Old Poison (Dangerous Ground 2) Page 9

  The voice was cold, level. It was followed by another spike of pain in his side as a foot landed solidly beneath the ribs. He bit off his cry and rolled away — tried to, anyway. There was a rope around his ankles and another around his wrists.

  He was on the ground. No, a floor. A cement floor. An interior. It was chilly, and it smelled weird. Like fish. Like the ocean.

  Taylor began to remember. He had been at Will’s. His car wouldn’t start. Then it came to him: Varga getting hit. Jesus. In the chest.

  “Varga?” His voice sounded like gravel.

  “She’s dead. Thanks to you.”

  No. It wasn’t — that couldn’t… He shook his head. A very bad idea.

  “Why the hell did you have to choose today to ride together?”

  A woman’s voice from down a long, echoing tunnel. She seemed to expect an answer. Taylor mumbled, “Car wouldn’t start.”

  “Of course your goddamned car wouldn’t start,” ranted the voice. “That was the point. If you’d just walked out the door at the time you always do, everything would have been fine. But you had to try and play tricks. And now another person has died because of you.”

  He tried to place her. She seemed to know him, so he must know her, right? Nothing was familiar about her. The voice wasn’t familiar. He tried to peer up at her through his sticky eyelashes. Nothing. Nothing she said made any sense. She went rambling on about Varga and how he’d caused her death. He tried to assess the situation, but so far nothing was making sense.

  Maybe his bewilderment was too obvious to miss. “You don’t know who I am, do you?” she asked finally.

  He shook his head.

  “I’m Alexandra Sugimori. The wife of the man you murdered.”

  Chapter Ten

  “Sugimori,” Taylor echoed.

  “Are you going to pretend you don’t remember, you lying sack of shit?”

  “I remember.”

  “Yes,” she said with bitter satisfaction. “You could hardly forget.”

  No, he could hardly forget. And now the pieces clicked into place like a Japanese puzzle box. Except it still didn’t make sense.

  “You destroyed him. You destroyed our life.”

  He shook his head, and she kicked him again. He began to worry about his right lung, the one that had been shot three months earlier. The doctors had warned him that it would always be vulnerable, especially to tearing loose from his rib cage again. He was pretty sure getting repeatedly kicked in the ribs would be discouraged.

  “Murderer!”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he protested. “I didn’t kill Inori. I wasn’t even in Japan when he —” Taylor stopped. Over the past few days the memories had returned, and though the pain had faded through the years, it still hurt. It always would.

  “When he killed himself?” she asked.

  Taylor nodded. He pulled surreptitiously at the rope binding his wrists. A lot of rope. Hopefully that meant they didn’t know what they were doing.

  “The suicide that you drove him to.”

  He tried to deny it, moving his head in negation — not easy lying on the floor.

  “Liar.”

  She kicked at him again, but this time he rolled to protect his lung and ribs. Her foot caught him over the kidneys. Not a huge improvement, as these things went.

  “I’m not lying,” he gasped. “I don’t know who you are or what you think happened —”

  “I told you who I am.” She turned to someone else. “Lift him up. I want him to see my face. I want to see his.”

  Someone bent over him, hands grabbing his shirt, dragging him up. He was half lifted, half thrown against a wall. Taylor struggled to stay vertical, to face his abductors.

  It was hard to discern them in the gloom, but the man was Japanese. Young, early twenties, neck and hands covered in the intricate tattoos of the Yakuza. Terrific. Taylor turned his attention to the woman. He still didn’t remember her except for the few seconds before he’d been knocked out. He’d seen her shoot Varga. He wasn’t about to forget that.

  She was saying to him, “Are you pretending you didn’t know Inori was married?”

  Taylor swallowed. “I…”

  She came toward him again, and he burst out with the truth. “I knew. It wasn’t real to me.”

  That stopped her. “Wasn’t real?”

  “You weren’t there. You were just a photo on his desk. I knew you were in the States. I thought you were separated or something.” The woman standing over him, trembling, fists clenched, bore no resemblance to that long-ago smiling portrait.

