by Harker Moore
Sakura pushed tea toward them. Darius picked his up. She took a sip from her cup, but the liquid was still too hot and she set it down. “Let me see the autopsy photos for Siebrig,” she said to Jimmy.
He opened a drawer and handed her a file.
She picked out one of the photographs taken before the procedure. “Not an android.” She pointed to the metallic tracks, like giant stitches holding the torso together. “More like Bride of Frankenstein. Cutting and reassembling. Maybe our little monster is creating the woman of his dreams.”
A couple hours later Willie was shivering in the sun as a cold wind whipped up the street, a remnant of the gusts of early morning. She pulled her coat tighter, moving closer to the entrance of the restaurant. Then, glancing back, she smiled, catching sight of Hanae as she rounded the corner with Taiko in the lead. It always gave her pleasure to watch the two of them moving as a unit in the crowd.
“This place is nice,” Hanae said when they had settled inside and ordered.
“It is nice,” she said. “I eat here a lot. It’s only a couple blocks from my office.”
“You are enjoying your work?”
“I am. It’s been a while since I’ve seen patients. At least normal patients.” She laughed. “ . . .You know what I mean.”
“Patients who are not serial killers.”
Not the kind of comment she’d expected. She studied Hanae’s face. But the words had been simple, devoid of sadness or irony. “No serial killers,” she said lightly. “But quite a few who are interesting.”
“You are happy then?”
The question seemed wistful, and was not about work. “With Kenjin, you mean?”
Hanae smiled at her use of the name. “Yes,” she said, “with Kenjin.”
“Things between Michael and me seem to be good right now. I don’t think much beyond that.”
Hanae nodded, sipped at her water.
Willie had expected a little gentle gloating; it was Hanae, after all, who from the beginning had promoted the idea of Michael and her as a couple. But the silence stretched, expressive perhaps of the trouble she suspected still existed at home. The tension, so palpable in Jimmy, had not lessened since Hanae’s return. His stress was, if anything, increasing.
A strain not due entirely to the pressures of a new investigation, she guessed, but more to Hanae’s reaction to it. His wife’s subtle maneuvering the other night to include herself in their discussion had not pleased Jimmy. Surely Hanae had earned the right, and she for one believed they would only benefit from her insight. But Jimmy had minded, despite his efforts to pretend otherwise.
The food came, looking as delicious as always, and they ate. Conversation resumed, and they laughed over things that had happened in the city, and funny stories that Hanae told about her cousins Nori and Sei. But the undercurrent of what was not spoken remained. In the end, her training took over.
“Hanae, I have to say something that you probably don’t want to hear.”
“What is it?” The porcelain face, emptied suddenly of expression, was doll-like.
“You went through so much last year. I just think you might benefit from seeing someone. And I’d be happy to recommend—”
“It is not necessary, Willie.” The dark head had tilted downward, the white center part showing stark and childlike in the black hair.
“Then talk to me as a friend. . . . I know that I’m Jimmy’s friend, too”—it had needed to be said—“but you can tell me anything. Ask me anything. It will stay between us.”
Hanae’s eyes came up to meet her own, black wells that did not at all seem sightless.
No good deed goes unpunished. The thought a sudden current in her mind.
“There is something I need to know.” Hanae was smiling.
She waited, knowing she was going to regret this.
“Where exactly,” Hanae asked her, “was Leslie Siebrig’s body found?”
Maybe it’s the blindness, Willie thought as she watched Hanae walk away from the restaurant under gathering clouds. She could only guess at what it was that made Hanae so different, although she suspected it was something fundamentally spiritual that set her friend apart. In frustration, she twisted a strand of hair. How easily she’d been trapped. Though trapped was perhaps too harsh a word. Rather she’d been led by Hanae, following her willingly down the garden path. It was still difficult to consider that any sort of guile had been used. She held Hanae above manipulation. Yet she had been manipulated. She had told Jimmy’s wife where Leslie Siebrig’s body had been discovered.
