A Cruel Season for Dying (8 page)

“I take it this is an official visit,” he said.

She moved fractionally closer. “The D.A.’s office always takes a keen interest in the work of the NYPD.”

He stood still, just breathing, inhaling her fragrance.

“I hope you won’t disappoint me,” she said. “I expect a case I can win, Lieutenant Sakura.”

Three bodies in less than a week. Another day of mobilizing the task force—officers borrowed from other commands to canvass
yet one more neighborhood.

Tonight, alone in his office, Sakura was beginning to feel the special fatigue that went with frustration. He had little real
hope for the smudged latents they had pulled today from the mirror in Westlake’s bathroom, and a second session with Greenberg
this evening had gotten him nothing new. The gallery owner, whose alibi checked out, had denied talking to the press and could
still provide no connecting link between his partner and Carrera.

Nor did Greenberg know of any connection between his partner and Geoffrey Westlake; though like many others in the city, he
had
certainly been aware of the model’s work as an actor in TV ads. The evening news had played it big, with commentary voiced
over running clips of Westlake’s commercials—local celebrity, a Halloween-night victim of what they were now all calling a
gay serial killer.

Geoffrey Westlake’s friends and associates had apparently had little compunction about outing him after his death. Zoe Kahn
would have plenty of company in tomorrow’s morning editions. Sakura could only hope for some time before any more details
leaked. They had already suffered the first of what would certainly become many false confessions. A copycat could be next.

For a moment he let himself give in to exhaustion, and closing his eyes, he massaged his temples. Above him the banks of fluorescents
buzzed like insects. One tube, going bad, enhanced the illusion of tiny frenetic wings beating between him and the light.

In the black behind his eyes, an image of Faith arose, as if it had been waiting for the moment. He had managed to avoid working
with her all these years only because she was avoiding him too. Apparently, her interest in this case was too great for any
consideration of personal feelings. Faith had always had a way of attaching herself to high-profile cases.

But a case high powered enough to advance a career could also blow up in your face. There could be nothing worse for a prosecutor
than failing to convict a man whom the media had painted as a monster and a threat to public safety. Faith was, as she’d said,
counting on him not to box her into a trial without a solid chance of conviction. Her trust in him was flattering.

And the truth was he trusted her too. Not that she would cover his errors or make excuses to the press for his mistakes, but
neither would she stab him in the back. Faith had no sentiment, but she did have integrity. Their past emotional involvement
would never be allowed to affect her professional judgment. She was the best the D.A.’s office had, and he should be grateful
she was on the case. He had just not been prepared for his own visceral reaction.

He opened his eyes, studied his hands white with chalk from the blackboard. He hated getting chalk on his fingers. The dryness
made his flesh plump up, feel tight and lifeless. He took out his handkerchief, the one Hanae washed and ironed and made sure
he was never without,
and rubbed his hands. He noticed that the white dust had made perfect tracings of his fingerprints. What he needed was a trip
down the hall to wash up, but he was not yet ready to concede another day’s defeat.

With so little to go on, he’d been concentrating the efforts of his people on reconstructing the last few weeks of Carrera’s
and Milne’s lives. But despite extensive interviews, nothing had been discovered which tied the two together or suggested
why either might have been targeted for murder. Canvasses of the neighborhoods had so far produced neither witnesses nor suspects,
and the days had gone by in a blur of paperwork adding to no result. With today’s discovery of Westlake’s body, the process
was repeating under the intensifying scrutiny of the press. Not that it mattered. Press attention was an annoyance, not a
goad. He needed none beyond his own drive.

He accepted his ambition. He had thrived on testing himself for as long as he could remember. That his need to excel might
spring at least in part from the unusual circumstances of his youth was not something he usually examined. The past was the
past.

He had no real memory of his mother or his early life in New York. His first clear memories were of his bed in the house on
Hokkaido, the smell of the sea, and the sight of his grandfather’s prize roosters strutting in the little yard.

In many ways the years in Japan had been his happiest. And, certainly, sending little Akira to be cared for by his grandparents
must have seemed to Isao, his father, the most rational solution to the problem of a motherless two-year-old. Who else was
there to care for him? His mother, Mai, a student like his father, had been third-generation American. Her father lived fairly
near in New Jersey, but her own mother had died nearly as young as she from the same heart condition.

In the house on Hokkaido, the existence of his father had played like an undertone to the rich sensory mix of his child’s
life on the rural coast of Japan. There were photographs and letters to his grandparents, with always a word for him. And
then the one short summer visit when he was almost seven.

His father had returned for
O-bon,
the Feast of the Dead, when the ancestral spirits of each family were honored. What he remembered most about that visit was
the joy of his grandmother as she prepared
for the festival, cleaning and dusting, hanging out the red lantern that would guide the spirits home. It had seemed to his
child’s mind that it was his father she was guiding, as much a spirit to him as his long-dead ancestors.

But his father had at last appeared, very tall and real, with gifts for everyone and fruit and flowers for the family altar.
It had been a good time, and at the end of the week, they had attended the celebrations in the nearby city. Amid the food,
and the dancing, and the fireworks, his father had helped him place his little raft with its paper lantern among the others
on the river. It was
Toro Nagashi,
the floating lanterns meant to comfort the spirits as they left again on their way.

