Here's the first few scenes of my detective novel "Be Careful What You Ask For." All comments welcome!
Chapter One
The police inspector knelt
over the dead waitress’s body, gently tilting her young, battered face as her
hair, dusty with debris, fell at odd angles. Sticky crimson blood had oozed out
of her nose, ears and mouth and one eye stared into the night while the other
was a swollen bloody mass. Her legs were oddly twisted beneath her, but
the sleeveless black silk blouse and short black skirt she wore didn’t look
disturbed. Nothing lay beside her.
He spent several minutes
probing a purple cheek, split open, bruised and disfigured, finding very little
bone still intact.
"Sato?"
The inspector
turned his head toward the voice and was blinded by the crime scene lights that
made the body seem like a broken mannequin. Shading his eyes, he peered at his
partner, Detective Ken Abe, and stepped out of the light, careful not to
disturb anything.
Abe had been watching Sato for a full
five minutes, puffing on a cigarette, watching his old friend at work.
"So?"
“She was surprised, then frightened, then beaten, left for
dead,” Sato said, giving voice to this thoughts as he crossed over to Abe, wiping his hands on a handkerchief.
Abe
nodded. He had known Sato for over 20 years. He knew how his friend’s mind
worked, unhurried, always direct and to the point. And most times, he did not
disagree, like now.
Sato
said, "I think she came out here expecting something or someone."
Abe nodded. It seemed that way to
him, too.
"I don’t think she’s been dead for very long, perhaps
less than an hour,” Sato continued. “Wasn’t she discovered shortly after
midnight?"
Abe
nodded.
“Do
we know who placed the call?”
“Another
waitress,” Abe said, crushing out the cigarette. He took the call, but knew few
details. “She’s inside with Kato and Endo.”
Sato’s guttural “huh” sounded like
a dismissive grunt, but it was nothing of the sort. Abe knew Sato was envisioning
the crime, assimilating the facts into some sense of order.
Sato then walked
over to the medical examiner, who took the cue and rapidly launched into his
assessment: “It looks like somebody struck her across the face,
so hard it snapped her head back against that concrete wall. Caused internal
brain hemorrhaging.” The doctor hated making a definite statement at a crime
scene, but he knew Sato needed to hear something. “She slumped to the ground,
and that was it.”
“No
one moved her, touched her in any way?”
“No!” If it had been anyone other than Sato, the doctor would
have been insulted.
“Any signs of rape?”
“I don’t know.” The doctor hesitated, scratching his
ear. “Maybe. Her panties don’t look like they’ve been disturbed, but there’s nothing
strange about the thighs or buttocks. No strange marks or bruises. I don’t know
for sure. Like I said, it looks like she just dropped. Some kind of smack in
the face, her head hits the wall, probably got a fractured skull. Probably
burst something in her brain. We’ll know more later.”
Abe watched his old partner closely. He knew Sato always
performed his duty well, but this time he saw none of the steely resolve he had
always admired when the case was fresh, when there were clues to uncover. Abe
thought he saw pain. He wondered if it had to do with Sato’s wife, Miki,
bedridden all these months. Maybe it had something to do with his retirement,
only weeks away.
But Abe decided he must have been seeing things when Sato’s
expression seemed to harden before his eyes. He watched him turn to look at the
young woman once more.
“She was pretty,” Abe said.
Sato nodded. “What
was she doing in a dark alley so late at night?” Sato asked. “What could have
happened that would lead to this?”
Abe
thought for a moment. “This club has a lot of
foreigners come to listen to music. College girl looking to meet foreigners,
have an adventure.”
Sato rubbed his chin. “Adventure.”
“And she probably liked the excitement of Roppongi.”
“Huh,” Sato grunted. “Lots of people. Lots of
different types of people.”
Abe considered that. “Waitress work isn’t easy. It had
to be something.”
“Maybe she had a boyfriend. Maybe a jealous boyfriend.
“Maybe a secret admirer.”
“Yes, maybe.”
+
As far as the uniform police at the scene were concerned, the
best thing the poor girl could have hoped for was that Inspector Shig Sato
would lead the investigation. Everyone was pleased that the inspector returned
to Azabu station for his last month on the force, even the chief, old Wada, and
he hated everything.
A cheerful
gray sergeant noticed the rookie next to him watching Sato so he whispered,
“Lucky girl. She got Sato.”
The rookie could only manage an awestruck “Sato.”
The sergeant whispered, “I’d want him hunting down my
killer.”
The rookie could only nod.
“Sato can talk a confession out of anyone,” the
sergeant said. “And watch this, kid. Abe can smell dog shit at fifty yards and
tell you the breed and what the dog had to eat that day. If there are any clues
here, they’ll find them.”
“His sense of smell?” The rookie had never heard of
such a thing.
The sergeant nodded: “People say Abe was hit in the
head with a baseball when he was a kid. Hit some nerve. I don’t know. But he’s
got a nose on him.”
The rookie couldn’t help noticing Sato looked cool and
commanding in a dark suit, white shirt, plain tie, his face fixed in intense
concentration. But Detective Abe: he saw a rotund, affable middle-aged man who
looked more like a cheerful bum than a detective, a bum who slept in his
clothes and didn’t care if he had broken shoe laces haphazardly knotted
together and mismatched socks.
“This man was Sato’s partner?” The rookie tried to take it
all in as he watched Abe bend over and then crouch down, the palm of his hand
lightly caressing the pavement like a mother stroking her baby.
