Steel Breeze (6 page)

“And?”
Desmond could hear Lucas laughing and slapping against the mat, probably
rolling off the ball. He couldn’t remember the last time
he
had laughed,
but it was good to know that his son still could.

“He
fetched the staff from his tent and traded it for the bill. Said he only took
it because he needed a walking stick more than some rich kid needed to learn
how to clock somebody with it.”

“What
was your impression of his personality?”

“He
did seem…agitated, a bit twitchy. That must have been evident at the trial.”

“Honestly,
I couldn’t bear to watch much of it. But I know he wasn’t allowed an insanity
plea.”

Salerno
cleared his throat. “The DA wanted him in that sweet spot: crazy enough to kill
but not too crazy to pay for it. Deemed fit to stand.”

“Disturbed
man plus possession of the murder weapon equals guilty.”

“They
wanted me to testify that he had stolen a martial arts weapon. It was true, so
I signed a statement, but I was relieved when they didn’t subpoena me.”

“Just
a walking stick to Harwood?”

“Maybe.”

“You’re
holding something back,” Desmond said. “What is it?”

“I
started going down to the river now and then to leave food for them. Bread,
stew, ramen noodles. Most times they hid from me, but I did have one more run
in with Harwood at the dojo. He was hanging around in the open doorway on a
summer night, watching the Iaido class.” Salerno didn’t look away from Desmond,
but he seemed to be listening for the sound of Lucas, maybe wishing the boy
would interrupt so he wouldn’t have to tell this part.

“What’s
Iaido?”

“Japanese
sword art. We used to have a visiting instructor come in to teach it one night
a week. Kendo too, that’s the fencing version with armor and bamboo swords.”

“And
this…Iaido is done with wooden swords too?”

“No.
They’re usually aluminum or unsharpened steel.”

“So
you actually taught a samurai-sword class here?”

“
I
didn’t, Sensei Masahiro used to, but it was a long drive for him. When we
didn’t have enough students enrolled in the class we dropped it.”

Desmond
stood up and sat down again. He cupped his hand over his mouth and slid it down
his chin, looking at the ceiling. How had he ever doubted Harwood’s guilt? But
the homeless man had a home now—Walpole State Penitentiary. Crazy or not,
fascinated with swords or not, he sure wasn’t cavorting around playgrounds in a
samurai mask. “Did the police know you hosted a sword class that Harwood used
to watch?”

“We
had already dropped it by then, but they took a list of all the students who
had attended and interviewed them. I didn’t volunteer the information that
Harwood had observed a class. It was only the one time, and he was never in the
building. I’d sent him away, told him that me bringing meals to the camp didn’t
mean he was absolved for stealing the staff.”

“You
do
think he’s innocent.”

“I
don’t know, Desmond. When he asked me about the sword class he seemed indignant
about the whole idea of martial arts; why people would want to learn how to
hurt each other. I tried to explain, as I often do with parents, that in
addition to the self-defense techniques we teach in Aikido, the weapons lessons
have more to do with harmonizing body and mind. The opponent you are really
trying to defeat is yourself, your own clumsy, unconscious tendencies. The
martial arts are about mastery of the self and meditation on your own
mortality.”

Desmond
thought that sounded like a nice New Age sales pitch to gloss over a tradition
of macho posturing, but he had to admit that he liked Salerno. The man had a
gentle and intelligent presence. Not what he had expected when he ventured in
here. “So Harwood was offended by the school, by the idea of teaching
violence.”

Salerno
nodded. “And I didn’t want the police to be able to suggest that he was
fascinated by it, nor did I want to argue for his innocence. For all I know, he
did kill your wife, and I wanted to keep my hand off the tiller.”

Desmond
sat back in the folding chair. It creaked under his weight. He listened for
Lucas and didn’t hear the bouncing ball. “What are the chances of the sword
that killed my wife being found within a mile of a martial arts school with a
sword class?”

“The
police asked that very question. I think they knew that none of our students
would have risked ditching the weapon so close to a place where it could be
connected to them. But, correct me if I’m wrong…. Didn’t the sword that killed
your wife belong to you?”

“Yes.
Sandy’s grandfather brought it back from World War II as a souvenir. When he
died, her father gave it to me. He figured since I write fantasy stories, I’d
like a sword. I hung it over my desk, out of Lucas’s reach, and pretty much
forgot about it.”

“I
heard the killer broke into your house, saw the sword on the wall, and then
decided to use it when your wife encountered him.”

“Yeah.
They called it a ‘weapon of opportunity.’”

