Dismissed With Prejudice (9780061760631) (7 page)

“How'd it go?” I asked cautiously when, still tight-lipped and grim-faced, she returned to the car.

“They asked about insurance,” she answered. I caught Big Al's slight knowing nod.

“I told them he didn't have any,” she added. “Naturally, Mother wants the very best, but I gave them the check and told them that was it. It'll have to do. There's no more where that came from. It's money I was saving for a stud fee.”

With his worst mortician suspicions confirmed, Big Al shoved the car into gear and backed out of the parking place.

“Do you think maybe he did carry insurance?” she asked hopefully after a silence. Kimi Kurobashi was grasping at financial straws.

“Maybe,” I said.

“And do policies pay off in case of suicide?”

“That depends,” I said. “You'd have to have the policy itself in hand and talk to one of their claims people in order to find out. Have you seen any policies?”

“No, but everything at the house was packed. I'll have to ask Mother if she remembers packing any papers. Of course, there's always the possibility that he left them at the office.” Her voice drifted away.

I turned and looked closely at Kimiko Kurobashi. She was wound tight as a coiled spring. For her mother's sake, she was doing what had to be done, trying up the loose ends, and keeping herself under control while she did it.

“Would you like to go there and look?” I asked gently.

“Please,” she said, her eyes filling with tears. “If it wouldn't be too much trouble.”

I knew how much it cost her to ask us for help. No way in hell could we have turned her down. At least I couldn't have.

“No trouble at all,” I replied.

As he turned the car in the direction of Fourth
Avenue South and Industry Square, Big Al Lindstrom made only the slightest grimace, one that was invisible to Kimiko Kurobashi riding in the backseat. He didn't approve, but he kept his mouth shut about it.

The crime scene team had completed their work and gone away. I figured we'd have to go find Bernard Rennermann to let us in. When we got to the complex, Big Al dropped us off and took the car to the next building to find Rennermann while Kimiko and I went inside to wait. We were standing talking in the hall outside the MicroBridge office when the door was opened by a tall scarecrow of a woman with a beaked nose and heavily hooded eyes that were red with weeping.

“I'm sorry but we're not—” the woman started, breaking off at once as soon as she recognized Kimiko Kurobashi.

“Oh, Kimi, you did come. I'm so glad. It's so good to see you after all these years.”

“Hello, Mrs. Oliver,” Kimi said.

“How is your mother? I wanted to call and talk to her and tell her how sorry I was, but the police wouldn't let me. They told me I shouldn't until we knew for sure that she had been properly notified.”

“Mother's fine,” Kimi responded. She stepped into the reception area and looked around. No one else was in evidence. “What are you doing here? I understood the place was shut down, out of business.”

Mrs. Oliver shook her head and pressed a damp hanky to her nose. “I told your father that I'd stay until the end of the month, and I will, no matter what. Someone should be here to answer the phones if nothing else, to let people know what's going on. I don't know what to tell people though. The records are all gone.”

“What records?” I asked quickly.

Mrs. Oliver gave me a quick, hostile look.

“It's all right, Mrs. Oliver,” Kimi said. “He's a police officer, one of the detectives.”

“The records. The customer lists, the sales records, the specifications and parts lists, his most recent design work. They're gone, all gone. Everything.”

“Are you sure?” I asked.

“Of course I'm sure. When I came in this morning, I opened my file cabinet, and the drawers were empty. So were his. So was every file drawer in the place, here and down in engineering, and in the comptroller's office as well. Oh, there are still a few things left, your father's personal papers, some pension and tax records, that kind of thing, but the bulk of the company records, the important ones, are gone. I thought maybe the police had taken them, but they said no, that nothing had been removed except the…”

I could see Mrs. Oliver cringed at using the word
body
in Kimi's presence. She chose instead to leave the sentence hanging unfinished.

Mrs. Oliver was a woman in her mid to late six
ties who walked with a stately, unbowed step. Leaving us standing, Mrs. Oliver went back over to her desk and eased her angular frame primly onto the rolling chair behind it.

“I was here on time this morning,” she said, “but the officers wouldn't let me in. They finally allowed me inside my own office on the condition that I stay out of Mr. Kurobashi's.”

“Did you?”

“Did I what, stay out? Of course, but I did go as far as the doorway and look around.”

“Did you notice anything out of place?”

“His ashtray is gone. Maybe it just got knocked down behind the desk. I couldn't see that far.”

“What kind of ashtray?”

“A marble one. I gave it to him at Christmas, but then he quit smoking in June.”

I remembered that Kimiko had mentioned an ashtray, but I had no recollection of its being in the room, much less on the desk.

“Anyway, to go back to the files,” Mrs. Oliver continued. “I didn't worry about them that much. After all, we were moving by the end of the month, but now I'm not so sure.”

“Why not? What do you mean?”