What Hanae would do with the information, Willie had a pretty good idea. She would go to the scene of the crime. And why? This too she thought she knew. It was part of Hanae’s need to understand what Jimmy did, to be fully part of that other life he lived. The one he so desperately wanted to keep from her. But exclusion was apparently not something Hanae could accept any longer. Jimmy’s last serial case had forced her to that boundary that divided them, and she had crossed over. There could never be a turning back.
But more, Hanae was a woman of deep and driving instincts. Living in a world honed from another kind of reality, guided by senses forged by precise and unique forces. Blindness had made of Hanae a different species. More refined, where others were awkward. More exacting, where others were grossly inept. She embodied a perfect elegance of touch and feeling. In a world of bumbling, blunted fools, Hanae Sakura was as close to being psychic as Willie would allow was possible.
It was the movie within the movie, played a hundred times. Yuppie mother driving with her spawn from the city. A bucolic excursion meant for making memories. Not for the two squirming boys, too young to later recall it. The memories are for her.
The city falls away, a discarded backdrop. The traffic is minimal after the thruway. The weather here dry and autumnal. Indian summer. The Navigator slips through a panorama of new-rolled hay and pied cows lazing on the still green hilltops, through the woodland that separates the farms, where a leaf here, a tree there, has been set ablaze. A warning, subliminal, lurks in the Technicolor perfection. A darkness slowly piling in the ultimate blandness of blue sky and turning leaves.
They stop at a diner for the bathroom, where the gray-haired waitress dispenses pie and blessings on the cutest little things, with all that red hair. Then the road again, where the montage quickens. More rolling hills and farmland, then the quick-cut to the turnoff. A vehicle that passes as they stop to check the sign—Smiley’s Pumpkin Patch, 2 miles. The Navigator follows in the fading wake of the van, pulls minutes later into the lot.
Crane shot as Mother emerges from the driver’s seat. The boys freed to spill onto the withered verge, where other parents wait with their fidgeting broods for the hay wagon to depart. Mother bends to her sons, dancing roly-poly in their quilted loden jackets. A word on behaving, a promise of the petting zoo tossed on the air as a bribe.
Edit to the tractor as it pulls along, to the jostled group in the wagon. Edit to the field. To Mother’s hyped cheeriness as they enter into the rows of orange fruit. So much time before the hay wagon will make its return. No quick-cuts in her mind. So many minutes to allocate, declaring this one too large. This too small. Too thin. Not flat enough at the bottom. Two three-year-old attention spans to harness to the search for the perfect pumpkin.
It happens as it always does in these scenes. The air full of noise and laughter so suddenly still. The bark of a dog, sharp as gunfire. Sounds becomes muffled, limited to the air inside her head, the ambience of a sinus cavity. It’s Mother’s POV now.
She straightens, shielding her eyes, as a flock of birds rises and vees in the air above her head. Dark shapes against the impossible blue, their arrow a signal. Instinctive little animals, the boys bolt, a tandem zigzag, like elves or hobbits dancing in the rows.
Jason . . . Damon! The names spark from her lips as she grasps the reality of their flight. She breaks and moves, speeding past parents who are oblivious, past children who look up a
t her with the smiles of conspirators. “Jason . . . Damon!” She is screaming the names like a primal chant, past any urban self-consciousness.
In seconds, she stops. Spins. Confused as to their direction. The green jackets and bobbing russet heads have been swallowed by the field of jack-o’-lanterns on the make, the yet-to-be-grinning pumpkins.
Fade out and cut to the twins. Jason, emerging at the far end of a row. Damon pulls up behind him, a hand going out like a tether to his brother’s shoulder, not actually touching, nor needing to. The two stand, still giggling at their escape, waiting for the impulse of what’s to come next.
Jason turns, still laughing, his gaze on the lonely tree that has wandered, it seems, into the borderland from the orchard. A movement at the bole catches his eye. An apparition has appeared in the shadows of branches. Realization spreads, a silent communiqué traced in the change of expression that passes from brother to brother. Mirror faces totter between wonder and woe. Is this something grand or ferocious, this giant with pumpkin head?
