The Bitter Season Page 6

“Ha-ha,” Taylor said without humor. “Were you first on the scene?”

  “Yeah. The university called for a welfare check. The male DB was a professor of something or other. He didn’t show up for a big meeting, didn’t answer on any of his contact numbers. We came, did a walk around the house, spotted the bodies through the patio door to the dining room. Looks like that’s where the killer went in—knocked a pane out of the French doors, reached inside, and let himself in.”

  “Any footprints?”

  He shook his head. “Had to have happened before the snow.

  “We went in and checked the house for other possible victims,” he went on. “It’s all clear. Looks like a burglary gone bad. The home office and the bedrooms were gone through.”

  “Have there been any recent burglaries in the area?” Taylor asked.

  “A couple B-and-Es, no violence, no home-invasion shit. This is a nice quiet neighborhood.”

  “Suspects on the burglaries?” Kovac asked.

  “Not that I’ve heard.”

  “What’s this bullshit about a samurai sword?”

  “No bullshit, Sarge. You’ll see. Down the hall and to the left. These people were killed by freaking ninjas.”

  “Ninjas didn’t use samurai swords,” Taylor said. “Samurai used samurai swords.”

  “There’s a difference?”

  “That’s why you’re still in a uniform, Dave.”

  “Fuck you, dude,” he said with a laugh. “I’m not stupid. I just lack ambition.”

  “I don’t remember any questions about ninjas on the detective’s exam,” Kovac said as they went into the front hall of the house and put sanitary booties on over their shoes.

  “I was a ninja in a past life,” Taylor said, deadpan as he pulled on purple disposable gloves.

  Kovac looked around the hallway they had come into. As the exterior of the house suggested, everything was prim and proper: cream-colored wainscoting and drab gray wallpaper, an expensive-looking Oriental carpet runner leading the way down the hall. To the left was a formal living room. The furniture looked stiff and uncomfortable, the chairs upholstered in silky fabrics that didn’t invite anyone to sit on them. It was a “kids, don’t touch anything” kind of a house, a museum of antiques and formality. At the top of the staircase a spotlight shone on a huge painting of an ancient Chinese man scowling down on them with disapproval.

  Taylor looked from the staircase to the front door, frowning. “That’s bad feng shui.”

  “What?”

  “The Chinese never want a staircase to end directly opposite the door like that. All of your good chi will go out the door. It’s very unlucky.”

  Kovac’s brows pulled together. “Who are you?”

  Taylor shrugged. “I grew up on Karate Kid and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, then Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan. I’ve always had an interest in the martial arts and the societies that practice them.

  “These people have all this Chinese and Japanese art and antiques. They were allegedly killed with a samurai sword. Too bad they didn’t extend their interests to philosophy. They should have at least hung a mirror over the door to bounce the good chi back in before it could escape.”

  “Their good mojo went out the front door, and this is why a ninja killed them?”

  “If you buy into the philosophy,” Taylor said, snapping photos of the offending staircase and front door with his iPhone. “There’s a whole faction of people who believe Bruce Lee died because the design of the house he was living in flew in the face of feng shui.”

  “Are you one of them?” Kovac leveled a flat stare at him. “Don’t even think about trying to feng shui the cubicle.”

  Taylor held his hands up to ward off the idea. “Hey, man, I’ve got my shit together. Your life force is not my business.”

  “That’s right.”

  As they proceeded down the hall, the stench of a violent death scene wafted out of the dining room to greet them: blood, urine, and shit, the stink of absolute terror.

  Kovac cut his partner a look. “Don’t puke on my scene, ninja boy.”

  “Don’t worry,” Taylor said, brows pulling low over his narrowed eyes as he put his game face on.

  “Mr. Culbertson!” Kovac called out as they stopped in the wide doorway to the scene of the crime.

  The room was busy with a swarm of people in jumpsuits collecting evidence, photographing the scene, dusting for fingerprints. Culbertson, the ME’s investigator, had his back to them, hands on his hips as he stood over a body.

