The Bitter Season (14 page)

“Handy Dandy Home Services,” Taylor said. “They’ve got all their paperwork: registered, licensed, insured, etcetera. They’ve had a few complaints against them on the various websites that rate these businesses. Nothing violent. No big red flags. From what I’ve read, they rank somewhere in the middle of the pack for price and quality.”

“In keeping with the professor’s penny-pinching,” the lieutenant said.

“We’re on our way to talk to the owner,” Kovac said. “Who knows where he gets his workers. Some of those companies are on the up-and-up, and all their workers are on the books. Others—not so much. Guys that work that kind of job can be transient.

“And I want to take a harder look at the family and the professor’s associates, too,” he said. “The daughter is a trip. We know she and the dad were at odds.”

“But could you see her beating her father’s head in?” Mascherino asked. “That beating was brutal. Does she seem like she could be that strong?”

“She’s athletic,” Kovac said. “And she’s tall. Bigger than her father. And the brother says she’s bipolar. Maybe she just snapped.”

“Bipolar is not the same as psychotic,” Taylor pointed out.

“But bipolar people can be violent.”

“Violent people can be bipolar,” Taylor corrected him. “Contrary to what the movies and TV would have us believe, the overwhelming majority of people with mental illness are not violent. Statistically, they’re more apt to become victims.”

“We’re not talking about statistical probabilities,” Kovac argued. “We’re talking about Diana Chamberlain. Is she or is she not a weird chick?”

“She’s a weird chick,” Taylor agreed. “And she’s sleeping with the enemy. But could she hack up her mother with a sword? If she attacked her father with nunchucks in a blind rage, and hacked her mother up with a samurai sword, could she just turn that rage off and coldly stage a burglary as slick and professional as this? Not likely. Either she snapped and went ape shit crazy or she didn’t. No one can turn that on and off like a faucet.”

Kovac blew out a breath and sat back in his chair, already regretting the pizza. Now he was getting too fucking old to eat pepperoni.

“The daughter’s apartment was a pigsty, but at a crime scene she’s meticulous?” Taylor went on. He shook his head. “The burglary points to a pro.”

“And the other professor?” Mascherino asked. “The one the daughter is sleeping with?”

“Ken Sato. It’s easy to argue motive for him,” Kovac said. “Eliminating the competition for a big promotion.”

“But with Diana messing up her father’s chances, bringing a complaint against him with the Office for Conflict Resolution, you could argue Sato already had pretty clear sailing for that job,” Taylor said.

“He could have done it for love, I suppose,” Kovac offered. “She hated her father—not without reason, by the sound of it. But is Sato a professor by day and a ninja cat burglar by night?”

“Find out,” the lieutenant said. “What about the son?”

“Smart, quiet, nerdy kid. He’s a paralegal for a law firm. His alibi kind of sucks,” Kovac said. “He was home alone, working.”

“But we can check his computer,” Taylor said, “and confirm what Wi-Fi network he was using. We can check his cell phone records and see what towers it was pinging off.”

“He seemed pretty shaken up by what happened,” Kovac said. “With the sister being a flake, the responsibility for the aftermath is falling on him. We’re bringing him to the ME’s office for the official ID tomorrow morning.”

“Any hits on the Chamberlains’ credit cards?” Mascherino asked.

Kovac shook his head. “No action on their cell phones, either.”

It was the lieutenant’s turn to sigh. “I’m sure I don’t have to tell you this case is front and center until it’s solved. You’ve got Tippen and Elwood full time, and you can borrow anyone else available if you need to.”

“The overtime is approved?”

“Yes. Whatever you need. I want this case solved before it can be used as a political football.”

“Isn’t it too late for that already?” Kovac asked. “I heard the press conference was belly-to-butt with brass and suits. The local stations are running the story practically nonstop.”

“The union and the politicians aligning with the union are going to use this case as an example of what’s wrong with the force,” she said. “Not enough officers, not enough money.”

“And I’m supposed to be against that?” Kovac asked. “It’s the truth.”

“Do you want the public panicking, believing no one is safe in their own home?” Mascherino asked. “Do you want them thinking we’re not doing our jobs, that we’re using a high-profile case—the horrible deaths of these innocent people—to extort money from the city?”

“No.”

“That’s the flip side,” she said. “The mayor starts beating his drum about the no-good, dirty police union. Then what?”

