As usual, I’m at the office before 8:00 a.m., having already done a thirty-minute jog and fifteen minutes of stretching, despite waking up exhausted. I was working on the arcade-murder profile until midnight last night, giving me less than six hours’ sleep…that’s going to hurt. I prefer something around the eight-hour mark, especially when my days are so busy. I could have finished the profile and been tucked up in bed much earlier, except my train of thought was interrupted by a phone call from my mum in Melbourne. She was in the mood to chat and I didn’t have the heart—or courage—to tell her I was working at nine-thirty at night. I’d never hear the end of it.
First thing on my agenda this morning is Interpol. We need to gather as much information as we can on our Japanese victim, who may have been living in Singapore. It’s not the first time I’ve had to deal with the US Bureau of Interpol—when AmericanPsycho fled the country I contacted them immediately. Unfortunately we couldn’t alert the French police in time for him to be intercepted at the Paris airport, but I check in with the US Bureau and the head office in France every now and again. One time we managed to get through the many layers of high-tech security he sets up and traced one of his online flower orders to an Internet café in Paris. But he’d made sure cameras in the area were out for an hour on either side of the online order and our knowledge that he was there was useless, although it did confirm my suspicions that he was still in Paris.
My contact at the Washington, D.C. office is Latoya Burges. I look up her direct line in Outlook and punch in the number.
“Hey, Latoya. It’s Agent Sophie Anderson.”
“Hey, Sophie. What’s up? Any more contact from our friend?”
“Just the usual.” As much as I’d like to ignore the monthly red rose that he sends my way, it’s impossible.
“I see.”
I change the subject. “We’ve got ourselves a Japanese homicide vic here in L.A. I was hoping you could help.”
“Sure. What you got?”
“His name, passport details and fingerprints. And we know he flew in from Singapore.”
“I’ll look him up. Shoot.”
I read out the information.
“Hold on a sec.”
I hear typing in the background.
“No criminal record coming up. Nothing on a Jo Kume in our database. But I’ll place a call to our Singapore and Japanese offices later today and get a full file together for you.”
“That’d be great. Thanks.” I pause. “How long do you think it’ll take?”
“Should only be a day or two, honey. But we’ve also got to factor in the time difference.”
I do the calculation in my head. If memory serves me right, Singapore is three hours behind Melbourne. So given it’s 8:00 a.m. here, it’s midnight in Singapore. It’ll be at least another eight hours before anyone even sees my request. “No worries. I’ll e-mail you his prints, too. Maybe you’ll come up with a hit on those, or Singapore or Japan will. Can you call me on my cell if you get something?”
“Sure thing, honey.”
Next on my list is the offender profile for Santorini’s murder. It feels good to finally have it done. The past few weeks it’s almost felt as though I’ve had the boy’s death hanging over my head in some way. But I know that’s just me losing my sense of objectivity—a common struggle for me when it comes to victims, especially the young ones. I read over the profile and add a few finishing touches before sending it through to the requesting officer in LAPD, and CC’ing George Rosen.
I’ve profiled Santorini’s killer as someone he knew, possibly quite well. There’s something very personal about the blitz-style attack, a case of a youth who was angry with the victim and lost control. I doubt he intended to kill James Santorini, but that’s meaningless. The killer will have a history of anger management issues, and is most likely someone from Santorini’s school or part of a shared club or group. It’s also possible the killer is a family member, although not immediate—perhaps a cousin. Despite my initial thoughts that the murder could be linked to gangs, I’ve now ruled that out. The attack was personal and the work of only one perpetrator. Presumably the LAPD will act on the profile, going back through all the statements they took from Santorini’s school and other networks, or maybe starting in these areas again.
I’m going over Kume’s crime-scene photos again when my speakers chirp with the arrival of an e-mail. It’s from the forensic pathologist Lloyd Grove and the subject line reads Racial background of Little Tokyo victim. Even though we now know the victim is Japanese, I click on the e-mail.
After I’ve read it, I immediately dial Ramos’s cell. “Ramos, Anderson. You seen Grove’s e-mail yet?”
“No. I’m actually with Newman and our vic’s laptop at the moment.”
“Oh, cool,” I say, excited by the prospect of getting the guy’s computer history.
“What’s the e-mail say?”
“That our vic is half Korean and half Japanese, with a bit of Chinese heritage thrown in, too.”
“Really? So not just Japanese.”
