Demons

by Unknown Author

  Throwing on her Joe Rocket, she drummed down the stairs, raced out the back entrance, and dashed across the street to the medical center. Minutes later, she zipped out of the underground garage and headed for the Brooklyn

  Bridge.

  She was at the Park Avenue address within ten minutes, the denunciations of Pakistani cab drivers hanging' in her wake. There was a Channel Six news van at the curb, a blow-dried producer arguing with a cop. Six or seven cop cars were double-parked at the curb and a small crowd had gathered. This was a big deal. People knew who Scott Chalmers was.

  Also, a second samurai killing. Wouldn’t the press have a field day with this? She wondered if they already knew. Sara pulled onto the sidewalk. A cop came to chase her away until she showed her badge and tugged off her helmet.

  “Pezzini, from the One-One. I’m doing the headless killings. Hold this.” She handed the cop her helmet, got off the bike, tucked it next to the glass entrance, took the helmet back and locked it to her bike.

  The cop trailed behind her as she headed for the revolving glass doors. “He’s on the penthouse. They can tell you more, I just got here. Nice bike!”

  She waved, went through the doors, beelined past a homicide detective interviewing the security guard. Chalmers’ penthouse was on the fifty-second floor. Two cops stood in the round marble foyer, guarding a Greek fountain whose gentle gurgling belied the carnage inside. Sara introduced herself and showed her badge.

  Sara let herself through the double, hand-carved teak doors leading' to the living room, where three cops were standing around an incredible scene: Chalmers’ decapitated body lay spread-eagled in the middle of a white shag rug. His head lay about five feet away, staring toward the patio. At first glance, it looked as if the swordsman had lopped and run. No planting of the head on a makeshift pike this time. She heard quiet, steady sobbing from down the hall.

  “I’m Pezzini,” she said. “I caught a similar case in the Village yesterday. Who’s in charge?”

  A plainclothes raised his hand. “McVickers, Homicide. We’ve been waiting for you. The wife found the body about an hour ago, when Chalmers didn’t come back to bed. Her screams alerted the maid, who phoned 911.”

  Sara scrunched up her forehead. “There was a wife and a maid in the house when the murder was committed?” “Apparently.”

  “Guy must be some kind of ghost. How’d he get up here? Did you talk to security?”

  “Security swears no one entered the building after ten p.m. We have videos of the main entrance, entry hall, elevators, and stairwell. We’re going over them now.”

  Sara looked around the room. It was constructed on two levels, with a broad sunken area, at least eight hundred square feet, filled with glass display cases and priceless objects. The top of one had been pried up on its hinges. Inside, what was obviously a display frame for a sword was empty.

  “Anybody know about the sword?” she asked, pointing. “That’s what we figured he used for a murder weapon. We got a call into the insurance company.”

  “Mind if I talk to the widow?”

  “Be my guest.”

  Sara followed the sobbing down a hall lined with Japanese and Chinese prints and brush paintings, past plinths topped with Chinese potteiy, past a life-sized terra-cotta warrior, to a sitting room in which a plump police matron tried to soothe the inconsolable widow.

  Sara put a hand on the widow’s shoulder. “I’m Detective Pezzini. I’m very sorry for your loss, Mrs. Chalmers.” The cop got the message and stood. A moment later, they were alone. The grieving widow appeared to be in her late twenties, with the leggy good looks of a Rockette. Her long blond hair slumped shapelessly over her satin-clad shoulders as she sniffled into a handkerchief.

  “Ma’am, I’m very sorry to intrude on your grief, but if we act quickly, we have a better chance of apprehending the killer. What is your name?”

  “Grace.”

  “You found your husband how, Grace?”

  “We were asleep last night. We’d been watching Leno. Scott leaned over and said he thought he heard something. I wasn’t really awake, but a few minutes later I heard a noise, a swooshing sound, and voices. And when I went to investigate, there he was ..

  “You have a maid?”

  “Yes, Giselda. She called 911. She knows what to do. She’s not afraid, she’s perfectly legal. She’s from Nicaragua.”

  “Did you notice the missing sword?”

  “Oh, no ...”

  “What?”

