Dismissed With Prejudice (9780061760631)

by Jance, Judith A.

  The room seemed smaller than it actually was. There was a desk with a gray computer terminal on it and next to the computer, facing into the room, was a tall gold-plated trophy of a woman on horseback. I read the inscription: Kimiko Kurobashi, Best All Around Cowgirl, U.S. Intercollegiate Rodeo Championship, 1982. The only other items on the desk were two pieces of a slender rosewood container, slightly curved and less than two feet long, a swatch of shiny black silk, and a bill to MicroBridge in the amount of $1,712.19 from a company called DataDump.

  “The body’s over here, you two,” Doc Baker said, motioning to us across the room. Dr. Howard Baker, King County’s chief medical examiner, is spending less and less time at crime scenes these days, so I was more than a little surprised to see the man himself.

  Big Al went ahead to have a look. He stopped short, grimaced, and swallowed hard. “Harry karry?” he asked.

  “Hara-kiri,” Doc Baker corrected firmly. “If you’re going to say it, you’d better say it right or you’ll have half the folks in the International District jumping down your throat. But yes, that’s what it looks like to me. I’ve called George in from the crime lab just to be sure. He should be here in a few minutes.”

  George Yamamoto is the head of the Washington State Patrol Crime Laboratory. He is also one of Seattle’s more visibly prominent Japanese-American citizens.

  “We’ve got a tentative ID from the landlord,” Doc Baker added.

  Dreading the sight that had given Big Al Lindstrom pause, I moved to a point where I could see. The dead man was lying on the blood-soaked carpet, his body twisted half on its side as though he had simply slipped out of his chair, the back of which had been shoved against the wall. A rusty, gore-covered knife lay on the floor nearby, its ornate handle only inches from the lifeless bloodstained fingers, while a mound of internal organs spilled onto the floor beneath him.

  Suicide is usually ugly, but this was worse than most. No matter how many years I do this job, no matter how much I think I’ve seen it all, it never gets any easier. Sickened, I looked away.

  Five feet above the dead man, a framed but faded color photo sat askew on the wall, revealing behind it the open door of a small concealed safe. I looked at the picture closely, grateful there was something in the room besides the dead man to occupy my attention.

  It was an enlarged snapshot of a child on a horse and a middle-aged man. The man was standing near the horse’s head and beaming proudly up at the child in something akin to adoration. The child seemed tiny, especially in relation to the fully grown animal, a gray Appaloosa. The girl couldn’t have been much older than nine or ten. The dark hair and almond eyes said Japanese, but she was wearing an ornate, fringed cowgirl outfit and white pointed boots in the best cowboys-and-Indians tradition. Her hair was braided into two long Annie Oakley plaits, while a huge white cowboy hat framed her small oval face and dark hair. She was grinning for the camera, mugging in typical kid-gets-first-horse fashion.

  Looking away from the picture, my attention strayed to the open door beside it. The concealed safe was empty, absolutely empty, without even a layer of dust to indicate what might have been kept inside.

  “What was in there?” I asked.

  “Nothing,” Doc Baker answered glumly. “Not a damn thing. If we knew that we’d probably be a long way down the line toward understanding exactly what went on here.”

  Dodging bloody footprints, I stepped close enough to look down at the screen of the computer on Kurobashi’s desk. In the bright light of the room, pale amber letters glowed faintly on the CRT. Close examination revealed that the entire work space was covered with what looked like alphabet soup. The words were composed of English letters. Other than that, they were totally unrecognizable. I discerned a pattern, though. It was the same two lines repeated over and over.

  “What does that say?” I asked.

  Doc Baker shrugged. “Nobody here can read it. That’s the other reason I’ve called George in. Somebody said they thought it was Japanese.”

  As if on cue, George Yamamoto appeared at the door. He paused in the doorway for a moment, pulling on a pair of rubber gloves. Doc Baker saw him a moment after I did.

  “There you are, George. We’ve been waiting for you. He’s over here.”

