He rocked in his chair, looking off wistfully, as if picturing Diana Chamberlain shining in all her bipolar glory. He came back to the moment with a sigh.
“I’m gonna go down the hall here in a minute, and she’s gonna tell me how you took advantage of her when she was at her most vulnerable, and how your beady little eyes lit up when you saw her parents’ house that day. She’ll probably turn on the waterworks and tell me how she’s overcome with guilt for recommending Handy Dandy to her poor dead mother . . .
“I think I’ll stop in the break room and get a bag of popcorn to take with me for that show,” he said, smiling.
A fine sheen of sweat glistened on Krauss’s forehead. He looked at Kovac now, not past him.
“You’re sure you don’t want anything to eat, Gordon?” Kovac asked as he got up. “I could bring you some popcorn, too. No? Suit yourself.”
He was almost to the door when Gordon Krauss spoke for the first time since he had been taken into custody.
“She asked me to do it,” he said. He had a voice like smoke and gravel. “I told her no.”
Holy. Fucking. Shit.
Kovac turned around slowly, as if afraid a sudden move might rewind what he’d just heard. It was all he could do to maintain an expression of mild curiosity. “You’ll give me Diana Chamberlain?”
“I want a deal,” Krauss said. “And I want a lawyer.”
*
“THAT WAS SERIOUSLY IMPRESSIVE,” Taylor said as he pointed the car in the direction of Dinkytown.
The rain had subsided. Clouds scudded across the big moon, pushed by a brisk wind bringing a fresh band of crappy cold weather from the west.
“It’s all about patience,” Kovac said. “You won’t get anywhere screaming at a guy like that. You’re not going to scare him. He’s playing the odds. He knows he’s smart. He knows he’s been careful. He doesn’t believe you have anything. You show him one card at a time before you throw in the big bluff.
“Bully the ones that are already scared,” he said. “Like that guy that shit in the wastebasket the other day. He’s a mouse. Mice scare easily. Krauss is a rat. He’s clever and ruthless.”
“He thinks he can leverage Diana Chamberlain into leniency on the other charges,” Taylor said.
“Or mitigate the damage to him in this case.”
“He says he didn’t accept the job.”
“He can say he was born of a virgin for all I care,” Kovac said. “It doesn’t matter if he took the job, didn’t take the job, or is lying through his teeth. We can use him against her.”
The interview with Kovac over the second he requested an attorney, Krauss had been taken back to a holding cell to wait. Kovac’s heart was still beating like a bass drum. The adrenaline was gushing through his system like water out of a fire hose. That high was one of the reasons he had stayed on the job after all these years.
Now they just had to hope Diana Chamberlain wasn’t running. She hadn’t answered Taylor’s text regarding the suspect in custody. He had hoped that information would reel her in, that she would be curious and want to insert herself into the situation and start spinning the story for damage control.
“No word of Charlie?” Kovac asked.
“None.”
That worried him. The state of the kid’s apartment worried him. The fact that he—or someone—had e-mailed his resignation to his boss worried him. Kovac had locked down the apartment as a crime scene. He and Taylor had checked out the Chamberlain house in case Charlie might have gotten the idea to go home and kill himself where his parents died. The uniforms guarding the house hadn’t seen him.
They pulled onto Diana’s street to what was a worse-than-normal glut of cars. Someone in her building was having a belated Halloween party. Despite the chill in the air, costumed revelers spilled out of the big house, onto the wide porch, down the steps, and onto the sidewalk and lawn, drinking and dancing.
Taylor double-parked. The patrol car that had followed them there parked behind them. As they got out of the cars, Kovac directed the uniformed officers to go around the house and cover alternate means of escape.
Friday night—one of the last there would be before winter smacked its frozen fist down on the city and forced everyone indoors until spring. Students were out celebrating their couple of days of freedom from the drudgery of academia. Kovac and Taylor had to thread their way through a mob of ghosts, ghouls, vampires, and zombies to get to the door of Diana Chamberlain’s apartment.
Taylor knocked hard. “Diana? It’s Detective Taylor!”
He had to shout in the attempt to be heard above the music and the voices of the partygoers. Recordings of screams and shrieks and moans emanated from a dozen or more smartphones, adding to the atmosphere.
Taylor pounded on the door again. “Diana?”
“Kick it in,” Kovac ordered, pulling his weapon and positioning himself to the side of the door.
The old door frame gave way with little effort on Taylor’s part.