by Tami Hoag
From the corner of his eye he could see Sato bristle.
“Do you think I killed him, too?”
“I don’t know that anybody killed him. But it would make me a little nervous if the candidates for the job I wanted were dropping like flies.”
“Stuart got sick and died. People do. I don’t see that one death has anything to do with the other. It’s an unfortunate coincidence.”
Kovac bobbed his eyebrows and made a noncommittal humming sound as he looked at a photograph of the Chamberlain children dressed up in their white karate outfits, standing ramrod straight, bare feet wide apart, arms crossed, their expressions grave. They must have been around eight and ten, he thought. Even then Diana towered over her brother.
“Did you know Diana when she was in and out of rehab?” he asked.
“She put that behind her several years ago.”
“Has she ever talked about any of the rehabs she went to?”
“No. You don’t think she could be connected to this handyman suspect, do you? He came out of a drug rehab, right?”
Kovac didn’t answer.
“She doesn’t hang with any of those people.”
“That’s not to say someone couldn’t remember her, and think her family is loaded,” Kovac said. “You see?”
He led the way down the hall to Lucien Chamberlain’s study. “Watch your step. The crime scene unit has already processed the scene, but I still don’t like to mess up bloodstains and footprints if I can help it.”
Sato tiptoed around the dried bloody shoe prints like a cat.
“Charlie tells us Diana is bipolar,” Kovac said. “Do you know if she’s on medication?”
“You’d have to ask her,” the professor said, his voice chilly. He was about done with the subject of Diana. He looked pointedly at his watch. “Can we get on with this? I have an appointment in an hour.”
“Sure,” Kovac said. “We’ll get the insurance report on the values, but I want you to look at what was taken and tell me if you think the thief knew the significance of what he was stealing.”
“Okay. Let’s start here,” Sato said, gesturing to an empty display case. The glass had been shattered. A brass plaque described the missing item as SAMURAI MEMPO—JAPAN—CIR. 1800. “Mempo was the mask worn by the samurai in battle,” he said. “This one covered the entire face and was made from leather with a detachable iron nosepiece. It’s lacquered white on the outside with red accenting the lines of the face, and lacquered bright red on the inside. The hallmark of these masks is a terrible grimacing facial expression, meant to intimidate the enemy. The missing one also had a horsehair mustache. They added those so that decapitated heads on the field of battle wouldn’t be mistaken for women’s heads and discarded.”
“There were women on the battlefield?”
“More than you would think. There were actually female warriors—onna-bugeisha. They participated in battles a lot more than the history books say. The remains of a hundred and five bodies at the Battle of Senbon Matsubaru in 1580 were recently DNA tested. It turned out thirty-five of them were women.”
He shook his head at a memory. “Lucien and I actually argued about it. Misogynist that he was, he tried to find every alternate explanation he could to diminish the significance of the onna-bugeisha. And yet, he has their weapon of choice in his collection—the naginata. Fucking hypocrite,” he muttered.
Kovac looked up at the wall to a thing that appeared to be a spear on one end and a curved sword on the other, and imagined a pack of angry women armed with them.
“He also chose to adamantly ignore the samurai practice of wakashudo,” he said with disgust. “Ridiculous homophobic dinosaur.”
Kovac raised an eyebrow. “There were gay samurai?”
“They didn’t label people that way. Like the Spartans, they accepted and actively encouraged relationships among the warriors. Wakashudo literally means ‘the way of the young men.’ It was a normal part of a mentor-student relationship among warriors. It wasn’t until Westerners and Christian missionaries came to Japan that homophobic attitudes were imposed on the society.
“Opening to the West was the demise of samurai culture in every way,” he continued. “And the Victorian attitudes of Westerners kept details like the onna-bugeisha and wakashudo—truths they didn’t approve of—out of the history books.
