The Bitter Season (38 page)

Nikki entered the house
through the open back door, weapon drawn. She had charged the first uniformed officers to come up the alley with keeping Eric Burke alive until the ambulance arrived. One was keeping pressure on his neck wound while the other started chest compressions as he began to slip away.

The lights were on in the laundry room/mud room, a cheery white space splashed with Eric Burke’s blood. The spatter arced across the room on the ceiling, on the wall, on the washing machine, on the floor. What the hell was this assailant fighting with? Burke’s face had been laid open like the belly of a gutted fish—sliced too cleanly for the weapon to have been an axe or a hatchet. If it was a knife, the blade was long.

She thought of Kovac’s samurai-sword murders. What the hell was wrong with people?

Drops of blood pooled on the kitchen floor where the attacker had paused for a moment.

Where was Evi? Where was little Mia?

A faint cry of “Mommy!” from overhead cut along Nikki’s nerve endings like a razor. Her blood pressure spiked so hard she could hear her blood rushing across her eardrums. At least the child was alive. Was she crying over her mother’s dead body? Was the assailant still in the house?

Leading with her weapon, she moved into the dining room.
There was no sign of a struggle, save for the drops of blood on the hardwood floor that led the way into the living room and up the stairs to the bedrooms.

The patrol sergeant in the backyard had argued for her to wait for a SWAT unit. Nikki refused. What were they supposed to do? Sit around on the deck waiting while Evi Burke and her daughter were raped and slaughtered inside the house? No.

The sound of voices upstairs rose and fell. She couldn’t make out how many or what they were saying.

From where she stood at the bottom of the stairs, she could see nothing. She would be a sitting duck if there were a bad guy in the hallway.

The child’s voice wailed, the sound piercing Nikki’s ear like a needle. “Mommy! Mommy!”

She swore under her breath. Kovac would kill her for going in alone—if someone else didn’t kill her first.

She started slowly up the stairs.

*   *   *

T
HE HIT ON THE
BOLO for Charlie Chamberlain’s car pulled Kovac and Taylor out of the crime scene in Diana Chamberlain’s apartment. Mascherino had taken charge of the scene, sending them on their way.

The Toyota was found parked on a side street in a quiet neighborhood east of Lake Nokomis, not far from where Gordon Krauss was apprehended earlier in the day. Kovac asked for the reporting officers to sit on the car from a discreet distance and wait for them to get there.

Was there supposed to have been a meeting there? Kovac wondered. Was this the place chosen for a payoff to Krauss, to buy his silence about the solicitation with enough cash to get him out of town?

The radio crackled with coded bursts as they sped south on Hiawatha, dash strobe running. Reports of a home invasion in the
area. Units were on the scene and multiple units were en route. Not my monkeys, not my circus, Kovac thought as they turned off the main drag and were instantly swallowed up by a neighborhood of small, neat older homes. He killed the dash light.

There was no sign of the patrol car that had called in on the BOLO and should have been sitting watching, waiting for the Toyota’s driver to return. They had responded to the home invasion call-out.

Kovac and Taylor walked up on the Toyota, one on either side, each with a Maglite held high. The keys were on the driver’s seat. Bloody fingerprints and handprints marred the pale gray interior on the dash, and the interior of both doors. Blood smeared the passenger’s seat.

“Well, that’s not a good sign,” Kovac muttered.

“You want to wait for a crime scene unit?” Taylor asked.

“We’ll be here all night.”

Kovac opened the driver’s-side door with a gloved hand, reached in, and pressed the button to pop the trunk.

He didn’t know what he had been expecting. He had suspected the corpse at Diana’s belonged to Charlie, that Diana and Sato had killed him to get him out of their way. But when he and Taylor both shone their flashlights into the trunk of Charlie Chamberlain’s car, it was Diana Chamberlain inside.

She looked like she was resting, lying on her side with her eyes half closed. Her throat had been cut from ear to ear. Placed next to her, staring up at them, was the head of Ken Sato, his penis sticking out of his mouth.