“And look at this.” She gestured toward her computer, and Kimi hurried around to where she could see the screen.

“That's the index,” Mrs. Oliver continued. “That's all that's there, in every file and in every backup file on every computer in the place. I can't even read it, to
say nothing of make it work. Your father had his fill of paperwork when he worked for Boeing. He preferred computer files to hard copy wherever possible, and we made archive files of every hard drive in the place, but all those floppies are gone, and this is all there is in the computer itself.”

Kimi straightened up and met my questioning gaze.

“What is it?” I asked.

“A virus,” she answered, her face hard beneath a sudden pallor.

“A virus? What are you talking about?”

“A computer virus.”

I hurried around the desk to see for myself. The index showed a long list of files with the amount of disk space each occupied, but there was only one file name, written in Japanese and repeated over and over.

Kimi stepped away from the desk and leaned heavily against the wall.

“The poem again?” I asked.

She nodded. “The first few letters.”

“What poem?” Mrs. Oliver asked, looking back and forth between us. “What are you two talking about?”

“Someone fed a virus into the computer system,” Kimi explained. “When the virus program is activated, it works like a cancer, destroying all the files, filling it up with junk, in this case the first two lines of my father's favorite poem. Why would he do that?”

“Your father?” Mrs. Oliver was outraged. “He wouldn't do such a thing, Kimi. Never in a million years. Your father wasn't like that. He had worked too hard. We all had. For years. How can you even suggest such a thing!”

She broke off, again lifting the hanky to her face, sobbing inconsolably.

“It's all right,” Kimi said, reaching out and laying a comforting hand on Mrs. Oliver's shoulder. “I'm sure you're right. There must be records somewhere. There was a guy here from a moving company last night when I came to talk to my father. I saw him carrying files in and out. All we have to do is find out which company he works for and where he took them. They're probably all stacked in a warehouse somewhere.”

And that's when I remembered the bill, the invoice on Tadeo Kurobashi's desk. In my mind's eye, I could see the yellow sheet of paper from DataDump as plain as day. What I saw most clearly, though, was the cute little company logo that ran across the top of the page:
Have shredder. Will travel
.

Shit, I thought. It took real effort not to say it aloud.

Kimi was looking at me. The unspoken reaction must have registered on my face. Maybe I choked. That's easy enough to do when you're busy biting your tongue.

“What's the matter?” she asked. “What's wrong?”

“We may have a problem with that,” I said. “I don't think that guy you saw was from a moving company.”

“He wasn't? What was he doing here then?”

“I'm not sure,” I said.

Big Al appeared at the open doorway with little Bernard Rennermann nipping at his heels.

“I guess we don't need you to let us in after all,” Al said over his shoulder. “Looks like everything's under control here.”

Which was, in fact, something of a misstatement.

L
OCKED OUT OF HER FATHER'S INNER OFFICE
, Kimi was able to get some of the information she needed from Mrs. Oliver. Yes, there was a modest amount of life insurance—a $50,000 policy as far as she could remember, and a will that had been drawn up fairly recently. She was sure Mr. Yoshiro, Mr. Kurobashi's personal attorney, would have a copy of it.

“What about this Davenport guy?”

“You know him?” Mrs. Oliver asked, sniffing with distaste.

“He was here this morning,” I told her.

“His specialty is bankruptcy,” Mrs. Oliver said. “He's not good for much else.”

Taking what information we had, we headed back to Kirkland. It was three-thirty by the time we returned to the house in Bridle Trail Downs. The moving van was gone. In its stead we found a maroon Caprice Classic station wagon. At first I thought maybe the car belonged to some friend of the family come to offer condolences. That impression was short-lived.

We found Machiko Kurobashi huddled on one of the stone benches near the fishpond while a group of four screaming hellions streamed around her, clambering over fences, scrambling up and down trees, yelling at the tops of their lungs. The new owners had apparently arrived right on schedule to take possession of the property. The parents were nowhere in evidence.

Machiko waved gratefully when she saw us and started up from the bench, hobbling in our direction as fast as she could. Two of the children trailed along behind her, with one of them, a girl, doing an exaggerated pantomime of the old woman's gait.

“Did you used to live here?” the boy demanded rudely. “Was this your house?”

Machiko reached the safety of her daughter's arms and fell into them. “We go now?” she pleaded.

The children must have seen the look of unreasoning rage on Kimi's face. They stopped short a few feet away from her and backed off warily.

“Oh, come on, Jared,” the girl said, grabbing her brother's arm and pulling him backward, away from Kimi and her mother. “Don't bother with her. She's old. She can't even speak English.” The girl stuck out her tongue at Kimi, and the two children raced away toward the barn, splashing wildly through the fishpond as they ran, leaving the formerly placid water roiled and muddy, while frantic carp darted in every direction.

