Eleven days after picking up the case, Garcia and Jackson arrange for Taga to stop by, this could be a long day, so they decide to eat before he arrives. Like many detectives, both men live so far from downtown Los Angeles that they have to rise by five to get to work at eight. By midmorning they are ready for lunch. Garcia pulls up in front of Uncle John’s, located in a dreary section of downtown, on a street lined with sooty turn-of-the-century hotels with rusty fire escapes, dingy lobbies, and clerks ensconced in clear plastic booths. Uncle John’s is a narrow shotgun strip of a restaurant, consisting of a dozen swivel stools filled with cops and city workers. The counter faces a smoky, aromatic griddle sizzling with hash browns, eggs, ham, and chow mein. A sign in front advertises CHINESE AND AMERICAN FOOD.
After Garcia and Jackson order, they prepare for the upcoming interview. As they polish off heaping plates of chow mein, Garcia entertains Jackson with some condescending advice given to him when he was first promoted from South-Central. His partner warned Garcia that in the ghetto he had investigated cases with a machete, but now he would have to learn to use a scalpel. Jackson chortles and says, “Let’s get out our scalpels and get ready to open up Taga.”
They meet Taga back at the squad room. He is wearing the same outfit he had on the first time they interviewed him, jeans and a short-sleeved denim shirt. He appears nervous, picking at a cuticle and licking his lips. He agrees immediately to a polygraph, so the two detectives escort him up a flight of stairs, deposit him in a room, and brief the examiner, Jesse Delgado. As is customary, Delgado interviews Taga before the exam, while the detectives move to another room and watch on a video monitor. Taga tells Delgado that his first name is Kazumi, but friends call him George. He immigrated to the United States twenty-one years ago and lived in New York and Florida for five years before moving to California. When Delgado asks Taga if he is currently taking any medication, he looks embarrassed and acknowledges that he occasionally pops a few Viagra pills.
“Roy,” Garcia says to Jackson, “nothing is real with this guy. He takes Viagra so his new girlfriend will think he’s a stud. He’s bald, but wears a toupee. He’s married with a child, but pretends he doesn’t see them. He says he runs an auto business, but he’s a flimflam man.”
Taga then recounts the story he told the detectives last week, again insisting that he had not seen Yuriko and Michelle since they left for Japan. Delgado hooks Taga up for the test and says, “I’m going to ask you a math problem. The reason is, I want to see how you react when you’re thinking about something.”
“The math question,” Jackson quips, “should be: If Taga drove seven miles to the harbor at a speed of thirty-five miles per hour with two bodies in his trunk, how much faster could he drive, using the same amount of engine power, after he dumped the bodies into the water and drove home?”
After Delgado tells Taga to add 65 and 65, he asks him a number of questions: “The last time you saw Michelle and Yuriko, were they alive?” “Did you tie anything around the arms of the victims?” “Did you place the victims’ bodies into the harbor?” Delgado asks the same set of questions four times.
Taga sits rigidly, tightly gripping the arms of his chair, looking like a terrified passenger in a plummeting airplane. After the exam, he asks, “How did the test come out?” Delgado tells Taga he will know in about ten minutes.
In the observation room, Delgado spreads the printout on a table and detectives study the results. “He’s lying big-time,” Delgado says. “This is textbook.” He turns to the detectives and asks, “You want me to go after him?”
“The sympathetic approach is the best way,” Jackson says.
“Give him an out,” Garcia says.
Delgado nods and returns to the polygraph room. He explains to Taga that there are three results of a polygraph exam: truthful, inconclusive, and “deception indicated.” He tosses the exam on a table, points to the result, and tells Taga, “Read it to me.”
“‘Deception indicated’ …” Taga reads. “‘Probability of deception is greater than ninety-nine percent.’”
“What is greater than ninety-nine percent?” Delgado asks.
“A hundred percent,” Taga says weakly.
Delgado nods. “George, one hundred percent you failed this polygraph test.… Now, I don’t know why you did this to her. Maybe she threatened you. You said she attacked you.… Maybe this was self-defense.… The truth is going to come out with the evidence. It’s just a matter of time. So what I need to know, George, is why this thing happened? Because you’re not a bad person.…”
Delgado stares at Taga, whose legs and arms are tightly crossed. He bends slightly, into an upright fetal position.
“Okay,” Delgado says, “did she threaten to kill you? Is that why you did this?”
