The Bitter Season (Kovac and Liska, #5)(34)

“Do you know which sword it was?” she asked. “Did they use more than one?”

She wasn’t crying now. She wasn’t tearing up at the thought of her parents being hacked to death. She wanted to know which sword their killer had chosen to use.

“I can’t comment on that,” Kovac said again. “I wouldn’t know one from the other at any rate. We were hoping you might be able to help us in the weaponry department, Mr. Sato.”

Sato sat down on the couch a foot away from the girl, touching her reassuringly on the shoulder. “Absolutely. Whatever you need.”

“Did they suffer?” the girl asked. “I wouldn’t want to think my mother suffered.”

She sounded like she was talking about a stray animal that had been run over.

Kovac took a seat on a hard, straight wooden chair to be at her eye level. He thought of Sondra Chamberlain lying spread-eagle on the floor of her dining room, a quarter of her face sliced away, a samurai sword planted through her abdomen. “It looked like it happened pretty fast.”

The girl blinked her wide gray eyes. Vacant eyes. He wondered if she was on something.

“When was the last time you spoke to either of your parents?” Taylor asked. He took the other hard wood chair and balanced his notebook on his thigh as he scribbled his notes.

“I was there for dinner Sunday. It was my father’s birthday,” she said. “And my mother called me every day. I didn’t answer her call yesterday, though.”

“What time did she call?”

“Around eight thirty. I don’t take her calls after dinner. I can’t stand to listen to her when she’s been drinking.”

“How would you know she’d been drinking if you didn’t speak to her?” Taylor asked.

She looked at him like he was an idiot. “My mother drinks in the evening. Every evening. I would drink, too, if I lived in that house, but I wouldn’t live in that house, so I don’t want to hear about it.”

“Your father was a difficult man?” Kovac asked.

“An egotistical, misogynistic megalomaniac.”

“But you went to his birthday dinner?” Taylor said.

“It was a command performance. I didn’t say I enjoyed myself.”

“You were his grad student,” Kovac said. “Did he twist your arm to do that?”

“It was a prestigious position with one of the leading scholars of East Asian history in the country.”

“We were told you filed a complaint against your dad with the Office for Conflict Resolution. What was that about?”

“That was about him treating me like dirt in my capacity as his assistant.”

“I’m getting the impression you didn’t get along with your dad,” Kovac said dryly. “Did you really think it would be any different working with him? In my personal experience, if people are *s, they’re *s all day long. Or did you think having the subject in common might soften him? Was that where your interest came from? You wanted something in common to share with him?”

Now her eyes filled with tears and her face went red from trying to hold them back. She sprang up from the couch and ran into the adjacent bedroom, slamming the door behind her.

Kovac looked at Sato.

“Obviously Diana has a difficult relationship with her father. It’s a long story.”

Kovac sat back and spread his hands. “We’ve got nothing but time.”

The professor sighed, not happy to be put on the spot.

“Diana has issues.”

“Such as?”

He glanced at the bedroom door as if he thought she might be listening on the other side. The muffled sound of her sobs filled the silence.

“Diana was adopted when she was four or five. She has abandonment issues. She’s insecure. An insecure girl shouldn’t have Lucien Chamberlain for a father. Life revolves around him, his needs, his career. Children have to have their needs met, too.”

“She’s not a child anymore.”

“We’re all children with our parents, aren’t we?” Sato asked. “She went through a rebellious stage: drugs, drinking, dropped out of school, in and out of rehab. When she came out of that, she decided to start fresh, finish school, and try to mend her relationship with her father.

“She’s a very bright girl,” he continued. “Lucien could appreciate that when she applied herself within his rigid construct of how students should learn. But not every student responds to the traditional methods.”

“He rejected her?” Taylor asked.

“Nothing as simple as that. Rejection implies defeat. Lucien would rather make a student quit than admit he needed to change his methods.” Sato shrugged. “He was who he was, and she is who she is. The two of them working together was a train wreck waiting to happen.”

“He must have been angry when she filed the complaint against him,” Taylor said.

“He was livid. He believed she timed it to sabotage his bid for the promotion to head of East Asian studies.”

“Didn’t she?”

Sato looked again at the closed bedroom door. “Probably.”

“And what’s your role in this family drama?” Kovac asked. “Is she sleeping with you to piss off her old man? Or are you sleeping with her to piss off your colleague?”