by Tami Hoag
“I can’t comment on that,” Kovac said again. “I wouldn’t know one from the other at any rate. We were hoping you might be able to help us in the weaponry department, Mr. Sato.”
Sato sat down on the couch a foot away from the girl, touching her reassuringly on the shoulder. “Absolutely. Whatever you need.”
“Did they suffer?” the girl asked. “I wouldn’t want to think my mother suffered.”
She sounded like she was talking about a stray animal that had been run over.
Kovac took a seat on a hard, straight wooden chair to be at her eye level. He thought of Sondra Chamberlain lying spread-eagle on the floor of her dining room, a quarter of her face sliced away, a samurai sword planted through her abdomen. “It looked like it happened pretty fast.”
The girl blinked her wide gray eyes. Vacant eyes. He wondered if she was on something.
“When was the last time you spoke to either of your parents?” Taylor asked. He took the other hard wood chair and balanced his notebook on his thigh as he scribbled his notes.
“I was there for dinner Sunday. It was my father’s birthday,” she said. “And my mother called me every day. I didn’t answer her call yesterday, though.”
“What time did she call?”
“Around eight thirty. I don’t take her calls after dinner. I can’t stand to listen to her when she’s been drinking.”
“How would you know she’d been drinking if you didn’t speak to her?” Taylor asked.
She looked at him like he was an idiot. “My mother drinks in the evening. Every evening. I would drink, too, if I lived in that house, but I wouldn’t live in that house, so I don’t want to hear about it.”
“Your father was a difficult man?” Kovac asked.
“An egotistical, misogynistic megalomaniac.”
“But you went to his birthday dinner?” Taylor said.
“It was a command performance. I didn’t say I enjoyed myself.”
“You were his grad student,” Kovac said. “Did he twist your arm to do that?”
“It was a prestigious position with one of the leading scholars of East Asian history in the country.”
“We were told you filed a complaint against your dad with the Office for Conflict Resolution. What was that about?”
“That was about him treating me like dirt in my capacity as his assistant.”
“I’m getting the impression you didn’t get along with your dad,” Kovac said dryly. “Did you really think it would be any different working with him? In my personal experience, if people are assholes, they’re assholes all day long. Or did you think having the subject in common might soften him? Was that where your interest came from? You wanted something in common to share with him?”
Now her eyes filled with tears and her face went red from trying to hold them back. She sprang up from the couch and ran into the adjacent bedroom, slamming the door behind her.
Kovac looked at Sato.
“Obviously Diana has a difficult relationship with her father. It’s a long story.”
Kovac sat back and spread his hands. “We’ve got nothing but time.”
The professor sighed, not happy to be put on the spot.
“Diana has issues.”
“Such as?”
He glanced at the bedroom door as if he thought she might be listening on the other side. The muffled sound of her sobs filled the silence.
“Diana was adopted when she was four or five. She has abandonment issues. She’s insecure. An insecure girl shouldn’t have Lucien Chamberlain for a father. Life revolves around him, his needs, his career. Children have to have their needs met, too.”
“She’s not a child anymore.”
“We’re all children with our parents, aren’t we?” Sato asked. “She went through a rebellious stage: drugs, drinking, dropped out of school, in and out of rehab. When she came out of that, she decided to start fresh, finish school, and try to mend her relationship with her father.
“She’s a very bright girl,” he continued. “Lucien could appreciate that when she applied herself within his rigid construct of how students should learn. But not every student responds to the traditional methods.”
“He rejected her?” Taylor asked.
“Nothing as simple as that. Rejection implies defeat. Lucien would rather make a student quit than admit he needed to change his methods.” Sato shrugged. “He was who he was, and she is who she is. The two of them working together was a train wreck waiting to happen.”
“He must have been angry when she filed the complaint against him,” Taylor said.
“He was livid. He believed she timed it to sabotage his bid for the promotion to head of East Asian studies.”
“Didn’t she?”
Sato looked again at the closed bedroom door. “Probably.”
“And what’s your role in this family drama?” Kovac asked. “Is she sleeping with you to piss off her old man? Or are you sleeping with her to piss off your colleague?”
“I’m just a friend, Detective,” he said, his expression carefully neutral. “I’m just a shoulder to cry on.”
“You’re not sleeping with her?”
“No,” he said, but he couldn’t quite hold eye contact as he said it.
Liar, liar.
“She seems very . . . comfortable with you,” Taylor said.
“I’ve known Diana for five years. I could see from the start the struggle she was having with her father, and I could understand it, too. My own father is controlling and manipulative. We have that in common. And I’ve had my own struggles with Lucien.”
“What kind of struggles?” Kovac asked.
“I’m from a more modern school of teaching. I believe in challenging old ways and old thoughts. Lucien found me threatening because I pull students out of his dull rut and let them open their eyes.”
“Were you a threat to him?”
“Not in the way you mean. Not physically.”
“But professionally and as a parental figure,” Taylor said.
