On a Thursday afternoon in September—the last day of summer—a woman and a child are discovered lashed together beneath a commercial fishing boat in the Los Angeles harbor. Initial speculation is that they are kidnap victims, possibly foreign nationals. A Harbor Division lieutenant, already overburdened with homicides and sensing the complexity of the case, calls Captain Jim Tatreau to ask if Homicide Special will take over. The fresh homicide galvanizes the squad room, generating an adrenaline rush in detectives and supervisors.
John Garcia and Rick Jackson, the first team listed on the on-call board, head south on the Harbor Freeway at about two o’clock. Because one of the victims was a child, the detectives quickly intellectualize the grim scenario. Already they are intrigued by the case’s possibilities.
“How deep under the water you figure they were found?” Garcia asks.
“Probably ten to twelve feet,” Jackson says. “We’ll need to get a dive team out there. Definitely bizarre. I never had anything even close to this.”
“Could be drugs,” Garcia says.
“Maybe a payback,” Jackson says. “Maybe domestic shit.”
As they drive south toward the ocean, the temperature drops, a film of fog veils the horizon, and offshore winds kick up swirls of dust on the frontage roads. Garcia pulls off the freeway in San Pedro, about twenty miles south of downtown. Speeding by the waterfront, past cruise ships and tankers, he realizes he is heading in the wrong direction and whips around. Moments later he crosses the Vincent Thomas Bridge, a graceful emerald-green suspension structure spanning the main channel of the harbor and leading to Terminal Island. The car passes a convoy of huge trucks. From dawn to dusk, trucks rumble across the artificial island, picking up loads from the massive container vessels from Asia that have recently docked. Garcia slows down to traverse a grimy jungle of warehouses, loading docks, shipyards, and shuttered tuna canneries.
“What a fucked-up spot,” he says. “A perfect place for a dump job.”
Terminal Island and the harbor area are part of Los Angeles—which was founded on a river, not on the sea—because in the late nineteenth century, the city’s business magnates realized the city needed a port if it was to prosper. Collis Huntington, who headed the Southern Pacific Railroad, proposed Santa Monica, about fifteen miles west of downtown, because he had purchased much of the waterfront property there. But the powerful Chandler family, which owned the Los Angeles Times, preferred San Pedro, partly because they believed that if the port was located in Santa Monica, Southern Pacific would monopolize transportation to the area. Several panels of engineers appointed by federal committees also picked San Pedro. They contended that the porous cliffs surrounding Santa Monica would provide insufficient solid ground for port facilities and property development, and that the bay offered no shelter from the pounding surf.
The Chandlers prevailed. The federal government approved about $3 million for the harbor. The city annexed a half-mile-wide corridor to the ocean, bisecting a string of cities. San Pedro and its neighbor Wilmington were “consolidated” with Los Angeles in 1909. (State law prohibited “annexation” of one incorporated city by another.)
The shallow harbor was dredged and deepened, and the city finally had its port. Los Angeles soon surpassed San Francisco, which has a fine natural port, as the economic engine of the West.
Garcia screeches to a stop at Fish Harbor. A half-dozen patrol cars are parked near a long ribbon of yellow crime-scene tape that keeps a gaggle of reporters and camera crews at bay. In the harbor, rugged commercial fishing boats flank a cracked asphalt dock speckled with bird droppings. A gray navy frigate and a few freighters cruise in the distance, silhouetted against a skyline of spired cranes. A brisk breeze carries the scent of seawater laced with diesel fumes. The only sounds are the thrumming of boat engines and the squall of gulls. A late-afternoon burst of sunshine burns off a layer of fog, and bright patches of blue bleed through the mist.
Garcia and Jackson are met at the harbor by three other Homicide I detectives; a fresh homicide means reinforcements. In addition to the five detectives, Captain Tatreau and Lieutenant Clay Farrell—who heads Homicide I—are gathered on the dock with a coroner investigator. Farrell, who is forty-four, red-haired, and lanky, is the antithesis of the stereotypical officious LAPD command officer. Self-deprecating and easygoing, with an off-the-wall sense of humor, he leads through conciliation, not confrontation.
Many of the detectives in Homicide I and II reflect the personalities of their lieutenants. Farrell’s men joke more often and seem to spend more time fraternizing in the squad room, comparing notes on cases. Lieutenant Hartwell is soft-spoken and reserved, and his Homicide II detectives—who tend to be younger, and newer to the unit—often spend entire mornings quietly hunched over their murder books. Homicide I detectives usually head downstairs for coffee breaks, where they gossip and swap stories.
Tatreau, who is tall and slender, with graying red hair, supervises Homicide Special, as well as RHD’s other units. Although clearly ambitious, Tatreau, who is fifty-one, has engendered much loyalty because he is not afraid to challenge LAPD brass and back up his detectives when they need his support.
As the group gathers for a briefing, a Harbor Division detective describes the discovery of the bodies. A diver was checking the brass fittings beneath a fishing boat this morning, when suddenly he spotted two feet. Then two legs. Then two bodies bobbing beneath the hull. He called the port police, who notified the LAPD about noon.
A harbor patrol boat pulls up beside the dock, and the coroner investigator and RHD crew climb on the vessel. The coroner investigator lifts a royal blue tarpaulin to reveal a woman and a young girl bound face-to-face by a weighted nylon scuba-diving belt. The woman’s left wrist is tied to the girl’s right wrist by an elaborate binding of what appears to be telephone cord. The skin of both victims is mottled and slightly decomposed. A tattered yellow sundress drapes the woman. The girl, who looks about four or five, wears a green dress with purple daisies. Tiny toes peek out of her pink and powder blue sandals.