With that, Machiko lost all control. Clutching her daughter, she burst into tears. Except for the distant squeals of those bratty kids, the only sound in the universe was that of her pitiful sobs, and there wasn't a damn thing anybody could do about it.

With a lump in my throat I watched Kimi turn her mother around and gently guide her frail footsteps toward the Suburban. She escorted Machiko to the passenger's side of the vehicle, then left her standing there for a moment, leaning on the cane, while Kimi opened the back door and pulled out a small varnished footstool. Putting that at her mother's feet, she helped Machiko climb up into the van.

Once her mother was settled, Kimi closed the car door and returned the footstool to its place in the backseat. Slamming the second door with a ferocious shove, she came around to the other side of the van. Dry-eyed and tight-lipped, she looked up at me.

“Thank you for your help,” she said stiffly.

“You're going?”

She nodded.

“We'll need your phone number in Pullman.”

“I don't live
in
Pullman,” she said, “but the number's in the Pullman book. You can get it from information.”

Awkwardly, I extracted one of my business cards and illegibly scrawled my home number across the back of it. I pressed the card into her hand. “My home number's on there, too, in case you need it.”

Nodding, she swung herself up into the driver's side and drove away without so much as a backward glance toward the home of her youth. Machiko too, her daughter's older mirror image, stared resolutely ahead. The only good thing about that whole terrible can of worms was that at least they had each other.

Big Al was looking at his watch. “We'd better get the hell out of here too, Beau. It's already rush hour. We don't want to get stuck on the bridge.”

Despite his dire prediction, we got back downtown without being stalled in traffic. Up on the fifth floor of the Public Safety Building we wrote our reports. Al finished up in a hurry and left. Hunting and pecking with my left hand, it took me a whole lot longer. When I finished at last, I took the extra few minutes to look up the number for DataDump in the phone book. Their answering machine said they were closed until 9:00
A.M
.

I finally left the department around 5:15. Threatening clouds hung low over the Olympics, promising a storm for later that night while a chill breeze blew in off Puget Sound. Fall was coming. And winter would be coming after that. And I wasn't looking forward to either one of them.

I couldn't shake the disgust I felt about the way those damn brats had acted and at the hurt expression on Machiko's face as she watched those unruly little shits go crashing through her beloved fishpond. Life was not fair, I decided. Life was a crock.

It was nighttime. I wanted to go home and shower. I still reeked from sweating champagne, but I had also gone through the whole day without eating. Although I didn't feel particularly hungry, I knew my body needed fuel. I went to the Doghouse and ducked into the bar, ordering a MacNaughton's first and a chili-burger second.

I was well into the MacNaughton's when Winnie, the hostess, came looking for me. “You have a phone call, Beau,” she said.

Being a creature of habit has its disadvantages—most important of which is that everybody knows where you go and what you do. As I walked to the phone, I did a quick mental rundown of where everybody was. I wondered if something terrible had happened to Peters and Amy on their honeymoon or to the girls or Mrs. Edwards. Or maybe Big Al had crashed and burned on his way home to Ballard.

Having sorted through all the possibilities of who the call
might
have been from, I was stunned when the person on the phone actually turned out to be George Yamamoto. I had never been in the Doghouse with him, and I had no idea how he knew it was one of my hangouts. Word evidently gets around.

“Thank God I found you,” George murmured. “Wait for me right there. I'm on my way over.”

“All right. I'll be in the bar.”

I had finished the chili-burger and was having a dessert MacNaughton's when George showed
up at the door. For the first time in all the years I've known him he looked agitated, upset. If I had any lingering visions of Japanese-Americans daintily sipping warmed sake from tiny porcelain cups, George Yamamoto dispelled that stereotype in a hurry. He ordered a double Scotch on the rocks and swilled it down like it was water.

“Have you heard from Doc Baker?”

“No, not yet. Why? What's going on?”

“The autopsy. We finished, just about half an hour ago.”

“And?”

“I was right. It's murder, not suicide. We couldn't see it until after we moved the body. He died as a result of a blow to the head. A blunt object of some kind.”

“The handle of the sword maybe?” I asked.

“No. If he tried that, the killer would have cut himself badly.”

“You're saying ‘he'?”

“Generic,” Yamamoto replied. “He/she.”

“But why the rest of it? Why the mutilation?”

George shook his head. “I don't know, unless they thought we'd miss the head injury and fall for the phony suicide bit.”

I thought of the bloody carnage in Tadeo Kurobashi's office.

“A real sicko,” I said.

George nodded. “Yes, but that's not all of it.”

“What else?”

“Remember the message you left with Doc Baker?”

“About the sword being done by a student of someone, that Masamune guy?”

“It wasn't,” he said. He turned and signaled the waitress for more drinks, ordering one for each of us.

“If it wasn't, then what's all the fuss about?” I asked, puzzled.

