The Bitter Season (22 page)

“He didn’t like me. I didn’t like him.”

“Did he think you were trying to sabotage him so Ken Sato could get the promotion?”

“Of course he did. Daddy always thinks the worst of me. Everybody always thinks the worst of me.”

“Yeah? Do they have good reason?”

She gave him the finger and then took a picture of herself doing it, making a comic tough-chick face.

“You were supposed to meet with him yesterday at the Office for Conflict Resolution,” Taylor said. “Did you know he wasn’t going to come to that meeting? He was meeting with his attorney instead.”

She didn’t answer him right away. It made him wonder what she might be reliving in her head.

“What didn’t happen doesn’t matter,” she said.

What didn’t happen didn’t happen because Lucien Chamberlain died Tuesday night.

“You should be more fun, Detective Taylor,” she said, unfolding her legs and getting up from the bed.

“Where were you Tuesday night?” he asked.

She reached out and dragged a fingertip across his jaw as she passed him.

“I was in bed,” she said. She paused in the doorway and rubbed up against the doorframe like a cat. “Dreaming.”

“Alone or with company?”

“I have to go pee now,” she announced. “Can I use the bathroom at the other end of the hall, or is that a crime scene, too?”

Taylor motioned her on her way. He followed her into the hall but paused just outside the door of the master bedroom, his attention catching on a small key panel mounted on the wall—another keypad for the security system.

Mascherino had told them that, according to the security company, the system had been armed a little after seven Tuesday evening and disarmed at around twelve thirty. The Chamberlains had been in bed. Both sides of the bed had been used, the covers and pillows rumpled and tossed. Lucien Chamberlain had died in his fussy silk dressing gown. Sondra Chamberlain’s blood had saturated her baby blue robe.

Why had they gone downstairs at all, he wondered. If they suspected an intruder, why didn’t they stay in their bedroom and call 911 or hit the panic button on the alarm panel?

Analyzing the crime scene, they believed that the professor had gone downstairs first, and that Mrs. Chamberlain later either heard something and went to investigate, or became concerned when her husband didn’t come back to bed and went downstairs to find him.

But neither of them had been worried about going downstairs
because they didn’t think anyone was down there waiting to kill them.

He flipped the front of the keypad down, revealing the numbers and emergency buttons. The panel was lighted. The system was unarmed but functional. If someone came into the house while the system was armed, they had half a minute to enter the code or have the alarm sound. During that thirty seconds, most systems beeped the countdown until the code was entered.

Before he could form another thought, a scream split the air.

Taylor bolted down the hall, even though the sound seemed to have come from downstairs. He went in the direction Diana had gone, remembering only as he turned the corner to the bathroom that there was a second staircase that went down to a TV room at the back of the house.

He cursed under his breath as he thundered down the stairs. Kovac was going to kill him.

One scream gave way to another and another.

Diana Chamberlain was on her knees in the dining room, in the middle of the huge bloodstain on the Oriental rug, screaming and screaming. Her white shirt was stained with her mother’s blood where she had thrown her body down on the still-wet carpet. She had pressed her hands into it and wiped them over her face, painting herself with the last evidence of her mother’s life.

Charlie Chamberlain knelt beside her, trying to comfort her. He had come in through the French doors, having knocked out the piece of plywood that temporarily covered the empty space where the Chamberlains’ killer had broken out the glass and let himself in. He wrapped his arms around his sister and smothered her sobs against his shoulder, his hand tangled in her hair.

“Look what you’ve done!” he shouted, his glare going in the direction of Kovac and Sato, who had rushed into the room from the study, both of them looking shocked.

“Oh my God! Oh my God!” Diana sobbed over and over.

Sato spat out a curse as he went toward her. “Di—”

“Fuck you!” Charlie snapped, exploding to his feet. His first punch caught Sato on the cheekbone, snapping his head to the side. The second one glanced off the professor’s ear and temple. Sato stumbled backward, falling into Kovac. Momentum carried both of them backward into an antique sideboard.

Diana shrieked as her brother lunged after Sato, shouting, “This is all your fault!”

Taylor ducked and moved, hitting Chamberlain in the midsection with his shoulder and driving the much smaller man off his feet and to the other side of the room like a tackling dummy. In one motion, he set Charlie Chamberlain down and spun him around, pushing him flat up against the wall.

