by Tami Hoag
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.”
* * *
“THAT WAS SERIOUSLY IMPRESSIVE,” 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.
41
“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.”
42
“I had to kill him. It had to happen that way to close the circle.”
There was comfort in inevitability, once one accepted that truth and let go the need to control. As it turned out, surrender of control led to freedom. Control wasn’t freedom at all. Control was a burden. Acceptance was freedom. In acceptance, chaos fell into silence, and the Way became crystal clear.
So beautifully simple. So very Bushido . . .
Lucien Chamberlain claimed to have appreciated that philosophy. Bushido: the way of the samurai. The essence of life is found in death. If he truly believed that, he would have died happy.
Of course, he didn’t truly believe that. The things Lucien coveted from the way of the warrior were the obvious and wrong things: power, control, force, superiority, and violence for the sake of all those other things. And because of that, death was the necessary end to the cycle of abuse.
I love you—I hate you. I give—I take. On a whim. For a laugh. To punish you. To belittle you. To give false hope for no other reason than to take it away again just to prove a point. I’m stronger than you. I’m more powerful than you. I’m more ruthless than you. I will control you. I will hurt you because I can—to keep you down, to make you crawl, to make you beg . . . for love.
You don’t belong here anyway; we just keep you because we can . . .
Around and around, and around and around.
It was time to close the circle.
“I know, deep down, you understand. We’re supposed to be together, you and I. Our fates are intertwined. We were put together for a reason. We have to accept that. In acceptance we find freedom.”
They drove south on surface streets. They didn’t have far to go. It was a small world, after all.
One more stop. That was all. One more stop, and the circle would be complete. In order for the circle to be complete, one had to find the beginning. The very beginning.
The search had taken time and patience, starting and ending long before the killings, but with no end purpose in mind. Just the need to know, to have a name, to imagine a face, to ponder the why. But the pieces had fallen magically into place. The universe had a plan. It wasn’t always clear, and it wasn’t always kind, but in the end a pattern emerged. The circle of life: birth, conflict, growth, enlightenment, death. And in death one found the meaning of life.
There was comfort in acceptance of truth. Accepting the inevitable created simplicity. Simplicity was a beautiful thing, even drenched in blood.
The side street was dark and empty. The neighborhood was quiet.
“I’m sorry you can’t come with me, but this part is mine. We’ll be together again soon. Then we’ll be together forever.”
The kiss was long and lingering, with no one to judge. There was freedom now. It didn’t matter that the lips were cold or that the body was lifeless. The spirit lived on. Their spirits would live on together once the circle was complete.
43
“Thank God they caught the guy,” Eric said.
They had watched the story of the murder suspect’s capture on the local news at five and six. The station was featuring the story in their promo for the news at ten. The crime had been so horrific, the capture of the suspect had the entire Twin Cities population breathing a collective sigh of relief, and clamoring for details at the same time. Had he known the couple? Had he killed before? How had he gained entry to their home? Could this happen to us?
The suspect had worked for a handyman service. Already the news on channel eleven had put together a companion piece on how commonly used household services like handyman services and carpet cleaners, and even home security companies, could be staffed by dangerous criminals.
Evi didn’t want to think about any of it. She had spent so much of her life feeling afraid, being in danger. The last two nights had reminded her: She didn’t want that emotion in the life she had now. She wanted to feel safe. Tonight she couldn’t remember what that fe
lt like.
How fragile perfection was. Like a snowflake, beautiful and unique, and gone in the blink of an eye with the touch of a finger. Just days ago she had looked at her life and dared to believe that happiness could last. Tonight she felt the weight of dread on her shoulders.
“I don’t like that you could have met that guy,” Eric grumbled.
“I didn’t meet him,” Evi said. “I told you.”
“But you could have. The home visits scare me. You know that. Some of those girls know some rough customers.”
“And I would know more about that than you, wouldn’t I?”
“I know you do. I know you’re aware. I know you’re careful. But we both know none of that stops somebody else from doing something terrible. I just—”
Evi reached up and put a finger against his lips. “Can we not talk about this anymore tonight? I’m tired. You’re tired. I just want to sit here with you and relax and stare at the television.”
He smiled and wrapped his arm around her shoulders and kissed the top of her head. “Yes, ma’am.”
They sat on their cushy couch with their stocking feet up on the big ottoman. Eric snuggled Evi into his side and used the remote control to cue up a show they both liked, which they had recorded while having their evening playtime/bath time/bedtime with their daughter. The first thing to come up when he pushed the Play button was the promo for the ten o’clock news, the photograph of Gordon Krauss briefly filling the screen.
Detective Liska had asked Evi if this man could be Jeremy Nilsen grown up and gone bad. She honestly couldn’t say. In twenty-five years her memory of him had faded to a blur. She remembered thinking he was handsome. He had a strong jaw and straight brows. His hair was brown. He was lean and athletic. Beyond that, she couldn’t recall. She’d known him for such a short time and then had never seen him again. She had become a different person, and the memories that belonged to the girl she was had been buried or thrown away. Better for both of them.