  “Bullshit. You wanted to think that. You seduced my husband, a good and honorable man, and you drove him to suicide.”

  “I didn’t seduce anyone.” This was insane. He couldn’t believe it was happening. Where the hell had this madwoman been for eight years? Why was she was doing this? And why now?

  The man said something quietly to her. Alexandra listened to him, but her fierce pale eyes never left Taylor’s face.

  She nodded. “You abandoned my husband and left him to face the disgrace alone. You’re a coward as well as a murderer.”

  “It wasn’t like that. I was reassigned. I didn’t have a choice about leaving. And Inori broke it off with me before I left, before I started my second tour in Afghanistan. It wasn’t a question of leaving him to face…disgrace.”

  He knew he was wasting his breath, but somehow he had to try and reach her. The kid…no way. Taylor recognized those empty eyes, eyes like a gun barrel. There was no mercy in him. The woman was his only hope. And it wasn’t much of a hope.

  “Listen to me. It was my first foreign posting at an embassy. I was young and inexperienced. Your husband was kind to me, and eventually we did become friends. It was…not my intention to hurt anyone.”

  “You used my husband. You seduced him. You perverted him.”

  Taylor shook his head.

  “My husband kept a safe-deposit box. Did you know that?”

  “No.”

  She was smiling eerily at him. “I didn’t know either. Yuki found out about the box after the death of Otou-sama.”

  Otou-sama. The respectful honorific for one’s father. The woman was Western, so she must be referring to her father-in-law, Inori’s father. But who the hell was Yuki?

  The young thug next to Alexandra folded his arms, staring at Taylor with his bold black eyes. Yuki, I presume?

  One thing for sure, if they were introducing themselves, they had no intention of letting Taylor leave there alive.

  * * * * *

  Will was on the phone to a contact in Little Tokyo when Cooper stepped inside his office and closed the door.

  “Later,” Will said to Noriyori Arai and replaced the receiver.

  Cooper said, “MacAllister spent two years in Japan. If his annual evaluations are anything to go by, he was a choirboy. A smart, efficient, ambitious choirboy.”

  “I never thought otherwise.”

  “No? Well, maybe I’m more cynical than you. There’s nothing here that suggests grounds for a grudge match eight years later.”

  Will’s heart sank. There had to be some lead, some clue, something that would help him find Taylor, but every turn seemed to be a dead end. According to Lt. Wray, the license plate belonged to a Dodge Pinto that had hit the scrap heap six months earlier. And Will’s neighbor Linda Schnell had been unable to pick the female shooter out of any mug-shot books. Linda was working with an LAPD sketch artist, trying to come up with a composite of the female abductor.

  “There’s only one very small indication of a potential lead. MacAllister was friends with a Japanese American contractor, Inori Sugimori, at the embassy. Sugimori was a political specialist. He committed suicide two weeks after MacAllister was reassigned to Afghanistan.”

  “Is there anything suspicious about Sugimori’s death?”

  “Other than the fact it was suicide?” Cooper asked drily.

  “Was it suicide?”
>
  “Yes. It was certainly never questioned. It was pretty gruesome, and the physical evidence seems to have been conclusive.”

  Reluctantly, Will asked, “How did he do it?”

  “He used a family sword dipped in poison to run himself through the belly.”

  Will clenched his jaw lest any unwise words escape.

  “The family on Sugimori’s father’s side was very old and very respectable samurai stock. The rumor — and this is only rumor — is that Sugimori killed himself as a matter of honor.”

  “I don’t see what this could do with MacAllister.”

  “No?” Cooper looked grimmer than ever. “The other rumor was that Sugimori and MacAllister were sexually involved. As you know, eight years ago the State Department took a very different view of homosexuality within the ranks.”

  The State Department was very proud of its new and enlightened views. Will didn’t bother to tell Cooper that gay employees still faced discrimination and harassment from coworkers both at home and abroad. No point. Progress had been made since the days MacAllister had been posted in Japan; after all, Rome wasn’t burned in a day.

