The Kaisho (15 page)

She had been sitting in the same position for hours, changing it only to make a single phone call forty minutes ago—that to Tanzan Nangi, Nicholas’s friend and hers. Every so often she shivered as if she were suffering with a disease—which, in point of fact, she was: it was called despair.

Nangi had been unavailable, but his secretary, Umi, recognizing Justine’s voice even before she introduced herself, had promised to give her boss the message that Justine was waiting for him in her room at the Hilton. Putting down the receiver, she had no idea what she would say to him when he arrived—really she had no idea why she had phoned him, except that some core of self-preservation deep inside her recognized that she had become a mote in a black void, spinning out of control, that she desperately needed a reference point from which to return to the process of logical decision-making.

A soft knock on the door dispersed her inertia just enough for her to rise, move across the room on leaden feet, and open the door. She had been ready to greet Nangi, but her heart froze in her chest.

Standing in the hall outside her door was a handsome American with long dark hair, light eyes, and a smiling mouth. He was less tanned than she remembered him in Maui, but somehow more fit, admirably filling out his dark blue suit.

He gave her a quick grin as he strode across the threshold to her room, then took her in his arms and gave her a long kiss.

“God, it’s great to see you again,” Rick Millar said, his arms still encircling her.

Justine, the taste of him still in her mouth, remembered how he had followed her all the way from New York to Maui after he had promoted her to vice president of his advertising firm, Millar, Soames & Roberts. She had walked out on him when she had discovered that he had fired her friend in order to make room for her. In Maui, she had almost had an affair with him. Almost. Now, seeing him while in this terribly vulnerable state, her throat locked up and her heart ached. She was so close to weeping she could feel the tears burning beneath her eyelids, and she thought,
Oh, Christ! It won’t take much more to rip me into pieces.

“Rick, what are you doing here?” When she found her voice, it was high and breathless.

“I was with Mr. Nangi when his secretary phoned about your call. He was going to come here, but I persuaded him that seeing a friendly face from home would be the best tonic for you.” His face creased in genuine concern. “He’d been telling me a bit about your problems adjusting to the lifestyle here. He’s very worried about you but at a loss as to how to help.”

Justine shook her head, still confused. “But how is it you’re
here,
in Japan?”

He would not let her go, looking deep into her pain-racked eyes, and she felt herself trembling beneath his touch. “I could lie to you, Justine, and tell you that I’m out here making Far East contacts or that I’m on vacation, but I’m not. The truth is I came here to find you and somehow—I admit I don’t yet know how—to convince you to come back to New York and rejoin the firm on a permanent basis.”

Justine thought she would faint. How many times as a little girl had she dreamt her dreams and wondered what would happen if they came true?

“You can’t be serious.”

“Justine, listen to me, we’re about to expand. After going through a bad patch during the recession, business has never been better. The problem is, I’m doing everything myself. Try as I may, I haven’t been able to replace you. Would you believe I’ve gone through four VPs since you left? I can’t put in any more seventy-two-hour weeks.” He squeezed her. “I need you. I’m not making it a secret. If you come back, you can do so on your own terms. I mean it. I’m prepared to give you a piece of the business. A quarter of it, if that’s what it takes.” He squeezed her again, his obvious enthusiasm running like a fever from his veins to hers. “Just say yes.”

Justine closed her eyes. She knew what she would say before she heard the word on her lips, and a curious sensation of warmth washed over her, of some hard carapace breaking open, shattering irrevocably.

“Yes.”

“What in the name of God d’you make of that?”

Croaker looked up at the waxy-skinned corpse hanging by its heels from the ceiling fixture in the kitchen. Outside the window filthy gray clouds streaked with purple pressed down on the inchoate clutter of a rumbling interstate—a landscape so familiar it was frightening.

Though the blistered vista was cloned virtually everywhere throughout America, this particular portion was just outside Marine on St. Croix, Minnesota.

Croaker stared at the blood that still filled the stainless-steel sink, turning it brilliant carmine in the center, rich maroon where it had begun to cake at the sides. It was preferable to looking at the corpse, although no matter what he did he could feel the psychic weight of it like a painful prickling beneath his skin.

