Tokyo Enigma

A Mick Sanchez Mystery

By

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and events
described herein are products of the author's imagination or are
used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any
resemblance to actual events, locations, organizations, or persons,
living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

ISBN 13: 978-1-60174-215-5

Tokyo Enigma
Copyright © 2016 by
Sam Waite

Cover design
Copyright © 2016 by Judith B.
Glad
Cord photo: dhannte, morguefile;
Tokyo skyline photo:
pigprox, fotolia.com

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The bruises matched. That alone could be enough to convict.
Japanese prosecutors believed that streaks across the hands of
American executive Charles Dorian and a fatal ring around the throat
of a young model were caused by the same silk cord. It was scarlet
and enwrapped with strands of hair as though it had been woven
through the victim's coiffure. A woman's adornment had been used
as a garrote.

The assignment appeared bound for a predestined outcome
and was in a part of the world I didn't want to see again. I dropped
the fact sheet back on Abe Granger's desk.

"Find someone else."

"This is high profile, Mick. It means a lot to the company,
and right now we're thin on talent."

Abe, boss and mentor, didn't have to say much more. I
chastised myself. A man named Mick Sanchez ought to have an open
mind about cultures, especially if his business card read Global Risk
Management. I'd done a lot of work in Europe and Latin America, but
there were memories of some places I'd rather leave dormant.

It wasn't just the surreal horror of Vietnam. It was the
work-a-day chaos in Thailand, Taiwan and Japan of dodging crowds
walking, pedaling or driving in motley directions. It was the
humanity that swirled around me, furtively brushing the surface as
though I existed in a curious but perilous dimension. It was the
feeling that I was a six-foot-one, two hundred and ten pound thumb
in someone's eye that had made me vow never to go back to East
Asia.

In another life, I had done a two-and-a-half-year tour in
West Pac that began with a hundred and ten degree summer in IV
Corps, Vietnam. It ended with a minus thirty degree winter in
Wakkanai, Japan, the home of a U.S. Air Force listening post that sat
on a spit of land jutting toward Russia, taunting the country's
cryptologists and the Arctic wind. From Wakkanai, I traveled along
Hokkaido's north coast to interview an inmate in Abashiri Prison, a
fortress on a stark landscape bared to Siberian storms blowing down
the Tatar strait. The prisoner had been convicted of selling a
controlled substance to a U.S. airman, and I was pursuing military
justice for CID, Criminal Investigations Department.

Snow lay deep. It was early February, and the convict wore a
thinly padded jacket. What I could see of his skin had a translucent
pallor, the color of lemonade, as though his strength had been
leached by the cold. I questioned him for nearly an hour, but I never
saw his eyes. He kept his chin tucked tight against his chest. It was a
Pavlovian effect. My translator said that if a prisoner made eye
contact with a guard, first he suffered a beating then he spent hours
kneeling on a reed mat facing a wall.

After twenty some-odd years and a worthless vow not to
return, I was back to interview another prisoner. The stakes had
been raised.

My company's client, Kyle Solutions, had agreed to take over
a Japanese robotics developer, started up on the personal savings of
engineers who had been victims of corporate downsizing. The
company was on the brink of bankruptcy. It had a prototype for an
uncannily accurate stereoscopic guidance system for industrial
robots, but no line of product. A start-up like that in America could
put out a tin cup and empty it regularly as investors filled it with
cash. In Japan, a company without products wouldn't be looking for a
million bucks or a hundred million yen. It would be lucky to raise a
hundred yen to buy the cup.

Kyle Solutions, a technology conglomerate based in San
Francisco, had stepped in for the rescue and put Charles Dorian in
charge to make sure the prototype reached production stage. The
Japanese engineers kept their jobs, and Kyle's management had a
white-picket-fence vision of a blissful union.

That ended when Dorian was found in a hotel room with the
body of a young model. He had passed out and reeked of alcohol. She
had been strangled with a cord, presumed by prosecutors to be the
one found wrapped around his hand.

Global Risk Management, GRIM among employees, provided
private corporations with a range of services from anti-terrorist
training to general-purpose troubleshooting. Kyle Solutions hired us
to protect their investment.

Pauline Cramer, our Human Resources chief, must have run
a data search and found a match for "Japan, prisoner, interview." She
sent my name to Abe Granger. I was tapped. Never mind GRIM's
small stable of Asia specialists, or the decades-long gap.

A lot had changed. Back then, my hotel lobby in mid-town
Tokyo would not have looked like it belonged in New York. The
athletic thirtyish woman carrying a Prada bag and wearing a
mid-thigh black sheath with a vent in the back would have stood out
anywhere but a hostess bar. The man wearing a navy-blue cashmere
overcoat, lightweight wool suit and understated silk tie would have
had to do his shopping overseas. There would have been fewer
women and no men with hair dyed brown or red.

One individual who did stand out was my contact from
Protect Agency, an ill-named investigative outfit that GRIM had used
before. He was not among the dyed set. What was left of his thinning
hair was black, streaked white. It was long and framed his puffy
cheeks in an anemic frizz. To his credit, he had made no attempt to
comb it over his balding crown.

I was the only foreigner in the lobby. He spotted me quickly,
nodded and shuffled across the carpeted floor as though he was
trying to charge his body with static electricity. His shoulders
slumped.