  “That damned sword! I should have known! He beat some other collector out in an online auction, and the other collector sent threatening e-mails. Scott had to put a block on him. Then, when the sword arrived, the deliveryman slipped on the stoop and ended up suing the association. When Scott opened the sword, he cut himself very badly.”

  “Was it a Muramasa sword, by any chance?”

  Grace looked at her with wide-eyed astonishment. Her eyes were green. Sara recalled from somewhere that this was Mrs. Chalmers number four. “That’s right. A very rare collector’s item. How did you know?”

  “Just a hunch. I would appreciate seeing anything you might have about the sword, including history, a cancelled check, how Mr. Chalmers learned of it, anything like that.”

  “All right.”

  “We’ll have to take Mr. Chalmers’ computer, the one he used to purchase the sword.”

  “Of course. I’ll show you where it is.”

  Sara thought the woman’s grief was a little showy. What the hell. So what if she’d married Chalmers for his money? She hadn’t killed him. Sara made a mental note to check up on the three prior Mrs. Chalmers, to see if any held a grudge. It was a long shot, but cases were made on less.

  Mrs. Chalmers showed Sara to Chalmers’ office. Sara ordered the computer boxed up and brought in. When she returned to the living room, Koenig and Kim had arrived.

  “We’ve got to stop meeting like this,” Koenig told her.

  “I agree. Did you take a look?”

  Koenig nodded. “Just like the other one. A clean cut. I have an enlargement of the striations, by the way. We should be able to match the cuts. Something tells me this killer is not going to great lengths to disguise his modus operandi.”

  It was nearly three by the time Sara returned to her apartment, where she switched off all the phones in defiance of regulations and fell into a deep sleep.

  CHAPTER

  THREE

  She was in the court of the Tokugawas ... and she was a man. He was kneeling on a cotton pad on the polished mahogany floor of a castle, wearing a white silk kimono displaying the family crest—a crab superimposed on a peony. Two samurai stood on either side, wearing kabuto of varnished leather, their hands resting on their long swords. Immediately in front of him knelt his son, Genz-aburo, eighteen-until the past week, an up-and-coming officer in the shogun’s army. Genzaburo wore a white silk kimono, also with the family crest. His topknot had been unceremoniously severed moments earlier. He knelt now, facing a slab of sandalwood atop which lay a simple sheathed tanto. Directly behind Genzaburo, feet at shoulder width, arms crossed behind him, stood the Captain of the Guard Kamo Atsutane wearing the double swords of his office.

  “Shigeyoshi!” barked Grand Superintendent Mizuno Kawachi no Kami Morinobu, in Japanese. The dreamer experienced the language both inside and outside. She could hear it as Japanese-harsh, indecipherable. At the same time, she heard its meaning clearly.

  “You have betrayed your shogun by collecting forbidden swords! When ordered to deliver these swords to the magistrate to be destroyed, you distributed them among your retainers! Most infamously, you gambled your future on the failure of your shogun! For this most heinous crime, you and your son, Genzaburo, a party to your betrayal, are ordered to commit seppuku.”

  Shigeyoshi looked up, from under his hedgerow brows, and saw his son, his pride and joy, face so young he had not yet begun to sprout facial hair. He looked beyond his son, out the open door to the garden out
side. It was overcast, and he could just see the branch of a gingko tree. Even in the pale autumn light, the leaves glowed luminescent.

  The breeze stirred through the great hall, bringing with it the scent of jasmin and horse manure.

  “Grand Superintendent!” Shigeyoshi declared in a firm voice. “Permission for my son and I to compose our death poems!”

  The Grand Superintendent, a squat, powerful man with a mustache like a swallow’s tail, nodded curtly. He motioned for the guard to provide paper and brushes. Moments later, these were given to Genzaburo and Shigeyoshi.

  Shigeyoshi had been working on the poem in his head for some time. The peculiar thing was, he felt no shame for betraying the shogun. He never liked the man, anyway. He felt instead a transcendent calm, a satori that he’d never studied, but somehow, on the knife edge of death, achieved. He saw in his mind a long line of glittering blades extending back two centuries to their creation.

