The Bitter Season (18 page)

“You think she’s not going to flip out on him if he did that to her mother?”

“That line of thinking would rule out the brother then, too. How could she be around him if he did that to their mother? But she’s hanging all over him like a cheap sweater,” Kovac said. “I wanted to go take a shower watching that. Do you think they’re sleeping together?”

“The brother and sister? He doesn’t really react to her that way. He seems to know how to handle her. I guess he’s had his whole life to master it.”

“Yeah. He doesn’t want her alone with us, though,” Kovac said. “What’s he afraid of? What’s she going to let slip? Does he think she did it? Does he think she’ll rat him out? Are they in it together?”

“We’ll find out today who inherits what,” Taylor said. “What does either of them have to gain besides getting rid of a tyrant?”

“Isn’t that enough?” Kovac asked. “I didn’t even know the guy, and I want to punch him in the throat. Add the bonus of whatever that collection of his is worth, and what money Mom was worth, insurance policies . . .”

“I still say the scene says pro,” Taylor said. “My money’s on the handyman.”

“A drug addict in and out of rehab,” Kovac mused. “Diana
Chamberlain has been in and out of rehab. I wonder what the odds are that their paths might have crossed.”

Kovac’s head was throbbing with the effort to keep all the threads from tangling and something important from falling through the cracks. He had been up for almost thirty hours, and he was starting to feel it. The adrenaline had finally started wearing off as he sat across the table from Dan Franken in an interview room at oh-dark-thirty in the morning while Taylor was at the Hennepin County Medical Center ER getting a head CT.

Taylor was probably right, Kovac thought. He probably shouldn’t have been driving a car, but he was afraid to stop moving. If he had been sitting on the passenger side, he would have been slack-jawed and drooling, sound asleep with his head against the window. That would have been okay with Liska. They’d been together too long to worry about impressing each other. But he didn’t want Taylor thinking he was too old for all-nighters—even though he was in fact starting to feel too old for all-nighters.

His mood soured, he parked the car in a space designated for some city councilman he didn’t give a shit about.

“Ummm . . .” Taylor made a half-assed gesture at the sign as they got out of the car.

“Screw him,” Kovac growled. He wanted a gallon of coffee to be delivered intravenously, and to eat a greasy donut just to perpetuate the cop stereotype.

They went into the CID offices and straight to the war room.

“We got a hit on Professor Chamberlain’s credit cards,” Tippen said by way of a greeting.

“If you tell me you have a culprit in custody, I’ll kiss you on the mouth,” Kovac said, making a beeline for the coffee maker.

“Pucker up, pal. Suite three, down the hall.”

“Seriously?”

“Detained by security at the Lake Street Kmart. I’ll pass on the kiss, though. People will think we’re in love.”

“You have a problem with that?” Kovac asked, his mood brightening again with the prospect of a lead. “I’m hurt.”

“It’s not you, it’s me,” Tippen said, leading the way down the hall. “I’ll only break your heart in the end, my friend.”

“You’re not my type anyway,” Kovac said as they stopped outside the interview room. “So tell me we have a sword-wielding ninja on the other side of this door.”

“I never promised you the moon.”

What they had on the other side of the door was an angry three-hundred-pound woman with a rainbow-colored hair weave and drawn-on eyebrows like the golden arches of McDonald’s. She sat behind the undersize table, her arms crossed atop the wide ledge of her chest, glaring at the cops as they entered the interview room.

“Sergeant Kovac,” Tippen said, “meet Professor Lucien Chamberlain.”

“You’re Professor Chamberlain?” Kovac said, straight-faced.

“Yes, I am,” she said. “And I demand to be released on my own personal renaissance.”

“
Recognizance,
” Taylor corrected her. “You can’t get that from us.”

“What
can
I get from you, then, you sweet, hot piece of man candy?” she asked, batting her long false eyelashes at him.

“You’re Professor Lucien Chamberlain,” Kovac said again, moving to block her sight of Taylor. Kovac put his reading glasses on and held up the driver’s license Tippen handed to him, as if to compare the photo to the person sitting before him. “You’re a professor of East Asian history at the University of Minnesota? Five-feet-nine-inch, one-hundred-fifty-five pound Caucasian male Lucien Damien Chamberlain?”

“Well, that’s an old picture,” she said stubbornly.