  He was the first person to physically examine the decedent at a death scene. No one touched the body before he did, for any reason. It was his unpleasant task to take the temperature of the corpse to aid in figuring out the time of death. It was his job to assess and make note of the visible wounds and a hundred other minute details.

  Culbertson turned around to face them, blocking their view of the scene. Lean and vaguely scruffy, fast-talking and shifty-eyed, he was the kind of guy who looked like he would step out of a dark alley in a sketchy part of town and try to hustle you out of something or into something. Kovac had known him for years. They had polished off more than a few bottles of whiskey together, burning the taste of death out of their mouths at the end of a long night.

  “It’s about time you got here, Kojak. I thought sure the words samurai sword would get even your jaded ass excited about a couple of stiffs. You’re slowing down in your old age.”

  “Fuck you very much,” Kovak said without much rancor. “Steve, Michael Taylor, who drives like an old lady despite his dashing good looks. Taylor, Steve Culbertson, ME investigator and all-around reprobate.”

  “Another noob?” Culbertson asked, arching a dark, bushy brow. “What happened to the last one?”

  “He reconsidered his career path.”

  “I can’t imagine why. Was it your sunny disposition or the fact that you drive like a drunken Formula One reject? You look like hell, by the way.”

  “Thanks. I’m trying to dispel that whole ‘fifty is the new thirty’ myth.”

  “Job well done.”

  “Can you introduce us to our host and hostess here?” Kovac asked. “I’m sure we’ll find their personalities more agreeable than yours.”

  “Be really careful where you step,” Culbertson warned, going into professional mode. “There is literally blood everywhere in here. You can’t see it so much on the red walls, but it’s on the ceiling, the chandelier, the drapes. This was your basic massacre.”

  Culbertson stepped to the side, clearing the sight line to the carnage on the dining room floor. The scene stopped Kovac in his tracks.

  The contrast of the fussy, formal room and the raw animal violence that had ended these people’s lives was jarring. The victims’ bodies had been so abused that Kovac’s brain automatically wanted to reject the idea they had ever been living, breathing human beings. His last tiny sliver of raw, unjaded humanity, he thought. The thought lasted less than the blink of an eye.

  He had seen people decapitated, disemboweled, burned, drowned, strangled, beaten, run over. Not that long ago he and Liska had a case where the assailants had poured acid on the victim’s face while she was still alive. There was no end to the ways people could destroy one another.

  “One assailant or two?” Kovac asked.

  “I’d say one. Looks like one set of shoe prints in the blood.”

  The female victim lay on her back, spread-eagle, with her head at Kovac’s feet. She was, quite literally, bathed in blood. It was impossible to determine her hair color, difficult at a glance even to distinguish her race. He could see she was a woman because her nightgown had been torn, exposing one large, bloody breast that had been sliced diagonally.

  A horrific gash cleaved the left side of the woman’s face, from her partially severed ear, across her cheek, completely opening her mouth. The edges of the lips curled back in a macabre grimace, exposing muscle, tissue, bone, and teeth. Another gash cut deep into her neck where it me
t her shoulder.

  That had probably been the first blow, Kovac thought. The one that knocked her down, but not the one that killed her. She had been slashed and stabbed in the torso multiple times. The weapon that had been used to kill her stood upright. Her killer had run the sword through her stomach so hard the blade had penetrated the floor and stuck there like a steel exclamation point.

  “Sondra Chamberlain,” Culbertson said. “Fifty-eight years of age, and her husband, Professor Lucien Chamberlain, forever fifty-three. They were just starting to go into rigor when I got here. So I’d say they were probably killed between one A.M. and two thirty. Obviously, they died right where they are. You can see what happened to the wife. The husband was bludgeoned, strangled, and stabbed in the back—probably postmortem. Toss-up on cause of death. He took a hellacious beating with the handle end of the nunchucks.”

  “Nunchucks?” Kovac repeated.

  “Surprised a thief?” Taylor speculated.

  Kovac gave him the eye. “How many burglars carry nunchucks around with them?”

  “We’ll get to that,” Culbertson said. “Looks like this patio door was the point of entry.”

