A Mourning in Autumn

by Harker Moore

Genres: Mystery; Fall & winter reads

Synopsis

NYPD homicide detective Lieutenant Jimmy Sakura is back as he faces a series of gruesome murders. In the back alleys of New York City, the latest in a series of murders is more disturbing than anything detective Lieutenant Jimmy Sakura has ever seen: women ritually executed in the most brutal way possible. Not only must Sakura delve into the disturbing recesses of his mind where the tools for this kind of investigation lurk, but he must conceal this agonizing work from his wife Hanae who has only just recovered from the wounds-physical and mental-that she suffered at the hands of Jimmy's last quarry. With no one to rely on, and faced with his worst nightmare, Sakura threatens to bend under the strain as he seeks out the self-styled "Eater of Souls" and risks pushing himself far beyond the point of no return.

Release date: July 31, 2007

Publisher: Grand Central Publishing

Print pages: 348

Sample

CHAPTER 1

The dawn streets were blue-black and shadowless. Lieutenant James Sakura drove over city asphalt still silvered with rain, wondering if last night’s weather had marked real change. Summer had been the hottest he could remember, the heat of July running relentlessly through September—a succession of days so bright and brittle a hammer could crack the sky. Now, on the first day of the new month, the morning had a definite chill. The cold gave an added sense of déjà vu to the ride.

FBI-trained, commander of a special homicide unit within the NYPD, Sakura had thought himself ready that October morning nearly a year ago, when the call had come giving him jurisdiction in a developing serial case. He’d believed himself prepared for the challenges of stranger-to-stranger murder, where the motive for violence was none of the normal human spurs of lust, or greed, or vengeance, but a psychotic fantasy within the killer’s mind. He had felt confident of his ability to withstand the added intensity of departmental politics and the pressures of an unrelenting press. He had been handling all these things when his opponent had outflanked him. And if in the end, the killer had been apprehended, if the department had seized the opportunity to create a public hero . . . well, he knew the measure of his failure.

There had been months of leave when he’d considered not returning to the job. But the emptiness at home had forced him back to the thing he did best, if not well enough. If this new summons brought with it a warrior’s exhilaration, for his personal life it could hardly have come at a worse time.

A full collection of departmental vehicles had gathered at the mouth of the alley where this morning’s body had been found. Sakura pulled his car behind the medical examiner’s van and got out, flashing his shield and signing in with the officer in charge of the log.

A grid search was under way in the lot that widened out from the alley, patrolmen looking for anything that might be tied to the crime. Near the stranded sanitation truck with its spilled load, Lieutenant Morris Martinez was holding court within a knot of officers and brass. Martinez had been one of his mentors in the years he’d worked on vice. Sakura waited for his old friend to spot him, and watched while he walked over.

“What brings you to my patch this time of the morning?”

The question, Sakura knew, was little more than perfunctory. Mo was savvy, had to figure what this impromptu appearance might mean. “McCauley wants me to take a look,” he answered. “Says he has a bad feeling about this one.”

Martinez grunted a laugh. “Must be real bad. The chief don’t like you, Jimmy. Thinks you rose too fast.”

“He could be right.” Sakura glanced over at the clutch of crime scene techs ringing the body. “So, what do we have?”

“Ain’t that just like the chief not to fill you in.” Mo wasn’t letting it go.

“No particulars,” Sakura affirmed. “He just said he thinks we might be looking at a serial.”

“Could be.” Martinez worked the tie at his throat. “Jane Doe here is the second body like this to turn up in the last six months. First one didn’t get caught till she hit the collection center. This time we got lucky, thanks to some bad hydraulics. Piston blows on the garbage truck and tosses the load.”

“The driver call it in?”

“Yeah, regular civic-minded.”

“Have you found anything?”

“Clean so far. Rain washed away any tire prints. I got my guys canvassing to see if anybody saw anything interesting going down since the last pickup.” Martinez looked back to where the sanitation truck backed up to the toppled Dumpster. “Driver’s already having a fit,” he said. “Nobody’s told him yet he’s got to go downtown.”

“The body still where they found it?”

Martinez nodded. “All wrapped in plastic like a Christmas package, just like the first. The surprise comes when you open it.”

“Surprise,” Sakura repeated. He had detected some particular note of warning.