“Also known as Millicent Johnson, Antoinette LaPort, Robert Milland,” Tippen said, producing an array of credit cards and driver’s licenses as with a magician’s card trick. He plucked one from the rest. “And last but by no means least: Ms. Sparkle Cummings.”

“Ms. Sparkle, where did you get this ID and credit card?” Kovac asked. “Lucien Chamberlain’s.”

“I didn’t steal it, if that’s what you think.”

“You’re not a cat burglar-slash-martial arts assassin in addition to your many other talents?”

“Are you out your mind?”

“You seem to have a lot of alternate personalities,” Tippen said. “Did you not steal any of them?”

“I plead the Fifth Commandment.”

“Your mother and father will be glad to hear it,” Kovac said. “Look, I don’t care about any of the rest of those people. I don’t care how you came to have their credit cards in your possession. I don’t care if you boiled them and ate them. I only need to know where you got Lucien Chamberlain’s cards.”

She gave him a look. “I’m not going to recriminate myself. I know my rights. This ain’t my first rodeo, handsome.”

“Indeed, it is not,” Tippen said. “Ms. Sparkle and her alter egos have been guests of Hennepin County on several occasions—shoplifting, possession, vagrancy, public intoxication, and multiple counts of soliciting . . .” He gave the woman a sideways look. “Ms. Sparkle, you naughty girl!”

She laughed, eyes flashing. “Honey, I ain’t giving all this away for free!” she said with an elaborate gesture to her person.

“Honest to God,” Kovac said, bracing his hands on the table and leaning down. “I’m not interested in sending you to jail if you help me out here, Sparkle. If you help me out, I’ll help you out. I’ll get you into a shelter if you want. I’ll get you into a drug program if you need it. I will have you relocated like a bear to another part of the city. Whatever you want, sweetheart. I need to know where you got these cards.

“But if you don’t play nice with me,” he continued, “I’ll flip the switch and be the biggest jerk you ever met. Lucien Chamberlain and his wife are on slabs down at the morgue, and I will be very
happy to arrest you for putting them there just because I’m tired and pissed off.”

“I didn’t kill nobody!” she protested.

“I don’t care,” Kovac said. “I haven’t slept since God was a child. I will throw you in jail and take a vacation to Bermuda. Where did you get these cards?”

“I found them!”

“Found them where?”

“On the ground next to a garbage can.”

“Where?”

The address she gave them was a street lined with check cashing places, bail bonds places, and dive bars; a part of town populated with drug dealers and their customers, homeless people, street hustlers, and prostitutes.

“When was this?”

“Yesterday morning,” she said. “I like to get out early and look for treasures. People drop things, lose things, throw all kinds of things away when they’re drunk or high. I found this weave in the trash,” she said, pointing to the rainbow on her head.

“So these cards were on the ground like somebody just threw them away?” Taylor asked.

“That’s the God’s honest truth,” she said.

“You didn’t see anybody drop them or throw them there?” Kovac asked.

“No. I wasn’t out the night before. The weather was bad. I found them in the morning, on the sidewalk all covered in ice.”

*   *   *

“W
HAT THIEF THROWS AWAY CREDIT C
ARDS
?” Mascherino asked. “They use them, they sell them, they don’t throw them in the trash.”

She had come into the war room for an update and to bring them a gallon of Starbucks and a bag of deli sandwiches. Gold stars
for the lieutenant. She sat with them now, nibbling on an egg salad on whole wheat as they filled her in.

“Unless the idea is to throw us off the scent,” Kovac said. “A misdirection play. We have to run around chasing down these credit cards and whoever happened to get hold of them, wasting time and taking up our manpower while our bad guy is off unloading a fortune in antique weaponry.”

“We just heard from American Express that Sondra Chamberlain’s card is vacationing without her in Spain,” Tippen said.

“So was this a theft with two murders thrown in?” Mascherino asked. “Or was it a double homicide and the trinkets were a bonus?”

“We’ll find out this afternoon what the stolen pieces from the weapon collection are worth,” Taylor said. “Plus Mrs. Chamberlain’s jewelry, and the small electronics.”

“The other burglaries in the area,” Mascherino said, looking again to Tippen and Elwood. “What was taken?”

“Small electronics, cash, and jewelry,” Elwood said.

“Art? Antiques?”

“No.”