“That’s where Lucien’s soul lived—in Victorian times,” he went on. “He was rigid, judgmental, sexually repressed. The irony, of course, is that the Victorians were secretly some of the most sexually deviant, fucked-up people ever.”
“Do you think Chamberlain was that, too?” Kovac asked. “Deviant? Some of what I see in Diana’s behavior makes me wonder if there’s a history of abuse.”
“I wouldn’t know,” Sato said, but he looked away as he said it. “Anyway, back to the mask—I recently saw one for sale that was not quite as old or quite as nice as this one. The guy wanted three grand for it.”
“Is there a black market for this kind of stuff?”
“Sure, for the ultra-rare pieces. Men all over the world are enamored of the samurai and their culture. Wealthy men like expensive toys. But the average bozo thinks samurai and ninja are cool, too. So, a common thief might take that mask or a sword or dagger just because it excites him, not because he understands the historical or monetary value.”
He went to a blank spot on the weapon wall and tapped a finger on the brass plaque. “This was a kubikiri tanto, a head-cutting knife from the middle of the Edo period. Rare. Valuable. The blade is seven to eight inches long, with the cutting edge on the inside of the blade. This would have been carried by a high-ranking samurai, who had the honor of removing the heads of slain enemies in the field as trophies. A hard-core martial arts movie groupie might know what it is. But it’s rarely seen in Western collections, so a knowledgeable thief would definitely want it.”
Kovac rubbed a hand across his forehead and sighed. “Well, why should this be easy?”
“One of the things that makes Lucien’s collection stand out,” Sato said, “is that he got his hands on these things most Westerners couldn’t. It’s a small collection, but the quality is special. He traveled and studied extensively in Japan and China when he was younger—an opportunity that allowed him to make connections. Money talks louder than tradition to some people,” he muttered.
Sato clearly didn’t approve of Chamberlain having these things. Kovac wondered if that disapproval stemmed from jealousy or bigotry, or loyalty to long-dead ancestors. Ken Sato was as American as anyone, but the blood of ancient Japan ran in his family. He talked about Westerners like he wasn’t one.
“What’s the most valuable thing in the collection?” Kovac asked.
“There are three swords that are worth low five figures apiece,” Sato said, going to the center section of the display wall, where the long swords were mounted one above another all the way to the ceiling, some with matching shorter blades directly beneath them. “The top three here.”
It would have required a ladder to get them down from the wall, Kovac noted. Not burglar-friendly. The lowest one in that section was gone. The only long sword that was missing was the sword that had been used to murder Sondra Chamberlain.
“The samurai carried a pair of weapons called daisho,” Sato said. “Individually: The long sword, katana, and the shorter weapon, wakizashi. The katana was the iconic weapon of the samurai. Bushido—the warrior’s code—says the samurai’s soul is in his katana. The wakizashi was for stabbing in close combat. It was also the weapon used for seppuku—ritual suicide.”
“Like hari-kari?”
“Harry Caray was a baseball announcer,” Sato said with the thinnest edge of condescension. “Hara kiri. It refers to the act of slicing open one’s own abdomen.”
“That’s harsh.”
“Death before dishonor.” Sato indicated a blank spot on the wall at about eye level. “That’s the blade that’s missing here: a wakizashi. A nice one.”
“Did Chamberlain do anything with this stuff besides collect it?” Kovac asked as he looked through the glass doors of a cabinet at the collection of various types of nunchucks and throwing stars. “Did he know how to use any of it?”
“Lucien was all about possession—possession of knowledge, possession of things, possession of people,” Sato said, not quite able to keep his disgust at bay. “Possession of the position of power . . . It’s such a bad joke that he tried to possess all things samurai but had no true grasp of Bushido.”
“But did he know how to use a sword?”
“He liked to say he did.”
“Do you?”
Sato gave him a long, narrow look, trying to decide if this was some kind of trick; trying to decide if he should play the game. The tiniest of unkind smiles turned just the very corner of one side of his mouth.
