A Cruel Season for Dying (51 page)

“You need to get back to your room.”

“I’m okay. Have you talked to Hanae?”

“Not yet. She’s not expecting me until later today.”

“Probably best not to tell her over the phone what’s happened.”

He nodded.

“How’s this going to play at Police Plaza?”

“McCauley will want me off the case.”

“He can’t do that.”

“
Zanshin.
That’s when a samurai’s gut warns him something bad is about to happen.”

“What are you going to do?”

His laugh was bitter. “Avoid McCauley as long as I can.”

“And …”

“Kelly said Michael might have found something in my office right before the attack. I’d like to know what it was.”

“So would I.”

“I’ll call you,” he said. Then, “If you need anything, Adelia or one of the men will be around.”

“You don’t think …?” She didn’t finish.

“No.” He shook his head. “But it’s better to be careful.”

Darius lay on his back in the bed, his lower body hemmed in by starched sheets, his arms free but wedded to IV tubes. Sensors
attached to his chest fed a heart monitor, which bleeped cardiac contractions across a blue screen. A biography of electrical
impulses. A life reduced to jagged lines.

Sakura moved to the side of the bed, placed his hand against the cool aluminum railing. Michael’s face was clear, except for
a green
tube, forking into both nostrils, that piped in oxygen. His eyes were open, dark and immense, staring at something out of
Sakura’s reach.

For a moment he watched his chest rise and fall with reassuring regularity.

“Michael, it’s Jimmy.” He reached inside the fence of rails and clasped his hand. “You’re going to be okay.”

Darius was paler than he’d ever seen him, paler than after the Hudson shooting. A pallor that seemed manufactured, as though
chalk had been rubbed into his pores. A whiteness that lay on the flesh rather than existed as part of it. Yet the black hair
pulled back from his forehead seemed alive. A thing apart from the rest of the body. Like the eyes.

The eyes shifted now. “Willie …” Her name more breath than sound.

“She’s fine.”

The eyes closed.

“Michael, I have to know. What did you find in my office?”

The lids lifted.

“Kelly said …”

Darius’s lips came together, struggling to form meaning. Jimmy bent over, felt Michael’s fingers tighten around his wrist.
But the single word was unintelligible.

Zoe walked into the marble lobby, looking appropriately grim. Hospitals gave her the creeps. But despite this aversion, she
had carefully cultivated sources in every major facility in the city, staff people who could tip her off to celebrity and
crime victim admissions. She had gotten more than one exclusive delivering flowers, even posing once as a grief counselor.

There would be no elaborate subterfuge today that might only get her spotted. She would simply walk down the hallway to scope
things out. Hope for the break that she needed.

Since the now famous press conference, she’d devoted her byline to proclaiming Thomas Graff a police scapegoat. With his suicide,
a sacrificial lamb.
WHO
’
S NEXT
?
TEN DAYS AND COUNTING
! were the headlines
for today’s cover. Zinging it home once again that the man who’d murdered little Lucia Mancuso was still out there, and that
anyone at all could be the target of his homicidal rage.

Except that no one had.

Where was the killer? There had been lulls like this before, but something kept telling her that this wasn’t the dry spell
it appeared. Which was why she was here so early. She’d jumped at the tip from her source who claimed that James Sakura had
been here visiting a patient.

And no ordinary patient. This one had been checked in under a “John Doe” and put into a private room. Security on the hall
too, according to her man. Plainclothes. Discreet. Something important was definitely going down.

She took the elevator up and got out, avoiding the attention of the nurses at the central station. Visitors would not be allowed
in for hours.

She stood frozen in the hallway as she saw him come out of the target room. He looked dead on his feet. Shirt opened at the
neck. Tie pulled loose. He needed a shave. But none of it made him appear any less desirable. She hadn’t realized just how
much she missed him. She watched him shove his hands into the pockets of his pants and slump against the wall.

It had to be somebody important if they had Rozelli watching the door. Somebody connected to the serial.

She started walking again. The heels of her shoes registering as soft clicks on the polished tile. He must have heard her
because he turned then.

For one instant he smiled. That patented smirk that flashed the perfect white teeth and made his eyes go slanty. A reflex,
done without thinking, as though nothing ugly had passed between them. Then as quickly, his face emptied, went blank. She
would have settled for anger.

“Hi, Rozelli. Long time no see.”

He shifted, bending one leg so that the flat of his foot rested against the wall.