From the corner of his eye, he could see Diana going toward Sato—and he could see Kovac coming toward him. He cringed inwardly as Kovac stepped up beside him, his expression like stone.

“You had one job, Stench.”

“That’s some temper you keep locked away,”
Kovac said.

They stood in the fussy sitting room, Charlie Chamberlain pacing one end of the room. Kovac had closed both sets of doors. He wanted the young man isolated, but didn’t want him to have the cooling-off period of a ride downtown. He wasn’t being arrested. Sato had no intention of pressing charges, despite the shiner he was going to be sporting in short order. The professor and Diana were in another room with Taylor.

Kovac wanted Charlie like this: hot, rattled, still emotional, embarrassed and upset that he had lost control. Nothing was worse to a control freak than losing his grip in front of people. Charlie was still breathing hard. He cradled his right hand against his belly as he paced. He wouldn’t look Kovac in the eye.

“You’ll want somebody to take a look at that hand,” Kovac said. “You cracked him good. Could be broken. I don’t imagine you get the opportunity to deliver a lot of beat-downs as a paralegal.”

“It’s fine,” the kid said, flexing his fingers. They wouldn’t straighten all the way. The hand was red and swollen.

“Then again,” Kovac said, looking at the framed photo of Charlie and his sister as kids in their karate outfits, “for all I know, you’re some kind of umpteen-degree black belt of whatever and you spend your free time breaking concrete blocks with that hand.

“Did you keep up with it?” he asked, gesturing to the photograph.

Chamberlain didn’t respond.

“What was that about?” Kovac asked. “‘This is all your fault.’ What did you mean by that?”

Still nothing. He continued pacing, looking down at the floor. He chewed at a cuticle on his uninjured hand like a starving animal gnawing its own paw.

“Do you think Sato killed your parents? Why would he do that? Because of the job promotion? You need to help me out here, Charlie. Or is this about Diana?” Kovac asked. He sat down on the arm of a tufted leather chair, tired just watching this kid’s nervous energy burn.

“He puts things in her head,” the kid said. “He just uses her to get at our father.”

“So you know they’re sleeping together, right? That bothers you—the idea of him and her sweating up the sheets?”

“Shut up!” Charlie snapped. He didn’t want to hear it, but he didn’t deny it, either. “Of course it bothers me. She’s my sister. He’s taking advantage of her.”

“You’re very protective of her,” Kovac said, going right back to the conversation they had had at the morgue. “That must be exhausting, considering. She’s not exactly a stranger to trouble, is she? Drinking, drugs, shoplifting, sex—”

“She’s fragile,” he said in his sister’s defense. “You don’t understand.”

“I’m trying to, Charlie,” Kovac said, keeping his voice even and soft. Annoyingly calm. “Help me. Why is Diana so fragile? Did someone abuse her when you were kids?”

He wasn’t going to talk about it. Kovac could see the stubborn set of his jaw, the muscles flexing as he fought to contain whatever unpleasant memories were coming to him.

Kovac pushed a little harder. “Did your father abuse her?”

“He abused everyone,” Charlie muttered with a hint of a tremor in his voice. He stared hard at the floor, or at some memory only he could see. He was breathing like he was under the strain of a great weight.

“Physically?” Kovac asked. “Sexually?”

The kid shook his head, but the movement was small, almost as if he was saying no to himself rather than to Kovac’s questions. No, he would
not
talk about this.

“Do you think Sato put Diana up to going to the Office for Conflict Resolution?” Kovac asked. “To mess with your father’s chances at the promotion?”

“He certainly didn’t try to stop her,” Charlie said sarcastically. “She wants to please him.”

“And piss off your old man at the same time? Bonus. Did your dad know she was sleeping with Sato? Is that what they argued about Sunday night?”

If that was the case, Lucien Chamberlain could have used that information against Sato. Which would have been worse in the eyes of the university: a professor who created a hostile work environment with his bipolar grad student daughter, or a professor who slept with his rival’s daughter as a power play? Kovac had to think Sato came out with the short end of that stick, no matter Sato’s comment from the night before when he implied he had no fear of losing his job over his relationship with the girl.