  “Okay,” Will said. “Any proof MacAllister and this Sugimori were actually involved?”

  “No. But there seems to have been no other reason for Sugimori to have killed himself. And there was the little problem of him being married, you see.”

  “If this is some kind of revenge thing, why would anyone wait eight years?”

  “Sugimori’s father recently passed away. At a guess? I’d say some special information the old man had came to light after his death, and it triggered a sequence of events…”

  * * * * *

  “I want him to suffer…”

  He could hear them arguing from the other room. Alexandra was still crying, still ranting. Yuki had dragged her from the room to spare her that final loss of face. She’d come unglued as she started describing the contents of Inori’s safe-deposit box. The cracks had already been there — had probably always been there, barely plastered over. Taylor had no way of knowing. Inori had barely spoken of his wife in the States.

  One thing for sure, Alexandra had never been meant to see the contents of that fucking box. No wonder she was coming apart in pieces; even Taylor wasn’t finding it easy to hold it together. Why had Inori kept that junk? Why hadn’t he destroyed it before he’d destroyed himself? What could he have been thinking? He was such a fastidious, meticulous man. To have kept those items… Had a part of him wanted them found?

  Christ. Blindfolds and cock rings were the least of it. The Japanese were a highly inventive race. And Taylor… Well, he’d had a wild streak, no doubt about it. He had prided himself on being willing to do anything once. Granted, they had played those games more than once. But for Taylor it had always been a test of his manhood, of himself, of his limits. Inori… No question it had been different for Inori. Those pretty, pretty needles. The butterfly board. No wife was meant to see those. Hell, he wouldn’t want Will to see those things.

  No, he definitely didn’t want Will to know about that stuff.

  Taylor listened with half an ear while he took stock of his surroundings and tried to figure his options. They were, at best, limited.

  He had worked out that he was in a house. An abandoned house. Even the carpet had been torn up and removed. They’d dumped him in a large empty room with vaulted ceilings and tall windows. A dining room, maybe? He could see shadows moving across the distant white ceiling. Water. He was sure he was very near the ocean. Right on the beach. He could feel the pound of the surf beneath the floor like a sluggish heartbeat. The smell of fish and tide pools permeated. The sound of surf and mewling gulls drifted through a broken window high overhead.

  The gulls and waves were the only sounds he heard.

  There were no sounds of cars, no hum of traffic, no voices, telephones, televisions. Wherever he was, he was not near people.

  “With this knife, I’m going to cut off his balls. With this knife, I’m going to chop off his dick —”

  Yeah, that would be not counting Alexandra and Yuki, who were still discussing what to do with him in a passionate spate of mixed Japanese and English. Yuki was all in favor of a bullet between Taylor’s eyes and getting the hell out of Dodge. Alexandra kept stressing the importance of making Taylor suffer for his past sins. Making Taylor pay was her theme song, and it was easy enough to see who was the mastermind — using the term loosely — behind the tokens of disaffection over the past week.

  She had mentioned castration several times, and Taylor was fervently hoping Yuki’s sense of self-preservation would prevail. It wasn’t just fear for himself — although that was considerable. Taylor didn’t want Will having to face the horror of a mutilated lover. A dead lover would be bad enough. There was always that risk in their profession, and they both accepted it. But the kind of thing Alexandra was talking about? No. Taylor did not want Will struggling to come to terms with that. Will would find a way to blame himself. Taylor knew only too well how painful — well, he knew how it had felt when he’d learned Inori had killed himself.

  But he couldn’t think about that now. He’d avoided thinking about it too closely for eight years. Now was definitely not the time to confront those memories.

  The sea air gusted in, brisk and salty, catching his attention. He looked up to where the small round window had been broken. Way too high to climb, unfortunately, even if his hands and feet were free, but there might still be some glass around. He studied the filthy floor for the sparkle of anything bright and shiny and useful.

  He saw nothing. It was just a broken window, and it would be cold when evening came — assuming he was still alive when evening came.

  * * * * *

  “Is the wife still around?” Will asked.

