The Bitter Season Read online

  No, she was not a beautiful woman, and at fifty-eight her plainness was giving way to a heavy, matronly look he didn’t like at all. He told her to diet and exercise. It didn’t help. He believed she secretly ate sweets and hid the evidence. He once went through her dresser drawers when she was away visiting her mother, but had found nothing incriminating, only a vast collection of foundation garments she never appeared to wear.

  He had married her for her family connections and, to a lesser degree, her money—better, more logical reasons than looks or lust. They had been together nearly thirty years.

  He watched her sleep now, envious. He had always been a light sleeper. His brain was always working. Now he would lie here, driven mad by the incessant tic tac tic tac while his mind worried at the day-to-day annoyances of academia, and the power struggle going on in the History Department.

  He fretted because he hadn’t published anything recently. And that thought automatically brought the rush of bitterness that he had never been able to sell his book on the comparative similarities and differences in the warrior cultures of medieval China and Japan, his masterwork.

  He should already have been named head of East Asia studies, not be fighting for the title. If he had a published book that was well received by his peers, the university would not have been able to deny him. He would have been the clear front-runner. Instead, he was in competition with Ken Sato and some Vietnamese woman from UCLA.

  Sato, who never failed to irritate with his unconventional lifestyle and his unconventional teaching methods. Lucien suspected Sato was being considered for the job largely because he was Japanese, and the chosen star of that pompous ass and committee member, Hiroshi Ito. Lucien had considered suing on the basis of racial discrimination if Sato—or the Vietnamese woman, for that matter—were to get the position. He was far more deserving. Then again, he worried what a lawsuit would do to his reputation. Reputation was everything in academia.

  If Sondra’s father had still been alive, his influence at the university would have negated all other issues. What terrible luck that he had died of a heart attack nearly a year past. Lucien was beginning to feel that the powers of the universe were against him. And now, to further complicate his life, was this ridiculous business with Diana and the Office for Conflict Resolution. The mere thought of it infuriated him. The conniving little bitch—jeopardizing his promotion, forcing him to take the actions he was about to put in motion . . .

  No wonder he couldn’t sleep.

  Tic tac tic tac. The sound was relentless.

  Then came a sound out of time, out of place. A sound that seemed to come from another part of the house. Downstairs.

  He sat up in the bed and strained to listen. They lived in a lovely old established neighborhood. But there were plenty of criminals in the run-down parts of the city. Crime was no longer a rarity in Minneapolis. Lucien blamed Minnesota’s overly generous public assistance programs for ruining the work ethic of the poor minorities.

  He’d had a home security system installed years ago. Sondra had the jewelry she had inherited from her mother. He had a valuable collection of Asian antiques he had accumulated over the years, most notably artifacts of generations of samurai and ninja warriors. Had Sondra forgotten to set the alarm after dinner? It was her responsibility. He often worked late in his study, too engrossed to be bothered with household details.

  Tic tac tic tac tic tac . . . thump.

  Or was it just the wind? There was a shutter loose on one of the study windows. Someone from the handyman service was supposed to have come four days ago to fix it, but it had been banging against the house earlier in the evening. He had snapped at Sondra for hiring the incompetent fools in the first place.

  She had originally called them to clean the rain gutters and put on the storm windows. The service was unreliable, its workers rude. Lucien wrote a scathing review of their work on Yelp after the storm window fiasco. The owner promised to rectify the situation in a timely fashion, but they had yet to show up. They were in no hurry to do a job for which they would not get paid. Now the shutter, which they had probably purposely loosened in the first place, would drive him mad the rest of the night with the syncopated combination of bang, thump, together with the tic tac tic tac tic tac of the freezing rain on the windows.

