The Bitter Season (Kovac and Liska, #5)(25)
“She alleges his behavior is—was demeaning, condescending, and sexist, and created a hostile work environment. You can imagine we don’t want to start off this new chapter in East Asian studies with something like that making the news.”
“Who should we speak with about that situation?” Kovac asked.
“Inez Ngoukani. The office is in this building, on the sixth floor. I’ll call down and let her know you’ll be coming.”
“How did the professor feel about his assistant ratting him out like that?” Taylor asked.
“Lucien was extremely upset about it, as you might imagine, but the girl wouldn’t back down. He finally agreed to go through mediation in the hope of ending it. We wanted the matter settled and put to rest before we had to make our decision.”
“We’ll need the name and contact information for the student, too,” Kovac said.
“Yes, of course,” Foster said with a rueful look. “It’s Diana Chamberlain. Lucien’s daughter.”
*
“SO THIS GUY WAS some kind of a dick,” Kovac said as they got on the elevator. “His own kid reports him for being an ass right when he’s up for a big promotion. Families. Gotta love ’em.”
“You don’t think the daughter could have killed them, do you?” Taylor said. “Beating the old man to death with a pair of nunchucks? Running her mother through with a sword? Hard to picture a woman doing that.”
Kovac shrugged. “She could be a freaking Amazon for all we know. I’m not going to think anything until we meet her, except that dear old narcissist Dad must have been royally pissed with her for messing up his chances for the big dream job.”
“It had to take something pretty obnoxious for the daughter to make a formal complaint. I mean, she’s his grad student. Why would she take that on in the first place—and why would he have her in his department—if they didn’t have a good relationship to start with?”
“I had a feeling about that guy,” Kovac muttered. They walked out of the building, and he stepped off to the side, digging a cigarette out of his coat pocket.
“Which guy? Foster?”
“Our stiff. Murdered in a silk dressing robe.” He lit up, thought of Liska, felt guilty, and then took a long, satisfying drag and blew it out slowly. “What kind of guy puts on a silk dressing robe to go downstairs in the middle of the night? He’s gotta be gay or he’s gotta be a prick.”
“I know what not to get you for Christmas.”
“I don’t want pajamas, either,” Kovac said. “I don’t see the point of wearing clothes to bed.”
“That’s more information than I needed.”
Kovac took another pull on his smoke, imagining the bruise he would have ended up with if Liska had been there. She would have hauled off and socked him in the arm as hard as she could.
“What’s your story, anyway, Stench?”
Taylor’s eyebrows sketched upward. “You want to know what I wear to bed? This is getting weird.”
“No. What’s your story? Your family background.”
“I grew up in Plymouth. Mom, dad, kid sister.”
“Nice family? Good family?”
“Nice family, yeah, middle class, living in the ’burbs. My dad worked for Pillsbury. My mom made us go to church on Sunday.”
“Your parents loved you, raised you right.”
“Yeah.”
“You joined the army, but you came back here to settle down, to be near the family.”
“My dad passed away. Head-on crash with a drunk driver. I came back to help my mom out.”
“You’re a good kid,” Kovac said. “You probably never did anything to give your parents ulcers.”
“I don’t know about that.”
Kovac laughed. “Oh come on. I know. I can tell by your haircut. You were captain of the football team, lettered in three sports, took the homecoming queen to prom, and always used a condom.”
Taylor scowled a little. “Is there a point to this conversation?”
“Sure,” Kovac said. He blew out one last hard jet stream of toxic fumes. If he smoked only half the cigarette, that wasn’t so bad. He stubbed it out on the sidewalk and palmed the dead butt. At least he wasn’t a litterbug.
“Here’s your lesson for the day, Junior. If there’s one thing I can assure you about working Homicide, it’s that you are going to see some of the most mentally f*cked-up people and family situations you can imagine. After all the years I’ve been doing this job, just when I say I’ve seen everything, somebody comes up with some new and different way to be a sick, perverted wack job.
“Never judge a family by their address or bank account,” he went on. “And never underestimate the power of the American public to utterly shock and disappoint you.”
*
THE DIRECTOR OF THE Office for Conflict Resolution was waiting for them. Inez Ngoukani was tall and elegant, an ebony sculpture with long slender limbs and full features beneath a tight cap of steel gray hair. She invited them into a conference room as graciously as if they were at her home for a pleasant chat.
“May I offer you something to drink, gentlemen?” she asked in a beautiful, cultured accent. Kovac felt like he should have gone and washed up and brushed his teeth before coming in the room.