“You’ll see for yourself.” Mo’s smile was grim. “I suspect you’ll be attending the autopsy.”

“I saw the ME’s van on my way in,” Sakura said.

“They’re ready to take her.”

“Crime Scene?”

“Pretty much finished.” Martinez grinned more warmly now, clapping him on the back. “We all just been waitin’ for you, Jimmy.”

Outdoor crime scenes were bad, a dumped body the worst. Disconnected. Anonymous. A location with no immediate link to either killer or victim. Little chance for physical evidence beyond the body itself, and whatever hair or fiber might cling to skin, or clothes, or wrapping.

Sakura moved carefully. Mo was an old friend and a realist. Still, all cops were territorial, and he didn’t want to ruffle any feathers. If McCauley, as was likely, shifted the investigation to Major Case, then some of these same patrolmen and precinct detectives would be detailed to help his unit with the legwork. Yet the here and the now were his only opportunity to satisfy himself that nothing important would be missed. He walked the lot in his own private grid search, retracing the steps of the techs.

Finally it was time for his undivided moment with the body. He went to where it lay, squatting down on the wet pavement. Getting as close as was possible.

A spill of garbage like vile jetsam issued from the wounded Dumpster, damp and greasy cardboard mixing with other refuse from the restaurant that fronted the lot, marinara sauce and wilted vegetables stewing in the morning’s weak sun. And atop it, like the chrysalis of a huge and unknown insect, the winding sheet of befouled plastic.

The shape inside was unmistakably a woman’s, but obscured. The layers of Visqueen fogging the contours. The features blurred and indistinct. Except for the eyes. Some trick of wrapping, or the closeness of the face, the way it pressed against a particular thinness in the plastic. The eyes seemed to float at the surface. A wide and clouded blue. Windows that opened on nothing.

The rain had disappeared with the night. The sky mid-morning was dry and unclouded, though powdered with city grime. Sakura drove through the tunnel into Queens, junctioning with the Van Wyck Expressway. He hoped he was not going to be late. The plane from Japan was not scheduled to land for a while, but the traffic was always bad getting in and out of the airport. He hated that he was nervous. His wife’s homecoming after so many months should bring him pleasure, not make him feel like an anxious suitor. But perhaps that was just what he was. No use to pretend that Hanae’s sudden decision to return home meant that all that was between them had been healed.

He had thought for a time that he would follow her to Kyoto, that perhaps this was the gesture that was wanted. But as his leave stretched on, and Hanae found new reasons why it was not yet time for his visit, he had feared she might never be ready to resume their marriage.

It took longer for him to understand that what kept them apart was her guilt. He had known that she felt shame—a Japanese woman’s shame for her own violation. He had not considered how deeply responsible she might feel for bringing a killer into the heart of their lives; his own bad conscience had assumed the burden of that. But his wife had had her own part in the silence that had nearly killed her and had robbed them of their unborn child. It was not only he whom she’d needed the time to forgive, but herself.

But forgiveness was a process with no foreseeable end, as he had learned these last few months—a process he believed they might better accomplish together. Perhaps Hanae too had come to this conclusion, and this was the reason she had finally decided to come home.

To come home on the day that had seen the beginning of a new serial case. Were the gods cruel? Or kind? Throwing him into the river where he had almost drowned. Sink or swim. He needed his work. He needed his wife. He had always tried to protect her from the harshest part of his life. He had wanted an island, and had so spectacularly failed.

The sign above the expressway said Terminal 3. He exited, checking the time. Still forty-five minutes before her flight would land. He had left the office in plenty of time, thanks to Darius’s urging. Still hard to believe that his ex-partner was now back on the force, sliding into the retiring Pat Kelly’s place in his unit. Amazing how much red tape could be instantly cut when headquarters wanted you happy.

Did McCauley want him happy? Maybe, at least, for now. The chief of detectives was not a man to buck his superiors. He had stopped by McCauley’s office earlier, directly after his visit to the crime scene, and the chief had made it official. The two female homicides appeared to have enough common features to warrant a move of jurisdiction. The paperwork was still in progress, but Sakura’s Special Homicide Unit was now effectively in charge of what looked to be a budding serial investigation. He had met briefly with his team to fill them in before leaving for the airport. There would be a hurried autopsy this evening to justify the conclusion that the two women had been victims of the same killer. He must find the words to explain to Hanae why he could not stay home with her on her first night back. No, not explain. It was not words he needed, but faith. Sink or swim. He felt a sudden eagerness for the sight of her that pierced his heart.

