by John Donohue
Micky had been shooting me looks all day, squinting significantly through the smoke of barbecue and birthday cake candles. With everyone fed and presents unwrapped, it was time to rendezvous in the family room. Art slipped in after me, pulling the sliding glass doors to the yard closed.
The family room looked like the place old overstuffed furniture went to die.
“What’s up, Mick?”
“Art’s been following up with that guy Schedel from LA. Getting details to see whether there’s some sort of connection between the two murders.”
I turned to Art. “And?”
“You, my man, are looking at the Dick Tracy of cyberspace,” he commented with a big smile.
“Well, at the very least, we are looking at a dick,” Micky commented under his breath.
Art shot him a look and went on. “It turns out that there have been at least two other homicides of this type in the last week.”
“Come on!” I protested. “The papers would have a field day.”
“Yeah, “ Art answered, “but they didn’t take place in the same area. Homicide is local crime, and these things happened in different states. Unless you’re looking, you wouldn’t find’ em.”“Method is slightly different each time,” Micky commented.
Art shrugged, “Basic underlying pattern is the same.” “What’s that?” I could guess, but I wanted the details.
“The other two victims also were prominent martial arts instructors.”Art ticked the points off on his fingers one by one as he talked. “They checked out OK. No problems with gangs or drugs. No disgruntled students.”
“No disgruntled lovers,” Micky added.
“Both were killed in somewhat exotic ways.” I lifted my eyebrows and Art answered the unspoken question. “The first victim, the guy in LA, was stabbed to death with a broken stick. Coupla days later, a Japanese national in Phoenix named Kubata goes down.”
“Sanjiro Kubata?” I interrupted.
“You know him?”
I nodded appreciatively. Kubata was the real thing. A champion in kendo who had capped a successful tournament career in Japan by relocating to the U.S. to promote kendo here. I’d never met him, but he was said to be charming and talented. He was, from all reports, a master technician, a skilled teacher, and had a real flair for self-promotion. The Japanese had loved him. They called him the “Jewel of the Budokan,” and when he left that famous training hall in Kyoto, his fans wailed.
I couldn’t believe that Yamashita hadn’t mentioned it. I couldn’t believe he was dead.
“Believe it,” Art said. “He sustained a number of serious injuries from some sort of weapon, but the actual cause of death there was strangulation.”
“No rope,” Micky said. “Bruises are consistent with a fairly sophisticated choke technique.”
“OK, pretty gruesome,” I admitted, still trying to adjust to the surprise. “But how is it unusual?” I asked.
Micky fielded the question. Behind him on the wall, an old Republic Pictures poster for Sands of Iwo Jima was beginning to curl away from the scotch tape that held it to the paneling.
“Most homicides are fairly routine in turns of MO. You got guns, knives, and blunt instruments.”
“With beatings,” Art said, “you usually get a victim who has been worked over. All over. Death is usually from internal bleeding and it takes a while.”
“Now for stranglings,” Micky jumped in, “you got your ropes, wires, and what have you. Ligature strangulation and manual. Crime of passion, lots of thumb marks on the front. They like their victims to see them.” He and Art were really warming to their topic.
“But what we see here is different.”“How so?” I asked Art.
“Whoever did this was a pro,” he said. “The victims in both LA and Phoenix were not subject to wild, unfocused beatings, which is what you usually get. Rage killings. In these cases, someone pounded the shit out of them, but boy oh boy, he knew where to pound. The choke job was the same type of thing. Focused.”
“You know, it’s hard work beating someone to death.” Micky said reflectively, like he had considered the option. “Most times, it takes a while. Usually, some restraints are involved. But not here. These killings were almost surgical. The bruises tell us that a pro did it.”
“Let me ask you a question,” I said. “You’re always talking about bruises on the victims. It seems to me that it takes a while for a bruise to form. I know you get some discoloration on a body after death . . .”
“Postmortem lividity,”Art said.
“Right. But that has to do with blood settling. How do you get bruises like the ones you’re talking about? If the victim is killed relatively quickly after the injury?”