His father was to leave the next day, and he woke to a change in the house. Anger in his grandfather. Tears from his grandmother,
which were more than the sorrow of a son’s parting. His father had taken him aside in the garden and revealed the story of
his secret life, like offering up a peach. It seemed he had remarried and become a United States citizen. Even after the training
in his specialty was completed, he would not be returning to Japan. And he, Akira, must also return to the land of his birth.
Someday soon he would be sent for to live with his family in America.

And so with this promise, his father had once again disappeared from the ordinary course of his life, leaving him as one marked
amidst the chaos he’d created.

Letters arrived with photos now of the blue-eyed wife and the children. A son, Paul, only two years younger than himself.
And Elizabeth, the three-year-old daughter. But no word of when Akira was to join them. It would be four years before that
summons came.

He shook his head, an unconscious gesture of denial. He had read somewhere that Japanese emigrants more quickly than any other
group lost their language and their culture. This might seem odd in a society where ethnic identity was so strong, but it
was simply a fact that
Japaneseness
was not easily sustained outside the unique context that created it.

And though it was so with his father, whose own Japaneseness had fallen so easily from his shoulders, it was not exactly so
with him. Certainly, he was American, not only by birth but by conviction and
choice. And yet, if James Sakura believed anything at all, he believed that some essential element of his being had been forged
in those misplaced years on Hokkaido, that his
tamashi,
the core of his soul, was Japanese.

He realized he had been refolding the handkerchief in his hand, duplicating Hanae’s pattern. And now he tucked it back inside
his breast pocket. He reexamined the chalkboard, for what seemed the hundredth time, hoping to discover somewhere in the tidy
display of his writing, something of the spirit of his killer. Despite all manner of modern detection, was it not a man’s
tamashi
that must ultimately betray him?

If a serial killer had a soul? It was a question he’d once half jokingly asked at an after-hours bull session at Quantico
of the instructor who’d asserted in class that serial killers were not fully human. Serial killers had souls, Dr. French had
replied, but their consciences were undeveloped, and as sociopaths, they were as incapable of moral judgment as a two-year-old.
Sakura had not agreed, and yet her answer had disturbed him. It disturbed him now.

He was shaking his head again. There was more than enough that was troubling about this case without dragging in the intangible.
Like the ease with which the killer gained access to his victims. His boldness in killing them in their own apartments, where
he apparently remained for hours, performing a ritual that included cleaning and posing their bodies. According to Linsky’s
estimate, Milne had died late on Sunday night. Was it only luck of one sort or another that had prevented Jerry Greenberg’s
earlier than scheduled return from interrupting the murder of his lover?

The killer’s luck had held again last night. An electronic card system let residents in and out of Westlake’s building. The
model had been noticed by one of the other residents leaving at around nine o’clock. No one had seen his return. But with
no sign of forced entry, it seemed probable that the killer had been someone he’d brought back to his apartment.

Sakura picked up the jade disk from his desk, a good luck talisman, a gift from his uncle Ikenobo on his seventh-year
matsuri,
when he was brought to the local shrine to be blessed. Rubbing its smooth
surface, he swiveled in his chair to study the photographs tacked around the chalkboard’s wooden frame. Borrowed photos were
juxtaposed with crime scene close-ups of each of the three victims. Greenberg had provided a small color snapshot of David
Milne. Carrera and Westlake were represented by eight-by-ten black-and-white posed publicity stills. The gallery owner, the
dancer, and the model. If, as now seemed likely, all were victims of a serial killer randomly targeting gays, then what particular
set of circumstances had placed each of these three men in whatever territory their murderer considered his hunting ground?
And what was the unwitting set of cues that had pushed the killer over the line and made each man’s selection as a victim
inevitable? What had each man done or said that singled him out, fitted him for the passive role inside the killer’s fantasy?

Johnny Rozelli’s familiar laugh rang out in the squad room. Sakura turned from the blackboard and looked through the glass
that fronted his office. Talbot and Rozelli, two of the four detectives from his unit, were still working the keyboards. With
this third murder his Special Homicide Unit was being expanded into a task force, McCauley allowing him to handpick from among
the available officers. He was confident in his people, and yet there was still that void he always felt in moments like
this one. He was not himself immodest—he understood his own value well—but Michael Darius had something that went beyond ordinary
cop instinct, a gut-level ability to quantum leap the facts that had little to do with either logic or training. He looked
at the stack of files littering his desk. Would Michael see something in this jumble that he continued to miss?

He rose from his chair and walked to the floor-to-ceiling window, which was the dominating feature in the tiny eleventh-floor
office. Beyond the plaza the Municipal Building loomed over Chambers Street, its collocated towers topped by the statue
Civic Fame.
Bracing his hands against the black glass, he dropped his head and breathed deeply, as if he could inhale the night. Then
closing his eyes, he let his head fall back on his shoulders. His next breath held a single soft sound.
Hanae.
His wife’s name. His mantra.