by Harker Moore
She snapped off the recorder, pressed her mouth into a hard line. She would have to reply to her cousin. She must tell Nori that her dream was no more than a mirror of her fear of marriage to Hiroshi. Her family expected such guidance, but she did not always want to see beneath the mist that shrouded the mountain.
At four, behind her blind eyes, she had seen her grandmother fall— the missed step bringing her to the ground, her head hard against the stone lantern in the garden. It had been her first prophetic vision. One that had brought tears to her eyes and had caused her mother and father to think she was ill. She had had a fever, her body on fire like the fire beneath the lids of her eyes illuminating the death of her grandmother. Over and over she had repeated her grandmother’s name, begging to see her.
“Bad dream.” Mama-san had whispered those words in her ear.
But she had not been sleeping. Only in her bed playing with her favorite doll.
Later that evening, when her uncle had come to the house, she knew his words before they were spoken. And after, her mother had taken her into her arms, holding her so tightly that she could feel her frightened heart against her own chest. For a time she harbored a child’s guilt, never certain whether her vision had made what had happened so.
Taiko stirred. She ran her foot down the length of his spine. What would he make of the new one? She shook away the thought. She did not have Dr. Blanchard’s confirmation. Yet she had known the last time, even before she’d seen a doctor.
But she had lost the baby. After only three months she had miscarried. The life slipping away in a small flood between her thighs. Jimmy had been more concerned with her own health than the loss of the child. But she was inconsolable for months. And later a softer sadness had settled inside her, which she had hidden from Jimmy, and most of the time from her own awareness. Except when she visited the little shrine to Jizo she had constructed in her heart and made offerings in remembrance of her water child.
She should not wait for the doctor’s appointment to tell Jimmy. She should tell him tonight. She listened for the door of the genkan to open. Silence. Lightly she touched Taiko’s head with the tip of her toe and sighed. Her husband was once again late.
“Why don’t you pack it up, Lieutenant?” Pat Kelly’s nicotine-wasted voice caught Sakura off guard.
“What’s your excuse, Kelly?”
“Nothing waiting for me at home.”
Sakura picked up his cup, took a sip. “Cold.”
Kelly came into the office, slumped into a chair. He fished inside his jacket, unplugging a cigarette from a crumpled pack. “So what’re you thinking?” He hitched an unlit unfiltered between his teeth.
He stood and walked to the window. “I don’t like this waiting.”
Kelly grunted. “He’ll ante up soon enough.”
“I know.” He came back and sat down behind his desk.
“Lorenzo.” Kelly chuckled. A smoker’s laugh.
Nate Lorenzo. Captain Nathan Lorenzo. An NYPD cop accused of hiring a hit on his wife. His first murder case. A case no one else wanted to touch. Taboo. Even Internal Affairs had played it soft.
“Excuse my language, Lieutenant, but it took big balls to go after Lorenzo.”
“It was my job.”
Kelly shook his head. “There’re ways to do the job, and then there’re ways.”
“I know only one way.”
“That’s what I mean, Lieutenant. This serial ain’t got nothing on Lorenzo. You’ll get him.”
“I don’t feel so confident, Kelly. It’s been two weeks.”
Kelly shrugged, nursing the cold cigarette. “Can’t figure a crazy.”
He picked up the jade disk. “Something is about to happen.”
“That’s the only way we get moving. The only way we get the son of a bitch off the streets.”
“Somebody will die.”
“Somebody always dies, Lieutenant.”
“It feels bad, Kelly.”
The vet half stood, stuffing the worked-over cigarette into his pocket. “That’s how you and Darius got along so well. God knows nobody else could.”
“What do you mean?”
“Those feelings you two get.”
No, he didn’t have Darius’s instincts. “I’m not like Michael.”
“Closer than you think.” Kelly grinned. “You just don’t know it.” Fully rising from his seat, and with what was an extraordinary gesture, he reached across the desk and clasped his arm.