“No. I’ve already been on the phone to Interpol this morning, but I’ll give them a call back and ask them to expand their search to Korea and maybe even China, too, just in case.”
“Great.”
“It will take a couple of days, though. So what’s up with Kume’s computer?”
“It’s looking good, Anderson. Newman said Kume hasn’t even tried to hide anything on his laptop, so we’ve got e-mails, Internet history, favorites, everything. We’re starting with financials and we’ve managed to trace regular transfers from a Singapore bank to a GCE account here in the States. It came out of a business account Kume had under the name Best Enterprises.”
“Really? Drug payments? Blackmail?”
“All possible. Newman’s not sure yet whether we’ll have to get a warrant for GCE to release the account holder’s details or if he’ll be able to get a name from the computer records. See how we go in the next few hours.”
“Things are looking up,” I say. Sometimes cases crawl along, and other times the snowball effect of evidence and information can make it hard to keep up. But I always prefer the snowball cases. Makes our jobs easier and generally leads to a better outcome—the bad guy in prison sooner. Just the way I like my murder cases.
“We’ve come a long way from a John Doe yesterday,” Ramos comments.
“We sure have.”
Once I’ve said goodbye and hung up, I call Latoya and ask her to expand the search to Korea and China, given our vic’s heritage.
“Can do on South Korea, but not with North Korea or China. They’re not part of the Interpol program. The best I can do is try to contact their federal police, but I can’t guarantee anything. To be honest, I doubt either country will be interested in helping us out.”
“Okay.” I sigh. With the world getting smaller, we need as much international cooperation as we can get. But given it can be hard enough getting all the US law-enforcement agencies working together, it’s not that surprising that the world is a lot to ask. I thank her once again before hanging up and moving back to the crime-scene photos and reports.
It’s still too early to draft an offender profile—I don’t know enough about the vic yet—but I am starting to get a feeling for our killer. He’s orderly…methodical. He picked the crime scene well, an isolated location within a busy section of a big city, cased it and eliminated the potential danger of the parking lot’s lights. Then he lured Jo Kume to the parking lot and killed him using a weapon that an experienced forensic pathologist hasn’t been able to trace.
By the time I’ve gone over the case file another two times, my sense of achievement has vanished. Despite all our inroads into the victim’s identity and actions, I get the feeling this killer is going to be hard to catch. He’s planned the murder exceedingly well.
I sigh, and check my watch—1:00 p.m. I’ve still got two hours before the division-heads meeting at 3:00 p.m. While I could continue revising the case details, I decide to concentrate on my vision of someone getting shot. If it’s related to Kume’s murder, maybe it means his killer has murdered before and his handiwork could be in ViCAP. The Violent Criminal Apprehension Program runs a national online database into which law-enforcement professionals from all around the US can enter details about violent crimes. Problem is, if my vision’s right and a past or future victim of the killer’s is shot, that’ll be useless to plug into ViCAP—I’d get thousands upon thousands of shooting victims coming up. That’s not going to work. I could, however, do a search on the throat wound. Maybe our killer has struck before using the same weapon…whatever it is.
I open up the ViCAP software on my computer and do a search across all US states, with the cause of death as throat wounds. With no other variables like victim race, sex, age, signature or keywords plugged into the system, I get lots of results—four hundred and twelve, to be precise. And here I was thinking I had time up my sleeve. Trying to work in my dream, I narrow the search down by adding gunshot wound to the injuries. This time, I only get thirty-five results. So there are thirty-five victims who were shot and experienced some sort of throat wound. I open up the first entry, only to find the person was shot in the throat. It could be a long two hours…
I’m still scanning through the results when my computer gives me the second meeting reminder—it’s 3:00 p.m. I flip my notebook over to a fresh page and grab my BlackBerry, before scurrying to the boardroom. I walk in just as Brady kicks the meeting off.
Sitting around the boardroom table are the division heads; Brady’s direct reports, like me; some of the unit heads, like Petrov; and Melissa, who takes the minutes. The L.A. field office has four main divisions. Counterterrorism led by Brad Jones, Criminal headed by George Rosen, Counterintelligence led by Sandy Peters and Cyber Crime headed by Ed Garcia. In addition, it’s got programs in white-collar crime, civil rights and organized crime, including gang-related activities, and at least one person from each area is at the meeting. Except for Melissa, all the attendees are much higher up in the food chain than I am, but it’s useful if I’m aware of all the cases and on hand to give my opinion from a behavioral perspective.