“I wasn’t trying to steal Diana away from him—as a teacher or a father. I was trying to help her. We commiserate over how difficult her father is—was, and let her blow off some of the anger and frustration she feels,” Sato explained. “I appreciate Diana’s spirit. She needs someone to encourage her to reach her full potential, not criticize and belittle her, or try to make her live in a cage inside her own mind.”
“So you’ve become special friends with the troubled daughter of your biggest professional rival,” Kovac said. “How’d that go over with her father?”
“Lucien didn’t know. He would have misconstrued the relationship.”
“And gotten your ass fired?” Kovac asked. “I have to think the university frowns on professors and students being special friends.”
“I wouldn’t get fired,” Sato said with confidence, like he had someone on the inside greasing the wheels for him.
“But you wouldn’t get that promotion, either, would you?” Kovac asked. “If Lucien Chamberlain made some claim of impropriety against you, whether or not you were guilty, it wouldn’t look good, would it?”
Sato looked at him as the implication sank in, his dark eyes steady. “I wouldn’t kill for it, if that’s what you’re thinking.”
“When did you last see Professor Chamberlain?” Taylor asked.
“Yesterday at work.”
“And where were you last night?”
“At home.”
“Can anyone vouch for that?”
He cut another quick glance at the bedroom door. What would be worse: to have an uncorroborated alibi, or to say he was in bed with the dead man’s daughter? He was a suspect either way. So was she.
“I was alone.”
Kovac raised his eyebrows just to mess with the guy. That’s the answer you picked? Huh.
“Okay,” he said, getting to his feet. “We’ll be in touch about the weaponry.”
Sato walked with them to the door.
“Anything I can do to help.”
“We’ll need you both to come in and get fingerprinted for elimination purposes.”
“Me?” Sato said, surprised. “I haven’t been in that house in a year or more.”
Kovac smiled at him. “Better safe than sorry. I can’t just assume they have the world’s greatest cleaning lady. It’s no big deal, really. It takes two minutes.”
“Yeah, sure,” Sato said with no conviction.
“We understand Professor Chamberlain’s collection is valuable,” Taylor said.
“It’s incredible.”
“How could he afford that on a professor’s salary?”
“They’ve always had money. Sondra’s family was connected to some chemical-pharmaceutical fortune. Lucien made sure people knew. He liked people to think he taught for higher reasons—like his ego.”
“You didn’t like him,” Kovac said.
“Nobody liked Lucien. He wasn’t a likeable man. People respected him, or they envied him for what he had: his position, his possessions—”
“His collection?” Taylor said. “Something someone would kill to have?”
Sato frowned. “I hope not.”
“I hope so,” Kovac said. “Because if someone killed those two people the way they killed them just for the hell of it . . .”
He let that hang as he handed Sato a business card. “We’ll be in touch,” he said.
Ken Sato saw them the ten feet to the door and locked the deadbolt as soon as they were on the other side.
“That’s some messed-up shit right there,” Taylor said softly, glancing back over his shoulder as they went down the hall to the apartment house’s front door. “The daughter sleeping with Dad’s rival for the big promotion. I can’t wait to meet the son.”
“What’d I tell you?” Kovac said. “The all-American family. It’s Norman Fucking Rockwell on acid.”
* * *
SATO TAPPED ON THE BEDROOM DOOR. “Diana?”
No answer. No sound. She might have fallen asleep. She might have slit her wrists. Either was possible in her current state of mind. He opened the door and slipped inside.
The bedside lamps were on. She was naked, kneeling on the bed, touching herself, her eyes already glazed, her mouth wet and open. Her body was beautiful, lithe and subtly muscular. Her nipples were pierced with small silver rings. A ruby studded her navel.
She grabbed him by the waist of his jeans and pulled him closer.
“Diana.” He breathed her name as she undid his pants and took him in her mouth.
The sex with her was crazy and hot, as addictive as crystal meth. She went to a dark, desperate place in her mind he didn’t want to know about, but he willingly went along for the ride.
She rode him hard, sweating, gasping, crying, and when the end came for her, she pounded her fist against his tattooed chest over and over and over, like she had a knife in her hand.
Then, exhausted, she collapsed on top of him and drifted into unconsciousness on an anguished whispered word: “Daddy . . .”
12
“You’re here about my parents,” Charles Chamberlain said as he opened the door to his apartment, his expression grave, his voice quiet and a little unsteady. Nerves. Emotions. Both. He was pale, though whether that was natural or caused by the circumstances, Kovac couldn’t guess.
He appeared to be a modest, unremarkable young man—early twenties, medium height, medium build, medium brown hair cut in a medium-length, conservative Everyman style. He wore nerdy glasses, and was neatly dressed in khaki pants and a button-down shirt, tucked in.
“Professor Foster called and broke the news. He said you’d be contacting me. I didn’t know if I should call the police department or go downtown or go to the house, or what,” he said. “How does anyone know what to do when something like this happens?”
“They don’t,” Kovac said. “Everybody gets the crash course.”
“We’re sorry for your loss, Mr. Chamberlain,” Taylor said.
“Thank you.”
