The Bitter Season (Kovac and Liska, #5)(67)

They left him standing on the sidewalk looking like an unhappy wet puppy.

Inside the front door, they shed their dripping coats, hanging them on an iron coat tree. Taylor handed out booties for everyone to cover their shoes.

The house still carried a hint of the smell of spilled blood and the faint stink of cigarettes. While no one was allowed to smoke in a house being processed as a crime scene, plenty of the people on the job ducked outside for a break during the hours it took to do the job, bringing the smell of smoke back inside with them.

“Where were they killed?” Diana Chamberlain asked. True to her word, she held up her phone and took a video of the foyer and the staircase.

“The dining room,” Taylor said. “We won’t be going in there.”

“I think I should.”

Sato gave her a disapproving look. “Di, no.”

“I should,” she insisted, turning to him with her bravest and most earnest expression. “It’s the last place their souls were,” she said with all the drama of a soap opera actress. “That’s where I should say good-bye to them.”

“We really can’t have people in there,” Kovac said. “We need you to go upstairs with Detective Taylor and look through your mother’s things.”

He turned to Sato. “Professor, you and I are going to the professor’s study.”

He didn’t look any more like a professor today than he had the day before. He was in black jeans and a black hoodie with several glossy black Japanese characters running down the left side of his chest.

“Do you have some kind of history with the boy?” Kovac asked. “He doesn’t seem too happy to see you.”

“Charlie thinks I’m an anarchist because I don’t fit in any of his neat little boxes.”

“What the hell does that mean?”

“It means he can’t control me, and control is everything to Charlie. Control the emotions. Control the situation. Move the chess pieces around on the board to create the best defense.”

“Defense against what?”

“Life,” he said, looking around as they went into a fussy formal sitting room that was lined with dark wood bookcases crowded with leather-bound tomes and framed family photos.

“These aren’t the best circumstances, but he seems pretty uptight for a twenty-four-year-old kid.”

“You would be, too, if Lucien were your father,” Sato said. “Charlie always tried to be the peacemaker. Given the personalities involved, that’s a stressful role. He’s a sensitive kid.”

“He’s very protective of his sister.”

Sato didn’t comment. He stood in the center of the room with his hands on his hips and looked around. “It’s strange to be in here knowing Lucien and Sondra are gone.”

“Did you come here often?” Kovac asked.

He laughed. “No. Lucien invited me once a year to their annual Chinese New Year party, so I could see what a successful life he had.”

“And you don’t have a successful life? You’re a professor, too. You’re in line for the same promotion.”

“I’m not married to money.”

“You could be,” Kovac said, watching him carefully. “Now you could get the girl, get the job, get the money. It’s clear sailing. You’d probably end up with the collection, too. Half of it, anyway.”

Sato’s expression hardened. “You brought me here to accuse me of murder?”

“I’m not accusing you of anything. Just pointing out the obvious.”

“Am I seriously a person of interest?”

“Did you seriously think you wouldn’t be?” Kovac asked, giving him a look like Come on. “Everyone connected to the Chamberlains is a person of interest until I’m satisfied they’re not.”

“What about this manhunt for some drug addict carpenter I heard about on the news?”

“He’s someone we need to have a conversation with,” Kovac answered, peeved that the media was running away with that story. Dan Franken would probably threaten to sue the department before the day was out. The fact that his illegal employee was being hunted in connection with a murder investigation would be bad for business. “We have to consider all possibilities.”

“The fact that this guy is on the run says enough to me,” Sato said. “Innocent people don’t flee the police.”

“He could be guilty of something. That doesn’t make him guilty of this,” Kovac said. “Anyway, why don’t you enlighten me about some of this stuff?”

Sato gestured to the painting over the fireplace, a fearsome-looking elaborately dressed warrior of some kind, sword drawn. The colors were bold and solid—black, dark blue, bright white. The matting and frame probably cost a week’s pay.

“It’s a late-nineteenth-century ukiyo-e—a Japanese woodblock print.”

“Is it valuable?”

“No, not very. It’s in pristine condition, and it’s a beautiful example of the art, but they’re not rare. After Japan opened up during the Meiji Restoration in 1868, tons of these came west. Japan and all things Japanese were all the rage in Europe and in the States.”

“So this collection of Chamberlain’s is just a bunch of tourist trinkets from back when?”