  George Yamamoto didn’t move forward immediately. He stood gazing at the nameplate on the door, seeming to draw into himself, as if marshaling his resources for some terrible ordeal. His face was pale, his mouth set in a narrow line, and he said nothing. There was none of the usual banter that Baker and he often volley back and forth when they encounter one another at crime scenes.

  Big Al and I moved aside to make room for him. George Yamamoto squared his shoulders, stepped resolutely to the side of the desk, and looked down at the corpse. As he did so, a barely perceptible tremor passed through his body.

  “It’s Tadeo,” he said quietly.

  “Tadeo!” Doc Baker’s head came up sharply. He eyed George Yamamoto questioningly through his thick, bottle-bottom glasses. “You knew him?”

  George nodded. “His name is Tadeo Kurobashi. He was my friend.”

  With those few words, what had started out as a routine investigation into an ordinary suicide wasn’t routine anymore. Like an automatic camera whirring into focus, Tadeo Kurobashi’s ugly death suddenly took on the sharply delineated lines and proportions of personal tragedy. A friend’s personal tragedy.

  And in that instant, everything that was routine about it went straight out the window.

  CHAPTER 2

  I HAVE WORKED WITH THESE TWO MEN for so long, spent so much time in both the medical examiner’s office and the crime lab, that I know Doc Baker and George Yamamoto far better than I know some of the Seattle P.D. brass upstairs in the Public Safety Building.

  The two men are a study in contrasts. Baker is a big burly man, a human tank, who habitually goes over or through people rather than around them. His volume control is permanently stuck on loud, and when he speaks, he gesticulates wildly, flapping around like some overweight bird attempting to become airborne. Baker’s suits look like they were pulled as-is off the rack at the nearest big-and-tall shop. They’re often wrinkled and unkempt. He looks like the proverbial rumpled bed much of the time, and his socks seldom match whatever else he’s wearing.

  George Yamamoto, on the other hand, is absolutely precise, from the meticulously folded and creased cuffs of his Brooks Brothers trousers to his carefully articulated manner of speech. When he speaks, he punctuates his words with small, deft hand gestures. Where Baker orders his subordinates around, George’s quietly efficient management style inspires both loyalty and dedication. Of the two, I’d have to say, George Yamamoto’s crime lab is a much tighter run ship than Doc Baker’s medical examiner’s office.

  Now, as George stood over the body of his dead friend, I was struck by his unflinching self-control. Tadeo Kurobashi may have been one of George Yamamoto’s close friends, but you couldn’t tell that by looking. The head of the Washington State Patrol Crime Lab is nothing if not a complete professional. His friend was dead, but it was George’s job to help us find out how and why. That didn’t mean he wasn’t hurting; he was, but he didn’t let it show, and he didn’t let it get in the way.

  “What do you have so far, Howard?” he asked.

  For once even Doc Baker seemed subdued. “George, I had no idea he was a friend of yours, or I never would have called you in.”

  Yamamoto finished donning his protective clothing. “It’s all right,” George replied, waving aside the apology. “You had no way of knowing.”

  He made his way around to where Doc Baker was standing, and together the two of them knelt on the floor beside the body. Speaking in hushed, careful tones that were astonishingly low for someone as noisy as Doc Baker, they took their time examining Kurobashi’s corpse with its gaping, horrifying wound. Finished at last, both men stood up simultaneously.

  “Well?” Baker asked pointedly, almost but not quite reverting to h
is normally brusque, blunt style. “What do you think?”

  “It’s definitely not hara-kiri,” George announced.

  Baker frowned. “It isn’t? But I thought…”

  George shook his head. “Absolutely not, although someone may have wanted us to think it was.”

  “How can you tell?”

  “It’s just not right. Seppuku is a form of ritual suicide with a long and honored tradition. Originally it was done with sharpened bamboo. But this is wrong. Totally wrong.”

  “What’s all wrong?” Baker asked.

  “For one thing, he’s in a chair, not on a zabuton. That’s a floor cushion. For another, he’s not wearing a kimono. Tadeo was a stickler for tradition with an eye for detail as well.”

  “What detail?” Doc Baker was frowning.