  Extending far into the future, into a land that was as much straight up and down as horizontal, a place where life exploded in an unstable mix of barbarism and high culture.

  The universe tilted, with Shigeyoshi in the center. It was as if he could suddenly see all the way to the sun. All those glittering blades, extending far into the future, much farther than their origin in the past. The magistrate had always known he was destined for greater things. His own rise through the bureaucracy had been meteoric; he’d been hailed as one of the most talented of the Shogun’s administrators, and marked for great honors and responsibilities.

  Vanity, all, in the face of the purity represented by the Murmasa blades. Particularly the Blade. Which even now, had escaped the shogun’s wrath.

  The Grand Superintendent shoved him with a boot. “Go on! We don’t have all day! Do you have a poem in mind?”

  Taking brush in hand, Shigeyoshi wrote:

  As it flies into the sun How piercing the swallow’s song Feathers turn to dust

  Pleased with the steadiness of his hand, the casual but controlled line of his script, he handed the paper to the Grand Superintendent who held it before him like a proclamation, then rolled it tightly into a cylinder to be delivered to Shigeyoshi’s widow.

  Shigeyoshi was pleased to see that Genzaburo, too, had finished his poem and handed it to one of the guards.

  “May I know my son’s poem?” Shigeyoshi asked.

  “No,” the Grand Superintendent replied. “Proceed.”

  Shigeyoshi watched as Genzaburo let the front of his kimono fall open, revealing his flat belly over a knotted white loincloth. Composing himself, the boy gripped the tanto, removed the blade from the lacquered hardwood sheath, and, holding it in both hands, plunged it into his belly. The curved arc of his body jerked, once, then the boy regained control and drew the blade horizontally across the lower part of his abdomen to free his intestines. At a nod from the Grand Superintendent, the samurai to Genzaburo’s left drew his long sword, held the blade over his head for one heart-stopping instant, then brought it down in a killing stroke that severed Genzaburo’s head from his shoulders, and sent it rolling across the sandalwood base, trailing blood.

  How unnatural for a father to see his child die, Shigeyoshi thought. The thought was cool, as if he had not just seen the flesh of his blood forced to destroy himself. Beneath the cool, buried deep as within the heart of a glacier, a white-hot kernel of rage flickered. He had cut himself on the Blade, let his blood seep into its soul. He and the Blade were one now. Even if he were destroyed, his soul would live on. In the Blade.

  The Grand Superintendent nodded in satisfaction. “At least your son conducted himself like a samurai. Can you do less?”

  Shigeyoshi took in three long breaths and let them out. Untying the knot of his kimono, he let it fall open. His belly, too, was flat as the Hokkaido Road, despite his forty-plus years. He was samurai, and had not failed to practice his skills on a daily basis.

  Feeling an immense calm settle over him like the fog in Edo Bay, he grasped the natural finish honoki wood sheath of the katana before him and slowly removed the blade.

  He almost gasped. But years of Bushido had taught him to control his emotions, and he gave no sign. How could they make such a mistake? Or was it a mistake? Had the Emperor deliberately ordered the Muramasa placed there as a form of ironic punishment?

  No. Nor was it a mistake. It was a sign—a sign that he, Shigeyoshi, was correct and the emperor was wrong! Freeing the blade entirely, he rocked forward on his knees, got the balls of his feet under him, rose in a twisting motion and plunged the blade forcefully through the Grand Superintendent’s belly an instant before a guard rushed forward and killed him with a single blow, albeit not as artful as that which had dispatched his son.

  Sara woke with a piercing pain in her neck and shoulder. The bedclothes were twisted and drenched with sweat. Shmendrick was purring loudly and licking her cheek with his sandpaper tongue. Sara lay there for a minute, gasping, wondering what she’d done to cause such pain, until it gradually subsided. She tried to connect it to the dream she’d been having, but it was one of those dreams, so utterly vivid while you dream it, that disappear like cotton candy in the rain the moment you wake.

  Thank God the pain subsided. She must have twisted something working out the other day, and this was a delayed reaction.

  By the time she had stretched, showered, and eaten something, it was noon. She turned on her cell phone. It immediately began ringing. She thumbed the button.