“But I didn’t do this,” Taga pleads.
“That determination has already been made—”
But Taga interrupts: “You not a policeman, though, right?”
“No … but I can go back and explain to the detectives why this thing happened.…”
“Okay,” Taga says. “So you want me to tell the truth.”
“I want you to tell me the truth.”
“Not to Rick?”
“Well, I can explain it to Rick. Why did this happen, George?”
“Why?” Taga asks, canting his head to the side. “Well,” he says, pausing for a moment. “Because they wanted to die.”
Jackson and Garcia stare at the monitor for a moment, dumb-founded. Then they leap to their feet. Jackson throws an arm around Garcia.
Garcia points excitedly at the monitor and says, “He’s talking some serious shit!”
“They wanted to die?” Delgado asks, attempting to hide his surprise and retain his equanimity. “So they came back to the house? Tell me what happened.
“No,” Taga says, shaking his head. “It wasn’t at the house.”
“You picked them up at the airport?”
“In fact, I did,” he says casually.
“Okay. And what did they say to you?”
“Well, I explained I don’t want to live with them and, you know, we had a long conversation. And I don’t know what happened, but they just took some kind of poison. So when I came back to them, they passed away.… And what happened is, you know, they didn’t want, when die, to be separated. They don’t want nothing to do with me. And they brought something from Japan … and they drink something.”
“Where do they drink it at, George?”
“I don’t know. Okay? Because I wasn’t there.… I went to the rest room. We were talking at the harbor, in San Pedro … at Ports O’ Call, where the restaurants are.”
Delgado holds up a palm. “Okay, George, wait a minute. You picked her up at the airport and then you took her and Michelle from there to Ports O’ Call?”
“Yeah. And we stayed in the parking lot and then talked quite a bit. And then I park. But by then I should have reported to the police.…”
“Where did you get the telephone cord from, George?”
“From the airport.”
“Okay. So did you give her the poison?”
“No!” he says emphatically.
“After they took the poison, you wrapped their arms?”
“No. After they took poison or whatever they took, I just check the pulse and there is no pulse there.… Because I went to the public bathroom that’s there in the parking lot. When I come back, they are gone.”
“Were they still inside the car?”
“Yeah.”
“And then what did you do?”
“Well, she was talking about she was going to kill themselves. If she die, please put her in the water.… I didn’t want them, you know, separated. That’s why I … tied them up.”
“Where did you take them to?”
“The harbor.”
“What did you put on them to weigh them down?”
“A weight.”
“Did you feel bad?”
“Of course I feel bad,” he says defensively.
“George,” Delgado says, “how did Michelle take the poison?”
“Mom giving them or some kind. I don’t know. I just know they’re gone.”
“I need you to be up-front with me, okay? … George, did you give the poison?”
“No.”
“Where did she get the poison from?”
“I don’t know.… Actually, I was going to kill myself too, but…” He drops his chin and his voice trails off.
“George, how come you didn’t say this before?”
“Because … nobody knows, you know, how they die.… Because I’m the responsible.”
“Feel bad?”
Taga nods. “Feel bad.”
Garcia and Jackson confer before confronting Taga, who they realize is more clever—and more devious—than they had anticipated. Tying the bodies together, face to face, and dumping them in the harbor was, the detectives suspect, an attempt to throw investigators off his scent by creating a plausible Japanese mother-child suicide scenario. They decide the solicitous approach will be most effective. Jackson is known as an excellent interviewer and Taga seems to trust him, so he will take the lead.
In the interview room, Jackson hands Taga a 7UP, then reads him his constitutional rights so his statement will be admissible in court. Taga agrees to recount what happened the day Yuriko and Michelle returned from Japan. He had expected them back in September, he admits, not January, and Yuriko called him when she arrived that morning. Taga picked her up at the airport; he eventually told her he had a new girlfriend, who was living at the house.
“We drove to … Ports O’ Call.… And we park in parking space and we talk, talk, talk, talk,” Taga says. “She said she want to … to take the life away.” She asked him, Taga says, “to put me to the water and don’t let anybody know how I died.”
Yuriko climbed out of the car and walked about the parking lot as she described her plan. “And so I’m getting hungry, you know,” Taga says. Jackson and Garcia share an almost imperceptible look of disbelief. Taga says he asked Yuriko if she wanted to eat. She told him he could pick up dinner while she waited with Michelle. Taga visited the men’s room first; when he walked out, he glanced at the car.
