A Cruel Season for Dying (16 page)

The image scrolled in his brain, her hands come dripping with gray water from the bucket. The same spindly hands that tended
him after the beatings. Huge white spiders crawling on his skin with old wash-cloths wrapping ice, binding his wounds with
bands of yellowed adhesive. Treating him at home. Not because of the shame. Not even because of the fear. Because emergency
rooms and hospitals were full of germs that could kill you. She’d kept him safe from germs, if nothing else.

Jacketless and shoeless now, he pulled off his shirt and tossed it into the corner, breathing in the mattress funk of night
sweat and spilled semen. Reminding himself it was freedom he inhaled. That the hustling wasn’t forever.

“What’s that?” He’d turned to see the john taking something from the bag he’d been carrying.

“Camera.” The man showed him. “I want to take some pictures.”

“Whatever.” He shrugged. “You paid for the night.” He walked into the bathroom, thinking it was funny how things worked out.
Gil and Chad had been gone since this morning, faceless extras in some porno flick they were shooting out in Jersey, of all
places. He’d turned down the gig because he hadn’t liked the idea of doing it on camera. And he never crossed the Hudson.
A symbolic thing with him. Never going
back. Weird that he’d ended up starring in his own little freak show tonight.

He unzipped his jeans, deciding to think of nothing, finding the softened edge inside his brain, the place where the dope
he smoked had nestled and spread. The floorboards creaked. The john had followed him into the bathroom. His penis still aimed
at the toilet, he turned, saw what he saw.

His body reacted, moving ahead of his mind. Something … the mask … registered. The canister coming up to spray. He fought
at first, holding his breath, his hands protecting his face. But the attempt at flight was a gesture, like most everything
else in his life. At the end it was pleasant to surrender.

T
here was an old stink of fast food and stale sex in the small room. You could have easily missed
ASBEEL
printed in ash on the dirty wall, if not for the flood lamps the techs had set up. The cold illumination made the body on
the mattress appear romantically spectral rather than dead. What the light made of the rest of the room was less forgiving.
The only relief in the dingy, cramped space was a tangle of color in an old poster thumbtacked against a closet door:
BARBRA
,
THE CONCERT
.

The killer had been slumming, thought Sakura. Except the young victim looked no different from the others. Attractive, fine-boned,
lean. The muscles of his body defined more by life on the streets than workouts at any gym. The boy’s mouth was fixed in a
full-lipped pout, as though he were somehow put out by this final, unfortunate turn of events.

The swan wings jutted out whiter against the soiled mattress ticking, the boy’s delicate fingers cupping his sex in a gesture
that seemed oddly modest. In another reality the ash markings inscribing his chest might have been a testament to some primitive
rite of passage.

The snap of Linsky’s gloves stopped Sakura’s thoughts.

“Injection marks?” he asked the M.E., his words punctuated by frigid puffs in the underheated room. He could see the wings,
the drawing, a new name written on the wall. He needed confirmation of what his eyes could not so easily discern.

Linsky lifted the victim’s arm. “He was a user. Heroin, I suspect.” He inspected the groin and between the toes. “Fairly new
at it, it seems.”
He pulled at the skin on the inside of the elbow, isolating the site where two fresh-looking marks appeared. “I can’t be positive,
but these look like what we’ve been seeing. We’ll run the complete battery of tests. I can’t be specific, but I think this
one’s been dead for less than twenty-four hours.” The M.E. moved to the other side of the room and motioned for the gurney
to be brought in.

Sakura took another look at the corpse. The cooling-off period was over.

“Seems our killer wasn’t as selective.” McCauley walked up behind him and bent over the body, looking down at the slim wrists.
The bruising from the duct tape was clear. The chief of detectives stretched back to his full height, glanced around the room.
“This is a rat hole. The kid working the streets?”

“Unconfirmed. But Talbot is talking to the roommate who found him this morning.”

McCauley took out a handkerchief and held it against his face as though he feared contamination. “Who’s this Dr. French you’re
bringing in?”

“Forensic psychiatrist. Consults on serials for the Bureau. She was one of my instructors at Quantico.”

McCauley nodded. “An agent?”

“Independent.”

“Good. We don’t need the FBI to tell us how to run things. You know jurisdiction is a sacred cow, Sakura. How good is she?”

“The best.”

McCauley finished with his handkerchief, stuck it back in his pocket. “I said you can bring in whoever you need. If Dr. French
can help you get this son of a bitch off my streets, more power to you. I want him. Now.”

He watched McCauley walk out of the room, peel off the latex gloves, and deposit them into the plastic bag the techs had provided.
Now,
the chief had said, but Sakura had not understood it as an ultimatum. At least, not yet.

