Baker moved quickly to the door to summon his peons, the two technicians from the van who, along with their stretcher, were still waiting patiently in the outside reception area. “You can move him out as soon as George and the detectives give the word.”
George waved for them to come ahead, while Big Al and I stepped back far enough to allow them to bring the stretcher into the room. George Yamamoto watched in silence as they carefully wrapped the hands to preserve trace evidence, covered the body with a disposable sheet, and eased it into a body bag and onto a stretcher.
Although the rubber-gloved technicians worked in almost total silence, Doc Baker’s voice, booming away in the next room, provided more than enough background noise.
When they finally carried the stretcher out the door, Doc Baker stuck his head back inside. “I’m leaving,” he said.
“When will you be doing the autopsy, Howard?” George Yamamoto asked quietly.
“I don’t know exactly. That’ll depend on whatever else is scheduled. Why?”
“I’d like to be there.”
Baker frowned. “How come?”
Doc Baker can be pretty overbearing at times, but George Yamamoto didn’t back off an inch. “Tadeo was a friend of mine, Howard. I’m asking as a personal favor.”
Finally Baker nodded reluctantly. “That doesn’t sound like such a good idea, but all right,” he agreed. “Except I don’t know how much advance notice there’ll be.”
“Whenever it is,” George replied, “I’ll be there.”
Baker looked from Yamamoto to me. “Crime-scene team’s up next, you guys. They’ve been waiting outside.” With that, Dr. Howard Baker marched out of the room. George started after him.
“Wait,” I said, stopping him. In the flurry of activity, Baker had forgotten to ask George to look at the words on the CRT. “While you were over by the desk, did you happen to get a look at what was on the computer screen?”
“No. What was it?”
“Check it out, would you? Can you read Japanese?”
“Some,” George replied noncommittally. He turned and made his way back to the desk, walking gingerly around behind it, avoiding the blood-soaked part of the carpet from which the body had been removed. With a forefinger resting thoughtfully on one cheek, Yamamoto stood peering down at the computer’s screen for several long seconds.
“It’s part of a poem,” he said eventually, nodding, “written in Romaji—romanized letters. I recognize it. I’m sure I’ve seen it before, but I can’t remember the name of it or who wrote it. It’s the same two lines repeated over and over.”
“What does it say?”
Again, George Yamamoto studied the screen for a long time. “It’s something about a child,” he said.
“What does it say exactly?”
“I’m a criminalist, Beau, not a poet, but it’s something to the effect that even in this fouled-up world, a child still gives hope.”
I gave George Yamamoto full credit for keeping himself under very tight rein. Given the circumstances, I think I would have utilized far stronger terminology than fouled-up, but George is too straitlaced, too dignified to let something as profane as the “F-word” escape his lips.
“Is that his child?” I asked, motioning toward the picture on the wall behind the desk.
George nodded. “That’s her,” he said. “Kimiko. Kimi, we used to call her.”
“Where does she live? Here in Seattle someplace?”
“Not anymore. She’s a graduate student over in Pullman, working on her Ph.D. at WSU.” He pronounced it “WAZOO,” the way generations of Cougars and non-Cougars alike have referred to Washington State University.
“Kimiko?” I repeated. “Al, did you get that?”
Big Al was taking notes for both of us, and he wasn’t exactly being Cheerful Charlie about it. “Got it,” Al answered grudgingly.
George Yamamoto looked closely at my injured hand. “What happened to you?” he asked.
His question caught me flat-footed. I had no idea what had happened to my hand, and no ready-made answers leaped to my lips. Fortunately, Big Al Lindstrom came blundering to my rescue.
“Grace Beaumont. That’s what we’re calling him down in homicide these days. Got his fingers stuck in a car door. Pretty stupid if you ask me. How do you spell that name again, Kimiko?”
What door? I wondered as Big Al continued taking notes. And how had it happened? And why didn’t I remember it? But being a detective has its advantages. At least now I had more information than I’d had before.
