A Yoko Kamimura Mystery
Hazel Dawkins
Copyright © 2011 by Hazel R. Dawkins
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the author, except where permitted by law.
Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data:
Dawkins, Hazel R.
Eye Sleuth, a Yoko Kamimura Mystery/Hazel R. Dawkins
This is a work of fiction. Although many of the characters are real practitioners of behavioral optometry or associated in some way with this optometric specialty, some of the characters and most of the events are inventions of the author.
Cover design by Stella Bella
Page design by Dennis Berry
Sketches throughout the book by A. Mitchkoski
MurderProse.com logo created by [email protected]
ISBN-13: 978-1463773090 (CreateSpace trade paperback)
ISBN-10: 1463773099 (CreateSpace trade paperback)
1. Behavioral Optometry; 2. Optometric Vision Therapy; 3. OEP Foundation, California; 4. The College of Optometry, State University of New York; 6. New York City – Gramercy Park, National Arts Club, the Quaker Meeting House on East 20th Street, now the Brotherhood Synagogue; 7. England – Bournemouth, Christchurch Priory, Royal Bath Hotel.
Kindle ebook.
CreateSpace trade paperback available at:
http://www.murderprose.com
Note to readers: recipes may be found near the end of the book.
To Colin
Acknowledgments
My deep gratitude goes to the many people who have been so generous with their help and expertise.
Dennis Berry, with whom I collaborated on Eye Wit, the second Yoko Kamimura mystery, was untiring and valiant with help when it came to resolving issues about this book, Eye Sleuth, the first Yoko Kamimura mystery. Whatever the problem or question, he always found answers and shared valuable information with speed and grace. I thank him for his expertise and many kindnesses.
Special appreciation goes to Aggie Mitchkoski, for her willing and expert assistance at many levels, from editorial sleuthing to taking the photograph for the jacket to creating the sketches that open each chapter. Aggie also rescued me from my bewildered wanderings on the Library of Congress web site when I was trying to register the copyright.
Dr. Gus Forkiotis and Dr. Bob Bertolli were very encouraging from the start, although they told me they were worried that I would drastically reduce the number of practitioners because of the murder and mayhem in Eye Sleuth.
The eagle eye of Dr. Earl Lizotte, who doesn’t usually read mysteries but who was persuaded to do so, caught some technical errors, for which I am most appreciative.
Bob Williams, the Executive Director at the OEP Foundation, was always willing to respond to my queries even though he has a demanding job and travels a great deal. I am grateful for his help and support over the years, ever since the initial publication and various updates of my factual book on behavioral optometry, The Suddenly Successful Student & Friends.
My life was made smoother, despite hours of sitting at the computer, by sessions of the brilliant, restorative shiatsu of Maribeth Dawkins.
Some years ago, I took the first draft of Eye Sleuth with me when I visited Pam, my brother John’s partner, in England. She read it with interest. “Oh,” she said when she’d finished. “I think you’re on to something.” That was encouragement indeed.
Thank you, one and all.
One
Lunch was all I had on my mind when I walked out of the building where I work into the spring sunshine flooding downtown Manhattan. An early lunch to help make up for the breakfast I'd skipped because I overslept…again. The sidewalk was a swift stream of people dodging each other in search of fast food. I headed for Lexington Avenue but stopped abruptly when someone tugged my arm and called my name. Startled, I turned to see a woman I didn't know. She spoke, her voice so low I strained to hear her.
“What? What did you say?”
The stranger spoke again and this time I heard her clearly but before I could say a word, there was an ear-shattering burst of sound and the stranger lost her hold on my arm. Stunned, I watched, unable to move, as the life began to drain from her eyes. Her body fell away from me in a macabre arc. I've lived in New York all my life but I've only heard gunshots at the movies yet I knew with grim certainty the staccato burst of noise had been bullets blasting the stranger to the ground. The crowd scattered, leaving me staring down. The woman was still, her eyes aimed sightlessly at the sky. Panicked, I looked around wildly. Where had the bullets come from? A crazy boyfriend or a gang war?
I desperately wanted to run and hide, to scream for help, but I was frozen in place, filled with high anxiety. Gulping air, I tried to think but couldn’t. My eyes were riveted on the woman lying on the sidewalk. Her glossy black hair haloed her head on the grimy cement and a spatter of blood welled up on her silky white blouse. Sickened, I closed my eyes to blot out the sight but the after-image on my retinas was horrific. Bitter saliva flooded my mouth. The woman had tugged on my arm, had spoken my name, but I didn't know her. All I knew for sure was that she'd warned me of danger and that her heritage was Japanese. Like mine.
The stranger’s warning circled in my mind, a maddeningly endless loop. “Ki o tsukenasai. Kiken-desu.” I knew enough Japanese to understand she’d said, “This is a warning, there’s danger.”
