The Bitter Season (Kovac and Liska, #5)(37)

“I don’t know what to say,” the kid murmured, almost to himself. His hands were trembling as he rested them on his knees. “It’s surreal. I keep thinking there must be some mistake. Who would want to kill my parents? And then I turned on the television when I got home, and there was the house on the news. It’s crazy! They were killed with a sword?”

He looked straight at Kovac, clearly wanting a denial that was not forthcoming.

“Oh my God.”

He had that haunted look in his blue eyes, like someone who had seen something unspeakable. He shook his head as if he might be able to shake the images out of his brain.

“Who could do something like that?” he whispered, a shudder passing through him.

“Can you think of anyone who might have had a grudge against one or both of them?” Taylor asked.

Chamberlain laughed abruptly, in the way people do when they’re shocked. “Sure. But they’re professors who think my father is an ass. They’re not people who go around committing murder! My mother has her charities. She goes to her book club. Who could she possibly offend?”

He pulled his glasses off and rubbed a hand across his face. His fingernails were bitten to the quick. He picked at a cuticle as he breathed in and out with purpose, trying to pull himself together.

“It had to be some kind of thug or a homicidal maniac or something, right?” he asked, glancing up with that light of desperate hope in his expression that Kovac had seen so many times. When it came to violent crime, everyone wanted to believe in the bogeyman. No one wanted to think they might know a killer.

“We have to consider all possibilities,” Kovac said. “Right now we’re just trying to get a picture of your parents’ life and the people in it. Had they mentioned having a problem with anyone? A neighbor, someone doing work on the house, anything like that?”

“The one neighbor, the Abrams, have already gone to Arizona for the winter. They’ve lived next door forever. My mother and Mrs. Abrams are friends. The house on the other side of them is vacant. It was sold over the summer. The new owners are renovating,” he said. “My father complained about the noise on the weekend.”

Kovac would set Taylor to the task of checking out the construction crew. Maybe someone had a record. Maybe someone had a temper, or a screw loose, or both.

“Had your parents had any work done on their own house recently?”

“Oh, well, there was the Yelp incident,” he said, as if they should know what that meant.

“What’s that?”

“My mother hired a handyman service to do some work around the house. My father didn’t like the job they did, and he went on Yelp and wrote a nasty review. I guess he and the guy running the business got into it over the phone a couple of times. But people don’t kill people over bad Yelp reviews.”

“You’d be surprised,” Kovac said. “You run into the wrong person, they’ll kill you for having blue eyes. That’s why we need to know anything at all that might fit into the picture. Even if it seems insignificant to you.”

Taylor stared intently at his phone, flipping through the photographs he had taken earlier. He stopped on one, enlarged it with his thumb and forefinger, and shot a look at Kovac.

“Handy Dandy Home Services. There was a notation on the calendar in the kitchen for last Friday.”

“The guy had offered to come back and do some work for free if my father took the bad review down,” Chamberlain said.

“Do you know if that happened?”

“I don’t know. My father said he wouldn’t take it down until he was satisfied with the follow-up work.”

“I’ll look it up,” Taylor said, tapping the screen of his phone.

“When did you last see your folks?” Kovac asked.

“Sunday. My father’s birthday dinner.”

“And how was that?”

He bobbed his eyebrows, looked away, and sighed. “It was the usual family gathering.”

“What does that mean?”

He didn’t want to say. He stared down at his hands and picked at the loose piece of cuticle.

“We’ve already spoken to your sister,” Kovac prompted. “You might as well give us your version.”

Another sigh as he considered what to say.

“My mother tried too hard to be festive. My father played the role of tyrant, my sister got belligerent, and we all ended up screaming at each other.”

“That’s the usual?”

“It is for us. In case no one’s told you, my father is a raging narcissist, and my sister is bipolar. It’s not a good mix. Our mother drinks to take the edge off.”

“And what do you do?”

“I try to keep my head down.”

“Have you spoken to your sister today?”

He shook his head and gave in to the nervous urge to bite off the offending loose cuticle. “She won’t pick up. She isn’t answering text messages, either. She’s punishing me for not taking her side Sunday. I didn’t take his side, either. But she didn’t care. You’re either for Di or you’re against her. She doesn’t believe in neutrality.”

“Who’s the oldest?” Kovac asked.

“She is.”

“But she’s still a student?”