  “The traditional dress for seppuku is a white kimono.”

  The frown became thunderous. “You mean to tell me it isn’t seppuku because he’s wearing the wrong goddamned clothes? What about the sword? That is a samurai sword, isn’t it? And isn’t this hara-kiri or whatever the hell you call it a samurai tradition?”

  Baker was reluctant to give up his pet theory even in the face of expert information to the contrary.

  “It is that,” George Yamamoto agreed; “and it may still turn out to be suicide, but I doubt it.”

  Up until then, Doc Baker had been treating George Yamamoto with uncharacteristic deference and consideration, but anyone casting doubt on one of Baker’s prize assumptions is going to get run over by a truck.

  “You’re saying it’s not suicide then? You think it’s murder?”

  George nodded. “Of all people, Tadeo wouldn’t have violated the ancient traditions.”

  Baker rolled his eyes in disgust. “You mean he’d commit suicide by following some ancient recipe? Come now.” Some of Baker’s customary truculence was leaking back into his manner, but George wasn’t intimidated.

  “Tadeo knew more about samurai traditions than almost anyone in the country,” he replied quietly. “He spent a lifetime learning about it.”

  Big Al and I had lingered in the background. We didn’t want to disturb their deliberations, but we didn’t want to miss out on something important, either.

  “What did you call it?” I asked.

  “Seppuku,” Yamamoto repeated. “You probably know it as hara-kiri. It’s the ritual disembowelment of the samurai.”

  Big Al stirred uneasily. “What’s all this crap about samurai? This is Seattle, for Chrissakes, not Japan. Besides, I thought all that samurai bullshit went away a hundred years ago.”

  “More like a hundred and twenty,” Yamamoto corrected. “It’s gone, but not forgotten.”

  “And that rusty old knife over there is supposedly a samurai sword?”

  George Yamamoto regarded Big Al with an air of impatience bordering on irritation. He nodded slowly. “A tanto,” he said. “A hidden sword, sometimes called a woman’s sword.”

  Al Lindstrom grunted. “That thing’s so rusty it’s hard to believe it could do that kind of damage.”

  George knelt down on one knee and examined the weapon. “Don’t let appearances fool you. It can cut, all right. Those ancient swords were made from such high carbon content steel that they’ll rust in minutes just from not having the blood wiped off, but they’re still sharp as hell. From the looks of it, this one could possibly be very valuable.”

  “An antique, then?” I asked.

  George nodded.

  “Do you think it belonged to him?”

  George glanced at me. A shadow of personal grief flickered across his carefully maintained professional facade. He stifled it as quickly as it had appeared. “I don’t know. If it did, he never mentioned it, at least, not to me.”

  “You said he was an expert. Why? Was he descended from a samurai warrior?”

  “Not that I know of, but from the time I first knew him, he was interested in samuari history and lore as well as the swords and all the accompanying sword furniture.”

  “What kind of furniture?” Big Al asked.

  “The other equipment besides the blades themselves that were part of a warrior’s equipment.”

  “How long did you know him, George?” I asked gently.

  There was a slight pause before he answered. “We had met earlier, when we were little, but we became friends in Minidoka.” George Yamamoto made the statement softly, evenly, looking me square in the eye as he did so. “During the war,” he added with quiet dignity.

  George turned away. Once more he stood looking down at his friend’s body in a room that was suddenly oppressively quiet. The $20,000 reparation being paid to survivors of Japanese War Relocation Camps may have mystified the rest of the country, but not the people who live here in the Northwest. We had a larger concentration of Japanese-Americans before the war. As a consequence we’re more aware of the irrevocable damage done to those 125,000 people who were stripped of their rights and packed off to detention camps during World War II. Around here the scars are still very close to the surface.

  Most the the detainees were citizens, born in the U.S. or naturalized, but they were nevertheless suspected of complicity with the Japanese, summarily deprived of their livelihood and possessions, and shipped into the interior. Minidoka, a raw barracks camp in the wilds of the Idaho desert, was where many of Seattle’s Japanese-American folk, suffering alternately from terrible heat and terrible cold, waited out the war.

