by Tami Hoag
“Our Asian studies program has always been small but well regarded,” said Foster. “With this new influx of money, and expansion, yes, the title will carry cachet in the academic world.”
“And money?”
Foster’s answer stuck in his throat as the implication struck him. “You don’t think— Surely you can’t believe— No. No, no. That’s insane.”
“Yeah,” Kovac said, nodding. “So is what happened to the Chamberlains. We’ll need to speak to the three other candidates.”
Foster pulled off his glasses and pinched the bridge of his nose, mumbling, “Oh my God. This is unbelievable.”
“It’s routine procedure, Professor,” Taylor assured him. “We have to examine every possibility, even the far-fetched variety.”
“Ken Sato,” Foster said, looking through a file on his desk. Too nervous and flustered, he sat back again. “Ken is already on staff here. A very dedicated, innovative teacher. Dynamic. Popular with the students. Then we have a candidate currently teaching at the University of California–Los Angeles. Hanh Luu. Our interviews with her have been via Skype up to this point. She’s flying in this Friday.”
“And the fourth one?” Taylor asked, glancing up from his note taking. “You said there were four finalists. Chamberlain, Sato, Luu, and . . .”
“There were four. This is just all the more tragic . . .” He shook his head in disbelief. “Stuart Kaufman. Professor of East Asian art history. He passed away suddenly about two weeks ago. We’re all still reeling from his loss.”
“Passed away of what?” Kovac asked, on point.
“Pancreatitis and kidney failure. It was terrible. He went home with the stomach flu one day, and the next day he was dead. We were all so shocked.”
“Had he been ill prior to that?” Taylor asked.
“He had been hospitalized for pancreatitis once before several years ago. I understand once you’ve had it, you’re susceptible to it.”
“Was there an autopsy?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think so. He died of natural causes.”
Kovac just stared at him.
Foster blinked and looked away. “I can’t believe any of this is happening.”
“These three professors—Chamberlain, Sato, and Kaufman—how did they get along with each other?”
“They were professional acquaintances. Lucien and Ken Sato, being in the same department, had their differences, but they went to all the same functions and never tried to kill one another. That’s just absurd even to consider. Stuart ran with the Art History crowd. He didn’t have that much to do with either Lucien or Ken.”
“How long have the three of them worked here?”
“Stuart had been on the faculty for twenty-five years. Lucien came here from Macalester College in 2001. Ken has been with us only the last five years—”
“And he was being considered for head of this new department?” Taylor asked.
“He came to us highly recommended by one of our retired professors, Hiroshi Ito, whose brother had Ken as a student in the graduate program at the University of Washington. At thirty-eight, he’s already published two well-received books on Japanese history. Like I said, Ken is a very dynamic individual. He’s the face of the future for the department.”
“What did Lucien Chamberlain think of that idea?”
Foster’s mouth turned like he’d tasted something sour. “Lucien was predictably not happy about that. He felt Ken was jumping the food chain. But it wasn’t his decision to make. Hiroshi Ito is on the committee, so of course Ken would be considered for the position.”
“What was Professor Chamberlain like?” Kovac asked. “Was he a nice guy? Did he get along with his co-workers?”
“Lucien . . . was a very intelligent man,” Foster said, obviously choosing his words with the care of a man walking across a minefield. “Very professional.”
“You don’t have to be diplomatic with us,” Kovac said. “I’m sure you don’t want to speak ill of the dead, but we’re not the media. We’re investigating a double homicide here. Let’s call a spade a spade. If he was a pompous ass, then we need to know that.”
“He could be difficult,” Foster admitted. “He held his students and his peers to a high standard, and tended to put himself on a pedestal.”
“Did he have any enemies in particular?”
“I wouldn’t go so far as to call anyone an enemy.”
“But people didn’t like him.”
“He isn’t the kind of man who has friends. He has—had colleagues, rivals. He was a bit of a narcissist.”