“They were going to resolve their issues,” Charlie said. “They just had to cool off. They were going to meet—”

“Only, your father had no intention of going to that meeting,” Kovac said. “On Monday he called his attorney’s office and made a Wednesday appointment for the same time of day. Now, in my experience, when a parent and an adult child have a big argument and the next day the parent is calling his attorney, that means one thing: he’s changing his will. And when that parent turns up dead before that change can happen, we call that motive.

“Is that where the argument went Sunday night, Charlie?”

The kid shook his head vehemently. He was close enough that Kovac could see the tears rising in his eyes. His face was as red as if he was holding his breath against the need to scream.

“The old man had just had it with Diana’s behavior, and said enough was enough,” Kovac suggested. “He was disowning her, writing her out of the will. I can see that. He probably never wanted her in the first place, right? I mean, he doesn’t strike me as a kid person, from what I’ve heard about him—especially not someone else’s kid. And then it turns out she’s defective, with the bipolar disorder. He probably wanted his money back.”

“Stop it,” Charlie said, his voice barely above a whisper.

Kovac knew he had hit a nerve. He felt a little rotten about it, but it went with the job. He had to keep poking until he found a raw patch, then dig in.

The tears were welling up and spilling over, streaking down Charlie Chamberlain’s cheeks despite his efforts to hold them back. He scrubbed them away with the back of his good hand.

“Do you know who killed your parents, Charlie?” Kovac asked quietly.

“No.”

“Do you think Diana knows?”

He kept shaking his head. “She didn’t do this. It was a robbery. His picture was all over the news at noon. Why didn’t you tell us about that? There’s a manhunt for a suspect, and you never even mentioned it to us.”

“I don’t know what the media is saying,” Kovac said. “We don’t know enough about the guy to even call him a suspect.”

“That’s bullshit. This handyman did it, and you’re wasting time accusing my sister—”

“I’m not accusing your sister, but who could blame her if she had something to do with it?” Kovac pressed. “Your old man was a piece
of work. You two couldn’t do anything right. You couldn’t make him happy. Kids deserve parents who love them. Diana lost out on that twice—dumped by her birth mother, then gets adopted by a drunk and a tyrant who was ready to disown her. That’s gotta hurt.”

“Stop it!” Charlie shouted. He glared at Kovac, tear-wet eyes narrowed. “You don’t know anything about us!”

Kovac lifted his hands in surrender. “I’m trying to learn. Enlighten me, Charlie.”

A framed photo in the bookcase caught Chamberlain’s eye. He stared at it for a few seconds then snatched it off the shelf and hurled it at the fireplace. The frame hit the brick and the glass shattered. He stormed out of the room and out the front door.

Kovac winced and swore under his breath as the door slammed. He watched through the bay window as the kid hustled down the sidewalk to his car. He might have pushed too hard. Charlie was a smart kid with legal training and connections. He had only to pick up a phone and one of his bosses would be recommending criminal defense attorneys. The second that happened, there would be no more access to the two people closest to the victims. If Charlie lawyered up, he would make sure Diana did, too.

“You okay?” Taylor asked, hustling into the room. “He didn’t punch you out, too, did he?”

“Not because he didn’t want to,” Kovac said. “I might have just screwed that up. I had him right on the edge, and I took one step too many.”

He went to the fireplace and picked up the now-broken picture frame Charlie had thrown. The glass was shattered. A spiderweb of cracks seemed to dissect the family in the photograph, separating the subjects from one another. The Chamberlain family: Lucien and Sondra, Diana and little Charles—the kids maybe eight and six respectively.

Fitting, he thought. It seemed they hadn’t been as much a family
unit as four individuals who happened to live under the same roof. Lucien Chamberlain had been the center of his own universe. Sondra Chamberlain created her own world of committees in the afternoons and wine at night. Diana lived in her own world, a victim of her mental illness and whoever wanted to take advantage of that. And then there was Charlie: the good kid, the peacemaker, trying to keep the family ship upright and balanced.

“The kid has twenty-four years of rage bottled up inside of him.”

“Do you think he might have unleashed it on his parents?” Taylor asked.

“I don’t know.”

