Japantown (3 page)

These Japanese were from Tokyo.

In fact, if this were old Japan, the scene might have found its way into a woodblock print when the genre veered away from the “floating world” and other lighter subjects. I had clients who snapped up the more grotesque
ukiyo-e
prints with ghosts and goblins and gore. The pictures weren’t as graphic as the spectacle before me, but some came close, for in the old days before photography ukiyo-e, and variations of the art, served a secondary purpose of reporting the events of the day. They functioned more as a premodern data stream than art, which is why they made their way west to Europe as disposable wrapping material for breakables, much as newspaper is used today.

Renna spoke in a low growl. “The kill went down fast. Automatic at close range. Maybe four-five rounds a second. Ejected casings scattered like peanut shells. Bastard didn’t care too much about leaving them.”

“Awfully arrogant,” I said. “Add high-level firepower, what’s that say? Psycho or gang?”

“Could be either. Come take a look at this.”

Shoving his hands in his pockets, Renna ambled around to the far side of the scene. I trailed after him until we stood at the point closest to the mother, which also gave us a different angle on the children. The boy’s mouth was slack, his lips ice blue and parted. The girl’s long black hair fanned across the brickwork. She wore a glistening red dress under a pink coat. The dress looked new and very much like the kind of thing my daughter might dream of wearing.

I raised my hand to block the glare. The girl’s fingers were plump with baby fat and curled around a furry lump matted with blood. I thought I recognized the lump. “That a Pooh bear?”

“Yeah.”

I was suddenly aware of the frigid night air coursing through my lungs. Aware that tonight only a thin yellow band of tape separated the living from the dead. That the frail girl on the cobblestones, clutching a favorite toy, resembled my Jenny to an uncomfortable degree.

Renna thrust his chin at the mother. “That look familiar?”

My eyes swept over the scene from our new position. About six feet from where we stood, a scrap of paper floated in a pool of blood near the mother. On it was a kanji character, which crawled over the note’s
fiber-rich white surface with the jagged, free-form sprawl of a giant spider.

Kanji were the basic building blocks of the Japanese writing system—complex, multistroke ideographs borrowed from the Chinese hundreds of years ago. Blood had seeped into the paper and dried to the brownish purple of old liver, obscuring the lower portion of the character.

“Does it?” Renna prodded.

I shifted to the left to cut the glare of the kliegs—and froze.

Illuminated in the unforgiving white light was what looked to be the same kanji I’d found the morning after my wife died.

CHAPTER 4

M
OSTLY
, I remember the bones.

The inspector and his team had spread black plastic tarp across my in-laws’ front lawn and were laying ash-covered debris out in a grid as they reclaimed items from the rubble. Shapeless blocks of melted metal. Scorched slabs of cement. And, in a discreet corner behind a freestanding screen, a mounting collection of charred bones.

Over the next two months I spent all my time attempting to track down the kanji spray-painted on the sidewalk. It had given me purpose, a way to attack my grief. If there was a message to be had about Mieko’s death, I wanted to find it.

Calling in a pile of markers, I received introductions to experts all over the United States and Japan. But no one could read the kanji. No one had ever seen it. The damn thing didn’t exist. Not in the multi-volume kanji dictionaries. Not in linguistic databases. Not in regional records dating back centuries.

But I’d laid eyes on it myself, so I dug deeper. I applied the same techniques I used to trace an elusive piece of art, and eventually I unearthed a lead. In a musty corner of a mildew-laden university library in Kagoshima, a wizened old man approached me. He had heard of my inquiries and asked to see the kanji, then insisted on anonymity before he would speak. I consented. Three years ago, he told me, he had seen the same kanji next to a body in a suburban park in Hiroshima, and it had also been found at another murder site in Fukuoka fifteen years earlier. But my only witness was clearly terrified of something and vanished before I could drag any further details out of him.

Renna knew about my hunt for the kanji—he and Miriam had watched Jenny during my crazed string of trips to Japan, comforting her while her father communed more with the dead than with the living.

I said to the lieutenant, “Is a closer look possible?”

He shook his head. “Can’t move it yet. Can’t allow you inside the tape. But from here, you think it’s the same?”

“Ninety percent chance.”

“What’ll close the deal?”

“Need to see it without the blood.”