“Mommy! Mommy!”
Mia ran into the room, sobbing.

Evi looked at her daughter and, heedless of the blade at her throat, shouted, “Run, Mia! Run!”

But her daughter, just five years old, and never having known danger in her whole brief life, didn’t understand. Mommy was her safety. She stood ten feet away, confused and terrified, wailing, her precious little face red and wet.

Rage rose up like a wall inside Evi. Whatever mistakes she had made in her life, this would not be one of them. She wouldn’t let her murder be the last thing her child saw before a madman butchered her.

She reached up and clawed at her assailant’s eyes. Startled, he pulled back in reaction, lifting the blade from her throat.

Evi kneed him in the groin and ducked to the side as he doubled over, her focus on Mia. If she could grab her child and run—

He caught her by the hair, nearly yanking her off her feet, and slammed her back against the wall, shouting, “NO! No! You will
not
ruin this for me!”

The back of Evi’s head banged hard on the frame of the window. Her knees went weak, and her vision swam. She saw him turn toward Mia. She reached out to try to grab him and dropped to her knees, too dizzy to keep her feet beneath her.

She watched in horror as he scooped up her daughter. He had
dropped the sword in favor of the long knife that hung from his belt. He put the point of the blade to Mia’s throat.

“You’re going to do what I tell you!” he shouted. “Or I’ll slit her throat, and you can watch her die!”

*   *   *

“P
OLICE
! Drop the knife! Drop it now!” Nikki yelled. She entered the room gun first, taking a stance maybe five feet from the assailant. “Drop it now or I’ll blow your fucking head off!”

“No!” He hiked the child up higher against him so that her head overlapped the lower half of his battered face. The point of the knife pricked the tender flesh of the little girl’s throat, and blood began to trickle down.

Evi was on her knees, sobbing, pleading. “Let her go! Please! She’s just a little girl!”

Mia was screaming and kicking, trying to wriggle from the grasp of her captor.

“Stop it!” he snapped into her ear. “Stop it right now!”

“Mia, be still!” Evi cried.

“You hurt that child, I’ll make you wish you’d never been born,” Nikki promised.

He laughed, a sound that was strangely tragic. “I already wish that,” he said quietly. “That’s why I’m here.”

“What does that mean?”

“You’re not a part of this,” he said. “You don’t belong here. Get out. This is between me and her,” he said, nodding toward Evi.

“Then let the little girl go,” Nikki said. “There’s no reason to hurt her.”

He shook his head, hefting Mia up and adjusting his hold on her.

“She’s getting heavy, isn’t she?” Nikki said. “Put her down. Let her go. Let’s end this now. Nobody has to get hurt.”

“No,” he said. “You’re wrong.”

“I’ll stand here like this ’til hell freezes over,” Nikki told him.
“Can you hold her that long? Come on. Put her down. We can all walk out of here.”

Come on, asshole, give me something to work with here, she thought. She had to keep him talking. The longer she kept him talking, the heavier that child was going to feel in his arms.

“What’s your name?” she asked, readjusting her grip on the Glock in her hands.

He laughed again, a sound full of nothing but sadness, and nodded toward Evi. “Ask her.”

Evi was sobbing quietly into her hands, rocking as she kneeled on the floor, just out of reach of her daughter.

Nikki could hear cars pulling up outside. There were no sirens, but someone was running lights. She could see the flash of blue, red, and white through the window.

“Put the child down,” she said softly. “Let’s end this.”

“Let’s,” he said, but he made no move to let Mia Burke go. Instead, he lowered himself and the child to the floor, putting her on her feet and kneeling behind her, the knife still pressed to her throat.

Strange knife, Nikki thought in the back of her mind. Exotic. It was long, maybe eighteen inches, and gently curved from end to end. The soft amber nightlight played over the surface of the blade. The handle was elaborately wrapped in some kind of fine blue cord.

“Give her the gun,” he said, nodding toward Evi.

“No. I can’t do that. You let the little girl go.”