He tried to imagine Charlie Chamberlain in that role. It seemed anyone who had to butt heads with Lucien Chamberlain could have been driven to want to kill him. But want-to and follow-through were two different things. Could the boy who had always played the peacemaker, backing down and working around his father’s ego rather than challenging him, have taken that giant leap to murder? Could he have chosen a sword from the wall in his father’s study and hacked his mother to death? Sondra Chamberlain had been nearly decapitated. Her wounds had been so catastrophic that she had to have bled out in a matter of minutes. Could her own son have done that to her? He thought about Ken Sato’s efficient movement with the sword in the study.

“He’s spent his life trying to fly under the radar and maintain the status quo with the old man,” Kovac said. “It would make more sense for him to take out Sato. He hates the guy messing with his sister. And if Dad gets the promotion, nothing else matters. That’s all the professor cared about. If he had had clear sailing for the job, his conflict with the girl would have been moot.

“Did you get anything out of the other two?” he asked.

Taylor shook his head. “They left. Sato was too pissed off. The girl was too hysterical. They went out the back door.”

Kovac set the broken picture frame aside and dug his phone out
of his pocket to check his messages. There was no news from Tippen or Elwood.

“What did the girl have to say about her rehab history?”

“She was vague. She danced around everything: the rehab questions, the abuse questions. I never got a straight answer. She did say her parents always wanted to give her back to wherever they adopted her from. That’s something every kid wants to hear from Mom and Dad,” Taylor said sarcastically.

“Wow,” Kovac said. “I threw that idea out at Charlie just to goad him—that the old man was going to change his will and disown the daughter. He should have punched me.”

“It’s sad,” Taylor said, looking around the room, with its expensive antiques and its photographs of an unhappy family. “These people seemed to have everything to give kids a good upbringing: education, financial security . . .”

“Money doesn’t cure people of being narcissistic assholes,” Kovac pointed out. “Get everybody’s phone records. Landlines and cell phones for our vics and for the three amigos. I want a time line of every phone call, starting Sunday evening.”

“Done,” Taylor said. “We should have the records by the end of the day.”

“Good.”

“You know they’re all probably calling lawyers as we speak.”

“Probably,” Kovac conceded. “I thought we were being clever bringing them here. Instead we’re up for the Clusterfuck of the Year award.”

Taylor shrugged, then winced and rubbed at his stiff neck. “Seemed like a good idea at the time.”

“Yeah, well . . .” Kovac nodded. “I’ve said for years that’s going on my headstone.”

*   *   *

K
OVAC CLOSED HIS EYES
and dozed in the car on the twenty-minute drive to the office of the Chamberlains’ insurance agent. As much
as he hated to give up control and let the kid drive, he needed a rest, however brief. He was dog tired. Not for the first time (or the hundred and first time), he thought, I’m getting too damned old for this. In the next thought, he wondered what Liska was doing. He wondered how bored she was. He thought of cold case squads as the place old Homicide dicks went when they couldn’t keep up anymore. Then he remembered with no small amount of depression that he was an old Homicide dick.

He looked at Taylor out of the corner of his eye: a man just coming into his prime, smart, fit, hungry, good-looking. All the things Kovac had been nearly two decades ago. Well, he admitted, he’d never been that good-looking. He had probably never been that fit, either. He had to grit his teeth against the urge to groan as he got out of the car at the insurance agent’s office, his body protesting old injuries and the lack of sleep.

The agent, Ron Goddard, a short, bald Buddha of a guy, met them at the receptionist’s desk with a friendly smile and showed them down a narrow hall to his small office, which looked out onto the parking lot. He closed the blinds with a twist of a wand and went around behind his desk.

“I can’t believe what happened,” he admitted as he took his seat. “Twenty years in this business and I’ve never had a client murdered. A college professor and his wife. A nice home in a good neighborhood. You just don’t expect a murder.”

“They weren’t expecting it, either,” Kovac said.

Goddard shook his head. “I told Professor Chamberlain he’d be wise to upgrade his security system. The technology today is amazing.”

“Why didn’t he?” Taylor asked.

“He didn’t see the need. The system he had worked well. They had never had any serious crime in the neighborhood.” He made a sheepish face. “And to be perfectly honest, he was cheap. Or maybe it’s more accurate to say he was paranoid. He always thought people were trying to rip him off. I had to work to get him to insure the
household contents for replacement cost. He thought I was just trying to make a bigger commission.”