Before Renna could reply, someone near the patrol cars shouted for him. Muttering under his breath, Renna stalked off and dove into a huddle with a plainclothes detective. They exchanged some words I couldn’t hear, after which Renna signaled to a female detective with cinnamon-brown hair, good muscle tone, and no makeup. She separated from the crowd.

“Sir?”

“Corelli,” Renna said, “have you done this before?”

“Twice, sir.”

“Okay. Listen up. I want teams of two knocking on any door with lights. As soon as it’s decent, say six, hit the rest. Get warm bodies up Buchanan checking the apartment complexes on both sides of the mall for witnesses. Hit anyplace on the hill that overlooks the crime scene. Send two teams to rip apart the Miyako Inn, where the vics were staying. Find out if anyone saw or heard anything and if any members of the family had contact with the staff. Talk to all shifts. Drag them out of bed if you have to. Got that?”

“Yes, sir.”

I wondered if the police footwork would ferret out any useful information. Should the killer prove to be even half as elusive as the kanji, Renna’s efforts would lead nowhere.

“Good. Next, bring me the hotel bill, luggage, and a computer printout of any calls in or out. Order a full workup on the rooms for prints and fiber and get onto the Japanese consulate for a list of any friends the vics might have in town, the state, the country. In that order.”

“Okay.”

“You find any walk-by witness yet?”

“No, sir.”

“Anyone in the coffee shop?”

“No, but that’s where the deceased last ate. Tea and cake for the adults, sundaes for the kids. Third night running. They were on their way back to their rooms when they got hit.” She pointed to the Miyako Inn’s blue sign beyond the far end of the pedestrian mall, glowing benignly behind the towering twin pillars of a red torii gateway designating the northern edge of the concourse.

Torii were most often composed of two red, inward-leaning columns surging up into the sky and topped by a pair of horizontal rails. They were symbolic structures from Shinto, Japan’s indigenous religion, and usually mark the approach to a shrine, where sacred ground begins. This one was decorative and marked the north face of the Japantown mall, its placement at the boundary of a commercial district faintly sacrilegious.

Renna pursed his lips. “But no witnesses?”

“No.”

“Who heard it?”

“Most of the people in Denny’s, for starters. But this close to the projects, they either thought it was gangs or firecrackers.”

In other words, no one was willing to venture into the night to confirm the source of the noise.

“Okay, close off the area. Don’t let anyone out until our boys have their vitals and don’t let anyone in unless they have a note from God. Got it?”

“Yes, sir.”

“And Corelli?”

“Sir?”

“Did you call Bryant HQ for the rest of my people?”

“That’s next on my list but—”

Renna’s eyes narrowed. “What?”

“It’s a lot of manpower. Are you expecting heat on this one, sir?”

“I’m expecting it to rain large political turds—why?”

“Never mind.”

Corelli bolted with newfound motivation and Renna stomped back to my bench. “We got computer-confirmed IDs off the family’s passports. Hiroshi and Eiko Nakamura, kids Miki and Ken. Mean anything?”

“No. But there’s probably a million Nakamuras in Japan.”

“Smith and Jones?”

“Yeah. You have a Tokyo address for them, right?”

“Not yet.”

“It’ll be Tokyo.”

“You sure?”

“Yeah. Grooming, clothing, they’re from the capital.”

“Good to know. How about Kozo Yoshida? The second male.”

I shrugged.

Renna’s eyes roamed the mall. “Not unexpected. Now, refresh my memory. Tell me everything about the kanji and why you still can’t read the goddamned thing. And make it simple.”

—

Two miles off the California coast, a man in his early thirties sat at the stern of a thirty-six-foot Sports Fisherman with twin Volvo engines piloted by Captain Joseph Frey. The boat chugged doggedly through rolling Pacific swells, navigating a course for Humboldt Bay, two hundred fifty miles north of San Francisco. The passenger and his three companions posed as affluent Asian businessmen wanting to fish the Northern Californian seaboard. Tackle was hooked and oiled. Live bait swarmed at the bottom of a steel tank, blue slivers darting in the moonlight.

