The Bitter Season (35 page)

“You realize you’re going
away for a long time here, Gordon, right?” Kovac asked casually. “We’ve got a whole grab bag of charges against you. Assaulting an officer, resisting arrest, fleeing the scene, attempted murder of a homeless guy last summer.”

There was a flicker of something in Krauss’s eyes at that last bit, so fast that Kovac couldn’t have named it. It was the first tiny crack he’d seen in Krauss’s armor since they brought him in. They had been in the box now nearly four hours.

“We’ve got a witness who ID’d you as trying to beat his friend’s brains out with a hammer.”

Still Krauss said nothing, but his expression had changed subtly. He looked less self-satisfied. He had played the Zen prisoner, saying nothing, asking for nothing, drinking nothing. Kovac had asked him several times if he wanted something to eat, but had gotten no response. But as cool as Gordon Krauss had played it, he couldn’t keep it up forever. He was probably beginning to dehydrate. His stomach was growling loudly.

Slowly, Kovac had picked away at Krauss’s show of confidence with small, sharp truths. He never raised his voice. He remained genial throughout, indifferent to Krauss’s silence.

“Aaaah,” he said. “You didn’t know I had that in my pocket, did you? You were probably thinking you were in the clear for that. It happened months ago. Just a bunch of homeless junkies having a
party down by the river. Who gives a shit what happens to them, right? Nobody came looking for you.

“Turns out they weren’t all high. We’ve got a good witness, sober as a judge, an honest-to-God war hero.” He embellished Liska’s facts. Details made a more convincing story. “And then there’s the fact of those IDs we found in your room at Rising Wings. It’s only a matter of time before we connect them to their owners—living or dead.”

He let that sink in and took a sip of coffee.

“You’re racking up the prison time like a freaking Vegas slot machine on jackpot,” he said. “And all that is just frosting on the cake, really, because I can put you with Diana Chamberlain at the rehab, and at her parents’ house within days of the murders. And she is gonna fucking bury you to save herself. We both know that.”

The corners of Krauss’s mouth turned ever so slightly downward.

“I realize you probably haven’t gotten to watch much TV in the last few days,” Kovac said, “but I have to tell you, she’s a very convincing grieving daughter on camera. Ooooh, those big eyes, that pouty mouth . . . Of course, crazy girls do make the best actresses.”

He rocked in his chair, looking off wistfully, as if picturing Diana Chamberlain shining in all her bipolar glory. He came back to the moment with a sigh.

“I’m gonna go down the hall here in a minute, and she’s gonna tell me how you took advantage of her when she was at her most vulnerable, and how your beady little eyes lit up when you saw her parents’ house that day. She’ll probably turn on the waterworks and tell me how she’s overcome with guilt for recommending Handy Dandy to her poor dead mother . . .

“I think I’ll stop in the break room and get a bag of popcorn to take with me for that show,” he said, smiling.

A fine sheen of sweat glistened on Krauss’s forehead. He looked
at
Kovac now, not past him.

“You’re sure you don’t want anything to eat, Gordon?” Kovac
asked as he got up. “I could bring you some popcorn, too. No? Suit yourself.”

He was almost to the door when Gordon Krauss spoke for the first time since he had been taken into custody.

“She asked me to do it,” he said. He had a voice like smoke and gravel. “I told her no.”

Holy. Fucking. Shit
.

Kovac turned around slowly, as if afraid a sudden move might rewind what he’d just heard. It was all he could do to maintain an expression of mild curiosity. “You’ll give me Diana Chamberlain?”

“I want a deal,” Krauss said. “And I want a lawyer.”

*   *   *

“T
HAT WAS SERIOUSLY IMPRESSIV
E
,” Taylor said as he pointed the car in the direction of Dinkytown.

The rain had subsided. Clouds scudded across the big moon, pushed by a brisk wind bringing a fresh band of crappy cold weather from the west.

“It’s all about patience,” Kovac said. “You won’t get anywhere screaming at a guy like that. You’re not going to scare him. He’s playing the odds. He knows he’s smart. He knows he’s been careful. He doesn’t believe you have anything. You show him one card at a time before you throw in the big bluff.

“Bully the ones that are already scared,” he said. “Like that guy that shit in the wastebasket the other day. He’s a mouse. Mice scare easily. Krauss is a rat. He’s clever and ruthless.”