Micky’s eyebrows shot up. “Pretty smart, Connor,” he said.
Art looked at him, “Are you sure you two are related?”
Micky grinned. He gestured for us to wait. The glass door slid back and let some of the party noise wash into the room. He came back in with some beers from the big orange cooler on the patio and shook the ice chips off as he handed them to us. Then he walled the family off again and continued.
“When you first look at the corpse, you don’t see the bruises,” my brother told me. “Then you have the M.E. stick him in the cooler overnight.” He popped the tab on the can and took a drink. Micky had stopped being squeamish a long time ago.
“Then you see the bruises,” Art commented. “Sort of like developing a picture.”
“OK, I got it,” I said.
“To get back to the issue here,” Micky continued, “both the other victims appear to have been killed somewhere in the early part of the morning. And . . . “
“And,” Art chimed in.
“Someone signed ‘Ronin’ at each scene.” I sat back in my chair. “Oh, no.”
“Oh, yes,” Art answered. “The messages are slightly different . . .”
“How so?”
“The LA murder just had the signature ‘Ronin,’” Micky replied.
“In Phoenix, the killer added something: ‘I am coming.’ Then the same signature,” Art said.
“So what does that tell you?” I asked.
“Details of the Ronin thing were not released to the press in the Ikagi murder. So a copycat is out.” Micky trotted out the other details. “Killings are geographically dispersed, but they folIow a pattern.”
“We got a request in for a DNA sample from the LA killing,” Art told me. “We’ll compare it with samples from the Kubata and Reilly murders. It’ll take a few days, but we’ll see if they match up.”
“You know they’ll match up, Art,” Micky said.
“OK,” I asked, “and if they match up, what does that mean?” “It means,” Micky said, “that we have a nut job on the loose who gets off starring in his own Jackie Chan snuff film.”
“Well, does it narrow things down for you in terms of suspects?” I persisted. “You know, give you a handle on what the killer might look like?”
“We know he’s probably a male,” Micky said. “But that’s not a big help. Statistically, most killers are. He’s about five feet nine or ten inches and probably right handed.”
“Gee, Sherlock, did you figure all that out by yourself?” Art asked. Then he looked at me and smirked. “Don’t be too impressed, Connor.” He gazed at his partner. “I read the site analysis from the crime lab too, Mick.”
My brother looked sheepish.
“They do an analysis of this kind of thing,” Art explained. “You’d be amazed. From splatter marks, position of the body . . . “
“Star signs, phases of the moon, mood rings . . .” Micky added. “ . . . they can come up with a profile of the killer. Probable sex, age, size. It’s weird.”
“Yeah,” Micky agreed, “but I have to admit, it works. I know old-timers who claim the walls of a murder scene can talk to them.” He looked at me. “But it’s bullshit.” Art nodded in agreement as Micky went on. “These forensic guys, on the other hand, seem prett
y good.”
“Yeah, but other than that, we don’t have much. The DNA comparison is only gonna help us when we get a suspect in custody,” Art pointed out.
Micky squinted off into the distant yard, thinking. “Right now, Connor, our assumption is that this guy is Asian. Japanese. Whoever it is has been pretty well trained. It’s the same in both cases. He’s into this martial arts shit as his method. You look at the victims; they’re connected by the arts. And killed by them.”
It didn’t sound like much when you said it out loud. He continued anyway. “You don’t learn this stuff at the neighborhood Y.”
“So?” I asked.
“It narrows things down some more. Theoretically, at least.”
“Does this help things?” I asked.
“Maybe,” Art explained. He held up his empty beer can and looked at it as if he suspected evaporation as the culprit. Micky got us another round.
“On the one hand, we probably don’t have any records like prints on this guy. Have to go through Interpol. Then again, if he’s a Japanese national visiting the area, we should have INS records.”
“Summer in the city,” Micky commented. ‘’I’ll bet there are thousands of Japanese tourists in town.”
“How’re you gonna run him down?” I said.
Micky smiled evilly. “That, bro, is what newly minted detectives are for.”
