Toward Night's End (18 page)

“True. But as I mentioned, we had more vessels out there than we ever normally do. For him to get through, well, I won’t say it’s not possible. But I’d say it’s not too likely.”

“Could he have made it close to here? To the Seattle area and then sunk his boat? Knowing you were looking for it?”

“You think he came ashore here?” the captain asked.

“Just a theory.” Which could explain Sean Kanagawa’s murder.

“I kind of doubt that happened, if you want my opinion.”

“Why not?” Johnstone asked.

“It takes a while to sink a trawler that size. The bay is crowded. Someone would’ve seen it go down. It would’ve been reported.” The captain looked at both of them and added, “Just my opinion.”

“I appreciate it,” Johnstone told him. He and the chief exchanged looks. The chief sat silently, so Johnstone stood, saying, “Well, thank you for coming in.”

“My guess, for what’s it worth, is that he foundered,” Kimball said, rising.

“Really?” Johnstone said, surprised.

“Weather service isn’t always accurate. It was a vicious storm out there. We rescued two boats. One was salvaged. The other sank. It was one of the worst I’ve been in.”

“So you think he may have sunk?” Johnstone asked.

“Pretty good chance. Some of those boats the Japanese use are pretty old.” He shrugged. “Best they can afford. But some are pretty ugly. He could’ve very well foundered.”

“Interesting.” Johnstone said. He shook the captain’s hand. “Thank you for your time.”

“Hope you find him. Pretty scary to think how vulnerable we are, tell you the truth.”

“That’s what your exercise showed you?” Johnstone asked, curious.

“Well, that’s confidential, sir. But we got a whole lot of coastline to protect. California, Oregon, here. Big job.”

“I guess it is,” Johnstone said.

Once the Coast Guard captain had left, his chief said, “Write up the report. We know who the killer is. We just don’t know where the hell he is.”

Johnstone still didn’t want to blame all three murders on Matthew Kobata. But he didn’t tell the police chief that. He would write a report, including the fact that a note was left in his car when he was at Seattle’s Naval Air Station that instructed him to see Sean Kanagawa. A man who had just been killed. He didn’t think the anonymous note writer knew that. He thought it was a genuine tip connecting Cody Carsteen to Kanagawa. Their matching tattoos were just another connection. He would also point out that an eyewitness verified that Porter’s truck was not at the Kobata house when Matthew left on his boat.

However, since he hated to write reports, Johnstone sat at his desk, stalling for a bit by looking through his unopened mail. There wasn’t much of interest. As he reached the bottom of the stack, there was a thick padded envelope. He impatiently ripped off the top and reached inside the envelope. But there were no papers inside. Just a couple of small objects. He grabbed one. As he extracted his hand, he was horrified to find that it was a human fingertip. His stomach churned as he quickly dropped it on the desk. He instinctively pushed back his chair and rose to his feet, his heart racing. After a moment, he carefully turned the envelope upside down. One more fingertip tumbled across his desk.

It took him several minutes before he could breathe again. He looked around the office bullpen, but there were only a few other officers scattered about, and no one was paying any attention to him. Using a pencil, he lined up the two bloody fingertips in a row. He knew they weren’t from the same hand.

But what that meant just made him seethe.

“Okay, let me explain what’s going on. You have a very substantial contusion here,” the doctor said, tapping the right side of Daniel’s forehead which had a large bump. He was a young, white man, wearing a white lab coat. Kumiko stepped closer to see exactly what the doctor was pointing at. “Okay, this is all blood. The injury caused blood to leak into the tissue here. Now, in the next few days, this pooling of blood will go down.” The doctor traced his fingers down the right side of Daniel’s face. “Think of it as gravity simply pulling it down. So, you’ll get a black eye, then the cheek bone will be dark, kind of purple and so on. Understand?”

Daniel nodded, watching the doctor with his right eye. The left was already black and blue and sealed shut. A large bandage covered his broken nose. “So I can I have two black eyes at the same time?”

The doctor actually smiled. “Well, you’re not going to win any beauty contests, put it that way. By tomorrow, your left eye should be open, but like I said, the right will get the swelling as it all moves south.”

“Sorry? South?” Kumiko asked, puzzled.