The detectives study the intricate binding and debate whether the case is a double murder or a murder-suicide. “If the mother wanted to kill herself and her child, why bind the hands?” Jackson asks.
“To prevent them from escaping,” Garcia says.
“You figure she’d think that far ahead?” Jackson asks.
“Maybe not,” Garcia says. “The diver’s belt bothers me.”
Crouching beside the bodies, another detective studies the binding and says, “That ain’t no fucking suicide. To be bound up like that doesn’t make any sense.”
“The autopsy will determine if they were alive before they hit the water, by the absorption of water into the lungs,” the coroner investigator interjects. “That will tell us if it’s a murder or a body dump.”
“Either case, there’s at least one murder,” Jackson says. “No five-year-old girl decides on her own to jump overboard.”
The victims are not Caucasian, but the detectives cannot determine their race or ethnicity. One detective, convinced the woman and child are Asian, bets another, who believes they are Latino, a Code 7—the police code for a meal break. The detectives then argue over whether the victims were dumped beneath the boat or killed elsewhere and carried by the current to Fish Harbor. They also speculate on how long the victims have been dead. The coroner investigator estimates that gases in the bodies would have buoyed them to the surface after about ten to fourteen days.
The detectives climb back onto the dock and Tatreau tells them to send out a Teletype to law enforcement agencies. Farrell suggests that Detective Eric Mosher call the department’s missing persons’ bureau and check incident reports at the Harbor Division station. Detective Wally Tennelle interviews the captain of the boat where the bodies were found. Another detective, Mike Berchem, a single father, asks Tatreau whether he can slip away for an hour to meet with his daughter’s clarinet teacher at school. Farrell tells Tatreau he has to attend the Back to School Night festivities at his son’s school. Tatreau, who looks bemused, tells them the Homicide Special old-timers, who used to work until midnight and then drink until the bars closed, would not recognize the detectives today.
Although the other investigators at the harbor will provide assistance, Jackson and Garcia head the investigation. Jackson, forty-eight, is burly and bald, with a florid face and a bushy gray mustache. Voluble, with a line of patter and a wisecrack for even the bleakest occasion, he truly seems to love the work and revels in the challenge of piecing together the random clues, the disparate leads, the wisps of evidence. Smaller and stocky, Garcia, forty-one, is a flashy dresser, one of the few detectives who departs from the squad’s investment banker uniform. He wears a tan suit, a lime-green shirt, and a matching green silk tie.
The detectives, who exude the ease of veteran partners, immediately divide the duties and split up. Garcia slowly circumnavigates the harbor, gazing downward, searching for evidence. He stops occasionally and interviews forklift drivers, crane operators, and fishing boat crews. Waiting for the dive team to arrive, Jackson chats with an officer whose metal nametag identifies him as Sergeant Mays.
“Any relation to Willie?” jokes Jackson, a rabid baseball fan.
“He’s my second cousin.”
“Seriously?” Jackson asks, taken aback.
The sergeant explains the family connection and says, plaintively, “Whenever I’d play ball they’d always stick me in center and expect too much.”
Mays, who tells Jackson he is half black and half Japanese, asks how the woman and young girl were bound. “Mother-child suicide is not uncommon in Japan,” Mays adds. “But that kind of binding is more consistent with the Chinese culture.”
When the sergeant who heads the dive team arrives, he and Jackson—who are old friends—shout in unison: “Yo, man!” They laugh and shake hands. After Jackson briefs the dive sergeant, he confers briefly with the other divers before they leap off the dock and into the water to search for evidence beneath the boat where the bodies were found.
The glassy water undulates as the divers descend. As the languid summer twilight lingers, the setting sun tints a bank of low clouds coral and crimson. The bellow of a freighter working its way out of the harbor shatters the calm. Atop the warehouses, cranes, and shipyards, lights gradually flicker on, streaking the water with flashes of gold as the sky fades from violet, to deep blue, to black.
Leaning against a patrol car, Jackson tells a few officers the significance of the “Yo, man” greeting. He was a young detective, and the dive team sergeant was a patrol officer. “A guy was playing Pac-Man at a 7-Eleven,” Jackson says. “Another guy walks into the store and says, ‘Yo, man.’ The guy playing Pac-Man turns around and shoots him: Bam! Bam! Bam! Just like that. The victim staggers around, spits up blood, and finally collapses.” Jackson pauses for effect, then continues. “You know what I found interesting? When I got there, the owner of the 7-Eleven was doing a brisk business. He never even closed the store.”
The shooting stemmed from a “pimp versus pimp dispute,” Jackson explains. He has a wealth of stories from his days as a homicide detective in Hollywood, a division famous for its bizarre and varied cases. Jackson, who enjoys holding court, has an engaging manner and a performer’s instinct that suggests he was well suited to his old beat.
Jackson knew he wanted to be a detective when he was a junior high school student in Lakewood, a working-class suburb about ten miles north of Fish Harbor. He read all the Hardy Boys books, and for a junior high school career project, he wrote to the FBI. When Deputy District Attorney Jack Kirschke was arrested for the murder of his wife and her lover in 1967, Jackson, who was in high school, avidly followed the case and pored over all the lurid newspaper stories, fascinated by the detectives.