  He wasn’t going to get a minute’s sleep, and first thing in the morning he had yet another meeting with Foster, the department chair; the director of undergraduate studies; and Hiroshi Ito, professor emeritus. He needed to be sharp, to present himself at his best. The decision on the head of East Asia studies would be made before the Thanksgiving break. He would go into the meeting with confidence, sure in the knowledge that he had an ace to play that Ken Sato could never trump, but still, he wanted his sleep. He wanted to look as confident as he felt.

  Maybe if he closed all the doors between the stairs and the study, the sound would be muffled enough not to bother him. It was on the other side of the house from the master bedroom.

  Giving his sleeping wife another resentful glare, he threw the covers back and slipped out of bed. A creature of habit, he put on his dressing gown, adjusting the sleeves of his pajamas so the cuffs showed and tying the belt in a tidy knot. He paused at the head of the stairs, just in front of his pair of eighteenth-century Qing dynasty carved rosewood chairs and the spotlighted Qing period portrait on silk. He paused and listened.

  Thump bump, thump bump, thump . . .

  Yes, the shutter. After his meeting tomorrow he would take a moment to go on Yelp and write another scathing review of the handyman service.

  He made his way down the stairs with the bearing of a king, the amber glow from the tiny art spotlight floating ahead of him, ever dimmer and more diffuse. He didn’t bother turning on a light at the bottom of the stairs. The white of the streetlight at the end of the block came in through the transom above the front door. Turning, he made his way toward the back of the house. His study was just beyond the dining room. He would shut the study door, and shut the heavy pocket doors to the dining room on his way back.

  Bang thump . . . bang thump . . . bang thump . . .

  The sleet tapping on the windows seemed louder to him down here for some reason. His level of irritation rose as he realized he must have neglected to turn off the lamp in the study. The glow came into the dining room from across the far hallway. The dining room seemed cold and drafty. The diaphanous white curtain at the French doors to the patio drifted into the room, fluttering like a ghost in a movie.

  The chill he felt then came from within.

  One of the doors stood open a foot or so—just enough for a person to slip inside.

  Lucien stood frozen, unable to think, unable to move.

  The dark figure came from the direction of his study. A ninja! he thought in astonishment. A silent intruder dressed entirely in black, even the hands covered; even the head was covered in black, only the eyes showing. Eyes looking straight at him, shining black, like an animal’s.

  Lucien drew a breath to call out, but no sound came out of his suddenly bone-dry mouth. It felt as if the walls of his throat were stuck together, cutting off his air, as if an unseen hand had him by the neck.

  In the next instant, the violence began like a sudden, terrible storm. The ninja came at him, and was on him before he could do more than stagger back and slam into the dining room table. The strength and power of the assailant was overwhelming. He felt like a frail old man, like his bones would snap and crumble to dust beneath the other’s strength.

  And they did. His collarbone shattered beneath the first strike. He could raise only one arm up to protect his head, and it went numb as he was struck on the wrist.

  The attacker’s fists were like iron, raining down blow after blow. Lucien scrambled to get away, falling toward the open patio door, landing on one knee on the hardwood floor. His kneecap exploded with pain. Even as he tried to crawl for the door, he looked back over his shoulder.

  The faint light caught
for a second—not on the fist of his assailant, but on the weapon he clutched in one hand. The nunchaku: two handles fashioned of iron-hard oak connected at one end by a short horsehair rope. The ninja wielded the weapon as a club, bringing it down with vicious intent, striking Lucien’s head once, then twice.

  His vision blurred as his eye socket collapsed. He heard the crunch of his skull fracturing beneath the second blow. He lost consciousness before he could register the next strike. He was unaware as the assailant kicked him viciously in the ribs and then stepped behind him and brought the himo, the horsehair rope that linked the two handles, beneath his chin and used the ancient weapon as a garrote to choke him until his tongue came out of his mouth, swollen and purple.

  The assailant dropped him to the floor in a heap, and dropped the bloody nunchaku beside him. Shards of bone penetrated the left frontal lobe of Lucien’s brain, severing neural pathways, disconnecting the structures vital for forming thought and emotion. The damage set off an electrical storm, sending random signals to his limbs. His arms and legs jerked and twitched like those of a marionette in the hands of a mad puppet master.

