The Bitter Season (Kovac and Liska, #5)(116)

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 f*ck 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.