A few years later, he enrolled at San Jose State University, one of the first schools in the state to offer a major in criminal justice. Jackson, whose father was a plumber, was the first person in his family to graduate from college. When an LAPD hiring freeze was lifted, he joined the department, with the homicide unit as his goal. Six years later, while he was working as a robbery detective in Hollywood, the homicide unit was overwhelmed and Jackson was drafted to assist during busy stretches.
The head of Hollywood’s homicide unit was Russ Kuster, a legendary detective known for his exacting standards and scrupulous attention to detail. Kuster saw that Jackson was bright and hard-working and had an aptitude for talking to people from all strata of society. In 1983, he hired him.
Homicide investigation was Kuster’s life and he expected the ultimate effort from detectives investigating the ultimate crime. “This report may go before the U.S. Supreme Court!” he would rage, tossing a misspelled document back to an embarrassed detective. “Do it right!” In part because of Kuster’s zeal, Hollywood Homicide always had one of the highest clearance—or solve—rates in the city. Many nights, when Jackson awoke from a deep sleep and wearily picked up the ringing phone, he heard Kuster murmur, “Are you naked?” Someone had been murdered and it was time for Jackson to go to work. These were some of the happiest days of Jackson’s life. Every case seemed like an adventure, an escapade of the unexpected. And, unlike some L.A. homicide units, Hollywood had great camaraderie.
When Kuster was still a bachelor, he and a roommate worshiped the country singer Roy Acuff and started calling each other Roy, an inside joke. Soon Kuster was addressing all his detectives as Roy. They knew whom he was talking to—when he called out “Roy!” or “Roy?” or “Roy” or just plain “Roy”—by his tone of his voice. So many Hollywood alumni were promoted to RHD that the custom spread. Now, even Homicide Special detectives with no connection to Hollywood often address one another as Roy.
Practical jokes were a staple of the Hollywood Homicide squad room. On Jackson’s first day of work, an old-timer slipped a motel key into his suit pocket, so his wife would find it when he returned home. Jackson soon devised his own repertoire of practical jokes. Once, he even targeted Kuster himself. Knowing that Kuster had recently undergone a comprehensive physical examination, he managed to obtain a sheet of official stationery from the medical clinic. He wrote: “Complete results of the tests are still pending, but a preliminary analysis of your stool sample detected a parasitic larvae. Although not yet a serious intestinal problem, if this condition goes unchecked, you probably will detect, for the next seven to ten days, a persistent itching in your rectal area. Please contact me as soon as possible.” After signing the name of the doctor who had actually performed the physical, Jackson mailed the letter to Kuster at home. Kuster was at his desk in the squad room when he nervously called the doctor and inquired about the parasitic larvae. The doctor laughed. When he told him that the letter was a fake, Kuster folded it up, buried it in his pocket, and, without saying a word, quietly returned to his paperwork. Jackson never let on to Kuster that the prank was his.
After five years at Hollywood Homicide, Jackson was promoted to RHD. On call one night shortly after joining the unit, he was awakened by a detective who told him that someone from Hollywood Homicide had just been shot. “You know him,” the detective told Jackson. “It’s Russ Kuster.”
Kuster had been off duty, drinking at a Hungarian restaurant’s bar, when a belligerent customer argued with the owner, who demanded that he leave. The customer returned with a nine-millimeter pistol and flashed its laser-beam sights at patrons. Kuster identified himself as a police officer and attempted to convince the man to drop his weapon. But the gunman opened fire. Wounded in the knees and chest, Kuster crumpled to the ground. But before he died, he managed to fire seven rounds, hitting the gunman three times. The final bullet entered the gunman’s chin and shattered his skull.
Now as Jackson studies the patch of inky water where the divers descended, he says, “Seeing this water reminds me of a case in Hollywood where a guy was stabbed ninety-nine times. It was kind of disappointing. I was kind of hoping it would hit triple digits.” The patrol officers laugh. “It was a bizarre sight. The pathologist circled each stab wound with Wite-Out and numbered them.”
Finally, the dive team sergeant emerges from beneath the boat and climbs onto the dock, panting. “We did a thorough hull search. No hair found where the body was discovered. Couldn’t really find much of anything. I checked the whole boat. I wanted to do a quick onceover before the tide changes. We’ll have a more thorough search tomorrow when we’ve got daylight.”
About nine P.M., the detectives climb into Garcia’s Dodge Intrepid and cruise through Terminal Island’s darkened maze of streets on their way back downtown. Jackson and Garcia agree that this is a singular case.
“I never had a water caper before,” Garcia says.
“I never had one where people were tied together like this,” Jackson says.
“I doubt this is a mother-child suicide,” Garcia says. “All that extra tying and binding. And the diver’s belt bothers me. What are the chances of this woman knowing anything about diver’s belts?”
“If it’s a murder,” Jackson says, “I hope it’s a gunshot. Strangulation might be hard to see because they’ve been in the water so long.”
“We could go a long time without an ID,” Garcia says.
“Might have to get an artist down to the coroner to draw a composite. But that could prove to be a pain in the ass. Could generate jillions of calls.”
A detective pages Jackson, who calls him back on his cell phone. After hanging up, he tells Garcia that a composite might be unnecessary. A Thai Airways boarding pass has been discovered in the mother’s pocket. The victims flew from Tokyo to Los Angeles fourteen days ago. IDs may be possible when the airline opens tomorrow.
