The Bitter Season (Kovac and Liska, #5)(57)

“But she likes to twist men around her curvy little finger,” Kovac said. “And there’s Sato—”

“You think she’s not going to flip out on him if he did that to her mother?”

“That line of thinking would rule out the brother then, too. How could she be around him if he did that to their mother? But she’s hanging all over him like a cheap sweater,” Kovac said. “I wanted to go take a shower watching that. Do you think they’re sleeping together?”

“The brother and sister? He doesn’t really react to her that way. He seems to know how to handle her. I guess he’s had his whole life to master it.”

“Yeah. He doesn’t want her alone with us, though,” Kovac said. “What’s he afraid of? What’s she going to let slip? Does he think she did it? Does he think she’ll rat him out? Are they in it together?”

“We’ll find out today who inherits what,” Taylor said. “What does either of them have to gain besides getting rid of a tyrant?”

“Isn’t that enough?” Kovac asked. “I didn’t even know the guy, and I want to punch him in the throat. Add the bonus of whatever that collection of his is worth, and what money Mom was worth, insurance policies . . .”

“I still say the scene says pro,” Taylor said. “My money’s on the handyman.”

“A drug addict in and out of rehab,” Kovac mused. “Diana Chamberlain has been in and out of rehab. I wonder what the odds are that their paths might have crossed.”

Kovac’s head was throbbing with the effort to keep all the threads from tangling and something important from falling through the cracks. He had been up for almost thirty hours, and he was starting to feel it. The adrenaline had finally started wearing off as he sat across the table from Dan Franken in an interview room at oh-dark-thirty in the morning while Taylor was at the Hennepin County Medical Center ER getting a head CT.

Taylor was probably right, Kovac thought. He probably shouldn’t have been driving a car, but he was afraid to stop moving. If he had been sitting on the passenger side, he would have been slack-jawed and drooling, sound asleep with his head against the window. That would have been okay with Liska. They’d been together too long to worry about impressing each other. But he didn’t want Taylor thinking he was too old for all-nighters—even though he was in fact starting to feel too old for all-nighters.

His mood soured, he parked the car in a space designated for some city councilman he didn’t give a shit about.

“Ummm . . .” Taylor made a half-assed gesture at the sign as they got out of the car.

“Screw him,” Kovac growled. He wanted a gallon of coffee to be delivered intravenously, and to eat a greasy donut just to perpetuate the cop stereotype.

They went into the CID offices and straight to the war room.

“We got a hit on Professor Chamberlain’s credit cards,” Tippen said by way of a greeting.

“If you tell me you have a culprit in custody, I’ll kiss you on the mouth,” Kovac said, making a beeline for the coffee maker.

“Pucker up, pal. Suite three, down the hall.”

“Seriously?”

“Detained by security at the Lake Street Kmart. I’ll pass on the kiss, though. People will think we’re in love.”

“You have a problem with that?” Kovac asked, his mood brightening again with the prospect of a lead. “I’m hurt.”

“It’s not you, it’s me,” Tippen said, leading the way down the hall. “I’ll only break your heart in the end, my friend.”

“You’re not my type anyway,” Kovac said as they stopped outside the interview room. “So tell me we have a sword-wielding ninja on the other side of this door.”

“I never promised you the moon.”

What they had on the other side of the door was an angry three-hundred-pound woman with a rainbow-colored hair weave and drawn-on eyebrows like the golden arches of McDonald’s. She sat behind the undersize table, her arms crossed atop the wide ledge of her chest, glaring at the cops as they entered the interview room.

“Sergeant Kovac,” Tippen said, “meet Professor Lucien Chamberlain.”

“You’re Professor Chamberlain?” Kovac said, straight-faced.

“Yes, I am,” she said. “And I demand to be released on my own personal renaissance.”

“Recognizance,” Taylor corrected her. “You can’t get that from us.”

“What can I get from you, then, you sweet, hot piece of man candy?” she asked, batting her long false eyelashes at him.

“You’re Professor Lucien Chamberlain,” Kovac said again, moving to block her sight of Taylor. Kovac put his reading glasses on and held up the driver’s license Tippen handed to him, as if to compare the photo to the person sitting before him. “You’re a professor of East Asian history at the University of Minnesota? Five-feet-nine-inch, one-hundred-fifty-five pound Caucasian male Lucien Damien Chamberlain?”

“Well, that’s an old picture,” she said stubbornly.

“Also known as Millicent Johnson, Antoinette LaPort, Robert Milland,” Tippen said, producing an array of credit cards and driver’s licenses as with a magician’s card trick. He plucked one from the rest. “And last but by no means least: Ms. Sparkle Cummings.”