18

   As usual, the fifth-floor anteroom of the downtown detective division was busy, even at two o’clock in the morning. Detectives moved among the beat-up prostitutes and twitching druggies brought in for questioning; in the corner a man in a checked sport coat was shouting, “I said, shut the fuck up!” over and over to a female officer with a clipboard.
   In all the swirl and noise, Masao Ishiguro looked distinctly out of place. Wearing his blue pinstripe suit, he sat in the corner with his head bowed and his knees pressed together. He had a cardboard box balanced on his knees.
   When he saw us, he jumped to his feet. He bowed deeply, placing his hands flat on his thighs, a sign of additional respect. He held the bow for several seconds. Then he immediately bowed again, and this time he waited, bent over, staring at the floor, until Connor spoke to him in Japanese. Ishiguro’s reply, also in Japanese, was quiet and deferential. He kept looking at the floor.
   Tom Graham pulled me over by the water cooler. “Holy Christ,” he said. “It looks like we got a fucking confession happening here.”
   “Yeah, maybe,” I said. I wasn’t convinced. I’d seen Ishiguro change his demeanor before.
   I watched Connor as he talked to Ishiguro. The Japanese man remained hangdog. He kept looking at the floor.
   “I never would have figured him,” Graham said. “Not in a million years. Never him.”
   “How is that?”
   “Are you kidding? To kill the girl, and then to stay in the room, and order us around. What fucking nerves of steel. But look at him now: Christ, he’s almost crying.”
   It was true: tears seemed to be welling up in Ishiguro’s eyes. Connor took the box and turned away, crossing the room to us. He gave me the box. “Deal with this. I’m going to take a statement from Ishiguro.”
   “So,” Graham said. “Did he confess?”
   “To what?”
   “The murder.”
   “Hell, no,” Connor said. “What makes you think that?”
   “Well, he’s over there bowing and scraping—“
   “That’s just sumimasen,” Connor said. “I wouldn’t take it too seriously.”
   “He’s practically crying,” Graham said.
   “Only because he thinks it’ll help him.”
   “He didn’t confess?”
   “No. But he discovered that the tapes had been removed, after all. That means he made a serious mistake, with his public blustering in front of the mayor. Now he could be accused of concealing evidence. He could be disbarred. His corporation could be disgraced. Ishiguro is in big trouble, and he knows it.”
   I said, “And that’s why he’s so humble?”
   “Yes. In Japan, if you screw up, the best thing is to go to the authorities and make a big show of how sorry you are, and how bad you feel, and how you will never do it again. It’s pro forma, but the authorities will be impressed by how you’ve learned your lesson. That’s sumimasen: apology without end. It’s the Japanese version of throwing yourself on the mercy of the court. It’s understood to be the best way to get leniency. And that’s all Ishiguro is doing.”
   “You mean it’s an act,” Graham said, his eyes hardening.
   “Yes and no. It’s difficult to explain. Look. Review the tapes. Ishiguro says he brought one of the VCRs, because the tapes are recorded in an unusual format, and he was afraid we wouldn’t be able to play them. Okay?”
   I opened the cardboard box. I saw twenty small eight-millimeter cartridges, like audio cassette cartridges. And I saw a small box, the size of a Walkman, which was the VCR. It had cables to hook to a TV.
   “Okay,” I said. “Let’s have a look.”

   The first of the tapes that showed the forty-sixth floor was a view from the atrium camera, high up, looking down. The tape showed people working on the floor, in what looked like an ordinary office day. We fast-forwarded through that. Shadows of sunlight coming through the windows swung in hot arcs across the floor, and then disappeared. Gradually, the light on the floor softened and dimmed, as daylight came to an end. One by one, desk lights came on. The workers moved more slowly now. Eventually they began to depart, leaving their desks one by one. As the population thinned, we noticed something else. Now the camera moved occasionally, panning one or another of the workers as they passed beneath. Yet at other times, the camera would not pan. Eventually we realized the camera must be equipped for automatic focusing and tracking. If there was a lot of movement in the frame—several people going in different directions—then the camera did not move. But if the frame was mostly empty, the camera would fix on a single person walking through, and track him.
   “Funny system,” Graham said.
   “It probably makes sense for a security camera,” I said. “They’d be much more concerned about a single person on the floor than a crowd.”
   As we watched, the night lights came on. The desks were all empty. Now the tape began to flicker rapidly, almost like a strobe.
   “Something wrong with this tape?” Graham said, suspiciously. “They fucked around with it?”
   “I don’t know. No, wait. It’s not that. Look at the clock.”
   On the far wall, we could see the office clock. The minute hands were sweeping smoothly from seven-thirty toward eight o’clock.
   “It’s time lapse,” I said.
   “What is it, taking snapshots?”
   I nodded. “Probably, when the system doesn’t detect anybody for a while, it begins to take single frames every ten or twenty seconds, until—“
   “Hey. What’s that?”
   The flickering had stopped. The camera had begun to pan to the right, across the deserted floor. But there was nobody in the frame. Just empty desks, and occasional night lights, which flared in the video.
   “Maybe they have a wide sensor,” I said. “That looks beyond the borders of the image itself. Either that, or it’s being moved manually. By a guard, somewhere. Maybe down in the security room.”
   The panning image came to rest on the elevator doors. The doors were at the far right, in deep shadow, beneath a kind of ceiling overhang that blocked our view.
   “Jeez, dark under there. Is someone there?”
   “I can’t see anything,” I said.
   The image began to swim in and out of focus.
   “What’s happening now?” Graham said.
   “Looks like the automatic focus is having trouble. Maybe it can’t decide what to focus on. Maybe the overhang is bothering the logic circuits. My video camera at home does the same thing. The focus gets screwed up when it can’t tell what I am shooting.”
   “So is the camera trying to focus on something? Because I can’t see anything. It just looks black under there.”
   “No, look. There’s someone there. You can see pale legs. Very faint.”
   “Christ,” Graham said, “that’s our girl. Standing by the elevator. No, wait. Now she’s moving.”
   A moment later, Cheryl Austin stepped from beneath the ceiling overhang, and we saw her clearly for the first time.