At the coroner’s office, the detectives wait by a counter for the investigator. Jackson points to the aquarium by the back wall and asks a clerk, “You feed the fish any scraps from the autopsies?” The clerk, gnawing on a large ear of corn, ignores Jackson. He has heard the joke before.
A coroner investigator leads the detectives to the room where the official autopsy will be conducted tomorrow. Splayed on a metal gurney, the victims are still bound together. Their bodies are face-to-face, streaked yellow and green, like tarnished brass. Wedged between them is a small pink-and-white checked purse with MICHELLE printed along the side.
From a distance, the figures look like a sculpture in a traditional mother-child pose: the woman is on her back, head turned slightly to the side, one arm draped protectively around the neck of the little girl, whose head is buried beneath the woman’s breast, a tiny hand reaching out, fingers extended.
Garcia studies the victims’ hands and determines that, although they have been in the water for almost two weeks, the ridges on their fingertips have sufficient definition for fingerprinting. On the back of the girl’s head, Garcia studies a perfect circle, the size of a dime. “Is that a gunshot?” he asks.
“I think you’d see some eggshell fracturing,” the investigator says. “But we’ll know for sure at the autopsy.”
Jackson points to the metal weights on the dive belt. “If someone else strapped them together, maybe we can get prints off the buckle. We’ll have to go with vacuum metal deposition.” This sophisticated, high-tech procedure is probably the only hope of recovering a fingerprint from a metal weight that has been submerged in the ocean. Evidence is placed in a steel vacuum chamber and a thin layer of gold is applied. Microscopic specks of oil from the fingerprints absorb gold fragments. Zinc is then spread over the surface. The two metals vaporize when they are heated in the chamber. The zinc coats the entire surface, except the fingerprints, which become visible as a contrasting image.
Garcia and Jackson examine the cord binding the victims’ wrists, scrutinizing the intricate pattern of swirls and knots.
“It’s kind of a loose binding, so maybe she could have done it herself,” Jackson says. “But it’s not like it’s just wrapped around. It’s wrapped and woven and twisted and turned.”
“That’s what bothers me,” Garcia says. “Could the woman do that with one hand?”
“It would be pretty damn hard,” Jackson replies. He asks the investigator if the woman could have tied the binding herself.
“Possible,” the investigator says. “Not plausible.”
Another investigator speaks up: “I think Mama did it for cultural reasons.”
“Or maybe someone wants us to think she did it for cultural reasons,” Garcia says. “Something about this situation stinks.”
The next morning, the squad room is abuzz. Homicide Special detectives are so jaded by sudden and violent death that they often approach even the most brutal homicide in a blasé manner. But this one is unusual enough to capture their interest. Detectives who sit near Garcia and Jackson pepper them with questions: Could the woman have tied the knots with one hand? If no vehicle was recovered, how did the pair get to Fish Harbor? Did they die beside the fishing boat, or did the current carry them there? Finally, every question leads to the critical one: Is this case a murder-suicide or a double homicide?
By midmorning, Thai Airways provides the IDs: Yuriko Taga, thirty-eight, and her four-year-old daughter, Megumi. “Is that a Japanese name?” Garcia asks Ron Ito, a Japanese-American detective, who nods.
The case is moving fast, so Lieutenant Farrell calls a meeting. Garcia, Jackson, and four other detectives gather with Farrell in Captain Tatreau’s office, which serves as the unit’s conference room when he is gone. Farrell dispatches one detective to the Japanese consulate and another to search driver’s license data. A third heads to LAX to pick up the manifest from Thai Airways and interview other passengers on the flight. Garcia will attend the mother’s autopsy while Jackson coordinates the investigation.
Back in the squad room, a detective who grew up in India tells Garcia and Jackson that mother-child suicide is not uncommon in Asian cultures. “In India there have been a number of cases where mothers have burned or drowned their kids,” says the detective. “In Ventura, a mother killed her kid and the Indian community rallied behind her because of the cultural thing. The Japanese even have a name for it.”
The detectives soon learn that oyako shinju, parent-child suicide, has a long history in Japan, where suicide is not considered a sin. A woman who leaves her child behind, however, is regarded as a cruel mother who has broken the parent-child bond. If a Japanese mother believes herself disgraced—if her husband leaves her for another woman, for example—she might commit oyako shinju to expiate shame and punish him. If she survives, Japanese courts do not consider her a murderer, although parent-child suicide is illegal. The mother often is not imprisoned and is charged with, at most, involuntary manslaughter.
Garcia and Jackson recall that a Japanese woman living in Santa Monica killed her children in the mid-1980s, and the case received extensive publicity.
A thirty-two-year old housewife, humiliated by her husband’s affair, waded into the ocean, her infant daughter and four-year-old son in her arms. She gulped salt water and lay facedown on the sandy bottom. After bystanders dragged the floating bodies out of the water, doctors were unable to save the children, but the woman was resuscitated and charged with first-degree murder.
More than four thousand Japanese-Americans signed a petition urging the court to grant her clemency. A Japanese sociologist who testified at a hearing for the woman claimed that there is at least one parent-child suicide a day in Japan, usually involving the mother. The woman was eventually allowed to plead guilty to manslaughter and was sentenced to one year in the county jail, which she had already served at the time of sentencing. She received five years’ probation, with psychiatric treatment.
