The Bitter Season (Kovac and Liska, #5)(39)

“Are you kidding me?” Chamberlain asked, horrified. “We have to come look at them?”

“It’s an unpleasant formality,” Kovac said. “They’ll let you do the viewing on a monitor.”

Chamberlain looked away, shaking his head. He didn’t want to be a part of any of this. He didn’t seem to want to be a part of his family at all. He had gone to that disastrous birthday dinner out of a sense of duty. Now duty would drag him to the morgue.

“We can take you down there and bring you back,” Kovac said.

“Now?” the kid asked, incredulous.

“Tomorrow is soon enough.” Kovac took a card out of his pocket and handed it to him. “We’ll be in touch. Sorry for your loss.”


*



“THE FAMILIES I’VE SEEN . . .” Kovac started as they left the apartment building. “Makes being divorced twice seem not so bad.”

Even as he said it, he thought of Tinks and her boys. They did well as a family—as long as that * she had been married to stayed in line or out of the picture.

Kovac had started his own family once. Or so he had thought. His second wife gave birth and then promptly divorced him, took the kid, and moved to Seattle, where she remarried with suspicious haste. It all happened so fast and so long ago, it seemed like some weird bad dream now. He doubted the kid was even his. Kovac had been a convenient source of health insurance, that was all.

“The Yelp review is still up,” Taylor said.

“How bad is it?”

“He called the workmen incompetent, ignorant, filthy, and foul-mouthed, and said that was apparently company policy as evidenced by the behavior and attitude of the manager over the phone. Thirteen people have found the review useful. Three thought it was funny.”

“Funny?”

Taylor shrugged. “Thirteen ‘useful’ is thirteen customers lost, to say nothing of the people who read the review but didn’t comment. That’s dollars lost to a small business, plus a bad reputation in a good neighborhood.”

“See what you can find out about the business. Let’s pay a visit to the manager. For now, let’s go back to the office. I want to get the war room set up. There’s so many people that hated this professor, I already need a program to keep track of them.”


*



CHARLIE CHAMBERLAIN SAT ON HIS SOFA for a long time after the detectives had left. He sat with perfect posture, staring into the middle distance, images and arguments tumbling through his mind. Pandora’s box had opened wide, and all the memories came spilling out, one running into the next, and into the next.

Him at five in short pants and a bow tie, with knobby skinned knees, and tears on his cheeks. His mother’s drunken, angry face; her mouth twisted open like a gash in her face. His father’s cold stare.

He saw himself at nine, at twelve, at fourteen. He heard the voices.

Stupid boy . . .

I told you never . . .

. . . so disappointed . . .

Get out of my sight . . .

Worthless . . .

. . . mistake . . .

He saw the hand striking, the belt swinging.

He saw his sister and heard her crying.

He felt the helplessness of a child.

“Such a perfect family,” everyone used to say. They didn’t know, and wouldn’t suspect. Appearances were all that mattered. Appearances, accolades, money, the right car, the perfect dinner party. Two children brought out on cue and promptly put away.

Seen not heard.

Don’t cause a problem.

Don’t say a word.

He didn’t know how much time passed as he sat there. Years passed through his head. He might have sat there an hour or all night, lost in a trance, in emotional limbo. So many feelings tore through him and collided that they canceled each other out until he was numb.

What was he supposed to feel?

The doorbell brought him back into the moment. He had no idea of the time. Maybe the detectives had come back to take him to the morgue to identify the bodies.

He put an eye to the peephole and took in the distorted view of his sister—hair disheveled, eyes red, face swollen.

“Di,” he said as he opened the door.

“They’re dead, Charlie,” she said, her face twisting in anguish. “Oh my God, they’re dead!”

She threw herself against him and began to sob. He put his arms around her and held her. They had only ever had each other.

“They’re dead,” she mumbled through her tears. “We’re free . . .”

Even as he tried to comfort her, he knew that wasn’t true. They weren’t free. The future might be clear ahead, but the past was something no one could escape but the dead. There was irony. They would always be damaged by their pasts and by the choices other people had made. The only ones free in this story were lying on slabs at the county morgue.

But he said nothing as he held his sister, and they cried together.





13


Nikki read files until her eyes burned and her vision blurred. So much for the idea of no late hours working cold cases. While there may have been no outward sense of urgency in solving a case that had been gathering dust in the archives for a quarter of a century, that didn’t change who she was. She was still going to dig and scratch and poke and prod with the focus of a terrier.