“What
was she doing in the backyard in the middle of the night?”

“Our
dog always whined to be let out around four in the morning, and she’d gotten up
to let him out. Usually she’d wait by the sliding glass door to let him back in
when he was done before he could bark. When he didn’t return that night, she
must have stepped outside and gone looking for him…the dog was killed first.”

“And
nothing was stolen?”

“Nothing.
Just the sword, later found in Harwood’s tent with her blood on it.”

“It
sounds like maybe someone disposed of it in the perfect place for a variety of
suspects: some of them martial artists, some of them vagabonds.”

“That’s
what I’m beginning to think.”

“Why
now? What brought you here after all this time?”

Lucas
pushed through the curtain and crashed into Desmond’s lap. “Daddy, I’m hungry.”

“Okay,
buddy. We’ll go soon.” Desmond tousled Lucas’s hair. It was stiff. The kid was
overdue for a bath. “Would you please go get Peter’s ball and bring it back to
him?”

“I
can do it!” Lucas ran out of the room, and Desmond almost wished he could
afford to enroll him in classes. The change of scenery seemed to have done him
some good.

“He’s
a good boy,” Salerno said.

“Yeah.”
Desmond flashed a rueful smile. “Looks like time is short, but if I could
squeeze in one more question: you mentioned fencing armor? Do you guys ever use
samurai face masks?”

Salerno
looked confused. “Not sure what you mean. The Kendo helmets have a wire
grille.”

“So
nothing like a wrathful face plate?”

“No.
I think I’ve seen what you’re talking about in books, but no, we don’t have
anything like that, why?”

“I
get the feeling you and I will talk again.”

“My
door is always open to you.”

“To
be continued? Gotta feed the boy.”

“To
be continued.”

At
the front door, as Desmond and Lucas stepped out into sunlight, Salerno handed
Desmond a business card. “Call me anytime. And, you know, Sensei Masahiro might
be able to tell you more about those masks. He
is
Japanese. His number’s
on the back. Super nice guy. Very approachable.”

Chapter 6

The wooden
guard tower was the only landmark on the road to indicate that the site had
once been an internment camp. Agent Drelick pointed through the dusty
windshield. “That’s it,” she said, “pull over.”

Pasco
eased up on the gas and pulled the government-issued Crown Vic to the side of
the road where it churned up a cloud of yellow dust that was immediately
shredded by the wind. The tower was separated from the highway by a four-strand
barbed-wire fence running along galvanized T-bars. The fence was mostly for
show, the wires spaced far enough apart that the agents could have climbed
through if they didn’t mind tearing a few holes in their clothes. Someone
had
climbed through last night.

Pasco
parked behind a police cruiser that had been posted to keep the traffic moving.
The local law hadn’t shut down U.S. 395, but Drelick thought they probably
should have. She shielded her eyes and looked up, saw a young man moving around
on top of the tower. There was an aluminum ladder inside the x-braced frame of
the structure, propped up against a wooden ladder built into the tower but that
didn’t extend low enough for anyone to reach from the ground. The top of the
tower was a simple cube: a guardhouse made mostly of windows, the roof
constituting a platform surrounded by a 2 x 4 railing. The figure she’d spotted
moving around up there was the forensics photographer, now leaning back against
the railing to get a wide shot of the area where the bloodstains must have
been.

A
young officer with a pockmarked face climbed out of the cruiser and came to
stand beside Drelick as she stared up at the tower. Pasco stayed in the car
with the engine idling.

“Are
you with the FBI, ma’am?” the officer asked, appraising her black trench coat
and polished shoes, and thinking, no doubt, of some X-Files episodes he’d seen
on Netflix. She knew her haircut didn’t help, but fuck it; she wasn’t going to
change what looked good on her just because of some actress who wasn’t even on the
air anymore.

She
nodded, flashed her ID, and read it to him, “Special Agent Erin Drelick.” She
tilted her chin toward the tower. “Was that ladder here before today?”

“No,
ma’am. When they reconstructed the guard tower they only went halfway to the
ground with the built-in ladder. Didn’t want to encourage the local kids, you
know? Stunts, graffiti, etc. We brought the other ladder in this morning.”

“‘We?
Were you personally here when the ladder was brought in?”

“Yes,
ma’am.”

“Did
you check the ground under the tower for impressions from another ladder used
by the perp?”

“There
weren’t any.”

“How
about shoe prints?”

“Negative
again.”

“Anybody
take a picture of the ground before stomping around on it and erecting a
ladder?”