Sakura looked down, covering the old detective’s hand with his own. When he looked up, the air glinted between them. Then he felt the vet’s hand slip from beneath his. The sergeant grinned. It was as close to a real smile as he would likely get from Pat Kelly.
The room had a sour coldness, but Jude Pinot, standing near the bed, had begun to peel off his clothes. His eyes were shut, which somehow made it easier. Even in the darkness he hated to look at this dump, a flop he shared with two other guys. Holing up to sleep like bats in the daylight. Flittering back and forth at night.
At least in the house in Jersey, things had been warm and clean. He could still see his mother, if he wanted, like a movie inside his lids. On her hands and knees, scrubbing at old linoleum more chipped and faded than she was. Working away, as if it were the germs she always talked about that had left him with bruises and broken ribs, instead of that bastard she’d married.
The image scrolled in his brain, her hands come dripping with gray water from the bucket. The same spindly hands that tended him after the beatings. Huge white spiders crawling on his skin with old wash-cloths wrapping ice, binding his wounds with bands of yellowed adhesive. Treating him at home. Not because of the shame. Not even because of the fear. Because emergency rooms and hospitals were full of germs that could kill you. She’d kept him safe from germs, if nothing else.
Jacketless and shoeless now, he pulled off his shirt and tossed it into the corner, breathing in the mattress funk of night sweat and spilled semen. Reminding himself it was freedom he inhaled. That the hustling wasn’t forever.
“What’s that?” He’d turned to see the john taking something from the bag he’d been carrying.
“Camera.” The man showed him. “I want to take some pictures.”
“Whatever.” He shrugged. “You paid for the night.” He walked into the bathroom, thinking it was funny how things worked out. Gil and Chad had been gone since this morning, faceless extras in some porno flick they were shooting out in Jersey, of all places. He’d turned down the gig because he hadn’t liked the idea of doing it on camera. And he never crossed the Hudson. A symbolic thing with him. Never going back. Weird that he’d ended up starring in his own little freak show tonight.
He unzipped his jeans, deciding to think of nothing, finding the softened edge inside his brain, the place where the dope he smoked had nestled and spread. The floorboards creaked. The john had followed him into the bathroom. His penis still aimed at the toilet, he turned, saw what he saw.
His body reacted, moving ahead of his mind. Something … the mask … registered. The canister coming up to spray. He fought at first, holding his breath, his hands protecting his face. But the attempt at flight was a gesture, like most everything else in his life. At the end it was pleasant to surrender.
CHAPTER
6
There was an old stink of fast food and stale sex in the small room. You could have easily missed ASBEEL printed in ash on the dirty wall, if not for the flood lamps the techs had set up. The cold illumination made the body on the mattress appear romantically spectral rather than dead. What the light made of the rest of the room was less forgiving. The only relief in the dingy, cramped space was a tangle of color in an old poster thumbtacked against a closet door: BARBRA, THE CONCERT.
The killer had been slumming, thought Sakura. Except the young victim looked no different from the others. Attractive, fine-boned, lean. The muscles of his body defined more by life on the streets than workouts at any gym. The boy’s mo
uth was fixed in a full-lipped pout, as though he were somehow put out by this final, unfortunate turn of events.
The swan wings jutted out whiter against the soiled mattress ticking, the boy’s delicate fingers cupping his sex in a gesture that seemed oddly modest. In another reality the ash markings inscribing his chest might have been a testament to some primitive rite of passage.
The snap of Linsky’s gloves stopped Sakura’s thoughts.
“Injection marks?” he asked the M.E., his words punctuated by frigid puffs in the underheated room. He could see the wings, the drawing, a new name written on the wall. He needed confirmation of what his eyes could not so easily discern.
Linsky lifted the victim’s arm. “He was a user. Heroin, I suspect.” He inspected the groin and between the toes. “Fairly new at it, it seems.” He pulled at the skin on the inside of the elbow, isolating the site where two fresh-looking marks appeared. “I can’t be positive, but these look like what we’ve been seeing. We’ll run the complete battery of tests. I can’t be specific, but I think this one’s been dead for less than twenty-four hours.” The M.E. moved to the other side of the room and motioned for the gurney to be brought in.
