“How could someone break in? What happened to their alarm system?”
“We don’t know yet. Were they good about arming it?”
“Yes, every night after dinner. It was part of my mother’s routine. She took the dishes to the kitchen, set the alarm on the back door keypad, then started cleaning up.”
“What time did she start drinking?” Kovac asked bluntly.
The kid gave him a look, like he wanted to express outrage and denial, but in the end he said, “She liked a glass of wine with dinner . . . and maybe another after dinner. So what? She wasn’t a falling-down drunk, if that’s what someone told you.”
“Did you speak to her last night?” Taylor asked.
“No. I was working. I turned my phone off. I have a deadline,” he said. His brows knit and his eyes filled. “I had a message from her when I turned it back on this morning. Just wanting to talk. She gets lonely. I guess by the time I picked up the message . . .”
By the time he picked up the message, his mother was already dead on the dining room floor. He was seeing some version of that in his head now.
“Try not to beat yourself up, kid,” Kovac said. “We can’t foresee bad stuff coming; otherwise we’d stop it from happening.”
He was regretting not taking the chance to have had one last conversation with his mother. People always did. They wanted to believe they would have had some incredible moment of clarity about how much they loved that person they were unknowingly about to lose; how whatever petty arguments and angry words they held against one another would have magically dissolved, and they would have had the most beautiful, meaningful conversation of their lives.
The truth was if Charles Chamberlain had answered that call from his mother, he would have been irritated because she was interrupting his work when he had a deadline. He would have heard the lonely, wine-soaked self-pity in his mother’s voice and thought, Here we go again. They probably would have had unpleasant words about his father or his sister. And he would now be feeling guilty for that conversation because he hadn’t been patient, and he hadn’t consoled her, and now she was dead and he hadn’t told her he loved her.
The kid showed them to his living area, just to the left of the front door, and they all sat down. Like his sister’s place, most of the apartment could be seen at a glance: a tiny kitchen, a counter to eat at, a living room, a hall that led to a bedroom and a bath. Unlike his sister’s place, Charles Chamberlain’s small home was modest, not cheap, and neat as a pin. There were no dirty dishes visible. It didn’t smell of weed. The furniture might have been from the fifties or sixties—or at least made to look that way—low and clean, with straight lines and no frills. Jazz music played softly in the background from fist-size speakers beside a twenty-three-inch flat-screen TV on a console made from some kind of industrial serving cart. A laptop computer sat open on a small desk in one corner, two filing cabinets with a slab of glass for a top.
“I don’t know what to say,” the kid murmured, almost to himself. His hands were trembling as he rested them on his knees. “It’s surreal. I keep thinking there must be some mistake. Who would want to kill my parents? And then I turned on the television when I got home, and there was the house on the news. It’s crazy! They were killed with a sword?”
He looked straight at Kovac, clearly wanting a denial that was not forthcoming.
“Oh my God.”
He had that haunted look in his blue eyes, like someone who had seen something unspeakable. He shook his head as if he might be able to shake the images out of his brain.
“Who could do something like that?” he whispered, a shudder passing through him.
“Can you think of anyone who might have had a grudge against one or both of them?” Taylor asked.
Chamberlain laughed abruptly, in the way people do when they’re shocked. “Sure. But they’re professors who think my father is an ass. They’re not people who go around committing murder! My mother has her charities. She goes to her book club. Who could she possibly offend?”
He pulled his glasses off and rubbed a hand across his face. His fingernails were bitten to the quick. He picked at a cuticle as he breathed in and out with purpose, trying to pull himself together.
“It had to be some kind of thug or a homicidal maniac or something, right?” he asked, glancing up with that light of desperate hope in his expression that Kovac had seen so many times. When it came to violent crime, everyone wanted to believe in the bogeyman. No one wanted to think they might know a killer.