The stillness of the genkan was as welcoming as a womb. Jimmy watched as his wife’s hand drifted across the heavy silk of her marriage kimono, suspended on a slender shaft of wood in the entrance. For too many months, the kimono, a tangible symbol of their commitment, had hovered like a pale ghost, a painful reminder of what had been lost, and more agonizing, of what yet might be lost.

Hanae’s fingernail caught on one of the fine golden threads. “I am clumsy,” she spoke softly, a schoolgirl who had somehow failed to please her teacher.

He reached for her hand. It seemed like a round heart beating in the center of his palm. “I love your hands.”

“But my fingers are too long for my palms, Husband,” she said, her sightless eyes, dark and smiling, fixed on his face.

She had not forgotten his foolish comment, made, it seemed, a thousand years ago. That was good, he told himself. “I must be more careful of what I say, Wife.” He heard himself laughing. And the teasing, that too was good.

“Do you hear that, Taiko?” She reached down and roughed the fur of the shepherd’s head. The dog’s tail made a muffled tattoo against the tatami rug. She bent and unfastened his harness, kissing him on his muzzle. She raised her head, her blind eyes finding him again. “And how are my other friends?”

“They have missed you. But I believe they knew you were coming home. Flitting about as if their cages had grown too small.”

She nodded, rising, moving with familiar steps into the living room, to the cages of her finches. Tee-tee-tee. Trumpet chirps mixed with spongy sounds of wings fluttering. She extended her neck, pursing her lips, so that her favorite could kiss her. She giggled, reaching inside the cage, bringing the bird to her cheek. “He is fat, my husband. I am afraid you have spoiled him.”

“It was my only recourse. He made me pay for your absence, Wife.” He watched as she returned the bird, then strummed the bars of the other cages, offering greetings in Japanese, running a finger under a plump breast, across a glossy wing.

He could smell the whiteness of her, an exotic floral scent that drifted from her like breath. And he remembered sitting by her side that first day, years ago now, in the park in Kyoto. It seemed he could not make anything work that day, his mouth torturing the Japanese, his brain scurrying for sensible conversation. It was as though the sight of her, with her lacquer-shiny hair, drawn back against the powdery white of her moon face, had drugged him.

It came as a shock that she was blind. She had none of the affectations he sometimes associated with sightless people. When she spoke, she faced him squarely, her eyes level with his. It was clear to him that she had created her own world, but with bridges enough for others to cross. The absence of sight seemed of little consequence, her instincts and her heart sure and steady guides. She was as complete a human being as he had ever met, and beyond her beauty and kindness, it had been this quality of serene self-awareness that had most attracted him that day in the park.

He moved to stand behind her now, resting his hands upon her shoulders. “Hanae . . .”

She turned inside his arms. “You do not need to apologize, Jimmy. I know there is much to do when a life has been taken.”

“Dr. Linsky is waiting to do the autopsy.” His voice sounded strangely disembodied. The old fears rising like a beast inside his chest.

“I shall be here,” she spoke in Japanese.

He forced himself to silence because he sensed she was glad that he must leave, but not for any terrible reason. There was no coldness, only a sweet shyness that said she needed time to get used to being his wife again. He bent and kissed her, feeling her tremble against his mouth. Then, gently pulling away, she rested her head against him. There would be many other nights, he told himself. For now, it was a gift that she was home.

The city’s basement morgue was a twilight world, fluorescent-lit night and day. The only indication of the lateness of the hour was the relative peace that had settled in the locker-lined hallways. Sakura, who’d come early to the cutting room, was grateful for the quiet, as if alone with the body in the green-tiled space, he might gain some insight that had eluded him in the immediacy of the crime scene. But there was still nothing much to see. Only the dead eyes, grown cloudier still in their chrysalis of plastic, shutting in whatever final image lay trapped within the circuit of optic nerve to brain.

“Thinking of starting without me?” Dr. Linsky had entered with an attendant through the black-aproned doors. He managed to look immaculate in simple scrubs and apron.

“Not part of my job description.” Sakura stepped back.

“I find that comforting.”

