Japantown (12 page)

“Like ’em?” I asked, while I was thinking,
How had Noda found the kanji so fast?

Jenny smiled and nodded and shoveled in another mouthful of egg, holding her fork in a close-fisted overhand grip. As she lifted the next mound to her lips, she said, “Uh-oh,” and sneezed twice. The yellow mass flew from her fork as if launched by catapult, smacked against the far wall, and dribbled down onto the carpet.

Eyes wide with apprehension, Jenny said, “Oopsies,” leapt from her seat, dashed into the kitchen for a rag, hurriedly wiped up the egg, rinsed the cloth, then charged back to the table and wiggled into my lap. “Sorry I messed up the place, Daddy.”

I said, “What mess?”

The comment yielded a nervous smile.

“In fact,” I said, “that part of the room is now the cleanest spot in the whole place. Could you do the rest of the apartment too, please?”

Jenny laughed and snuggled deeper into my lap. “You’re a good daddy most of the time.”

Before I could probe that gem, Jenny hopped off my lap and raced into her small cubbyhole of a bedroom at the back of our apartment to prepare for summer school. After she washed and dressed, I combed out her hair, rebraided it, and escorted her upstairs to the Meyerses’.

Back in the apartment I faced a hard truth. Unwittingly, I was
re-creating the same harmful cycle Jake had foisted on me when he left at night for an assignment both my mother and I sensed was dangerous. Jenny’s smile was still bright, but a fretful note had crept in after the skirmish with Homeboy. I would have to keep a close eye on her.

I shook off my domestic troubles and scanned Noda’s email with renewed amazement.

Somehow, the chief detective had leveraged Brodie Security’s resources and given the elusive kanji a home. Not in the dictionaries or history books. Not in folkloric traditions or any of the musty archives I’d rummaged through, but in a little town in a distant prefecture hundreds of miles west of Tokyo. No wonder I hadn’t found it. Noda had latched on to the slimmest of slim threads.

I sent the detective a congratulatory email and asked him to hold off on a trip to the village. Then, bearing secrets of a far-off kind, I set out to keep my third appointment with Lieutenant Frank Renna in the last thirty hours.

CHAPTER 17

G
UESS
it’s not a candy wrapper,” Renna said.

“Guess not.”

We were in Renna’s office behind closed doors, drinking bad coffee and discussing Noda’s find. Wrestling with the implications, Renna grew thoughtful, while I wondered how best to broach the subject of my new client, a clear conflict of interest. In the squadroom on the other side of Renna’s glass-paneled door, three detectives on the J-town task force had gathered around a ten-foot-long whiteboard with all the latest leads. The most senior of the lot was shaking his head.

Renna snapped out of his reverie. “What you’re telling me is the kanji’s so rare, chances of its being at the crime scene accidentally are about as good as my waking up next to Miss Universe?”

“Or Mister Universe.”

“So what’s the name of this place again?”

“Soga-jujo. I checked the map. It’s a small farming village in a little isolated river valley. We’re talking real backwoods, Frank. Good old boys. One or two surnames. Radish and rice growers for centuries. Probably twenty, thirty generations. You could go out there and film
Deliverance Two.
”

Renna made a decision. “Send your man. The city will pay. Any way I can get a handle on this thing works for me.”

This is where I drew the line. I wouldn’t jeopardize our friendship over a conflict of interest, and in accepting Hara’s case, that was exactly what I had. Having access to the Japanese mogul gave me a handle on
the case I didn’t want to relinquish if it wasn’t necessary. Renna would see that too. But it was still a conflict.

“The city won’t have to foot the bill,” I said. “Katsuyuki Hara came to see me. Wants me to work the case. Turns out he’s the grandfather of the kids.”

Renna’s head snapped up. “The telecom guy? You?”

“Yep.”

“You say the word, I’ll dump him.”

We were silent. In the squadroom, the three detectives were now at their desks, working the phones. Pinned to a bulletin board on the far wall were a rotation roster, a pair of wanted posters, and under a
CRIMINAL OF THE WEEK
sign, a photograph of the mayor, his eyes masked with a black bar of kraft paper. As I gazed out on the scene, I wondered how far my friendship with Renna could stretch under the strain of the case. With his career on the line, he would have to wend his way through the labyrinth of city and police politics with caution.