Kovac was silent for a moment. “You’re a smart cookie, Lieutenant,” he said, his mouth kicking up at one corner. “I think I might like you.”

Mascherino smiled like the
Mona Lisa.
“Yes, I am, and thank you. Now go do your jobs. We’ve got a case to solve.”

“You can’t possibly think I did it.”

Dan Franken was thirty-six, six feet tall, and thick bodied. He had a bony, hawkish blade of a nose, and his dark eyes sat back in deep sockets. They had a tendency to dart from side to side, from Kovac to Taylor and back again. His mouth turned downward by nature, a lipless horseshoe centered on planes of heavy five o’clock shadow.

Kovac and Taylor stood silent, Kovac propping himself up against a tall filing cabinet, Taylor looking all military: legs straight, feet apart, hands clasped behind his back. A human guard dog on alert.

“I mean, I didn’t get along with the guy, but the wife seemed nice enough. I felt bad for her, having to be married to an asshole like that,” Franken said. His voice was rough with half a lifetime’s worth of cigarettes. He shook one out of a pack now and lit up, blowing the smoke up at the low yellowed acoustic-tile ceiling. “I heard on the radio someone hacked them up with a samurai sword. That’s nuts, man! What the fuck?”

Franken ran his business out of a tiny, cluttered wood-paneled office in an old commercial park on the North Side. The low buildings made of corrugated steel were part of a U-Store-It complex, and housed an odd variety of businesses: It’s a Party! party planning; Faux Flora, silk plants; B&D Auto Body; the offices of an outpatient drug rehab called Rising Wings; Iron Neck Gym. Franken looked
like he might have spent his free time at the last one, Kovac thought. His hands, clenched in loose fists at his sides, were the size of five-pound hammerheads.

“Professor Chamberlain wasn’t very happy with your work,” Taylor said. “We read his review. His son said the two of you got into it.”

“I never met the son,” Franken said. “I didn’t even know he had a son.”

“Did you argue with Professor Chamberlain?”

“Hell, yeah. I argued with him the day it happened, and I argued with him again when I found out about the Yelp review,” he admitted. “That was a shitty review. People look at those things, you know, especially young professionals. That’s a big part of my market.”

He sat back against his desk and tapped his cigarette ash off into an ashtray heaped with butts that testified to an evening spent slogging through paperwork. “He should have given us the chance to take care of the problems. But no, he had to be a prick and go online and run his mouth. I had other jobs lined up in that neighborhood. I lost two of them because he called the people up and ragged on about how terrible my guys were and what a shit job they did.”

“So you were pretty pissed.”

“Yeah, I was pissed! Of course I was pissed! Do you know how hard it is to get a new business going in this town? I’ve got plenty of contracting experience, but I don’t have the name or the kind of bucks it takes to get into new construction. This is my way in: Handy Dandy. I trademarked the name. My brother-in-law thinks I might be able to franchise it if things go well. I’ve spent the last three years trying to build a reputation.”

“Chamberlain cost you business,” Kovac said. “He cost you time, he cost you money. He set you back—who knows how far?”

“So I went to his house in the middle of the night and killed him and his wife so I can lose everything I’ve worked for and spend the rest of my life in prison?” Franken said. “You’re out of your mind.”

“What kind of work did you do for them that they were so unhappy about?” Taylor asked.

“Cleaned the gutters, put on storm windows. Cheap fucker. The guy has that kind of money and doesn’t replace those old windows. A couple of them got broken. He flipped his shit. Of course we would have fixed them right away, that day. He throws a hissy fit and kicks the guys off the property then bitches all over the neighborhood that he doesn’t have storms on half his windows.”

“Did you do any work inside the house?”

“They fixed a couple of wonky cupboard doors in the kitchen.”

Taylor glanced at Kovac. The security code was on the keypad on the wall near the kitchen door.

“Did you go back and finish the job?” Taylor asked.

Franken set his jaw like a petulant teenager. “I told him if he took the review down, we’d finish the job and not charge him.”

“That would be a no,” Kovac said. “We’ll need the names and contact information of the workers.”

“Yeah, sure,” Franken said, but he looked down at the ashtray as he said it, crushing out his cigarette.

“What kind of guys do you have working for you?” Kovac asked.

“They’re decent guys, hard workers.”

