by Harker Moore
Sakura placed a folder next to the black-and-white shots of the walls. Although Whelan had been informed that his visit was connected with the recent homicides, he’d purposely withheld the photographs of the victims’ bodies. Now he opened the file and slid color prints of the two murdered men toward the language expert.
The reaction was surprise, as though the professor were wondering if the range of human behavior could support such conduct. He frowned. “What besides murder is this man doing?” Then in answer to his own question, he blurted out, “Why, the devil’s making angels!”
The cell phone sounded in Sakura’s jacket. He fished it out, flipped open the case. “Sakura,” he responded.
“We just found number three.” Kelly’s voice in his ear.
There was less street activity than might have been expected in front of an apartment building where murder had been committed only hours before. A single patrol car and a crime lab van stood parked near the curb. The uniformed officer who’d remained outside turned as an unmarked sedan pulled up, stopping in midstreet.
The man standing outside the corner bistro watched as a tall figure exited from the front seat, holding a badge aloft, his identity obvious from media reports. In the failing sunlight his skin shone with the pale translucency of Asian flesh, his thinness lightly masked by a navy top-coat he’d worn against an afternoon grown blustery and colder. His black hair was stylishly cut, his eyes intent under delicate slashes of dark brow.
There was an elegant deliberateness, a sense of concentrated intelligence that marked the detective’s actions. One leather-gloved hand pinned the badge to his coat, then reached to tame a maroon tie carelessly blown against the plane of his starched white shirt. He glanced over his shoulder briefly, then turned his attention to the entrance of the building.
The man watched the detective mount the steps, his focus already moving into the interior, to what lay in the bedroom upstairs. Murder had thrice been committed. He had upped the ante on Lieutenant James Sakura.
The third victim’s apartment, like the others, showed no evidence of a break-in. Sakura entered, thinking that there was terrible irony in serial murder. With each death came another layer of impressions, a new set of clues. Hope that at last there would be something that would lead to the killer. Yet nothing seemed different in Westlake’s apartment, except for BARAKEL written above the bed.
The meticulous order of the bedroom was the same. So was the nude body, the wings splayed like blades of scissors. As with the first two victims, there was that quality that seemed to transcend death. He searched for something to ground the scene. But nothing could anchor what was in this room to any world he understood. Westlake’s features were relaxed, almost beatific, seeming to welcome what must have been a horrific death. The nude body appeared genderless, sterile, unviolated in what was usually a sexually motivated crime.
Sakura reminded himself that the grotesque tableau was a map to the killer’s mind, a reaffirmation that the murderer himself was a kind of victim, a slave to the complex fantasy that was driving him to do the things that he did. He stilled his own mind, reducing his focus to the key questions: What had taken place here? Why had it happened the way it had? Who would have committed these crimes for these reasons?
One of the techs, emerging from the bathroom with the black light, interrupted his thoughts.
“The guy’s real careful, Lieutenant. He’s not taking off the gloves. But I think he might have spent some time in the john this go-round. Smears all over the countertop. Maybe some good enough partials on the mirror.”
Sakura nodded. It was a long shot, but clear prints sometimes came through latex. “Tell Murray to take plenty shots of that bathroom,” he said. “Black-and-white and color. And—”
“Yeah, Lieutenant, I know. We’ll look for all the pubes.” The tech went back into the bathroom.
“Linsky shown up?”
Sakura turned at the sound of Lincoln McCauley’s voice. “He’s been notified.”
The chief came through the bedroom door, bent over the corpse. “This one gay too?”
“Unknown. Officer Sanchez is still questioning the friend who called it in.”
McCauley grunted. “Look at him. Pretty as a picture.”
“Mr. Westlake was a model.” Sakura followed the chief’s eyes back to the body on the bed. One thing was sure. There was little gross physical difference among the three dead men. All had been small framed, fine-boned. And with the genitals tucked neatly between the thighs, any one of them could have been mistaken for a particularly boyish female.