“They weren’t there. So I looked at it a bit closer. They were laying in the backseat.” He closes his eyes for a moment and shudders. He checked their pulses. They were both dead, so there was no point, he says, in calling an ambulance. “At that point I should have contact, you know, the authorities, but I didn’t.… And then I waited until evening.”
Taga does not have the demeanor of the stereotypical murder suspect. He is extremely polite and agreeable, without a hint of defensiveness. He may be lying through his teeth, but he is almost obsequious in his desire to appear cooperative.
When Jackson asks about Yuriko and Michelle’s luggage, Taga explains that he dumped the suitcases off at a storage facility, where earlier he deposited the family pictures. Jackson, thinking ahead to trial, is attempting to demonstrate that Taga was not a bereaved husband but a cold-blooded opportunist. He asks whether Yuriko had any cash in her purse. Taga acknowledges that he found $90, pocketed the money, and then threw the purse away.
Taga tells the detectives that Yuriko carried a yellow plastic bottle with her on the plane. He holds his hands a few inches above his 7UP can to indicate the size. She and Michelle, he says, both drank a “strange-smelling” poison from the bottle. The detectives know that the coroner’s preliminary toxicological tests revealed no poison residue, but the bodies were submerged for so long that a poison could have dissipated. More sophisticated tests eventually will be conducted.
Taga says he returned home at about three P.M. and transferred the bodies to his van. Holding his palms together, he demonstrates how he tied them up. He grabbed a weight belt from the garage and strapped them together.
“Where was Sachiko when this happened?” Jackson asks. “Was she in the house?”
Taga nods, but says she had no idea what he had done.
“Did you do anything else, or did you stay home until you left that evening?” Jackson asks.
“I don’t remember,” Taga says. “I might have gone out. I’m not sure … I was just, you know, gone … mentally.” At eight P.M., he transported the bodies to Fish Harbor, he says, “and slipped them in the water.” He told Sachiko he had to work that night.
Garcia and Jackson know that while Taga’s story might contain a modicum of truth, it also includes numerous inconsistencies, elisions, and outright fabrications. But they are reluctant to confront Taga now, to home in on his falsehoods and challenge him. As long as he is in a cooperative mood and does not ask for an attorney, they hope to beef up their case. They decide to present an unusual request to him. Jackson asks Taga if he will accompany them to Fish Harbor and Ports O’ Call tonight and demonstrate how Yuriko and Michelle died, how he tied them up, and how he dumped their bodies in the water.
Taga cheerfully agrees, seemingly under the impression that because Jackson asked him to accompany them to the crime scene, he accepts his version of events.
Taga waits in the interview room while Jackson and Garcia look for help tonight. When a murder case comes to fruition, the squad room instantly mobilizes. Half a dozen detectives volunteer and Garcia and Jackson, aided by Lieutenant Farrell, deploy them. A few are enlisted to write search warrants for the storage facility where Taga claimed he put the luggage, and for the town house, where they will search for vials, prescription bottles, poisons, credit cards, and home computers. Others agree to remain on call in case they are needed. Jackson, flushed with excitement, recounts how Taga transported the bodies in the van from his house to Fish Harbor.
“I have one critical question, Roy,” a detective tells Jackson. “Because he had the two bodies in the back of the van, did he use the carpool lane?”
Jackson and Garcia are cackling as they walk back to the interview room. They usher Taga down the elevator and cross the street to the Parker Center parking lot.
“Will I be charged for assisting the suicide?” Taga asks.
“Obviously you haven’t been truthful with us,” Jackson says, stalling for time. “So we’ll just have to see.”
The detectives and Taga pile into Garcia’s Dodge at about six o’clock and head south on the Harbor Freeway. “When did your first marriage end?” Jackson asks, as they snake through rush-hour traffic.
“Eight or nine years ago.”
“Why’d you get divorced?”
“She found out I had a girlfriend.”
Jackson turns around, wags his finger at Taga, who sits in the backseat, and says, “You never learned. You should be like Johnny here,” Jackson says. “His motto is ‘Home to work. Work to home.’”
“I was like that for one day,” Taga says somberly. Jackson and Garcia laugh and Taga, seeing their amusement, laughs too.