This was their third excursion in the last two weeks with Captain Frey, who hoped they would become regular customers. The previous weekend, they’d trolled south of San Francisco, laying line at three lively locations between the city and Santa Cruz, where the four men had deboarded for an IT convention due to start the following day. The weekend before, they’d headed three miles straight out for some serious deep-sea fishing. On this trip, the captain’s prized customers wanted to drop line at a string of favored sites on the way north, then disembark at Humboldt and catch an evening plane to Portland for a regional company conference.

What Captain Frey didn’t know was that this would be their final trip together. In fact, it would be the last time his passengers would set foot in the Bay Area for at least five years.

The rules of Soga forbade it.

At the front of the craft, one of the men engaged Frey in conversation, asking about the best place to lay for lingcod. While holding a steady northerly course, the captain described the sweet spots he would hit on the seaboard, gesturing with enthusiasm to unseen fishing grounds beyond the bow. Unobserved by Captain Frey, the man in the stern unzipped a black sports bag at his feet, extracted the Uzi submachine gun used for Japantown, and dropped it overboard into the frothy chop, where the weapon began a journey to the murky floor forty-five hundred feet below.

CHAPTER 5

M
Y
nightmare was beginning again.

I looked over at a clutch of uniformed cops huddled at the barricade. To fight off the sea-chill, many of the patrol boys wore black leather jackets over their summer blues while the detectives hunkered down in trench coats or heavy-duty parkas. Some talked, some listened, and more than a few fired quick glances down the corridor of shops toward us.

No, that wasn’t right.

Toward the bodies.

Uncertainty was the prevailing emotion. It spoke of violation and despair in a way you rarely saw in officers of the law, but this was the unhealthy mix I’d lived with every day since my wife’s death four years ago, when she flew to L.A. to help her parents with some immigration papers.

—

The call woke me at 6:49 a.m., the police having gotten my number from a neighbor. I grabbed the next commuter flight to LAX and pulled up in a rental car while the fire inspector was still working the site.

When I introduced myself, he gave me a sympathetic look. “These cases, what can you do? With your older homes, you get slippage. Say you have substandard electrical, or it stresses during a strong quake or punchy aftershock. A conduit tube might pop from its power box, taking the wires with it. If they connect to an unused outlet, it goes unnoticed. Then your years of hot L.A. weather parch the two-by-fours, and
when the exposed wire eventually droops and comes in contact with a beam—up she goes. Unless any of the victims were a smoker, that’ll probably be our culprit.”

“None of them smoked.”

“Well, there you go, then.”

I stood on the sidewalk in a daze, watching absently as the excavation continued. My wife, her parents, and a visiting uncle had slept in the house the night before.

It was while waiting for the fact-finding exercise to wind down that I noticed the kanji. Mieko’s parents lived five blocks from my old place, so I knew the neighborhood well. The area was integrated and gang infested, with the typical graffiti eyesores. Much to my surprise, embedded in the territorial markings of the local Salvadoran gang was a Japanese character. It was sprayed on the sidewalk in the same black, red, and green, intentionally mimicking the gang’s highly abstract hieroglyphics. To the uninitiated it blended in, just another gratuitous defacement. However, if you could read Japanese, it sprang out at you with the aggressiveness of a 3-D graphic. And the paint looked newer.

Asian gangs cruised the area, so the kanji’s presence was not unusual. But because I found it outside the house where my wife had just died, and because old friends in the neighborhood told me they hadn’t seen the marking before, I became suspicious.

Once I confirmed that the kanji hadn’t shown up elsewhere in the area and wasn’t listed in any dictionary, I headed to Japan, where the old man cornered me in the library and divulged his secret. Seemingly fearful for his life, he disappeared the second I turned my back. But the fact that someone else had actually seen the kanji—and, shockingly, only at murder scenes—was a godsend.

But only to me.

Those who should care didn’t.

When I approached the Japanese police in Hiroshima, I received a sympathetic but condescending reception. No one could recall such an incident or had heard of an unreadable kanji. Besides, they told me, hundreds of parks dotted the suburban landscape. Reluctantly, they allowed me to fill out the appropriate paperwork, then quietly ushered me to the exit with endless bows and an assurance that they would be
in touch if something turned up. Nothing turned up. The LAPD didn’t bother with paperwork; they just laughed me out the door. Two weeks later the fire inspector’s office declared the blaze accidental and the police closed the case.