“Most Japanese tourists will be traveling in groups,” I suggested. “This guy probably won’t.”
“Ya see? It gets better and better. We’ve got it narrowed down a bit more.” He paused for a minute and looked significantly at Art. They didn’t say anything, but I got the sense of messages flying back and forth through the air. Messages I was not meant to hear.
Art sat forward in his chair and began to speak very slowly and clearly to me. “So think about this, Connor. The link is through Japan. And the martial arts.”
I said nothing, just sipped some beer and watched him work. “So there are three prominent martial artists,” he continued.
“And this guy is . . . I dunno, tracking them down.”
“You sure?” I asked him. He shrugged.
“Oh yeah,” Art said. “The sequence is too tight.” He ticked the points off one by one. “LA . . . Phoenix . . . now here. All within days of one another. The killer is traveling. Messages seem to pretty much bear that interpretation out: all that ‘I am coming, I am here’ shit.”
“High drama,” my brother agreed.
But something was bothering me. “Ya know, I don’t see Reilly as being in the same class as Ikagi and Kubata. Not at all.”
Art nodded. “There’s a link between victims we don’t see yet.”
“Ya follow a trail, it’s because it leads to something,” Micky said quietly. “The trail leads here. The calligraphy confirms it. In LA, it was just the signature, a kind of general announcement. Then Phoenix and a type of warning. But here, the message is that he’s arrived.”
“Question is,” Art commented, “who’s supposed to be getting the message?”
“There’s something we don’t know about that’s happening right under our noses,” Micky groused. “Someone local is reading that message and knowing what it means.”
“What!” I couldn’t believe it.
The expression on their faces told me they were disappointed. So my brother filled me in.
“There’s something your pal the sensei is not tellin’ us.”
“Come on,” I said. “This is all speculation. We don’t really know anything for sure.”
“It feels right to me,” my brother said flatly. He looked questioningly at Art.
“My gut says ‘yeah’ too,” his partner replied. And they waited with that quiet cop intensity for me to say something.
“Maybe whoever is doing this is just a lunatic,” I protested. “The victims might not be linked.”
“Then why kill them?” my brother asked.
“I know something about Ikagi,” I said. “He was a pretty prominent karate instructor. Real old school. Very well respected. Kubata was too. I can dig around and see what I can find out. But they’re both celebrities of a type.”
“Celebrities?” Micky sounded incredulous.
“Well,” I shrugged, “in the martial arts world.”
“Connor,” Art said, “are you saying that Ikagi and Kubata got whacked because Ronin thought they were famous?” He was dubious. “I dunno. We’ll keep it in mind . . . But what about Reilly?”
I shrugged.
“I still think there’s a connection,” Micky finished.
I shrugged again.
“But think of the fun we could have,” Art said with glee. “A celebrity.”
“Killed by a stalker. “ Micky had that look in his eye.
Art continued. “A celebrity stalker.”
“Don’t do this, “ I pleaded. But it was too late.
Micky went on. “A samurai celebrity stalker.”
Art pointed triumphantly to the ceiling. “A psycho samurai celebrity stalker.”
Which seemed to sum it all up nicely.
We sat for a while longer and swirled more beer around in fresh cans, like witches stirring a potion. As I went outside, Micky was punching numbers into the phone. Working the angles.
“Connor,” he called, and I turned back into the room.
“Yeah, Mick?”
“Something like this . . . we know what we’re doin’. Trust me. Talk to Yamashita for us.”
I nodded that I would, but I didn’t feel too good about it.
9. Local Talent
At the heart of both sound and movement there is vibration. Yamashita wants us to be sensitive to sound; he says it has a message. Different types of activity, different places, have distinct aural signatures, he insists. They lay bare the essence of an activity, its spirit. Remaining open to the message that sound sends can help the warrior. Or so my sensei maintains.