“I know this is a tough time,” Kovac said, “but we need to ask you some questions. It’s important that we get as much information as we can as fast as we can.”
“I understand.” He stepped back from the door, inviting them in. “Professor Foster said it was probably a burglary, that someone might have targeted them—maybe for my father’s collection. Is that true?”
“There appear to be elements of a burglary,” Taylor said. “There have been a couple of burglaries in the area recently. But we don’t know anything for sure at this point.”
“How could someone break in? What happened to their alarm system?”
“We don’t know yet. Were they good about arming it?”
“Yes, every night after dinner. It was part of my mother’s routine. She took the dishes to the kitchen, set the alarm on the back door keypad, then started cleaning up.”
“What time did she start drinking?” Kovac asked bluntly.
The kid gave him a look, like he wanted to express outrage and denial, but in the end he said, “She liked a glass of wine with dinner . . . and maybe another after dinner. So what? She wasn’t a falling-down drunk, if that’s what someone told you.”
“Did you speak to her last night?” Taylor asked.
“No. I was working. I turned my phone off. I have a deadline,” he said. His brows knit and his eyes filled. “I had a message from her when I turned it back on this morning. Just wanting to talk. She gets lonely. I guess by the time I picked up the message . . .”
By the time he picked up the message, his mother was already dead on the dining room floor. He was seeing some version of that in his head now.
“Try not to beat yourself up, kid,” Kovac said. “We can’t foresee bad stuff coming; otherwise we’d stop it from happening.”
He was regretting not taking the chance to have had one last conversation with his mother. People always did. They wanted to believe they would have had some incredible moment of clarity about how much they loved that person they were unknowingly about to lose; how whatever petty arguments and angry words they held against one another would have magically dissolved, and they would have had the most beautiful, meaningful conversation of their lives.
The truth was if Charles Chamberlain had answered that call from his mother, he would have been irritated because she was interrupting his work when he had a deadline. He would have heard the lonely, wine-soaked self-pity in his mother’s voice and thought, Here we go again. They probably would have had unpleasant words about his father or his sister. And he would now be feeling guilty for that conversation because he hadn’t been patient, and he hadn’t consoled her, and now she was dead and he hadn’t told her he loved her.
The kid showed them to his living area, just to the left of the front door, and they all sat down. Like his sister’s place, most of the apartment could be seen at a glance: a tiny kitchen, a counter to eat at, a living room, a hall that led to a bedroom and a bath. Unlike his sister’s place, Charles Chamberlain’s small home was modest, not cheap, and neat as a pin. There were no dirty dishes visible. It didn’t smell of weed. The furniture might have been from the fifties or sixties—or at least made to look that way—low and clean, with straight lines and no frills. Jazz music played softly in the background from fist-size speakers beside a twenty-three-inch flat-screen TV on a console made from some kind of industrial serving cart. A laptop computer sat open on a small desk in one corner, two filing cabinets with a slab of glass for a top.
“I don’t know what to say,” the kid murmured, almost to himself. His hands were trembling as he rested them on his knees. “It’s surreal. I keep thinking there must be some mistake. Who would want to kill my parents? And then I turned on the television when I got home, and there was the house on the news. It’s crazy! They were killed with a sword?”
He looked straight at Kovac, clearly wanting a denial that was not forthcoming.
“Oh my God.”
&nb
sp; He had that haunted look in his blue eyes, like someone who had seen something unspeakable. He shook his head as if he might be able to shake the images out of his brain.
“Who could do something like that?” he whispered, a shudder passing through him.
“Can you think of anyone who might have had a grudge against one or both of them?” Taylor asked.
Chamberlain laughed abruptly, in the way people do when they’re shocked. “Sure. But they’re professors who think my father is an ass. They’re not people who go around committing murder! My mother has her charities. She goes to her book club. Who could she possibly offend?”
He pulled his glasses off and rubbed a hand across his face. His fingernails were bitten to the quick. He picked at a cuticle as he breathed in and out with purpose, trying to pull himself together.
“It had to be some kind of thug or a homicidal maniac or something, right?” he asked, glancing up with that light of desperate hope in his expression that Kovac had seen so many times. When it came to violent crime, everyone wanted to believe in the bogeyman. No one wanted to think they might know a killer.
“We have to consider all possibilities,” Kovac said. “Right now we’re just trying to get a picture of your parents’ life and the people in it. Had they mentioned having a problem with anyone? A neighbor, someone doing work on the house, anything like that?”
“The one neighbor, the Abrams, have already gone to Arizona for the winter. They’ve lived next door forever. My mother and Mrs. Abrams are friends. The house on the other side of them is vacant. It was sold over the summer. The new owners are renovating,” he said. “My father complained about the noise on the weekend.”
Kovac would set Taylor to the task of checking out the construction crew. Maybe someone had a record. Maybe someone had a temper, or a screw loose, or both.
“Had your parents had any work done on their own house recently?”
“Oh, well, there was the Yelp incident,” he said, as if they should know what that meant.
“What’s that?”