The
officer pulled his hat down to shield his eyes and looked up. “We went up
before the CSI got here. There was nothing on the ground to take a picture of,
Agent.”

“And
what did you find up top?”

“Just
blood. Mostly soaked into the wood and not much of it considering what we found
in the park.”

“Do
you think whoever went up there last night climbed the bracing to reach the
half-ladder?”

“Must
have. Probably had the head in a backpack or something so he could use both
hands for climbing.”

“Where’s
the head now?”

“On
the ground over there in Block 20 where the birds dropped it.” He pointed beyond
the barbed wire at a spot in the patchy sagebrush where two figures stood over
a white canvas sheet held down with stones. One of the figures was driving a
pole into the ground with a hammer, but the wind was pulling the clanging in
some other direction so it sounded out of sync with the blows, a dislocated
sound, like the tolling of a phantom bell. “If it wasn’t for the crows fighting
with him, that turkey vulture pro’ly woulda got away with it. Then all we’d
have would be a little blood up there that wouldn’t be found until God knows
when.”

Drelick
nodded. “Thank you, Sergeant….”

“Wilkes,
ma’am. Sherriff Knowles is waiting for you at the main entrance.”

She
climbed back into the car, and Pasco crawled up the gravel shoulder. They
passed a wooden sign suspended from a pair of posts by rusty chains at the four
corners: MANZANAR WAR RELOCATION CENTER. She recalled seeing a heated debate in
the
Los Angeles Times
a few years back about the use of the phrase
“concentration camp” at the site. Apparently, the more conservative party had
prevailed. The park featured an auto tour but not today; another police cruiser
blocked the entrance. Pasco flashed his ID, and they drove between a pair of
stone huts to where the sheriff’s car was parked. Knowles started his engine at
their approach, pulled out in front of them, and gave a curt “follow me” wave
out the window.

Drelick
had looked at the web site, so she knew that the white building going by on the
left had once been the school auditorium and was the only building that
remained from the original camp. With a modern facelift, it now served as the
Information Center housing artifacts, photographs (including the famous Ansel
Adams set), and little theaters that screened short documentary films for
visitors. All that remained of the rest of the village amounted to a few stone
foundations, piles of rocks amid the sand‐blasted scrub, and signs indicating
the places where numbered barracks blocks had once stood. They cruised past a
replica of a tarpapered plywood barracks near Block 20 and parked in the scant
shelter it provided from the dusty wind, behind the sheriff’s car.

Sheriff
Knowles shook their hands while shouting over the howling wind, “Welcome to
Manzanar. What have you been told about this crime scene and your role here?” As
a national monument, Manzanar fell into a weird jurisdiction where the
Department of the Interior, the California State Police, and the FBI all played
in the same sandbox.

“We
were told you have partial remains,” Drelick said. “Remains of a victim we may
have the rest of. We’re here to make an ID.”

Knowles
nodded. “If it’s a positive, he’s yours. If not, he goes to the morgue in town.
I sure as hell hope he’s yours because I’ll be damned if I know where to start
looking for the rest of him.”

“Let’s
have a look,” Pasco said.

Following
the sheriff to the spot she had glimpsed from the road, Drelick felt like she
was fording a river against a strong current. A ribbon of yellow police tape
broke free of the barricade stakes that cordoned off the area, flashing past
Drelick’s wind-lashed hair and snagging in a tree where it trilled with a
staccato flapping sound. Dust as fine as flour filled her nostrils, and she
wished for a bandana to tie over her face like a bandit in a spaghetti Western.

Knowles
gave a nod, and an officer rolled one of the boulders aside with his boot. The
canvas flew up on the wind, releasing a cloud of black flies and wrapped tight
around the torso of a park ranger who was caught off guard—holding his hat down
on the crown of his head while batting at the canvas with his free hand. For a
fleeting second he looked like a man fighting a ghost while he wrestled the
fabric into a bundle.

A
severed human head stared up at Erin Drelick from the dusty ground, its skin
painted in the purple-gray palette of death. The eyes and nasal cavity had been
picked over by carrion birds, leaving ragged white necrotic tissue where the
eyelids and nostrils should have been. The red cut along the neckline, however,
was laser straight.

“You
have that photo?” she asked Pasco.

He
took a 2 x 3 from his pocket, a headshot of Geoffrey Lamprey, age 37. Pasco’s
thumbnail blanched white as he squeezed it to keep the wind from stealing it. Drelick
nodded and said, “It’s Lamprey. Confirm?”

“Confirmed,”
Pasco said.