Garcia is unfamiliar with Terminal Island, so Taga, eager to be helpful, provides directions to Fish Harbor. “I should have brought some flowers,” he says, staring out the window. They arrive at dusk and walk to the dock. The searing heat of September has passed, and the muted, honeyed light heralds the subtle Southern California fall. The sky is streaked purple, pink, and orange, a watercolor palette. There are only a handful of boats in the harbor tonight and the silence is occasionally broken by the ping of water against the steel hulls and the occasional flutter of seagulls’ wings as they pass overhead.
“What made you pick this spot?” Jackson asks.
“We used to date near here,” he says, pointing across the harbor to Ports O’ Call.
Jackson asks him where he dropped the bodies. Taga leads them down the dock and stops. His body sags. His face crumples for a moment. “Here.”
“Did you step out of the van?” Garcia asks.
“No,” Taga says. “I stay in van for about ten minutes. I kind of meditate and say sayonara.” He demonstrates how he shoved the bodies out of the van and into the water. His lower lip trembles. He clasps his hand over his mouth. “After splash, I put hands together and … and …” He searches for the word.
“Pray?” Garcia asks.
“Yes. Pray.”
“Were there any boats around?” Jackson asks.
“No. This peaceful spot. Very quiet. Dark. Stars and moon.”
“Did you ever think they’d be found?” Jackson asks.
“Not for long time.”
They return to the car and cross the Vincent Thomas Bridge. Taga directs them to Ports O’ Call. As Garcia cruises through the parking lot, Taga points to a public rest room. Garcia screeches to a stop, and they climb out of the car. The first stars flicker overhead as the light fades above the hills.
Taga says he parked near here and then talked with Yuriko while Michelle played. He then decided to pick up some food at a nearby restaurant. But first he used the rest room. When he walked out, he could not see his wife and daughter in the car.
Garcia asks why he did not simply walk from the rest room to the restaurant. Why did he leave the rest room, walk all the way around to the other side, and check on his wife and daughter?
“I wanted to ask them something.”
“What?” Garcia asks.
Taga looks confused, as if the question has stumped him. He finally says, “I want to see what they want to drink. But I don’t see them. I think maybe sleeping.” Taga then crawls into the car and lies down on the seat to demonstrate Yuriko’s position. He taps the floor to show the detectives where Michelle was curled up. He shows how he picked her up, shouted her name, and shook her lifeless body. His manner is curiously devoid of emotion.
“Anything unusual about their bodies?” Garcia asks.
“Their eyes open. They smell funny.”
“Then where do you go?” Garcia asks.
“Home.”
“When you got home, did you transfer the bodies to the van right away?” Garcia asks.
“Yes. But didn’t put diving belt on them until evening.” Taga explains that the van he used to transport the bodies is parked at a Torrance garage that a business partner owns.
They drive north on the Harbor Freeway, past the glaring lights of the oil refineries that stink of burnt rubber and spew clouds of white steam, vivid against the night sky. They pull into a cinderblock garage, past oil-stained parts and several cars in various states of repair. Taga motions toward a large white Ford van.
He then directs them to the nearby storage facility where he dumped Yuriko and Michelle’s suitcases and stored the family pictures. Taga tells them that the blanket he spread out in the van before he transported the bodies is also in the facility. “Even though dead bodies, not appropriate to put on floor. I use blanket.”
Jackson asks Taga where he keeps the key. He fishes in his pocket and hands it over. Garcia parks in front of the building, flips on his cell phone, and whispers into the receiver. Jackson turns around and faces Taga, who sits primly in the backseat, hands folded on his lap.
“Let me explain something,” Jackson says. “You lied about some crucial things. We have two people dead and the way they died, according to your story, is highly unlikely. Even if poison was used, it’s also highly unlikely they’d be dead in five minutes, like you explained. Johnny and I have been doing this kind of work a long time. To be very honest, we suspect they died in another way. So we have to arrest you.”
“For murder?” he says, surprised.
“Yes.”
Taga massages an earlobe and says, “Even if you find poison, I still be charged?”
“Yes,” Jackson says.
“So you really think I need to be arrested?” he asks.
“No question,” Garcia says.
When two Homicide Special detectives pull up behind Garcia’s car, Jackson opens the back door, gently guides Taga onto the street, and cuffs him.
“Any weapons?” Garcia asks.
Taga laughs, but his eyes are flat. “No.”
