The Bitter Season (6 page)

The voice was growing louder, coming closer.

The assailant went very still. Dead calm.

“Lucien? I hope you’re not eating something at this hour. You’ll get your acid reflux back,” she said as she came into the dining room. “Why do you have the door open in this weather? Everything is getting wet! What are you thinking?”

She came around the side of the table, stopping at the sight of her husband lying dead in a pool of blood.

“Lucien!”

She looked up and shrieked as Death came straight at her.

The scream died in her throat as the sword struck her in the side of the neck.

“So, I’m leaning toward Stench,”
Kovac said as he walked into the cubicle with his third cup of office coffee.

He’d had the better part of a pot of the stuff at home, trying to rouse himself from a listless night’s sleep. Liska had given him a modern cup-at-a-time machine with all the lights and bells and whistles, but he turned his nose up at the fussy little flavored pods that went in it as “not real coffee.” He still used a Mr. Coffee machine from the last century. He and Mr. Coffee produced a brew that was capable of stripping varnish—not unlike the stuff that came out of the office coffeemaker.

Taylor looked up from his computer screen, green eyes bright and clear, no bags under them. “I’m sorry? What?”

“For your nickname. You need a nickname. I’ve been lax with that, I admit. It doesn’t usually take me this long. I’m off my game,” Kovac confessed.

“That’s okay,” Taylor said, going back to his work. “I don’t need a nickname.”

“Sure you do. We can’t just keep calling you Noob. It’s too generic.”

“That’s okay.”

“Did you have a nickname in the service?”

“Taylor.”

“That lacks imagination.”

Although, that might have suited him, Kovac thought as he looked at Taylor’s workspace. It was devoid of the ridiculous tacky and vulgar stuff Tinks had collected to clutter the place up—her coffee mug full of crazy pens, the cop cartoons printed off the Internet and pinned up on the walls, the voodoo doll of her ex, the framed photos of her kids. Taylor didn’t have so much as a Post-it. Boring. Finally, a flaw.

Kovac’s work area was a mess: binders and file folders in precarious stacks, notes and reminders hastily scribbled on scraps of paper and stuck haphazardly to the cabinet doors and the bottom of his computer screen. On the shelf above the computer a human skull sat with a fake severed finger in its nose hole and a cigarette clenched between its teeth.

He set his coffee mug on the desk—black with a ceramic gun for a handle. The taste went bitter in his mouth, and his mood soured. Michael Taylor was the modern detective in a nicely tailored charcoal suit and shined shoes, a business executive with a badge. His side of the cubicle could have belonged to a bank vice president. Kovac, on the other hand, felt like he’d slept in his clothes. He had nicked himself shaving. He looked like he was on the backside of a three-day bender, with his bloodshot eyes and the dark smudges beneath them, while his partner could have been a model for
GQ
magazine.

“I like Reek, myself,” Tippen said, wandering over from the giant whiteboard where all active cases were listed on a grid. “It has a medieval feel to it.”

“Maybe we could put this off until I do something more impressive than puke on a suspect who shit all over the interview room,” Taylor suggested.

Tippen shrugged. “We could, but seriously, how are you going to top that?”

“How about a double homicide with a samurai sword?” Elwood asked as he joined them.

“What are the odds of that happening?” Kovac grumbled.

“Better than even. The call just came in. You guys are up.”

*   *   *

T
HE CITY LOOKED LIKE
it was made of glass, all the trees and bushes, parked cars and fire hydrants encased in a thick layer of ice that had turned the entire metro area beautiful and treacherous overnight. The sleet and freezing rain that had begun after midnight had eventually turned into a light snow as the temperature dropped, covering the ice, doubling the danger. The ERs would be full of car accident victims and slip-and-fall broken hips and wrists.

Taylor had snagged the car keys before Kovac could reach for them, and drove them across town like a grandma, carefully avoiding the fender benders that littered the streets.

“I’d like to get there before they mummify,” Kovac complained, drumming his fingers impatiently on the armrest.

“I’d like to get there in one piece,” Taylor countered. “They aren’t going to get any deader.”

Kovac scowled. “You know, I’ve probably been driving longer than you’ve been alive.”

“Yeah. It’s a pure damn miracle you’ve made it to this ripe old age. I’m just making sure I get as far along as you.”

