Taylor motioned her on her way. He followed her into the hall but paused just outside the door of the master bedroom, his attention catching on a small key panel mounted on the wall—another keypad for the security system.
Mascherino had told them that, according to the security company, the system had been armed a little after seven Tuesday evening and disarmed at around twelve thirty. The Chamberlains had been in bed. Both sides of the bed had been used, the covers and pillows rumpled and tossed. Lucien Chamberlain had died in his fussy silk dressing gown. Sondra Chamberlain’s blood had saturated her baby blue robe.
Why had they gone downstairs at all, he wondered. If they suspected an intruder, why didn’t they stay in their bedroom and call 911 or hit the panic button on the alarm panel?
Analyzing the crime scene, they believed that the professor had gone downstairs first, and that Mrs. Chamberlain later either heard something and went to investigate, or became concerned when her husband didn’t come back to bed and went downstairs to find him.
But neither of them had been worried about going downstairs because they didn’t think anyone was down there waiting to kill them.
He flipped the front of the keypad down, revealing the numbers and emergency buttons. The panel was lighted. The system was unarmed but functional. If someone came into the house while the system was armed, they had half a minute to enter the code or have the alarm sound. During that thirty seconds, most systems beeped the countdown until the code was entered.
Before he could form another thought, a scream split the air.
Taylor bolted down the hall, even though the sound seemed to have come from downstairs. He went in the direction Diana had gone, remembering only as he turned the corner to the bathroom that there was a second staircase that went down to a TV room at the back of the house.
He cursed under his breath as he thundered down the stairs. Kovac was going to kill him.
One scream gave way to another and another.
Diana Chamberlain was on her knees in the dining room, in the middle of the huge bloodstain on the Oriental rug, screaming and screaming. Her white shirt was stained with her mother’s blood where she had thrown her body down on the still-wet carpet. She had pressed her hands into it and wiped them over her face, painting herself with the last evidence of her mother’s life.
Charlie Chamberlain knelt beside her, trying to comfort her. He had come in through the French doors, having knocked out the piece of plywood that temporarily covered the empty space where the Chamberlains’ killer had broken out the glass and let himself in. He wrapped his arms around his sister and smothered her sobs against his shoulder, his hand tangled in her hair.
“Look what you’ve done!” he shouted, his glare going in the direction of Kovac and Sato, who had rushed into the room from the study, both of them looking shocked.
“Oh my God! Oh my God!” Diana sobbed over and over.
Sato spat out a curse as he went toward her. “Di—”
“Fuck you!” Charlie snapped, exploding to his feet. His first punch caught Sato on the cheekbone, snapping his head to the side. The second one glanced off the professor’s ear and temple. Sato stumbled backward, falling into Kovac. Momentum carried both of them backward into an antique sideboard.
Diana shrieked as her brother lunged after Sato, shouting, “This is all your fault!”
Taylor ducked and moved, hitting Chamberlain in the midsection with his shoulder and driving the much smaller man off his feet and to the other side of the room like a tackling dummy. In one motion, he set Charlie Chamberlain down and spun him around, pushing him flat up against the wall.
From the corner of his eye, he could see Diana going toward Sato—and he could see Kovac coming toward him. He cringed inwardly as Kovac stepped up beside him, his expression like stone.
“You had one job, Stench.”
21
“That’s some temper you keep locked away,” Kovac said.
They stood in the fussy sitting room, Charlie Chamberlain pacing one end of the room. Kovac had closed both sets of doors. He wanted the young man isolated, but didn’t want him to have the cooling-off period of a ride downtown. He wasn’t being arrested. Sato had no intention of pressing charges, despite the shiner he was going to be sporting in short order. The professor and Diana were in another room with Taylor.
Kovac wanted Charlie like this: hot, rattled, still emotional, embarrassed and upset that he had lost control. Nothing was worse to a control freak than losing his grip in front of people. Charlie was still breathing hard. He cradled his right hand against his belly as he paced. He wouldn’t look Kovac in the eye.
“You’ll want somebody to take a look at that hand,” Kovac said. “You cracked him good. Could be broken. I don’t imagine you get the opportunity to deliver a lot of beat-downs as a paralegal.”