“It would be helpful to know if our bad guy was familiar with the weapon or was just hacking away,” Kovac said. “If he knew what he was doing would there be a pattern to the wounds?”
“If we’re talking about a trained swordsman, yes.”
“And how would that go?”
Sato said nothing as he weighed his choices. Then he turned and chose a sword from the wall, unsheathed it, and set the black lacquered scabbard aside on the credenza. He took a stance in front of Kovac, taking a moment to carefully position his grip around the handle of the katana and test the weight of the weapon in his hands. His expression grew hard and dark as he looked down the length of the blade.
“The katana is made for slashing,” he said quietly as he flexed his wrists, raising and lowering the tip of the sword methodically. “The first strike would be an overhead cut.”
He raised the sword over his head and brought it down slowly, at a slight angle, aiming for the place where Kovac’s neck met his shoulder. He stopped just shy of touching him.
Kovac stood stock-still, never taking his eyes off Sato’s.
“When a katana was made, it was tested by cutting through the limbs of prisoners,” Sato said. “Or they would pile corpses one on top of another to see how many bodies the sword could cut through in one slice. A good blade could cut through three bodies in a stroke, flesh and bone. An exceptional blade—as many as seven.”
He stepped back, drawing the sword all the way to the left, across his body. “The second strike would be a sideways stroke,” he said, moving in slow motion as he swung the blade almost like a baseball bat. “High to decapitate. Or low to disembowel.”
The tip of the blade, which looked just as lethal now as it probably was two centuries ago, passed within an inch of Kovac’s stomach.
Sato stepped back again, into some kind of ready stance, and then brought his feet together and bowed deeply.
“And that,” he said as he straightened, “is shinkendo: the real way of the sword. Was that helpful, Detective?”
“One way or another,” Kovac said as he watched Lucien Chamberlain’s chief rival sheath the sword and reverently place it back on the curved rests that held it in its place of honor on the wall. One way or another . . .
* * *
“THIS LOOKS GOOD ON ME, DON’T YOU THINK?”
Diana Chamberlain lifted her streaky blonde waves up in two messy handfuls and admired herself in the mirror over the dresser. She had put on one of her dead mother’s necklaces—a thick twist of dark gray beads that brought out her pale gray eyes.
The costume jewelry had been left untouched by the thief—the necklaces left hanging in the closet, the earrings in trays stacked on the dresser, the bracelets in a dresser drawer that had been pulled open but left alone. The large lacquered rosewood tiered jewelry box that sat atop the dresser had been emptied.
Taylor stood near the door to the master bedroom like a guard and watched Diana in the mirror, his face carefully neutral. She had changed her look from that morning, abandoning the studious glasses and letting her hair loose, unbuttoning the man’s white shirt one button too far for modesty, giving glimpses of a lacy black bra when she moved. The red lipstick had been refreshed, he noticed as she pursed her lips and batted her eyelashes at her reflection—and at his.
“Don’t you think I’m pretty?” she asked, her voice dark and smoky.
His inclination was to ignore the question, but Kovac had given him a job. Put those looks to work, Junior. See what you can get her to say.
He had always been acutely aware of the power of his looks, but not necessarily comfortable with that power. He didn’t like being given things for no other reason than that he was handsome. Nor did he like using his looks as some kind of bait. It wasn’t his nature to be disingenuous.
“You’re a very pretty girl,” he said flatly, like it was a dry fact. “Were you close to your mom?”
She pouted for a second at his apparent lack of interest in her beauty. “She was my mother. Of course I loved her. She was the sweetest person.”
“Except when she was drinking?” Taylor said. “How long had she been doing that? Did she drink when you were little?”
“How would I know?” she asked quietly. “Everything is normal to a kid.”
“I knew it was normal for my uncle Phil to smell like beer,” Taylor said. “I knew it was hard to understand him when he talked. I knew to stay away from him if he’d had one too many. And when I was old enough, I figured it out that Uncle Phil was a drunk.”