“He thinks he can leverage Diana Chamberlain into leniency on the other charges,” Taylor said.

“Or mitigate the damage to him in this case.”

“He says he didn’t accept the job.”

“He can say he was born of a virgin for all I care,” Kovac said. “It doesn’t matter if he took the job, didn’t take the job, or is lying through his teeth. We can use him against her.”

The interview with Kovac over the second he requested an attorney, Krauss had been taken back to a holding cell to wait. Kovac’s heart was still beating like a bass drum. The adrenaline was gushing through his system like water out of a fire hose. That high was one of the reasons he had stayed on the job after all these years.

Now they just had to hope Diana Chamberlain wasn’t running. She hadn’t answered Taylor’s text regarding the suspect in custody. He had hoped that information would reel her in, that she would be curious and want to insert herself into the situation and start spinning the story for damage control.

“No word of Charlie?” Kovac asked.

“None.”

That worried him. The state of the kid’s apartment worried him. The fact that he—or someone—had e-mailed his resignation to his boss worried him. Kovac had locked down the apartment as a crime scene. He and Taylor had checked out the Chamberlain house in case Charlie might have gotten the idea to go home and kill himself where his parents died. The uniforms guarding the house hadn’t seen him.

They pulled onto Diana’s street to what was a worse-than-normal glut of cars. Someone in her building was having a belated Halloween party. Despite the chill in the air, costumed revelers spilled out of the big house, onto the wide porch, down the steps, and onto the sidewalk and lawn, drinking and dancing.

Taylor double-parked. The patrol car that had followed them there parked behind them. As they got out of the cars, Kovac directed the uniformed officers to go around the house and cover alternate means of escape.

Friday night—one of the last there would be before winter smacked its frozen fist down on the city and forced everyone indoors until spring. Students were out celebrating their couple of days of freedom from the drudgery of academia. Kovac and Taylor had to thread their way through a mob of ghosts, ghouls, vampires, and zombies to get to the door of Diana Chamberlain’s apartment.

Taylor knocked hard. “Diana? It’s Detective Taylor!”

He had to shout in the attempt to be heard above the music and the voices of the partygoers. Recordings of screams and shrieks and moans emanated from a dozen or more smartphones, adding to the atmosphere.

Taylor pounded on the door again. “Diana?”

“Kick it in,” Kovac ordered, pulling his weapon and positioning himself to the side of the door.

The old door frame gave way with little effort on Taylor’s part.

“Police! We’ve got a warrant!” Kovac called and then ducked inside and to the left, back to the wall, gun out in front of him. Taylor followed.

The apartment was dark and still. And cold, Kovac realized. He could feel a breeze from the windows on the other side of the room. The cheap curtains and moonlight fluttered inward.

As his eyes adjusted to the lack of light, it became clear that Diana’s apartment, a mess to begin with, was in an even greater state of disarray than he remembered. Chairs had been overturned. Trash littered the floor. The sofa and heavy armchair had been cut and disemboweled in much the same manner as Charlie’s furniture had been.

Holding his gun in one hand, Kovac pulled his phone out of his coat pocket and turned on the flashlight. As he began to shine it around the room, a couple of drunken partygoers stumbled into the apartment, laughing. Taylor wheeled on them, gun first, and barked, “Get the fuck out! Police business!”

Their eyes bugged out comically, and they backpedaled, tripping each other and falling into the hall. Taylor shut the door and turned the deadbolt.

Kovac moved toward the lone bedroom. The door was closed but not latched. He stood to the side and pushed it open with his foot. Nothing happened. No one shouted. No shots were fired. The room held the same cold, eerie feeling of stillness, save for the
curtains and moonlight drifting inward. The breeze pushed the scent of blood and feces toward them. A figure lay motionless on the bed.

He shone his light on the body that lay spread-eagle among the tangled sheets, naked and painted in blood, drenched in blood, so much blood no skin was visible at a glance.

The victim was a male of medium stature. He had been eviscerated and castrated. The intestines spilled out of the body cavity and onto the sheets.

“Holy God,” Taylor murmured, lowering his weapon.

“I think we might have just found Charlie,” Kovac said, though it was merely speculation on his part.

The victim’s head was nowhere to be seen.

“Holy ninja, Batman,”
Steve Culbertson said as he stood over the body. “Someone cut off this man’s giblets with a Ginsu knife!”