“That’s like being a little pregnant,” Kovac said. “What you’re saying is people didn’t like the guy, and not without reason.”
Foster sighed. “This is so uncomfortable. Egos are a common commodity in the academic world, Detective. Lucien’s was bigger than some and smaller than others. We’re educators, not thugs.”
“And yet we have a dead professor.”
“I thought it was a burglary,” Foster said. “That’s what they were saying on the news: that Lucien and Sondra probably interrupted a burglar.”
“That very well might be,” Kovac said. “There appeared to be things missing from the house, including pieces from the professor’s collection. Do you know of anyone who can help us understand the significance of what we’re looking for?”
“Lucien’s collection is impressive.”
“You’ve seen it?”
“The tour was always the highlight of their annual dinner party. Ken Sato will be able to help you understand what you’re looking at there. He was practically drooling when we walked through the house last winter. Chinese New Year,” he added, thinking back on a happier event. “They always have their party on Chinese New Year.”
“We’ll need contact numbers for the Chamberlains’ next of kin,” Kovac said. “By the family photos, it looks like they have a couple of kids.”
“Yes, a son and a daughter. My secretary can give you their information. Charles and Diana.” He made a bit of a face. “Sondra was caught up with all things royal and British. Her family name was ‘Spencer.’ They were somehow distantly related to the family of Princess Di.”
“Thank you for your time, Professor,” Taylor said as they all rose. “Sorry for your loss.”
Kovac placed his business card on the desk. “If you think of anything we should know, just call. We’ll be in touch.”
“Was Professor Chamberlain going to get the job?” Taylor asked as they moved toward the door.
Foster’s brow furrowed as he frowned. “We haven’t made the decision yet.”
“But . . . ?” Kovac prompted.
“He was high on the list, and then his student assistant filed a complaint against him with the Office for Conflict Resolution.”
“A complaint about what?”
“She alleges his behavior is—was demeaning, condescending, and sexist, and created a hostile work environment. You can imagine we don’t want to start off this new chapter in East Asian studies with something like that making the news.”
“Who should we speak with about that situation?” Kovac asked.
“Inez Ngoukani. The office is in this building, on the sixth floor. I’ll call down and let her know you’ll be coming.”
“How did the professor feel about his assistant ratting him out like that?” Taylor asked.
“Lucien was extremely upset about it, as you might imagine, but the girl wouldn’t back down. He finally agreed to go through mediation in the hope of ending it. We wanted the matter settled and put to rest before we had to make our decision.”
“We’ll need the name and contact information for the student, too,” Kovac said.
“Yes, of course,” Foster said with a rueful look. “It’s Diana Chamberlain. Lucien’s daughter.”
* * *
“SO THIS GUY WAS some kind of a dick,” Kovac said as they got on the elevator. “His own kid reports him for being an ass right when he�
�s up for a big promotion. Families. Gotta love ’em.”
“You don’t think the daughter could have killed them, do you?” Taylor said. “Beating the old man to death with a pair of nunchucks? Running her mother through with a sword? Hard to picture a woman doing that.”
Kovac shrugged. “She could be a freaking Amazon for all we know. I’m not going to think anything until we meet her, except that dear old narcissist Dad must have been royally pissed with her for messing up his chances for the big dream job.”
“It had to take something pretty obnoxious for the daughter to make a formal complaint. I mean, she’s his grad student. Why would she take that on in the first place—and why would he have her in his department—if they didn’t have a good relationship to start with?”
“I had a feeling about that guy,” Kovac muttered. They walked out of the building, and he stepped off to the side, digging a cigarette out of his coat pocket.
“Which guy? Foster?”
“Our stiff. Murdered in a silk dressing robe.” He lit up, thought of Liska, felt guilty, and then took a long, satisfying drag and blew it out slowly. “What kind of guy puts on a silk dressing robe to go downstairs in the middle of the night? He’s gotta be gay or he’s gotta be a prick.”
“I know what not to get you for Christmas.”