Jackson wonders if this is a variation of the Santa Monica case. But if his victims are from Japan, how did the woman know about Fish Harbor, a remote spot? Jackson asks Ito.
But before Ito can respond, Mike Berchem rushes into the squad room and interrupts. He informs Jackson that the mother had a driver’s license, so he was able to obtain her address from the state Department of Motor Vehicles. Her husband, Kazumi Taga, is now waiting in an interview room. Because Garcia is viewing the autopsy, Berchem assists Jackson.
A veteran homicide detective never informs a family member that a loved one is dead until after the interview. Once a death notification is made, family members are usually too shaken to provide the detective with any useful information. So Jackson decides to interview Taga first and establish some basic biographical information.
Taga, who is fifty, wears jeans, a short-sleeved denim shirt, white socks, and black dress shoes with silver buckles. He sits stiffly in the chair, arms crossed, fingers tightly gripping his forearms. A thick, swirling, coal-black toupee that sits slightly askew atop his head is his most distinguishing feature.
For the past twenty years he has lived in the United States, he says in heavily accented English. He works at home, buying and selling cars for an independent dealer and shipping car parts to Japan. He met his wife about six years ago, in a restaurant bar.
Taga’s statements and mannerisms are oddly disjointed and contradictory. When Jackson asks, “How is your marriage?” Taga smiles and laughs briefly. “She want to live in Japan. I want to live in United States. We were having some discrepancy or argument. Whatever you call it.”
Taga explains that his wife has enrolled their daughter, Megumi, whom friends in the United States call Michelle, in a Japanese kindergarten because she wants her to be educated there. Michelle attended preschool in Los Angeles last year and Taga says he had hoped she would continue her studies here. His wife and daughter flew to Japan in July, he says, and are staying with Yuriko’s mother.
“Do you know when they’re supposed to come back?” Jackson asks.
“January.”
“So she wants her to start school over there for a little while and see how they like it?” Jackson asks.
Taga nods.
“Were you guys talking about a divorce?”
“Not that far yet … we were trying to work it out.” Taga tells them he last talked to his wife on the phone about three weeks ago. She asked him to send money. Next week he plans to call Japan again for his daughter’s birthday. Finally, he asks: “Is anything wrong?”
Jackson has been waiting for this question. Detectives have snatched Taga up, transported him to LAPD headquarters, deposited him in an interview room, and bombarded him with questions about his wife and daughter. Jackson finds it odd that it took Taga this long to express concern.
“We’ll explain everything,” Jackson says. “It’s just important that we get as much information as we can now.”
Taga meekly acquiesces.
“Some of these questions may seem strange, but I’ll explain everything in a little bit,” Jackson repeats. “Let’s change the subject for a minute. Do you golf, by any chance?”
“Golf,” Taga asks, looking bewildered. “Used to.”
“Do you have any hobbies? Do you swim? Do you fly an airplane? Do you fish?”
“Ooooh,” he says, dragging out the word and slowly exhaling. “After marriage, you can’t pursue the hobby so much.”
After they casually discuss sports for a few minutes, Jackson asks in a matter-of-fact tone, “Do you scuba dive or snorkel or anything like that?”
Taga rubs his mouth and says through his fingers, “No.”
“Okay,” Jackson says. “So she isn’t coming back until January, right? Did you have a lot of arguments about this?”
“Yeah, sort of. I mean, I don’t know what her intention is, but she wants to try to live in Japan.”
“Did your wife have any medical problems at all? Either physical or psychological?”
“Well, yes, mental … like depression. She doesn’t want to do anything. Not sleeping.”
“She wouldn’t sleep much? How much?”
Taga says he does not know because Yuriko sleeps with their daughter and he spends his nights alone in the master bedroom.
“That’s okay,” Jackson says reassuringly. “That happens.”
Jackson attempts to glean the names of Yuriko’s friends, but Taga insists that his wife had no friends and rarely talked to neighbors.
Berchem has told Jackson that he discovered that several other people were staying at Taga’s house. When Jackson asks about them, Taga says that a Japanese woman and her two children, friends of the family, are temporarily living with him so they can learn English. Jackson asks him about previous marriages, and Taga says he is divorced. Flashing a complicitous smile, Jackson points to himself and Berchem, noting that they are divorced as well. Taga says his ex-wife and two daughters now live in Hawaii. Then Jackson discovers that Taga has not talked to them in fourteen months, which he finds significant.
“What’s your relationship with your daughter, Michelle?” Jackson asks.
“Very close,” Taga says.
“Who is closer to your daughter, you or your wife?”
“She closer to me. When I come home from work, she hang around me all the time.…”
“What was the main problem that you and your wife had?” Jackson asks.
“Ooooh. Time to time we had, you know, some financial problems. But that wasn’t a big issue, because we managed.”
“Did your wife ever tell you she was definitely going to leave you?”
Taga fiddles with his watch and says, “No. No.”
“Was the most recent problem her wanting to live in Japan and you wanting to stay here?”
Taga nods. When his cell phone rings to the tune of “Take Me Out to the Ball Game,” Jackson uses the interruption to grab a cup of coffee and confer with Berchem in the squad room.
“He seems to be close to his daughter,” Berchem says. “He’s going to be really upset.”
“Unless,” Jackson says, “he killed them.”
As they return, Jackson hears Taga murmur the word “sweetie” before clicking off the cell phone.
“‘Sweetie’?” Jackson says, surprised. “Who is ‘sweetie’?”