“Thank
you, Sheriff. That’s our head. Have your men bag it. There’s a cooler full of
ice in our trunk.”

Sheriff
Knowles worked his jaw through a couple of rotations like he was chewing on
something. “A cooler of ice? You’re just gonna put it in the trunk of your
car?”

“You
think we should FedEx it to L.A.?” Pasco said. “Taxpayers already put the gas
in our car to come up here.”

“Alrighty
then. Officer Cook, you heard the lady; evidence bag.”

Drelick
turned to the park ranger in the straw hat and insulated vest. “Are you the one
who saw it drop?”

He
nodded, still holding the bundled canvas to his chest.

“Give
us the play-by-play,” Pasco said.

“I
saw the birds from the road before I got to work this morning. They were
fighting over something up on top of the tower, but I couldn’t see what. I
drove right over there as soon as I was inside the park. Maybe seeing me coming
made the vulture decide to take off with the head. He flew right over me, and a
couple of the crows tried to dive-bomb him. That’s when he dropped it right
here.”

To
the Sheriff, Drelick said, “Did you find anything on the tower?”

“Just
a little blood on the top platform where the head must have been left. Nothing
in the guard booth. No prints, no fabric on the barbed wire. You can go up and
have a look if you’d like. But tell me, Agent: what makes this a federal case
if the rest of the victim was also found in sunny California? Believe me, I’m
glad it is, but I’m also curious.”

Drelick
stepped closer to him and, speaking under the roaring wind so that only he
could hear her, said, “There’s a resemblance to a case in Arizona.”

“Huh.”

“You
have any leads on witnesses who may have seen a car parked near the tower last
night?” Pasco asked.

“Not
yet, but I’m sure you noticed we are in the middle of bumfuck nowhere. We’ll
see if anyone comes forward when it hits the news. So far no reporters have
noticed we’ve closed the park, and I’m in no hurry to bring it to their
attention.”

“Good,”
Drelick said, “Hold off until we’re gone.”

The
ranger shifted on his feet, suddenly looking uneasy. “Who did you call?” Pasco
asked him.

“Just
my wife.”

“She
a gossiper?”

The
ranger shook his head. Drelick read his brass nametag. “Mr. Abath, my partner
and I are going to need a tour of the grounds. Will you ride with us?”

“Of
course.”

“Sheriff,
did your men check the barracks replica for evidence?”

“Clean
as a whistle. The beheading wasn’t done here. And if the head belongs to your
victim, then my understanding is there aren’t any other missing parts…are there?”

“No,”
Drelick said, “but whoever put the head on the tower wanted to frame it for presentation,
to send a message or make a symbol out of it. And unless you’ve combed this
entire square mile, there may be more to the message that we’ve yet to find.”

“I’ll
get a team together with some dogs,” the sheriff said.

“Mr.
Abath, have you or your fellow rangers found any foreign items in the park this
morning?”

“Beg
pardon?
Foreign?
”

Pasco
said, “A machete would be good, but she means
anything
. A hankie, a food
wrapper…litter.”

“No
sir, but people do leave offerings at the graveyard all the time. We don’t keep
track of what’s left there from one day to the next.”

“Take
us there first,” Drelick said.

The
cemetery was at the southwestern edge of the site, beyond the gardens and the
signs marking where the hospital and children’s village had once stood. It was stark,
little more than a barren lot corralled by a fence of bark-stripped tree limbs
in an X pattern. A few small circles of stones were the only indicators that
six bodies were buried there. The desolate, snow-dusted Sierras dominated the
horizon like a decaying animal jawbone under the cobalt sky. In the foreground,
flanked on three sides by squat, rope-threaded posts, a three-tiered white
marble base culminated in an obelisk with black-painted
kanji
characters
carved into its face. Clusters of origami cranes hung from strings and huddled
in the shelter of the monument, their bright colors incongruous with the somber
desolation.

“What
does it say?” Drelick asked, pointing at the
kanji
characters.

“
To
Console the Spirits,
” Abath replied. Gesturing at the cranes, he said, “These
are the offerings. People leave the origami birds, coins, rocks…all sorts of
little trinkets. Hmm…. Haven’t seen
that
before.” He bent down to pick
up a pair of wire-rimmed spectacles from the marble base, but Drelick seized
his arm.

“Could
have fingerprints,” she said. She snapped a couple of photos with her phone
while Pasco produced a latex glove and a Ziploc bag from his coat pocket. Drelick
scanned the horizon and said, “The glasses were facing east, toward the watchtower.”