  Cooper nodded and handed a sheet over. “Here’s her LKA. She’s based out of Los Angeles.”

  If Cooper had bothered rounding up a Last Known Address, his mind was working the same way as Will’s. Not that it was any great leap to want to speak to the surviving spouse or lover. Spouses and lovers always ranked high both for doing in loved ones and avenging them. Feeling the way he did about Taylor, Will understood why — on both counts.

  Cooper said, “She wasn’t in Japan when Sugimori died. In fact, she wasn’t in Japan for the two years MacAllister worked at the Tokyo embassy. Some problem with her visa. At least that’s how it looks on paper.”

  “You think they might have been estranged?”

  “Hard to say. It’s difficult to get a handle on Sugimori. Professionally he was well regarded, highly respected. His private life — well, that’s harder to read. He was the product of a mixed marriage. His mother was an American. She worked as an interpreter for the UN, which is where she met Sugimori’s father. He was a wealthy Japanese businessman, and she was his second wife. She died giving birth to Sugimori, and he married his third wife, a Japanese national, shortly after. So what you’ve got there is this half-American kid born into a very traditional, conservative Japanese family. There’s an older son and daughter by the first wife, then Sugimori, then a younger son eventually born to the third wife.”

  Taylor’s lover. Okay. So why hadn’t Taylor told him about Sugimori when Will asked about Japan? That was the part Will was having trouble wrapping his mind around. Not like they didn’t know they’d each had other lovers, Taylor in particular. In fact, that was one of the reasons Will had been hesitant to ever start with Taylor.

  Oh.

  Maybe he’d just answered his own question. Maybe Taylor was guilty about this relationship? Thought Will would disapprove? He was funny that way. Took Will’s occasional criticisms to heart in a way that Will never intended — nor reciprocated.

  “Sugimori was educated in Japan but went to university in the States, which is where he met the wife, Alexandra Burton. They married right after college, and Sugimori worked for the State Department. Eventually he applied for the posting to Japan, got it, and move
d back to Tokyo.”

  “And Alexandra didn’t follow?”

  “Apparently not. Now it might have been bureaucratic red tape, or it might have been something else. If MacAllister and Sugimori were having a sexual relationship, it was probably something else.”

  “Why don’t I go find out?” Will suggested.

  “Why don’t you? But bring LAPD along. We don’t want any accusations of coercion or improper use of force.”

  Will raised his brows. “Me?”

  * * * * *

  He needed to piss quite desperately by now. Maybe it was weird to worry about that, seeing that there was a good chance he might end up with his balls or dick cut off — never mind dead — but there was something especially humiliating about being forced to wet himself. It made him furious.

  Taylor opened his mouth to let loose a string of invective, but they were back, and the look on Alexandra’s face shut him up. Not that he had ever imagined he was going to make her understand, see things from his point of view, but he thought she would string it out, want to keep talking to him, make him listen.

  Give Will a chance to find him.

  Maybe she would have, but there was Yuki to consider. Whatever Yuki’s role in all this — besides discoverer of his older brother’s box of secrets and bearer of bad news — was hard to say. Clearly he was the more practical of the two. He was observing Taylor with those cold, unwavering eyes, already thinking about how to dispose of the body.

  “Here’s what we’re going to do,” Alexandra announced. She sounded relatively cheerful, so she was getting her way about whatever this was. She carefully set down a white sake bottle a few feet from Taylor and straightened up.

  The bottle reminded him how thirsty he was. That he hadn’t eaten since lunchtime the day before. The bottle scared him.

  “This is laced with rat poison. When you become desperate, you can drink it.”

  “Gee, thanks.” Taylor looked past her to Yuki, who stood in the doorway, arms folded and impassive. “You think of everything.”

  “Oh, you will drink it,” Alexandra informed him. “Even though you’ll have to struggle to get to it. You see, we’re going to leave you here to die. To die of thirst and hunger. Like you, this house is condemned. Abandoned. No one ever comes here. It’s private property in the middle of nowhere, so you can scream and yell all you like. No one will ever hear you. No one will ever find you.”