Japantown Read online

  “Everyone wants a look-see.”

  This is going to be real bad, I thought as Renna led me toward the kill zone.

  —

  On a rooftop two hundred yards away, a man who used the name Dermott Summers when he traveled lay flat on his stomach and watched Lieutenant Frank Renna walk toward ground zero with a recent arrival.

  Summers sharpened the focus of his night-vision binoculars and frowned. Jeans, flannel shirt, hat, an obscured badge. No city official would show up dressed like that.

  Undercover cop? Maybe. But then why did the lieutenant go over to greet him?

  Summers zoomed in on the newcomer. There was something in his stride, but no, he wasn’t law enforcement. Summers set down the binoculars and picked up his camera. He adjusted the range of the telephoto lens and captured several shots of the new guy.

  This time he noticed the HT, and the hairs on the back of his neck rose. Japanese ball cap? Bad news. But just the kind of news he was charged with discovering—and defusing. That was the beauty of Soga. With deep-cover surveillance on site after the kill, no one could trip them up.

  Summers trained his camera on the new man’s car and snapped a close-up of the license plate, several of the Cutlass, then called in the number. He’d have name and vitals inside thirty minutes.

  At the thought, Summers’s trigger finger twitched. The takedown had been perfect. He’d brooded over being sidelined during the kill, but here was a bonus straight from heaven. He might see some action yet.

  CHAPTER 3

  THE kill zone fell midway between the rest areas.

  The one-block stretch on Buchanan between Post and Sutter had been converted to a pedestrian mall long ago. Soft red brick replaced cold black pavement, and a sushi shop, shiatsu parlor, and a few dozen other shops sprang up along the concourse. Two rest areas provided benches and sculpture and were originally designed to allow shoppers a place to pause and refresh body and mind. Now they framed a scene I would never forget.

  As we approached, portable klieg lights brought the victims into focus: three adults and two children.

  Children?

  My abdominals tensed and something in my stomach began to curdle. Inside a circle of yellow crime-scene tape was a parent’s worst nightmare. I could make out the small neat bodies of a boy and a girl. Someone’s daughter—and the same age as my Jenny, give or take. Nearby lay two men and a woman. A family. And a Japanese one at that. Tourists. This wasn’t a murder scene. This was sacrilege.

  “Hell, Frank.”

  “I know. You gonna be okay with this?”

  Why did there have to be children?

  Renna said, “You can still opt out. Last chance.”

  I waved the suggestion away. Someone had decimated what had once been a vital, functioning household, leaving in the wake of their attack with high-powered weaponry a tossed salad of shredded flesh, frayed garments, and clotted blood.

  The sourness stirred in the pit of my stomach. “This has got to be the work of a psycho. No sane person would do this.”

  “You been around any gang action lately?”

  “Good point.”

  When my parents’ divorce flung me back to Los Angeles, I’d spent five years on the cusp of South Central in a gang-infested neighborhood, then put in two more here in the Mission District grunge before I could afford decent quarters in the Sunset and, after marriage, in my present cupboard apartment in East Pacific Heights. I’d seen my share of corpses, but this outdid nearly any scenario gangland could summon up. Slick purple-red pools of blood had collected in the spaces between the bodies, and viscous streams threaded their way through the brickwork.

  I took a deep breath to settle my nerves.

  Then I saw the mother’s death mask. A tortured face. Despairing. Aware, in the last seconds of life, of the horror playing out around her.

  The sight left me breathless and depleted. Maybe I wasn’t up to this. My limbs grew leaden. Ramming my fists into the pockets of my jeans, I gritted my teeth to restrain my fury.

  One minute the family was strolling through Japantown, the next they faced darkness and death in a foreign land.

  Not a trace of the thief

  but he left behind

  the peaceful stillness

  of the Okazaki Hills

  Years ago, long before we married, Mieko had whispered those words in my ear to ease the pain of my own mother’s passing, my second encounter with the poem. Unbidden, it came to mind a third time when Mieko was killed, leaving Jenny and me to struggle on without her. Now the verse made its presence felt once more and I knew why. Embedded in those four lines was the balm of a larger truth, a comforting kernel of wisdom stretching back generations.

  “You still with me?”

  I dragged myself away from personal demons. “Yeah.”

  Renna rolled a couple of imaginary marbles around in his mouth as he considered my answer. A full head of black hair capped deadpan cop eyes and rugged features. He had a hard face with deep lines, but the lines had soft edges. If his face were a catcher’s mitt, you’d say it was broken in just right.

  Renna stepped up to the crime scene tape and said, “How’s it going, Todd?”

  Inside the tape, a forensic tech scraped up a blood sample. His hair was clipped short and his ears were large and pink. “Some good, mostly bad. This was late night in a commercial district, so we have an uncontaminated site. That’s the good news. Other side is, Henderson was grumbling louder than usual. He’s saying nothing we got is gonna tell us squat even though he’s fast-tracking it. He gathered debris, fibers, and prints and rushed back to the lab but did a lot of frowning. Fiber’s old. Doesn’t think it’s from the shooter.”

  “What kind of prints?” Renna asked.

  Todd glanced my way, then with a look queried Renna, who said, “Todd Wheeler, Jim Brodie. Brodie’s consulting on this one but keep it to yourself for now.”

  We exchanged nods.

  Todd angled his head at an alley. “Hasn’t rained for a while so we got footprints in the passageway alongside the restaurant. Soft and padded and probably silent. A treadless loafer or moccasin-type shoe. Probably the shooter waiting.”

  Renna and I looked at the alley. An unlit walkway ran between a Japanese restaurant and a kimono shop to public parking in the rear. With a balcony extension overhead, the lane was steeped in shade. I scanned the shops to the left and the right. On the other side of the mall was a second alley, but it offered less cover.

  My stomach muscles twitched and I returned my attention to the victims. They lay in a close-knit cluster, arms and legs crisscrossing in places like some grotesque game of pickup sticks. In the brittle white glare of the kliegs, eye ridges cast dark shadows over sinking sockets and highlighted round cheekbones, chic haircuts, stylish clothing. A look I saw three times a year when I flew across the Pacific.

  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 th
e 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

  MOSTLY, 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 Spo
rts 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

  MY 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.