   She was beautiful and assured. She moved unhesitatingly into the room. She was direct, purposeful in her movements, with none of the awkward, shuffling sloppiness of the young.
   “Jesus, she’s good-looking,” Graham said. Cheryl Austin was tall and slender; her short blond hair made her seem even taller. Her carriage was erect. She turned slowly, surveying the room as if she owned it.
   “I can’t believe we’re seeing this,” Graham said.
   I knew what he meant. This was a girl who had been killed just a few hours before. Now we were seeing her on a videotape, walking around just minutes before her death.
   On the monitor, Cheryl picked up a paperweight on one of the desks, turned it in her hand, put it back. She opened her purse, closed it again. She glanced at her watch.
   “Starting to fidget.”
   “She doesn’t like to be kept waiting,” Graham said. “And I bet she doesn’t have much practice at it, either. Not a girl like that.”
   She began to tap on the desk with her fingers in a distinct rhythm. It seemed familiar to me. She bobbed her head to the rhythm. Graham squinted at the screen, “Is she talking? Is she saying something?”
   “It looks like it,” I said. We could barely see her mouth moving. And then I suddenly put it together, her movements, everything. I realized I could sync her lips. “I chew my nails and I twiddle my thumbs. I’m real nervous but it sure is fun. Oh baby, you drive me crazy…”
   “Jesus,” Graham said. “You’re right. How’d you know that?”
   “Goodness, gracious, great balls of—“
   Cheryl stopped singing. She turned toward the elevators.
   “Ah. Here we go.”
   Cheryl walked toward the elevators. Just as she stepped beneath the overhang, she threw her arms around the man who had arrived. They embraced and kissed warmly. But the man remained beneath the overhang. We could see his arms around Cheryl, but we could not see his face.
   “Shit,” Graham said.
   “Don’t worry,” I said. “We’ll see him in a minute. If not this camera, another camera. But I think we can say this is not somebody she just met. This is somebody she already knows.”
   “Not unless she’s real friendly. Yeah, look. This guy isn’t wasting any time.”
   The man’s hands slid up the black dress, raising her skirt. He squeezed her buttocks. Cheryl Austin pressed against his body. Their clinch was intense, passionate. Together they moved deeper into the room, turning slowly. Now the man’s back was to us. Her skirt was bunched around her waist. She reached down to rub his crotch. The couple half walked, half stumbled to the nearest desk. The man bent her back against the desk and suddenly she protested, pushing him away.
   “Ah, ah. Not so fast,” Graham said. “Our girl has standards, after all.”
   I wondered if that was it. Cheryl seemed to have led him on, then changed her mind. I noticed that she had changed moods almost instantaneously. It made me wonder if she had been acting all along, if her passion was faked. Certainly the man did not seem particularly surprised by her sudden change. Sitting up on the desk, she kept pushing at him, almost angrily. The man stepped away. His back was still to us. We couldn’t see his face. As soon as he had stepped back, she changed again: smiling, kittenish now. With slow movements, she got off the desk and adjusted her skirt, twisting her body provocatively as she looked around. We could see his ear and the side of his face, just enough to see that his jaw was moving. He was talking to her. She smiled at him, and came forward, slid her arms around his neck. Then they began kissing again, their hands moving over each other. Walking slowly through the office, toward the conference room.
   “So. Did she choose the conference room?”
   “Hard to say.”
   “Shit, I still can’t see his face.”
   By now they were near the center of the room; and the camera was shooting almost directly down. All we saw was the top of his head.
   I said, “Does he look Japanese to you?”
   “Fuck. Who can tell. How many other cameras were in that room?”
   “Four others.”
   “Well. His face can’t be blocked in all four. We’ll nail his ass.”
   I said, “You know, Tom, this guy looks pretty big. He looks taller than she is. And she was a tall girl.”
   “Who can tell, in this angle? I can’t tell anything except he has a suit on. Okay. There they go, toward the conference room.”
   As they approached the room, she suddenly began to struggle.
   “Oops,” Graham said. “She’s unhappy again. Moody young thing, isn’t she?”
   The man gripped her tightly and she spun, trying to twist free. He half carried her, half dragged her to the room. At the doorway, she spun a final time, grabbed the door frame, struggling.
   “She lose the purse there?”
   “Probably. I can’t see clearly.”
   The conference room was located directly opposite the camera, so we had a view of the entire room. But the interior of the conference room was very dark, so the two people were silhouetted against the lights of the skyscrapers through the outer glass windows. The man lifted her up in his arms and set her down on the table, rolled her onto her back. She became passive, liquid, as he slid her skirt up her hips. She seemed to be accepting, moving to meet him, and then he made a quick movement between their bodies, and suddenly something flew away.
   “There go the panties.”
   It looked as if they landed on the floor. But it was hard to tell for sure. If they were panties, they were black, or some other dark color. So much, I thought, for Senator Rowe.
   “The panties were gone by the time we got there,” Graham said, staring at the monitor. “Fucking withholding of evidence, pure and simple.” He rubbed his hands together. “You got any Nakamoto stock, buddy, I’d sell it. ‘Cause it isn’t going to be worth shit by tomorrow afternoon.”
   On the screen, she was still welcoming him, and he was fumbling with his zipper, when suddenly she tried to sit up, and slapped him hard on the face.
   Graham said, “There we go. A little spice.”
   The man grabbed her hands, and tried to kiss her, but she resisted him, turning her face away. He pushed her back on the table. He leaned his weight on her body, holding her there. Her bare legs kicked and churned.
   The two silhouettes merged and separated. It was difficult to determine exactly what was happening. It looked as if Cheryl kept trying to sit up, and the man kept shoving her back. He held her down, one hand on her upper chest, while her legs kicked at him, and her body twisted on the table. He still held her on the table, but the whole scene was more arduous than arousing. As it continued, I had trouble with the image I was seeing. Was this a genuine rape? Or was she play-acting? After all, she kept kicking and struggling, but she wasn’t succeeding in pushing him away. The man might be stronger than she was, but I had the feeling that she could have kicked him back if she had really wanted to. And sometimes it looked as if her arms were locked around his neck, instead of trying to push him away. But it was difficult to know for sure when we were seeing—
   “Uh-oh. Trouble.”
   The man stopped his rhythmic pumping. Beneath him, Cheryl went limp. Her arms slid away from his shoulders, dropped back on the table. Her legs fell slack on either side of him.
   Graham said, “Is that it? Did it just happen?”
   “I can’t tell.”
   The man patted her cheek, then shook her more vigorously. He seemed to be talking to her. He remained there for a while, maybe thirty seconds, and then he slipped away from her body. She stayed on the table. He walked around her. He was moving slowly, as if he could not believe it.
   Then he looked off to the left, as if he had heard a sound. He stood frozen for a moment, and then he seemed to make up his mind. He went into action, moving around the room, looking in a methodical way. He picked up something from the floor.
   “The panties.”
   “He took ‘em himself,” Graham said. “Shit.”
   Now the man moved around the girl, and bent briefly over her body on the far side.
   “What’s he doing there?”
   “I don’t know. I can’t see.”
   “Shit.”
   The man straightened and moved away from the conference room, back into the atrium. He was no longer silhouetted. There was a chance we could identify him. But he was looking back into the conference room. Back at the dead girl.
   “Hey, buddy,” Graham said, talking to the image on the monitor. “Look over here, buddy. Come on. Just for a minute.”
   On the screen, the man continued to look at the dead girl as he took several more steps into the atrium. Then he began to walk quickly away to the left.
   “He’s not going back to the elevators,” I said.
   “No. But I can’t see his face.”
   “Where is he going?”
   “There’s a stairwell at the far end,” Graham said. “Fire exit.”
   “Why is he going there, instead of the elevator?”
   “Who knows? I just want to see his face. Just once.”
   But now the man was to the far left of our camera, and even though he was no longer turned away, we could see only his left ear and cheekbone. He walked quickly. Soon he would be gone from our view, beneath the ceiling overhang at the far end of the room.
   “Ah, shit. This angle’s no good. Let’s look at another tape.
   “Just a minute,” I said.
   Our man was moving toward a dark passageway that must lead to the staircase. But as he went, he passed a decorative gilt-frame mirror hanging on the wall, right by the passage. He passed it just as he went under the overhang, into final darkness.
   “There!”
   “How do you stop this thing?”
   I was pressing buttons on the player frantically. I finally found the one that stopped it. We went back. Then forward again.
   Again, the man moved purposefully toward the dark passage, with long, quick strides. He moved past the mirror, and for an instant—a single video frame—we could see his face reflected in the mirror—see it clearly—and I pressed the button to freeze the frame—
   “Bingo,” I said.
   “A fucking Jap,” Graham said. “Just like I told you.”
   Frozen in the mirror was the face of the killer as he strode toward the stairwell. I had no trouble recognizing the tense features of Eddie Sakamura.

19

   “This one is mine,” Graham said. “It’s my case. I’m going to go bring the bastard in.”
   “Sure,” Connor said.
   “I mean,” Graham said, “I’d rather go alone.”
   “Of course,” Connor said. “It’s your case, Tom. Do whatever you think best.”
   Connor wrote down Eddie Sakamura’s address for him.
   “It’s not that I don’t appreciate your help,” Graham said. “But I’d rather handle it myself. Now, just so I have my facts straight: you guys talked to this guy earlier tonight, and you didn’t bring him in?”
   “That’s right.”
   “Well, don’t worry about it,” Graham said. “I’ll bury that in the report. It won’t come back to you, I promise you.” Graham was in a magnanimous mood, pleased at the prospect of arresting Sakamura. He glanced at his watch. “Fucking A. Less than six hours since the original call, and we already have the murderer. Not bad.”
   “We don’t have the murderer quite yet,” Connor said. “I’d bring him in right away, if I were you.”
   “I’m leaving now,” Graham said.
   “Oh, and Tom,” Connor said, as Graham headed toward the door. “Eddie Sakamura is a strange guy, but he’s not known to be violent. I doubt very much that he’s armed. He probably doesn’t even own a gun. He went home from the party with a redhead. He’s probably in bed with her now. I think it would be advisable to bring him in alive.”
   “Hey,” Graham said. “What is it with you two?”
   “Just a suggestion,” Connor said.
   “You really think I’m going to shoot this little shithead?”
   “You’ll go out there with a couple of black and whites for backup, won’t you?” Connor said. “The patrolmen might be excitable. I’m just giving you the background.”
   “Hey. Thanks for your fucking support,” Graham said, and he left. He was so broad, he had to turn slightly sideways to go through the door.
   I watched him go. “Why are you letting him do this alone?”
   Connor shrugged. “It’s his case.”
   “But you’ve been aggressive all night in pursuing his case. Why stop now?”
   Connor said. “Let Graham have the glory. After all, what has it got to do with us? I’m a cop on extended leave. And you’re just a corrupt liaison officer.” He pointed to the videotape. “You want to run that for me, before you give me a ride home?”
   “Sure.” I rewound the tape.
   “I was thinking we could get a cup of coffee, too,” Connor said. “They make a good one in the SID labs. At least, they used to.”
   I said, “You want me to get coffee while you look at the tape?”
   “That would be nice, kōhai,” Connor said.
   “Sure.” I started the tape for him, and turned to leave.
   “Oh, and kōhai. While you’re down there, ask the night duty officer what facilities the department has for videotapes. Because all these need to be duplicated. And we may need hard copies of individual frames. Especially if there’s trouble about Sakamura’s arrest as Japan-bashing by the department. We may need to release a picture. To defend ourselves.”
   It was a good point. “Okay,” I said. “I’ll check.”
   “And I take mine black with one sugar.” He turned to look at the monitor.

   The scientific investigation division, or SID, was in the basement of Parker Center. It was after two in the morning when I got there, and most of the sections were closed down. SID was pretty much a nine-to-five operation. Of course, the teams worked at night collecting evidence from crime scenes, but the evidence was then stored in lockers, either downtown or at one of the divisions, until the next morning.
   I went to the coffee machine, in the little cafeteria next to Latent Prints. All around the room were signs reading:


DID YOU WASH YOUR HANDS? THIS MEANS YOU

   and:


DON’T EXPOSE FELLOW OFFICERS TO RISK. WASH YOUR HANDS.

