A Cruel Season for Dying (19 page)

“Second floor?” She turned to Hanae, wondering if there were an elevator.

“No. It’s this staircase I wanted you to see.”

She turned back, really looked at what was in front of her. In this city you forgot to do that. There was too much, so you
saw nothing.

Illuminated by a skylight, the staircase glowed, curving and sinuous. Simple, but magnificent, it made you think of a snake.
Except it was a snake you wanted to touch.

“It’s beautiful.” She reached out, stroking the warm wood.

Hanae’s hand moved next to hers. “It is his soul you feel inside.” The soft voice spoke at her shoulder. “It was Kenjin who
made this.”

Dr. Isaacs’s office was a small and crowded sanctuary. Haim Isaacs himself was a big man, bearded, balding, and jolly. More
like a secular Santa Claus than a Hebrew scholar.

“Please sit, Lieutenant Sakura.” The professor’s beefy hand indicated a well-loved chair.

“Thank you for seeing me.”

His eyes went just short of twinkling. “My pleasure. I have no sense of shame. I am what you call a show-off. I enjoy talking
about what I know.”

Sakura laughed.

“So, you want to know about angels.”

“Yes,” he said. “Understanding angels may be critical to apprehending this killer.”

The professor nodded.

“A serial killer is not like other murderers,” Sakura said. “Most killers murder people they know and at least have superficially
rational motives for what they do.”

“Jealousy, greed, hatred.” Isaacs enumerated emotions, which in another context might have been labeled sins.

“Yes. But serial murder is different. The killer murders to satisfy a well-rehearsed script inside his head. This particular
killer’s fantasy seems to be about transformation.” He removed the crime scene photos from a folder and spread them across
the desk.

Isaacs sat, looking at them for a moment, then stood and moved to the window, examining the remnants of a cold and dreary
afternoon. “Dr. Whelan seems to believe your killer is making human beings into angels,” he said. His words settled against
the glass in a fine mist.

“But why
fallen
angels?” Sakura asked.

“Your victims were all homosexuals. Let’s start there.” Dr. Isaacs walked back to his chair. “Angels are androgynes, beings
that are neither male nor female. Your killer may believe that homosexuality, which is the union of
like
to
like,
is closer to the androgynous state of angels.”

“So you’re saying that in the killer’s mind, homosexuals are more like angels than heterosexuals.”

“Yes,” he answered.

“And through ritual murder, he’s transforming homosexuals into angels?” Sakura said.

“Exactly. The wings are symbolic of his success.”

“But why
fallen
angels?” he asked again.

“According to
Enoch,
the fallen angels were punished because they took on human bodies to sleep with the daughters of men. They were anything
but homosexual. It seems something of a contradiction.”

Sakura frowned. “So where does that leave us?”

“I don’t know. Maybe the names are not attached to the bodies and are simply the killer’s statement against heterosexuality.
Those names, Lieutenant Sakura”—he smiled—“may be no more than the graffiti of a very angry man.”

Sakura maneuvered through tight traffic, recalling the spread of prints he’d just moments ago reviewed with Dr. Isaacs. Black-and-white
stills from some godless universe inhabited by a madman. And with the images of the hellish photographs came the odor of incense
used by the killer. Strange, until today the scent had never evoked that other incense that precisely demarcated his life.

It had been three years and his California home was still alien to him. As were his stepmother, Susan, and his half brother,
Paul, and his half sister, Elizabeth. From the very first day when his stepmother had given him her too-quick smile, he understood
he was an outsider. With his father so involved with his practice, it was Susan who cataloged his days; it was Susan who had
finally decided that he was to be called James, believing that Akira was too cumbersome for teachers and friends. He was certain
she had also declared that his father was to be Ike instead of Isao.

Nine-year-old Paul was more difficult to read. Moody and intense, his father’s second son was like a desert mirage. There
and not there. But seven-year-old Elizabeth was as bright and open as the sparklers he had once lit on festival days in Japan.
She had almost made his life bearable.

He had fought the irony. For so long he had wanted to live with his father, but when his wish had finally been granted, he’d
despised his new life.

Sakura pulled into his space in the underground garage. For a moment he sat and watched the keys dangle from the ignition.
He reached for the crime scene photographs. The ancient incense came to him fresh, along with the face of his father.

He had returned from school to find Isao slumped on the edge of his bed, seemingly trapped in his American doctor’s suit.
When his father spoke, the words slapped like an open palm. His grandmother was dead.

The trip back home was a dream, flying in over the ocean. He’d descended through the blue labyrinth of sky, weaving blindly
in and out of clouds. Mountains pierced the cold mist. Snow like fresh cream shrouded hills and rooftops. But home could not
be the same. His greatest happiness was gone. And he’d come to pick through her ashes
for her bones, to bury her inside the dark, cold earth of a Buddhist cemetery.

