The Bitter Season (Kovac and Liska, #5)(18)

“Be really careful where you step,” Culbertson warned, going into professional mode. “There is literally blood everywhere in here. You can’t see it so much on the red walls, but it’s on the ceiling, the chandelier, the drapes. This was your basic massacre.”

Culbertson stepped to the side, clearing the sight line to the carnage on the dining room floor. The scene stopped Kovac in his tracks.

The contrast of the fussy, formal room and the raw animal violence that had ended these people’s lives was jarring. The victims’ bodies had been so abused that Kovac’s brain automatically wanted to reject the idea they had ever been living, breathing human beings. His last tiny sliver of raw, unjaded humanity, he thought. The thought lasted less than the blink of an eye.

He had seen people decapitated, disemboweled, burned, drowned, strangled, beaten, run over. Not that long ago he and Liska had a case where the assailants had poured acid on the victim’s face while she was still alive. There was no end to the ways people could destroy one another.

“One assailant or two?” Kovac asked.

“I’d say one. Looks like one set of shoe prints in the blood.”

The female victim lay on her back, spread-eagle, with her head at Kovac’s feet. She was, quite literally, bathed in blood. It was impossible to determine her hair color, difficult at a glance even to distinguish her race. He could see she was a woman because her nightgown had been torn, exposing one large, bloody breast that had been sliced diagonally.

A horrific gash cleaved the left side of the woman’s face, from her partially severed ear, across her cheek, completely opening her mouth. The edges of the lips curled back in a macabre grimace, exposing muscle, tissue, bone, and teeth. Another gash cut deep into her neck where it met her shoulder.

That had probably been the first blow, Kovac thought. The one that knocked her down, but not the one that killed her. She had been slashed and stabbed in the torso multiple times. The weapon that had been used to kill her stood upright. Her killer had run the sword through her stomach so hard the blade had penetrated the floor and stuck there like a steel exclamation point.

“Sondra Chamberlain,” Culbertson said. “Fifty-eight years of age, and her husband, Professor Lucien Chamberlain, forever fifty-three. They were just starting to go into rigor when I got here. So I’d say they were probably killed between one A.M. and two thirty. Obviously, they died right where they are. You can see what happened to the wife. The husband was bludgeoned, strangled, and stabbed in the back—probably postmortem. Toss-up on cause of death. He took a hellacious beating with the handle end of the nunchucks.”

“Nunchucks?” Kovac repeated.

“Surprised a thief?” Taylor speculated.

Kovac gave him the eye. “How many burglars carry nunchucks around with them?”

“We’ll get to that,” Culbertson said. “Looks like this patio door was the point of entry.”

“No security system?” Taylor asked.

Culbertson shrugged. “Maybe it wasn’t on. My mother is eighty-two and she refuses to turn her alarm on.”

The professor lay facedown, head pointing in the opposite direction of his wife’s, beaten down in his pajamas and bathrobe. Something about that struck Kovac as extra sad. He guessed the professor had probably been a fussy little man who had creases pressed into his pajama bottoms. He had gotten up in the night and put on his bathrobe and slippers to meet the Grim Reaper.

Kovac picked his way around the bodies to find a place he could hunker down and get a better look at the damage done to the man’s head. The left side of the skull had been caved in with terrible force, like a hardboiled egg that had been smashed with a hammer. Shards of bone spiked the exposed brain. The left eyeball hung out of the shattered socket, lolling against the man’s bloody, broken cheek.

Lying on the bloodstained Oriental rug a foot or so from the dead man’s hand was the apparent murder weapon: wood-handled nunchucks covered in blood, strands of the victim’s salt-and-pepper hair sticking to the ends.

“Ever see anything like this before?” Kovac asked Taylor as he straightened.

“Yeah,” Taylor said quietly. “I have. But not in this country.”

“Looks to me like whoever did this enjoyed himself,” Culbertson said.

“So, we’ve got a sword-wielding maniac running around the city,” Kovac declared. “Great. A f*cking wack job.”

“He left his weapons here,” Taylor pointed out.

“I don’t think he brought them to the party,” Culbertson said. “These were weapons of opportunity. Come see.”

They followed a trail of bloody footprints out of the dining room and to a study full of dark furniture and a darker collection. Weapons lined the walls—swords, daggers, knives, Chinese throwing stars, stuff Kovac had seen only in movies. Glass cases displayed iron helmets and painted face masks from ages past. Several of the cases had been shattered, the contents taken.

“Safe to assume our assailant helped himself to the weaponry,” Culbertson said. “It’s a homicidal maniac’s wet dream.”

Kovac put his reading glasses on and took a closer look at the deadly beauty of the weapons: swords impressed with intricate carvings in the handles, etchings on the blades. Small plaques beneath each piece gave a description, a date, and a place of origin.