The chief stood up. His eyes leaked a predatory look his recently acquired polish couldn’t contain. His smile was nasty. “You’re a hot item, Sakura. Of course the press is a whore. Can turn on you at any time.” He removed a cigar from the case he kept in the inner pocket of his jacket and began working it between his teeth. “They’re calling our killer a serial. Targeting gays. Talked about ritualized aspects in the murders.” He spoke around the cigar. “Read the Post, Sakura?”
“I saw it.”
“Have you now. Well, it seems you may have a leak you need to patch, Lieutenant.” He unplugged the cigar. “I’m out of here. Call me after you hear from Linsky.”
Sakura watched McCauley’s back as he moved out of the room. He had no illusions about his relationship with the chief of detectives. They didn’t like each other.
He walked over to one of the windows facing out onto the street. A taxi below had screeched to a halt, the driver shaking his fist at a woman crossing against the light.
“Well, I’ll be damned, Lieutenant. If it ain’t ‘Miss Assistant D.A.’ herself.” Murray had poked his head out of the bathroom just in time to catch Faith Baldwin jaywalking.
Impervious to the cold, she didn’t have on a coat, and Sakura watched her body glide inside the man-tailored suit as though she wore nothing at all. A wisp of chestnut hair was momentarily trapped inside the frames of glasses she didn’t need, but in true Baldwin style used only for effect.
“Think she’s a dyke?” The other tech joined them at the window.
“She’s got big enough balls. But I figure her for a nympho. Fire under all that ice.” Murray laughed, began reloading his camera.
Sakura turned away from the window. Of one thing he was sure— Faith had balls, but she was no dyke. Their eight-month affair more than five years ago was proof of that. It was a relationship both had agreed to keep secret, and Faith had been more than discreet. In public, the assistant D.A. had made a show of barely tolerating him, her game of high indifference seeming only to intensify what happened between them in bed. His fingers went to his wrist as he recalled the last time they’d made love. Faith had used his own handcuffs on him. It had been a kind of insanity that had both frightened and excited him.
He looked up at the sound of her cool, uninflected voice. “What do we have here, Lieutenant Sakura?” Her green eyes, cool too, met his straight on.
“Something quite unpleasant, Ms. Baldwin.”
“Such decorum, Lieutenant.” She unlocked her eyes and glanced over at Westlake’s corpse.
“I take it this is an official visit,” he said.
She moved fractionally closer. “The D.A.’s office always takes a keen interest in the work of the NYPD.”
He stood still, just breathing, inhaling her fragrance.
“I hope you won’t disappoint me,” she said. “I expect a case I can win, Lieutenant Sakura.”
Three bodies in less than a week. Another day of mobilizing the task force—officers borrowed from other commands to canvass yet one more neighborhood.
Tonight, alone in his office, Sakura was beginning to feel the special fatigue that went with frustration. He had little real hope for the smudged latents they had pulled today from the mirror in Westlake’s bathroom, and a second session with Greenberg this evening had gotten him nothing new. The gallery owner, whose alibi checked out, had denied talking to the press and could s
till provide no connecting link between his partner and Carrera.
Nor did Greenberg know of any connection between his partner and Geoffrey Westlake; though like many others in the city, he had certainly been aware of the model’s work as an actor in TV ads. The evening news had played it big, with commentary voiced over running clips of Westlake’s commercials—local celebrity, a Halloween-night victim of what they were now all calling a gay serial killer.
Geoffrey Westlake’s friends and associates had apparently had little compunction about outing him after his death. Zoe Kahn would have plenty of company in tomorrow’s morning editions. Sakura could only hope for some time before any more details leaked. They had already suffered the first of what would certainly become many false confessions. A copycat could be next.
For a moment he let himself give in to exhaustion, and closing his eyes, he massaged his temples. Above him the banks of fluorescents buzzed like insects. One tube, going bad, enhanced the illusion of tiny frenetic wings beating between him and the light.