What did she mean? What was the danger? Why would a stranger come up to me on the street and warn me about danger? Was someone about to gun me down too? I opened my eyes and looked around nervously. People on the other side of the street were standing and staring. Even the traffic had halted. Horns blared and drivers were leaning out of their windows yelling and craning to see what was going on. As suddenly as the gunshots had come, the scene changed. Cars started to drive off slowly and people began walking away. On my side of the street, the space around me and the stranger on the ground was a strangely empty circle, no one wanted to step near where I stood by the woman lying on the ground.
Was my problem that I'd been in the wrong place at the right time? Did the stranger think she knew me? I squeezed my eyes shut again but couldn’t blot out the scene from my mind’s eye. Cautiously, I opened my eyes. Nothing had changed. A woman lay on the sidewalk on East 24th Street, a dead woman unless I was mistaken. A few morbid souls edged back from the safety of doorways to stare curiously. I definitely lost my cool. I almost lost the breakfast I hadn't eaten.
I’m Yoko Kamimura, third-generation Japanese American born in the U.S., that makes me Sansei. The woman sprawled on the sidewalk looked about my parents’ age, Nisei, the second generation born here. Or was she freshly arrived from Japan? Later, when the police questioned me, it dawned on me that although she’d spoken Japanese, the stranger’s accent was more that of someone brought up in the U.S.
I’m an optometrist, not what you normally consider a perilous line of work. If you want to talk about peril, I was living in Manhattan on 9/11. When the Twin Towers were hit, I was over a mile away, but no one in the city escaped the horrendous fallout. That cataclysmic event sent shock waves across the country. Now, years later, time has helped to leaven the searing memories but the terror of it flooded back as I stared at the woman lying motionless on the sidewalk. Then I swear I saw the woman’s blouse flutter slightly. Was she breathing? Had she survived? Bending over the body to check for a pulse, I heard a familiar voice.
“Yoko, what happened?”
No pulse. Reluctantly I removed my fingers from the stranger's neck and looked up at the man who'd pushed through the
crowd gawking at the woman on the ground. It was Allan Barnes, the IT guy from the office next to mine. Before I could speak, Mike, the head security guard, a tall Jamaican with the buttered vowels of the Islands, came hurrying out of the college.
“Dr. Kamimura, are you all right?” Mike took a long hard look at the body on the sidewalk, stretched a strong arm protectively in front of me and started talking into his intercom. Fending off voyeurs, he guided me into the lobby. My legs moved stiffly, my face was rigid. I was a walking robot. Until a car backfired and I jumped inches in the air, clutching Mike, clenching my jaw to block the scream in my throat. Damn, what happened to the calm woman of science I think I am?
“Here, sit. You're safe now,” Mike said. Safe? Really? What about the warning of danger? I didn’t say a word about the double trouble of death and that warning, I couldn’t. Mike turned to Allan, who'd followed us in. “Mr. Barnes, did you see what happened?”
“Not really,” Allan said.
“She doesn’t have a pulse. The woman is dead…” I choked on the words.
“I had Fred call the police,” Mike said quietly. “Don't you worry now.”
That’s it. The police. I can talk to the police about the warning. Relief swept over me.
Mike settled me on one of the chairs behind his central lobby station and waved over a guard, sending him to close the main doors and funnel the lunch crowd emptying out of the elevators to the side exit. Allan hovered, despite Mike’s attempts to persuade him to sit down at the other end of the station.
“So did you see who shot her?” Allan asked me.
“No…no, I didn’t see anything.”
“How weird that someone came up to you and was standing right by you and you wouldn’t see anything. Did you know her?”
“No I don’t…didn’t know her.”
“Looked like she was saying something to you just before the shot. Maybe that’s a clue to why it happened?”
Finally, when I sat silently, not responding to him, Allan walked over to the other side of the security station, picked up the phone and made a call. Probably to let his boss know what was happening. I couldn’t bring myself to call my boss, Dr. Forrest, I couldn’t move, just sat.
By the time a police car and an ambulance had roared up to the curb outside, my stomach had stopped heaving but I was still in shock. Discreetly, I wiped the sweat off my face and a façade of stillness settled over me until a nonsense rhyme revved up in my mind. “One fine day in the middle of the night, two dead men got up to fight.” Giggles gathered in my gut and my shoulders started to shake. Mike was watching me from the corner of his eye––good security guards have excellent peripheral vision. Poor peripheral vision causes a lot of traffic accidents but Mike had never been in a traffic accident, not even a fender-bender. No way could I crack under Mike's gaze. Even though he was looking directly out at the activity on the street, I knew Mike had me clearly in his peripheral vision.
I banished the jingle. Settle down, focus. A woman had been shot in front of me. In broad daylight. Why had she been killed? Was this random violence or deliberate? A drive-by shooting? Then that last question, one I couldn’t avoid any longer: Were the shots meant for her or for me? Sweat beaded my face again at the last question. What the hell was going on? I’d been warned of danger and the messenger had been killed right in front of me. I started to feel frantic again. Call yourself a scientist? Act like one. Put emotion aside. Examine the facts objectively. My mental nagging helped. I forced myself to stop thinking about the murder and what the danger could be. I began to calm down and the cogs in my brain started to mesh. OK. First, try to analyze what happened. Start at the beginning. Who was this woman?