   The reason was that the SID teams used poisons, especially Criminalistics. There was so much mercury, arsenic, and chromium floating around that in the old days, officers had sometimes gotten sick by drinking from a Styrofoam cup that another lab worker had merely touched.
   But these days people were more careful; I got two cups of coffee and went back to the night-duty desk. Jackie Levine was on duty, with her feet up on the desk. She was a heavyset woman wearing toreador pants and an orange wig. Despite her bizarre appearance, she was widely acknowledged to be the best print lifter in the department. She was reading Modern Bride magazine. I said, “You going to do it again, Jackie?”
   “Hell, no,” she said. “My daughter.”
   “Who’s she marrying?”
   “Let’s talk about something happy,” she said. “One of those coffees for me?”
   “Sorry,” I said. “But I have a question for you. Who handles videotape evidence here?”
   “Videotape evidence?”
   “Like tape from surveillance cameras. Who analyzes it, makes hard copies, all that?”
   “Well, we don’t get much call for that,” Jackie said. “Electronics used to do it here, but I think they gave it up. Nowadays, video either goes to Valley or Medlar Hall.” She sat forward, thumbed through a directory. “If you want, you can talk to Bill Harrelson over at Medlar. But if it’s anything special, I think we farm it out to JPL or the Advanced Imaging Lab at U.S.C. You want the contact numbers, or you want to go through Harrelson?”
   Something in her tone told me what to do. “Maybe I’ll take the contact numbers.”
   “Yeah, I would.”
   I wrote the numbers down and went back up to the division. Connor had finished the tape and was running it back and forth at the point where Sakamura’s face appeared in the mirror.
   “Well?” I said.
   “That’s Eddie, all right.” He appeared calm, almost indifferent. He took the coffee from me and sipped it. “Terrible.”
   “Yeah, I know.”
   “It used to be better.” Connor set the cup aside, turned off the video recorder, stood, and stretched. “Well, I think we’ve done a good evening’s work. What do you say we get some sleep? I have a big golf game in the morning at Sunset Hills.”
   “Okay,” I said. I packed the tapes back in the cardboard box, and set the VCR carefully in the box, too.
   Connor said, “What’re you going to do with those tapes?”
   “I’ll put ‘em in the evidence locker.”
   Connor said, “These are the originals. And we don’t have duplicates.”
   “I know, but I can’t get dupes made until tomorrow.”
   “Exactly my point. Why don’t you keep them with you?”
   “Take them home?” There were all sorts of departmental injunctions about taking evidence home. It was against the rules, to put it mildly.
   He shrugged. “I wouldn’t leave this to chance. Take the tapes with you, and then you can arrange the duplication yourself, tomorrow.”
   I stuck them under my arm. I said, “You don’t think anybody at the department would—“
   “Of course not,” Connor said. “But this evidence is crucial and we wouldn’t want anybody to walk by the evidence locker with a big magnet while we were asleep, would we?”
   So in the end I took the tapes. As we went out the door, we passed Ishiguro, still sitting there, contrite. Connor said something quickly to him in Japanese. Ishiguro jumped to his feet, bowed quickly, and scurried out of the office.
   “Is he really so scared?”
   “Yes,” Connor said.
   Ishiguro moved quickly down the hall ahead of us, head bent low. He seemed almost a caricature of a mousy, frightened man.
   “Why?” I said. “He’s lived here long enough to know that any case we might have against him for withholding evidence is not strong. And we have even less of a case against Nakamoto.”
   “That’s not the point,” Connor said. “He’s not worried about legalities. He’s worried about scandal. Because that’s what would happen if we were in Japan.”
   We came around the corner. Ishiguro was standing by the banks of elevators, waiting. We waited, too. There was an awkward moment. The first elevator came, and Ishiguro stepped away for us to get on. The doors closed on him bowing to us in the lobby. The elevator started down.
   Connor said, “In Japan, he and his company could be finished forever.”
   “Why?”
   “Because in Japan, scandal is the most common way of revising the pecking order. Of getting rid of a powerful opponent. It’s a routine procedure over there. You uncover a vulnerability, and you leak it to the press, or to government investigators. A scandal inevitably follows, and the person or organization is ruined. That’s how the Recruit scandal brought down Takeshita as prime minister. Or the financial scandals brought down Prime Minister Tanaka in the seventies. It’s the same way the Japanese screwed General Electric a couple of years ago.”
   “They screwed General Electric?”
   “In the Yokogawa scandal. You heard of it? No? Well, it’s classic Japanese maneuvering. A few years ago, General Electric made the best scanning equipment in the world for hospitals. GE formed a subsidiary, Yokogawa Medical, to market this equipment in Japan. And GE did business the Japanese way: cutting costs below competitors to get market share, providing excellent service and support, entertaining customers—giving potential buyers air tickets and traveler’s checks. We’d call it bribes, but it’s standard business procedure in Japan. Yokogawa quickly became the market leader, ahead of Japanese companies like Toshiba. The Japanese companies didn’t like that and complained about unfairness. And one day government agents raided Yokogawa’s offices and found evidence of the bribes. They arrested several Yokogawa employees, and blackened the company name in scandal. It didn’t hurt GE sales in Japan very much. It didn’t matter that other Japanese companies also offer bribes. For some reason, it was the non-Japanese company that got caught. Amazing, how that happens.”
   I said, “Is it really that bad?”
   “The Japanese can be tough,” Connor said. “They say ‘business is war,’ and they mean it. You know how Japan is always telling us that their markets are open. Well, in the old days, if a Japanese bought an American car, he got audited by the government. So pretty soon, nobody bought an American car. The officials shrug: what can they do? Their market is open: they can’t help it if nobody wants an American car. The obstructions are endless. Every imported car has to be individually tested on the dock to make sure it complies with exhaust-emission laws. Foreign drugs can only be tested in Japanese laboratories on Japanese nationals. Foreign skis were once banned because Japanese snow was said to be wetter than European and American snow. That’s the way they treat other countries, so it’s not surprising they worry about getting a taste of their own medicine.”
   “Then Ishiguro is waiting for some scandal? Because that’s what would happen in Japan?”
   “Yes. He’s afraid that Nakamoto will be finished in a single stroke. But I doubt that it will. Chances are, it’ll be business as usual in Los Angeles tomorrow.”

   I drove Connor back to his apartment. As he climbed out of the car I said, “Well, it’s been interesting, Captain. Thanks for spending the time with me.”
   “You’re welcome,” Connor said. “Call me any time, if you need help in the future.”
   “I hope your golf game isn’t too early tomorrow.”
   “Actually, it’s at seven, but at my age I don’t need much sleep. I’ll be playing at the Sunset Hills.”
   “Isn’t it a Japanese course?” The purchase of the Sunset Hills Country Club was one of the more recent outrages in L.A. The West Los Angeles golf course was bought for a huge cash price: two hundred million dollars in 1990. At the time, the new Japanese owners said no changes would be made. But now, the American membership was slowly being reduced by a simple procedure: whenever an American retired, his place was offered to a Japanese. Sunset Hills memberships were sold in Tokyo for a million dollars each, where they were considered a bargain; there was a long waiting list.
   “Well,” Connor said, “I’m playing with some Japanese.”
   “You do that often?”
   “The Japanese are avid golfers, as you know. I try to play twice a week. Sometimes you hear things of interest. Good night, kōhai.”
   “Good night, Captain.”
   I drove home.

   I was pulling onto the Santa Monica freeway when the phone rang. It was the DHD operator. “Lieutenant, we have a Special Services call. Officers in the field request assistance of the liaison.”
   I sighed. “Okay.” She gave me the mobile number.
   “Hey, buddy.”
   It was Graham. I said, “Hi, Tom.”
   “You alone yet?”
   “Yeah. I’m heading home. Why?”
   “I was thinking,” Graham said. “Maybe we should have the Japanese liaison on hand for this bust.”
   “I thought you wanted to do it alone.”
   “Yeah, well, maybe you want to come over and help out with this bust. Just so everything is done by the book.”
   I said, “Is this a CYA?” I meant cover your ass.
   “Hey. You going to help me out, or not?”
   “Sure, Tom. I’m on my way.”
   “We’ll wait for you.”

20

   Eddie Sakamura lived in a small house on one of those narrow twisting streets high in the Hollywood hills above the 101 freeway. It was 2:45 a.m. when I came around a curve and saw the two black and whites with their lights off, and Graham’s tan sedan, parked to one side. Graham was standing with the patrolmen, smoking a cigarette. I had to go back a dozen meters to find a place to park. Then I walked over to them.
   We looked up at Eddie’s house, built over a garage at street level. It was one of those two-bedroom white stucco houses from the 1940s. The lights were on, and we heard Frank Sinatra singing. Graham said, “He’s not alone. He’s got some broads up there.”
   I said, “How do you want to handle it?”
   Graham said, “We leave the boys here. I told ‘em no shooting, don’t worry. You and I go up and make the bust.”
   Steep stairs ran up from the garage to the house.
   “Okay. You take the front and I’ll take the back?”
   “Hell, no,” Graham said. “I want you with me, buddy. He’s not dangerous, right?”
   I saw the silhouette of a woman pass one of the windows. She looked naked. “Shouldn’t be,” I said.
   “Okay then, let’s do it.”
   We started up the stairs single file. Frank Sinatra was singing “My Way.” We heard the laughter of women. It sounded like more than one. “Christ, I hope they got some fucking drugs out.”
   I thought the chances of that were pretty good. We reached the top of the stairs, ducking to avoid being seen through the windows.
   The front door was Spanish, heavy and solid. Graham paused. I moved a few steps toward the back of the house, where I saw the greenish glow of pool lights. There was probably a back door going out to the pool. I was trying to see where it was.
   Graham tapped my shoulder. I came back. He gently turned the handle of the front door. It was unlocked. Graham took out his revolver and looked at me. I took out my gun.
   He paused, held up three fingers. Count of three.
   Graham kicked the front door open and went in low, shouting “Hold it, police! Hold it right there!” Before I got into the living room, I could hear the women screaming.