“Ooooh,” Taga says, looking embarrassed. “Sweetie?”
“Yeah.”
“Ooooh. That’s the person …” he sputters. “What do you call that … the nickname …” Taga finally says he was talking to Sachiko, the woman staying at his house.
“Do you have a relationship with her?”
Taga strokes his chin.
“A little bit?” Jackson suggests.
“In a sense, yes, but not, not …” he says, searching for the right word. “Not quite yet.”
“Maybe later?” Jackson suggests.
“Well, depends. I mean, my wife … I don’t know,” Taga says, struggling. He explains that, initially, the woman’s thirteen-year-old daughter was going to live with him so she could learn English. Then her mother and her young son decided to study English as well, so the family arrived from Japan in July and will leave next month.
“When did your wife find out about Sachiko staying with you?”
“Ooooh. Sometime in August.”
“And how did she find out?”
Taga pauses a moment. “I mentioned it.”
“What did she say?”
“She say, ‘Well, that’s good for you.’ And stuff like that. So she can stay in Japan longer.”
“Was she jealous?”
Taga insists his wife was not jealous, because they last had sex in January and she “wants me stay away from her.”
“Do you have a sexual relationship with Sachiko?” Jackson asks.
“No,” Taga says.
Jackson does not believe him, but he does not think Taga will reveal much more now. Jackson asks him if his wife had life insurance. Taga shakes his head.
Now is the time, Jackson decides, to tell him about the bodies found at Fish Harbor. He inches his chair closer to Taga and says softly, “Let me explain something. We’re conducting an investigation that started yesterday. And that’s why we have you down here to talk to us today. What I’m going to tell you is going to be bad news for you. We found two bodies yesterday—a woman and a young girl. And there was paperwork on the bodies that indicate, most likely, it’s your wife and your daughter.”
Taga clenches his fists. Tightly shutting his eyes, he pinches the bridge of his nose and grits his teeth, jaw muscles quivering. A minute later, his body suddenly goes slack and he collapses in his chair. “My Michelle?” he sobs.
“I believe so,” Jackson says.
Taga stifles two quick cries and says, “No! They’re in Japan.”
“No,” Jackson says sadly. “They’re in the United States.” Jackson asks Taga whether he knew his wife and daughter might return early.
“No,” Taga says. He throws his head on the table and weeps, his body heaving. Jackson and Berchem leave the room to get him a glass of water, but Taga’s sobs echo throughout the office bay adjacent to the interview room. Craning her neck, a secretary listens for a moment and asks Jackson: “When they cry like that, does that mean they’re guilty or innocent?”
“With this guy, I can’t tell.”
Berchem tells Jackson he believes there is a chance Taga truly did not know his wife and daughter had returned from Japan. Berchem speculates that when the wife arrived at the house and saw another woman and her children, she decided to commit suicide and, to punish Taga, take the daughter with her.
A detective who overhears them says sarcastically, “This poor guy hadn’t had sex with his wife since January. If I hadn’t had sex with my wife since August, I’d toss her in the harbor.”
Garcia returns from Yuriko’s autopsy and explains to Jackson that the pathologist was unable to find any obvious evidence of injury, strangulation, or suffocation. The pathologist had hoped, by assessing how much water was absorbed into her lungs, to learn whether Yuriko was alive before she plunged into the harbor. But because she had been submerged for so long, and had lost so much fluid, an accurate assessment was impossible. Tomorrow, Garcia says, during Michelle’s autopsy, they might have better luck.
While Garcia and Jackson mull all this over, Berchem returns to the interview room, where Taga is still crying. Scrutinizing him in a detached, clinical manner, Berchem tries to discern if Taga is truly surprised or is feigning grief. He eventually asks, “You honestly still believed they were in Japan?”
Taga lifts his head and says weakly, “The only thing she mentioned was, she might want to come back … early … because my daughter miss me.”
“Do you have any reason to believe that she may have taken her own life with your daughter?”
“Well, she kept saying she’s going to kill herself.”
“When did she start talking about that?”
She threatened to kill herself with a knife and once cut herself on the hand, Taga says. He stares at his shoes and says, “That’s part of the depression.” Taga adds that in addition to threatening suicide, Yuriko “beat me couple of times.… She had a mental problem.”
When Jackson returns, Taga says, “She mention, you know, she want to kill herself a few times, but not seriously. When she depressed she either get very violent or very self-closing.”
“Very closed up?” Jackson asks.
“Yeah.”
Berchem asks Taga, “What would your wife be doing down in San Pedro?” He wants to determine how familiar Yuriko was with the harbor area.
“Well, we go to Ports O’ Call,” he answered, referring to a waterfront tourist spot with restaurants and shops, not far from Fish Harbor.
“Is that a special place for her?”
“Well, when we were dating, you know, we go there to chat, to date.”
Jackson tells Taga he is not under arrest, but that the detectives in the unit would like his permission to search his home and car. Taga agrees without hesitation.
Taga lives in Torrance, between downtown and the harbor, in a new development not far from the Harbor Freeway. Garcia and Jackson drive there along with Tina Matsushita, a thirty-three-year-old Japanese-American officer just drafted from the LAPD’s Asian Crime Investigation Section to translate. Both of Matsushita’s parents were born in Japan; they immigrated to Los Angeles in the 1950s, and she grew up speaking Japanese at home. Farrell and four other detectives, who will help with the search, meet the others at Taga’s home.