Hanae sat before the small Buddhist altar she had brought with her from Kyoto. She was preparing for meditation and was thinking
about
Willie, who was arriving today in New York. Willie, a Catholic who struggled with her religion, had once joked after reading
a book on Japan that the Japanese must surely be the pack rats of religion, tucking away bits and pieces of spirituality to
pull out what was needed at the moment.

She had laughed and admitted it was true. It was a common saying that every Japanese had a Shinto wedding and a Buddhist funeral,
a generalization that was both more and less than accurate. The actual situation was more complex. Taoism and Confucianism,
even Christianity, were all part of the religious and ethical mix in Japan.

Today she must be a Buddhist. Offering her thanks for Willie’s coming. Meditating on why Willie’s arrival should bring such
a sense of relief. Certainly, she liked Willie very much, from the time when Jimmy had attended the academy at Quantico. She
remembered how strange she had thought it at first when her husband had become so familiar with one of his teachers. It was
different in Japan, where the rules of hierarchy proscribed a formal relationship between a teacher and student. But also
unlike Japan, where friends met in restaurants rather than sharing meals in their homes, Jimmy had invited Willie to their
small Virginia apartment for dinner.

She had been so nervous preparing that meal. And Willie had come early. But after a short introduction, Jimmy and their guest
had taken their drinks to the adjoining living room, where they’d sat and joked about people and cases and things that had
happened in class. It had been very pleasant to hear Jimmy laughing about the work that he always took so seriously. But that
was the effect of Willie on everyone. Listening to their words and their laughter, she had forgotten her nervousness about
the food. So the meal was a great success. And she and Willie had themselves become close over those long months at Quantico.

So, naturally, she was happy Willie was arriving today. Willie was her friend. And Willie was a window that opened on Jimmy’s
working world. Willie would tell her the things about his job that Jimmy would not—the dangers and the pressures from which
he believed he must protect her.

But that was not all of it. She wanted more from Willie than a wife’s small and secret pathway into her husband’s hidden life.
She wanted
Willie as part of this case for the same reason she wanted Kenjin. She feared this case. She forced herself to form the word
in her mind. She
feared
it, had feared it since Jimmy had first been placed in charge, although she had at once understood it as both a great challenge
and opportunity. But it was not that she thought Jimmy needed his friends’ help. She feared he would need their protection.

Was this one of her presentiments of danger, or something small and foolish? Was she afraid that the more successful Jimmy
became in his work, the less important she would be to him?

She had never resented Jimmy’s dedication. Her husband was indivisible. No split existed between what Jimmy was and what he
did. It was this wholeness in him that she loved, a wholeness that had encompassed her since the day they had met. There was
no moment of his life, she knew, of which she was not a part. And so it would be with their child.

Foolish, foolish, Hanae.
Was it not simply change that she feared?

She sat upright on the cushion, making a place for stillness. For a long time she remained, contemplating the Noble Truths
that all is impermanence, that suffering results from an attempt to confine the fluid forms of reality in the rigid categories
created by the mind.

The telephone rang.

The apartment building was an oddity in the city. One of a handful of grand Victorian ladies passed down through a family
both rich enough and eccentric enough to resist the pressures toward going condo. The lobby was L-shaped and cavernous. A
march of white columns in blue gloom. Carved marble fireplaces more than two decades cold.

A single shaft of late sun pierced through heavy draperies, falling in a hazy spotlight where Hanae Sakura sat in her red
coat on one of the faded sofas. Dust motes like frenzied ghosts danced in the beam, whipped up by Taiko’s tail beating a welcome
on the carpet.

Michael Darius had come in from the street and was crossing the lobby toward them, Hanae’s eyes tracking as if she could see.
He shifted his tool bag to his other hand and leaned down to pet the shepherd.

“You should have called,” he said to Hanae.

“We have not been waiting long.” She reached out a hand to settle the dog. Her pale face, veiled in sun, canted upward to
Darius.

He sat down in a chair by the side of the sofa, his knees cutting the light.

“You’re making cabinets?” she asked him.

He smiled. She could smell as well as he the sawdust clinging to his work clothes. “Shelves,” he said, “for a private residence.
Rosewood. Very nice.”

“You always do beautiful work.”

He smiled again at the double edge. Small talk was impossible between them. “Jimmy came by here the other night,” he said.

She didn’t answer. She was sitting perfectly still.

“I don’t want to go back to police work, Hanae. Besides, I’m a better carpenter.”

“Is this what you believe?”

“Yes. And there’s always the law….” His words ran out in silence. “Do you want to come up?”

“No.” She smiled. “Jimmy phoned before I came here. They have found another body, but he has promised to try to be home for
a few hours tonight.” She got up from the sofa, bringing Taiko to his feet. His harness jingled like muffled bells. “I’m going
to have something special prepared.”