   There were two of them, completely naked, running around the room and shrieking at the top of their lungs, “Eddie! Eddie!” Eddie wasn’t there. Graham was shouting, “Where is he? Where is Eddie Sakamura?” The redhead grabbed a pillow from the couch to cover herself, and screamed, “Get out of here, you fucker!” and then she threw the pillow at Graham. The other girl, a blonde, ran squealing into the bedroom. We followed her, and the redhead threw another pillow at us.
   In the bedroom, the blonde fell on the floor and howled in pain. Graham leaned over her with his gun. “Don’t shoot me!” she cried. “I didn’t do anything!”
   Graham grabbed her by the ankle. There was all this twisting bare flesh. The girl was hysterical. “Where is Eddie?” Graham said. “Where is he?”
   “In a meeting!” the girl squealed.
   “Where?”
   “In a meeting!” And flailing around, she kicked Graham in the nuts with her other leg.
   “Aw, Christ,” Graham said, letting the girl go. He coughed and sat down hard. I went back to the living room. The redhead had her high heels on but nothing else.
   I said, “Where is he?”
   “You bastards,” she said. “You fucking bastards.”
   I went past her toward a door at the far end of the room. It was locked. The redhead ran up and began to hit me on the back with her fists. “Leave him alone! Leave him alone!” I was trying to open the locked door while she pounded on me. I thought I heard voices from the other side of the door. In the next moment Graham’s big bulk slammed into the door and the wood splintered. The door opened. I saw the kitchen, lit by the green light of the pool outside. The room was empty. The back door was open.
   “Shit.”
   By now the redhead had jumped on my back, and locked her legs around my waist. She was pulling my hair, screaming obscenities. I spun around in circles, trying to throw her off me. It was one of those strange moments where in the middle of all the chaos I was thinking, be careful, don’t hurt her, because it would look bad for a pretty young girl to end up with a broken arm or cracked ribs, it would mean police brutality even though right now she was tearing my hair out by the roots. She bit my ear and I felt pain. I slammed myself back against the wall, and I heard her grunt as the breath was knocked out of her. She let go.
   Out the window, I saw a dark figure running down the stairs. Graham saw it, too.
   “Fuck,” he said. He ran. I ran, too. But the girl must have tripped me because I fell over, landing hard. When I got to my feet I heard the sirens of the black and whites and their engines starting up.
   Then I was back outside, running down the steps. I was maybe ten meters behind Graham, about thirty feet, when Eddie’s Ferrari backed out of the garage, ground the gears, and roared down the street.
   The black and whites immediately took up pursuit. Graham ran for his sedan. He had pulled out to follow while I was still running for my own car, parked farther down the road. As his car flashed past me, I could see his face, grim and angry.
   I got into my car and followed.


* * *

   You can’t drive fast in the hills and talk on the phone. I didn’t even try. I estimated I was half a kilometer behind Graham, and he was some distance behind the two patrol cars. When I got to the bottom of the hill, the 101 overpass, I saw the flashing lights going down the freeway. I had to back up and pull around to the entrance below Mulholland, and then I joined traffic heading south.
   When the traffic began to slow up, I stuck my flasher on the roof, and pulled into the right-hand breakdown lane. I got to the concrete embankment about thirty seconds after the Ferrari hit it flat out at a hundred and sixty kilometers an hour. I guess the gas tank had exploded on impact, and the flames were jumping fifteen meters into the air. The heat was tremendous. It looked like the trees up on the hill might catch on fire. You couldn’t get anywhere near the twisted wreck of the car.
   The first of the fire trucks pulled up, with three more black and whites. There were sirens and flashing lights everywhere.
   I backed up my car to make room for the trucks, then walked over to Graham. He smoked a cigarette as the firemen began to spray the wreck with foam.
   “Christ,” Graham said. “What a fucking cockup.”
   “Why didn’t the backup patrolmen stop him when he was in the garage?”
   “Because,” Graham said, “I told them not to shoot at him. And we weren’t there. They were trying to decide what to do when the guy drove away.” He shook his head. “This is going to look like shit in the report.”
   I said, “Still, it’s probably better you didn’t shoot him.”
   “Maybe.” He ground out his cigarette.
   By now, the firemen had gotten the fire out. The Ferrari was a smoking hulk crumpled against the concrete. There was a harsh smell in the air.
   “Well,” Graham said. “No point staying around here. I’ll go back up to the house. See if those girls are still there.”
   “You need me for anything else?”
   “No. You might as well go. Tomorrow is another day. Shit, it’ll be paperwork until we drop.” He looked at me. He hesitated. “We in sync about this? About what happened?”
   “Hell, yes,” I said.
   “No way to handle it differently,” he said. “Far as I can see.
   “No,” I said. “Just one of those things.”
   “Okay, buddy. See you tomorrow.”
   “Good night, Tom.”
   We got into our cars.
   I drove home.

21

   Mrs. Ascenio was snoring loudly on the sofa. It was three forty-five in the morning. I tiptoed past her and looked in Michelle’s room. My daughter lay on her back, her covers tossed aside, her arms flung over her head. Her feet stuck through the bars of the crib. I tucked the covers around her and went into my own room.
   The television was still on. I turned it off. I pulled off my tie and sat down on the bed to remove my shoes. I suddenly realized how tired I was. I took off my coat and trousers and threw them onto the television set. I lay down on my back and thought I should take off my shirt. It felt sweaty and grimy on my body. I closed my eyes for a moment and let my head sink back into the pillow. Then I felt a pinching, and something tugging at my eyelids. I heard a chirping sound and thought in a moment of horror that birds were pecking at my eyes.
   I heard a voice saying, “Open your eyes, Daddy. Open your eyes.” And I realized that it was my daughter, trying to pull my eyelids up with small fingers.
   “Yuuuh,” I said. I glimpsed daylight, rolled away, and buried my face in the pillow.
   “Daddy? Open your eyes. Open your eyes, Daddy.”
   I said, “Daddy was out late last night. Daddy is tired.”
   She paid no attention. “Daddy, open your eyes. Open your eyes. Daddy? Open your eyes, Daddy.”
   I knew that she would continue saying the same thing, over and over, until I lost my mind, or opened my eyes. I rolled onto my back and coughed. “Daddy is still tired, Shelly. Go see what Mrs. Ascenio is doing.”
   “Daddy, open your eyes.”
   “Can’t you let Daddy sleep a while? Daddy wants to sleep a little longer this morning.”
   “It’s morning now, Daddy. Open your eyes. Open your eyes.”
   I opened my eyes. She was right.
   It was morning.
   What the hell.