Renna leaned forward. “Hang on to Hara, but you clear everything out of this office with me first.”

“Hara wants results, not details, so he won’t be a problem. But I’ll need to brief my boys in Tokyo. It’s the only way they can work.”

Furrows creased the lieutenant’s brow. “Okay, but keep it in-house.”

“Done. Can you hold off City Hall?”

“No telling, but at the moment they need me more than I need them.”

“And if that changes?”

Renna’s whole career rested with the SFPD. The alternatives were not appealing.

“Without results? The boot downstairs or worse. That happens, you can bet the mayor will act. Have you met him?”

“No.”

“You’re about to.”

I heard a tap on the door behind me. Renna waved to a figure on the other side of the glass. Mayor Gary Hurwitz stepped into the office, followed by a suited entourage of three, including city councilman Calvin Washington, deputy mayor Robert DeMonde, and Gail Wong, the mayor’s spokesperson and head tiger shark of his support staff.

“Gary,” Renna said, standing. Following his example, I also rose.

“Sit, Frank. I hope I’m not intruding.”

“No, good timing,” Renna said, remaining on his feet. “Let me introduce you to Jim Brodie. He’s the guy I told you would be consulting on Japantown.”

The major gave me a bright smile. “Yes, of course. My visit was fortuitous, then. I want to stay on top of this one, so I’m glad we have a chance to meet.” He wore a gray herringbone suit, white button-down shirt, and powder-blue tie, an ensemble that complemented his wavy black hair and piercing gray eyes.

We shook hands and Hurwitz introduced the other three. I exchanged quick handshakes with them, Gail’s assessing gaze lingering the longest, then the mayor said, “I was down the hall at Judge Taylor’s, so I thought I’d stop in and preview any new developments you might have.”

It was clear he expected nothing, so I watched with masked satisfaction as Renna rolled out Noda’s discovery.

“We’ve located the kanji.”

The mayor seemed stunned, then pleased. “Have you now? Well, that’s great. Just great. I heard it was a dead end.”

“Not from me, you didn’t,” Renna said.

“From other sources.” He looked at me, his smile dazzling. “Was that your work?”

“An associate’s,” I said.

He pumped my hand again. “Frank said you knew your way around the Orient. I’m delighted. Well-done, gentlemen. Keep it up. I’m looking for a swift resolution to this tragic affair.”

“We all are,” Renna said.

“Fine, just fine. I’m going to have Gail or Bob stop by a couple times a day for the latest, if you don’t mind.”

“Not a problem,” Renna said.

“Excellent, excellent,” the mayor said, and shook my hand again, then the entourage departed as quickly as it had arrived.

“Expressive guy,” I said.

“Yep, but don’t be fooled. He has sharp teeth. They all do. Gail in particular. She’s a former VP from a Silicon Valley startup, Bob’s a
sales yak and self-made millionaire, and Calvin made his bucks with a chain of barbecue joints in the East Bay, mostly in Oakland, Fremont, around there. Birds of a feather, the lot of them. Rumor has it Hurwitz is grooming Gail and Bob for the election after next. Her for deputy and By-the-Book Bob for the mayor’s seat after Hurwitz vacates. Keep it in the family.”

I shrugged. “It could be worse, I suppose.”

“True.” Renna tossed down the rest of his coffee like he wished it were something stronger. “That reminds me. The lab boys dug up a tidbit.”

“What?”

Renna’s face dimmed. “It’s not going to improve your appetite any.”

“Can’t get any worse.”

“Oh yeah,” he said. “It can. You know anything about spatter?”

“No.”

“A.k.a.
blood patterns
. With all the firepower on the streets these days, it’s a ballooning science. Almost an industry.”

“You don’t say.”

“I do. When each bullet exits the body, it sends out a spray trail. Multiple entries produce multiple trails. The sprays fall in a precise progression, later over earlier. Directions are different. Blood types are different. Water on water blends, but blood on blood layers because it’s thick like oil. When new drops fall on old, they make circles or half-circles, and don’t mix completely because blood begins to coagulate the instant it hits the air. By charting the location of the sprays and taking enough blood samples at the points where the spray trails intersect, the lab jocks can determine who was shot first.”

My heart seemed to slow. “And?”