In the black behind his eyes, an image of Faith arose, as if it had been waiting for the moment. He had managed to avoid working with her all these years only because she was avoiding him too. Apparently, her interest in this case was too great for any consideration of personal feelings. Faith had always had a way of attaching herself to high-profile cases.
But a case high powered enough to advance a career could also blow up in your face. There could be nothing worse for a prosecutor than failing to convict a man whom the media had painted as a monster and a threat to public safety. Faith was, as she’d said, counting on him not to box her into a trial without a solid chance of conviction. Her trust in him was flattering.
And the truth was he trusted her too. Not that she would cover his errors or make excuses to the press for his mistakes, but neither would she stab him in the back. Faith had no sentiment, but she did have integrity. Their past emotional involvement would never be allowed to affect her professional judgment. She was the best the D.A.’s office had, and he should be grateful she was on the case. He had just not been prepared for his own visceral reaction.
He opened his eyes, studied his hands white with chalk from the blackboard. He hated getting chalk on his fingers. The dryness made his flesh plump up, feel tight and lifeless. He took out his handkerchief, the one Hanae washed and ironed and made sure he was never without, and rubbed his hands. He noticed that the white dust had made perfect tracings of his fingerprints. What he needed was a trip down the hall to wash up, but he was not yet ready to concede another day’s defeat.
With so little to go on, he’d been concentrating the efforts of his people on reconstructing the last few weeks of Carrera’s and Milne’s lives. But despite extensive interviews, nothing had been discovered which tied the two together or suggested why either might have been targeted for murder. Canvasses of the neighborhoods had so far produced neither witnesses nor suspects, and the days had gone by in a blur of paperwork adding to no result. With today’s discovery of Westlake’s body, the process was repeating under the intensifying scrutiny of the press. Not that it mattered. Press attention was an annoyance, not a goad. He needed none beyond his own drive.
He accepted his ambition. He had thrived on testing himself for as long as he could remember. That his need to excel might spring at least in part from the unusual circumstances of his youth was not something he usually examined. The past was the past.
He had no real memory of his mother or his early life in New York. His first clear memories were of his bed in the house on Hokkaido, the smell of the sea, and the sight of his grandfather’s prize roosters strutting in the little yard.
In many ways the years in Japan had been his happiest. And, certainly, sending little Akira to be cared for by his grandparents must have seemed to Isao, his father, the most rational solution to the problem of a motherless two-year-old. Who else was there to care for him? His mother, Mai, a student like his father, had been third-generation American. Her father lived fairly near in New Jersey, but her own mother had died nearly as young as she from the same heart condition.
In the house on Hokkaido, the existence of his father had played like an undertone to the rich sensory mix of his child’s life on the rural coast of Japan. There were photographs and letters to his grandparents, with always a word for him. And then the one short summer visit when he was almost seven.
His father had returned for O-bon, the Feast of the Dead, when the ancestral spirits of each family were honored. What he remembered most about that visit was the joy of his grandmother as she prepared for the festival, cleaning and dusting, hanging out the red lantern that would guide the spirits home. It had seemed to his child’s mind that it was his father she was guiding, as much a spirit to him as his long-dead ancestors.
But his father had at last appeared, very tall and real, with gifts for everyone and fruit and flowers for the family altar. It had been a good time, and at the end of the week, they had attended the celebrations in the nearby city. Amid the food, and the dancing, and the fireworks, his father had helped him place his little raft with its paper lantern among the others on the river. It was Toro Nagashi, the floating lanterns meant to comfort the spirits as they left again on their way.
His father was to leave the next day, and he woke to a change in the house. Anger in his grandfather. Tears from his grandmother, which were more than the sorrow of a son’s parting. His father had taken him aside in the garden and revealed the story of his secret life, like offering up a peach. It seemed he had remarried and become a United States citizen. Even after the training in his specialty was completed, he would not be returning to Japan. And he, Akira, must also return to the land of his birth. Someday soon he would be sent for to live with his family in America.
