear he
did
care. “I figured him out a long time ago. Narcissists love themselves. The rest of us live on a sliding scale of pleasing them or displeasing them.”

“Where did you rank on that scale lately?”

“Somewhere on the lower end of center,” he admitted.

“What was his beef with you?”

He shrugged, as if to say,
Take your pick
. “I should have become an attorney instead of a paralegal. I should have become a doctor instead of a lawyer. I should have been him instead of me. That’s how it works. To try to live up to his expectations is a trap. He just keeps raising the bar—a lesson my sister refuses to learn.”

He went quiet for a moment. “I guess she doesn’t have to now.”

Kovac sat back and scratched the side of his face, thinking he needed a shave, watching the kid’s body language. He was uncomfortable talking about his family issues. He was having a hard time sitting still. He kept glancing at Taylor, who was reading something on his phone.

“What was the fight about Sunday?” Kovac asked.

Chamberlain rolled his eyes. “Diana is—
was
our father’s student assistant. Pretty much the worst idea ever. She filed a complaint about him at school, and he’s up for a big promotion. He accused her of sabotaging him.”

“Was she?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know. Probably. Partly. I mean, it’s not like he isn’t a jerk. He was hard on her. But her timing . . . Everything is complicated with Diana. Her brain is hardwired differently. She doesn’t feel obligated to make sense to anyone but herself.”

“What about Ken Sato?”

“What about him?” he asked, his expression carefully neutral.

“He and your sister seem . . . close.”

The kid shook his head again, like a pitcher shaking off a catcher’s signs. He didn’t want to play this game.

“I mind my own business. I don’t get involved in Diana’s life.”

“She’s truly bipolar? Is she on medication?”

He shrugged. “She should be. Whether or not she takes it, I don’t know. Why are you asking all these questions about her?” His eyes got big. “You can’t think she would— No. No.”

“We’re just trying to get a clear family picture,” Kovac reassured. “We’re not accusing anybody of anything.”

Chamberlain looked around, uncomfortable, anxious, probably feeling trapped in his own home. He’d just about had enough. He got up and walked behind his chair, needing to burn off some of the anxiety. He chewed on a thumbnail as he paced.

“Di is a mess, but she would never do anything like that,” he said. “I mean, she and our father went around and around. That was just their relationship. It was like a sick game.”

“What was your relationship with your father like?” Taylor asked.

“It was . . . fine,” he said, struggling for the right word, clearly not satisfied with the one he chose. “I have my own life. I saw him when I had to see him. We weren’t buddies or anything. That’s not who he is.”

“We have to ask,” Kovac said. “Where were you last night, Mr. Chamberlain?”

The kid looked from one of them to the other. “I was here, working. I have a deadline.”

“Can anyone verify that? A roommate, a friend, a co-worker, a neighbor?”

“Oh my God,” he breathed. “Do I need an
alibi
?”

“It just makes our job easier if we can conclusively put people in place while we figure out the time line,” Kovac said.

“I was home. Alone.” He looked like he might get sick.

“Lots of people are. That’s not a crime.”

“I was on my computer,” he said. “It has a log.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Kovac said, rising. Taylor took his cue and stood.

“What happens now?” the kid asked. “Should I be making arrangements or something? Who’s supposed to do that?”