Sakura took another look at the corpse. The cooling-off period was over.
“Seems our killer wasn’t as selective.” McCauley walked up behind him and bent over the body, looking down at the slim wrists. The bruising from the duct tape was clear. The chief of detectives stretched back to his full height, glanced around the room. “This is a rat hole. The kid working the streets?”
“Unconfirmed. But Talbot is talking to the roommate who found him this morning.”
McCauley took out a handkerchief and held it against his face as though he feared contamination. “Who’s this Dr. French you’re bringing in?”
“Forensic psychiatrist. Consults on serials for the Bureau. She was one of my instructors at Quantico.”
McCauley nodded. “An agent?”
“Independent.”
“Good. We don’t need the FBI to tell us how to run things. You know jurisdiction is a sacred cow, Sakura. How good is she?”
“The best.”
McCauley finished with his handkerchief, stuck it back in his pocket. “I said you can bring in whoever you need. If Dr. French can help you get this son of a bitch off my streets, more power to you. I want him. Now.”
He watched McCauley walk out of the room, peel off the latex gloves, and deposit them into the plastic bag the techs had provided. Now, the chief had said, but Sakura had not understood it as an ultimatum. At least, not yet.
Hanae sat before the small Buddhist altar she had brought with her from Kyoto. She was preparing for meditation and was thinking about Willie, who was arriving today in New York. Willie, a Catholic who struggled with her religion, had once joked after reading a book on Japan that the Japanese must surely be the pack rats of religion, tucking away bits and pieces of spirituality to pull out what was needed at the moment.
She had laughed and admitted it was true. It was a common saying that every Japanese had a Shinto wedding and a Buddhist funeral, a generalization that was both more and less than accurate. The actual situation was more complex. Taoism and Confucianism, even Christianity, were all part of the religious and ethical mix in Japan.
Today she must be a Buddhist. Offering her thanks for Willie’s coming. Meditating on why Willie’s arrival should bring such a sense of relief. Certainly, she liked Willie very much, from the time when Jimmy had attended the academy at Quantico. She remembered how strange she had thought it at first when her husband had become so familiar with one of his teachers. It was different in Japan, where the rules of hierarchy proscribed a formal relationship between a teacher and student. But also unlike Japan, where friends met in restaurants rather than sharing meals in their homes, Jimmy had invited Willie to their small Virginia apartment for dinner.
She had been so nervous preparing that meal. And Willie had come early. But after a short introduction, Jimmy and their guest had taken their drinks to the adjoining living room, where they’d sat and joked about people and cases and things that had happened in class. It had been very pleasant to hear Jimmy laughing about the work that he always took so seriously. But that was the effect of Willie on everyone. Listening to their words and their laughter, she had forgotten her nervousness about the food. So the meal was a great success. And she and Willie had themselves become close over those long months at Quantico.
So, naturally, she was happy Willie was arriving today. Willie was her friend. And Willie was a window that opened on Jimmy’s working world. Willie would tell her the things about his job that Jimmy would not—the dangers and the pressures from which he believed he must protect her.
But that was not all of it. She wanted more from Willie than a wife’s small and secret pathway into her husband’s hidden life. She wanted Willie as part of this case for the same reason she wanted Kenjin. She feared this case. She forced herself to form the word in her mind. She feared it, had feared it since Jimmy had first been placed in charge, although she had at once understood it as both a great challenge and opportunity. But it was not that she thought Jimmy needed his friends’ help. She feared he would need their protection.
Was this one of her presentiments of danger, or something small and foolish? Was she afraid that the more successful Jimmy became in his work, the less important she would be to him?
She had never resented Jimmy’s dedication. Her husband was indivisible. No split existed between what Jimmy was and what he did. It was this wholeness in him that she loved, a wholeness that had encompassed her since the day they had met. There was no moment of his life, she knew, of which she was not a part. And so it would be with their child.