“Did these homeowners have anything in common?”

“Anthony and Lillian Johnson are both art history professors at the U,” Elwood said. “That neighborhood is thick with college professors, obviously, but it might be interesting to note the Art History Department and the History Department are both housed in Heller Hall.”

“What about the other case? Is this a thief targeting university people only?”

“No. The other house belongs to a CPA and his wife,” Tippen said. “No connection to the U at all. No connection to any of the other victims.”

“Did any of these people know the Chamberlains?”

“The professors were acquaintances, not friends.”

“Lucien Chamberlain didn’t have any friends,” Kovac said.

“The wives were friendly,” Elwood said. “They served on a museum charity together. Mrs. Johnson is pretty broken up about what happened.”

“Had any of these people had handyman work done recently?” Mascherino asked.

“All of them,” Tippen said. “Two different companies. The CPA used Handy Dandy, and the Johnsons used Lundquist Contracting.”

“What’s the proximity of the two houses from one another?” Taylor asked.

“Same street, about a block apart,” Elwood said. “So, anyone working either job might have cased other houses in the neighborhood. And these houses are about two blocks away from the Chamberlains’.”

“So what’s the update on your missing handyman?” the lieutenant asked, turning back to Kovac and Taylor.

“We don’t have one yet,” Taylor said. “There’s no Gordon Krauss in the system.”

“The name is probably an aka,” Kovac said. “He came out of a church shelter. They didn’t care what name he used. The rehab took him as a charity case. They didn’t bother with paperwork. Nobody’s checking up on this mutt. He could be anyone.”

“If we can get our warrant for his room at Rising Wings, we can lift his prints,” Tippen said. “Prints don’t lie.”

“You’ll have it by the time we finish lunch,” Mascherino said. “Have there been any sightings of him today?”

“Not that have panned out,” Elwood said.

“And Michael, how’s your head?” she asked, looking at Taylor.

“I’m fine, ma’am. A little headache and a stiff neck is all.”

“Good,” she said. “When is the last time a suspect used martial arts to get away from you—any of you?”

“Never,” Taylor said. “But if this guy is a veteran, then he’s had some combatives training. And he’s pretty good if he can land a kick like that.”

“I’ll be interested to see if he has a pair of nunchucks in his room,” Kovac said.

The lieutenant sighed and pushed the last of her sandwich aside on its little square of brown paper. She may not have been in the office all night, or out in the rain looking for their phantom suspect, but she had stayed late and come in early, and here she was now with her suit jacket off and the sleeves of her crisp white blouse neatly rolled up. That was more than Kovac could have said for a lot of lieutenants.

“I’ve spoken with the Chamberlains’ family attorney,” she said. “He’s been out of the country. He got back late Tuesday evening. He says Professor Chamberlain called his office Monday morning and made an appointment for late Wednesday afternoon.”

“Did he say what the appointment was for?” Kovac asked.

“He didn’t know. He said Chamberlain would never have told his secretary. He was a very private man.”

“He and the daughter were supposed to meet with Ms. Ngoukani at the Office for Conflict Resolution late Wednesday,” Taylor said.

Kovac arched a brow. “Sounds like maybe he decided he didn’t care to resolve that conflict after all.”

“But he had to,” Taylor countered, “or he wasn’t getting the promotion.”

“We’re missing a puzzle piece,” Mascherino said as she rose to leave. “Go find it.”

Kovac breathed a long sigh and glanced at his watch as the lieutenant made her exit. They had an hour before they had to leave for the Chamberlain house.

“I’m gonna lock myself in a room for an hour,” he said to Taylor. “Come find me when it’s time to go. Or if you solve the case in the meantime, that’d be good, too.”

An hour of shut-eye would recharge his batteries enough for him to get through the afternoon.

He stepped out of the war room and ducked right.

“Sam Kovac! You’re a sore sight for my eyes.”

“Oooooh man!” Kovac groaned. “The most beautiful woman in my life, and you have to catch me on the backside of an all-nighter? You’re heartless, Red.”

“You’re working the latest crime of the century,” Kate Quinn said. “Murder is not a pretty business.”

He’d been in love with her for years, the girl of his dreams: a tall, gorgeous redhead with a quick mind and a smart mouth. But she had always been out of his league (or so he thought), and she had ended up with an FBI profiler who looked like George Clooney.