The Bitter Season (Kovac and Liska, #5)(124)

She swore under her breath. Kovac would kill her for going in alone—if someone else didn’t kill her first.

She started slowly up the stairs.


*



THE HIT ON THE BOLO for Charlie Chamberlain’s car pulled Kovac and Taylor out of the crime scene in Diana Chamberlain’s apartment. Mascherino had taken charge of the scene, sending them on their way.

The Toyota was found parked on a side street in a quiet neighborhood east of Lake Nokomis, not far from where Gordon Krauss was apprehended earlier in the day. Kovac asked for the reporting officers to sit on the car from a discreet distance and wait for them to get there.

Was there supposed to have been a meeting there? Kovac wondered. Was this the place chosen for a payoff to Krauss, to buy his silence about the solicitation with enough cash to get him out of town?

The radio crackled with coded bursts as they sped south on Hiawatha, dash strobe running. Reports of a home invasion in the area. Units were on the scene and multiple units were en route. Not my monkeys, not my circus, Kovac thought as they turned off the main drag and were instantly swallowed up by a neighborhood of small, neat older homes. He killed the dash light.

There was no sign of the patrol car that had called in on the BOLO and should have been sitting watching, waiting for the Toyota’s driver to return. They had responded to the home invasion call-out.

Kovac and Taylor walked up on the Toyota, one on either side, each with a Maglite held high. The keys were on the driver’s seat. Bloody fingerprints and handprints marred the pale gray interior on the dash, and the interior of both doors. Blood smeared the passenger’s seat.

“Well, that’s not a good sign,” Kovac muttered.

“You want to wait for a crime scene unit?” Taylor asked.

“We’ll be here all night.”

Kovac opened the driver’s-side door with a gloved hand, reached in, and pressed the button to pop the trunk.

He didn’t know what he had been expecting. He had suspected the corpse at Diana’s belonged to Charlie, that Diana and Sato had killed him to get him out of their way. But when he and Taylor both shone their flashlights into the trunk of Charlie Chamberlain’s car, it was Diana Chamberlain inside.

She looked like she was resting, lying on her side with her eyes half closed. Her throat had been cut from ear to ear. Placed next to her, staring up at them, was the head of Ken Sato, his penis sticking out of his mouth.





47


“Mommy! Mommy!” Mia ran into the room, sobbing.

Evi looked at her daughter and, heedless of the blade at her throat, shouted, “Run, Mia! Run!”

But her daughter, just five years old, and never having known danger in her whole brief life, didn’t understand. Mommy was her safety. She stood ten feet away, confused and terrified, wailing, her precious little face red and wet.

Rage rose up like a wall inside Evi. Whatever mistakes she had made in her life, this would not be one of them. She wouldn’t let her murder be the last thing her child saw before a madman butchered her.

She reached up and clawed at her assailant’s eyes. Startled, he pulled back in reaction, lifting the blade from her throat.

Evi kneed him in the groin and ducked to the side as he doubled over, her focus on Mia. If she could grab her child and run—

He caught her by the hair, nearly yanking her off her feet, and slammed her back against the wall, shouting, “NO! No! You will not ruin this for me!”

The back of Evi’s head banged hard on the frame of the window. Her knees went weak, and her vision swam. She saw him turn toward Mia. She reached out to try to grab him and dropped to her knees, too dizzy to keep her feet beneath her.

She watched in horror as he scooped up her daughter. He had dropped the sword in favor of the long knife that hung from his belt. He put the point of the blade to Mia’s throat.

“You’re going to do what I tell you!” he shouted. “Or I’ll slit her throat, and you can watch her die!”


*



“POLICE! Drop the knife! Drop it now!” Nikki yelled. She entered the room gun first, taking a stance maybe five feet from the assailant. “Drop it now or I’ll blow your f*cking head off!”

“No!” He hiked the child up higher against him so that her head overlapped the lower half of his battered face. The point of the knife pricked the tender flesh of the little girl’s throat, and blood began to trickle down.

Evi was on her knees, sobbing, pleading. “Let her go! Please! She’s just a little girl!”

Mia was screaming and kicking, trying to wriggle from the grasp of her captor.

“Stop it!” he snapped into her ear. “Stop it right now!”

“Mia, be still!” Evi cried.

“You hurt that child, I’ll make you wish you’d never been born,” Nikki promised.

He laughed, a sound that was strangely tragic. “I already wish that,” he said quietly. “That’s why I’m here.”

“What does that mean?”

“You’re not a part of this,” he said. “You don’t belong here. Get out. This is between me and her,” he said, nodding toward Evi.

“Then let the little girl go,” Nikki said. “There’s no reason to hurt her.”

He shook his head, hefting Mia up and adjusting his hold on her.