by Harker Moore
“Coffee or hot chocolate?” Adrian Lovett asked, matching her steps as she walked down the stairs.
“Tea.”
“Tea, of course.” She heard the sharp zip-zip of his jacket. “There’s a little place right around the corner. We can even sit outside, if you think Taiko would be more comfortable…. Up for a short walk?”
“I love walking. I walk in the park at least twice a week.”
“Central Park?” She could hear the muffled slide of his hands into gloves.
“Yes, Taiko and I need the exercise.”
“When did you get him?”
“Soon after I moved to the city. A friend of mine thought it would be a good idea.”
“Have Taiko, will travel.”
“I don’t …” She’d turned toward him.
“A stupid joke. Old American television show.”
The metallic jungle of Taiko’s harness made high-pitched notes as they moved. The afternoon sun stretched cool skeleton shadows across the pavement, and dry leaves scratched the cement in a wild game of hopscotch. From behind someone laughed, a perfect sound, like a single egg cracking. Hanae shivered.
“Cold?”
“No, I love cold weather.”
“We don’t have to sit outside.”
“No, it will be fine. Taiko will like that better.”
“Well, here we are.” She felt his hand touch the center of her back, direct her toward a table.
He ordered her a pot of tea and a cup of black coffee for himself.
“Are you enjoying the class?” she asked, pulling off a glove, lifting her cup.
“Very much. But I’m not very good. I’m doing it mostly for therapy.”
“Therapy?”
“To relax. My job gets a bit stressful at times. I’m a Web designer, and all my clients want everything yesterday. But I can’t seem to get anything done until after the sun goes down. I’m what you’d call a night owl.”
“A wise bird.”
“I don’t know about that. I read somewhere that owls are stupid.”
She laughed. “I have become something of a night owl too. I cannot sleep until my husband comes home.”
“What does he do?”
“My Jimmy is a policeman.”
“Jimmy … as in Lieutenant James Sakura, NYPD?”
“Yes.”
“Big case he’s working on.”
She nodded, taking another sip of tea.
“I’m separated,” he said. “One son.”
“A son”—she could feel herself smiling—“… how old?”
“Eight next month. He was a Christmas present.”
“Will you see him for his birthday?”
“Actually, my ex and I are good friends. I pretty much get to see Christopher whenever I want”—he took a swallow of coffee—“but what I can’t figure is how you sculpt the way you do?”
She removed her other glove, set it down with the other. Taiko was running his muzzle against her leg. “May I …?” she asked.
Then she reached across the table, taking his face into her hands. A small muscle jumped in his neck, flinched as though she’d surprised him. Her palms pressed lightly against the bones of his cheeks, the ends of her fingers learning the texture of his skin. At first she moved tentatively, like the uncertain landing of a small insect, then her hesitancy gave way to a steely strength. A sculptor’s hands seeking to mold the contours of his jaw and chin, setting in place the curves and planes of his features. Her thumbs resting at last inside the deep wells of his eyes.
“You are older than I thought,” she said, letting her hands fall into her lap. “And your eyes are green.”
GAY KILLER RELIGIOUS FANATIC? the cover headline screamed. Willie, waiting for Jimmy in his office, picked up the Post from the waste-basket near his desk. It was last Thursday’s edition, and the article had featured disturbingly accurate details of the incense burned at the scenes. She tossed the rag back in the trash.
“Hi.” Jimmy came in and sat down, offering her tea.
“Thanks.” She accepted. She had found the morning exhausting.
“How are you and Michael getting along?”
“Okay.” She watched him preparing the tea. “I can’t say that visiting the Milne and Westlake crime scenes has given me any brilliant new insights. Darius may have something…. What about you?”
Jimmy gave a negative shrug. “We had a couple of names come up with Walt’s cross-check program.”
“Oh …?”
“A few people on the Milne gallery list turned up as signers on petition sheets from the neighborhood action meeting. It’s what you’d expect. We’re checking it out, but none of them seem good for the murders.” He poured hot water over the leaves in the pot.
“I don’t guess we’ve had any results yet on the bartender’s composite?” she asked him.
“All the wrong kind. The sketch could fit at least a quarter of the population.”
“You get back the lab work on Pinot?”
Jimmy nodded. “Same pattern, including the LSD. Only difference, he was positive for marijuana. Trace of heroin.”
He poured out tea for the two of them, handed her a cup. She watched him sip. The only man who didn’t look silly with a tiny cup in his hand.
“I’m still waiting to hear your theory,” he said, “about how he’s using the LSD.”
She smiled. “What do you know about brainwashing?”
“I think you might have talked about it at Quantico. I’m not sure how much I remember.”
It was an invitation to go on. Jimmy never forgot a thing.
“Well, washing is not the best metaphor for the process.” She settled back in the chair. “Computer terminology works better. Reprogramming the brain … erasing old patterns of thought and behavior, replacing them with new ones.”
“I remember your mentioning the Hearst case.”
She nodded. “Spoiled heiress Patty transformed against her will into machine gun–wielding Tanya. Nice trick, even if the jury didn’t buy it.”
