“Yesterday at work.”
“And where were you last night?”
“At home.”
“Can anyone vouch for that?”
He cut another quick glance at the bedroom door. What would be worse: to have an uncorroborated alibi, or to say he was in bed with the dead man’s daughter? He was a suspect either way. So was she.
“I was alone.”
Kovac raised his eyebrows just to mess with the guy. That’s the answer you picked? Huh.
“Okay,” he said, getting to his feet. “We’ll be in touch about the weaponry.”
Sato walked with them to the door. “Anything I can do to help.”
“We’ll need you both to come in and get fingerprinted for elimination purposes.”
“Me?” Sato said, surprised. “I haven’t been in that house in a year or more.”
Kovac smiled at him. “Better safe than sorry. I can’t just assume they have the world’s greatest cleaning lady. It’s no big deal, really. It takes two minutes.”
“Yeah, sure,” Sato said with no conviction.
“We understand Professor Chamberlain’s collection is valuable,” Taylor said.
“It’s incredible.”
“How could he afford that on a professor’s salary?”
“They’ve always had money. Sondra’s family was connected to some chemical-pharmaceutical fortune. Lucien made sure people knew. He liked people to think he taught for higher reasons—like his ego.”
“You didn’t like him,” Kovac said.
“Nobody liked Lucien. He wasn’t a likeable man. People respected him, or they envied him for what he had: his position, his possessions—”
“His collection?” Taylor said. “Something someone would kill to have?”
Sato frowned. “I hope not.”
“I hope so,” Kovac said. “Because if someone killed those two people the way they killed them just for the hell of it . . .”
He let that hang as he handed Sato a business card. “We’ll be in touch,” he said.
Ken Sato saw them the ten feet to the door and locked the deadbolt as soon as they were on the other side.
“That’s some messed-up shit right there,” Taylor said softly, glancing back over his shoulder as they went down the hall to the apartment house’s front door. “The daughter sleeping with Dad’s rival for the big promotion. I can’t wait to meet the son.”
“What’d I tell you?” Kovac said. “The all-American family. It’s Norman Fucking Rockwell on acid.”
*
SATO TAPPED ON THE BEDROOM DOOR. “Diana?”
No answer. No sound. She might have fallen asleep. She might have slit her wrists. Either was possible in her current state of mind. He opened the door and slipped inside.
The bedside lamps were on. She was naked, kneeling on the bed, touching herself, her eyes already glazed, her mouth wet and open. Her body was beautiful, lithe and subtly muscular. Her nipples were pierced with small silver rings. A ruby studded her navel.
She grabbed him by the waist of his jeans and pulled him closer.
“Diana.” He breathed her name as she undid his pants and took him in her mouth.
The sex with her was crazy and hot, as addictive as crystal meth. She went to a dark, desperate place in her mind he didn’t want to know about, but he willingly went along for the ride.
She rode him hard, sweating, gasping, crying, and when the end came for her, she pounded her fist against his tattooed chest over and over and over, like she had a knife in her hand.
Then, exhausted, she collapsed on top of him and drifted into unconsciousness on an anguished whispered word: “Daddy . . .”
12
“You’re here about my parents,” Charles Chamberlain said as he opened the door to his apartment, his expression grave, his voice quiet and a little unsteady. Nerves. Emotions. Both. He was pale, though whether that was natural or caused by the circumstances, Kovac couldn’t guess.
He appeared to be a modest, unremarkable young man—early twenties, medium height, medium build, medium brown hair cut in a medium-length, conservative Everyman style. He wore nerdy glasses, and was neatly dressed in khaki pants and a button-down shirt, tucked in.
“Professor Foster called and broke the news. He said you’d be contacting me. I didn’t know if I should call the police department or go downtown or go to the house, or what,” he said. “How does anyone know what to do when something like this happens?”
“They don’t,” Kovac said. “Everybody gets the crash course.”
“We’re sorry for your loss, Mr. Chamberlain,” Taylor said.
“Thank you.”
“I know this is a tough time,” Kovac said, “but we need to ask you some questions. It’s important that we get as much information as we can as fast as we can.”
“I understand.” He stepped back from the door, inviting them in. “Professor Foster said it was probably a burglary, that someone might have targeted them—maybe for my father’s collection. Is that true?”
“There appear to be elements of a burglary,” Taylor said. “There have been a couple of burglaries in the area recently. But we don’t know anything for sure at this point.”