The Bitter Season (Kovac and Liska, #5)(43)

“But with Diana messing up her father’s chances, bringing a complaint against him with the Office for Conflict Resolution, you could argue Sato already had pretty clear sailing for that job,” Taylor said.

“He could have done it for love, I suppose,” Kovac offered. “She hated her father—not without reason, by the sound of it. But is Sato a professor by day and a ninja cat burglar by night?”

“Find out,” the lieutenant said. “What about the son?”

“Smart, quiet, nerdy kid. He’s a paralegal for a law firm. His alibi kind of sucks,” Kovac said. “He was home alone, working.”

“But we can check his computer,” Taylor said, “and confirm what Wi-Fi network he was using. We can check his cell phone records and see what towers it was pinging off.”

“He seemed pretty shaken up by what happened,” Kovac said. “With the sister being a flake, the responsibility for the aftermath is falling on him. We’re bringing him to the ME’s office for the official ID tomorrow morning.”

“Any hits on the Chamberlains’ credit cards?” Mascherino asked.

Kovac shook his head. “No action on their cell phones, either.”

It was the lieutenant’s turn to sigh. “I’m sure I don’t have to tell you this case is front and center until it’s solved. You’ve got Tippen and Elwood full time, and you can borrow anyone else available if you need to.”

“The overtime is approved?”

“Yes. Whatever you need. I want this case solved before it can be used as a political football.”

“Isn’t it too late for that already?” Kovac asked. “I heard the press conference was belly-to-butt with brass and suits. The local stations are running the story practically nonstop.”

“The union and the politicians aligning with the union are going to use this case as an example of what’s wrong with the force,” she said. “Not enough officers, not enough money.”

“And I’m supposed to be against that?” Kovac asked. “It’s the truth.”

“Do you want the public panicking, believing no one is safe in their own home?” Mascherino asked. “Do you want them thinking we’re not doing our jobs, that we’re using a high-profile case—the horrible deaths of these innocent people—to extort money from the city?”

“No.”

“That’s the flip side,” she said. “The mayor starts beating his drum about the no-good, dirty police union. Then what?”

Kovac was silent for a moment. “You’re a smart cookie, Lieutenant,” he said, his mouth kicking up at one corner. “I think I might like you.”

Mascherino smiled like the Mona Lisa. “Yes, I am, and thank you. Now go do your jobs. We’ve got a case to solve.”





14


“You can’t possibly think I did it.”

Dan Franken was thirty-six, six feet tall, and thick bodied. He had a bony, hawkish blade of a nose, and his dark eyes sat back in deep sockets. They had a tendency to dart from side to side, from Kovac to Taylor and back again. His mouth turned downward by nature, a lipless horseshoe centered on planes of heavy five o’clock shadow.

Kovac and Taylor stood silent, Kovac propping himself up against a tall filing cabinet, Taylor looking all military: legs straight, feet apart, hands clasped behind his back. A human guard dog on alert.

“I mean, I didn’t get along with the guy, but the wife seemed nice enough. I felt bad for her, having to be married to an * like that,” Franken said. His voice was rough with half a lifetime’s worth of cigarettes. He shook one out of a pack now and lit up, blowing the smoke up at the low yellowed acoustic-tile ceiling. “I heard on the radio someone hacked them up with a samurai sword. That’s nuts, man! What the f*ck?”

Franken ran his business out of a tiny, cluttered wood-paneled office in an old commercial park on the North Side. The low buildings made of corrugated steel were part of a U-Store-It complex, and housed an odd variety of businesses: It’s a Party! party planning; Faux Flora, silk plants; B&D Auto Body; the offices of an outpatient drug rehab called Rising Wings; Iron Neck Gym. Franken looked like he might have spent his free time at the last one, Kovac thought. His hands, clenched in loose fists at his sides, were the size of five-pound hammerheads.

“Professor Chamberlain wasn’t very happy with your work,” Taylor said. “We read his review. His son said the two of you got into it.”

“I never met the son,” Franken said. “I didn’t even know he had a son.”

“Did you argue with Professor Chamberlain?”

“Hell, yeah. I argued with him the day it happened, and I argued with him again when I found out about the Yelp review,” he admitted. “That was a shitty review. People look at those things, you know, especially young professionals. That’s a big part of my market.”

He sat back against his desk and tapped his cigarette ash off into an ashtray heaped with butts that testified to an evening spent slogging through paperwork. “He should have given us the chance to take care of the problems. But no, he had to be a prick and go online and run his mouth. I had other jobs lined up in that neighborhood. I lost two of them because he called the people up and ragged on about how terrible my guys were and what a shit job they did.”