  “No security system?” Taylor asked.

  Culbertson shrugged. “Maybe it wasn’t on. My mother is eighty-two and she refuses to turn her alarm on.”

  The professor lay facedown, head pointing in the opposite direction of his wife’s, beaten down in his pajamas and bathrobe. Something about that struck Kovac as extra sad. He guessed the professor had probably been a fussy little man who had creases pressed into his pajama bottoms. He had gotten up in the night and put on his bathrobe and slippers to meet the Grim Reaper.

  Kovac picked his way around the bodies to find a place he could hunker down and get a better look at the damage done to the man’s head. The left side of the skull had been caved in with terrible force, like a hardboiled egg that had been smashed with a hammer. Shards of bone spiked the exposed brain. The left eyeball hung out of the shattered socket, lolling against the man’s bloody, broken cheek.

  Lying on the bloodstained Oriental rug a foot or so from the dead man’s hand was the apparent murder weapon: wood-handled nunchucks covered in blood, strands of the victim’s salt-and-pepper hair sticking to the ends.

  “Ever see anything like this before?” Kovac asked Taylor as he straightened.

  “Yeah,” Taylor said quietly. “I have. But not in this country.”

  “Looks to me like whoever did this enjoyed himself,” Culbertson said.

  “So, we’ve got a sword-wielding maniac running around the city,” Kovac declared. “Great. A fucking wack job.”

  “He left his weapons here,” Taylor pointed out.

  “I don’t think he brought them to the party,” Culbertson said. “These were weapons of opportunity. Come see.”

  They followed a trail of bloody footprints out of the dining room and to a study full of dark furniture and a darker collection. Weapons lined the walls—swords, daggers, knives, Chinese throwing stars, stuff Kovac had seen only in movies. Glass cases displayed iron helmets and painted face masks from ages past. Several of the cases had been shattered, the contents taken.

  “Safe to assume our assailant helped himself to the weaponry,” Culbertson said. “It’s a homicidal maniac’s wet dream.”

  Kovac put his reading glasses on and took a closer look at the deadly beauty of the weapons: swords impressed with intricate carvings in the handles, etchings on the blades. Small plaques beneath each piece gave a description, a date, and a place of origin.

  “So,” Taylor said, “the question is did he know the weapons would be here, or were they a bonus once he got in the house?”

  “That’s for you guys to figure out,” Culbertson said. “I’m going to go do my job. I’ve got a bus coming to transport the bodies as soon as you give the go-ahead, Sam.”

  “Okay. Thanks, Steve.”

  “This one has to be worth a couple of rounds at Patrick’s tonight, don’t you think?”

  “At least. You buying?”

  “Shit, no. The noob’s buying, right?”

  Taylor looked confused. “Why am I buying?”

  “Because you’re celebrating your first scene working with me,” Culbertson said on his way out. “Kids these days. No appreciation for tradition.”

  Kovac rested his hands on his hips and looked around the study. A couple of desk drawers that had probably been locked had been forced open and rummaged through. Books had been cleared from shelves and lay scattered on the floor. Someone had been looking for a safe, most likely. There were a number of empty spaces in the wall display where only the small plaque beneath described the pieces that had been there.

  “So, maybe this mutt came looking to steal specific items,” Kovac speculated. “A collector with a bad attitude? Who would know this stuff is here?”

  “Family, friends, colleagues, maybe other collectors. His students, maybe.”

  Kovac scratched a hand back through his hair and sighed as he thought about the other recent burglaries in the neighborhood. No violence, the officer had said. No violence, no witnesses. There probably hadn’t been nunchucks or samurai swords at the other houses, either. Sometimes the only difference between a thief and a murderer was opportunity.

  Many a killer began his career by accident—in the heat of passion, in a moment of self-defense, in a split-second’s rage when a weapon was within reach. He struck out and killed—and then came the rush of adrenaline, the surge of power as he realized what he’d done. Few things were more intoxicating to a person with no conscience than the omnipotent control over life and death.

