Chapter Twenty-Four #2
“I will be. Hurts like a bitch, though. How’s your pop?”
“Better.”
“And your sister? I thought she’d come with you.”
“She did. She’s talking to Ito’s new nurses.”
Lennox eyed the old man in the bed. “I hope he talks to us now.”
“He’d better,” Kit said.
“I’m right here, Detectives,” Ito said, his voice much stronger than it had been. “I can hear you.”
“Good,” Lennox said, a bitter edge to her voice. “If you’d been honest with us, none of us would have gotten hurt.”
Ito’s mouth tightened. “For that, I am sorry.”
Kit didn’t accept his apology, because it wasn’t all right. But he cared for Akiko, so she’d afford him the minimum of respect. “We’re sorry for your loss, Mr. Ito,” she said instead. “We know that you were friends with Joe Fujioka for many years.”
There was no reaction to Joe’s name other than sadness. No anger or bitterness. So he probably didn’t know yet.
“Thank you, Detective.” Then Ito’s gaze focused on the doorway because Akiko had just come in. “Akiko.”
She inclined her head in a small bow. “Hanshi.”
Ito winced at the formality. “Will you come sit near me?”
Akiko did as he asked, murmuring a thank-you to Navarro when he pushed one of the visitor chairs next to Ito’s bed. She lowered herself into the chair and looked at Nicchi. “Are you all right?”
“I’ll live,” Nicchi said. “I’m glad Kit and Sam got you out. We were on our way to help you when we were attacked by one of Bob’s men.”
“I know. I’m happy you were able to stop him.”
Everyone had spoken so primly, so stiffly. They weren’t going to get anywhere like this.
Kit cleared her throat. “We have a few details to share, but we have a lot more questions. I assume you two have answers. Can we begin? Because I’d like to get back to my father.”
“Ask your questions, Detective.” Ito held out a hand for Akiko, but she kept her hands tightly clasped in her lap.
The old man seemed to sag into himself. “I will say that we thought we were doing the right thing. If we’d been successful, it would have been.
Akiko would have been protected and never brought into her father’s orbit. Now, the point is moot.”
Kit briefly considered telling Ito the truth now but dismissed the thought. The truth could upset him to the point that he might be unable—or unwilling—to give them the information they needed. Ito owed them that information. So she waited.
She assumed that Navarro had brought Lennox up to speed. It seemed that the others were letting Kit take the lead. Fair enough.
“That’s what Joe said last night.” Before I killed him.
Kit wasn’t sorry. If she hadn’t acted, she and Sam would be dead, and Joe would have made Akiko his prisoner until she decided not to tell anyone what he’d done.
So…forever. “But he wasn’t very specific in exactly what you’d done. Please tell us.”
“We knew that Bob had discovered Akiko’s existence,” Ito began.
“Wait,” Akiko interrupted. “How? We don’t know how he found out about me.” She glanced at Kit. “Do we?”
Kit shook her head. “That’s one of my questions. Mr. Ito?”
“I’m not entirely sure,” Ito admitted. “I was hoping you knew. It had something to do with her boat, because Joe saw photos of Akiko and her boat on Bob’s desk. That’s how he knew she’d been exposed. Then Joe came to me.”
That Bob had photos made sense. He’d been on her boat twice, the first time on her first day of business, so he’d known for at least five years. Hopefully they’d be able to figure out how he’d known, if only for Akiko’s peace of mind.
“So Joe came to you,” Kit said. “Why? Were you still close?”
“No. We’d stopped speaking after my twins were murdered.
Joe had brought them here to LA, given them jobs, and never told me they were here.
When I learned that they were dead—from Mary, who was only fourteen—and that Akiko had been surrendered to the foster system…
Well, I was furious. I let him know just how angry I was.
He asked what he could do to make amends, and I told him to make sure that Kenzo never discovered that Minnie had a child.
That if Kenzo did, he’d seize custody, and Akiko would be raised to be a criminal.
Like Joe. He agreed to listen for any mention of Akiko.
He didn’t expect that it would come from his own son. ”
Kit understood why Joe had been so solicitous. He hadn’t wanted to admit to his affair with Ito’s wife. “So Joe came to you and said, ‘Bob’s got a photo of Akiko.’ Then what happened?”
“Joe said that when he asked Bob who the photo was of, Bob said the woman owned a boat he planned to use to move contraband. I knew my Akiko wouldn’t do that, that Bob would have to frame her.
She would only be safe if we could get Bob and Kenzo to take each other out before Akiko was involved.
Initially, we didn’t know why Bob had chosen Akiko, just that we had to keep Bob from framing her.