The doctor grinned. “As it moves down, sorry.” He held up one finger in front of Daniel. “Follow my finger.”

With only his right eye, Daniel tracked the doctor’s finger move from left to right and back again.

“Very good,” the doctor announced.

Daniel glanced at his mother, hovering nearby, a worried expression on her face.

“How many fingers do you see, please?” the doctor asked, holding up two fingers.

Daniel studied the hand in front of him for a moment, concentrating with a slight frown. “Three,” he finally said. His mother gasped and he knew he had blown it. He looked at her and said, “Everything is blurry.”

“It’s okay,” the doctor assured him.

“How is it okay he not see?” Kumiko argued. When the doctor turned in her direction, she immediately gave him a polite half-bow. “So, sorry. But you had two finger, he say wrong. He say three.”

“Right, but he’s got a concussion and—”

“Concussion?” Kumiko repeated, completely baffled.

“Daniel was hit in the head. He has a brain injury—”

Kumiko gasped again, this time covering her mouth with both hands.

The doctor gave her a smile. “It sounds worse than it is. But he was knocked unconscious and that usually means a concussion. He’s been having headaches; when a nurse helped him to the bathroom, he didn’t have good balance. That just means a concussion.”

“How you treat?” Kumiko politely asked. “This thing. This concussion.”

“Rest,” the doctor explained. “That’s about it.”

“But aspirin? For headache. He have headache still. He say nose hurt very much.”

“Mama,” Daniel whined, greatly embarrassed.

“I know he’s in pain, but we can’t risk bleeding.” When she gave him another puzzled look, he said, “Aspirin can thin the blood. His nose could start bleeding all over again. It’s just too risky.”

“I see,” Kumiko said with a nod.

“He just needs to rest. No activity of any kind. He’ll get better,” the doctor told her. She looked doubtful and he smiled. “I promise. Daniel will make a full recovery.”

“Excuse me,” a man announced nearby. Everyone turned to see an Army major standing a few feet away. He looked at the doctor. “How is your young patient, Doctor?”

The doctor was a bit startled to see an Army major in the camp hospital. And quite puzzled as to why he had an interest in a patient. “Sir, I was just explaining to Daniel and his mother that he has sustained a concussion. Probably fairly mild.” He glanced at his patient. The large bandage across his nose, the left eye swollen shut and an ugly purple color. Bruises marked the rest of his face, even his neck. “Broken nose, the black eye, bruising.”

“How long will he be here?”

The doctor glanced at Daniel again, then said, “For a while. He can’t leave until he shows no more brain injury symptoms.”

“How long, Doctor?” the major repeated firmly.

“A few days to a week, Major.”

“I see, thank you.” He looked to Kumiko. “Mrs. Kobata?”

Her heart clenched in fear. Was it Julia? Had something happened to her? Or Ido? Both had gone to the mess hall for lunch. She wasn’t hungry and wanted to stay with Daniel. The major had stepped away, and it took all her will to follow politely and not blurt out her fears about her family. The major stopped. They were now in a quiet corridor.

“I just have a question for you.”

“Please?” Kumiko asked.

“At your home on Bainbridge Island, some of it is farm land?”

She was baffled by the man’s question, but promptly nodded. “Yes. We grow strawberries.”

“Strawberries,” he repeated thoughtfully.

Kumiko nodded again. “Strawberry.”

“Do you have a tractor?” he asked.

Kumiko was puzzled. “Tractor? No tractor, no.”

“No tractor? You considering getting one? I mean, before the war started, were you considering buying a tractor?”

She shook her head. “No.”

The major nodded his head and promptly walked away. He didn’t even say thank you, Kumiko thought. Slowly making her way back to Daniel, she couldn’t help but wonder what that was all about. It took her a moment to realize that when the Army major first approached, she worried about Ido and Julia. Not Matthew. She wondered if this was good or bad.

“Definitely female,” Mortenson said, studying one of the fingertips with a magnifying glass.

Johnstone knew that simply because the fingernail was longer than a man’s. It also looked dainty to his untrained eye. “The other?” he asked.

Mortenson turned his attention to the smaller fingertip. Johnstone paced behind the medical examiner, his footsteps echoing in the otherwise empty medical lab. “A child’s, I’d say.”