“Yeah, well,” Kovac grumbled. “By the time we get to this scene . . .”

Two radio cars were parked at the curb in front of the address. A news van had already staked out a spot on the opposite side of the street. Barricades had been put across the sidewalk and the end of the driveway to keep the vultures at bay. If the words
samurai sword
had gone out over the radio waves, every reporter and kook with a scanner would be rolling up at any minute.

“Bad news travels fast,” Taylor said as they pulled in behind the crime scene van.

“Faster than you,” Kovac returned, getting out of the car.

The house was a formal two-story brick Colonial that would have looked at home in Boston—white trim, black shutters, and a black lacquered front door with a big brass knocker and a wreath of wheat and fall leaves that said “rich but homey.” The kind of place upper-middle-class families had Thanksgiving dinners as depicted on television: everyone slender and well dressed, smiling and laughing. Not the kind of place where people were found hacked to death.

That was the thing with murder, Kovac thought as he flashed his ID at the uniform on the front steps: The emotions that fueled violence didn’t discriminate. People of all socioeconomic classes were equally capable of hate and rage, and equally capable of dying in a puddle of their own terror.

“Taylor! Mr. Bigshot homicide detective,” the uniform said with a grin.

Taylor ducked his head, sheepish. “Dave. How’s it going?”

“It’s a fucking bloodbath inside, man. Hope you didn’t eat a big breakfast. I hear you’ve developed a delicate stomach.”

“Ha-ha,” Taylor said without humor. “Were you first on the scene?”

“Yeah. The university called for a welfare check. The male DB was a professor of something or other. He didn’t show up for a big meeting, didn’t answer on any of his contact numbers. We came, did a walk around the house, spotted the bodies through the patio door to the dining room. Looks like that’s where the killer went in—knocked a pane out of the French doors, reached inside, and let himself in.”

“Any footprints?”

He shook his head. “Had to have happened before the snow.

“We went in and checked the house for other possible victims,” he went on. “It’s all clear. Looks like a burglary gone bad. The home office and the bedrooms were gone through.”

“Have there been any recent burglaries in the area?” Taylor asked.

“A couple B-and-Es, no violence, no home-invasion shit. This is a nice quiet neighborhood.”

“Suspects on the burglaries?” Kovac asked.

“Not that I’ve heard.”

“What’s this bullshit about a samurai sword?”

“No bullshit, Sarge. You’ll see. Down the hall and to the left. These people were killed by freaking ninjas.”

“Ninjas didn’t use samurai swords,” Taylor said. “Samurai used samurai swords.”

“There’s a difference?”

“That’s why you’re still in a uniform, Dave.”

“Fuck you, dude,” he said with a laugh. “I’m not stupid. I just lack ambition.”

“I don’t remember any questions about ninjas on the detective’s exam,” Kovac said as they went into the front hall of the house and put sanitary booties on over their shoes.

“I was a ninja in a past life,” Taylor said, deadpan as he pulled on purple disposable gloves.

Kovac looked around the hallway they had come into. As the exterior of the house suggested, everything was prim and proper: cream-colored wainscoting and drab gray wallpaper, an expensive-looking Oriental carpet runner leading the way down the hall. To the left was a formal living room. The furniture looked stiff and uncomfortable, the chairs upholstered in silky fabrics that didn’t invite anyone to sit on them. It was a “kids, don’t touch anything” kind of a house, a museum of antiques and formality. At the top of the staircase a spotlight shone on a huge painting of an ancient Chinese man scowling down on them with disapproval.

Taylor looked from the staircase to the front door, frowning. “That’s bad feng shui.”

“What?”

“The Chinese never want a staircase to end directly opposite the
door like that. All of your good chi will go out the door. It’s very unlucky.”

Kovac’s brows pulled together. “Who are you?”

Taylor shrugged. “I grew up on
Karate Kid
and
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles,
then Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan. I’ve always had an interest in the martial arts and the societies that practice them.

“These people have all this Chinese and Japanese art and antiques. They were allegedly killed with a samurai sword. Too bad they didn’t extend their interests to philosophy. They should have at least hung a mirror over the door to bounce the good chi back in before it could escape.”

“Their good mojo went out the front door, and this is why a ninja killed them?”

“If you buy into the philosophy,” Taylor said, snapping photos of the offending staircase and front door with his iPhone. “There’s a whole faction of people who believe Bruce Lee died because the design of the house he was living in flew in the face of feng shui.”