The end of the semester at the university has the repressed, tense sound of papers shuffling, like the chitinous noise of frantic insects. I had sensed it all week, even as I grew increasingly distracted by the murder. When I closed my eyes to rest them from the strain of grading papers, I saw the stark finality of Reilly, collapsed and cold at the crime scene. And on the wall, the message that he was here. Ronin. The name spoke of a man adrift. Or free. But from what?
My brother was much more grounded. He was waiting for a DNA report, but it didn’t slow him down. While I was still thinking about killers and exotic martial arts techniques, he got right down to the nitty gritty of police work. “It’s not like the movies,” he preached to me. “Whoever this guy is, he needs to eat. A place to sleep.” Micky believed grunt work would eventually lead us to the killer. But there was vibration here as well: the sense of the ticking of a clock, of time slipping away. Because Ronin was out there.
I had taken a quick look at things from my end, trying to get some information on the two victims. Anything that might give us a clue to Ronin’s identity. And how he chose his victims.
The martial arts world is like that of a lot of other fringe interest groups. You’d think it would be a small place, but once you started looking, you found all sorts of organizations, causes, and publications. The mainstream popular martial arts world is pretty well covered by periodicals like Black Belt and Karate/KungFu Illustrated, but there are a host of others that spring up overnight and fade away almost as quickly. I found a library that kept back copies of the most well established and used them as a starting point.
Of course, the library collection was not complete—the martial arts reading public is poor but enthusiastic and tends to steal back issues with shocking regularity. I was able to plug some of the holes by consulting the back lists that get included with every month’s issue. I used a contact at Dorian’s library to request copies of missing back articles I felt might be useful. Like my brother, I would have to wait on some things, but I plowed ahead.
It was a
fairly tedious process. I sat at a series of battered wooden tables, leafing through back issues that were limp and slightly aromatic with age. I clacked through innumerable computer search engines and Web sites, using up all my spare change printing relevant articles. It was a familiar sort of grind—not much different from academic research, really. By the end of the day, most of the information was coming together.
Ikagi was a fairly prominent karate sensei. The name was vaguely familiar to me even at the onset. There was coverage of him on and off over the years in the magazines I looked at. He had made a big splash when he first came to this country in the ‘80s. He had a tremendous pedigree: a gifted fighter and teacher who at one time had been honored by being asked to help train the emperor’s guards. In short order he became a well-established instructor in LA. He was a big proponent of introducing weapons training—known as kobudo—-into the more mainstream Japanese karate styles. We already knew that a jagged piece of a training staff had been used to kill him. In the weeks before the killing, Ikagi was in the news for helping out with choreography and technical advice for a new movie. It was the third or fourth installment of a shoot-’em-up where the wisecracking star is eventually stripped down to a sleeveless undershirt and takes a volume of punishment that would disable a platoon of Navy Seals. When it hit theaters, you would be able to glimpse Ikagi’s ghost as an extra in one of the group fight scenes.
But there was more to him than this. For all his success, Ikagi was a sensei who never lost sight of the real purpose of training. He was quoted in one article as insisting that the true pursuit of karate was not in perfecting fighting technique but in the spiritual development Ikagi referred to as “mirror polishing.” The phrase had strong links to Shinto and Zen Buddhism, and Ikagi had even adopted the name “mirror polisher” when he did calligraphy. From the various things I read, I got the sense that Ikagi was both tremendously skilled and unusually balanced in his approach to the martial arts.
Kubata, the Phoenix victim, was already known to me by reputation. He had been in this country for only a few months before he was killed. Welcome to the Valley of the Sun. He was part of a concerted effort to popularize kendo here and had launched a series of ambitious seminars that attracted a nationwide audience. Part of it was the result of the impressive charisma the man obviously possessed—they didn’t call him the Jewel of the Budokan for nothing. But I also suspected, after a generation of training, that there were thousands of judo and karate students whose joints hurt too much to continue with their arts and were looking for something else. Not a week before his death, he had been prominently featured on the cover of one of the national martial arts rags with the caption: “Master Kubata Introduces the Art of the Sword.” I knew of any number of teachers who had been laboring at this very goal for years, but modesty had not been one of Kubata’s failings.