Chapter Seventeen
Los Angeles, California
The floor of Ito’s living room was still stained with his blood.
Sam stared at it for a moment before following Navarro, Lennox, and the two LAPD detectives into Ito’s bedroom.
Detectives Burroughs and Desoto had met them at Ito’s front door, handing out gloves and shoe covers like party favors. They’d already been searching the apartment for hours.
Sam hoped they’d found some answers. “Do we still think that Danny Takahashi did this?” he asked the group. “Or are we looking at another doer?”
“That’s our assumption,” Burroughs said. “We never saw the assailant’s face, but he matches Danny’s size and build.”
“We know Danny was in San Diego on Sunday,” Navarro said, “when he shot at Kit the second time and then had the shootout with Nicchi in front of Ella Sherman’s house.
He was in San Diego on Tuesday, because that’s when he killed Paolo and Laurette Curry and broke into Akiko’s house.
But we don’t know where he was on Monday.
He could have come up here to search Ito’s condo and beaten him up and driven back to San Diego in time to do all those other things. ”
“Knowing that Danny Takahashi came from one of Ito’s dojos may explain why Ito isn’t dead,” Detective Desoto said. “He’s the only victim who’s lived so far. Well, and Nicchi, assuming it was Danny who shot at him in front of the Sherman woman’s house. Danny’s shot everyone else in the head.”
“But he couldn’t shoot Ito,” Sam said. He’d thought the same thing.
“He beat him nearly to death, though,” Lennox said, clearly skeptical.
“And a bullet would have been far less personal. It could be that the beating was to get Ito to tell him where to find whatever it was that he was looking for.” She gestured to the mess all around them.
The mattress had been gutted, photos knocked off the walls. Knickknacks littered the floor.
It was like that in every room of Ito’s condo. The place had been thoroughly searched, just like the other homes—Mary Sherman’s, Paolo’s, Laurette Curry’s, and Akiko’s.
That Danny Takahashi might have killed Akiko, if she’d been home, made Sam’s stomach churn. He thought about Paolo, how his face had been rendered unrecognizable.
“The severity with which both Ito and Paolo were beaten usually indicates intense emotion,” Sam said, “maybe rage or frustration. Or it could have been a psychopath’s absence of feeling. We won’t know until we find him and talk to him.”
“He could have killed Ito, though,” Detective Desoto insisted. “Instead he left him alive and able to ID him.”
Sam nodded. “True. And he didn’t kill Nicchi when he had the chance. Maybe it had something to do with the fact that both Ito and Nicchi were his sensei. Depending on how long he’d trained, there might be an instinctive inability to deal that final death blow.”
“Or maybe he thought that Ito was dead,” Navarro said. “Like you said, Dr. Reeves, we have to find him and ask him.”
Lennox looked around the bedroom. “What have you found here?”
“Photo albums,” Burroughs said with a gleam in his eye. “We’d just found them when you knocked.”
“They were in that wall safe,” Desoto said, pointing to the open safe. “Combo was Akiko McKittrick’s birthday.”
“Of course it was,” Sam murmured. “All those wasted years…”
“Yeah,” Lennox said quietly.
“Ito’s wife divorced him,” Detective Burroughs said. “Irreconcilable differences, according to the divorce decree, and Ito signed away his custodial rights.”
Desoto held up one finger. “But he paid child support and alimony for years, even though it wasn’t court ordered or even mentioned in the decree. Or he tried to, at least.”
Lennox looked surprised. “How do you know that?”
“Returned uncashed checks.” Desoto picked up a small box from the desk. “Also in the safe. He wrote a very generous check to Sakura Ito every month from the time of their divorce until 1991. But the checks were returned to him. She never took his money.”
Frowning, Sam glanced at Lennox, then at Navarro. “He wrote checks to Sakura Ito, but she’d changed her name to Nakamura. That might be why she never cashed them. But how did he know where to send them?”
“What’s this about Nakamura?” Burroughs asked, and Lennox explained what Kit had uncovered.
“And Sakura died in 1990,” Lennox finished.
“So he didn’t know she’d died,” Sam said, the realization making him sad. “Do you know where he sent the checks?”
Desoto held up a clear evidence bag with an envelope in it. “She had a PO box here in LA.”
“He didn’t know she’d moved to Nevada,” Lennox said, then she frowned, too. “How did she keep a PO box if she had all new ID?”
“Maybe she kept her old ID as well,” Navarro guessed. “If she was keen on hiding from Ito, she would have wanted him not to look for her. We can check the DMV database to see when her Sakura Ito driver’s license expired.”