The detectives who just arrived lead Taga into the backseat of their car. Jackson thanks them for working late and agreeing to book Taga at the county jail. One of the detectives says he is happy to earn the overtime. “October collars,” he whispers, “mean Christmas dollars.”
Garcia and Jackson sit in the car for a moment and stare out the windshield as the detectives drive away with Taga. They then turn toward each other and somberly shake hands. “If he hadn’t copped out, we’d be in trouble, Roy,” Garcia says. “We went from no case to a murder case.”
“What a bastard,” Jackson says.
“I really feel for that little girl,” Garcia says.
“If you can’t trust your father,” Jackson says, “who can you trust?”
At about ten o’clock that night they meet their translator, Tina Matsushita, at Taga’s town house. They want to interview Sachiko before Taga has a chance to call her from jail. The detectives follow her to the dining room table. Taga’s place is still set for dinner. The rice and soup bowl are facedown, flanked by chopsticks and a dish of tofu. Pictures of Sachiko’s children line the fireplace mantel. Sachiko is barefoot, her hair is damp, and she wears loose black pants and a gray T-shirt. The detectives are taken aback when they spot her T-shirt. Emblazoned on the front, in large block letters, is the word WHY?
“We have some bad news for you,” Jackson tells her, as Matsushita translates. “George has admitted doing a number of things that are very serious.”
“What kind of things?” she asks in a high-pitched little-girl voice.
“We can’t get into details,” Jackson says. “But he disposed of his wife and daughter’s bodies. We just arrested him for murder.”
She slaps her hand over her mouth and stares, wide-eyed, at Jackson. For about ten seconds she sits stock-still. The detectives hear the dryer tumbling on the back porch.
“We’re very sorry and I know this is very upsetting to you, but we have to ask you these questions,” Jackson says. “If he told you anything about what happened, it’s important for us to know.”
She sniffles and nervously bites a finger. “He hasn’t said anything.”
The detectives ask her questions about the night of the murder, but she recalls very little. He parked the white van in back of the house on several occasions, but she says she cannot remember the dates.
“This is a very serious case,” Jackson says. “A four-year-old girl is dead. If he calls you from jail, it’s important to tell us what he says. You understand?”
She quickly nods several times. “Is he coming home?” she asks.
“We’ll know in a few days,” Garcia says. “After we talk to the district attorney.”
Garcia and Jackson hope to quickly bolster their case before they present it to the DA, who has to file charges within forty-eight hours of an arrest; otherwise, the suspect is released. So the next day, a group of detectives search the storage facility and the town house and monitor the LAPD criminalists who scour the van for evidence. Others check with airport officials to confirm when Taga picked up his wife and daughter. Another detective escorts Taga from jail to the RHD interview room. He still has not asked for an attorney, so the detectives hope they can pry a few more details out of him and, perhaps, a full confession—without the self-serving details that limit his culpability. Taga’s toupee was confiscated at the jail and today the hair above his ears flares out like mini-wings and unruly strands swirl atop his head. He looks like an Asian Einstein.
Jackson is writing the lengthy arrest report, so Garcia will conduct the interview, assisted by Mike Berchem, who established a rapport with Taga when he first picked him up outside the town house. Taga tells Garcia and Berchem an elaborate—and possibly apocryphal—story of how he and Yuriko ripped off a Japanese businessman for $300,000. After discovering the scam, the man demanded the money back and threatened to kill Yuriko because it was “her account and her signature” on all the business documents, Taga says.
Taga and Yuriko were so despondent they discussed suicide, he says. “We thought about it, how we going to kill ourselves.” Eventually, Taga says, he researched poisons on the Internet.
Berchem asks sarcastically, “What did you look under, ‘poison dot com’?”
Taga chuckles. “Something like that.” He found a “recipe,” he says, for a particularly deadly poison, and mixed ferrocyanide with water and sulfuric acid. After boiling the compound for twenty minutes, he added ice water for the “cooling stage” and transferred the mixture into a “receiving tank,” which contained calcium. Then he measured the poison into four small vials.
After Taga enthusiastically describes the process, he diagrams his step-by-step approach on a piece of paper, providing the detectives with the name of the laboratory where he purchased the chemicals. He explains that he found the poison recipe on a CD-ROM he ordered over the Internet called The Poor Man’s James Bond.
“You drink it, you sniff it, you gone,” Taga says.