“That would appear to be the least of his problems,” Kovac said.

They stood around Diana Chamberlain’s bedroom in Tyvek jumpsuits so as not to contaminate—or be contaminated by—the gruesome scene. The lights were on now—the shitty overhead light and a couple of utility lights on tripods brought in by the ME’s investigator. The scene was only more horrific in the harsh light, the victim’s intestines gleaming wet as they spilled to either side of the body, the blood a vibrant dark red as it soaked the white sheets.

“Is the head lying around here somewhere?” Culbertson asked as he examined the abdominal wounds.

“Nope,” Kovac said. “Head and genitalia are MIA.”

He had seen more decapitated bodies than most people, yet it always amazed him how his brain wanted immediately to reject the image as not being real. The sight so went against nature that the brain would try to come up with an alternate explanation, no matter how far-fetched, rather than accept the terrible truth. He had often heard people say, about finding dead bodies in general, that they had thought it was a mannequin in the ditch, in the river, wherever it had been found, as if random mannequins littering the landscape were a common occurrence.

It certainly wasn’t natural to see a death like this one. As
hardened as all the people in this room were, this wasn’t normal even to them. Each would react and cope with it in his or her own way, which might sound callous or disrespectful or inappropriate to regular citizens, but it was how they learned to cope with the horrors they had to deal with on a daily basis. They all understood that, even their proper lieutenant.

“Decapitated first or eviscerated first?” Mascherino asked.

Kovac had alerted her to what they had found. He hadn’t expected her to show up. She had crossed herself upon seeing the body, but hadn’t turned a hair at the brutality of the scene. He gave her a gold star for being tougher than he had given her credit for.

“Eviscerated first is my guess,” Culbertson said. “But he must have been unconscious. There are no ligature marks on the wrists or ankles, no defensive knife wounds on the hands or arms that I can see. Nobody’s going to just lie down and take this. I mean, Mel Gibson in
Braveheart,
but in real life? No.

“It looks like the blade went in here about three inches to the right of the navel,” he said, tracing the path in the air above the body, “and was pulled across to the left. Then inserted in the middle and pulled up toward the sternum.”

“
Seppuku,
” Taylor said.

Everyone looked at him.

“
Seppuku,
” he said again. “The ritual suicide of the samurai. They disemboweled themselves.”

“And they cut off their own heads?” Kovac asked. “That’s a special trick.”

“No. Somebody else did that for them.”

“Why do you know these things?”

“I told you. I grew up on martial arts movies. In ritual suicide, the samurai kneels and makes the first cut across the abdomen then pulls the blade up toward the sternum, literally spilling his guts. Then a chosen swordsman whacks the guy’s head off with a single slice.”

“What about the boy bits?” Mascherino asked. “Is castration part of the ritual?”

Taylor shook his head. “Not that I know of.”

“That’s an angry crazy woman,” Kovac said. “That’s what that is.”

“You really think Diana Chamberlain is capable of doing this?” the lieutenant asked, sounding dubious.

“Taylor thinks she beat the hell out of Charlie yesterday,” Kovac said. “And she would certainly know how all this was done. She’s a graduate student in East Asian history. She grew up in a houseful of the weapons the samurai used. And if Gordon Krauss is to be believed, she solicited him to murder her parents. And if he didn’t take her up on it, then who did? I don’t think this kind of violence is beyond her.”

“Have you contacted the other professor?” Mascherino asked. “Her lover?”

“Calls go straight to voice mail,” Taylor said. “Could be they’re in this together. They both benefit. Sato gets the big job at the U. If Charlie’s out of the picture, they share the spoils: the collection, the inheritance, the house—everything.”

“And they’re free to be lovers without Charlie’s disapproval,” Kovac said.

“If this is Charlie,” the lieutenant said.

“If this is Charlie. This could be the mailman, for all we know.”

“Then where does Krauss fit in?”

“Maybe he doesn’t. Maybe he didn’t take the job. Maybe he’s a liar and an opportunist. I suggested to him that Diana might have asked him for a favor. Maybe he just took the ball and ran with it. Or maybe Diana was setting him up as a scapegoat. We know Sato knows how to use a sword.”

Mascherino nodded. “Put out an APB on all three of them: Ken Sato, and Charles and Diana Chamberlain. Armed and dangerous.”