Behind us the door to Tadeo Kurobashi’s office opened and two crime-scene investigators entered the room. Quietly but firmly they shepherded us out of the office. In the reception area outside, Big Al determinedly kept gathering family information.
“So the wife’s name is Machiko, and they live in Kirkland?”
“It’s called Bridle Downs now,” George said. “And yes, it’s part of Kirkland. Back when they bought it, though, it was still in the county. They moved there when Kimi got her first horse. She must have been around eleven at the time.”
Big Al jotted some information in his notebook, then looked at Yamamoto appraisingly. “Since you’re a friend of the family, do you want us to handle the notification, or would you like to do it?”
George shook his head. Throughout the painful ordeal, he had seemed totally self-possessed. Now, for the first time, he appeared to be unsure of himself.
“I don’t know. I knew Tadeo very well, but I was never close to his wife. Kimi and my two boys were friendly back and forth during high school, but that was years ago. Kimi would still remember me, I’m sure. I don’t think her mother would like having me around at a time like this.”
“So the two families socialized some?” I asked.
“A little. At least Tadeo and Kimi did. Machiko lived like a recluse in that house of theirs. She never did anything or went anywhere.”
There it was again, in his tone of voice, in what he said about Machiko Kurobashi, the same anger and resentment I had noticed earlier. If other people in their social milieu had felt the same level of antipathy toward Machiko Kurobashi that George Yamamoto did, then living as a recluse was probably a fairly good choice.
Looking for more breathing space in the small reception area, I backed around behind the receptionist’s desk. Like Tadeo Kurobashi’s, the desktop computer was still turned on, amber words glowing dimly on a dark screen in the office’s bright fluorescent lighting.
I’m no linguist, but it looked to me as though that screen was showing the same thing as Tadeo Kurobashi’s. To the left of the receptionist’s desk was another small office, little more than a cubicle, with still another computer, this one sitting on a rolling stand. I hurried over to that one and discovered the same thing, a screen entirely filled with two brief lines, written in Japanese, repeated over and over.
George Yamamoto had watched me in silence while I moved from one computer to the other. When I stopped in front of the second one, something in my attitude must have tipped him off. He cocked his head to one side. “What is it?” he asked.
“Same as the first one,” I said.
“What do you mean?” Yamamoto came around the desk and paused beside me. “You’re right,” he said, looking down. “It is the same thing.”
“What do you think it means?”
“I don’t know. If Howard is correct in his assumption and if Tadeo did commit suicide, then this is probably nothing more or less than an electronic suicide note.” He paused. “For Kimi,” he added.
“For Kimi?” I asked quickly. “For his daughter and not for his wife? Doesn’t that seem odd?”
“What’s odd is that he left it on all the computers like that. It seems to me as though Tadeo would have wanted it to be more private.”
Whatever was on that screen was a clue, a direction finder. I needed to know what it said as well as what it meant. Somehow I needed to capture the words for later, preserve them in ord
er to discover whatever evidence might be contained in those untranslated, repetitive lines.
I turned back to Big Al. “Is Nancy still out there?”
Nancy was Nancy Gresham, a Seattle P.D. police photographer. Lindstrom shrugged. “Probably. Want to talk to her?” I nodded and he hurried out into the outside hallway to find her. He was back with her a moment later, but when I told her what I needed, she shook her head doubtfully.
“I can try, but the resolution is pretty iffy.”
“You don’t think we’ll be able to read it?”
“Probably not. If I were you, I’d have someone copy it by hand verbatim, just in case.”
Because of my fingers, that onerous task fell to Big Al Lindstrom.
“Who, me?” Big Al protested. “I’m a Norwegian. You expect me to be able to write in Japanese?”
“You can copy the letters,” I said. With only minimal grumbling, Big Al Lindstrom hunched his massive frame over the computer. There was no question of touching either the computer or the stenographer’s chair in front of it for fear of disturbing evidence. Laboriously, one and two letters at a time, he began copying the unfamiliar words into his dog-eared notebook.