But instead of committing suicide, Yuriko fled to Japan with Michelle, taking two vials with her in case she decided to commit suicide at her mother’s house, Taga says. Challenging him, the detectives insist it would have been impossible for her to slip the vials past Japanese and U.S. Customs and airport security. But he sticks to his story.
When the detectives question him further about his family’s finances, Taga says Yuriko had no life insurance, but she owned their town house and had $100,000 equity in the property.
At first, Garcia did not believe that Yuriko and Michelle had taken poison. But Taga has been so specific that Garcia now believes it is a possibility. Still, he is certain that Yuriko and Michelle did not ingest the chemicals voluntarily.
During the summer, Taga says, he and Yuriko decided that when she returned she would carry the two vials, he would bring one from home, and the family would commit suicide. The detectives angrily tell Taga that his story is nonsensical: Why would she return to the United States to commit suicide? If she had the two vials with her, why didn’t she simply drink the poison in Japan?
Taga sips his coffee. “She want all of us to die, three of us … together.” After their conversation in the Ports O’ Call parking lot, Yuriko asked him, “‘Will you put us into the water together?’ That’s it.… I should have saved her.… I walked away.… So in the sense, I killed them.…”
After listening to Taga’s implausible, mutable tale, Garcia is angry. He jabs a finger at Taga and says, “Let’s stop playing these little touchy-feely games. You know, the financial this and the depressed that. It’s all baloney. I don’t believe it.… All you’re doing is digging a bigger hole for yourself. And it’s making things bad for you. You keep changing it because it’s not the truth.”
Taga scratches his pate with a curious expression, as if searching for the toupee that is no longer there. Eventually, however, he acknowledges that he did not get the telephone cord at the airport, but brought it from home before he picked up Yuriko and Michelle at the airport. Taga also says that he made it easy for Yuriko and Michelle to ingest the poison. He opened Yuriko’s two vials, set them on the front seat, and walked away. Months ago, Taga says, he tested the poison on a rat, so he knew it worked fast.
If Yuriko was intent on committing suicide, the detectives ask, why didn’t he simply leave a vial for her and save his daughter?
“My wife … no want to be separated from Michelle …” Taga says. “That was Yuriko’s choice.… I can’t control her.… She need Michelle to go with her.”
As Garcia and Berchem are concluding the interview, the detective assigned to search airport records discovers that Taga lied about picking up Yuriko and Michelle in the family car: he picked them up in the van. Garcia and Jackson are elated—they believe this means that Taga planned to kill his wife and daughter and dispose of their bodies. Because the act was premeditated, Taga could face first-degree murder charges and possibly the death penalty.
The detectives who searched his house have been successful, too. They have discovered three empty vials, wrapped in tinfoil, buried under a stack of receipts in a dresser drawer. In the drawer they also find a vial of Rohypnol, the “date rape drug.” Garcia and Jackson suspect that Taga slipped the Rohypnol into a drink and gave it to Yuriko and Michelle at the airport. When they were unconscious, he might have pulled out the vials and poured the poison down their throats.
Garcia uses the new information to set a trap for Taga. “After you left… Ports O’ Call… after they were dead, you took them to your house and then you placed them into your van, right?” Garcia asks.
“What would you say if I told you that’s not true?”
“The van?” Taga looks confused.
“What if we have cameras, and all the license plates are recorded that come and go out of that airport?” Berchem interjects. “And we can say on September seventh at such-and-such a time that van was there to pick up your daughter and your wife. And you did pick them up in the van.”
“I can prove it, George,” Garcia says. “We do our homework.”
Taga crosses his arms and stares vacantly at the interview room wall. His hands tremble.
“George,” Garcia calls out. “You all right? … You trying to think of a story to tell us this time, or what? … So what do you have to say to what we just told you, George? Help me understand, how did that van get in the airport?”
“Okay, so let me see. I, I go in the van,” he acknowledges.
“And you picked them up in the van so nobody would see them in the back … because you knew what was going to happen,” Garcia says.
Finally, Taga says, with a hint of irritation, “All right. I drove the van, okay? I had the van.” He explains, as the detectives stare at him skeptically, that he was embarrassed to admit he picked them up in such a beat-up, grease-stained vehicle because it would appear that he was disrespectful.
Garcia and Berchem press Taga further. He admits that his wife did not carry two vials with her from Japan. He brought three vials from home, the same three vials the detectives discovered in his dresser drawer. The final point that the detectives hope to establish is that Taga did not simply set the vials inside the van and walk away.