As a former detective lieutenant in the NYPD, Lew Croaker had seen many a grisly sight strewn about the garbage-laden streets of New York. But nothing like this.

Every bone in the late don’s limbs had been broken. That kind of torture was not new to Croaker, but the rest was. With the precision of a surgeon, his heart had been cut out of the cavity of his chest, neatly, cleanly, and lay nestled like a shiny nascent being on the don’s navel. Croaker moved closer now, and he saw a peculiar thing.

“The heart,” he said, “has been stitched to Goldoni’s navel.” His gaze moved lower. “And all the digits seem to have been broken in order to turn them one hundred and eighty degrees around.”

“Most curious, isn’t it? Smacks of some kind of ritual.”

Christ, what I wouldn’t give to have Nick here,
Croaker thought. Arcane rituals were his métier. He thought about calling him, then rejected the idea. At one time, he wouldn’t have had a second thought, but these days Nick had a huge corporation to run, a wife, and was still trying for a family. His priorities had changed. He had no time any more for jetting across the Pacific to solve bizarre mysteries. Croaker felt a deep pang of regret. He had never been one to long for the good old days, primarily because they’d never been all that good, but now he found himself wishing that time could be folded back upon itself and in a blink of an eye he’d find himself and Nick as they had once been. A team on the run, heading full tilt into dangerous waters.

He blinked, just to be sure, but the only live person in the room with him remained Will Lillehammer.

Lillehammer’s extreme thinness seemed cadaverous in this grisly setting. He apparently flew around the country—perhaps the world, for all Croaker knew—in a U.S. Air Force plane. The vehicle had been waiting for them, fueled and spotless, in an
AUTHORIZED
PERSONNEL
ONLY
section of the Naples airport. The military flight crew deferred to Lillehammer in a way they normally would not with a lowly civilian.

A shadow moved across Croaker’s field of vision and he noted it. He marveled at Lillehammer’s power. It was clear that neither the FBI nor the state troopers who monitored this stretch of the interstate nor the local hound dogs from Marine on St. Croix had been in here; yet the place was cordoned off by enough cops to handle a small-scale riot. It took a great deal of influence to keep this kind of murder scene pristine, he reflected.

During the flight here Croaker had read the fed sheet on the Goldonis. It was unusual and oddly incomplete. Dominic was born in 1947 to a woman named Faith Mattaccino, who, seventeen years later, would become the second Mrs. Goldoni. Nothing, apparently, was known about Dominic’s father—or even if his mother had been married to him.

According to government files, there was little known about Faith Goldoni herself save that she was an American of Italian ancestry born in 1923. A year after she married Enrico Goldoni she convinced him to adopt her son, Dominic. Enrico had two daughters from his first wife, one of whom—Margarite—lived in New York and was married to the attorney Tony “D.” DeCamillo. Faith died in 1974, in a boating accident off the Lido, the beachfront resort of Venice.

As for Enrico Goldoni, by the time of his marriage to Faith, he was already firmly entrenched in the netherworld of the Mafia. How a Venetian came to power in the essentially Sicilian criminal organization was not known, except that it seemed clear that through Enrico’s company, which manufactured and traded in fine silks and handmade brocades, other, less savory articles were easily transshipped worldwide.

On December 11 of last year, the authorities pulled Enrico’s corpse out of the Grand Canal, where it had been hooked around a wooden pole like a sack of debris. Who had killed him or why remained unanswered.

The Goldonis were, apparently, a family of death and secrets, but nothing in the file could have prepared Croaker for Dominic’s eerie and disturbing end.

Lillehammer came around from behind the corpse, his mouth quivering. “Do you ever get used to the stink?”

Croaker smiled, took a pair of baffled plugs out of his nostrils, replaced them almost immediately. “I wonder what happened to the head?”

“Perhaps he buried it.”

“Why would he do that?”

Lillehammer shrugged. “Why would he do any of this? The person’s deranged.”

“You think so?”

“What other conclusion could one make?”

“I don’t know. But my experience is there’s a wide range of possibilities.”

They moved out of the kitchen, down the hall. Through a dirt-smudged window Croaker could see the clouds lowering. He felt the pressure drop, but some of his discomfiture surely came from the defilement in the kitchen. Inch by mental inch he turned his mind away from the images firing behind his eyes. He thought they had been lucky to land before the storm hit.

