The Bitter Season (11 page)

Slowly, Nikki started to back away like a thug leaving a gang confrontation, mean-mugging all the way into their office. Grider followed, but went directly to his desk, grabbed his coat, and left without a word.

Seley sat at her desk, eyes wide. “Can I be you in my next life?” she asked. “You’re a total badass.”

Nikki ignored her, staring at the open door Grider had gone out, and thinking the very first thing he would do when he got out of the building would be to call Barbie Duffy.

“Generally speaking,” she said, “who doesn’t want a crime solved?”

“The perpetrators of the crime,” Seley answered.

“I’ll see you tomorrow,” Nikki said. “I’m going to go home and read every scrap of paper on this case again.”

Diana Chamberlain didn’t answer her phone.
She lived in a shabby neighborhood near the commercial district known as Dinkytown, not far from the U of M campus. An area where the big old box-style houses had been cut up into cheap apartments for students, and where the sidewalks were buckled from the massive roots of the old trees that lined the boulevards. An assortment of older cars took up all the parking spaces on the street.

The sun that had melted the morning’s ice was gone, and its meager warmth along with it. The temperature had dropped just enough to freeze the slush into ruts and turn the puddles back into little skating rinks.

Taylor cruised past the address, pulling into the parking lot of a dirty little strip mall a block down the street. He parked in a space reserved for customers of a small dry cleaners with a flickering red-neon Open sign in the front window. A pissed-off-looking tiny woman in a hot-pink sari stood in the doorway with her hands on her hips.

“Parking for dry cleaning only!” she shouted as they got out of the car.

“We’re here on police business, ma’am,” Taylor said politely, holding up his shield.

“Police dry cleaning business?” she asked pointedly.

“Uh, no, ma’am.”

“I thought not. Then take your handsome self away from here and park elsewhere. I have a business to run.”

“We’re from Homicide—” Taylor started.

“No one has been murdered here. I have no need of you.”

“We have to go deliver some bad news—”

“I’m so terribly sorry to hear it. Don’t let me delay you,” she said. “Get in your car and go deliver your bad news of a murder that did not happen here at Star Dry Cleaning.”

Taylor looked at Kovac, clearly not used to being denied anything by a female.

“What time do you close, ma’am?” Kovac asked.

“Six o’clock.”

“It’s almost six now.”

“In seven minutes it will be six o’clock. You are taking the parking space of customers who must rush in to get their dry cleaning at the last possible moment, and this will cost my business money.”

“It’s only four minutes by my watch,” Kovac said. “We can drag this out for four minutes and park for free or you can accept our gratitude and let us get on with our business.”

She arched a brow. “How much gratitude?”

He looked at Taylor. “Give the lady ten bucks.”

“Ten bucks?” Taylor said with a tone of protest as he dug out his wallet. “It’s three minutes.”

“You are a cheap man,” the woman scolded, snatching the bill out of his hand. “Cheapness makes you less handsome.”

“It’s ten bucks more than you would have had without us,” Kovac pointed out.

A brilliant smile split her face. “This is very true. I thank you, gentlemen. Excuse me now while I close my shop. Good day to you.”

“We could have just parked there,” Taylor grumbled.

“Don’t be a piker. It’s important to foster good community relations,” Kovac said, flipping up the collar of his coat. The damp cold
dug into his shoulders like talons. “Besides, it did my heart good to spend your money.”

“I’m so happy for you.”

Diana Chamberlain’s apartment was located on the ground floor of a huge, ugly brown house with a sagging wraparound porch. The front door was open. Three different kinds of loud music leeched through the thin walls into the first-floor hall, the volume rising and falling as apartment doors opened and closed. Taylor rapped on the door marked “B,” and they waited. He knocked again.

The door of the house opened and a college kid with dreadlocks came in with a bicycle and muscled it up the stairs to the second floor.

Taylor knocked again. “Miss Chamberlain?”

The door cracked open and a fit, good-looking Japanese man in his late thirties stared out at them. “Can I help you?”

Taylor held up his ID. “Police. We’re looking for Diana Chamberlain.”

“Finally. She had to see the news on TV first. Nice job, guys,” the man said sarcastically.

“And you would be . . . ?” Kovac asked.

“Ken Sato.”

“
Professor
Ken Sato?”

“Yes.”

Kovac cut Taylor a subtle
What did I tell you?
look.

“Do you live here?” Taylor asked. “We have a different address for you.”

“No, I came over for Diana,” Sato said. “She called me, hysterical. She’d seen the news coverage at the gym while she was working out.” He shook his head in disbelief. “I knew something had to be wrong when Lucien didn’t show for the meeting this morning. I never imagined anything like what happened. Was there really a sword involved? That’s a hideous thought.”

Doors opened and closed above them, and feet thundered down the stairs, accompanied by talk and laughter.

“We’d like to come in and speak to Miss Chamberlain,” Kovac said.

“She’s resting. She’s had a rough day.”

Taylor had the better angle to see into the apartment. He was looking past Sato, his suspicions rising just as Kovac’s were. For all they knew, Sato had massacred the Chamberlains and had come here to cross the daughter off the list.

“Yeah, well, I’m afraid we have to insist,” Kovac said. “We have a few questions we need answered.”

“She just lost her parents. This can’t wait until tomorrow?”

“No. It can’t,” Kovac said firmly.

Sato frowned, not moving from the doorway. A woman’s voice came from somewhere behind him.

“Ken? Who is it?”

“The police. They want to speak to you.”

“Oh, we’ll want to speak to you, too, Professor,” Kovac said. “You being so close to the family and all.”

Unhappy, Sato stepped back and motioned them inside. He was dressed in jeans and a long-sleeve Henley T-shirt that skimmed broad shoulders and a tapered waist. No bow tie, no tweed jacket. His Clark Kent glasses only made him look hipper. His thick black hair was shaved close on the sides of his head, and left long on top, to spill across his forehead. The sleeves of his shirt were pushed halfway up to his elbows, revealing intricate sleeves of tattoos on both forearms.

Diana Chamberlain was taller than Sato by several inches. She had to be close to six feet, an angular, athletic-looking girl in her mid-twenties with tumbling waves of streaky blonde hair. Her face was an interesting oval of slightly asymmetrical features. A bump on the bridge of her nose suggested it had been broken once. Her eyes and nose were red and puffy, presumably from crying.

Kovac introduced himself and Taylor. She looked Taylor up and down like he might be on the menu for dinner.

“We’re sorry for your loss, Miss Chamberlain,” Taylor said.

“We’re sorry about the way you found out, too,” Kovac added. “The media ran with the story before we could stop them.”

“Was it true?” she asked. She backed up to a sagging couch and curled her long legs beneath her like a foal, settling back into a corner and pulling a blanket around her shoulders. She never took her eyes off Taylor. “What they said about my parents being attacked with a sword—is that true?”

There was no emotion in her voice as she asked, no fear, no horror at the idea. Nothing but morbid curiosity.

“There was evidence to suggest that, yes,” Taylor said.

“That’s so terrible,” she said, wide-eyed. “With one of Daddy’s swords?”

“We can’t really get into those details yet,” Kovac said.

The apartment smelled of weed and incense. Everything in it looked thirdhand and worn out. The sink and counter of the kitchenette were piled with dirty dishes. It was a far cry from the home the girl’s parents had died in.

“Do you know which sword it was?” she asked. “Did they use more than one?”

She wasn’t crying now. She wasn’t tearing up at the thought of her parents being hacked to death. She wanted to know which sword their killer had chosen to use.

“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?”