  Absorbed in that thought, Kovac retraced the killer’s footsteps to the dining room, where the crime scene people were marking evidence and measuring distances. He stood in the doorway imagining the possible scenario: rushing at the professor with the nunchucks, swinging his arm, crushing the man’s skull. If that was how it had happened, the killer had gone back to the study to get the sword and then had waited for the wife to come looking for her husband.

  One death hadn’t been enough. The overkill spoke to frenzy—either a wave of rage or a sick euphoria. The sword that pinned Mrs. Chamberlain to the floor like a bug in a collector’s display case was a statement, an artist’s signature.

  “What are you thinking?” Taylor asked.

  He was thinking they had better hope someone had hated these people enough to do this terrible thing, because the alternative was a monster on the loose whose thirst for blood was not likely to fade.

  “I’m thinking you were right,” he said soberly. “About that feng shui business. They should have hung that mirror over the door before their luck ran out.”

  8

  “. . . here in this beautiful, normally quiet neighborhood, now the apparent scene of a brutal double homicide. While there has been no official statement from the police as to the names of the victims, the home belongs to Professor and Mrs. Lucien Chamberlain.”

  “Way to notify the next of kin, asshole,” Nikki muttered at the television on the kitchen counter.

  “Who’s an asshole?” R.J. asked.

  “You are,” Kyle muttered, helping himself to more bacon.

  “Don’t say ‘asshole,’” Nikki corrected halfheartedly.

  “You do.”

  “I’m the Mother of Dragons. I can use bad language if I want.”

  “Can I get a dragon tattoo?”

  “When you’re thirty-five. Now shush. I’m trying to listen to this.”

  With school canceled because of the treacherous road conditions, the boys had slept in. With Nikki working Cold Case, there was no urgent need for her to go in to the office. She had brought a stack of files from the Duffy case home with her to review, anyway. This was just the kind of scenario she had imagined when she first thought of leaving Homicide: being able to take a snow day with the boys and fix them a big breakfast instead of the usual hastily grabbed bowl of cereal or toaster waffles.
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  But now, with the local news reporting live for half the morning from the scene of a double murder, she was feeling jittery, wanting to know more—from inside the yellow tape. She wanted to be in on it.

  “Chamberlain is listed on the university’s roster as a professor of East Asian history,” the reporter went on, looking suitably grim. He was standing in the street with the background of an old established, well-off neighborhood crawling with police and crime scene investigators. “Reports of an attack by a sword-wielding assailant are unconfirmed at this point . . .”

  “Maybe they were attacked by one of the Knights Templar!” R.J. said excitedly. He jumped from his stool at the kitchen island and began to pretend he was fighting with a sword of his own.

  “You’re such a dork,” Kyle commented.

  “You’re a nerd.”

  “Mom, Master Gracie says he’s getting a new instructor who teaches escrima. Can I sign up?”

  “Me, too!” R.J. exclaimed.

  “What’s escrima?”

  “Filipino fighting sticks.”

  Nikki gave him a look. “Right. That’s all I need: the two of you beating each other with sticks. No.”

  “But, Mom—”

  She held up a finger to stave off his argument, her eyes fixed on the TV. Kovac and his new partner, Taylor, were in the shot, behind the reporter. They stood in front of a lovely brick house, deep in conversation with Lieutenant Mascherino and Deputy Chief Kasselmann.

  The double homicide of a U of M professor and his wife in their own home would bring out the brass and local political muckety-mucks—at least for the first few days of the investigation. Sam would hate that. To his way of thinking, they would be nothing but in the way and underfoot. They served no useful purpose at best and fucked things up at worst. Kovac liked to keep a tight rein on his investigations, and that meant keeping a tight rein on the flow of information to the media. A well-placed leak to the newsies could be a valuable tool. Information vomited out by a politician with an agenda never failed to make the detectives’ jobs more difficult.

  Nikki thought of her own case, and how the media attention could only have helped her. But now the attention of the press and the public would all be on the sensational slaying of a respectable couple in their lovely home, and the long-cold case of Ted Duffy, a Sex Crimes detective shot to death in his backyard twenty-five years ago would literally be yesterday’s news.