“Do you know who killed your parents, Charlie?” Kovac asked quietly.
“No.”
“Do you think Diana knows?”
He kept shaking his head. “She didn’t do this. It was a robbery. His picture was all over the news at noon. Why didn’t you tell us about that? There’s a manhunt for a suspect, and you never even mentioned it to us.”
“I don’t know what the media is saying,” Kovac said. “We don’t know enough about the guy to even call him a suspect.”
“That’s bullshit. This handyman did it, and you’re wasting time accusing my sister—”
“I’m not accusing your sister, but who could blame her if she had something to do with it?” Kovac pressed. “Your old man was a piece of work. You two couldn’t do anything right. You couldn’t make him happy. Kids deserve parents who love them. Diana lost out on that twice—dumped by her birth mother, then gets adopted by a drunk and a tyrant who was ready to disown her. That’s gotta hurt.”
“Stop it!” Charlie shouted. He glared at Kovac, tear-wet eyes narrowed. “You don’t know anything about us!”
Kovac lifted his hands in surrender. “I’m trying to learn. Enlighten me, Charlie.”
A framed photo in the bookcase caught Chamberlain’s eye. He stared at it for a few seconds then snatched it off the shelf and hurled it at the fireplace. The frame hit the brick and the glass shattered. He stormed out of the room and out the front door.
Kovac winced and swore under his breath as the door slammed. He watched through the bay window as the kid hustled down the sidewalk to his car. He might have pushed too hard. Charlie was a smart kid with legal training and connections. He had only to pick up a phone and one of his bosses would be recommending criminal defense attorneys. The second that happened, there would be no more access to the two people closest to the victims. If Charlie lawyered up, he would make sure Diana did, too.
“You okay?” Taylor asked, hustling into the room. “He didn’t punch you out, too, did he?”
“Not because he didn’t want to,” Kovac said. “I might have just screwed that up. I had him right on the edge, and I took one step too many.”
He went to the fireplace and picked up the now-broken picture frame Charlie had thrown. The glass was shattered. A spiderweb of cracks seemed to dissect the family in the photograph, separating the subjects from one another. The Chamberlain family: Lucien and Sondra, Diana and little Charles—the kids maybe eight and six respectively.
Fitting, he thought. It seemed they hadn’t been as much a family unit as four individuals who happened to live under the same roof. Lucien Chamberlain had been the center of his own universe. Sondra Chamberlain created her own world of committees in the afternoons and wine at night. Diana lived in her own world, a victim of her mental illness and whoever wanted to take advantage of that. And then there was Charlie: the good kid, the peacemaker, trying to keep the family ship upright and balanced.
“The kid has twenty-four years of rage bottled up inside of him.”
“Do you think he might have unleashed it on his parents?” Taylor asked.
“I don’t know.”
He tried to imagine Charlie Chamberlain in that role. It seemed anyone who had to butt heads with Lucien Chamberlain could have been driven to want to kill him. But want-to and follow-through were two different things. Could the boy who had always played the peacemaker, backing down and working around his father’s ego rather than challenging him, have taken that giant leap to murder? Could he have chosen a sword from the wall in his father’s study and hacked his mother to death? Sondra Chamberlain had been nearly decapitated. Her wounds had been so catastrophic that she had to have bled out in a matter of minutes. Could her own son have done that to her? He thought about Ken Sato’s efficient movement with the sword in the study.
“He’s spent his life trying to fly under the radar and maintain the status quo with the old man,” Kovac said. “It would make more sense for him to take out Sato. He hates the guy messing with his sister. And if Dad gets the promotion, nothing else matters. That’s all the professor cared about. If he had had clear sailing for the job, his conflict with the girl would have been moot.
“Did you get anything out of the other two?” he asked.
Taylor shook his head. “They left. Sato was too pissed off. The girl was too hysterical. They went out the back door.”
Kovac set the broken picture frame aside and dug his phone out of his pocket to check his messages. There was no news from Tippen or Elwood.
“What did the girl have to say about her rehab history?”