The Bitter Season (Kovac and Liska, #5)(36)

The bedside lamps were on. She was naked, kneeling on the bed, touching herself, her eyes already glazed, her mouth wet and open. Her body was beautiful, lithe and subtly muscular. Her nipples were pierced with small silver rings. A ruby studded her navel.

She grabbed him by the waist of his jeans and pulled him closer.

“Diana.” He breathed her name as she undid his pants and took him in her mouth.

The sex with her was crazy and hot, as addictive as crystal meth. She went to a dark, desperate place in her mind he didn’t want to know about, but he willingly went along for the ride.

She rode him hard, sweating, gasping, crying, and when the end came for her, she pounded her fist against his tattooed chest over and over and over, like she had a knife in her hand.

Then, exhausted, she collapsed on top of him and drifted into unconsciousness on an anguished whispered word: “Daddy . . .”





12


“You’re here about my parents,” Charles Chamberlain said as he opened the door to his apartment, his expression grave, his voice quiet and a little unsteady. Nerves. Emotions. Both. He was pale, though whether that was natural or caused by the circumstances, Kovac couldn’t guess.

He appeared to be a modest, unremarkable young man—early twenties, medium height, medium build, medium brown hair cut in a medium-length, conservative Everyman style. He wore nerdy glasses, and was neatly dressed in khaki pants and a button-down shirt, tucked in.

“Professor Foster called and broke the news. He said you’d be contacting me. I didn’t know if I should call the police department or go downtown or go to the house, or what,” he said. “How does anyone know what to do when something like this happens?”

“They don’t,” Kovac said. “Everybody gets the crash course.”

“We’re sorry for your loss, Mr. Chamberlain,” Taylor said.

“Thank you.”

“I know this is a tough time,” Kovac said, “but we need to ask you some questions. It’s important that we get as much information as we can as fast as we can.”

“I understand.” He stepped back from the door, inviting them in. “Professor Foster said it was probably a burglary, that someone might have targeted them—maybe for my father’s collection. Is that true?”

“There appear to be elements of a burglary,” Taylor said. “There have been a couple of burglaries in the area recently. But we don’t know anything for sure at this point.”

“How could someone break in? What happened to their alarm system?”

“We don’t know yet. Were they good about arming it?”

“Yes, every night after dinner. It was part of my mother’s routine. She took the dishes to the kitchen, set the alarm on the back door keypad, then started cleaning up.”

“What time did she start drinking?” Kovac asked bluntly.

The kid gave him a look, like he wanted to express outrage and denial, but in the end he said, “She liked a glass of wine with dinner . . . and maybe another after dinner. So what? She wasn’t a falling-down drunk, if that’s what someone told you.”

“Did you speak to her last night?” Taylor asked.

“No. I was working. I turned my phone off. I have a deadline,” he said. His brows knit and his eyes filled. “I had a message from her when I turned it back on this morning. Just wanting to talk. She gets lonely. I guess by the time I picked up the message . . .”

By the time he picked up the message, his mother was already dead on the dining room floor. He was seeing some version of that in his head now.

“Try not to beat yourself up, kid,” Kovac said. “We can’t foresee bad stuff coming; otherwise we’d stop it from happening.”

He was regretting not taking the chance to have had one last conversation with his mother. People always did. They wanted to believe they would have had some incredible moment of clarity about how much they loved that person they were unknowingly about to lose; how whatever petty arguments and angry words they held against one another would have magically dissolved, and they would have had the most beautiful, meaningful conversation of their lives.

The truth was if Charles Chamberlain had answered that call from his mother, he would have been irritated because she was interrupting his work when he had a deadline. He would have heard the lonely, wine-soaked self-pity in his mother’s voice and thought, Here we go again. They probably would have had unpleasant words about his father or his sister. And he would now be feeling guilty for that conversation because he hadn’t been patient, and he hadn’t consoled her, and now she was dead and he hadn’t told her he loved her.

The kid showed them to his living area, just to the left of the front door, and they all sat down. Like his sister’s place, most of the apartment could be seen at a glance: a tiny kitchen, a counter to eat at, a living room, a hall that led to a bedroom and a bath. Unlike his sister’s place, Charles Chamberlain’s small home was modest, not cheap, and neat as a pin. There were no dirty dishes visible. It didn’t smell of weed. The furniture might have been from the fifties or sixties—or at least made to look that way—low and clean, with straight lines and no frills. Jazz music played softly in the background from fist-size speakers beside a twenty-three-inch flat-screen TV on a console made from some kind of industrial serving cart. A laptop computer sat open on a small desk in one corner, two filing cabinets with a slab of glass for a top.