“Cream of the crop?”

“If they were the cream of the crop, they’d be working for better pay than I can afford.”

“Are they all on the books?”

“Absolutely,” he said, shaking another cigarette out of the pack.

“And they’ve all had background checks?”

“Yep.”

Meaning no one would be able to prove otherwise. Franken would give them the names of the guys that were legit, not the ones he paid in cash under the table.

Kovac sighed. “You know, Dan, we don’t have time to monkey-fuck
around here. We’re looking for a murderer. Now, I can go back downtown and waste an hour writing an affidavit, find a judge, get a search warrant, get pissed off, come back here, and turn this rat’s nest inside out just for kicks and giggles, and you’ll spend the next six months trying to put all your files back together, or you can tell us the truth.”

Franken’s expression didn’t change. His eyes went still, lids half lowered. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Let’s take him downtown, Sarge,” Taylor suggested, impatient. “He can sit in the box and think about it while we get the warrants.” He turned back to Franken. “You’ve got your equipment here? I saw your name on the big overhead doors on the next unit. We should probably get warrants for that space, too, Sarge. Who knows what he might keep in there.”

“Oh jeez,” Kovac grumbled. “It could take days to inventory all this shit. Days and days of no business for Mr. Franken. All those Handy Dandy customers waiting will have to look elsewhere for their home maintenance needs. And then, depending on what we find . . .”

“I’ll sue,” Franken said.

Kovac shrugged. “That’s not our department. We’re just trying to solve a brutal double homicide that’s all over the news. If you want your name attached to that story as an uncooperative person of interest, that’s your choice.”

Franken looked away, the muscles in his jaw working. He swore under his breath. “I’m just a taxpayer trying to run a business.”

“I appreciate that,” Kovac said. “And we’re not the business police. I personally don’t give a shit if you’ve dotted all your
i
’s and crossed all your
t
’s on your license application. But I’m gonna care a whole lot if you lie to me and a killer runs loose because of it.

“Now, you’ve got a drug rehab right around the corner,” he went on. “I’m willing to bet a few of the fine upstanding citizens who attend group therapy and whatnot there need to pick up a little pocket money now and again. Am I right?”

He could see Franken weighing his options, and not liking any of them.

“And I’m thinking it doesn’t take a master carpenter to clean the crap out of rain gutters,” Kovac said. “Where’s the harm in throwing a few bucks to a guy down on his luck?”

Franken ran a hand back over his thinning dark hair. “What happens to me if it turns out I hired a guy who did . . . something . . . bad?”

“From where we stand? Nothing—unless you sent him there specifically to do harm. On the other hand, hindering a police investigation will get your ass thrown in jail.”

Franken swore again and rubbed a big hand across his face. He pushed away from the desk and shifted his weight from one foot to the other. He wanted to pace, but there was no room to do it.

Kovac knew the feeling. He was losing patience, himself. He stepped a little closer to Franken. “If your guy is our guy, and he’s out there right now killing someone else? I will do everything in my power to get you charged as an accessory. How’s that for upping the ante, Dan? You can lose everything and spend the next twenty years in prison, or you can answer us honestly.”

“Fuck this,” Taylor muttered, scowling. He pulled a pair of handcuffs out and moved toward Franken.

Franken held his hands up. “Okay, okay! Yes, I sometimes pick up extra guys from the rehab. I’m a recovering alcoholic myself. I believe in second chances. Is that a crime?”

“I don’t have a problem with that, Dan,” Kovac said, stepping back, lessening the pressure. “It’s karmic. Somebody helped you out, you pay it forward, and the universe lets you save a few bucks. It’s all good—except that you don’t check these guys out, do you?”

He couldn’t look Kovac in the eye. “I’m a good judge of character.”

“They’re addicts. How do you know how recovered they are?” Taylor asked, irritably. “Or what they might have done when they were using? And you’re sending them into people’s homes?”

“Desperate people do desperate things, Dan,” Kovac said. “Drunks don’t generally steal, but drug addicts will do just about anything to get a few bucks for a fix—sell their own body, sell their own kids. I once got a call-out on a guy who tried to cut off his own arm with a chainsaw just to get the pain meds. Stealing is the least of it.”

“Yeah? Well, that’s not who I pick,” Franken barked back.