Foolish, foolish, Hanae. Was it not simply change that she feared?
She sat upright on the cushion, making a place for stillness. For a long time she remained, contemplating the Noble Truths that all is impermanence, that suffering results from an attempt to confine the fluid forms of reality in the rigid categories created by the mind.
The telephone rang.
The apartment building was an oddity in the city. One of a handful of grand Victorian ladies passed down through a family both rich enough and eccentric enough to resist the pressures toward going condo. The lobby was L-shaped and cavernous. A march of white columns in blue gloom. Carved marble fireplaces more than two decades cold.
A single shaft of late sun pierced through heavy draperies, falling in a hazy spotlight where Hanae Sakura sat in her red coat on one of the faded sofas. Dust motes like frenzied ghosts danced in the beam, whipped up by Taiko’s tail beating a welcome on the carpet.
Michael Darius had come in from the street and was crossing the lobby toward them, Hanae’s eyes tracking as if she could see. He shifted his tool bag to his other hand and leaned down to pet the shepherd.
“You should have called,” he said to Hanae.
“We have not been waiting long.” She reached out a hand to settle the dog. Her pale face, veiled in sun, canted upward to Darius.
He sat down in a chair by the side of the sofa, his knees cutting the light.
“You’re making cabinets?” she asked him.
He smiled. She could smell as well as he the sawdust clinging to his work clothes. “Shelves,” he said, “for a private residence. Rosewood. Very nice.”
“You always do beautiful work.”
He smiled again at the double edge. Small talk was impossible between them. “Jimmy came by here the other night,” he said.
She didn’t answer. She was sitting perfectly still.
“I don’t want to go back to police work, Hanae. Besides, I’m a better carpenter.”
“Is this what you believe?”
“Yes. And there’s always the law….” His words ran out in silence. “Do you want to come up?”
“No.” She smiled. “Jimmy phoned before I came here. They have found another body, but he has promised to try t
o be home for a few hours tonight.” She got up from the sofa, bringing Taiko to his feet. His harness jingled like muffled bells. “I’m going to have something special prepared.”
Darius stood too. He towered over her. “I’m sorry, Hanae, that I can’t do what you want.”
Again her head tilted, following his voice. The black almond eyes were laughing now. “Be selfish, Kenjin. Try to remember what you want.”
Michael Darius entered the bedroom like a man visiting a grave. He walked slowly, approaching the bed, still perfectly made, stopping paces from its padded edge. The thick mattress with its custom sheets and coverlet kept well beyond his reach. As if the bed were a trap.
He stood very still, his glance going to the paintings, to the photograph his wife had abandoned with the other things on the vanity. Allowing the memories to come. Aware of the scent that had enveloped him from the moment he’d entered. The odor of civet and roses that still lingered.
He turned and walked out, closing the door behind him for the last time. Knowing as the vow was renewed that it would not be kept.
He went to the kitchen and fixed himself a sandwich, as if the routine of living were a cure that might someday take hold. He took his plate to the living room and set it down on the table. The photographs still lay where he’d thrown them the night of Jimmy’s visit.
He pushed the plate away and pulled the eight-by-tens toward him, laying the shots of the crime scenes like a game of solitaire, placing the victim close-ups side by side. Three gay men, very similar in body type. Die-cut fodder for the killer’s sick fantasy. The homosexual context seemed obvious, even glaring. So why didn’t he buy it? What made him so sure that the obvious here was wrong?
As always when looking at dead bodies, thoughts of his sister could not be avoided. And the time away from police work had taken away the blunted edge of routine. Elena’s murder, when he had been in high school, came back with renewed force. His discovery of her body. The strangeness of the way his consciousness had split between horror and a numb objectivity. It was the numbness that had remained. His only interest, the pursuit of justice for the man who had done it. A part-time yardman, quickly apprehended, who had returned to rob, and only incidentally to rape and murder his sister.