Brady asks for Ed Garcia’s update first. Garcia has a team of computer specialists who work under him, focusing on any use of the Internet for criminal activities. It could be online credit-card scams, identity theft, money laundering or simply checking out the computer of a suspect, but most of his team is devoted to stopping the proliferation of online child pornography. With pedophiles able to download illegal photos and videos with the click of a mouse, and the World Wide Web as big as it is, it’s a massive area to police.
I take notes as we move around the table, and then give everyone a very brief update of my cases, focusing on my top priority, the Little Tokyo murder.
We’re almost done when my BlackBerry rings. Damn, forgot to switch it to Silent. “Sorry, I’m waiting on a few calls.” I take my notebook and pencil and slip out. I answer softly, aware that I’ve already disrupted the meeting.
“Hey, it’s Latoya. I’ve got something real interesting for you, honey. I got a match on those prints of yours, but not under Jo Kume. The name I got coming up is Jun Saito.”
That is big news—although if our vic was a drug dealer it’s not surprising he’d have fake ID, fake documents.
“Does the name ring a bell?” she asks.
“No.” I bring my notebook up to the wall. “Can you spell it please, Latoya.”
“Sure. J-U-N S-A-I-T-O.”
“Don’t suppose you know if that’s a Japanese name?”
“Now you’re testing me, honey.”
I smile. “Okay, thanks again, Latoya.”
“I’ll let you know when I hear something from Singapore, Japan or South Korea. I’ve already asked them to get back to me on both names—Jo Kume and Jun Saito.”
“Thanks.” Once I’ve hung up, I switch my BlackBerry to Silent and try to slip as quietly as possible back into the meeting. Sandy Peters, the head of Counterintelligence, is talking when I enter. I take my seat and place my notebook back on the table.
But the meeting’s disrupted again when Pasha Petrov suddenly says, “Does that say Jun Saito?” He points at the large letters scrawled diagonally across my notebook.
Peters stops midsentence and everyone looks at Petrov and me.
“Um, yeah,” I say hesitantly. “Turns out Interpol had a match on the fingerprints of our Little Tokyo victim, but under the name Jun Saito.”
“Holy crap!”
“What’s the problem, Petrov?” Brady asks.
Petrov puts his face in his hands. “Are you sure this is your Little Tokyo victim? That this guy’s dead?”
“It’s a computerized fingerprint match against Interpol’s database verified by a specialist. It must be right.”
He rubs his hands in his face. “It’s going to be war.”
“Spill it, Petrov,” Brady demands. “And so it makes sense for the rest of us.”
Petrov drops his hands on the table and looks at Brady. “You’ve got to know your organized crime history.” He sighs. “If this is who I think it is…” He shakes his head. “Some idiot’s killed the son and only living male heir of Hisayuki Saito.”
“We need a bit more enlightening, Petrov,” Brady says.
“Hisayuki Saito was born in Korea in 1923, when it was occupied by the Japanese. He started off as a street hood, but he took advantage of the Japanese occupation and joined the Yakuza. Later he moved to Japan and became the first Korean Yakuza godfather. The guy only retired a few years ago, and died last year. Nowadays there’s a whole Korean subculture in the Yakuza, and Saito was the founding father. So, if the Jun Saito who’s lying in the morgue was the only remaining son of Hisayuki Saito, this is a big hit. Especially given Jun Saito’s been missing for fifteen years, presumed dead.”
“Hit?” I say. Despite the staging elements, it hadn’t occurred to me that this could be a hit. I’m suddenly struck by the dispassion I felt from the killer. He got no real joy from it, it was a job. And no wonder he had the presence of mind to take out the light, and so easily. Besides, staging a crime scene to look like something it’s not is characteristic behavior of a contract killer. “You’re talking a professional hit man.”
“Whoever did this would have wanted someone outside of their organization to execute Saito. So yeah, they would have called in a professional.”
“He wasn’t shot,” I say, referring to the fact that most professional assassins shoot their victims, unless they’re trying to make the death look like an accident. “The coroner can’t work out what sort of weapon was used.” I voice these details, but immediately want to race back to my desk and enter the throat wound into ViCAP, on its own this time and with a cross-reference of organized crime.
“We need to talk about the MO after this meeting. I may recognize it,” Petrov says.
“Sure.”
Petrov continues. “The most surprising thing about this murder is that by all accounts Jun Saito wasn’t active in the Yakuza anymore. He disappeared fifteen years ago. Some people said he rejected his family’s past and went straight, starting a new life. But most felt he was at the bottom of the Sea of Japan.”