“I don’t want pajamas, either,” Kovac said. “I don’t see the point of wearing clothes to bed.”
“That’s more information than I needed.”
Kovac took another pull on his smoke, imagining the bruise he would have ended up with if Liska had been there. She would have hauled off and socked him in the arm as hard as she could.
“What’s your story, anyway, Stench?”
Taylor’s eyebrows sketched upward. “You want to know what I wear to bed? This is getting weird.”
“No. What’s your story? Your family background.”
“I grew up in Plymouth. Mom, dad, kid sister.”
“Nice family? Good family?”
“Nice family, yeah, middle class, living in the ’burbs. My dad worked for Pillsbury. My mom made us go to church on Sunday.”
“Your parents loved you, raised you right.”
“Yeah.”
“You joined the army, but you came back here to settle down, to be near the family.”
“My dad passed away. Head-on crash with a drunk driver. I came back to help my mom out.”
“You’re a good kid,” Kovac said. “You probably never did anything to give your parents ulcers.”
“I don’t know about that.”
Kovac laughed. “Oh come on. I know. I can tell by your haircut. You were captain of the football team, lettered in three sports, took the homecoming queen to prom, and always used a condom.”
Taylor scowled a little. “Is there a point to this conversation?”
“Sure,” Kovac said. He blew out one last hard jet stream of toxic fumes. If he smoked only half the cigarette, that wasn’t so bad. He stubbed it out on the sidewalk and palmed the dead butt. At least he wasn’t a litterbug.
“Here’s your lesson for the day, Junior. If there’s one thing I can assure you about working Homicide, it’s that you are going to see some of the most mentally fucked-up people and family situations you can imagine. After all the years I’ve been doing this job, just when I say I’ve seen everything, somebody comes up with some new and different way to be a sick, perverted wack job.
“Never judge a family by their address or bank account,” he went on. “And never underestimate the power of the American public to utterly shock and disappoint you.”
* * *
THE DIRECTOR OF THE Office for Conflict Resolution was waiting for them. Inez Ngoukani was tall and elegant, an ebony sculpture with long slender limbs and full features beneath a tight cap of steel gray hair. She invited them into a conference room as graciously as if they were at her home for a pleasant chat.
“May I offer you something to drink, gentlemen?” she asked in a beautiful, cultured accent. Kovac felt like he should have gone and washed up and brushed his teeth before coming in the room.
“We have cucumber water,” she said, gesturing gracefully to a glass pitcher on the table. “It’s very refreshing.”
“Thank you, ma’am,” Taylor said, and poured glasses for all three of them.
Kovac took a long drink, hoping to wash the smoke out of his mouth.
“Professor Foster broke the news to me about Lucien and his wife, Sondra,” Ngoukani said. “Terrible. So terrible to imagine what they must have gone through. The more educated we are, the less we believe violence can touch our lives. But it can and it does. I saw Lucien on Monday, and now he’s gone.”
“What was his mood when you saw him?” Kovac asked.
“Ooooh,” she said, raising her pencil-thin eyebrows nearly to her hairline. “He was in a foul humor. So angry.”
“Did he say why?”
“No, and I didn’t ask. I’ve been trying to help him come to a calmer, more reasonable place in his mind. He would have none of that Monday.”
“Did you find that unusual?”
“No, to be honest. Lucien is a difficult man. If something doesn’t go his way, he throws a tantrum like a spoiled boy. This ongoing clash with his daughter has not gone well for him. His temper has been terrible.”
“His daughter was his student assistant,” Taylor said. “That seems like an unusual situation.”
“Highly. And a recipe for disaster from the start,” Ngoukani said. “Professor Foster told me he tried to discourage them, but the two of them seemed bent on it. Who can decipher the tangled motives of a parent-and-child relationship as complicated as that one? One might think Diana wanted her father’s acceptance and approval, and that Lucien wanted to support her effort to follow in his footsteps, yet they butted heads constantly.”