Sato saw the sergeant and came over. “We have a name
for this poor kid?”
“Yamada, Kimi. Waseda student, 22 years old, works
here three or four nights a week,” the cheerful old sergeant said. “The other
detectives are with the staff inside.”
Sato turned his attention to Abe, now on his
hands and knees, inspecting the cracked asphalt, the gravel, the rubbish laid
out before him, his nose inches from the ground. Finding the minutest detail
was Abe’s forte and Sato knew Abe could be relied on to discover something no
one else would spot. It was a pleasure to watch him work.
The crime scene team, the medical
staff, the police officers, all were transfixed on Abe’s search for some unseen
object, mesmerized by his darting glances, his studying one thing, then
another. A sigh punctuated the silence. Then a cough. Then Sato absentmindedly
began whistling softly to himself.
Finally Abe stood. “This is no good. Someone’s been
walking all over the tracks.”
“What tracks?” the crime scene leader cried, horrified
the scene was tainted.
Abe ignored him. “Two men, pretty average, I’d say; one
wearing leather-soled shoes and the other in sneakers, both on motorbikes.
Stand off to the side, I want to see where the bike tracks go.”
Abe then leaned over and stared at the pavement for a
long minute.
“Ah-ha. Two different directions. Odd.”
Like Sato, the crime scene crew had seen this time
after time with Abe. It was always something amazing. Sato only grunted,
pleased for his friend, and scribbled in his notebook.
“Watch out for the vomit,” Abe told the crime scene
leader.
“Oh …” the man moaned, quickly stepping away. But there was
Abe, on his hands and knees, nose inches away from the splatter. He sniffed. He
sniffed again.
The sergeant whispered, “I heard he can tell which
brand of beer is in a pool of vomit.”
The youngster stifled a laugh.
“It’s a useful trick,” Sato said glancing at the young
officer, a small smile on his face. “I depend on Abe knowing the difference
between Kirin and Asahi.”
“Yes, sir,” was all the kid could say.
Abe slowly got back on his feet and said, “Hamburgers.
French fries. Recently consumed. Mos burgers, I’m sure. I think what happened
is one of the guys had something to eat, a little later were here, them and the
girl, and he was surprised and shocked maybe, but anyhow, one of them threw up
on the spot. A reaction of some sort. Like he saw the violence and it made him
sick.”
+
“Inspector?” an unseen voice called out.
“Yes?”
Sato turned and watched Detective Hisoka Endo emerge
from a door ten feet from where Kimi Yamada lay dead. Sato had met Endo only a
few hours before, when their shift began, and so far saw Endo for what he
seemed to be: a small, handsome, polite young police officer with the kind of
bearing and self-assuredness most young up-and-comers would kill for. He
dressed well, too well for a young detective, but compared to his
contemporaries, his appearance was downright conservative.
“The customers are getting restless,” Detective Mo Kato said
as he appeared from behind Endo and
walked out into the alley. “How
long are we going to hold them? We’re finished with them. Most of them said
they didn’t see anything.”
“Got anything?”
Kato pulled out his notes: “Well, there are two American GIs
in there. There were three, but one of them left around 10 or 10:30. He was the
dead girl’s boyfriend.”
Kato stopped chewing in his toothpick, his only reaction to
Sato asking, “One of them is missing? He’s not here?”
“That’s what they said,” came Kato’s casual reply. “No one
really noticed. The band was playing. The waitresses were busy. The two other
GIs watched the show. Nobody had anything to say until that girl was found.”
Sato grunted. “No one says they know anything, and this GI is
on the loose,” and the words burned into Sato’s mind. No matter what clues Abe
saw in the alley, Sato knew he had to find that GI.
“Who is still in there?”
Kato stopped chewing again: “Everyone. The customers. The
staff. The GIs.” Kato knew Sato wasn’t going to skip interrogating the people
in the club. Sato knew it too and what helped him decide what was next was the
fact he had known Kato for years and trusted him. The man’s easy nonchalance his
an intense, almost predatory instinct to hunt down criminals, and the man was
friends with most of the medical people. This helped Sato decide to take the
time necessary to gather clues while the crime scene is fresh; interview
witnesses before they start forgetting things.
“Kato, go with the medical people,” Sato decided. “And keep
in touch with headquarters. When they want to start issuing press releases, make
sure they don’t screw up. I don’t want the media to start jumping to
conclusions and ruining this case.”
Kato nodded and kept chewing on his toothpick. So he had to
wait for the medical people and crime scene team to finish their tasks. His was
a benign kind of patience. He believed waiting was a part of investigating.
Asking someone to hurry only caused mistakes, as far as Kato was concerned. He leaned
his tall, heavy body against a long, dirty concrete wall, unconcerned about any
dust and soot, and chewed on his toothpick as he silently watched the crime
scene people finish their tasks. He watched the medical team prepare the body
of the young woman for removal. He watched Sato and Abe go into the club. Then
he watched as the girl was taken away. Only then did Kato stir, to follow the
teams to their vehicles.
His mind wasn’t on the girl anymore, but on Endo. It wasn’t
that he was unhappy that there was a rookie on the team, but that it was the
inspector’s first night back at Azabu, and Endo just shows up. Kato did not
believe in coincidences. He could not put a name to his misgivings, but then,
he was happy Sato was back. Kato decided to focus on that.
