South Phoenix Rules (David Mapstone Mystery 6)

After a long silence, she nodded. “I guess I did.”

Now my stomach had a hole straight through it. “Was that before or after you screamed last night?”

Her eyes grew wide and wet again. “Everything happened fast, all right? But it was right there. And it mattered. So I did it. Now you can arrest me and all your fucking problems will be over, David, except they won’t.”

“Our problems are just beginning.” I said it quietly. She had taken evidence, tampered with it. A crime. Unless I called Kate Vare that moment, I was a part of it.

The house was silent for a long time. Finally, Robin took off the chain and rested it gently on the table.

“This was the most important thing in the world to him. He told me that if anything ever happened, he wanted me to have it.” She touched it tenderly, then slid it toward me. “He wanted me to show it to you. He said you’d know what it meant.”

7

She slid the dog tags at me like Kryptonite. It made me think of the Superman comics I collected as

a kid. I had filled a cardboard citrus box full of them, and today they’d really be worth money, but somewhere along the way I dumped them. I was having too many such magical thinking moments lately. Exhaustion, fear, and anger competed for my emotional center. I ran the Arizona Revised Statutes through my head, counting all the laws I was on the verge of violating. I stopped at seven.

Then I looked over at Robin again. She had shown up unexpectedly a year before, Lindsey’s half-sister, a woman she barely knew as an adult. And yet she had become important to Lindsey. Vital, especially the past few months. Now my one undamaged connection to Lindsey was ensuring this woman’s protection. I picked up the tags and examined them.

The information stamped into the two-inch-long, aged metal was basic: a name, serial number followed by some other numerals, another name and an address, all on five lines. There was a small notch in the end of each tag. I had wanted to study military history, but the discipline was frowned upon when I was in graduate school. My advisor had urged me to consider gender studies. But I was enough of an amateur scholar to know this data was from World War II. The numbers “43-45” indicated the years of immunization shots. The soldier’s blood type was O. He was a Protestant. The name and address were whom to notify in case of emergency. They went to Poston, Arizona. And the soldier’s name was Johnny Kurita. It was as far from the Sinaloa cartel, or a Hispanic academic from New York, as you could get.

“Nisei,” I said.

“The second generation,” Robin said. “The children of Japanese immigrants to America.”

I nodded, pleasantly surprised. Outside of her art knowledge, Robin had always seemed street smart rather than book smart, certainly not well versed in my dying discipline. I said, “The Poston address makes sense, too. Lots of Nisei were forcibly interned in World War II. Poston was a camp.” I hated to use the words, but they were accurate. “An American concentration camp.”

“And yet this Johnny Kurita was in the service?”

“The Nisei soldiers were famous for their bravery.”

“Why would they fight for a country that had done that to them?”

I let that sit. “What was Johnny Kurita to Jax?”

“He never said. But he always wore the chain and dog tags. I’d ask him about it, but he’d just say it was a memento. Something passed on to him. But it was really like an amulet to him. He’d touch it almost obsessively. When he took it off and let me hold it, I knew I was getting somewhere.”

“He didn’t explain it? No story behind it?”

“He said, ‘when I get to know you better.’ But that didn’t happen.” Her voice choked.

“And yet he said if anything happened to him, to give it to me…”

“Yes, that was about a week ago.”

“When, exactly.”

“Don’t be such a bastard, David. That’s not really you.” She screwed up her brow. “It was last Thursday night. We’d made love. I was touching his chest and playing with the dog tags. He put his hand on mine and said it. When I asked him about it, he just smiled and said, ‘it’s no big deal. Just a thought.’ I didn’t know what he meant.”

“Was he worried? Had anyone made threats against him?”

She shook her head. “There were never any threats. He was kind of a loner, which I appreciate. So I never met his friends here, if he had any. And he was new to town. He did seem distracted that night. Not quite himself.”

“Maybe he had somebody to kill.”

“He wasn’t a hit man!”

I asked her about where they went on dates. It was nothing out of the ordinary, although from the names of some of the restaurants they patronized it was clear he had money. Did he run into any old acquaintances? Anybody who might have seen her with him, and somehow chose her to send this horrific message? No. Did she ever feel as if they were being followed when they drove back here? No.