“What the hell did Ito do to make her cover her tracks so thoroughly?” Desoto wondered.
Sam had the same question. “It must have been bad or presented some danger to her or the children. My bet is she feared for her children. That’s usually why women leave and that’s especially true when they seek new identities.
” He picked up one of the three photo albums on the desk.
“Let’s see what was so important that Ito locked it away in a safe.
” He opened the album and sucked in a breath.
“Oh.” There was a baby, Japanese, maybe six months old.
She was wearing a dress and smiling widely.
Carefully he lifted the photo out of the corner mounts and turned it over. Akiko Jones. “It’s Akiko.”
He replaced the photo in its mounts, then turned the page.
More photos of a little girl—first a toddler, then a preschooler, then there were school pictures.
By the time he got to the school photos, the child more clearly resembled the Akiko he knew.
Then there were dojo photos—Akiko in her little gi, her hair in a high ponytail, later as a teenager, her expression focused and almost grim.
A final one, a photo of Ito and Akiko together, holding ice cream cones at the beach.
Both smiling. She looked to be about eighteen. “Akiko will want these.”
“Once they’re no longer needed for evidence, we’ll return them to her,” Desoto promised. “If Ito’s…you know. Gone.”
Which, given his current condition, was a possibility.
“I’ve got photos of the Sherman twins,” Navarro said, holding out the album he held so that everyone could see. “Dahlia and Raisa.”
“All the grandchildren he never publicly acknowledged,” Lennox said. “But he seemed to have cared for them. Supports the idea that he was trying to protect them by not telling them the truth.”
“Protection from?” Burroughs asked.
“We were wondering if Ito was involved in organized crime,” Lennox said.
“That makes sense,” Desoto said, “because of Danny Takahashi, Paolo, and the gun running. But if Ito was involved, he hid it well. We haven’t seen anything resembling a link to organized crime here in his condo.
We haven’t gotten his financials yet. We’re hoping to have them later today. Maybe that’ll show us something.”
Sam hoped that Ito wasn’t involved. For Akiko’s sake. But it didn’t look good.
He set the album aside and picked up the third.
“This album is of Ito as a young man. This one looks like his high school graduation,” he said, pulling free a photo that showed three young men in caps and gowns, arms across one another’s shoulders.
He flipped it over. “Three first names—Eddie, Mitch, and Joe. No last names. Eddie would be Ito. There’s also a year—1964.
” He turned the photo to study it more closely, tilting it when Lennox leaned to look as well.
“The sign behind them says MacKenzie High School.”
“That’s downtown,” Burroughs said. “Became a charter school for science and tech about twenty years ago. They’ll have old yearbooks, so we should be able to ID the other two. Why are you interested in this photo?”
“Not sure,” Sam said, then had a thought. Or more like a memory. He googled Kenzo Takahashi on his phone. Kenzo was only in his fifties, so that wasn’t him in the photo. But…“Kenzo Takahashi’s father was Michitaka Takahashi.”
“Mitch,” Lennox said with approval. “Nicely done, Doc.”
“How did you know that?” Navarro asked.
Sam shrugged. “Kit was talking about Kenzo and his father, the businesses they started. Now, knowing that Kenzo’s son studied karate with Ricky Nicchi at Ito’s dojo…It seems the families are closer than we thought. Has anyone approached Kenzo Takahashi yet?”
“We haven’t,” Desoto said. “We planned to interview him later today. Why?”
“These three young men look like best friends. If Ito is involved in something illegal—something he might have protected his children and his grandchildren from—and he was friends with Mitch back in the sixties…I don’t know.
It seems like we should get more information before we knock on Kenzo’s door. ”
“Not show our hand too soon?” Burroughs asked.
Sam nodded slowly. “Or not alert Kenzo to the fact that Akiko is his daughter, if he doesn’t already know.
That might have been what Ito was trying to hide.
Otherwise, why wouldn’t Kenzo have adopted her out of foster care?
But Ito didn’t do that. He left her there in foster care, while seeing her every week at the dojo.
I don’t know much about Akiko’s background, but I do know that she was in several homes.
At least one bad one before coming to McKittrick House.
Maybe Ito didn’t adopt her because he didn’t want Kenzo to find out about her. ”
“Mary Sherman left her in the system, too,” Lennox said. “Assuming she knew.”
Sam thought of Alf Ashton’s wife, how she’d surrendered her child for adoption. How she’d hinted that she’d done so because her home life at the time was abusive. How she wouldn’t have tried contacting her son unless he was in some sort of danger.