  * * *

  THE ASSAILANT STOOD BACK and watched by the silvered light that fell through the patio door, mesmerized as the victim’s arms and legs jumped and flopped. The movement subsided slowly until the man lay still on the floor.

  The face was caved in like a smashed jack-o’-lantern’s. His right cheek was lying in a pool of blood. The left eye hung from its shattered socket by a tangle of nerves and blood vessels. The nose was a lump of mush. He was still breathing in irregular fits and starts, gurgles and wheezes, causing tiny bubbles to form in the bloody mess of his mouth. Several teeth lay scattered on the Oriental rug.

  The weapon lay near the man’s mangled left hand, as if he had been the one wielding it. Blood and hair stuck to the heavy oak handles.

  Pulling a cell phone from a pocket, the killer leaned down close and took a photograph of the victim’s face, and then took another from slightly above, making sure to get the weapon in the picture, feeling almost giddy with the rush of excitement.

  Killing felt good, satisfying, exciting. Very exciting. Empowering.

  In no hurry, not concerned about being found, not concerned that the police might be coming, the assailant rose and went back into the study. A small lamp gave enough light to view the collection of ancient weapons mounted on the walls and in display cases. Knives and daggers, helmets and fearsome painted face masks of long-dead warriors from the other side of the world. And swords. Long, curving swords, some with elaborate scabbards and handles of carved wood, some with etched steel blades, some simple and plain. All of them deadly.

  One of the swords was chosen and carefully lifted down to admire, and an idea formed and slithered through the killer’s mind like a viper. The blade hissed as it was slipped from its scabbard. The light shone down the length of it. The edge was tested against the pad of a thumb. A tiny bead of blood welled up and ran down the blade. The sight of it brought an almost sexual stirring within.

  “Lucien?”

  The woman’s voice was far away and tentative.

  “Lucien? Are you down here? You should be in bed! You have that meeting in the morning.”

  The voice was growing louder, coming closer.

  The assailant went very still. Dead calm.

  “Lucien? I hope you’re not eating something at this hour. You’ll get your acid reflux back,” she said as she came into the dining room. “Why do you have the door open in this weather? Everything is getting wet! What are you thinking?”

  She came around the side of the table, stopping at the sight of her husband lying dead in a pool of blood.

  “Lucien!”

  She looked up and shrieked as Death came straight at her.

  The scream died in her throat as the sword struck her in the side of the neck.

  7

  “So, I’m leaning toward Stench,” Kovac said as he walked into the cubicle with his third cup of office coffee.

  He’d had the better part of a pot of the stuff at home, trying to rouse himself from a listless night’s sleep. Liska had given him a modern cup-at-a-time machine with all the lights and bells and whistles, but he turned his nose up at the fussy little flavored pods that went in it as “not real coffee.” He still used a Mr. Coffee machine from the last century. He and Mr. Coffee produced a brew that was capable of stripping varnish—not unlike the stuff that came out of the office coffeemaker.

  Taylor looked up from his computer screen, green eyes bright and clear, no bags under them. “I’m sorry? What?”

  “For your nickname. You need a nickname. I’ve been lax with that, I admit. It doesn’t usually take me this long. I’m off my game,” Kovac confessed.

  “That’s okay,” Taylor said, going back to his work. “I don’t need a nickname.”

  “Sure you do. We can’t just keep calling you Noob. It’s too generic.”

  “That’s okay.”

  “Did you have a nickname in the service?”

  “Taylor.”

  “That lacks imagination.”

  Although, that might have suited him, Kovac thought as he looked at Taylor’s workspace. It was devoid of the ridiculous tacky and vulgar stuff Tinks had collected to clutter the place up—her coffee mug full of crazy pens, the cop cartoons printed off the Internet and pinned up on the walls, the voodoo doll of her ex, the framed photos of her kids. Taylor didn’t have so much as a Post-it. Boring. Finally, a flaw.