“Tell me more about the daughter, George,” I said quietly. “About Kimi. Why would he leave the note for her?”
“They’ve been at war for years.”
“Who has, Kurobashi and his daughter?”
George Yamamoto nodded. “They were always very close when she was younger, but they had a falling out shortly after Kimi went away to school in Ellensburg. That’s where she got her undergraduate degree, at Central. As far as I know, they never got over whatever it was. They never made up.”
“Do you have any idea what the feud was all about?”
“No. Tadeo didn’t say, and I didn’t ask. I didn’t want to pry.”
“And how old is she now?”
“Kimi? Twenty-eight or twenty-nine.”
“Ten years is a long time to carry a grudge,” I observed.
George nodded. “I’m sure it ate at Tadeo, although he never talked about it. Kimi’s an interesting girl, Beau, bright and stubborn both. She’s right between my two boys in age. She never was the stereotypical lotus blossom. Tomboy is the only word for it. She was always out roughhousing with the boys, and she could hold her own with them, too.
“She was smart in school—good in science and a whiz at math. She took after her father in the brains department. I remember Tadeo telling me she was getting her Ph.D. in electrical engineering. He was proud of her, but I think he was a little baffled when he found out she was following in his footsteps. He was a double E too.”
“A what?”
“A double E, an electrical engineer.”
“So even though they were what you call ‘at war,’ Kurobashi kept in touch with her?”
“I could be wrong, but I think the bad feelings were pretty much one-sided on Kimi’s part. After all, he did have her picture on the wall in there.”
“And the trophy,” I added.
“Okay,” Big Al said, standing up and closing the notebook. “I’ve got it as good as it’s gonna be got. I don’t know if anyone else will be able to read the damn thing, but it’s the best I can do. So what now, notify the next-of-kin?”
I nodded. George Yamamoto flinched at my answer, but he didn’t offer to go along, and I didn’t press him. “We’d better,” I said, “before the Noon News does it for us.”
We rode the elevator down in silence. Just beyond the gate a maroon Nissan Pulsar NX with a black plastic condom over its face was parked in a no-parking zone with its Jesus Christ lights flashing. A man in a gray three-piece suit and a dark red power tie was arguing loudly and heatedly with the uniformed officer at the gate as though using his blinkers gave him carte blanche to block the fire lane.
“I’ll go in a minute but first I’ve got to find him, and no he isn’t over there with all those other people. I’ve already checked. If we don’t leave right now, we’ll never get to the courthouse in time.”
“What seems to be the problem here?” I asked, stepping through the gate.
The officer saw me and nodded gratefully. “This man says his client is inside and he needs to pick him up to go downtown. They’re due at an appointment in twenty minutes.”
“Who’s your client?” I asked.
The gray-suited man glared at me. “Who are you?” he demanded in return.
“Detective J.P. Beaumont.” I struggled my badge out of my pocket, marveling at how difficult even the most mundane tasks become when your fingers no longer work the way you need them to. The man in the gray suit sneered at my difficulty, which didn’t make me like him any better. I’ve seen enough young, overly ambitious attorneys in my time to recognize the type. I made it a point not to genuflect. “Who’s your client?”
This guy was medium young, thirty-four or so, with a long thin frame and narrow sloping shoulders. His car and clothing both screamed cool macho dude. He was someone who needed all the macho help an image-maker could give him. His cheeks were puffed up like a chipmunk’s and his protruding eyes were set too closely together. When he started to speak, a mouth full of silver braces flashed like a chrome grill in the midmorning sun.
“Mr. Kurobashi,” he answered.
I took a wild stab in the dark. “This appointment wouldn’t have anything to do with bankruptcy proceedings, would it?”