“But you believe she should have been acquitted?”
“Patty Hearst wasn’t guilty of anything more than possessing a human brain,” she said. “The jury just didn’t want to accept how quickly and profoundly a person’s reality could be changed by someone with the knowledge and ruthlessness to do it.”
She drained her cup, set it down on the desk. “You don’t like that idea, do you, Jimmy? You think you could have resisted.”
“Are you saying nobody could?”
“No. And certainly if you understand the process, that’s a defense.”
“Make me understand it.”
“The human brain is designed to accept certain kinds of software,” she said. “If the software is properly structured, and presented at the appropriate time, the brain will imprint the program—no questions asked.”
“What do you mean … imprint?”
“Although we don’t generally call what we do to our children brainwashing, we’re all programmed into modes of thought and behavior by our parents, society, and whatever culture we’re members of. From infancy on we build up a functioning model of the world, that little bubble of personal reality we so stubbornly mistake for the real thing.”
“But the model can be changed?” he said.
“It can be modified as we process new information. But the core realities that we develop early in life are extremely difficult to change.”
“But the Hearst case implies that they can.”
She nodded. “The subject must be returned to the infantile state. In the case of Patty Hearst, the SLA ripped her violently out of her old life, then isolated her for months in a dark closet. Functionally, she was returned to the womb and made totally dependent on her captors for all her most basic needs. First food and warmth. Later love and approval. Finally even sex. Every biosurvival circuit in her brain was disengaged from the rich American heiress model and reprogrammed to respond to the Symb
ionese Liberation Army model instead.”
He reached for the pot, poured more tea for them both. “What’s this have to do with the killer?”
He’d always known when to do that, she thought, even in class. Reel her in and return her to the bottom line. She picked up her cup, feeling the heat of the liquid. “The SLA did it the old-fashioned way,” she said. “There’s a faster method of reprogramming that’s more like a conversion experience. Like Saul becoming Paul on the road to Damascus.”
His own tea sat ignored. “LSD?” he said.
“Theoretically,” she answered, “LSD can chemically break down imprints. If the experience is carefully structured, a new set of imprints can be put into place while the subject is still in the vulnerable state.”
“And that’s what you think the killer is doing?”
She leaned forward toward him. “The wings, the writing, the symbol on the chests, it could all be part of what’s technically called the set, part of the structuring. Think about it, Jimmy. Isn’t that what all serial killers crave? For the victim to become part of the fantasy. He’s programming them to actually share that reality tunnel he’s trapped in.”
The audacity of it registered in his voice. “You don’t really believe that’s possible?”
She shook her head. “The subject’s attitude is critical to the process. I can’t imagine that the victims are in any mood to cooperate. Not that it probably matters.”
“Meaning?”
She watched him lift his cup, drink the steaming liquid.
“Meaning he’s probably psychotic,” she said. “It’s only what he believes that counts.”
The reception area of Physicians Plaza was at war with itself. The walls, tempered into a cool institutional gray, were fractured at irregular intervals with canvases of bold color and erratic line. The man, waiting for his three o’clock appointment, decided the raised and crusty pools of red pigment in the largest of the abstract paintings reminded him of drying blood.
He brushed back the cuff of his sleeve and checked his watch. It was now three-thirty, but he was a forgiving soul. His regular orthopedist had taken a last-minute ski trip with his family for Thanksgiving, and an associate was going to see him. He had never seen Dr. Kerry and was slightly disappointed he wouldn’t be seeing Hendrick, since this was probably his final checkup. He’d already gotten clean bills of health from Dr. Patel and Dr. Skidmore.
He heard his name called and looked up to see a pretty blond nurse standing at the entrance to the examination area.
“I’m Diana Tierney”—she smiled—“Dr. Kerry’s nurse.” She opened the door wider. “I’m sorry for the wait.” She apologized over her shoulder as she led him down the long hall.
“No problem,” he answered her breezily.
She opened the door to exam room 3. “It shouldn’t be too long.”
“Just grateful Dr. Kerry was able to fit me in.”
“We help each other out around here.” Another smile. “Any problem with the leg?”
“None at all,” he reassured her.
“Doing the exercises the therapist showed you?” She was studying his chart.
“Graduated to full body workouts,” he boasted.
“Great. Wish all our patients were as conscientious.” She reached for the paper sheet. “If you would remove your pants and cover your legs with this.”
“Of course,” he said.
He glanced around the room. The walls were sage green. He thought he might have been in this room before, but couldn’t recall ever seeing the painting over the examination table. Another abstract. This one smaller than the ones in the waiting room. No blood here.
He heard the voice first. Telling Nurse Tierney something about another patient. Then the sound of the door opening. The first thing he saw was the hand, beautifully manicured, extending toward him, taking his own into its soft dry palm. Then the voice again. Introducing himself. Saying something about the fine progress he’d made. Now he drew back the sheet, running the cool tip of a finger down the pale and puckered flesh of his scar.