“Well, I gave them the … vials,” Taga acknowledges. “I walked. I couldn’t see them take it.”
“But you gave them the vials,” Garcia says.
“Yeah, I gave it to them … just hand it to her.”
The detectives keep grilling Taga, but he will make no further admissions, instead repeating segments of his story in a monotone as if he has memorized them. The detectives realize the interview is coming to a close. They allow Taga to recount his final minutes with Yuriko and Michelle; he adds a few new wrinkles in this version.
He gave Yuriko the vials. “She said, ‘How I take this?’ I say, ‘Just drink it.’ No pain. Then I said good-bye to Michelle. Michelle said, ’Papa.’ Taga chokes on the word and emits a sudden sob. He covers his eyes and cries. He drops his hands limply to his sides. “I closed the door. I was crying. When I came back my wife was laying sideways. So I picked up Michelle and I opened the window to let the air in a little bit. Then I drove back home. And I went inside the house.… I pray. I was crying.… I wish they are going to come back.… I was looking outside hoping they’d come back … as some kind of ghost or something.”
Garcia and Berchem look at Taga with disgust. “It’s hard to come back,” Berchem snarls, “with thirty pounds of weights on you in the bottom of the ocean.”
Garcia and Jackson spend Thursday morning at the district attorney’s office. When they return to the squad room, shortly before noon, they announce that the DA has agreed to file murder charges against Taga. Several detectives exchange high-fives with them. A detective asks if the DA charged Taga with two counts of murder. Garcia nods. The detective claps him and Jackson on the back. Captain Tatreau shakes their hands and says, “Good job, guys.”
A detective calls out to Jackson, “Hey, Roy, the DA’s going to put out a press release and get all the glory.”
“They always do,” adds another detective.
Homicide Special detectives contend that whenever they screw up, their mistakes are magnified and the criticism in the press unrelenting. But when they do their job well, they believe, reporters pay little attention.
“Call press relations,” Captain Tatreau tells Garcia and Jackson. “Let’s get our own press release out.”
The detectives have been at their desks by six every morning this week. They are exhausted now, but giddy with the excitement following a cleared case.
At 3:40 in the afternoon, Garcia drives to Carrow’s, a chain coffee shop just north of downtown. He finishes off a French dip sandwich and Jackson bolts a fried chicken salad—their first meal of the day. As Jackson pushes aside his plate, he tells Garcia that he investigated his first poison case when working Hollywood. Like all good homicide detectives, Jackson has an excellent memory for names, addresses, and bizarre details.
“A radio call came through and patrol was sent to an apartment on Sierra Vista, off Santa Monica and Western,” Jackson recalls. “Two women were rushed by an ambulance to the hospital. Both were unconscious. One of them, Dorothy Green, had recently had a dispute over money with a man who used to live in the apartment building. Later, the man stops by the building carrying a gift box with a bottle of gin inside. He gives it to a friend of Dorothy’s and says, ‘Let her know I’m sorry.’ Witnesses say Dorothy pours a shot for her and her friend. Dorothy takes a big gulp and says, ‘Something’s wrong with this gin.’ She collapses. The friend, being brilliant, takes a sip and says, ‘Yeah, tastes bad.’ The friend is still conscious and she calls 911. Turns out the gin was spiked with cyanide. Dorothy ends up almost a vegetable—blind, can’t talk.
“We can’t identify the man because he lived in the building under an AKA. But two weeks later, the patrol officer who responded to the poisoning cruises by the apartment building and calls in on his radio: ‘Attempted murder suspect at location.’ He’d recognized the suspect by the description—male black, shaved head, beard, early forties. This suspect found out the second woman was released from the hospital. Maybe he returned to finish the deal. Anyway, patrol brings him to the station.
“We go through his wallet and find his real ID. In his wallet we find a to-do list on notepaper. It says, ‘Get cyanide,’ and lists the names of some lab companies. The guy goes to prison. Then two years later, Dorothy Green dies as a result of the poisoning. A jury convicts him of murder. The DA starts digging into his background for the penalty phase of the trial. They discover he attended Los Angeles City College twenty years earlier. A DA tracks down his chemistry teacher and asks if he remembers the guy. The teacher say, ‘Matter of fact, I do. He was very smart. He had to do a project at the end of the class. He wanted to do an experiment—with cyanide.’”