A Mourning in Autumn Read online

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  Copyright © 2004 by Bluestocking, Inc. All rights reserved.

  Mysterious Press

  Warner Books

  Hachette Book Group, USA

  237 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10017

  Visit our Web site at www.HachetteBookGroupUSA.com.

  First eBook Edition: July 2004

  ISBN: 978-0-446-50723-3

  Contents

  ALSO BY HARKER MOORE

  DEDICATION

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  PROLOGUE

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  CHAPTER 26

  CHAPTER 27

  CHAPTER 28

  CHAPTER 29

  CHAPTER 30

  EPILOGUE

  ALSO BY HARKER MOORE

  A Cruel Season for Dying

  From each to each . . .

  Dianne and Sandra . . .joined at the brain.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  The author would like to thank Karen Ross, Herbert Erwin, Gerrie Singer, Robert Aberdeen, Bill Troy, Jim Churchman, Stirling and Migo Nagura, Paul Perkins, and others for the expertise they so generously provide in sustaining Sakura’s world. Any errors or creative interpretations are the author’s.

  Very special thanks to Mel Berger and Colin Fox.

  PROLOGUE

  The basement was cold and nearly as silent as the death it contained. In the corner, in the darkness, the big Bosch cooler ran with the ambient sound of perpetually indrawn breath. The woman it had been keeping lay naked on the metal table in the middle of the room. A work lamp cut a circle overhead.

  He stood in the light. Breathed, openmouthed. Tasting for fear that lingered, for a whiff of the power that still drifted, mixed with molecules of decay. But the power was gone. The moment of transformation slipped irretrievably backward.

  The body wraps its mystery in corruption. The defiance of rot.

  Despite refrigeration, putrefaction could only be delayed. He drew the light closer, imagining he could detect a nascent tinge of green creeping like shadow in the slope of the belly. He pressed the skin where the dead flesh had purpled with lividity. Meat was the thought in his mind.

  Not a left thought. Left-brain would still detect some mechanistic elegance in this ruin. Still he was sinister, if the Romans got it right, giving preference to the hand, not the lobe that controlled it. Sinister from the Latin. The ancients unaware of that magic cross circuit in the brain.

  But there were other kinds of sorcery.

  Left-brain picked up the scalpel and made the wide looping cut from shoulder to shoulder. Then a long deep slit, from the midpoint straight down, a cleft from the breasts, through belly to pubis. The wounded flesh gaped, labial and inviting. Right-brain began with the snap and crunch of the cutters, till the breastbone lay open, and the smell like no other rolled in the air. Time to play in the muck.

  He was pleased, when it was finished, with his essential rearrangements. Practice made, if not perfect, at least a more satisfying configuration. Left-brain would tidy, would have more to do with this lump. But the eater of souls was ever hungry.

  Time for fresh meat.

  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 pla
stic 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 other
s 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.”