Sakura was silent. Half the game was enduring Linsky’s barbs. The ME’s sarcasms carried far more sting with detectives he considered incompetent.

The respect went both ways, and Sakura was pleased that McCauley had agreed to forward his request that Linsky perform this procedure. A Linsky autopsy was pure Zen. Never a motion wasted. Each movement completely in the moment. Even with the inevitable backlog, the ME never rushed, no matter how routine a death might appear. He could be trusted to see beyond the obvious.

“I’ve reviewed Dr. Bossier’s report on Helena Grady, the woman whose body was found at the recycling center,” Linsky was saying now. “I take it we’re assuming that the same person killed both these women.”

“The bodies were wrapped the same,” Sakura answered. “Both were dumped with commercial trash. The autopsy may show up something different.”

“We’ll certainly see,” Linsky said. He snapped on latex gloves. “Flunitrazepam was found in Grady’s system. You probably know it as Rohypnol.”

“The date rape drug.”

“Yes.”

“Anything else?” Sakura asked.

“MDMA . . . Ecstasy.”

“What was cause of death?”

“There was nothing definitive, but given a sexual assault situation, asphyxiation was a high probability. Dr. Bossier concluded that Helena Grady was most likely smothered with a dry cleaning bag.”

“That’s getting pretty specific, isn’t it?”

“There was forensic evidence—or rather a lack of it—to support the supposition,” Linsky said.

“Which was?”

“No marks on the victim’s neck. The thin plastic of a dry cleaning bag clings to the mouth and nostrils, occluding the airways without the need to secure the bag at the throat. And neither were there petechiae, something one might expect to see with other forms of asphyxiation.”

“You mentioned sexual assault,” Sakura noted. “I take it there was evidence of rape.”

“Helena Grady had abrasions in both the vaginal and anal areas. Some of which were possibly postmortem.”

“Semen?”

“None.”

“The killer must have worn a condom if there was penile penetration.”

“That is the most likely explanation.” Linsky had finished preparing his slides, and now he looked at the clock. “Keyes is late.”

Sakura was content to wait for the technician. Howard Keyes was the best at lifting fingerprints from skin. But Linsky seemed determined to begin the procedure on time.

“We can at least open this.” The ME picked up a scalpel and cut lengthwise through the plastic shroud.

The odor was distinctly unpleasant, but stepping forward Sakura was struck first by the image that clocked in and stuck in his brain. “It looks like . . .”

“. . . he’s been here before us.” The ME, completing his thought, was staring down at the neat Y of metal staples that tracked down the torso. “This was also in Bossier’s report.” Linsky looked up at him. “I think you can be certain, now, that you’re dealing with the same man.”

Hours later the vision still haunted.

Sitting behind the desk in his eleventh-floor office, Sakura was only a short distance from his home, but the apartment on Water Street seemed a world away. He hoped that Hanae was already asleep, exhausted by the twelve-hour flight. He could not go home, not yet, with the stink of tonight’s autopsy still clinging to his clothes. Its horrors still clinging in his mind.

He’s been here before us. He was remembering Linsky’s words and the image of that metal Y of staples like a trackroad in the flesh. The persistent vision like an invitation, a token to ride whatever dark fantasy had inspired such a death—a fantasy that seemed to include some parody of autopsy.

His mind had raced with questions that had had to be delayed till Keyes had come and finished fingerprinting the entire surface of skin. But there had been no prints to find. The killer had been as meticulous in removing physical evidence as he had been in closing the body.

Inside had been a different matter. Dr. Linsky had removed the staples to reveal the carnage within the cavity. Every major organ had been cut out of the body, and then replaced.

It had looked at first glance like a bloody jumble, but Linsky had a different perspective.

“Dr. Bossier noted that Helena Grady’s organs had been . . . scrambled,” the doctor had said. “I don’t think it’s that random, at least not in this case. It’s a fairly crude job of reassembly, but it appears to me that the natural arrangement of the organs has been inverted.”

Sakura had looked more closely then, and had seen. The reposition of the heart, with its apex tipped toward the right side of the chest. The stomach, liver, and spleen, all reversed. Held together . . . suspended in a silver web of nearly invisible wire.

The phone buzzed on his desk. “Sakura,” he answered it.

“I thought you might be there, Lieutenant.”