  Kovac’s work area was a mess: binders and file folders in precarious stacks, notes and reminders hastily scribbled on scraps of paper and stuck haphazardly to the cabinet doors and the bottom of his computer screen. On the shelf above the computer a human skull sat with a fake severed finger in its nose hole and a cigarette clenched between its teeth.

  He set his coffee mug on the desk—black with a ceramic gun for a handle. The taste went bitter in his mouth, and his mood soured. Michael Taylor was the modern detective in a nicely tailored charcoal suit and shined shoes, a business executive with a badge. His side of the cubicle could have belonged to a bank vice president. Kovac, on the other hand, felt like he’d slept in his clothes. He had nicked himself shaving. He looked like he was on the backside of a three-day bender, with his bloodshot eyes and the dark smudges beneath them, while his partner could have been a model for GQ magazine.

  “I like Reek, myself,” Tippen said, wandering over from the giant whiteboard where all active cases were listed on a grid. “It has a medieval feel to it.”

  “Maybe we could put this off until I do something more impressive than puke on a suspect who shit all over the interview room,” Taylor suggested.

  Tippen shrugged. “We could, but seriously, how are you going to top that?”

  “How about a double homicide with a samurai sword?” Elwood asked as he joined them.

  “What are the odds of that happening?” Kovac grumbled.

  “Better than even. The call just came in. You guys are up.”

  * * *

  THE CITY LOOKED LIKE it was made of glass, all the trees and bushes, parked cars and fire hydrants encased in a thick layer of ice that had turned the entire metro area beautiful and treacherous overnight. The sleet and freezing rain that had begun after midnight had eventually turned into a light snow as the temperature dropped, covering the ice, doubling the danger. The ERs would be full of car accident victims and slip-and-fall broken hips and wrists.

  Taylor had snagged the car keys before Kovac could reach for them, and drove them across town like a grandma, carefully avoiding the fender benders that littered the streets.

  “I’d like to get there before they mummify,” Kovac complained, drumming his fingers impatiently on the armrest.

  “I’d like to get there in one piece,” Taylor countered. “They aren’t going to get any deader.”

  Kovac scowled. “You know, I’ve probably been driving longer than you’ve been alive.”


  “Yeah. It’s a pure damn miracle you’ve made it to this ripe old age. I’m just making sure I get as far along as you.”

  “Yeah, well,” Kovac grumbled. “By the time we get to this scene . . .”

  Two radio cars were parked at the curb in front of the address. A news van had already staked out a spot on the opposite side of the street. Barricades had been put across the sidewalk and the end of the driveway to keep the vultures at bay. If the words samurai sword had gone out over the radio waves, every reporter and kook with a scanner would be rolling up at any minute.

  “Bad news travels fast,” Taylor said as they pulled in behind the crime scene van.

  “Faster than you,” Kovac returned, getting out of the car.

  The house was a formal two-story brick Colonial that would have looked at home in Boston—white trim, black shutters, and a black lacquered front door with a big brass knocker and a wreath of wheat and fall leaves that said “rich but homey.” The kind of place upper-middle-class families had Thanksgiving dinners as depicted on television: everyone slender and well dressed, smiling and laughing. Not the kind of place where people were found hacked to death.

  That was the thing with murder, Kovac thought as he flashed his ID at the uniform on the front steps: The emotions that fueled violence didn’t discriminate. People of all socioeconomic classes were equally capable of hate and rage, and equally capable of dying in a puddle of their own terror.

  “Taylor! Mr. Bigshot homicide detective,” the uniform said with a grin.

  Taylor ducked his head, sheepish. “Dave. How’s it going?”

  “It’s a fucking bloodbath inside, man. Hope you didn’t eat a big breakfast. I hear you’ve developed a delicate stomach.”