Jason. Damon. The voice of their mother sounds somewhere not far. The pull of it shows in the tightening of muscles, in eyes that too determinedly fix upon what they still seek. In the climax of tension, the giant moves first, lowering the ripe pumpkin from in front of his human face. The twins break into laughter. Pumpkin Man smiles.
“Thank God.” Mother’s voice sounds through the final row. Mother herself appears and fills the shot, caught between anger and relief. She settles for a time on the latter, falling to her knees, gathering in her sons, still elusive in the swollen jackets—oblivious to little fingers stabbing backward at the tree where Pumpkin Man has dissolved.
The service alley was a canyon breathing a stony dampness in the gathering chill and wet of late afternoon. Hanae stood at the mouth of the passage, conscious of Mr. Romero behind her, sitting disapproving in the car. The driver had had to circle the block so many times she’d lost count, in order to find a parking place this close to the opening of the alley. And still, he had not been comfortable with letting her get out alone. At any moment, she feared, he might defy her instructions and join her.
Not much time, then. She moved forward with Taiko, a halfhearted drizzle misting against her skin, as if the upward thrusting of the surrounding buildings increased the condensation from the air. She was aware of being enclosed, of the traffic noises muffled. And the sky too seemed close, like the lid of a box. A vibration of light like cold metal.
She had almost not come after her first experience, realizing that by coming she was involving Willie, taking shameless advantage of her friend’s offer of help. Askme anything, Willie had said. And she had used those good intentions.
I have become a woman of secrets. Was that not what she had said of herself last year as she walked down the path of destruction? Once again she was keeping secrets from her husband, and worse, she had drawn Willie into her deception. Brick by brick she was adding to the wall that stood between her and her husband. The madness was that she somehow believed that only in the building of it could she one day tear it down. Surely the belief was irrational.
And yet she could not stop. Because to stop meant to sit still. To do nothing. To die. The progression of thought was a revelation. The decision to take action in the only way that had been open to her was part of the reason she had survived last year.
And she was fighting still, seeking justification for the things she had done to remain alive for a time long enough for Jimmy to find her, but so far away from healing or any kind of acceptance. She felt guilty and defiled, though there existed at the core of her this imperative to act, to reclaim herself. Not as she was. That Hanae had died. To truly survive she must change.
The thought was a balm. Perhaps she was not so far from the Buddha as she feared. The concept of change was vital. She must accept what had altered inside her. Accept this path.
Unconsciously, she’d been holding her breath. She let it out now, directing Taiko forward, across the wet and cracked pavement that covered the lot. She was allowing the scent, the odor of rotting food that marked the location of the Dumpster, to draw her.
The smell became intense, threatening prematurely to bring on the nausea she’d experienced at that other scene of death. She stopped and steadied her breathing, acknowledging the wave of sickness, acknowledging her fears. She had to accept these things, then let them go. As she must also let go of her doubt. If it were foolish for her to be here, then she would be a fool. A blind woman with no expertise in these matters, except the folly of having once allowed herself to be taken in by a killer. Did that not make of her an expert? That she had touched his dark heart and been touched in return? She had been so close to that one particular evil, had known its flavor. Could a taste of this one not provide some useful insight? Perhaps. And perhaps she was nothing more than a very imprudent woman. Risking everything.
She was here now. Too late to take it back.
She stood unprotected in the rain. Reached out to touch the Dumpster, the stinking hulk that had once held the body of Leslie Siebrig. Reached for that sucking darkness that did not come. There was only the smell of rot, overwhelming. And above it, like an overripe sweetness, like a flower that blossomed in dung, was the sense-image of her remembered vision. The melon in the garden sliced in twain. The nubby rind, the pattern of seed and pulp, a strange convolution beneath her searching fingers.