“All five victims were gunned down in seconds. Probably five or six. Seven, tops. Good groupings. No wasted shots. But there’s
always
an order, even if you’re splitting seconds. The shooter stepped in close and caught the big male in the back first, raked high for the adults, father followed by mother, left to right, then swung back low, right to left, for the children.”

Seven seconds, tops
. We were silent for quite a bit longer than it took for someone to eradicate the entire Nakamura family. I felt the embers of a smoldering heat jump-start my blood flow.

“Very, very cool,” I said softly.

“You got that right. Knocked out the biggest threat first.”

“So what’s that tell us?”

Renna took a long deliberate breath. “Two things. First, any way you look at it, it was an execution.”

I hesitated before asking the unavoidable: “And the second?”

“We have less time than I thought. So get a move on.”

I nodded guardedly. “Sure thing.”

As it turned out, acceleration would be the least of our worries.

CHAPTER 18

I
SPOTTED
him on the afternoon of the second day.

With lunchtime approaching and my leg on the mend, I curbed the Cutlass in front of the shop, then hoofed it the five blocks to Sweet Heat, a feisty Tex-Mex restaurant on Steiner. I ordered my usual chicken burrito with extra salsa and actually came close to finishing it, despite my lackluster appetite since Japantown. I paid the bill and ambled up Steiner toward Lombard, luxuriating in the fine summer weather.

I soaked up the bright noonday rays, working the leg, the muscles flexing pleasantly. A light-afternoon breeze with a slight saltiness was blowing in off the bay, and a sporadic mist hinted at the approach of a cooling fog. But for the moment the toasty Californian sun was out in full force, warming my shoulders and bleaching the sidewalk a custard yellow.

That’s when I felt him. My body tensed. The skin over my forearms rippled with gooseflesh. In my old neighborhood they called this the South Central early-warning system. Heightened under the watchful eye of my Korean neighbor, it kicked in now.

Someone was following me.

I strolled down the street, my gaze steady and serene, catching sight of him out of the corner of my eye, across the street, ten yards back. His gait was purposefully casual. Smooth, liquid, but not languid. He didn’t get it—the mist, the sea, the fleeting afternoon warmth. And because he wasn’t attuned to the vagaries of San Francisco and her fickle weather patterns, he stuck out.

At a leisurely pace, I found my way back to the shop, occasionally snatching an oblique image of a man in a beige sports coat. On Lombard, I turned left and he tagged along directly behind me for two blocks before passing over to the other side of the avenue and trailing me from across four lanes of traffic.

Abers greeted me as I reentered the store. “Back so soon?”

“Yeah. I eighty-sixed the idea of a stroll down Chestnut.”

“Ach, too bad. Nice day for a walkie.”

There you go. Even Abers, a South African transplant, got it. Though, cheerful as his rejoinder was, underneath he was still simmering about my taking Hara’s case and then refusing to discuss it with him. But we had come to an unspoken agreement: he would wait me out, and I would mention the unmentionable when I was ready.

“Watch the front for a minute, would you? I need to make a call.”

“Afterward, let’s have a talk-to about rearranging the back.”

“Good idea. Time permitting.”

The tenor of my voice caught Abers’s attention and he backed off.

Once in my office, I shut the door, pulled out a prepaid cell phone I used for Brodie Security business, and then stepped out into the alley because I’d yet to have the security people scan the shop for listening devices. I punched in Renna’s number.

“Homicide.”

“Renna, please.”

“Who’s calling?”

“Brodie.”

“Ah, the Japan guy. Hang on.” A hand muffled the sound. “Anyone seen the Loot?”

“Down the hall.”

The detective came back on. “Loot’s so busy he needs a body double. Be a minute.”

He put me on hold and “When the Saints Come Marching In” oozed from the speaker. The city’s public relations stiffs were getting subtle—if you thought a sledgehammer brass section was subtle.

Renna picked up and, mercifully, the saints vanished. “You got more?”

“You having me followed?”

He snorted. “I got thirty-five badges out on the J-town job following any shred of a lead we scrape up and another fifteen pulling double overtime to check out every freak in town. The pols are chewing on my ass and the newshounds are snapping at the parts the pols missed. I don’t have the manpower or the time to follow you around. Unless you’re planning to confess.”

“You sure one of your jokers isn’t trying to yank my chain?”