Second Day

1

   “Eat your pancakes.”
   “I don’t want any more.”
   “Just one more bite, Shelly.” Sunlight streamed through the kitchen window. I yawned. It was seven o’clock in the morning.
   “Is Mommy coming today?”
   “Don’t change the subject. Come on, Shel. One more bite. Please?”
   We were sitting at her kid-size table in the corner of the kitchen. Sometimes I can get her to eat at the little table when she won’t eat at the big table. But I wasn’t having much luck today. Michelle stared at me.
   “Is Mommy coming?”
   “I think so. I’m not sure.” I didn’t want to disappoint her. “We’re waiting to hear.”
   “Is Mommy going out of town again?”
   I said, “Maybe.” I wondered what “going out of town” meant to a two-year-old, what sort of image she would have of it.
   “Is she going with Uncle Rick?”
   Who is Uncle Rick? I held the fork in front of her face. “I don’t know, Shel. Come on, open up. One more bite.”
   “He has a new car,” Michelle said, nodding solemnly, the way she did whenever she was informing me of important news.
   “Is that right?”
   “Uh-huh. Black one.”
   “I see. What kind of car is it?”
   “Sades.”
   “A Sades?”
   “No. Sades.”
   “You mean Mercedes?”
   “Uh-huh. Black one.”
   “That’s nice,” I said.
   “When is Mommy coming?”
   “One more bite, Shel.”
   She opened her mouth, and I moved the fork toward her. At the last moment she turned her head aside, pursing her lips. “No, Daddy.”
   “All right,” I said. “I give up.”
   “I’m not hungry, Daddy.”
   “I can see that.”
   Mrs. Ascenio was cleaning up the kitchen before she went back to her own apartment. There was another fifteen minutes before my housekeeper Elaine came to take Michelle to day care. I still had to get her dressed. I was putting her pancakes in the sink when the phone rang. It was Ellen Farley, the mayor’s press aide.
   “Are you watching?”
   “Watching what?”
   “The news. Channel seven. They’re doing the car crash right now.”
   “They are?”
   “Call me back,” she said.
   I went into the bedroom and turned on the television. A voice was saying, “—reported a high-speed chase on the Hollywood freeway southbound, which ended when the suspect drove his Ferrari sportscar into the Vine Street overpass, not far from the Hollywood Bowl. Observers say the car hit the concrete embankment at more than a hundred miles an hour, instantly bursting into flames. Fire trucks were called to the scene but there were no survivors. The driver’s body was so badly burned that his glasses melted. The officer in charge of the pursuit, Detective Thomas Graham, said that the driver, Mr. Edward Sakamura, was wanted in connection with the alleged murder of a woman at a downtown location. But today, friends of Mr. Sakamura expressed disbelief at this charge, and claimed that police strong-arm tactics panicked the suspect and caused him to flee. There are complaints that the incident was racially motivated. It is not clear whether police intended to charge Mr. Sakamura with the murder, and observers noted that this was the third high-speed pursuit on the 101 freeway in the last two weeks. Questions of police judgment in these pursuits have arisen after a Compton woman was killed in a high-speed pursuit last January. Neither Detective Graham nor his assistant Lieutenant Peter Smith was available to be interviewed, and we are waiting to hear if the officers will be disciplined or suspended by the department.”
   Jesus.
   “Daddy…”
   “Just a minute, Shel.”
   The image showed the crumpled, smoking wreckage being loaded onto a flatbed truck for removal from the side of the highway. There was a black smear on the concrete where the car had struck the wall.
   The station cut back to the studio, where the anchorwoman faced the camera and said, “In other developments, KNBC has learned that two police officers interviewed Mr. Sakamura earlier in the evening in connection with the case, but did not arrest him at that time. Captain John Connor and Lieutenant Smith may face disciplinary review by the department, with questions being raised of possible procedural violations. However, the good news is there are no longer delays for traffic moving southbound on the 101. Now over to you, Bob.”
   I stared numbly at the TV. Disciplinary review?
   The phone rang. It was Ellen Farley again. “You get all that?”
   “Yeah, I did. I can’t believe it. What’s it about, Ellen?”
   “None of this is coming from the mayor’s office, if that’s what you’re asking. But the Japanese community has been unhappy with Graham before. They think he’s a racist. It looks like he played right into their hands.”
   “I was there. Graham acted correctly.”
   “Yeah, I know you were there, Pete. Frankly, it’s unfortunate. I don’t want to see you tarred by the same brush.”
   I said, “Graham acted correctly.”
   “Are you listening, Pete?”
   “What about this suspension and disciplinary review?”
   “That’s the first I heard of it,” Ellen said. “But that would be internally generated. It’s coming from your own department. By the way, is it true? Did you and Connor see Sakamura last night?”
   “Yes.”
   “And you didn’t arrest him?”
   “No. We didn’t have probable cause to arrest him when we talked to him. Later on, we did.”
   Ellen said, “Do you really think he could have done this murder?”
   “I know he did. We have it on tape.”
   “On tape? Are you serious?”
   “Yeah. We have the murder on videotape from one of the Nakamoto security cameras.”
   She was silent for a while. I said, “Ellen?”
   “Look,” Ellen said. “Off the record, okay?”
   “Sure.”
   “I don’t know what’s going on here, Pete. There’s more than I understand.”
   “Why didn’t you tell me who the girl was, last night?”
   “I’m sorry about that. I had a lot to take care of.”
   “Ellen.”
   A silence. Then: “Pete, this girl got around. She knew a lot of people.”
   “Did she know the mayor?”
   Silence.
   “How well did she know him?”
   “Listen,” Ellen said, “Let’s just say she was a pretty girl and she knew a lot of people in this town. Personally, I thought she was unbalanced, but she was good-looking and she had a hell of an effect on men. You had to see it to believe it. Now there’s a lot of irons in the fire. You saw the Times today?”
   “No.”
   “Take a look. If you ask me, you want to be very correct, the next couple of days. Dot your i’s and cross your t’s. Do everything by the book. And watch your back, okay?”
   “Okay. Thanks, Ellen.”
   “Don’t thank me. I didn’t call.” Then her voice got softer. “Take care of yourself, Peter.”
   I heard a dial tone.
   “Daddy?”
   “Just a minute, Shel.”
   “Can I watch cartoons?”
   “Sure, honey.”
   I found her a station with some cartoons and walked into the living room. I opened the front door and picked up the Times from the mat. It took me a while to find the story on the last page of the Metro section.


Charges of Police Racism
Cloud Japanese Fete

   I skimmed the first paragraph. Japanese officials of the Nakamoto corporation complained about “callous and insensitive” police behavior, which they said detracted from a star-studded opening night at their new skyscraper on Figueroa. At least one Nakamoto official expressed the view that the police actions were “racially motivated.” A spokesperson said: “We do not believe the Los Angeles Police Department would behave in this fashion if a Japanese corporation were not involved. We feel strongly that the actions of the police reflect a double standard for treatment of Japanese at the hands of American officials.” Mr. Hiroshi Ogura, chairman of the board of Nakamoto, was present at the party, which drew such celebrities as Madonna and Tom Cruise, but he could not be reached for comment on the incident. A spokesman said, “Mr. Ogura is deeply disturbed that official hostility should mar this gathering. He very much regrets the unpleasantness that occurred.”
   According to observers, Mayor Thomas sent a staff member to deal with the police, but with little result. The police did not modify their behavior, despite the presence of the special Japanese liaison officer, Lieutenant Peter Smith, whose job is to defuse racially sensitive situations… .
   And so on.
   You had to read four paragraphs before you discovered that a murder had occurred. That particular detail seemed to be almost irrelevant.
   I looked back at the lead. The story was from the City News Service, which meant there was no byline.
   I felt angry enough to call my old contact at the Times, Kenny Shubik. Ken was the leading Metro reporter. He had been at the paper forever, and he knew everything that was going on. Since it was still eight in the morning, I called him at home.

   “Ken. Pete Smith.”
   “Oh, hi,” he said. “Glad you got my message.”
   In the background, I heard what sounded like a teenage girl: “Oh, come on, Dad. Why can’t I go?”
   Ken said, “Jennifer, let me talk here for a minute.”
   “What message?” I said.
   Ken said, “I called you last night, because I thought you ought to know right away. He’s obviously working off a tip. But do you have any idea what’s behind it?”
   “Behind what?” I said. I didn’t know what he was talking about. “I’m sorry, Ken, I didn’t get your message.”
   “Really?” he said. “I called you about eleven-thirty last night. The DHD dispatcher said you had rolled out on a case but you had a car phone. I told her it was important, and for you to call me at home if necessary. Because I felt sure you’d want to know.”
   In the background, the girl said, “Dad, come on, I have to decide what to wear.”
   “Jennifer, damn it,” he said. “Chill out.” To me he said, “You have a daughter, don’t you?”
   “Yeah,” I said. “But she’s only two.”
   “Just wait,” Ken said. “Look, Pete. You really didn’t get my message?”
   “No,” I said. “I’m calling about something else: the story in this morning’s paper.”
   “What story?”
   “The Nakamoto coverage on page eight. The one about ‘callous and racist police’ at the opening.”
   “Jeez, I didn’t think we had a Nakamoto story yesterday. I know Jodie was doing the party, but that won’t run until tomorrow. You know, Japan draws the glitterati. Jeff didn’t have anything on the scheds in Metro yesterday.”
   Jeff was the Metro editor. I said, “There’s a story in the paper this morning about the murder.”
   “What murder?” he said. His voice sounded odd.
   “There was a murder at Nakamoto last night. About eight-thirty. One of the guests was killed.”
   Ken was silent at the other end of the line. Putting things together. Finally he said, “Were you involved?”
   “Homicide called me in as Japanese liaison.”
   “Hmmm,” Ken said. “Listen. Let me get to my desk and see what I can find out. Let’s talk in an hour. And give me your numbers so I can call you direct.”
   “Okay.”
   He cleared his throat. “Listen, Pete,” he said. “Just between us. Do you have any problems?”
   “Like what?”
   “Like a morals problem, or a problem with your bank account. Discrepancy about reported income… anything I should know about? As your friend?”
   “No,” I said.
   “I don’t need the details. But if there’s something that isn’t quite right… . “
   “Nothing, Ken.”
   “ ‘Cause if I have to go to bat for you, I don’t want to discover I have stepped in shit.”
   “Ken. What’s going on?”
   “I don’t want to go into detail right now. But offhand I would say somebody is trying to fuck you in the ass,” Ken said.
   The girl said, “Daddy, that’s disgusting.”
   “Well, you’re not supposed to be listening. Pete?”
   “Yeah,” I said. “I’m here.”
   “Call me in an hour,” Ken said.
   “You’re a pal,” I said. “I owe you.”
   “Fucking right you do,” Ken said.
   He hung up.