  “Pezzini.”

  “The crap has hit the fan,” Siry said.

  “Give me a minute, Joe. I just woke up.”

  “Yeah. I know you were out late and I’m sorry to bother you,” he said sarcastically, “but somehow Channel 6 got wind of the two decapitations, and they’re beating the drum about a samurai killer. Turn on the news.”

  Sara thumbed on her remote and the small Sony flared into life. She switched to Channel 6, and there was footage of her arriving on her motorcycle and taking off her helmet. She turned on the sound.

  “... homicide detective Sara Pezzini, who has been involved in a series of high-profile cases with bizarre elements.” She turned it off.

  “What do they know?” she asked Siry.

  “They know two prominent Manhattanites, one an antique dealer, the other a collector, have had their heads lopped off. And even though we ain’t said one word about it, they’re speculating that in each case something was taken.”

  “Did they mention swords?”

  “No, and thank God for small favors. I want you to come down here and give a statement.”

  Sara sighed. “Oh, Joe ...”

  “Yeah, yeah, I know you hate this p.r. bat guano. I hate it, too. But you do it so well. So hop on your Yamaguchi and zip on down here, will ya? Oh, and by the way, got anything new?”

  “The killer took a sword made by a famous sword-smith named Muramasa. And I suspect the same was taken from Bachman.”

  “Well that's something. I’ll need a report.”

  “Before, or after I meet the press?"

  “Don’t bust my chops. I scheduled a conference for five p.m. That way, we can at least make the bastards sweat a little. Come on in—you’ll have the space you need to compose your report and whatever you’re gonna tell ’em. We’ll work it out together.”

  “Thanks, Joe. You're a pip.”

  Sara showered, dressed, inhaled a yogurt and a banana, fed Shmendrick, packed her kit and split. As she opened her front door, Weiskopf opened his with the swift moves of someone who’d been waiting a while. “They’re back,” he declared.

  “Who’s back?” Sara asked, knowing full well, and wondering how she was going to get out of this.

  “Those juvenile delinquents! I can hear ’em right now down there, playing that crapola music.”

  “Okay, Ben. I’ll go talk to them.”

  “Yeah, that’s right,” Weiskopf said with an air of defeat. “Go talk to them.”

  Sara took the elevator to
the lobby. As soon as the doors opened, she could hear loud salsa music emanating from the front door. At least it wasn’t rap. She briefly considered shooting the boom box, but then she’d have to file a discharge report, and they’d put her on suspension. If anyone complained.

  On the other hand, sad to say, she could hear gunshots occasionally at night, and no reports were ever filed. She looked out. It was relatively gloomy in the marble lobby, and bright outside, so she doubted the pachucos had detected her presence. She counted five of them, including the girl Lupe, and a smooth new player wearing wide, pleated cotton trousers with suspenders over his muscle shirt, revealing a sinewy torso covered with tattoos.

  Making sure her badge was visible, Sara strode out the front door, took one look at the boom box and froze. The pachucos watched with amusement as she dug in her backpack for a piece of paper. They stopped smiling when she shut off the boom box.

  “Hey, what for you do that, cop lady?” said one of the lesser fish, a kid whose hairline mustache did little to conceal the acne constellations stretching across his face.

  Sara turned the boom box around so she could read the serial number, ostensibly matching it to a slip of paper she held in her hand. “Guys, you may not believe this, but this boom box is stolen. I’m going to have to confiscate it.”

  “You can’t do that!” acne constellation wailed. “I pay my man Roberto twenty bucks for that box!”

  “Would you be willing to testify to that in court?” Sara asked earnestly. Acne constellation was silent. Suspenders grinned wolfishly.

  “’Ey, guapa," he said. “Yesterday you told me ese Hector off pretty good. Jorge Candido, El Presidente for life of the Brooklyn Romeros.” He held out his hand.

  Sara took it. “Sara Pezzini, Eleventh Precinct. Pleased to meet you, Jorge. Could you and me maybe have a little talk?” '

  “Whoah,” said acne constellation.

  “Look out,” said another.

  Lupe knotted her pretty little face into a scowl.

  “Just you and me, officer?”