  I knew vaguely that as a young teenager George Yamamoto had been incarcerated in one of those camps, but this was the first time he had ever spoken of it, and although I was barely born at the time, I felt ashamed of what had happened to him and to his family. Ashamed and chastened—a variation on a theme of the white man’s burden.

  The silence in the room had lengthened uncomfortably. I’m not sure George even noticed. He stood, lost in thought, gazing down sadly at the mutilated body of his dead friend.

  “What does Minidoka have to do with samurai history?” I asked.

  George walked over to the window before he answered. “Tadeo was interested in it, that’s all. Interested and curious. He spent hours every day talking to the old ones there, asking them questions, listening to their stories. He came out of the camp as an unofficial samurai expert. He was particularly interested in swords. The rest of the time he spent fiddling with radios. He single-handedly kept the few radios in the camp running on scavenged parts.”

  “Swords and radios?” I asked. “That’s an unlikely combination.”

  George smiled and nodded. “Tadeo is…was a very unusual man, equally interested in both the very old and the very new. Once the war was over, he went on and got degrees in electrical engineering from the University of Washington. We were in school there at the same time.”

  I could tell from the set of his shoulders that grief was hammering at him, and George Yamamoto was doing his best not to give way to it. Listening to him, I had, for the first time, a sense of what their meager existence in Minidoka must have been like. Obviously, living there together had forged a long lasting comrade-in-arms bond between Tadeo Kurobashi and George Yamamoto, the same kind of bond that comes from surviving other varieties of wartime experiences.

  “Is that where he met his wife?” I asked, once more trying to break up the silence before it swallowed us whole. “In the camp?”

  George swung away from the window. “Machiko?” he asked, spitting out the name as though the very sound of it was offensive to him. “No,” he answered. “Not her. She came over as a war bride in 1946 during the occupation. Tadeo married Machiko after her first husband died. He was still working his way through school when they married.”

  From the way he said it, I could tell that George had disapproved of his friend’s choice of wife, that he had despised her in the past and still did in the present, even after all the intervening years.

  Moving away from the window, George stepped over to the desk, standing in front of it and studying t
he items that lay on the smooth, polished surface. Without touching anything, he focused briefly on each of them, stopping eventually on the two halves of the wooden box. “Come look at this,” he said.

  Big Al and I did as we were told. Both the top and bottom of the slightly curved rosewood box had been carefully crafted and polished to a high gloss. The outside surface had been worn thin by years of opening and closing, but I was certain from looking at them that the two pieces would still fit together perfectly. On the top surface, a delicate inlaid ivory squirrel gathered an equally tiny mound of mother-of-pearl acorns. The exquisite inlay work was some of the best I’ve ever seen.

  “It’s beautiful,” I said.

  George Yamamoto nodded. “It is that, and I’m convinced that under all the blood we’ll find the same design repeated on the handle of the tanto itself. Once the blade is cleaned up, we’ll be able to see who made it.”

  “How can you do that?” Big Al asked.

  “A sword that fine would have been signed by the artisan who created it.”

  “You said a few minutes ago that it may be valuable. Just how valuable?”

  George shrugged. “That’s hard to tell. Several thousand maybe. Possibly more, depending on whether or not we’re dealing with a name-brand sword maker. Why do you ask?”

  “The landlord told us that Kurobashi was losing his business, that he was supposed to be completely moved out of the building by the end of the month.”

  “I didn’t know that,” George murmured. “I can’t imagine how it could have happened. Tadeo was always careful with money.” He shook his head. “Getting back to the sword, even if it is valuable, selling it probably wouldn’t have helped him enough to make any difference.” He paused and looked around the room. “If he was losing his business, I suppose that makes the idea of suicide a little more credible, but still…”

  Impatiently, Howard Baker stripped off his surgical gloves with a series of sharp snaps. “And as of right now, that’s my preliminary finding, pending the autopsy, of course. All this talk of traditions and rituals doesn’t mean a damn thing. We’re going to find his fingerprints and nobody else’s on that knife handle. I’d bet money on it.”