The tidy complex where Yuriko Taga once lived with her daughter is threaded with narrow streets and lined with dozens of nearly identical two-story tan and white stucco town houses. The roofs are red tile and the postage-stamp backyards are dotted with barbecues, soccer goals, and toys. Taga’s town house has plush beige wall-to-wall carpeting and is decorated simply with Danish modern wooden furniture. When he greets the detectives, he is friendly and cooperative.
“This guy’s hard to read,” Farrell says to another detective. “When my cat died, I was more upset than him. I was so traumatized I had to take a week off.”
Jackson and Tina interview Sachiko, the woman staying at the town house, while Farrell and the others scour every room, closet, dresser, desk, bed, cabinet, and clothes hamper in the house. They examine the drains and toilets for remnants of blood and hair and even probe the vents and look beneath the toilet seats. While the detectives search, Taga plays with Sachiko’s seven-year-old son. When the boy scampers out the door, Taga turns to a detective and says, “I wish he was mine.”
The detectives find it curious that there is not a single picture of Yuriko or Michelle in the house. In fact, there is absolutely no hint that they ever lived here. Their clothes are not in the closets. Nothing in the drawers seems to have belonged to them. Sachiko’s son and daughter have each taken over a bedroom, and the house is filled with their possessions.
Farrell pulls a thick bundle of telephone cord out of a closet and shows it to Garcia.
“That’s just what was used to tie them up,” Garcia says. “This is probably where she got it from.”
“Or where he got it from,” Farrell says.
After about half an hour, Jackson, Matsushita, and Sachiko, who looks shaken, emerge from the breakfast room. Sachiko, slender and pretty, is barefoot and wears jeans and a loose black blouse. Jackson motions for Garcia and Farrell to meet him in a bedroom.
“He’s a fucking dog,” Jackson says. “They’ve been sleeping together since April. He met her in an Internet chat room when she lived in Japan. He told her that he was divorced, with no contact with his wife and daughter. She’s living here. Permanently. And remember when he told us he doesn’t dive? She says that when she was in Japan, he e-mailed her that he just got back from a trip to Baja. Where he went scuba diving. I want to book him right now,” Jackson says, tapping his bald pate, “so I can confiscate his toupee.”
The first maxim a homicide detective learns is Everyone lies. Taga certainly reinforces the detectives’ cynicism. But while Taga misrepresented every aspect of his personal life, Garcia and Jackson need evidence to book him for murder.
A few minutes later, a detective finds a dozen nude pictures of Sachiko in one of Taga’s dresser drawers. “She looks younger than thirty-six,” the detective says.
“His wife was only thirty-eight,” Jackson says. “That’s not much of an improvement.”
“You got to do it in increments,” Garcia quips.
When they finish searching the house, Garcia, Jackson, and two other detectives stop in Gardena at Guliani’s, a landmark Italian delicatessen, for meatball sandwiches on the front patio.
“I don’t think he whacked her,” one of the detectives says.
“I disagree,” his partner says. “This guy’s dirty.”
“You don’t understand—it’s a Japanese thang.”
“It could be a double murder thang,” the suspicious partner says.
Jackson interjects, “That’s why I call this case the Pendulum. I go back and forth. Sometimes I think he killed them. Other times I don’t know.”
When they return to the office, Matsushita prepares to call Yuriko’s mother. Jackson reminds her to amass as much information as possible before providing any details. After speaking quietly in Japanese for a few minutes, Matsushita places her hand over the telephone and whispers to Jackson: “The mom says the consulate called her and told her about two bodies found in the harbor. She wants to know if her daughter and granddaughter are dead or alive.”
“Tell her later,” Jackson says. “But first just say the investigators are doing an interview in another room and they won’t be free for a while. Then dirty the husband up a little bit and get her on our side. Tell her he was living with another woman and her two kids.”
She nods and continues the interview. The mother confirms that Yuriko and Michelle left Japan in early September and says her daughter was not depressed. When Matsushita asks who met Yuriko and Michelle at the airport, the mother says, “Her husband, of course.” Asked if Yuriko and her husband had marital problems, the mother says, “No. They were happy. Toward the end of August, my daughter called her husband and everything seemed fine. She even bought him gifts. My daughter never talked of marital problems. I never saw any sign that she was unhappy.”
Matsushita, looking drained after she has confirmed the mother’s worst fear, replaces the receiver carefully. The mother said that if Yuriko discovered Taga living with another family, she never would have committed suicide. She would have returned immediately to Japan. The last comment the mother made before hanging up was, “He did it!”
The detectives ask Matsushita if she can provide any insight. “If Yuriko returned home and found another woman and children living there, I think she would have felt a lot of shame,” Matsushita says softly. “Maybe she felt it was more honorable to take her life than live with the shame of her husband leaving her. In her mind, maybe the new girlfriend could never be a mother to her daughter. She might have felt it was a bigger disservice to leave the child alone than to kill her.”
“She might have come back, seen the other woman and kids, and flipped out,” Jackson says.
“Or he picked her up from the airport, didn’t want her interfering with his new life, and did her in,” Garcia says.
“The airport keeps track of all vehicles coming and going,” Jackson says. “If we can show he went to the airport on the day they arrived, he’s fucked.”
Eric Mosher, who is hunched over a computer checking Taga’s background for previous convictions, calls out, “You’re going to love this, guys. He’s got a manslaughter conviction.”