Linsky’s voice surprised him. The autopsy had been finished when he’d left the morgue.

“I came back to have another look at the body,” the ME was saying.

“Why was that?”

“A purplish mark on the victim’s right arm,” Linsky explained. “It appeared to be livor mortis, but its position seemed inconsistent. It turned out to be a birthmark. I’ll highlight it for you in the photographs. It should help you to identify your victim.”

“I see.”

“You sound disappointed, James. This isn’t television, where the medical examiner solves the crime.”

A joke. The use of his given name. It must be later than he thought. “No . . . Thanks,” he said. “I look forward to getting those photos.”

“You’ll have at least some of them tomorrow, and as many of the lab results as I can push through.”

“Thank you,” he said again, but the doctor had hung up.

He had been sitting in the dark, having switched off the overhead fluorescents. Now he flipped on the desk lamp, settling back in his chair. Was there another kind of mark from birth, he wondered, that made of one a victim, one a killer? Was that not what his friend, Dr. Willie French, believed, that a serial killer must be born before he could be made? Might that not be the very expression of karma, the misdeeds of past lifetimes encoded like a heritable characteristic within the DNA?

He remembered the Four Imponderables, those principles which the Buddha warned were not to be examined. To do so was to invite vexation, even madness. The third of the four was the admonition against seeking the result of karma. One should never seek to find a detailed link between a volitional act and its effect. Nor should one set oneself up as a judge between good and evil, for to do so would lead only to the intellectual snare of duality, and the suffering which must follow that delusion.

His job was not to judge, but to restore the balance of the law. Only in finding the killer was human justice possible. There was another warning that he remembered, which he would do well to heed—perceiving danger where there is none, and not perceiving danger where there is.

CHAPTER 2

Dr. Wilhelmina French stood in the huge window of her Upper West Side office looking down on the busy street. Hard to believe she was actually here in Manhattan, that she had already started seeing patients.

So much had happened so quickly after her father’s death. As if despite her escape from Edmond’s house so many years ago, he had after all been holding her life in suspension. So much had seemed at an end when her brother had called with news of her father’s final illness. She had taken her leave of Quantico to return to New Orleans. Had already left behind, or so she believed, what she had started here in New York.

Now she was back with a vengeance. Her grant might be in limbo—who knew if the government would ever get off its collective ass when it came to LSD research—but official indifference didn’t mean there wasn’t anyone interested in her theories. Quite a lot of people, it turned out, wanted to hear what Dr. Wilhelmina French had to say about serial killers and the possibility of early childhood detection and intervention. She’d become a bit of a celebrity since her part in the Death Angel case.

Still, the book contract would not have brought her back to New York. She could have written anywhere. She had worked on the outline in her own private limbo, fighting her childhood demons as she waited for Edmond to die. And then Michael had shown up at her father’s funeral.

She had not been sure that she would ever see Michael Darius again. But there he was, with no warning, at the cathedral. He had sat with her in the family pew, had left no doubt that he, at least, considered them a couple. She could still laugh out loud, remembering her brother’s face. She’d been holding out on him.

It was true. She might not phone Mason often, but her brother did expect to be kept informed. Growing up, she’d been the one he could turn to with the vicissitudes of his secret affairs, and in a kind of reverse fairness she’d felt an obligation to confide in him. She had learned that it was good to have his sympathetic ear, that her brother was more to be trusted than any of her friends.

Mason had liked Michael. And Michael seemed to like him. The four of them had ambled about amiably enough that week in the big house. She and Michael in her bedroom every night making up for the months apart, and what had not been said. Mason making plans with his partner Zack. It was the closest thing to happiness the old place had seen since the years when her mother had been alive.

She’d learned to accept happiness in these last few months. She had not learned to trust that it would last.

She answered the ringing phone.

“Willie?” Jimmy’s voice.

She smiled. “I’m glad it’s you. I’ve been wondering if it was okay to call Hanae. I don’t want to disturb her if she’s still resting from the flight.”

“I’m surprised she hasn’t called you yet. I know she’s anxious to see you.”

“How is she, Jimmy?”

“She seems fine. I think she’s glad to be home.”

“I’m sure that she is.”

“Did Michael say anything about yesterday?” He had changed the subject.

“Are we talking about the body in the Dumpster?”