Back to my romanticized version of the vic’s past—he did straighten up. “Are there pictures of this guy on file? Have you seen him?”
“Only a few shots. Mostly from fifteen to twenty years ago.” He shakes his head. “I guess I should have recognized him.”
“People change a lot in fifteen years, Petrov,” Brady says.
“Plus Grove said he’d had a nose job,” I add. “That’d alter his appearance, too.”
Petrov shrugs, still taking it a little personally. “So you said yesterday that he was seen entering a suspected meth lab in Long Beach, run by the Asian Boyz?”
“Uh-huh.”
“What the heck’s he doing there? After all this time?” Petrov rubs his face again. “What a mess. I hate to think of the repercussions.”
“Payback?” Brady says.
“I’d say so.” Petrov looks at me. “Saturday night wasn’t it?”
“Early hours Sunday morning. The body was discovered just before five.”
“And it’s Wednesday afternoon now. They usually retaliate fast, which means they either don’t know he’s dead yet or they haven’t identified who was responsible.”
“By they you mean the Yakuza?”
“That’s another problem. Who is a big question. Could be an internal hit. Someone from within the Yakuza. Or maybe the Japanese Yakuza is sending a message about Korean involvement in their organization.” He pauses. “Or it could be another group entirely, one of the Yakuza’s rivals, like one of the Chinese triads. Although I haven’t heard of any turf problems.” He shrugs. “Damn, it could even be the Russians.”
“And how is the Yakuza tied to the Asian Boyz?” I ask.
“Lots of organized crime operations use gangs and gang members for some of their work. The Yakuza has ties with a few Asian gangs, so it’s probably just a case of the Asian Boyz being right for the job. And they’ve got an arm down in Long Beach near the port.”
“So the Yakuza could be the client and the Asian Boyz the freelancer.”
“Exactly. And the Yakuza could be the buyer or distributor in Japan and other Asian countries if they are exporting.”
After a few seconds, Brady’s voice cuts through the short silence. “Right.” He stands up, his voice commanding. “What do you need, Petrov? Who’s going to have jurisdiction?”
Another interesting question…LAPD, the LASD, the DEA, the ATF and the FBI. Then there’s the Los Angeles City Attorney’s Gang Unit, which works with all agencies across the city to apprehend and prosecute gang criminals.
“I’ll let L.A.’s gang law-enforcement personnel across all agencies and task forces know about this development immediately. Maybe one of our informants can point us in the right direction.” He stops, obviously considering his options. “I’d like to make sure this is interagency, so we should run it out of the Safe Streets program, and specifically the Los Angeles Gang Impact Team. We’ll consult with the City Attorney’s Gang Unit, but I definitely want federal charges, not felony.” Petrov rubs his jaw. “If we run it out of Safe Streets we’ll be taking the lead, but I’ll make sure all parties are in the loop.”
Brady nods his approval. All the political t’s and i’s should be crossed and dotted with Petrov’s approach. “Don’t forget the CLEAR Program, too.”
Petrov nods.
The CLEAR Program, which stands for Community Law Enforcement and Recovery, is another interagency task force in L.A., another player. The US is a big country, with a correspondingly large number of different agencies and task forces, which can make life much more complicated than law enforcement in Australia. It was overwhelming at first, but I think I’m getting the hang of it now.
Petrov looks at me. “We’ll need to all work together on this.”
“Sure,” I reply. “What about the US Attorney’s Office?” Getting a federal prosecutor involved early will help ensure the case is as watertight as possible.
“We have representatives from the US Attorney’s Office and the District Attorney’s Office on the Gang Impact Team.”
“Great.” I remember Ramos. “What about Detective Ramos? Will he still be on this?”
Petrov glances at Brady, who nods, before saying, “If his captain okays it he should stay put. Anderson, you’ll work with Petrov and Ramos on this—full-time. It’s a good opportunity for you to get a firsthand insight into L.A.’s gangs and organized crime.”
I agree with Brady—it’s a great opportunity for professional development in an area I’ll clearly need in the future. Although it’s certainly throwing me in the deep end. While homicide isn’t that uncommon within the ranks of organized crime or gangs, targeting a high-level member, or in this case a significant figure in the history of the Yakuza, sends out warning signals to law enforcement. It’s not surprising that Petrov is worried about retaliation—this could turn into a bloodbath.