The Bitter Season (Kovac and Liska, #5)(35)

“I’m just a friend, Detective,” he said, his expression carefully neutral. “I’m just a shoulder to cry on.”

“You’re not sleeping with her?”

“No,” he said, but he couldn’t quite hold eye contact as he said it.

Liar, liar.

“She seems very . . . comfortable with you,” Taylor said.

“I’ve known Diana for five years. I could see from the start the struggle she was having with her father, and I could understand it, too. My own father is controlling and manipulative. We have that in common. And I’ve had my own struggles with Lucien.”

“What kind of struggles?” Kovac asked.

“I’m from a more modern school of teaching. I believe in challenging old ways and old thoughts. Lucien found me threatening because I pull students out of his dull rut and let them open their eyes.”

“Were you a threat to him?”

“Not in the way you mean. Not physically.”

“But professionally and as a parental figure,” Taylor said.

“I wasn’t trying to steal Diana away from him—as a teacher or a father. I was trying to help her. We commiserate over how difficult her father is—was, and let her blow off some of the anger and frustration she feels,” Sato explained. “I appreciate Diana’s spirit. She needs someone to encourage her to reach her full potential, not criticize and belittle her, or try to make her live in a cage inside her own mind.”

“So you’ve become special friends with the troubled daughter of your biggest professional rival,” Kovac said. “How’d that go over with her father?”

“Lucien didn’t know. He would have misconstrued the relationship.”

“And gotten your ass fired?” Kovac asked. “I have to think the university frowns on professors and students being special friends.”

“I wouldn’t get fired,” Sato said with confidence, like he had someone on the inside greasing the wheels for him.

“But you wouldn’t get that promotion, either, would you?” Kovac asked. “If Lucien Chamberlain made some claim of impropriety against you, whether or not you were guilty, it wouldn’t look good, would it?”

Sato looked at him as the implication sank in, his dark eyes steady. “I wouldn’t kill for it, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

“When did you last see Professor Chamberlain?” Taylor asked.

“Yesterday at work.”

“And where were you last night?”

“At home.”

“Can anyone vouch for that?”

He cut another quick glance at the bedroom door. What would be worse: to have an uncorroborated alibi, or to say he was in bed with the dead man’s daughter? He was a suspect either way. So was she.

“I was alone.”

Kovac raised his eyebrows just to mess with the guy. That’s the answer you picked? Huh.

“Okay,” he said, getting to his feet. “We’ll be in touch about the weaponry.”

Sato walked with them to the door. “Anything I can do to help.”

“We’ll need you both to come in and get fingerprinted for elimination purposes.”

“Me?” Sato said, surprised. “I haven’t been in that house in a year or more.”

Kovac smiled at him. “Better safe than sorry. I can’t just assume they have the world’s greatest cleaning lady. It’s no big deal, really. It takes two minutes.”

“Yeah, sure,” Sato said with no conviction.

“We understand Professor Chamberlain’s collection is valuable,” Taylor said.

“It’s incredible.”

“How could he afford that on a professor’s salary?”

“They’ve always had money. Sondra’s family was connected to some chemical-pharmaceutical fortune. Lucien made sure people knew. He liked people to think he taught for higher reasons—like his ego.”

“You didn’t like him,” Kovac said.

“Nobody liked Lucien. He wasn’t a likeable man. People respected him, or they envied him for what he had: his position, his possessions—”

“His collection?” Taylor said. “Something someone would kill to have?”

Sato frowned. “I hope not.”

“I hope so,” Kovac said. “Because if someone killed those two people the way they killed them just for the hell of it . . .”

He let that hang as he handed Sato a business card. “We’ll be in touch,” he said.

Ken Sato saw them the ten feet to the door and locked the deadbolt as soon as they were on the other side.

“That’s some messed-up shit right there,” Taylor said softly, glancing back over his shoulder as they went down the hall to the apartment house’s front door. “The daughter sleeping with Dad’s rival for the big promotion. I can’t wait to meet the son.”

“What’d I tell you?” Kovac said. “The all-American family. It’s Norman Fucking Rockwell on acid.”


*



SATO TAPPED ON THE BEDROOM DOOR. “Diana?”

No answer. No sound. She might have fallen asleep. She might have slit her wrists. Either was possible in her current state of mind. He opened the door and slipped inside.