“She was vague. She danced around everything: the rehab questions, the abuse questions. I never got a straight answer. She did say her parents always wanted to give her back to wherever they adopted her from. That’s something every kid wants to hear from Mom and Dad,” Taylor said sarcastically.
“Wow,” Kovac said. “I threw that idea out at Charlie just to goad him—that the old man was going to change his will and disown the daughter. He should have punched me.”
“It’s sad,” Taylor said, looking around the room, with its expensive antiques and its photographs of an unhappy family. “These people seemed to have everything to give kids a good upbringing: education, financial security . . .”
“Money doesn’t cure people of being narcissistic assholes,” Kovac pointed out. “Get everybody’s phone records. Landlines and cell phones for our vics and for the three amigos. I want a time line of every phone call, starting Sunday evening.”
“Done,” Taylor said. “We should have the records by the end of the day.”
“Good.”
“You know they’re all probably calling lawyers as we speak.”
“Probably,” Kovac conceded. “I thought we were being clever bringing them here. Instead we’re up for the Clusterfuck of the Year award.”
Taylor shrugged, then winced and rubbed at his stiff neck. “Seemed like a good idea at the time.”
“Yeah, well . . .” Kovac nodded. “I’ve said for years that’s going on my headstone.”
*
KOVAC CLOSED HIS EYES and dozed in the car on the twenty-minute drive to the office of the Chamberlains’ insurance agent. As much as he hated to give up control and let the kid drive, he needed a rest, however brief. He was dog tired. Not for the first time (or the hundred and first time), he thought, I’m getting too damned old for this. In the next thought, he wondered what Liska was doing. He wondered how bored she was. He thought of cold case squads as the place old Homicide dicks went when they couldn’t keep up anymore. Then he remembered with no small amount of depression that he was an old Homicide dick.
He looked at Taylor out of the corner of his eye: a man just coming into his prime, smart, fit, hungry, good-looking. All the things Kovac had been nearly two decades ago. Well, he admitted, he’d never been that good-looking. He had probably never been that fit, either. He had to grit his teeth against the urge to groan as he got out of the car at the insurance agent’s office, his body protesting old injuries and the lack of sleep.
The agent, Ron Goddard, a short, bald Buddha of a guy, met them at the receptionist’s desk with a friendly smile and showed them down a narrow hall to his small office, which looked out onto the parking lot. He closed the blinds with a twist of a wand and went around behind his desk.
“I can’t believe what happened,” he admitted as he took his seat. “Twenty years in this business and I’ve never had a client murdered. A college professor and his wife. A nice home in a good neighborhood. You just don’t expect a murder.”
“They weren’t expecting it, either,” Kovac said.
Goddard shook his head. “I told Professor Chamberlain he’d be wise to upgrade his security system. The technology today is amazing.”
“Why didn’t he?” Taylor asked.
“He didn’t see the need. The system he had worked well. They had never had any serious crime in the neighborhood.” He made a sheepish face. “And to be perfectly honest, he was cheap. Or maybe it’s more accurate to say he was paranoid. He always thought people were trying to rip him off. I had to work to get him to insure the household contents for replacement cost. He thought I was just trying to make a bigger commission.”
“What about the collection?” Kovac asked.
“That was his passion. He was more reasonable about that. The collection had a separate policy.” Goddard placed three binders side by side on the desk and tapped each one in turn. “Household, jewelry, and the collection. The inventories and appraised values. You can take those. I printed them out for you.”
Kovac picked up the binder for the collection and started to page through it.
“There’s a DVD in each one, too,” Goddard said.
“The son gave us one of those,” Kovac said.
“Charlie. Nice young man. He tried to convince his father to upgrade the security, too. Typical twenty-something tech-savvy kid. If I didn’t have one in my family already, I’d go out and adopt one,” the agent said with a chuckle. “My phone is smarter than I am. These gadgets are going to take over the world.”
“When was the last appraisal done on the collection?” Taylor asked.
“Five years ago. I had it in my pending file to suggest to Lucien that he might want to have it reappraised next year, just to be sure nothing had changed significantly. To my surprise, he called me Monday and asked about just that.”
“He wanted to have the collection reappraised?” Taylor asked. “Did he say why?”
“He said he was planning to donate it to the university.”