The Bitter Season (Kovac and Liska, #5)(71)

“I’m tired of answering questions. What about you, Detective Taylor?” she asked seductively, slowly coming toward him. “What’s it like to spend your life investigating gruesome murders? Do you like it? Does it excite you?”

Just like that, she turned on the sexuality, like flipping a switch. He could feel it emanate from her like heat. Diana Chamberlain had a master’s degree in disingenuousness. He wondered if the hypersexuality was part and parcel of her bipolar disorder, or if it was, as Kovac thought, the result of sexual abuse as a child—either before or after the Chamberlains adopted her.

“Come on,” she said, with a sexy one-sided smile. “The camera’s rolling. Your turn to confess something. What’s it like to stand over a dead body? Can you feel their souls? Are they still in the room?”

“They’re long gone by the time we get there.”

“Where do you think they go?”

“I don’t know. Where do you think they go?”

“I can’t decide,” she admitted, still videoing him. “If someone is bad, I hope they go to hell, but I don’t want to go there.”

“Why should you go to hell?” he asked. “Do you think you’re bad?”

“Oh, I’m a bad, bad girl . . . or so I’ve been told,” she said in a low, breathy voice. “Would you care to form your own opinion, Detective?”

She was standing too close to him now, recording his frown close up on her phone. He could feel her breath on his neck.

“I’d rather keep an open mind,” he said, stepping back. “What have you done that’s so bad?”

She laughed. “What haven’t I done?”

“I know you had a problem with substances for a while. But you’re past that now. You got your degree. You’re a grad student. Your parents must have been proud of you.”

“Must they have been?”

“They should have been. Looks to me like you’ve been getting your life together,” he said.

He went over by the window and looked out through the sheer curtain at the backyard. They were on the opposite end of the house from the professor’s study and from the dining room. Charlie Chamberlain was standing on the brick patio in the rain, looking into the dining room through the French doors.

“Do you still belong to a program?” he asked. “Do you stay in touch with anyone from your rehab days?”

“Like who?” she asked. She had started to follow him, then turned and sat down on the unmade bed, her back against the upholstered headboard, her legs crossed yoga style. She pulled a pillow into her lap, bent over, and breathed in the scent of one of her parents.

“A sponsor, a friend . . . ?”

“Ken says you’re after some addict who might have done work on the house,” she said. “Do you think he’s a friend of mine? Some guy I f*cked in rehab?”

Her tone had the edge of a challenge, like she wanted him to think she was offended, though he doubted she was. He didn’t bite. “Were you ever in the program at Rising Wings?”

“Where wasn’t I?”

Another answer that wasn’t an answer.

“My parents always wanted to give me back, you know,” she said.

“To the rehab? Which one?”

She looked at him like he was a sweet, dim child. She didn’t mean back to a rehab, she meant back from where they had adopted her. She had probably heard them say it, or suspected them of saying it. Given the egotistical * her father had apparently been, it wasn’t hard to imagine he might have said such a thing to her face. Maybe he said it Sunday night.

“Your brother said you had a big fight with your dad at his birthday dinner. What was that about?”

“He didn’t like me. I didn’t like him.”

“Did he think you were trying to sabotage him so Ken Sato could get the promotion?”

“Of course he did. Daddy always thinks the worst of me. Everybody always thinks the worst of me.”

“Yeah? Do they have good reason?”

She gave him the finger and then took a picture of herself doing it, making a comic tough-chick face.

“You were supposed to meet with him yesterday at the Office for Conflict Resolution,” Taylor said. “Did you know he wasn’t going to come to that meeting? He was meeting with his attorney instead.”

She didn’t answer him right away. It made him wonder what she might be reliving in her head.

“What didn’t happen doesn’t matter,” she said.

What didn’t happen didn’t happen because Lucien Chamberlain died Tuesday night.

“You should be more fun, Detective Taylor,” she said, unfolding her legs and getting up from the bed.

“Where were you Tuesday night?” he asked.

She reached out and dragged a fingertip across his jaw as she passed him.

“I was in bed,” she said. She paused in the doorway and rubbed up against the doorframe like a cat. “Dreaming.”

“Alone or with company?”

“I have to go pee now,” she announced. “Can I use the bathroom at the other end of the hall, or is that a crime scene, too?”

Taylor motioned her on her way. He followed her into the hall but paused just outside the door of the master bedroom, his attention catching on a small key panel mounted on the wall—another keypad for the security system.