“I’m not lying,” he gasped. “I don’t know who you are or what you think happened —”
“I told you who I am.” She turned to someone else. “Lift him up. I want him to see my face. I want to see his.”
Someone bent over him, hands grabbing his shirt, dragging him up. He was half lifted, half thrown against a wall. Taylor struggled to stay vertical, to face his abductors.
It was hard to discern them in the gloom, but the man was Japanese. Young, early twenties, neck and hands covered in the intricate tattoos of the Yakuza. Terrific. Taylor turned his attention to the woman. He still didn’t remember her except for the few seconds before he’d been knocked out. He’d seen her shoot Varga. He wasn’t about to forget that.
She was saying to him, “Are you pretending you didn’t know Inori was married?”
Taylor swallowed. “I…”
She came toward him again, and he burst out with the truth. “I knew. It wasn’t real to me.”
That stopped her. “Wasn’t real?”
“You weren’t there. You were just a photo on his desk. I knew you were in the States. I thought you were separated or something.” The woman standing over him, trembling, fists clenched, bore no resemblance to that long-ago smiling portrait.
“Bullshit. You wanted to think that. You seduced my husband, a good and honorable man, and you drove him to suicide.”
“I didn’t seduce anyone.” This was insane. He couldn’t believe it was happening. Where the hell had this madwoman been for eight years? Why was she was doing this? And why now?
The man said something quietly to her. Alexandra listened to him, but her fierce pale eyes never left Taylor’s face.
She nodded. “You abandoned my husband and left him to face the disgrace alone. You’re a coward as well as a murderer.”
“It wasn’t like that. I was reassigned. I didn’t have a choice about leaving. And Inori broke it off with me before I left, before I started my second tour in Afghanistan. It wasn’t a question of leaving him to face…disgrace.”
He knew he was wasting his breath, but somehow he had to try and reach her. The kid…no way. Taylor recognized those empty eyes, eyes like a gun barrel. There was no mercy in him. The woman was his only hope. And it wasn’t much of a hope.
“Listen to me. It was my first foreign posting at an embassy. I was young and inexperienced. Your husband was kind to me, and eventually we did become friends. It was…not my intention to hurt anyone.”
“You used my husband. You seduced him. You perverted him.”
Taylor shook his head.
“My husband kept a safe-deposit box. Did you know that?”
“No.”
She was smiling eerily at him. “I didn’t know either. Yuki found out about the box after the death of Otou-sama.”
Otou-sama. The respectful honorific for one’s father. The woman was Western, so she must be referring to her father-in-law, Inori’s father. But who the hell was Yuki?
The young thug next to Alexandra folded his arms, staring at Taylor with his bold black eyes. Yuki, I presume?
One thing for sure, if they were introducing themselves, they had no intention of letting Taylor leave there alive.
* * * * *
Will was on the phone to a contact in Little Tokyo when Cooper stepped inside his office and closed the door.
“Later,” Will said to Noriyori Arai and replaced the receiver.
Cooper said, “MacAllister spent two years in Japan. If his annual evaluations are anything to go by, he was a choirboy. A smart, efficient, ambitious choirboy.”
“I never thought otherwise.”
“No? Well, maybe I’m more cynical than you. There’s nothing here that suggests grounds for a grudge match eight years later.”
Will’s heart sank. There had to be some lead, some clue, something that would help him find Taylor, but every turn seemed to be a dead end. According to Lt. Wray, the license plate belonged to a Dodge Pinto that had hit the scrap heap six months earlier. And Will’s neighbor Linda Schnell had been unable to pick the female shooter out of any mug-shot books. Linda was working with an LAPD sketch artist, trying to come up with a composite of the female abductor.
“There’s only one very small indication of a potential lead. MacAllister was friends with a Japanese American contractor, Inori Sugimori, at the embassy. Sugimori was a political specialist. He committed suicide two weeks after MacAllister was reassigned to Afghanistan.”
“Is there anything suspicious about Sugimori’s death?”
“Other than the fact it was suicide?” Cooper asked drily.
“Was it suicide?”
“Yes. It was certainly never questioned. It was pretty gruesome, and the physical evidence seems to have been conclusive.”
Reluctantly, Will asked, “How did he do it?”
“He used a family sword dipped in poison to run himself through the belly.”
Will clenched his jaw lest any unwise words escape.
“The family on Sugimori’s father’s side was very old and very respectable samurai stock. The rumor — and this is only rumor — is that Sugimori killed himself as a matter of honor.”
“I don’t see what this could do with MacAllister.”
“No?” Cooper looked grimmer than ever. “The other rumor was that Sugimori and MacAllister were sexually involved. As you know, eight years ago the State Department took a very different view of homosexuality within the ranks.”
The State Department was very proud of its new and enlightened views. Will didn’t bother to tell Cooper that gay employees still faced discrimination and harassment from coworkers both at home and abroad. No point. Progress had been made since the days MacAllister had been posted in Japan; after all, Rome wasn’t burned in a day.
“Okay,” Will said. “Any proof MacAllister and this Sugimori were actually involved?”
“No. But there seems to have been no other reason for Sugimori to have killed himself. And there was the little problem of him being married, you see.”
“If this is some kind of revenge thing, why would anyone wait eight years?”
“Sugimori’s father recently passed away. At a guess? I’d say some special information the old man