Johnstone stopped. “About ten years old.”

Mortenson turned to him, surprised. “You saw the child?”

Johnstone nodded and started pacing again. “The other one belongs to his mother. I saw them two days ago. She did the tattoos.”

“She tell you that?”

“Someone else did. She didn’t deny it. Plus, it’s the only place in that area that does tattooing. She recognized the drawing. She knew.”

“Tell you what it means?” the medical examiner asked.

“I’m not sure. Maybe ‘Dragon’s Breath,’” Johnstone explained.

Mortenson frowned. “What’s that?”

“I’m not sure yet.” Johnstone was accustomed to working solo, but this case had him baffled, and he found himself needing to talk out loud. “But in ancient Japan, the shogun, the top army commander, if he went after some group, an area, it was said it was like a dragon’s breath.” He saw the coroner frown, so he added, “Dragons breathe fire to kill, exterminate their enemy.” He shrugged. “So maybe we have some Japanese group or gang operating here. Ready to cause us harm.”

Mortenson gave a low whistle. “This is big.”

Johnstone stopped pacing again. “It could be.”

“What are you going to do?”

“Try to find out if it’s true.” He resumed pacing. He caught Mortenson’s eye and nodded to the fingertips. “Left or right hand?”

Mortenson turned back to his table. Scrutinizing the body parts under the magnifying glass, he shook his head. “Impossible to tell.”

“Left,” Johnstone announced.

“Like the dead men.”

Johnstone nodded. “What I can’t figure out is, what does it mean? That woman—” his voice trailed off. Mortenson waited. Johnstone continued, saying, “She was clearly petrified. I could see that, but—” He sheepishly looked at Mortenson. “I pushed her. I knew she was scared, I could see that, but I pushed her anyway.”

“You were doing your job—”

“They did it to her son, for God’s sake!” Johnstone thundered.

“And you had no way of knowing that would happen. You can’t blame yourself.”

Johnstone studied him for a moment, then nodded. Mortenson then asked, “You said there is something you can’t figure out?”

It took Johnstone a moment to regroup. Then he asked, “Why is it done? At first I thought it was some initiation. A right of passage, if you will,” Johnstone said. “Especially with Petty Officer Carsteen. But then Sean Kanagawa just had one finger done. Carsteen had all four on the left hand. Now we have these. Obviously, it is some sort of warning.”

“Or another tattooing.”

“Like branding?” Johnstone said.

“Possibly.” Mortenson shrugged.

“As if to tell the world that Dragon’s Breath owns them?”

“Works for me.” Another shrug. Mortenson frowned again, “How long you talk to her? The woman?”

“I don’t know. A few minutes.”

“You go inside her home?”

“No. She was, well, frightened, like I said.”

Mortenson nodded and cupped his chin in one hand, lost in thought. Finally, he said, “So, either she told someone that you were there and what you were asking about, or—”

“She was being watched,” Johnstone said. “I thought of that.”

Mortenson turned and picked up the envelope.

“No return address. Post marked two days ago,” Johnstone told him.

“They were evacuated two days ago,” Mortenson said. “But if you’re right and this is some Japanese gang, then they were evacuated too.”

“Not necessarily,” Johnstone argued. “It’s a big city. They could hide out.”

Mortenson shook his head, while carefully inspecting the inside of the large padded envelope. “No. This is in the newspapers every day. Japanese this. Japanese that. They’d stand out like a sore thumb.”

“Maybe,” Johnstone conceded. “My guess is, they know there is an investigation going on. They were watching her.”

“Or, they found this,” Mortenson said, holding up Johnstone’s business card. “It was in the envelope.”

Johnstone just stared. He stepped forward and took it from Mortenson. Dried blood was splashed across his name and the precinct’s address. Turning it over, he found three words.

“
More will die
.”

The Navy commander, David Merrick, wearing his service dress blue uniform and his black shoes shined to perfection, sat next to Johnstone on the train ride south. He was a JAG officer, which meant he was an attorney, assigned to the Navy Judge Advocate General’s Corps. The young man was very well qualified, having conducted internal naval investigations for the past four years. Johnstone had thought that he was going to hate the JAG officer, but much to his surprise, he actually liked him. Which was good considering they were now on their way to the Manzanar internment camp together.