The man looked up, finally focusing, forcing his other senses to shut down. Only his eyes fed. Inhaling, swallowing, ingesting the light exploding like a nova from the physician’s head. Pouring out from the sockets of his eyes, the narrow nostrils of his nose. Spilling from his open mouth, from between even white teeth.
He willed himself to breathe air, his heart to pump. Blood through vessels. Stay in control, spoke the small voice inside his head.
More than a year ago, he had met Luis here. A patient like himself. Never, even in his dreams, had he expected to find another.
Almost a week now since Pinot and nothing learned from his death. If there was a different feel to the murder of the young hustler, it was a difference of degree, not of kind. Sakura threw down the report he’d been reading, a completely unenlightening interview with one of Pinot’s roommates. Perhaps it was only the dry simplicity of the reporting officer’s prose, but Gil Avery seemed singularly unaffected by the death of a boy with whom he had shared a room. Life seemed to mean so little to these lost children. Even their own. Had Pinot cared about the waste of his years at the end?
He had worked through lunch, and without a break his efficiency would begin to suffer. He boiled fresh water and poured it into the pot, the pleasant fragrance of his grandmother’s favorite gyokuro sending him back to Hokkaido.
The island was Japan’s northernmost. He had grown up on an unspoiled Pacific coast—cold in winter, but with summers of unimaginable beauty. The family farm grew rice. But his grandfather’s delight was in the breeding of chabo, ornamental bantam chickens.
It was his grandfather’s birds that had raised the dilemma of the fox. Kitsune lived everywhere on Hokkaido, carnivores whose main sources of food were insects and fruit. But it was a hard winter that last year of his boyhood, and one particular fox had discovered his grand-father’s chickens.
The kitsune were sacred to the goddess of rice, and his grandfather paid as much homage to the Kami as anyone. But his chickens were sacred too. So Grandfather declared that the fox’s actions in this case were Kunitsu-Tsumi, a hazard that must be taken care of for the good of the community. Which meant that he, Akira, was given the duty of dealing as he could with the fox.
According to Shinto, animals had spirits that were mono, which meant they could sometimes be mischievous and cause trouble for humans, as it was now with kitsune and his grandfather. So he went to the place in the woods where he had seen fox spoor and made offering of inarizushi, rice-stuffed tofu, which was the favorite food of the foxes that were the messengers of the goddess.
But the spirit of his adversary would not be soothed, and two more of his grandfather’s chickens disappeared. So now he made a wooden trap and baited it with the least valuable of the hens, and he placed the trap at dusk in the forest near the trail where he knew the fox would pass.
In the morning all was well with the birds. His grandfather smiled. But his own heart was heavy as he went with his noose to the forest.
Kitsune was there, very fine in his winter coat, pacing in the small cage, where chicken blood stained red the drifts of snow. So many years ago, he thought now. But the image so clear. And the feeling.
He raised the tea to his lips, letting its astringent sweetness soothe the memory. He had done what he had to do, the duty he owed his grandfather. And immediately after, he had gone to the shrine for purification.
But locked in its wild eyes, in the moments before the rope, had he not in his boy’s heart envied kitsune his freedom?
The lightbulb on the second-floor landing was out. Michael Darius stood in the unwholesome dark, knocking on the door to 23. He got no answer—as expected. According to the girl who rented the room below him, the guy who was living here now was out most nights. He reached into his pocket for the pick, adding illegal entry to his sins.
The apartment inside was cold and incredibly tiny. Paint peeled in scabs fro
m the discolored ceiling. It was amazing what people would put up with to live in this city. Westlake, when he’d stayed here, had been working regularly as a model. But the money, no doubt, had gone for restaurants and clothes. He must have jumped at the invitation to move into Lindel’s apartment.
Had it been only after the move that Westlake had been targeted by the killer? It was the question he had come here hoping to answer. A call to the actors’ union had gotten him Westlake’s old address, which was still in their files. But now that he was here … He looked around at the scarred and mismatched furniture, at the personal possessions of a stranger. And felt nothing.
At least he was alone. It had been difficult with Willie French looking over his shoulder. Even now she remained at the periphery of his vision, her beauty with the bluntness of a threat. He couldn’t let that matter. And with her or without her, it had made no difference. Milne, Westlake, and then alone at the Pinot murder scene, he’d come away with nothing more than that same haunting uneasiness he’d first experienced in Luis Carrera’s apartment.
There was nothing of that here. And nothing left of Westlake, even if it were still his name on the lease. Crazy, that even this dump could be a sublet. As much as he loved this city, he doubted that he could stand for long to inhabit such circumscribed space.
He turned off the light, walked to stand for a moment at the grimy, curtainless window. Across the narrow street was the facing glass of an abandoned building—a level black eye, blank and obvious, staring back.
Except for the task force meeting the first thing this morning, Sakura had been at his desk all day. He held a cup of coffee in his hand. He was past the refinement of tea, beginning to feel the physical effects of bad food or no food, and too little sleep. Rest and nourishment caught on the run between bouts with information.