The Bitter Season (Kovac and Liska, #5)(117)

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.”