“Give her the gun or I’ll kill this child right now.”

To prove his point, he cut an inch-long line on Mia Burke’s throat. Blood bloomed along the line and ran down the blade of the knife.

Evi screamed, “No!” as her child screamed and cried and called for her mother.

“Give her the gun!” the assailant shouted.

The telephone on the nightstand rang. Nikki thought she could hear the distant
whop-whop-whop
of helicopter blades beating the air.

“Give her the gun!”

Fuck.
She had to buy them time.

Nikki took the Glock in her right hand and moved her arm to the side slowly as she stepped toward the bed.

“I’ll put it right here,” she said, placing the gun on the foot of the bed.

A thousand scenarios raced through her mind. The last thing she was supposed to do was surrender her weapon, but she couldn’t shoot him without endangering the child, and she couldn’t stand there and watch him slit Mia Burke’s throat.

“Get the gun, Evangeline,” he said. “Get it and bring it over here.”

Evi pushed herself to her feet. She was trembling visibly. She looked at Nikki with desperation in her eyes.

“Get the gun!” he shouted. “I’ll cut her again! I swear to God! I don’t care any more about this child than you ever cared about me.”

“Do what he says,” Nikki told her. “It’ll be all right.”

How could she even say something so stupid? What part of this was all right? But she kept her voice calm and strong.

“Do what he says.”

She watched Evi pick the gun up like it was a dead rat, distaste and fear twisting her face. Her hands were shaking so badly she could barely hold on to it.

“Stay calm, Evi,” Nikki murmured to her. “It’s going to be all right. Just stay calm.”

*   *   *

E
VI LOOKED AT THE GUN
in her hands. Stay calm? Every cell in her body was trembling. She had never been so terrified in her life. It felt as if her nerves were wrapped around her throat, growing tighter and tighter. She could hardly breathe.

“Bring the gun over here,” he ordered.

She looked at the weapon in her hands, then at the stranger
holding a knife to the throat of her daughter. Both of them her children. His father had died because of him. Now her daughter might die by his hand. None of it should have happened. Her mother shouldn’t have died of an overdose. She should never have put Evi in a position to be taken advantage of by a man she should have been able to trust. Ted Duffy shouldn’t have come to her room that night. Evi shouldn’t have leaned on him. So many decisions by so many people had brought them to this moment, and the result was this battered animal holding a knife to Mia’s throat, a madman with an agenda only he could understand.

Evi walked toward him, holding the gun in front of her like some kind of offering.

“Put it to my head,” he ordered.

“What?”

“Put it to my head,” he said again.

“I don’t understand.”

“It’s time to close the circle, Jeager, Evangeline Grace,” he said. “I came here to close the circle. It started with you. It ends with you. I didn’t come here to kill you. I came here for you to kill me.”

*   *   *

S
H
E
HAD
BROUGHT
HIM
into the world. She would take him out of it. That was the circle, Charlie thought. She had given him to the cycle of madness that had been his family. He had ended their lives: The father who had tormented them, who would have disowned them. The mother who had never protected them, never nurtured them. Diana. He couldn’t leave her to self-destruct or to be destroyed by a man who only wanted to use her. Charlie had always loved her best. He had always protected her. He had been protecting her even as he cut her throat with the
wakizashi
he had taken from their father’s collection, the knife he now held to the throat of the child. A quick, painless death. A kiss to take her to the afterlife.

All that was left was for him to die.

That was the circle.

He had begun his search for his birth mother with no clear picture of what he wanted from her. He had known only that he had to find her, the woman who had brought him into the world and given him away like a puppy to the first stranger who would take him. Or maybe she had done it for money. Maybe that was what their father had meant when he used to say, “You’re more trouble than you’re worth.”

As the other pieces fell into place, his purpose for finding her had become clear. She could do this one thing for him, this one kindness. It would be their one perfect moment as mother and son. She had given him life and now she could give him the essence of life in death.

This was how it was supposed to end. He would be gone, and she would live with the memory of him forever.