“I wondered,” he said, “if you’d be interested in taking a look at some photos?”

She let him hear her laugh. “Thought you’d never ask, Lieutenant Sakura.”

Margot Redmond watched from a distance the rolling yellow text from the vertical LED sign flicker in twin images upon the lenses of his dark glasses. I am awake in the place where women die. Inside the cavernous space the man appeared taller and thinner than possible. The contrast between his fair skin and dark hair heightened in the interplay of paint box colors and tomblike blackness. When his arm shifted inside the crisp white of his shirt, exposing a bit of pale wrist, it was to withdraw one of the small bones laid out in rows on the long table. He seemed to smile, but she was uncertain.

“Mr. St. Cyr. David St. Cyr . . .” She walked up to him.

“Jenny Holzer likes to link ideological statements with the forms and meanings of architecture.” He spoke with a slight accent, neither looking up nor acknowledging his name. “Holzer was trying to make sense out of the chaos of death—spreading these bones out in neat tight lines.” He turned then so that only one lens trapped the LED script: Hair is stuck inside me.

This time she was sure he did smile. He returned the bone to the table, adjusted its position.

“I don’t think I’m late. . . .” She checked her watch, conscious of reflections of moving text pooling at her feet.

“I’m early. I wanted to see the Holzer exhibit. I missed it the last time. Lustmord.”

“Excuse me?”

“German . . . for sexual murder.” He smiled again, glancing over his shoulder, the arc of his arm indicating eight panels of electric signboards broadcasting script in red, yellow, and green. The words, in upper-case letters, scrolled downward at varying speeds. “The voices of the participants—perpetrator, victim, observer.”

She glanced down at the table. Saw that some of the bones had little silver bracelets around them. “Are these . . .”

“Human? Yes. I guess you could call them the forensic evidence. Quite a striking statement, don’t you think?”

“I don’t know what I think.” She looked away.

“Such happy insistent colors.” Fresh red letters burned across his lenses.

“The message is anything but happy.” She saw the words I hook her spine pulse down one of the columns.

“Ms. Holzer does what every good artist should. Forces the viewer to look at what he only pretends to reject.”

She could feel his eyes through the barrier of the dark glasses.

“Perhaps the sexual murderer is not a monster, but everyman,” he said.

She stole another glance at one of the LED signs. She smiles at me because she imagines I can help her.

“Come,” he said, “let’s talk.” He moved out of the room, through the annex, toward the main towers of the Guggenheim Museum. She watched him walk, something close to a swagger, with his dark designer jacket opened, his cashmere topcoat casually thrown over his left arm. She could have easily been misled, assumed that everything about him came without effort. But that would have been a false impression. She suspected that he was keenly conscious of every aspect about himself, and that there was exacting deliberateness in everything he did.

“I like this building,” he said, gazing up at the glass rotunda. “Wright’s giant spiderweb.”

In the light she saw that he was young and quite handsome. An anemic aristocratic kind of handsome. In the manner of English gentry and some homosexuals. She couldn’t remember if Patrice had mentioned he was gay.

“Frank Gehry did the Guggenheim in Bilbao, Spain.” He was talking again. “But I still haven’t decided if I like his design. Part of me sees brilliant undulating energy, a steely Daliesque landscape. Another part is reminded of a titanium beast humping its mate.” He laughed.

“You don’t do commercial?”

“No, I leave the public monuments to guys like Gehry and Koolhaas.”

“My husband loved what you did for Brad and Patrice.”

He shook his head. “I’m glad they’re happy. There are some things I might have done differently. But then, I’m never satisfied.”

“A perfectionist?” she asked.

He removed his glasses, and she saw that one of his eyes was blue, the other green. “Is that bad?”

“No, except . . .”

“Perfection is elusive.” His bicolored eyes fixed on her.

Unaccountably, she wondered if he thought she was attractive. “Reese and I are happy you’ve decided to take us on as clients.”

“That sounds ominous. You and your husband aren’t going to be difficult?”

“No, of course not. We understand how you work.”

“Good. Then we shall get along famously.”

Hanae sat upon a cushion on the floor of the bedroom. Eyes closed, she counted the strokes of the brush through her shoulder-length hair. She had almost gotten used to the length of the stroke, shorter now, more staccatoed than when she had had hair she could sit upon. Before he had cut it. Inside her head she