The razor edge flick. Wetness in her palm. Lips sucking. In her mouth, the taste of blood.
In the waning light, Sakura watched from across the side street. The dark car was parked alongside the curb, in what could loosely be called a loading zone in front of the Water Street apartments. The driver clutched the wheel, staring off into the cold dusk. For another moment he studied Romero, observing with detective eyes, much as he might examine the scene of a crime; then he walked up to the window and tapped on the glass. Romero flinched at the sound and whirled in his seat. His face contracted in fear. Then a slow smile of recognition
“Hello, Mr. Romero. I’m sorry I startled you.” He spoke as the driver rolled down his window.
“No . . . no, I was . . .” He stopped, seeming to have misplaced the words that would finish his sentence.
“Did you just drop off Hanae?”
At the mention of her name, Romero again examined the street though his windshield, then nodded. “Yes, Mrs. Sakura had some errands.” His words hanging in the air with his breath.
“Is there a problem, Mr. Romero? Is Hanae—”
His hand quickly rose to fend off the question. “Everything is fine, Lieutenant. Really.”
Their eyes met for a moment. Then Romero turned, seeming to slump fractionally into the upholstery. “I’ve been driving Mrs. Sakura almost from the day she came to New York, Lieutenant. It has been my pleasure. She is a remarkable woman.”
He reached and opened the door so that Romero could exit.
In the growing twilight, the two men stood facing each other. It was several minutes before he could get the driver to break his silence, to betray what he believed to be an unspoken oath of loyalty to his wife.
There was nowhere his brain directed him. He had shifted to automatic pilot and ended up inside his office, with the blinds closed. Steam from brewing tea hovered like a cloud inside the dark, outside an arc of blue fluorescence. Sakura reached for the jade piece and rubbed his fingers across its cool surface. That Hanae could do this, that she could put herself at risk. That she could secretly defy him. All of it was beyond belief.
Mr. Romero had not been forthcoming, but in the end he had revealed her transgressions. Her pilgrimage to the scenes of the crimes. For a moment he had considered confronting her, but the very intensity of his anger held him back. Now his fear seemed to demand it.
He breathed in the sweet steam, closed his eyes, and leaned back against the padded headrest. Why was this happening? Had not their separation stood for anything? Or had the evil that had reached out and taken Hanae a year ag
o scarred their marriage beyond healing?
“They said you’d come back.” Her voice, like the steam, settled softly inside the dark.
He opened his eyes and found Faith Baldwin standing at his door, her body backlit, so that her suit was nothing more than a nondescript blankness, the white collar of her blouse a flattened ghost around her face.
He straightened in his chair, watching her walk inside his office, set her briefcase down before she closed the door.
“Tired?” she asked, still standing.
“Yes.” His admission surprised him. “What are you doing here?”
“Just nosing around a bit.”
He shook his head. “Status quo . . . but you know with serials that can change in a moment.”
“I wasn’t necessarily referring to the investigation.” She moved closer to his desk, picked up the jade piece.
His eyes followed her hand. Watched her long fingers toy with the green talisman. Her eyes lifted, caught his. “Want to talk?”
He reached and took the jade. “It’s not anything that talk can help.” It was an empty statement, and he knew it.
“Anything else I might do to help?”
This time he braved her gaze.
“Anything at all?” Her voice was low, as she moved around the edge of the desk. “Anything . . .” she whispered, slowly bending over him, swirling his chair around.
“Faith . . .” His voice straining.
“Long overdue, James Sakura.” She separated his legs with her knee, bracing herself against the edge of the chair as her mouth came down and closed over his.
He reached to push her away. Then there was no saving himself, as his hands tightened on her arms, pressing her deeper into him, devouring the kiss she offered.
New toy. He lifted the camcorder, testing the infrared feature in the near-complete darkness of the basement. The newly purchased machine was a Left-brain embellishment, but not without its uses. The Sony, with its heightened sensitivity to electromagnetic radiation, was the favorite of ghostbusters everywhere.