   I looked around the apartment. Everything still looked the same. Morning sunlight was still streaming into the room. Michelle was sitting in her favorite chair, watching cartoons and sucking her thumb. But somehow everything felt different. It was creepy. It was like the world had tilted.
   But I had things to do. It was also getting late; I had to get her dressed before Elaine came to take her to day care. I told her that. She started to cry. So I turned off the television set, and she threw herself on the floor and began to kick and scream. “No, Daddy! Cartoons, Daddy!”
   I picked her up and slung her underarm to the bedroom to get her changed. She was screaming at the top of her lungs. The phone rang again. This time it was the division dispatcher.
   “Morning, Lieutenant. I have your uncleared messages.”
   “Let me get a pencil,” I said. I put Michelle down. She cried even louder. I said, “Can you go pick out which shoes you want to wear today?”
   “Sounds like you got a murder there,” the dispatcher said.
   “She doesn’t want to get dressed for school.”
   Michelle was tugging at my leg. “No, Daddy. No school, Daddy.”
   “Yes, school,” I said firmly. She bawled. “Go ahead,” I said to the dispatcher.
   “Okay, eleven forty-one last night, you had a call from a Ken Subotik or Subotnick, L.A. Times, he said please call him. Message reads ‘The Weasel is checking up on you.’ He said you would know what that meant. You can call him at home. You have the number?”
   “Yes.”
   “Okay. One forty-two a.m. this morning, you had a call from a Mr. Eddie Saka—looks like Sakamura. He said it’s urgent, please call him at home, 555-8434. It’s about the missing tape. Okay?”
   Shit.
   I said, “What time was that call?”
   “One forty-two a.m. The call was forwarded to County General and I guess their switchboard couldn’t locate you. You were at the morgue or something?”
   “Yeah.”
   “Sorry, Lieutenant, but once you’re out of your car, we have to go through intermediates.”
   “Okay. Anything else?”
   “Then at six forty-three a.m., Captain Connor left a beeper number for you to call. He said he’s playing golf this morning.”
   “Okay.”
   “And at seven-ten, we had a call from Robert Woodson, who is with Senator Morton’s office. Senator Morton wants to meet you and Captain Connor at one o’clock today at the Los Angeles Country Club. He asked that you call and confirm that you will attend the meeting with the senator. I tried to reach you but your phone was busy. Will you call the senator?”
   I said I would call the senator. I told the dispatcher to page Connor for me at the golf course, and have him call me in the car.
   I heard the front door unlock. Elaine came in. “Good morning,” she said.
   “I’m afraid Shelly isn’t dressed yet.”
   “That’s okay,” she said. “I’ll do it. What time is Mrs. Davis coming to pick her up?”
   “We’re waiting to hear.”
   Elaine had been through this routine many times before. “Come on, Michelle. Let’s pick your clothes for today. Time to get ready for school.”
   I looked at my watch, and was on my way to get another cup of coffee when the phone rang. “Lieutenant Peter Smith, please.”
   It was the assistant chief, Jim Olson.


* * *

   “Hi, Jim.”
   “Morning, Pete.” He sounded friendly. But Jim Olson never called anybody before ten o’clock in the morning unless there was a big problem. Olson said, “Looks like we got ourselves a rattlesnake by the tail. You see the papers today?”
   “Yeah, I did.”
   “You happen to catch the morning news?”
   “Some of it.”
   “The chief’s been calling me for damage control. I wanted to get where you stand before I make a recommendation. Okay?”
   “Okay.”
   “I just got off the phone with Tom Graham. He admits last night was a prime screwup. Nobody is covered in glory.”
   “I’m afraid not.”
   “Couple of naked broads impeded two able-bodied police officers and prevented apprehension of the suspect? Is that about it?”
   It sounded ridiculous. I said, “You had to be there, Jim.”
   “Uh-huh,” he said. “Well, one good thing so far. I’ve been checking if correct pursuit procedures were followed. Apparently they were. We have recordings off the computers, and we have voice recordings off the radio, and it’s all strictly by the book. Thank God. Nobody even swears. We can release those records to the media if this thing gets any worse. So we’re covered there. But it’s very unfortunate that Sakamura is dead.”
   “Yes.”
   “Graham went back to get the girls, but the house was deserted. The girls were gone.”
   “I see.”
   “In all the rush, nobody got the names of the girls?”
   “No, I’m afraid not.”
   “That means we have no witnesses to the events in the house. So we’re a little vulnerable.”
   “Uh-huh.”
   “They’re cutting Sakamura’s body out of the wreck this morning to ship what’s left to the morgue. Graham tells me as far as he’s concerned, the case is wrapped up. I gather there are videotapes that show Sakamura killed the girl. Graham says he is ready to file his concluding five-seven-nine report. Is that how you see it? The case closed?”
   “I guess so, Chief. Sure.”
   “Then we can shut this fucker down,” the chief said. “The Japanese community finds the Nakamoto inquiry irritating and offensive. They don’t want it to continue any longer than necessary. So if we can call it a day, it would help.”
   “It’s okay with me,” I said. “Let’s call it a day.”
   “Well that’s good, Pete,” the chief said. “I’m going to speak to the chief, see if we can head off any disciplinary action.”
   “Thanks, Jim.”
   “Try not to worry. Myself, I don’t see a disciplinary issue. As long as we have videos that show Sakamura did it.”
   “Yeah, we do.”
   “About those videos,” he said. “I’ve had Marty looking in the evidence locker. He can’t seem to find ‘em.”
   I took a deep breath and said, “No, I have them.”
   “You didn’t log them in the evidence locker last night?”
   “No. I wanted to get copies made.”
   He coughed. “Pete. It’d be better if you had followed procedure on that.”
   “I wanted to get copies made,” I said.
   “Tell you what,” Jim said, “get your copies made, and get the originals onto my desk by ten o’clock. Okay?”
   “Okay.”
   “It can take that long to locate the material from the evidence locker. You know how it is.”
   He was saying he would cover for me. “Thanks, Jim.”
   “Don’t thank me, because I didn’t do anything,” he said. “Far as I know, procedure has been followed.”
   “Right.”
   “But just between you and me: get it done right away. I can hold the fort for a couple of hours. But something’s going on down here. I don’t know exactly where it’s coming from. So don’t push it, okay?”
   “Okay, Jim. I’m on my way now.” I hung up the phone, and went to get copies made.

2

   Pasadena looked like a city at the bottom of a glass of sour milk. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory, on the outskirts of town, was nestled in the foothills near the Rose Bowl. But even at eight-thirty in the morning, you couldn’t see the mountains through the yellow-white haze. I tucked the box of tapes under my arm, showed my badge, signed the guard’s clipboard, and swore I was an American citizen. The guard sent me to the main building, across an inner courtyard.
   For decades, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory had served as the command center for American spacecraft that photographed Jupiter and the rings of Saturn, and sent pictures back to earth as video images. JPL was the place where modern video-image processing had been invented. If anybody could copy these tapes, they could.
   Mary Jane Kelleher, the press secretary, took me up to the third floor. We walked down a lime green corridor, past several doors that opened into empty offices. I mentioned it.
   “It’s true,” she said, nodding. “We’ve been losing some good people, Peter.”
   “Where are they going?” I said.
   “Mostly to industry. We always lost a few to IBM in Armonk, or Bell Labs in New Jersey. But those labs don’t have the best equipment or funding any more. Now it’s the Japanese research labs like Hitachi in Long Beach, Sanyo in Torrance, Canon in Inglewood. They’re hiring a lot of American researchers now.”
   “Is JPL concerned about it?”
   “Sure,” she said. “Everybody knows the best way to transfer technology is inside somebody’s head. But what can you do?” She shrugged. “Researchers want to do research. And America doesn’t do so much R and D any more. Budgets are tighter. So it’s better to work for the Japanese. They pay well, and they genuinely respect research. If you need a piece of equipment, you get it. Anyway, that’s what my friends tell me. Here we are.”
   She took me into a laboratory crammed with video equipment. Black boxes stacked on metal shelves and on metal tables; cables snaking across the floor; a variety of monitors and display screens. In the center of all this was a bearded man in his midthirties named Kevin Howzer. He had an image on his monitor of a gear mechanism, in shifting rainbow colors, The desk was littered with Coke cans and candy wrappers; he had been up all night, working.
   “Kevin, this is Lieutenant Smith from the L.A.P.D. He’s got some unusual videotapes he needs copied.”
   “Just copied?” Howzer sounded disappointed. “You don’t want anything done to them?”
   “No, Kevin,” she said. “He doesn’t.”
   “No problem.”
   I showed Howzer one of the cassettes. He turned it over in his hand, and shrugged. “Looks like a standard eight-millimeter cart. What’s on it?”
   “High-definition Japanese TV.”
   “You mean it’s an HD signal?”
   “I guess so.”
   “Shouldn’t be a problem. You got a playback I can use?”
   “Yes.” I took the playback machine out of the box and handed it to him.
   “Jeez, they make things nice, don’t they? Beautiful unit.” Kevin examined the controls in front. “Yeah, that’s high-definition all right. I can handle it.” He turned the box around and peered at the plugs on the back. Then he frowned. He swung his desk light over and opened the plastic flap on the cassette, exposing the tape. It had a faint silver tinge. “Huh. Do these tapes involve anything legal?”
   “Actually, they do.”
   He handed it back to me. “Sorry. I can’t copy it.”
   “Why not?”
   “See the silver color? That’s evaporated metal tape. Very high density. I’ll bet the format has real-time compression and decompression coming out of the box. I can’t make you a copy, because I can’t match the formats, which means I can’t lay down the signal in an equivalent way that is guaranteed readable. I can make you a copy, but I can’t be sure the copy is exact because I can’t match formats. So if you have any legal issues—and I assume you do—you’re going to have to take it somewhere else to get it copied.”
   “Like where?”
   “This could be the new proprietary D-four format. If it is, the only place that can copy it is Hamaguchi.”
   “Hamaguchi?”
   “The research lab in Glendale, owned by Kawakami Industries. They have every piece of video equipment known to man over there.”
   I said, “Do you think they’d help me?”
   “To make copies? Sure. I know one of the lab directors, Jim Donaldson. I can call over there for you, if you like.”
   “That would be great.”
   “No problem.”

