* * * * *
“I want him to suffer…”
He could hear them arguing from the other room. Alexandra was still crying, still ranting. Yuki had dragged her from the room to spare her that final loss of face. She’d come unglued as she started describing the contents of Inori’s safe-deposit box. The cracks had already been there — had probably always been there, barely plastered over. Taylor had no way of knowing. Inori had barely spoken of his wife in the States.
One thing for sure, Alexandra had never been meant to see the contents of that fucking box. No wonder she was coming apart in pieces; even Taylor wasn’t finding it easy to hold it together. Why had Inori kept that junk? Why hadn’t he destroyed it before he’d destroyed himself? What could he have been thinking? He was such a fastidious, meticulous man. To have kept those items… Had a part of him wanted them found?
Christ. Blindfolds and cock rings were the least of it. The Japanese were a highly inventive race. And Taylor… Well, he’d had a wild streak, no doubt about it. He had prided himself on being willing to do anything once. Granted, they had played those games more than once. But for Taylor it had always been a test of his manhood, of himself, of his limits. Inori… No question it had been different for Inori. Those pretty, pretty needles. The butterfly board. No wife was meant to see those. Hell, he wouldn’t want Will to see those things.
No, he definitely didn’t want Will to know about that stuff.
Taylor listened with half an ear while he took stock of his surroundings and tried to figure his options. They were, at best, limited.
He had worked out that he was in a house. An abandoned house. Even the carpet had been torn up and removed. They’d dumped him in a large empty room with vaulted ceilings and tall windows. A dining room, maybe? He could see shadows moving across the distant white ceiling. Water. He was sure he was very near the ocean. Right on the beach. He could feel the pound of the surf beneath the floor like a sluggish heartbeat. The smell of fish and tide pools permeated. The sound of surf and mewling gulls drifted through a broken window high overhead.
The gulls and waves were the only sounds he heard.
There were no sounds of cars, no hum of traffic, no voices, telephones, televisions. Wherever he was, he was not near people.
“With this knife, I’m going to cut off his balls. With this knife, I’m going to chop off his dick —”
Yeah, that would be not counting Alexandra and Yuki, who were still discussing what to do with him in a passionate spate of mixed Japanese and English. Yuki was all in favor of a bullet between Taylor’s eyes and getting the hell out of Dodge. Alexandra kept stressing the importance of making Taylor suffer for his past sins. Making Taylor pay was her theme song, and it was easy enough to see who was the mastermind — using the term loosely — behind the tokens of disaffection over the past week.
She had mentioned castration several times, and Taylor was fervently hoping Yuki’s sense of self-preservation would prevail. It wasn’t just fear for himself — although that was considerable. Taylor didn’t want Will having to face the horror of a mutilated lover. A dead lover would be bad enough. There was always that risk in their profession, and they both accepted it. But the kind of thing Alexandra was talking about? No. Taylor did not want Will struggling to come to terms with that. Will would find a way to blame himself. Taylor knew only too well how painful — well, he knew how it had felt when he’d learned Inori had killed himself.
But he couldn’t think about that now. He’d avoided thinking about it too closely for eight years. Now was definitely not the time to confront those memories.
The sea air gusted in, brisk and salty, catching his attention. He looked up to where the small round window had been broken. Way too high to climb, unfortunately, even if his hands and feet were free, but there might still be some glass around. He studied the filthy floor for the sparkle of anything bright and shiny and useful.
He saw nothing. It was just a broken window, and it would be cold when evening came — assuming he was still alive when evening came.
* * * * *
“Is the wife still around?” Will asked.
Cooper nodded and handed a sheet over. “Here’s her LKA. She’s based out of Los Angeles.”
If Cooper had bothered rounding up a Last Known Address, his mind was working the same way as Will’s. Not that it was any great leap to want to speak to the surviving spouse or lover. Spouses and lovers always ranked high both for doing in loved ones and avenging them. Feeling the way he did about Taylor, Will understood why — on both counts.
Cooper said, “She wasn’t in Japan when Sugimori died. In fact, she wasn’t in Japan for the two years MacAllister worked at the Tokyo embassy. Some problem with her visa. At least that’s how it looks on paper.”
“You think they might have been estranged?”
“Hard to say. It’s difficult to get a handle on Sugimori. Professionally he was well regarded, highly respected. His private life — well, that’s harder to read. He was the product of a mixed marriage. His mother was an American. She worked as an interpreter for the UN, which is where she met Sugimori’s father. He was a wealthy Japanese businessman, and she was his second wife. She died giving birth to Sugimori, and he married his third wife, a Japanese national, shortly after. So what you’ve got there is this half-American kid born into a very traditional, conservative Japanese family. There’s an older son and daughter