“I said it wasn't done by one of his students. It was done by him, by the master himself. It's an original.”

Silence opened up in a deep pool between us as the waitress brought our drinks. I waited until she left.

“Are you sure?” I asked.

“It's signed by him, but no, of course I'm not sure. It'll take an expert to ascertain whether or not it's genuine.”

“And what does it mean if it is?” I asked guardedly.

“It's priceless,” he said. “Absolutely priceless. It shouldn't be in the property room. It should be locked in a vault in a bank or a museum somewhere. We're not equipped to be responsible for something that valuable. I'm worried sick about it, but what can I do? Even if it isn't the actual murder weapon, it's still part of the investigation, no getting around it.”

“Fingerprints?” I asked.

“Several sets. They'll be running them through
the AFIS as soon as they can get the computer time, but that'll only work if the killer is on file.”

AFIS is the Automated Fingerprint Identification System, a recently purchased computerized program that had taken local law enforcement jurisdictions out of the Dark Ages and into the high-tech era of fingerprint identification.

“We should have results on that by tomorrow,” George added.

I tried to assimilate all the information George Yamamoto had given me. Every way I looked at it, none of it made any sense. “This doesn't add up,” I said. “If the sword was that valuable, why the hell would the murderer go off and leave it lying there on the floor?”

“He may not have
known
it was valuable. Maybe he was looking for something else, but what could be more important than a Masamune sword?” George asked.

“And how exactly did Tadeo Kurobashi come to be in possession of it?”

George took a long drink and shook his head. “I don't know. I just flat don't know. He couldn't have afforded to buy it, I'm sure of that, not even when he was making good money. It's a museum piece, Beau. We're talking about lots of money, a million, maybe more.”

“That much?

George nodded.

“But he was going through bankruptcy. If he had an asset that valuable up his sleeve, why was
he losing his house, his business? Why didn't he use it?” I waited for a moment, giving George a minute to collect himself before I asked the obvious question. “Could he possibly have stolen it?”

“No. Absolutely not.”

“Why else wouldn't he have unloaded it, then?”

“I don't know,” George answered.

We were quiet for a moment, both of us thinking. “Well,” I said at last, “going back to the killer or killers, if they weren't interested in the sword, they must have been after something else. Tadeo was an engineer. What exactly did he do?”

“He designed things, ways of putting microwave and computers together, and other things as well.”

“Do you have any idea what specific projects he might have been working on in the months before he died?”

“No. In the last few years, we haven't been that close, but maybe a new project is what they wanted.”

“More likely, they wanted to destroy it,” I said. “Do you know anything about computer viruses?”

“Who, me? I know they exist,” George answered, “but I don't know anything at all about how they work. Why?”

“Remember that poem we saw on Tadeo's computer screen?”

He nodded. “Sure. What about it?”

“It's a virus. We took Kimi by MicroBridge this afternoon. She wanted to go see if there was any sign of checkbooks or insurance papers there.”

“Did you find any?”

“No. We got the name and address of Kurobashi's personal attorney, but what we discovered from the receptionist is that those lines we saw on his screen are actually part of a computer virus that's invaded every file in every computer in the entire company. Most of the MicroBridge records are gone.”

“Gone?” George echoed. “Surely they kept backup copies of everything in the computer.”

“We asked Mrs. Oliver about that. She said that all backup copies of disks were missing this morning along with the other hard-copy documents that were removed from the files. She seemed to think they had merely been moved somewhere else in preparation for moving. My guess is that they've all been systematically destroyed.”

“What makes you say that? Files don't just get up and walk away over night.”

“I didn't say anything about walking away. Remember the bill on Tadeo's desk this morning? It's from a place called DataDump. Remember what it said at the top of the bill? If I remember right, their motto is
Have shredder. Will travel
.”

“Damn,” George said.

“Kimi told us that there was a guy there moving files when she was talking to her father.”

“She must have told you that after I left,” George said thoughtfully, “but that means Tadeo not only knew about the shredding, but probably even hired it done. If he had most of those docu
ments in his computer, though, it wouldn't have mattered.”

“Until someone infected the computer with a virus.”

“And now it's gone completely,” George added. There was a long pause while he fingered his drink. “Might they be in danger, too?”

“Kimi and her mother?” I asked.

He nodded. “Maybe they should stay in a motel for a while. Or should we ask the Kirkland police to keep an eye on them?”

I remembered how Machiko had summarily rejected that idea when, for another reason, Kimiko had suggested it. Still, now that George mentioned it, the idea that they too might be at risk bothered me more than I let on. “They're not in Kirkland,” I said. “They left this afternoon to drive to Pullman.”

“Pullman!” George exclaimed. “Why there?”

“Beats me. As soon as the movers finished getting the auction stuff out of the house, they took off.”