The Bitter Season (Kovac and Liska, #5)(74)

“Stop it!” Charlie shouted. He glared at Kovac, tear-wet eyes narrowed. “You don’t know anything about us!”

Kovac lifted his hands in surrender. “I’m trying to learn. Enlighten me, Charlie.”

A framed photo in the bookcase caught Chamberlain’s eye. He stared at it for a few seconds then snatched it off the shelf and hurled it at the fireplace. The frame hit the brick and the glass shattered. He stormed out of the room and out the front door.

Kovac winced and swore under his breath as the door slammed. He watched through the bay window as the kid hustled down the sidewalk to his car. He might have pushed too hard. Charlie was a smart kid with legal training and connections. He had only to pick up a phone and one of his bosses would be recommending criminal defense attorneys. The second that happened, there would be no more access to the two people closest to the victims. If Charlie lawyered up, he would make sure Diana did, too.

“You okay?” Taylor asked, hustling into the room. “He didn’t punch you out, too, did he?”

“Not because he didn’t want to,” Kovac said. “I might have just screwed that up. I had him right on the edge, and I took one step too many.”

He went to the fireplace and picked up the now-broken picture frame Charlie had thrown. The glass was shattered. A spiderweb of cracks seemed to dissect the family in the photograph, separating the subjects from one another. The Chamberlain family: Lucien and Sondra, Diana and little Charles—the kids maybe eight and six respectively.

Fitting, he thought. It seemed they hadn’t been as much a family unit as four individuals who happened to live under the same roof. Lucien Chamberlain had been the center of his own universe. Sondra Chamberlain created her own world of committees in the afternoons and wine at night. Diana lived in her own world, a victim of her mental illness and whoever wanted to take advantage of that. And then there was Charlie: the good kid, the peacemaker, trying to keep the family ship upright and balanced.

“The kid has twenty-four years of rage bottled up inside of him.”

“Do you think he might have unleashed it on his parents?” Taylor asked.

“I don’t know.”

He tried to imagine Charlie Chamberlain in that role. It seemed anyone who had to butt heads with Lucien Chamberlain could have been driven to want to kill him. But want-to and follow-through were two different things. Could the boy who had always played the peacemaker, backing down and working around his father’s ego rather than challenging him, have taken that giant leap to murder? Could he have chosen a sword from the wall in his father’s study and hacked his mother to death? Sondra Chamberlain had been nearly decapitated. Her wounds had been so catastrophic that she had to have bled out in a matter of minutes. Could her own son have done that to her? He thought about Ken Sato’s efficient movement with the sword in the study.

“He’s spent his life trying to fly under the radar and maintain the status quo with the old man,” Kovac said. “It would make more sense for him to take out Sato. He hates the guy messing with his sister. And if Dad gets the promotion, nothing else matters. That’s all the professor cared about. If he had had clear sailing for the job, his conflict with the girl would have been moot.

“Did you get anything out of the other two?” he asked.

Taylor shook his head. “They left. Sato was too pissed off. The girl was too hysterical. They went out the back door.”

Kovac set the broken picture frame aside and dug his phone out of his pocket to check his messages. There was no news from Tippen or Elwood.

“What did the girl have to say about her rehab history?”

“She was vague. She danced around everything: the rehab questions, the abuse questions. I never got a straight answer. She did say her parents always wanted to give her back to wherever they adopted her from. That’s something every kid wants to hear from Mom and Dad,” Taylor said sarcastically.

“Wow,” Kovac said. “I threw that idea out at Charlie just to goad him—that the old man was going to change his will and disown the daughter. He should have punched me.”

“It’s sad,” Taylor said, looking around the room, with its expensive antiques and its photographs of an unhappy family. “These people seemed to have everything to give kids a good upbringing: education, financial security . . .”

“Money doesn’t cure people of being narcissistic *s,” Kovac pointed out. “Get everybody’s phone records. Landlines and cell phones for our vics and for the three amigos. I want a time line of every phone call, starting Sunday evening.”

“Done,” Taylor said. “We should have the records by the end of the day.”

“Good.”

“You know they’re all probably calling lawyers as we speak.”

“Probably,” Kovac conceded. “I thought we were being clever bringing them here. Instead we’re up for the Clusterf*ck of the Year award.”

Taylor shrugged, then winced and rubbed at his stiff neck. “Seemed like a good idea at the time.”

“Yeah, well . . .” Kovac nodded. “I’ve said for years that’s going on my headstone.”


*



KOVAC CLOSED HIS EYES and dozed in the car on the twenty-minute drive to the office of the Chamberlains’ insurance agent. As much as he hated to give up control and let the kid drive, he needed a rest, however brief. He was dog tired. Not for the first time (or the hundred and first time), he thought, I’m getting too damned old for this. In the next thought, he wondered what Liska was doing. He wondered how bored she was. He thought of cold case squads as the place old Homicide dicks went when they couldn’t keep up anymore. Then he remembered with no small amount of depression that he was an old Homicide dick.