“So, how does this work?” Taylor asked. “The daughter filed a complaint. Could he have gotten fired?”
“No. Not at this point. The Office for Conflict Resolution is a neutral and independent office where the faculty and staff, including the student workers, can raise concerns,” she explained. “We advocate for neither management or nonmanagement. We facilitate discussions between the parties involved, consult with them individually, and offer coaching. We offer mediation in the hope of resolving the issue before it can escalate to the point of having to be reported to Human Resources or to the General Council for more serious consideration with the potential for career-impacting consequences.”
“But according to Forrest Foster this complaint was still going to create a problem for Professor Chamberlain with regard to his possible promotion,” Taylor said. “How does that work if this office is confidential?”
She gave him a look like he should have known better. “The university can be a very small and incestuous world, Detective. It was hardly a secret within the department that Lucien and Diana weren’t getting along. Diana came to this office with her complaints. Her father went to Forrest Foster with his outrage, trying to head his daughter off at the pass, so to speak, thinking if he could discredit her with his friend, the head of the department, that would be the end of it. But Forrest wasn’t willing to look the other way. He couldn’t. There’s too much at stake, and he is an honorable man. He encouraged Lucien to try to solve the issue through this office.”
“Did the daughter’s complaints hold water?” Kovac asked.
“Oh yes. Her father can be a tyrant. She’s not the first of his assistants we’ve heard from. Diana, of course, believed he was being particularly hard on her. If not for the fact that I am to remain neutral in these things, I would have to agree with her.
“Diana recorded several of their arguments on her cell phone. She played them for me.” She shook her head in disapproval. “Not to say Diana can’t dish it out, but Lucien doesn’t hesitate to make an argument personal, to go for the raw nerve.”
“And what did he have to say for himself?”
&nbs
p; “That Diana was being vindictive and ridiculous. He felt a great deal of pressure because of the circumstances and the timing. A cornered narcissist is a cornered cobra. He will strike out at anyone, regardless of their intent.”
“He struck out at you?” Taylor asked.
She waved the suggestion off like a bothersome fly. “I manage conflict for a living, Detective. We were all working very hard to try to bring the situation to a calm conclusion. Professor Chamberlain wanted Diana to drop her complaint. She would not. However, Forrest had finally talked Lucien around to sitting down for mediation.”
“It doesn’t sound like he was in the mood for mediation on Monday.”
“No, but I don’t know why. Perhaps they’d had another fight.”
“Did you speak to the daughter?”
She shook her head. “I haven’t heard from her this week. We were supposed to meet later this afternoon—the three of us. Of course, that won’t be happening now,” she said sadly. “Have you spoken with Diana?”
“She’s our next stop,” Kovac said, rising.
“Please give her my condolences,” Ngoukani said, showing them to the door. “And please let her know I’m available for her. All she need do is call.”
10
Two years after the death of her husband, Ted, Barbie Duffy married his fraternal twin brother, Thomas “Big Duff” Duffy.
“Clever girl,” Seley said. “Think of all the money she saved not having to change all her monogrammed towels.”
“It’s kind of creepy, if you ask me,” Nikki said.
They drove south on 77, across the Minnesota River, to the suburb of Apple Valley, and to a development where the houses were large and the lots were larger.
“There’s something sort of Stepford about it,” she continued. “Lose your spouse? Pick up a clone! Or were the Stepford wives robots? I forget.”
“It’s biblical, really. Isn’t there something in there about a man having to marry his dead brother’s wife?”
Nikki shuddered. “If I had to marry my ex’s brother, I’d become a lesbian.”
The last Duffy house they had been to could have fit into the current Duffy house twice with room left over. Instead of tired white clapboard, this one was faced in stacked stone and brown stucco. The pillars that held up the front portico looked to be fashioned from massive tree trunks. Prairie style on steroids. The heavy wooden front door was adorned with big black studs and fake strap hinges that looked like they had been hand-forged by some sweating, muscular shirtless artisan with a big hammer.