3

   Hamaguchi Research Institute was a featureless, mirrored glass building in an industrial park in north Glendale. I carried my box into the lobby. Behind the sleek reception desk I could see an atrium in the center of the building, and smoked-glass-walled laboratories on all sides.
   I asked for Dr. Jim Donaldson and took a seat in the lobby. While I was waiting, two men in suits came in, nodded familiarly to the receptionist, and sat on the couch near me. Ignoring me, they spread out glossy brochures on the coffee table.
   “See here,” one of them said, “this is what I was talking about. This is the shot we end with. This one closes.”
   I glanced over, saw a view of wildflowers and snow-capped mountains. The first man tapped the photos.
   “I mean, that’s the Rockies, my friend. It’s real Americana. Trust me, that’s what sells them. And it’s a hell of a parcel.”
   “How big did you say it is?”
   “It’s a hundred and thirty thousand acres. The biggest remaining piece of Montana that’s still available. Twenty by ten kilometers of prime ranch acreage fronting on the Rockies. It’s the size of a national park. It’s got grandeur. It’s got dimension, scope. It’s very high quality. Perfect for a Japanese consortium.”
   “And they talked price?”
   “Not yet. But the ranchers, you know, they’re in a tough situation. It’s legal now for foreigners to export beef to Tokyo, and beef in Japan is something like twenty, twenty-two dollars a kilo. But nobody in Japan will buy American beef. If Americans send beef, it will rot on the docks. But if they sell their ranch to the Japanese, then the beef can be exported. Because the Japanese will buy from a Japanese-owned ranch. The Japanese will do business with other Japanese. And ranches all around Montana and Wyoming have been sold. The remaining ranchers see Japanese cowboys riding on the range. They see the other ranches putting in improvements, rebuilding barns, adding modern equipment, all that. Because the other ranches can get high prices in Japan. So the American owners, they’re not stupid. They see the writing on the wall. They know they can’t compete. So they sell.”
   “But then what do the Americans do?”
   “Stay and work for the Japanese. It’s not a problem. The Japanese need someone to teach them how to ranch. And everybody on the ranch gets a raise. The Japanese are sensitive to American feelings. They’re sensitive people.”
   The second man said, “I know, but I don’t like it. I don’t like the whole thing.”
   “That’s fine, Ted. What do you want to do, write your congressman? They’re all working for the Japanese, anyway. Hell, the Japanese are running these ranches with American government subsidies.” The first man twisted a gold chain at his wrist. He leaned close to his companion. “Look, Ted. Let’s not get all moral here. Because I can’t afford it. And neither can you. We are talking a four-percent overall and a five-year payout on a seven hundred mil purchase. Let’s make sure we keep that in sight, okay? You personally are looking at two point four million in the first year alone. And it’s a five-year payout. Right?”
   “I know. It just bothers me.”
   “Well, Ted. I don’t think you’ll be bothered when this deal closes. But there’s a couple of details we need to handle…” At that point, they seemed to realize I was listening. They stood up and moved out of earshot. I heard the first man say something about “assurances that the State of Montana favors and approves…” and the second man was nodding, slowly. The first man punched him in the shoulder, cheering him up.
   “Lieutenant Smith?”
   A woman was standing beside my chair. “Yes?”
   “I’m Kristen, Dr. Donaldson’s assistant. Kevin over at JPL called about you. Something about tapes you need help with?”
   “Yes. I need them copied.”
   “I’m sorry I wasn’t here to take Kevin’s call. One of the secretaries took it, and she didn’t really understand the situation.”
   “How’s that?”
   “Unfortunately, Dr. Donaldson isn’t here right now. He’s making a speech this morning.”
   “I see.”
   “And that makes it difficult for us. With him not in the lab.”
   “I just want to copy some tapes. Perhaps someone else in the lab can help me,” I said.
   “Ordinarily yes, but I’m afraid it’s impossible today.”
   It was the Japanese wall. Very polite, but a wall. I sighed. It was probably unrealistic to imagine a Japanese research company would help me. Even with something as neutral as copying tapes.
   “I understand.”
   “Nobody’s in the lab this morning at all. They were all working late on a rush project last night, and I guess they were here to all hours. So everybody’s late coming in today. That’s what the other secretary didn’t understand. People are coming in late. So. I don’t know what to tell you.”
   I made one last attempt. “As you know, my boss is the chief of police. This is the second place I’ve stopped at already this morning. He’s really riding me to get this duplicated right away.”
   “I’d love to help you. I know Dr. Donaldson would be happy to. We’ve done special work for the police before. And I’m sure we can duplicate whatever material you have. Maybe later today. Or if you’d care to leave it with us…
   “I’m afraid I can’t do that.”
   “Okay. Sure. I understand. Well, I’m sorry, Lieutenant. Perhaps you can come back later in the day?” She gave a little shrug.
   I said, “Probably not. I guess it’s just my bad luck that everybody had to work last night.”
   “Yes. It’s a pretty unusual situation.”
   “What was it, something came up? Research problem?”
   “I really don’t know. We have so much video capability on site, occasionally we get a rush request for something unusual. A TV commercial that needs a special effect, or something like that. We worked on that new Michael Jackson video for Sony. Or somebody needs to restore tape that has been ruined. You know, rebuild the signal. But I don’t know what came up last night. Except it must have been a lot of work. Something like twenty tapes to be worked on. And a real rush. I hear they didn’t finish until after midnight.”
   I thought: It can’t be.
   I was trying to think what Connor would do, how he would handle it. I decided it was worth a stab in the dark. I said, “Well, I’m sure Nakamoto is grateful for all your hard work.”
   “Oh, they are. Because it turned out real well for them. They were happy.”
   I said, “You mentioned that Mr. Donaldson was giving a speech—“
   “Dr. Donaldson, yes—“
   “Where is he doing that?”
   “At a corporate-training seminar at the Bonaventure Hotel. Management techniques in research. He must be pretty tired this morning. But he’s always a good speaker.”
   “Thanks.” I gave her my card. “You’ve been very helpful, and if there is ever anything you think of, or want to tell me, call me.”
   “Okay.” She glanced at my card. “Thank you.”
   I turned to go. As I was leaving, an American in his late twenties, wearing an Armani suit and the smug look of an M.B.A. who reads the fashion magazines, came down and said to the other two men, “Gentlemen? Mr. Nakagawa will see you now.”
   The men leapt up, grabbing their glossy brochures and pictures, and followed the assistant as he walked in calm measured strides toward the elevator.
   I went back outside, into the smog.

4

   The sign in the hallway read:


Working Together:
Japanese and American Management Styles.

   Inside the conference room, I saw one of those twilight business seminars where men and women sit at long tables covered in gray cloth, taking notes in semigloom as a lecturer drones on at the podium.
   While I was standing there, in front of a table with the name tags of latecomers, a bespectacled woman came over to me and said, “Have you registered? Did you get your packet?”
   I turned slightly and flashed my badge. I said, “I would like to speak to Dr. Donaldson.”
   “He’s our next speaker. He’s on in seven or eight minutes. Can someone else help you?”
   “It’ll just take a moment.”
   She hesitated. “But there’s so little time before he speaks…”
   “Then you better get going.”
   She looked as if I had slapped her. I don’t know what she expected. I was a police officer and I’d asked to speak to somebody. Did she think it was negotiable? I felt irritable, remembering the young fashion plate in the Armani suit. Walking in measured steps, like a person of weight and importance, as he led the real estate salesmen away. Why did that kid think he was important? He might have an M.B.A., but he was still just answering the door for his Japanese boss.
   Now, I watched the woman circle the conference room, moving toward the dais where four men waited to speak. The business audience was still taking notes as the sandy-haired man at the podium said, “There is a place for the foreigner in a Japanese corporation. Not at the top, of course, perhaps not even in the upper echelons. But there is certainly a place. You must realize that the place you hold as a foreigner in a Japanese corporation is an important one, that you are respected, and that you have a job to do. As a foreigner, you will have some special obstacles to overcome, but you can do that. You can succeed if you remember to know your place.”
   I looked at the businessmen in their suits with their heads bowed, taking notes. I wondered what they were writing. Know your place?
   The speaker continued: “Many times you hear executives say, ‘I have no place in a Japanese corporation, and I had to quit.’ Or you will hear people say, ‘They didn’t listen to me, I had no chance to get my ideas implemented, no chance for advancement.’ Those people didn’t understand the role of a foreigner in Japanese society. They were not able to fit in, and so they had to leave. But that is their problem. The Japanese are perfectly ready to accept Americans and other foreigners in their companies. Indeed, they are eager to have them. And you will be accepted: so long as you remember your place.”
   A woman raised her hand and said, “What about prejudice against women in Japanese corporations?”
   “There is no prejudice against women,” the speaker said.
   “I’ve heard that women can’t advance.”
   “That is simply not true.”
   “Then why all the lawsuits? Sumitomo Corp. just settled a big antidiscrimination suit. I read one-third of Japanese corporations have had suits brought by American employees. What about that?”
   “It is perfectly understandable,” the speaker said. “Any time a foreign corporation begins to do business in a new country, it is likely to make mistakes while it gets used to the habits and patterns of the country. When American corporations first went multinational in Europe in the fifties and sixties, they encountered difficulties in the countries they entered, and there were lawsuits then. So it is not remarkable that Japanese corporations also have some period of adjustment coming into America. It is necessary to be patient.”
   A man said with a laugh, “Is there ever a time when it’s not necessary to be patient with Japan?” But he sounded rueful, not angry.
   The others in the room continued to make notes.
   “Officer? I’m Jim Donaldson. What is this about?”
   I turned. Dr. Donaldson was a tall, thin man with glasses and a precise, almost prissy air. He was dressed in collegiate style, a tweed sport coat and a red tie. But he had the nerd pack of pens peeking out of his shirt pocket. I guessed he was an engineer.
   “I just had a couple of questions about the Nakamoto tapes.”
   “The Nakamoto tapes?”
   “The ones in your laboratory last night.”
   “My laboratory? Mr., ah—“
   “Smith, Lieutenant Smith.” I gave him my card.
   “Lieutenant, I’m sorry, but I don’t know what you’re talking about. Tapes in my lab last night?”
   “Kristen, your secretary, said everybody in the lab was working late on some tapes.”
   “Yes. That’s true. Most of my staff.”
   “And the tapes came from Nakamoto.”
   “From Nakamoto?” He shook his head. “Who told you that?”
   “She did.”
   “I assure you, Lieutenant, the tapes were not from Nakamoto.”
   “I heard there were twenty tapes.”
   “Yes, at least twenty. I’m not sure of the exact number. But they were from McCann-Erickson. An ad campaign for Asahi beer. We had to do a logo transformation on every ad in the campaign. Now that Asahi beer is the number one beer in America.”
   “But the question of Nakamoto—“
   “Lieutenant,” he said impatiently, glancing at the podium, “let me explain something. I work for Hamaguchi Research Labs. Hamaguchi is owned by Kawakami Industries. A competitor of Nakamoto. Competition among the Japanese corporations is very intense. Very intense. Take my word for it: my lab didn’t do any work on any Nakamoto tapes last night. Such a thing would never happen, under any circumstances. If my secretary said it did, she’s mistaken. It’s absolutely out of the realm of possibility. Now, I have to give a speech. Is there anything else?”
   “No,” I said. “Thanks.”
   There was scattered applause as the speaker on the podium finished. I turned and left the room.