And so with this promise, his father had once again disappeared from the ordinary course of his life, leaving him as one marked amidst the chaos he’d created.
Letters arrived with photos now of the blue-eyed wife and the children. A son, Paul, only two years younger than himself. And Elizabeth, the three-year-old daughter. But no word of when Akira was to join them. It would be four years before that summons came.
He shook his head, an unconscious gesture of denial. He had read somewhere that Japanese emigrants more quickly than any other group lost their language and their culture. This might seem odd in a society where ethnic identity was so strong, but it was simply a fact that Japaneseness was not easily sustained outside the unique context that created it.
And though it was so with his father, whose own Japaneseness had fallen so easily from his shoulders, it was not exactly so with him. Certainly, he was American, not only by birth but by conviction and choice. And yet, if James Sakura believed anything at all, he believed that some essential element of his being had been forged in those misplaced years on Hokkaido, that his tamashi, the core of his soul, was Japanese.
He realized he had been refolding the handkerchief in his hand, duplicating Hanae’s pattern. And now he tucked it back inside his breast pocket. He reexamined the chalkboard, for what seemed the hundredth time, hoping to discover somewhere in the tidy display of his writing, something of the spirit of his killer. Despite all manner of modern detection, was it not a man’s tamashi that must ultimately betray him?
If a serial killer had a soul? It was a question he’d once half jokingly asked at an after-hours bull session at Quantico of the instructor who’d asserted in class that serial killers were not fully human. Serial killers had souls, Dr. French had replied, but their consciences were undeveloped, and as sociopaths, they were as incapable of moral judgment as a two-year-old. Sakura had not agreed, and yet her answer had disturbed him. It disturbed him now.
He was shaking his head again. There was more than enough that was troubling about this case without dragging in the intangible. Like the ease with which the killer gained access to his victims. His boldness in killing them in their own apartments, where he apparently rema
ined for hours, performing a ritual that included cleaning and posing their bodies. According to Linsky’s estimate, Milne had died late on Sunday night. Was it only luck of one sort or another that had prevented Jerry Greenberg’s earlier than scheduled return from interrupting the murder of his lover?
The killer’s luck had held again last night. An electronic card system let residents in and out of Westlake’s building. The model had been noticed by one of the other residents leaving at around nine o’clock. No one had seen his return. But with no sign of forced entry, it seemed probable that the killer had been someone he’d brought back to his apartment.
Sakura picked up the jade disk from his desk, a good luck talisman, a gift from his uncle Ikenobo on his seventh-year matsuri, when he was brought to the local shrine to be blessed. Rubbing its smooth surface, he swiveled in his chair to study the photographs tacked around the chalkboard’s wooden frame. Borrowed photos were juxtaposed with crime scene close-ups of each of the three victims. Greenberg had provided a small color snapshot of David Milne. Carrera and Westlake were represented by eight-by-ten black-and-white posed publicity stills. The gallery owner, the dancer, and the model. If, as now seemed likely, all were victims of a serial killer randomly targeting gays, then what particular set of circumstances had placed each of these three men in whatever territory their murderer considered his hunting ground? And what was the unwitting set of cues that had pushed the killer over the line and made each man’s selection as a victim inevitable? What had each man done or said that singled him out, fitted him for the passive role inside the killer’s fantasy?
Johnny Rozelli’s familiar laugh rang out in the squad room. Sakura turned from the blackboard and looked through the glass that fronted his office. Talbot and Rozelli, two of the four detectives from his unit, were still working the keyboards. With this third murder his Special Homicide Unit was being expanded into a task force, McCauley allowing him to handpick from among the available officers. He was confident in his people, and yet there was still that void he always felt in moments like this one. He was not himself immodest—he understood his own value well—but Michael Darius had something that went beyond ordinary cop instinct, a gut-level ability to quantum leap the facts that had little to do with either logic or training. He looked at the stack of files littering his desk. Would Michael see something in this jumble that he continued to miss?