“That’s none of your business,” he snapped. “That’s privileged information.” The braces caught the sun again and glinted wickedly. They were so at odds with his speech and mannerisms and cool macho dude getup that they somehow struck my funny bone. In my book, braces are for kids. I’m of the opinion that if your attorney is wearing braces, he’s probably too young for the job.
“Mr. Kurobashi is dead,” I said bluntly. “The medical examiner’s already taken him to the morgue.”
Stunned, the attorney reeled backward as though he’d been struck. He caught his balance on the shiny hood of the Pulsar and leaned on it heavily.
“Kurobashi, dead?” he croaked. “You can’t be serious!”
“Yes, I’m serious. Now give my partner here your name and address so we can get back in touch with you later.”
His name was Christopher H. Davenport, and his address was 1201 Third, the newest pricey address in town.
Davenport still looked shocked. “What happened?” he managed.
“It’s privileged information,” I shot back. “Right now we’re on our way to notify the next-of-kin. Please don’t make any attempt to contact the Kurobashi home until we’ve had a chance to make a personal visit.”
He nodded. “Of course not. I wouldn’t think of it.”
I left Davenport still dazed and sitting on the fender of his Nissan as I turned back to the cop. “Get word to Mr. Rennermann. Tell him that we’ll have to stop by to see him sometime later today or tomorrow.”
“Right,” the officer said, “will do.”
Once out of the building, George Yamamoto headed for his car and we went toward ours. Big Al was grumbling about having to play both chauffeur and secretary while my fingers were screwed up, but I wasn’t paying much attention. My headache was back and I was hours and miles away from any possibility of aspirin.
We were waiting at the stop sign for traffic to clear on Fourth South when George Yamamoto pulled up beside us and honked his horn. I rolled down the window.
He had changed his mind. “I guess I’ll go with you after all,” he said. “You’ll probably need someone to interpret. Machiko doesn’t speak English very well or at least she didn’t the last time I saw her.”
“You know how to get to their place?”
He nodded.
“We’ll follow you, then. Lead the way.”
Al waited long enough for George to pull out in front of us. “I could have found it all right, you know,” he said.
I think he resented George going along, regarded his presence in somewhat the
same light as Howard Baker did, as a hindrance rather than a help.
“Yes,” I said, “but unless I miss my guess, your Japanese isn’t all that hot. Mine sure isn’t.”
We drove to Kirkland in relative silence. At midmorning, traffic on the Evergreen Point Floating Bridge was fairly light. The entire trip only took about half an hour.
As we drove, I couldn’t get the picture of Kimi Kurobashi out of my mind. What monster had reared its ugly head between that happy-go-lucky, horsy kid and her adoring father? What had set them at each other’s throats? Whatever it was, now it was permanent. There would be no more chances for reconciliation. Those were gone. Used up.
Whatever hidden meaning might be locked in the cryptic message Tadeo Kurobashi had left for his wife or daughter in those final words on his computer screen, the feud between him and his daughter was never going to get any better. Their quarrel would never be over, never be resolved, not as long as Kimiko Kurobashi still lived.
People die. Quarrels don’t. That inalterable realization made me sad as hell.
For everyone concerned.
CHAPTER 3
THERE ARE A LOT OF THINGS ABOUT THIS job that aren’t wonderful; doing mountains of paperwork and dealing with the media are two items that come immediately to mind. But by far the worst part, bar none, is notifying next-of-kin. Delivering bad news, fatal bad news concerning a loved one, costs everybody—the people receiving it as well as those dishing it out.
Anyone who knocks on the door and walks into the home of survivors of a homicide victim is walking into an emotional mine field. There’s no way to prepare in advance for what may happen because everyone reacts differently. Some survivors accept the news calmly and quietly, while others burst into hysterics, either crying or laughing. I’ve seen both. On some occasions I’ve been made to feel welcome and even been invited to stay to dinner, while at other times I’ve been bodily thrown out of the house. Once I was assaulted by a grief-crazed widow who held me personally responsible for her husband’s death. She came after me tooth and nail, ready to flay the skin right off my face.
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