Garcia and Jackson hurry over. “You’re kidding,” Garcia says.
“I am,” Mosher says. “But he does have a GTA [grand theft auto] conviction in Florida and a couple of other minor things on his rap sheet. He’s got several different driver’s licenses with several different names listed.”
“A flimflam man,” Jackson says.
“He’s a fuck stick,” Mosher says.
“I think he told us she didn’t have any friends because he doesn’t want us talking to them,” Jackson says.
“That location where she was found bothers me,” Garcia says. “How’d she get there?”
Jackson waves a hand back and forth. “The pendulum’s been swinging all day for Taga. I think it just swung back to guilty.”
Early Saturday morning, Garcia and Jackson drive to the county coroner’s office, a drab, low-slung tan building at the edge of East Los Angeles, across the street from a busy stretch of Interstate 5. As they slip on their powder blue scrub suits, booties, and masks, Jackson says, “Nothing like the smell of decomposing bodies to start your weekend.”
Michelle, who is three feet six inches tall and weighs less than forty pounds, is laid out in the center of a seven-foot gurney. Surrounded by the expanse of steel, she looks tiny, forlorn, and poignantly alone. Her toes are too small for the usual toe tag. Instead, a yellow tag is tied around her ankle.
The gurney is lined up at the edge of the autopsy room, a large gray industrial chamber with a brown tile floor and huge fluorescent lights that hang from the ceiling. On one wall is a vast trough studded with chrome faucets. Another is lined by a countertop, covered with scalpels, scales, trays, and rulers, where pathologists measure, weigh, and log internal organs.
It is a busy summer Saturday, following a murderous Friday night. The room is bustling as pathologists work on half a dozen other corpses. Michelle is flanked by a man with a mountainous belly and a tattooed gangbanger with a gaping bullet hole in his chest. The gangbanger shot a policeman with an AK-47, a pathologist says, but fortunately his assault rifle then jammed and the cop’s partner dropped him with a single shot. He died facedown in a box of cat litter. Above his right nipple is a tattoo: ME SO HORNY.
“How’d you like your daughter to bring home a guy with that on his chest?” Jackson asks Garcia.
Detectives often informally grade their victims. They will search for the killer of a gangbanger or a drug dealer, but, perhaps, not with much investigative zeal. Detectives who work the ghetto often say, “Today’s suspect is tomorrow’s victim.” But victims who are not criminals, who are not complicit in their own deaths, are referred to as “good victims” or “innocent victims.”
There is no more innocent victim than a four-year-old child.
The pathologist carefully examines Michelle before the autopsy and concludes that there are no obvious bruises or signs of trauma or sexual abuse. After a victim has been strangled or suffocated, red hemorrhage specks—petechiae—often are visible around the eyes and inside the eyelids. But because Michelle’s body has been decomposing for the past two weeks, the pathologist says, petechiae are difficult to discern.
The pathologist conducting the autopsy on the gangbanger makes a huge Y-shaped incision from his shoulder to his lower abdomen. An autopsy technician, employing a tool that resembles a pair of gardening shears, crunches through both sets of ribs, and removes the sternum. The pathologist lifts the rib cage, like a door on a hinge, exposing the internal organs.
Michelle is so small that the shears are not necessary; the pathologist simply opens up her abdomen with a scalpel. He points to her ribs—“There’s no evidence of injury or old injuries”—then removes her organs, including the heart, lungs, liver, and kidneys. After examining them for trauma, he weighs them and prepares samples for microscopic examination and future testing.
When petechiae cannot be discerned, pathologists can sometimes confirm strangulation by examining the hyoid bone, which is just above the throat. “Take a look,” the pathologist says to the detectives. He holds up the U-shaped bone, covered in reddish tissue, and manipulates it to show the detectives it has not been fractured. But a child’s hyoid is flexible and pliant; the bone grows more brittle with age. Someone Michelle’s age could have been strangled, the pathologist says, but still have an intact hyoid bone.
Before an autopsy, all bodies are X-rayed to locate bullets, fractures, and other injuries. The gangbanger’s chest X ray, posted on an illuminated viewing box just above Michelle’s, reveals a white smudge: the bullet embedded in his body. Michelle’s tiny X ray, dwarfed by the gangbanger’s, reveals no major injuries.
A few serpentine lines thread the image of her skull. “We’ll soon see if those are hairline fractures,” the pathologist tells the detectives. He points to a perfectly round circle in the back of Michelle’s head. “We’ll also see if that’s a bullet hole.”
While two technicians are needed to move the gangbanger, the pathologist easily turns Michelle onto her stomach. She is so slight, he might be flipping a doll. After he hoses off her head, the detectives study the hole. Next the pathologist makes an incision with a scalpel, peels away her scalp, and studies the bare gray skull. It is as slick as an egg, except for one small indentation.
“It’s most likely postmortem,” the pathologist says. “She could have knocked it while under water. Or it could have been a fish.”
He points to several faint cracks in Michelle’s skull: “Those aren’t fractures. She’s so young, her skull’s still mending, still coming together.”
An autopsy technician zips off the top of Michelle’s skull with a device that looks like a power saw, and Jackson and Garcia avert their gazes. After the pathologist removes the brain and weighs it, the detectives quickly leave the room and strip off their scrubs.
“I hope I never have to see another autopsy of a little girl,” Garcia says.
Jackson groans. “Brutal.”