It wasn’t until we got into the Takahashi ledgers that we realized that Bob had been stealing from Kenzo for years. ”
“Did Mary find the stealing?” Kit asked.
“It was Mary and Hanshi together,” Ricky replied.
“Mr. Ito was an accountant back in the day,” Kit observed.
“He still is,” Akiko said. “His license has lapsed, but he handles the accounts for both dojos, and he helped me set up my business accounts. How much did Bob steal?”
“Not a lot,” Ricky said. “Which was puzzling. It wasn’t enough to buy an island in the Caribbean or anything.
But it was enough to bring down several of Kenzo’s businesses in the past. He’d manipulated the accounts to make it look like there was a lot less income into the businesses Kenzo started up.
The businesses his father started were left alone.
That was our first red flag that Bob was trying to undermine Kenzo’s position.
I studied Bob’s hiring and firing of security personnel and that also raised a red flag.
He’d steadily fired bodyguards and other personnel that had excellent records.
He personally hired their replacements. He built himself an army of loyal soldiers. ”
“We met one of them last night,” Kit said. “His name was Torrence. Joe killed him.”
“We met one of them, too,” Lennox said dryly. “His name was Sullivan. Nicchi took him out before he could kill us.”
Nicchi didn’t deny it. “At any rate, we began to see that Bob was trying to take over the business. We figured if Bob knew about Akiko, he somehow knew who she was to Kenzo. Joe insisted he’d been careful, that Bob couldn’t have found out from him, but I was doubtful.”
Joe hadn’t been all that careful, Kit thought. Nancy Sayer had seen him watching Sakura’s house once a month for fourteen years. And if Nancy had observed him, maybe Bob had, too. After all, Bob had known where to find Minako and Ichiro the night he’d killed them.
Nicchi was watching Kit shrewdly. “I had a lot of questions for Joe, but he was good at evading them. I wanted to know how he recognized Akiko from a photo on Bob’s desk.” Nicchi met Kit’s eyes. “You know, don’t you?”
Kit didn’t reply. Nicchi had kept secrets for days. He could have helped their investigation, but he hadn’t. She’d hold on to her secrets for a few more minutes.
“Joe said he was responsible for the attacks on Kenzo’s businesses,” Sam said when the silence became awkward.
Nicchi sucked in his cheeks and settled in his chair, his expression angry. But he didn’t push. For now.
Ito shook his head. “That was mostly Mary and me. Joe had access to Kenzo and to the company’s servers, so we’d give him files and he’d upload them.
As accountants, Mary and I were able to develop fake books to make it appear that Bob was embezzling a lot more than he was. We wanted Kenzo to notice.”
“Mary had just finished last week when she was in LA the last time,” Nicchi said.
“She focused on the casino, because that was Kenzo’s pride and joy—and his only legacy because Bob had ruined his other startups.
The casino was already being investigated by the gaming commission because we anonymously called in accounting discrepancies. ”
“Which you had engineered,” Kit said.
Nicchi nodded. “Joe was supposed to have uploaded the fake books this past Monday, but then Mary was murdered and everything fell apart.”
“I created fake memos signed by Bob,” Ito said, “and I canceled several convention reservations. That cost the hotels money and hurt their reputations when the clients complained. One or two instances could have been smoothed over, but we dropped a lot of bombs quickly and across all Kenzo’s businesses.
Kenzo finally noticed and tasked Joe with finding the culprit. ”
“But Joe was the culprit,” Kit said.
Lennox frowned. “Why didn’t Joe just tell Kenzo that Bob was trying to overthrow him?”
Nicchi scowled. “That was my idea at the beginning, but Joe said that Kenzo would have killed Bob, maintained control, and still found out about Akiko, since Bob had been taking photos of her and her boat. Which is probably true, but I never trusted Joe. He was playing both sides of the fence.” He focused on Kit.
“Why did Joe even care about Akiko?” He glanced at Kit’s sister. “No offense.”
Akiko shrugged and said nothing.
Kit sighed. “Okay. Well, like I said, we do have a few things to share. Some of them might not be easy to hear. But I’m going to go back to Bob for a moment.
He didn’t just want Kenzo’s business. He hated Kenzo and had since he was twelve years old.
Kenzo killed his parents. Joe didn’t know he knew when he took him in. ”
Ito’s eyes had widened, and he and Nicchi shared a glance. “That explains a lot,” Nicchi said. “What else did Bob do?”
“He killed Minako and Ichiro.”
Ito gasped. “What? Bob?” The machine monitoring his pulse began to beep, so he pursed his lips, taking deep breaths through his nose until his heartbeat had slowed. “I wish I’d killed him.”