I was certain I didn't know her. Had she ever come to one of the college clinics? Much of my work, first as a student and later as an optometrist, has been at the Infants’ Clinic under the guidance of my mentor, Dr. Elliott Forrest, who was now my boss. Challenging though it is to give youngsters vision therapy, it’s so rewarding. Whether youngsters are having difficulty reading or are hyperactive, vision therapy makes a huge difference. I’ve never worked at any of the college’s adult clinics. Had this woman brought a youngster to the Infants’ Clinic? Of the patients I've treated there, I could recall only two Asian families but they were Chinese not Japanese. Perhaps the stranger had come with a neighbor to the clinic and I'd been intent on child and parent, not noticing the second adult with them?
Mike interrupted my thoughts. “Thought you'd like some water, Dr. Kamimura.”
I took the glass carefully because my hand was shaky. The cool liquid was calming as it trickled down my throat. It began to feel safe behind the solid protection of the chest-high counter with the reassuring presence of Mike and Allan close by.
Outside the building, officialdom had swung into full action. Two more police cars were angled in at the curb and a trio of police officers stood in strategic positions, watching passersby and occasionally checking on technicians who were busy with plastic evidence bags. A police photographer snapped picture after picture. He didn't look concerned that the subject of his photos was dead. Why would he? It's probably what he saw all the time in his line of business.
“Excuse me.”
It was one of the uniformed men from the street. He must have come in the side door because I hadn’t seen him until he was standing right next to me. Normally, my peripheral vision is excellent but it had to be constricted right now, tension does that. Quietly the policeman asked me to go with him to the station house for an interview. I must have looked blank because he added, “Thirteenth Precinct? East Twenty-first Street, between Third and Second Avenues, a few blocks away. Detective Riley will interview you and take a statement.”
Now I knew where he meant. I often saw groups of rookies walking to the subway from the station. Sure, an interview. That’s what happened if you saw a crime, the police want to talk to you. Good. I wanted to talk to the police. I looked over to where Allan sat and saw another policeman was talking to him. Allan nodded and the two walked out to one of the police cars. Time for me to go, too.
“I’ll be back as soon as I can, Mike.”
“I’ll let Dr. Forrest know when he comes in, Dr. Kamimura,” Mike said.
I managed a lukewarm smile of thanks and nodded at Mike as I followed the policeman who'd spoken to me. When he helped me into the second car, I cringed as I felt his hand on my head, protecting it as I slid onto the back seat. Bizarre, I'd watched that movement on TV and now the hand of the law was on my head.
At the police station, I saw Allan being shown into a room down the hall from where I was being taken. The man who followed me in to the small, sterile space was around my age, early thirties. He was tall and wiry and his wavy brown hair was overdue for a trim. Alert, deep-set brown eyes with ridiculously long lashes. His black sweater hugged wide, bony shoulders and his jeans were neatly pressed. Pressed jeans? Not my idea of how a police detective dressed but what did I know. This guy looked resourceful.
“Dan Riley,” he said and we shook hands. He clicked on the tape recorder and I spelled my name for him and caught myself checking his left hand, doing my own detecting. No wedding ring. No paleness or indentation where one might have been recently, though some guys don't wear wedding bands. My flippant thoughts shocked me. Was I in denial? No. I knew I’d witnessed death and I knew I’d had a warning of danger. My errant thoughts had to be my psyche helping my hormones settle, trying to divert me from the overload of stress. Luckily, Riley hadn’t a clue what I was thinking. He didn’t waste time with chitchat.
“Where do you work?”
“At the College of Optometry, I’m an optometrist.”
“That’s part of the State University of New York, isn’t it?” Riley said. “SUNY, right?”
“Yes.”
“Are you full-time at the college?”
“Yes, private practice isn't for me.”
“Tell me what you do at SUNY.”
“Three mornings a week I work at the clinic where infants and children come for vision therapy. The rest of the time I do research.” Quiet, peaceful research. The work and the atmosphere suit me. Optometry is safe, guns aren’t part of the equipment.
“Your area of research?”
“I’m a behavioral optometrist, it’s….”
Riley interrupted me. “Yes, I’ve heard about behavioral optometry.”
That surprised me. Not many people had heard about it.
Riley ignored my look and repeated his question.
“What do you research?”
“I’m working with Dr Anders, he’s developing new vision therapy equipment, prototypes. Right now I’m transferring his handwritten notes to the computer.” I shook my head, I was giving him information that really wasn’t useful. I focused on the important part of the work I was doing. “My priority is to prepare the material for a paper Dr. Anders will give at an international conference, so I’m comparing the prototypes with existing equipment.”
Riley nodded, apparently satisfied with my explanation and commented, almost an aside, “You’re not a secretary, so you must be editing as you go?”
“To a certain extent,” I said, surprised at the man’s insight.
Abruptly, the questions shifted to the murder.
Eye Sleuth Page 1
