Japantown Read Free

a psycho. No sane person would do this.”
    “You been around any gang action lately?”
    “Good point.”
    When my parents’ divorce flung me back to Los Angeles, I’d spent five years on the cusp of South Central in a gang-infested neighborhood, then put in two more here in the Mission District grunge before I could afford decent quarters in the Sunset and, after marriage, in my present cupboard apartment in East Pacific Heights. I’d seen my share of corpses, but this outdid nearly any scenario gangland could summon up. Slick purple-red pools of blood had collected in the spaces between the bodies, and viscous streams threaded their way through the brickwork.
    I took a deep breath to settle my nerves.
    Then I saw the mother’s death mask. A tortured face. Despairing. Aware, in the last seconds of life, of the horror playing out around her.
    The sight left me breathless and depleted. Maybe I wasn’t up to this. My limbs grew leaden. Ramming my fists into the pockets of my jeans, I gritted my teeth to restrain my fury.
    One minute the family was strolling through Japantown, the next they faced darkness and death in a foreign land.
Not a trace of the thief
but he left behind
the peaceful stillness
of the Okazaki Hills
    Years ago, long before we married, Mieko had whispered those words in my ear to ease the pain of my own mother’s passing, my second encounter with the poem. Unbidden, it came to mind a third time when Mieko was killed, leaving Jenny and me to struggle on without her. Now the verse made its presence felt once more and I knew why. Embedded in those four lines was the balm of a larger truth, a comforting kernel of wisdom stretching back generations.
    “You still with me?”
    I dragged myself away from personal demons. “Yeah.”
    Renna rolled a couple of imaginary marbles around in his mouth as he considered my answer. A full head of black hair capped deadpan cop eyes and rugged features. He had a hard face with deep lines, but the lines had soft edges. If his face were a catcher’s mitt, you’d say it was broken in just right.
    Renna stepped up to the crime scene tape and said, “How’s it going, Todd?”
    Inside the tape, a forensic tech scraped up a blood sample. His hair was clipped short and his ears were large and pink. “Some good, mostly bad. This was late night in a commercial district, so we have an uncontaminated site. That’s the good news. Other side is, Henderson was grumbling louder than usual. He’s saying nothing we got is gonna tell us squat even though he’s fast-tracking it. He gathered debris, fibers, and prints and rushed back to the lab but did a lot of frowning. Fiber’s old. Doesn’t think it’s from the shooter.”
    “What kind of prints?” Renna asked.
    Todd glanced my way, then with a look queried Renna, who said, “Todd Wheeler, Jim Brodie. Brodie’s consulting on this one but keep it to yourself for now.”
    We exchanged nods.
    Todd angled his head at an alley. “Hasn’t rained for a while so we got footprints in the passageway alongside the restaurant. Soft and padded and probably silent. A treadless loafer or moccasin-type shoe. Probably the shooter waiting.”
    Renna and I looked at the alley. An unlit walkway ran between a Japanese restaurant and a kimono shop to public parking in the rear. With a balcony extension overhead, the lane was steeped in shade. I scanned the shops to the left and the right. On the other side of the mall was a second alley, but it offered less cover.
    My stomach muscles twitched and I returned my attention to the victims. They lay in a close-knit cluster, arms and legs crisscrossing in places like some grotesque game of pickup sticks. In the brittle white glare of the kliegs, eye ridges cast dark shadows over sinking sockets and highlighted round cheekbones, chic haircuts, stylish clothing. A look I saw three times a year when I flew across the Pacific.
    These Japanese were from Tokyo.
    In fact, if this were old Japan, the