“No?” Kovac said. “You’re a fucking mind reader? Look at my partner here,” he said, hooking a thumb at Taylor. “Good-looking kid. Nice suit. Polite. Do you think he’s a killer? He doesn’t look like a killer. He looks like freaking Channing Tatum. Do you think Channing Tatum is a killer?”

Franken just glared at him.

“Why would anybody that good-looking and clean-cut be a killer? Right? What’s he got to be pissed off about?” Kovac looked at Taylor. “Kid, how many people have you killed?”

“Seventeen, Sarge,” Taylor answered without the slightest hesitation, his green eyes narrowed and unblinking as he stared at Franken.

Kovac shrugged. “I rest my case. Now, who did you send to the Chamberlain house?”

Franken sighed. “One of my regular guys, Greg Verzano—he’s an idiot, but he’s not a killer—and a guy who works at Rising Wings. He’s a good guy,” he insisted. “He’s a vet. He had a drug problem, went through the program, and now he works there. They hired him; why shouldn’t I? I’ve never had any trouble with him.”

“Name?”

“Gordon Krauss. He’s not your guy. I’m telling you.”

“What does he do at the rehab?” Taylor asked.

“Odd jobs. Security. Janitor-type stuff.”

“Have you seen him today?”

“No, but he’s probably over there now. He stays there nights. They’ve gotten broken into a couple of times.”

“Surprise, surprise,” Taylor muttered, turning for the door. “I’ll start the car,” he said to Kovac on his way out.

“You stay here,” Kovac said, pointing at Franken. “And don’t even think about tipping Krauss off.”

The steady drizzle had picked up, Kovac noticed as he left Franken’s office and got back in the car.

“I called for backup,” Taylor said, putting the car in gear. “They’re three minutes out.”

Kovac looked over at him in the glow of the dash lights. “Have you really killed seventeen people?”

Taylor didn’t answer.

They drove slowly, with no headlights on, around the end of the building to the double row of parking in front of Rising Wings. The rehab took up an entire fifty-by-one-hundred-foot building, the last building at the back of the complex. Twenty yards beyond it stood a tall security fence, and beyond that, a lot full of RVs, fifth-wheel campers; pleasure boats on trailers, all covered with tarps for the winter. Security lights scattered sparingly across the lot cast glowing white balls of light that didn’t travel far in the rain.

Warmer lights glowed through the shades in a couple of Rising Wings’s windows, and several cars were parked near the building, but there was no way of knowing how many people might be inside. The building had multiple doors, one on each end and two along the side, probably on both sides. Kovac wanted the exits covered before they approached.

“I don’t want to just sit here,” Taylor said impatiently, opening the car door. “What if he comes out? I don’t trust Franken not to tip him off.”

“The unit’s two minutes out,” Kovac argued. “They’ll be here before I can get soaked to the skin. And there’s a big-ass fence on the other side of the building. Where’s he gonna go?”

Taylor hummed his disapproval and got out of the car, leaving the door ajar. Kovac grumbled and got out, hunching his shoulders
and flipping the collar of his coat up in a vain effort to keep the cold rain off his neck. Damn kid. “I’ll watch this side,” he said with resignation. “You take the back.”

Taylor hadn’t taken ten steps toward the building when a figure dashed out of the shadows, running hard for the fence.

“Well, shit!” Kovac snapped.

Taylor bolted, covering ground like a racehorse, yelling, “Stop! Police!”

The runner hit the chain link about a third of the way up. Taylor caught him by one leg and the back of his coat and yanked him down. They hit the asphalt with a thud.

Kovac hustled toward them, drawing his weapon, yelling, “Give it up! We’ve got you!”

We
. Like he was in the mix.

The two men rolled and scrambled on the ground. In the pale glow of a distant security light, Kovac couldn’t make out one from the other. He was still thirty feet away. Someone threw a punch. Someone threw an elbow. One grunted, one cursed. Then they were both on their feet, heads together, arms tangled, pushing and pulling as they staggered one way and then the other. Then one broke free, spun around, and kicked the other in the head like something from a Bruce Lee movie.

One man went down like a felled tree.

The other man ran down the fence line, then skidded around the corner of a building and out of sight. By the time Kovac turned the corner, their bad guy had disappeared.
Shit
. He could continue blind pursuit and get himself coldcocked or worse, or he could turn it over to the uniforms that were just pulling up alongside his unmarked unit.