I had a table in a teashop partially walled by waist-high
partitions, which gave the effect of a sidewalk café indoors. A
harpist in front of a mural of swans, lotuses and Grecian maidens
was playing something neoclassical.

"Mr. Mick Sanchez?" My contact's voice quavered in a high
pitch that he tried to fix with a spasm of little coughs.

I gestured to an empty chair, but he stayed on his feet and
ran his thumb along a corner of a scarred leather valise.

"Mr. Morimoto?"

His arms stiffened along his sides as though he had been
called to attention. I didn't like military reminders. Morimoto was
making me nervous. He bowed from the waist, his eyes skipping
from me to the chair as he fingered his valise. I felt like he was
waiting for me to recite the second part of a password: "Russia
buried Lenin... The maid can't make the beds." After a few seconds, I
caught on, stood and returned the bow. Morimoto looked relieved
and sat down.

"You must be tired," he said. "I'm sorry I couldn't meet you
at the airport last night," his head tilted down so that he peered out
the top edge of wire-frame glasses.

"I'm all right. No problems getting here, and I slept well. I
know you had short notice but..."

I was about to ask, "When do I see Charles Dorian?"

I paused too long. He interrupted.

"It's a fine day."

The corners of Morimoto's mouth sagged into inverted
crescents on either side of his chin. His voice and manner had an odd
gravity as though the idyllic autumn weather was a
disappointment.

"It is." I held my hand up for silence in case he had anything
else to say about the weather. "When do we meet Mr. Dorian?"

Morimoto appeared not to hear. He pulled a brochure from
his valise and laid it on the table. It looked like an ad for his agency.
Either he was following company procedure to the letter, or he was
guided by some ritual hard-wired into his psyche:

Bows.

Weather talk.

Self-promotion.

If I'd had time, I might have been interested to see how
many steps he played through. I didn't. I put my hand on the
brochure and gave Morimoto as much grin as I had in me.

"Dorian. What time? Today."

While Morimoto dabbed at perspiration beading on his
forehead and upper lip, I explained that it had been three days since
the "incident." Physical evidence on Dorian's body would be fading. I
needed to see it. "We, Mr. Morimoto, need to see it."

On the way to his car, he filled me in on the complexities and
uniqueness of Japanese social mores and legal customs. There was
form to follow. We had to go through lawyers. It might take a
while.

Form was not my strong point. The Dorian affair had lit up
political radar in the U.S., and Kyle Solutions had clout and money. It
was 6:42 p.m. Eastern Standard Time. I called GRIM from Morimoto's
car and asked the night watch to find out which senator on Kyle's
contribution list swung the biggest stick at State and have him or her
twist arms at the Japanese embassy, preferably the
ambassador's.

Some things hadn't changed. I was still a thumb in
someone's eye.

It took us an hour and ten minutes to get to the attorneys'
office. By then, the calls I had requested had been made. We were
cleared to visit Dorian at our convenience, which meant 1:30 p.m.,
the earliest we could get to the Tokyo detention center.

Japanese mores turned out less mysterious than Morimoto
had supposed.

He was right about having to bring a lawyer though. Masao
Ishii, a young attorney from the firm representing Dorian, came
along and brought me up to date on the case. Dorian and the victim,
Maho Hosoi, had been found in a high-rent love hotel that booked
rooms by the night or by the hour. A clerk had said Dorian and Hosoi
checked in together and Dorian booked two hours. They overstayed
the time, so he called the room. When he got no answer, he checked
and found both Dorian and the girl nude and unconscious. He called
police.

That line of business was heavy with yakuza, Japanese crime
syndicates, so the clerk's statement might not be gospel. At this point
there was no reason to doubt it. Forensics had determined that the
girl had been sexually stimulated shortly before her death. There
was no seminal fluid. Either a condom had been used and disposed
of, since none was found, or the nature of the sex act wasn't
missionary-approved. The cord used to strangle her was wrapped
around Dorian's hand. Marks on her neck were the only sign of
injury.

I asked Ishii if prosecutors were looking for any other
suspects. He just tilted his head and raised his eyebrows. At least he
didn't laugh.

When we arrived at the detention center, an officious guard
in a starched shirt with a collar too big for his neck led us to an
interview room. Dorian and a policeman, both dressed in street
clothes, were already waiting. The policeman offered to leave, but I
said it was okay for him to stay. I didn't expect to learn anything that
the authorities didn't already know. Everyone but Dorian exchanged
business cards with the policeman, and a couple of minutes later,
everyone including Dorian was served a small plastic cup of green
tea.

I guess Dorian was used to being in charge. He didn't wait
for questions.

"I won't be much help. Not even in my own defense. From
around eight o'clock that night—" He held his hand next to his head
and spread his fingers, "—it's gone, deleted. Zip. All I know is what
the prosecutors tell me."

He looked at his hands. Bruises from a cord were still faintly
visible. "Not good, is it?"

"Could be better."

I paused to gauge his reaction. He didn't give away anything,
and he didn't appear strained. Impressive after three days at the
hands of Japanese interrogators. They had a record of getting
confessions from innocent people.

"Let's say it was you. Then the question is 'Why?'"