“What does it matter if she drank?” she asked. “Who could blame her? My father wasn’t a nice man to live with.”
“She could have divorced him,” he said, taking a couple of steps closer to hear her better.
She shook her head as she fingered through a tray of earrings. “People always think they know how easy someone else’s life should be.”
She chose a big red button of an earring and put it on. It matched her lipstick. There was something exotic about her, something a little too eccentric or untamed for the stuffy formality of her parents’ bedroom, with its drab gray-green walls and heavy silk draperies.
“What about your life?” Taylor asked. “It’s tough on kids when their parents don’t get along. Was that hard on you and Charlie?”
She raised a shoulder and let it drop. “We had each other.”
“You watched out for each other. Is Charlie adopted, too?”
“He was here first.”
“But he’s younger than you.”
“They adopted Charlie as an infant. Two years later they adopted me. They decided to skip the baby phase the second time,” she said. “Too loud and messy. So they went out and got me—walking, talking, and already potty-trained. They thought that would be easier. Joke’s on them!” she said with a bitter smile. Then she sighed, and just looked sad. “Poor Mommy. All she wanted was a nice little family. She renamed me so Charlie and I went together like a set.”
“And what did your father want?”
“For us to be quiet, to speak when spoken to, to reflect well on him.”
“Was he abusive?”
“Daddy has expectations,” she said, slipping back into the present tense, as if she thought her father might still be watching her.
“And if you didn’t meet them?”
“When,” she corrected him.
“When . . . ?”
“Then Daddy doesn’t love you anymore,” she said, putting on the second earring. “Mustn’t disappoint Daddy.”
She picked up her phone off the dresser and took a selfie in the mirror, and then turned the camera on him.
“I’m tired of answering questions. What about you, Detective Taylor?” she asked seductively, slowly coming toward him. “What’s it like to spend your life investigating gruesome murders? Do you like it? Does it excite you?”
Just like that, she turned on the sexuality, like flipping a switch. He could feel it emanate from her like heat. Diana Chamberlain had a master’s degree in disingenuousness. He wondered if the hypersexuality was part and parcel of her bipolar disorder, or if it was,
as Kovac thought, the result of sexual abuse as a child—either before or after the Chamberlains adopted her.
“Come on,” she said, with a sexy one-sided smile. “The camera’s rolling. Your turn to confess something. What’s it like to stand over a dead body? Can you feel their souls? Are they still in the room?”
“They’re long gone by the time we get there.”
“Where do you think they go?”
“I don’t know. Where do you think they go?”
“I can’t decide,” she admitted, still videoing him. “If someone is bad, I hope they go to hell, but I don’t want to go there.”
“Why should you go to hell?” he asked. “Do you think you’re bad?”
“Oh, I’m a bad, bad girl . . . or so I’ve been told,” she said in a low, breathy voice. “Would you care to form your own opinion, Detective?”
She was standing too close to him now, recording his frown close up on her phone. He could feel her breath on his neck.
“I’d rather keep an open mind,” he said, stepping back. “What have you done that’s so bad?”
She laughed. “What haven’t I done?”
“I know you had a problem with substances for a while. But you’re past that now. You got your degree. You’re a grad student. Your parents must have been proud of you.”
“Must they have been?”
“They should have been. Looks to me like you’ve been getting your life together,” he said.
He went over by the window and looked out through the sheer curtain at the backyard. They were on the opposite end of the house from the professor’s study and from the dining room. Charlie Chamberlain was standing on the brick patio in the rain, looking into the dining room through the French doors.
“Do you still belong to a program?” he asked. “Do you stay in touch with anyone from your rehab days?”
“Like who?” she asked. She had started to follow him, then turned and sat down on the unmade bed, her back against the upholstered headboard, her legs crossed yoga style. She pulled a pillow into her lap, bent over, and breathed in the scent of one of her parents.