“Are you one of them?” Kovac leveled a flat stare at him. “Don’t even think about trying to feng shui the cubicle.”

Taylor held his hands up to ward off the idea. “Hey, man, I’ve got my shit together. Your life force is not my business.”

“That’s right.”

As they proceeded down the hall, the stench of a violent death scene wafted out of the dining room to greet them: blood, urine, and shit, the stink of absolute terror.

Kovac cut his partner a look. “Don’t puke on my scene, ninja boy.”

“Don’t worry,” Taylor said, brows pulling low over his narrowed eyes as he put his game face on.

“Mr. Culbertson!” Kovac called out as they stopped in the wide doorway to the scene of the crime.

The room was busy with a swarm of people in jumpsuits collecting evidence, photographing the scene, dusting for fingerprints.
Culbertson, the ME’s investigator, had his back to them, hands on his hips as he stood over a body.

He was the first person to physically examine the decedent at a death scene. No one touched the body before he did, for any reason. It was his unpleasant task to take the temperature of the corpse to aid in figuring out the time of death. It was his job to assess and make note of the visible wounds and a hundred other minute details.

Culbertson turned around to face them, blocking their view of the scene. Lean and vaguely scruffy, fast-talking and shifty-eyed, he was the kind of guy who looked like he would step out of a dark alley in a sketchy part of town and try to hustle you out of something or into something. Kovac had known him for years. They had polished off more than a few bottles of whiskey together, burning the taste of death out of their mouths at the end of a long night.

“It’s about time you got here, Kojak. I thought sure the words
samurai sword
would get even your jaded ass excited about a couple of stiffs. You’re slowing down in your old age.”

“Fuck you very much,” Kovak said without much rancor. “Steve, Michael Taylor, who drives like an old lady despite his dashing good looks. Taylor, Steve Culbertson, ME investigator and all-around reprobate.”

“Another noob?” Culbertson asked, arching a dark, bushy brow. “What happened to the last one?”

“He reconsidered his career path.”

“I can’t imagine why. Was it your sunny disposition or the fact that you drive like a drunken Formula One reject? You look like hell, by the way.”

“Thanks. I’m trying to dispel that whole ‘fifty is the new thirty’ myth.”

“Job well done.”

“Can you introduce us to our host and hostess here?” Kovac asked. “I’m sure we’ll find their personalities more agreeable than yours.”

“Be really careful where you step,” Culbertson warned, going into professional mode. “There is literally blood everywhere in here. You can’t see it so much on the red walls, but it’s on the ceiling, the chandelier, the drapes. This was your basic massacre.”

Culbertson stepped to the side, clearing the sight line to the carnage on the dining room floor. The scene stopped Kovac in his tracks.

The contrast of the fussy, formal room and the raw animal violence that had ended these people’s lives was jarring. The victims’ bodies had been so abused that Kovac’s brain automatically wanted to reject the idea they had ever been living, breathing human beings. His last tiny sliver of raw, unjaded humanity, he thought. The thought lasted less than the blink of an eye.

He had seen people decapitated, disemboweled, burned, drowned, strangled, beaten, run over. Not that long ago he and Liska had a case where the assailants had poured acid on the victim’s face while she was still alive. There was no end to the ways people could destroy one another.

“One assailant or two?” Kovac asked.

“I’d say one. Looks like one set of shoe prints in the blood.”

The female victim lay on her back, spread-eagle, with her head at Kovac’s feet. She was, quite literally, bathed in blood. It was impossible to determine her hair color, difficult at a glance even to distinguish her race. He could see she was a woman because her nightgown had been torn, exposing one large, bloody breast that had been sliced diagonally.

A horrific gash cleaved the left side of the woman’s face, from her partially severed ear, across her cheek, completely opening her mouth. The edges of the lips curled back in a macabre grimace, exposing muscle, tissue, bone, and teeth. Another gash cut deep into her neck where it met her shoulder.

That had probably been the first blow, Kovac thought. The one that knocked her down, but not the one that killed her. She had been slashed and stabbed in the torso multiple times. The weapon
that had been used to kill her stood upright. Her killer had run the sword through her stomach so hard the blade had penetrated the floor and stuck there like a steel exclamation point.