Chrysanthemums, the color of pale sunlight, stood in stark contrast to the black dresses of his aunts. For a moment he stared
at the single pearl, like a milky tear, hanging in the hollow of his aunt Otoko’s throat. Unlike the other female relatives,
his grandmother lay dressed in a white kimono, folded right over left, a mirror of life, marking her passage from this world.
But the flesh of her face seemed luminescent and smooth, her hair, pulled back into a tight knot, as black as in younger days.
Her lips moistened, she appeared almost alive.

He watched her taken away to have her flesh transformed to soft ash, her death-breath turned to pale smoke. He sat with his
family to eat the first meal, but each morsel was a stone falling through the hollow of his chest. Then at the close of the
ritual feast, his grandmother’s ashes were presented to the family, and with clean chopsticks each relative passed the remnants
of bone one to another. He made his arm iron so that he would not tremble as he passed a fragment of bone to his uncle Ikenobo.

Then yellow-robed monks chanted and prayed as his grandmother’s remains were placed inside an urn. Incense burned, filling
the air so thickly he thought he would vomit.

Sakura gagged now, dry heaving into his handkerchief, wiping a rivulet of saliva from the corner of his mouth. He counted
breaths, his head leaden against the seat rest. “Nakamura.” He spoke his grand-father’s name inside the cavern of the squad
car. After the funeral he had begged to stay behind with his grandfather. But Isao had refused.

Back in California he had overheard one of the few arguments between his father and Susan. She couldn’t understand why her
husband had not allowed his son to remain in Japan. Certainly, this arrangement would have been better for everyone concerned.
His father’s voice had been low but angry when he answered that California, not Japan, was Akira’s home now.

In the days that had followed, he had grown more sullen and quiet. He lost weight and his grades fell. In desperation, his
father sent him to a therapist. And although he had hated his sessions with
Dr. Ambrose, the psychologist became his savior in the end. He recommended that James be sent away for a time.

The boy from Hokkaido had been lost the day his grandmother died. A veil had fallen between Akira and the child who would
grow to be the man.

Michael Darius fit the key into the lock of Luis Carrera’s apartment, still uncertain if he really wanted to become a part
of what had happened behind this door. Early this morning when Sakura had first slid the key across his desk, he could only
stare at it. Finally he’d picked it up, put it into his pocket, got up, and walked out without saying another word. He’d had
no choice. His very presence at Police Plaza had betrayed him. He was infected with the old disease—his allegiance to Jimmy,
and his need to drive evil back into its hole.

He stepped under the yellow crime scene tape and moved inside. He reached back and closed the door, conscious of the dull
thud of wood meeting wood. The blinds were closed against the watery late-afternoon light, but even in the semidarkness it
was easy to make out the sooty leavings of the Crime Scene Unit.

He closed his eyes, willing himself to forget what he had seen in those photographs, what he’d heard Willie French say the
other night at Jimmy’s. He had to come into this naked, free of the weight of facts and opinions already laid out.

He opened his eyes and examined what had once been Carrera’s home. The living room was spare, except for the walls. Ballet
posters and photographs covered most of the space. Most photos showed Carrera himself in publicity stills or candid shots
with other dancers.

But the back injury in Linsky’s autopsy report had probably meant that Carrera would have never again achieved star status.
And he wondered if this had anything to do with what had happened. Had Carrera wanted to die?

He thought of the photograph he’d seen of Carrera lying dead in his own bed. Ironically, death seemed to have bestowed on
the dancer something he’d never been able to achieve in life. The white wings appeared natural rather than abstracted, sprouting
from his shoulders
rather than affixed by some mad killer’s hand. Even the unforgiving photography had been unable to hide the waxy translucency
of Carrera’s flesh. With his long fingers chastely folded over his groin, he seemed poised to fly, transform into some purer,
rarer entity.
Now I begin,
the image in the photograph had seemed to say.

He shook his head to dispel his thoughts and moved toward the bedroom. The air grew notably denser, so that he seemed to be
breathing through layers of gauze. The smell was distinctively Roman Catholic. He’d served for only two years as an altar
boy, but the scent that had flaunted pagan harems in the face of Christianity’s God was something he’d never forgotten. He
raked his tongue against his hard palate, scratching the tickle of spicy staleness.

He supposed it was that faint odor of the incense that drew him first. Then it was the metallic stink of blood. But what had
Jimmy said? That he’d never worked a homicide with less blood. In the end, however, when he stood in the bedroom, he was able
to determine with absolute certainty that what had drawn him in was the murderer’s own scent.

He thought peaches. Furry, fleshy peaches left in the hot summer sun too long. Allowed to linger in a bowl, forgotten until
their odor refused to be ignored. It was a scent that evoked waste. Terrible tragic waste. Yet it was a scent with which he’d
grown familiar. A scent he’d smelled a thousand times. An odor so intimate that at first he’d failed to notice, failed to
recognize as the odor of his own flesh.