Read Online Japantown by Barry Lancet - Free Book Online Page B

his eyes. I just couldn’t decipher what I’d seen.
    Renna glanced at the wall, which held framed black-and-white stills of workmen erecting towering steel beams, from a time when San Francisco was eager and proud and raising her bridges. Stout men with hard hats and T-shirts hauled melon-thick cables into position, navigating catwalks suspended hundreds of feet above churning bay waters.
    “Last year we bought Christine a dress just like the one Miki Nakamura was wearing, only blue. It’s why I became a cop. I won’t run from this.”
    I nodded slowly. With a senseless killing, you never knew what would get under your skin. What might strike too close to home.
    Renna leaned forward, eyes inflamed. “Listen, I’ll keep you informed, but I want you to stay on it. For as long as it takes. Can you do that?”
    “Easily.”
    “Even if the kanji’s not Mieko’s?”
    “After what I saw? Not a problem. Till death do us part,” I said, thinking of Mieko.
    “Good.”
    Renna withdrew an envelope from his jacket pocket and extracted two pieces of paper, spreading them on the table between us. One was the scrap from the crime scene encased in a cellophane evidence bag, the other an enlarged photocopy. “The kanji cleaned up like you said.”

    One look at the full array of black strokes shimmering on the textured Japanese paper and I felt my heart stutter. Before me lay an exactcopy of the character I’d seen on the sun-bleached sidewalk in Los Angeles. Not similar. Not off by a line or two, but a dead-on duplicate; a stroke-for-stroke replication. Designating Japantown as the fourth known strike by the same killer.
    “Well?” Renna asked.
    I found my voice with difficulty. “It’s the same. Exactly the same.”
    “I’m sorry to hear that,” Renna said. “You want, I could push the LAPD to reopen Mieko’s file.”
    My breath caught in my throat. For the longest time, I’d hoped for just such a scenario, but now that the offer was on the table, I hesitated. More than two years had passed. Down south, the evidence was nothing but cold cinders. Motivation would be lacking.
    “Will anything come of it?”
    He shrugged. “My guess, the ball’s in our court. We catch the perp, we wrap up your wife’s case too.”
    “Sounds like a plan.”
    “Good,” he said again, his voice dropping half an octave without losing clarity, “then here’s what I want. First, the Japantown shoot cranks things up a notch, so I need you to look for the kanji under new rocks. And this time I need answers. Lots of answers.”
    I rubbed the paper with the J-town kanji between my fingers. “Well, for starters, the stock is standard Japanese calligraphy parchment. Mass-produced. Machine-made. Not a local handmade washi .”
    Washi is the traditional Japanese paper you expect to see with calligraphy. It also features in scroll paintings, lanterns, and shoji screens. The best-quality paper is still made by hand in a way that has survived hundreds of years: a tray lined with wire mesh is dipped into a vat of pulped plant fiber suspended in water. The mesh captures a layer of pulp, then the papermaker hauls it up and allows the captured pulp fiber to solidify into a textured sheet.
    Renna cut me a look that suggested I’d have to do more than recite a few cultural nuggets to earn my keep.
    I said, “I take it your lab rats already told you that.”
    “Hours ago.”
    “Try this, then. Commercial washi is sold all over Japan and in many stores here. Handmade washi is made in limited quantities byindividuals and is easy to trace by its style, which varies by region. Your labbies tell you that?”
    “No.”
    “So if this paper was intentionally left by the shooter, then using commercial washi suggests caution.”
    “Okay. What about the character?”
    “Your boys can’t make any sense of it either?”
    “It’s being handled through channels. I want answers before the next ice age sets in, global warming permitting. Tell me why you