“This the house WITSEC bought for Dominic?”

“Lord no,” Lillehammer said. “This is where he was brought... to die.” He flipped open a black alligator-skin notebook. “This place’s for sale… been so for eight months now. No one has been in here since the bank took it over.”

“Except Dominic and his murderer.”

Croaker flipped on a miniflashlight, playing it over all surfaces. The white walls and ceiling glared back at them as if with evil intent.

“What’s this?”

Croaker had stopped. The circle of light hovered on one spot on the wall, darker than the surrounding area. The two men peered at it.

“It looks like—”

“Yeah,” Croaker finished for Lillehammer, “sweat.”

And he had smelled it then, his fear, and Lillehammer’s as well, he supposed, like an animal whose fetid breath spoke of spilled blood and kills without number.

That psychic pressure again, like an ache in his soul, more insistent now, even though they were farther from the kitchen, from the site of the defilement.

“Something happened here. Something… evil.”

“Evil?” Lillehammer looked at him quizzically. “What d’you mean, man? What could be worse than what’s hanging back there in the kitchen?”

“I don’t know… yet.”

Croaker played the beam of light over the entire area. The stain, ovoid and almost perfectly symmetrical, stood out like a stela in the Southeast Asian jungle, marking the passage of an ancient, enigmatic people.

He played the light along the baseboard of the wall, then down along the floor. Almost directly at his feet was another stain, this one smaller but thick, viscid.

“That almost certainly is semen,” Lillehammer said from over his shoulder. “Perhaps the murderer raped Goldoni before he strung him up and decapitated him.”

“No,” Croaker said. “As you pointed out, there was some kind of ritual performed on Goldoni—like a sacrifice.” He glanced up at Lillehammer. “No violation of the sacrificial victim would be permitted.”

“How the hell do you know that for certain?”

“I don’t. It’s just a… feeling.”

“Yes. I’ve been in the jungle,” Lillehammer said, “where feeling is everything. Brush of a ghost’s breath can save your skin... or lead you astray.”

Lillehammer smiled his ghastly smile, the tiny cross-hatched scars standing out white and livid in the intense beam of the flashlight. “I want this bastard, you see. Need to run him down, actually.”

“Need? Maybe you picked the right name for yourself, Ahab.”

Lillehammer gave a harsh, metallic laugh, and his rather large teeth clacked together like the jaws of a crocodile.

“Sure,” he said, employing one of his few Americanisms. “I’ll tell you all about it sometime.”

That’ll be the day,
Croaker thought. He watched as Lillehammer knelt, opened his small black case, drew on a pair of surgical rubber gloves, went about preserving the semen. “I’ll have it tested. Probably a dead end, but with the level of DNA mapping available these days, maybe we’ll get lucky—such as finding he has some odd genetic disease that will help us track him down.” Lillehammer was a total enigma, and that, Croaker thought now, was why he was drawn to him. The simple fact was Croaker loved mysteries. His father’s murder had led him to become a cop, but his own innate curiosity about the far side of human existence had caused him to become a homicide detective.

“Still,” Lillehammer continued as he packed up his gear, “we have no idea what happened here.”

“Not quite. The murderer was involved in a sexual act, most likely just after he killed Goldoni. It’s clear that Goldoni was killed in the kitchen—exsanguinated there.”

“All right. Perhaps he got off on the killing so much he masturbated to ejaculation. That would be consistent with a good many homicidal psychotics. They’re normally impotent, but the intense rage that causes them to kill—the very act of bringing death—releases their sexual restraint.”

Pressure on his psyche, a shadow on his soul.

“Possibly,” Croaker said. “But in this case, I don’t think so. Look at what we found in the kitchen. There was no sense of rage at work there, only a meticulous precision. And the sacrificial aspect? Only magicians, shamans, perform these complex rituals—power after power. I don’t see impotence in this particular psychic equation.”

Lillehammer seemed willing to accept that. He took another look around them. “If he didn’t have sex with Goldoni and he wasn’t masturbating, we’re left with only one other possibility.”