He could hear a helicopter getting close. More police. It didn’t matter. It would all be over soon.

“Do it,” he said.

She looked back at the policewoman.

“Do what he says, Evi,” the cop said. “Stand to the side of him. Put the gun to his temple.”

“No. No,” his mother said, crying. “Oh my God . . .”

“It’s all right, Evi. Just do what I tell you,” the cop said. “Stand to the side of him. Put the gun to his temple.”

“No. Please! I can’t!”

“Do it,” he said. “Do it!”

He tightened his hold on the child as he shouted, scaring the girl. She wailed for her mother. For
their
mother.

Evi raised the gun, her hands shaking so badly he thought she would strike him with it before she could put it to his head.

“Do it,” he said.

“I can’t!” she sobbed.

“Do it or I’ll kill her!”

“Mommy!” the child wailed.

“DO IT!”

*   *   *

N
IKKI HEARD THE CHOPPE
R
coming closer.
Whop, whop, whop
. From the corner of her eye, she could see the spotlight sweeping back and forth. She kept her focus on the bizarre tableau in front of her.

Evi Burke was sobbing, her hands trembling violently as she held the barrel of the Glock to the temple of the man who held a knife to her daughter’s throat, the man who might have murdered her husband for the sole purpose of getting her to blow his brains out.

Nikki calculated her odds of being able to get her second weapon out of her ankle holster in the split second she would have when he realized the gun to his head wouldn’t fire. She had set the safety.

“
Do it!
” he screamed. “I’ll kill her!”

“
Mommy!
”

Evi closed her eyes and braced herself.

WHOP, WHOP, WHOP, WHOP.

The police chopper swung in close and flooded the room with stark white light that struck the assailant in the face, blinding him.

“
Evi! Run!
”

Head down, Nikki exploded forward. With her left hand she shoved Mia Burke to the side as she brought her right knee up into her tormentor’s face. Momentum carried her forward. She ducked a shoulder and rolled, coming back up to her feet in a crouch, ready to block his attack.

He grabbed the knife off the floor as he turned over and came up onto his knees again, blood gushing from his broken nose.

Expecting him to come at her, Nikki went for the gun strapped to her ankle.

She pulled it free and brought it up, shouting, “Drop the knife! Drop it!”

He didn’t drop the knife.

He didn’t come at her.

He plunged the blade into his own stomach, screaming.

*   *   *

“J
ESUS
H
.
C
HRIST
, T
INKS.
I let you out of my sight for five minutes and suddenly you’re freaking Rambo. Or is it Rambette?”

Kovac. Nikki looked up as he came into the bedroom, parting the sea of SWAT uniforms milling around the doorway like some kind of film noir Moses in a trench coat and fedora. Taylor followed him, his handsome face set in stern lines as he scanned the room, zeroing in on the dead guy lying on the floor in a pool of blood.

“That’ll be Wonder Woman to you, Kojak,” Nikki said, ridiculously relieved to see him. It made no sense for him to be here, but she didn’t care.

Her head was spinning. Everything had gone in fast-forward from the moment she moved on the assailant. He had plunged the knife into his stomach and collapsed to the floor, and then SWAT was charging in, and paramedics, and the room was filled with light and noise, and commotion.

“You leave my squad, hijack my suspect, and solve a one-man crime wave while saving a mom and her kid,” Kovac said. “Wonder Woman it is.”

He looked down at the dead man and sighed.

“Your suspect?” Nikki asked, confused. “Who is he?”

“Charlie Chamberlain,” Taylor said, squatting down beside the body.

“He came here to die,” Nikki said. “He wanted Evi Burke to kill him. I don’t understand any of it.”

She heard a little tremor in her voice. The aftermath of the adrenaline dump. Clear as a bell in the midst of the crisis, now she felt the delayed surge of confusion and fear. So many things could have
gone wrong. Mia Burke could have been killed. Evi Burke could have been killed.
She
could have been killed.

“But you’re okay?” Kovac asked.