“Diana wouldn’t hurt our parents,” Charles said defensively, but his eyes glazed with a fine sheen of tears as he said it. Maybe he wasn’t as certain as he wanted to sound.
“I’m not saying she did,” Kovac said, lifting his hands a little, fingers spread wide. Nothing up my sleeve, kid. “But I don’t know who her friends are, or were. I don’t know that she didn’t—or doesn’t—have some bad boyfriend, back when she was going through her delinquent phase, and that guy knows where her parents live, and what they have. See what I’m saying here, Charlie?” he asked quietly.
He could see the wheels turning.
“She’s always been difficult,” the kid said, giving in. “Even when we were little. I don’t know why. Maybe something happened to her. I don’t know.”
“Something like what?”
“I don’t know!” he said, exasperated, glancing toward the door, willing it to open.
“Did your parents talk about something having happened to her?”
The kid drew a big breath like he was going to say something more, but the words stayed in his mouth as the door opened and Taylor ushered Diana Chamberlain back into the room.
“Are we done?” she asked. “Can we go home now?”
“Yeah, we’re done,” Kovac said, resting a hand on Charlie Chamberlain’s shoulder as he walked with him toward the door. Kovac as father figure. “This isn’t something anyone should have to deal with. I know it’s tough. I’m sorry.”
He sent them home in a cruiser, watching as the car pulled away in the drizzle.
“Did she come on to you?” he asked, cutting a glance at Taylor beside him.
Taylor rubbed his stiff neck as he watched them drive away. “Ooooh yeah.”
“I’d bet my pension she’s been sexually abused by someone somewhere along the line.”
“Daddy?”
“You know what they call that.”
“Incest?”
“Motive.”
“Sato said Diana Chamberlain was adopted when she was four or five,” Taylor said as they walked to the car. “That’s got to be tough for a little kid to be uprooted and given to strangers at that age. I’d like to know if she was broken before the Chamberlains got her or what, you know? Does she come from a long line of crazy? I wonder if we can find out.”
“Depends. Maybe the family lawyer can help us with that. Given that the Chamberlains had some bucks, it might have been a private adoption.”
“Poor kid. Abandoned by her real mother one way or another, then ends up with an alcoholic and a narcissistic jerk for adoptive parents. That’s some rotten luck.”
“That’s a petri dish full of resentment, is what that is,” Kovac said, digging the car keys out of his coat pocket.
Taylor frowned. “I can drive.”
“You have a head injury.”
“Yeah, well, I’d really rather not get another.”
“I got us here, didn’t I?” Kovac said, perturbed, as he slid behind the wheel.
“Yeah, but that bus—”
“Was in the wrong freaking lane. How could you see it anyway? You can’t even turn your head.”
“Well, there are these things on the sides of the car,” Taylor said, settling himself gingerly in the passenger’s seat. “They’re called mirrors.”
“Whatever. It’s five blocks. Don’t be such a *,” Kovac said as he turned left onto Fifth for the short ride from the morgue to City Hall.
A BMW swerved around them, horn blaring.
“There’s two lanes for a reason, asshole!” Kovac shouted. “Get the fuck over!”
Taylor cringed, then took a deep breath and let it out slowly.
“You survived a war, for Christ’s sake,” Kovac grumbled.
“Only to die in traffic.”
“Let’s get our minds back where they belong.”
“The road would be a good start.”
“I can drive this in my sleep,” Kovac said. “I have. What did you think of the kids’ reactions to seeing their parents messed up like that?”
“They seemed real,” Taylor said. “Even Diana’s reaction when she saw her mother seemed genuine—genuinely freaked out.”
“She just stared at her father, like he wasn’t even real,” Kovac said. “Could she be that completely cut off from him in her own mind? Did she not react because she had already accepted that he should be dead? Like maybe she’s pictured him that way a thousand times.”
“And Mom was a surprise?” Taylor asked, sounding doubtful.
“Maybe Mom was collateral damage,” Kovac said. “Daddy was the target. Mom’s supposed to be sleeping off her evening bottle of Chateau Blackout, but she wakes up, hears the commotion downstairs, goes to investigate . . .”
“Girls don’t go around physically overpowering people, beating people’s heads in,” Taylor argued. “And whoever killed Mrs. Chamberlain didn’t leave that sword in her by mistake. That was an exclamation point. And then we go back to the whole thing about the scene being too tidy and the burglary being too slick. I’m not saying the daughter couldn’t have had something to do with it, but—”
“But she likes to twist men around her curvy little finger,” Kovac said. “And there’s Sato—”