“How the mighty have fallen, if they have you pulling guard duty.” She couldn’t resist. “Unless …”

“There’s nothing here for you, Zoe.” His voice as expressionless as his face. Then the jingle of some coins in his pocket
before his foot came away from the wall and he moved back inside the room.

She stood staring at the door. Shut in her face. But oh, how wrong he was. On both counts. She wasn’t finished covering the
investigation that had gotten her star billing on every cable news program in the country. And she wasn’t nearly finished
with Johnny Rozelli.

The Manhattan sky was still overcast as morning dawned. Sakura, on his way home, drove with the patience of exhaustion. It
was snowing again when he reached the rental garage. He walked along the pavement in a cloud of tiny flakes.

White lights winked around the windows of several apartments, and a surge of holiday spirit hit him like a blunted punch.
Christmas was less than two weeks away. He’d almost let the season slip. One of many things he’d neglected since these murders
had started.

He shivered in the cold. He hoped Hanae had turned up the thermostat in the apartment. He imagined she would, if only for
her finches. She preferred the cold. He smiled, thinking how she’d always given him the greater share of the goose down in
their comforter. The image of her chubby hands kneading the fabric like dough flashed through his mind. How he wished he could
crawl under that dense mound of feathers, if only for a couple of hours, pulling Hanae over to his side of the bed. But he’d
have time for little more than a shower and a shave. He was determined to find what Michael had discovered in whatever time
he had.

Which could not be much. Despite the debate that still raged in the media over the “debunking” of the locket, the public at
large had taken comfort in the belief that Thomas Graff might still be the killer. That would no longer be possible when word
got out of a new attack, an attack moreover on his own people. He was going to look a fool. McCauley would take pleasure in
handing him his head.

He went into the building, up the stairs, and pushed his key into the lock.

Even years later, it would seem that his eyes had not betrayed him in that moment as he stood in the
genkan
—that the white silk of the
ceremonial marriage kimono was in fact her pale naked flesh, that the long sleeves hanging from the pole were the bright unblemished
wings of a swan. A portent that caused him to misinterpret reality.

“Hanae …?” he called out, his voice distorted in his ears as he forced himself to look up, to see the kimono hanging in place
as he removed his shoes in the
genkan.

“Hanae …?” He moved into the living room, his concern only growing with her failure to answer.

Taiko lay on the floor near the sofa. Not sleeping. Drugged. That was apparent in the dog’s sharp and shallow breathing, the
marked dilation of the pupils in half-lidded eyes.

“Hanae …?” He was trying to remain calm. Trying to tell himself that she was asleep in their bedroom. That Taiko was not drugged
but only sleeping, despite the evidence.

Hanae was not in their bedroom or anywhere else in the apartment. It was possible that Taiko had become sick. That the drug
was something that Hanae herself had given him. He must call Mr. Romero. The driver would know where she was.

But Mr. Romero did not. Nor did the neighbors.

He moved about the apartment like an automaton. Searching for clues. For an answer to how long she’d been gone. A pain that
was not physical tore at his heart and brain. He wanted to force back the clock. To make this not be. He sat down on the sofa.

After a moment he stood, not knowing what it was he was doing as his feet moved to the worktable and his hands removed the
cloth that covered the clay. The bust that Hanae had been working on was shrouded in sheets of plastic. He began to remove
the layers, like unwrapping a winding sheet from a corpse.

The face he revealed was cold and gray, but alive with the soul that his wife’s fingers had imparted. If the bust had once
mimicked the shape of his head and its planes the lines of his face, that had largely been lost beyond some lingering echo.
He stood there, unthinking. Then moved without volition. Felt the nose explode beneath the bludgeon of his fist. He hit it
again and again, smashing the face. The clay absorbing the force of his fury as it deformed beneath his blows, till the energy
of his emotion was as blunted as the ruined features.

But the core of his rage burned inward. And remained.

Terror shrieked like a living thing inside her brain. The force of it silencing her power to give it voice. She was seized
by blackness. Suspended in the kind of void she had never been allowed to experience since her birth. Alone. Abandoned in
the living darkness. Stripped. As if her other senses had followed in the wake of her sight.

She was naked. Physically naked. Beneath her, crisp sheets made a boundary.

Hanae seized on that. Curled. Wrapped her arms around her. Breathed consciously. In. Out. Finding her limit. A context for
thought. A concept, a reference point, rose in her mind. The memory of the slugs in her grandmother’s garden. Naked, quivering….