   I was driving away from the Bonaventure when Connor called in from the golf course. He sounded annoyed. “I got your page. I had to interrupt my game. This better be good.”
   I told him about the one o’clock appointment with Senator Morton.
   “All right,” he said. “Pick me up here at ten-thirty. Anything else?”
   I told him about my trips to JPL and Hamaguchi, then my conversation with Donaldson.
   Connor sighed. “That was a waste of time.”
   “Why?”
   “Because Hamaguchi is funded by Kawakami, and they’re in competition with Nakamoto. There is no way they would do anything to help Nakamoto.”
   “That’s what Donaldson told me,” I said.
   “Where are you going now?”
   “To the U.S.C. video labs. I’m still trying to get the tapes copied.”
   Connor paused. “Anything else I should know?”
   “No.”
   “Fine. See you at ten-thirty.”
   “Why so early?”
   “Ten-thirty,” he said, and hung up.


* * *

   As soon as I hung up, the phone rang. “You were supposed to call me.” It was Ken Shubik at the Times. He sounded sulky.
   “Sorry. I got tied up. Can we talk now?”
   “Sure.”
   “You got information for me?”
   “Listen.” He paused. “Are you anywhere around here?”
   “About five blocks from you.”
   “Then come by for a cup of coffee.”
   “You don’t want to talk on the phone?”
   “Well…”
   “Come on, Ken. You always want to talk on the phone.” Shubik was like all the Times reporters, he sat at his desk in front of his computer and wore a headset and talked on the phone all day long. It was his preferred way of doing things. He had all his stuff in front of him, he could type his notes into the computer as he talked. When I was a press officer, my office had been at police headquarters in Parker Center, two blocks from the Times building. And still a reporter like Ken would rather talk to me on the phone than see me in person.
   “Come on by, Pete.”
   That was clear enough.
   Ken didn’t want to talk on the phone.
   “Okay, fine,” I said. “See you in ten minutes.”

5

   The Los Angeles Times is the most profitable newspaper in America. The newsroom takes up one entire floor of the Times building, and thus is the area of a city block. The space has been skillfully subdivided, so you are never confronted by how large it actually is, and how many hundreds of people work there. But still it seems you walk for days past reporters sitting at clusters of modular workstations, with their glowing computer screens, their blinking telephones, and their tacked-up pictures of the kids.
   Ken’s workstation was in Metro, on the east side of the building. I found him standing by his desk, pacing. Waiting for me. He took me by the elbow.
   “Coffee,” he said. “Let’s get coffee.”
   “What is it?” I said. “You don’t want to be seen with me?”
   “No. Shit. I want to avoid the Weasel. He’s down hustling that new girl on Foreign. She doesn’t know any better yet.” Ken nodded toward the far end of the newsroom. There, by the windows, I saw the familiar figure of Willy Wilhelm, known to everyone as Weasel Wilhelm. Willy’s narrow, ferretlike face was at this moment composed into a mask of smiling attentiveness as he joked with a blond girl sitting before a terminal.
   “Very cute.”
   “Yeah. A little big in the rear. She’s Dutch,” Ken said. “She’s only been here a week. She hasn’t heard about him.”
   Most organizations had a person like the Weasel: somebody who is more ambitious than scrupulous, somebody who finds a way to make himself useful to the powers that be, while being roundly hated by everyone else. That was the case with Weasel Wilhelm.
   Like most dishonest people, the Weasel believed the worst about everybody. He could always be counted on to portray events in their most unflattering light, insisting that anything less was a cover-up. He had a nose for human weakness and a taste for melodrama. He cared nothing for the truth of any situation, and he considered a balanced appraisal weak. As far as the Weasel was concerned, the underlying truth was always strong stuff. And that was what he dealt in.
   The other reporters at the Times despised him.
   Ken and I went into the central hallway. I followed him toward the coffee machines, but he led me into the library. In the middle of the floor, the Times had a library that was larger and better equipped than many college facilities.
   “So, what is it about Wilhelm?” I said.
   “He was in here last night,” Ken said. “I came by after the theater to pick up some notes I needed for a morning interview I was doing from home. And I saw the Weasel in the library. Maybe eleven o’clock at night. You know how ambitious the little turd is. I could see it in his face. He had the scent of blood. So naturally, you want to know about what.”
   “Naturally,” I said. The Weasel was an accomplished backstabber. A year earlier, he had managed to get the editor of the Sunday Calendar fired. Only at the last minute did he fail to land the job himself.
   Ken said, “So I whisper to Lilly, the night librarian. ‘What is it? What’s the Weasel up to?’ She says, ‘He’s checking police reports on some cop.’ So that’s a relief, I think. But then I begin to wonder. I mean, I’m still the senior Metro reporter. I still do a story out of Parker Center a couple of times a month. What does he know that I don’t? For all I know, this should be my story. So I say to Lilly, what’s the name of this cop?”
   “Let me guess,” I said.
   “That’s right,” Ken said. “Peter J. Smith.”
   “What time was this?”
   “About eleven.”
   “Great,” I said.
   “I thought you’d want to know,” Ken said.
   “I do.”
   “So I said to Lilly—this is last night—I said, ‘Lilly, what kind of stuff is he pulling?’ And he’s pulling everything, all the old clips from the morgue, and apparently he’s got a source inside Parker who’s going to leak him internal affairs records. Some kind of a hearing about child molestation. Charge brought a couple of years ago.”
   “Ah, shit,” I said.
   “That true?” Ken said.
   “There was a hearing,” I said. “But it was bullshit.”
   Ken looked at me. “Fill me in.”
   “It was three years back,” I said. “I was still working detective. My partner and I answered a domestic violence call in Ladera Heights. Hispanic couple, fighting. Both very drunk. Woman wants me to arrest her husband, and when I refuse to, says he’s sexually abusing her baby. I go look at the baby. The baby looks okay. I still refuse to arrest the husband. The woman is pissed. The next day she comes in and accuses me of sexual molestation. There’s a preliminary hearing. Charges dismissed as without merit.”
   “Okay,” Ken said. “Now, you got any travel that’s questionable?”
   I frowned. “Travel?”
   “The Weasel was trying to locate travel records last night. Airplane trips, junkets, padded expenses…”
   I shook my head. “It doesn’t ring a bell.”
   “Yeah, I figured he must be wrong about that one. You’re a single parent, you’re not going on any junkets.”
   “No way.”
   “Good.”
   We were walking deeper into the library. We came to a corner where we could see out to the Metro section of the newsroom through glass walls. I saw the Weasel still talking to the girl, chatting her up. I said, “What I don’t understand, Ken, is why me? I mean, I got no heat on me at all. No controversy. I haven’t been a working detective for three years. I’m not even a press officer any more. I’m liaison. I mean, what I do is political. So why is a Times reporter gunning for me?”
   “At eleven o’clock on a Thursday night, you mean?” Ken said. He was staring at me like I was an idiot. Like there was drool coming down my chin.
   I said, “You think the Japanese are doing this?”
   “I think the Weasel does jobs for people. He is a scumbag for hire. He does jobs for the studios, record companies, brokerage houses, even the realtors. He’s a consultant. The Weasel now drives a Mercedes 500SL, you know.”
   “Oh, yeah?”
   “Pretty good on a reporter’s salary, wouldn’t you say?”
   “Yeah, I would.”
   “So. You got on the wrong side of somebody? You do that last night?”
   “Maybe.”
   “Because somebody called the Weasel to track you down.”
   I said, “I can’t believe this.”
   “Believe it,” Ken said. “The only thing that worries me is the Weasel’s source inside Parker Center. Somebody in the department’s leaking him internal affairs stuff. You okay inside your own department?”
   “As far as I know.”
   “Good. Because the Weasel is up to his usual tricks. This morning I talked to Roger Bascomb, our in-house counsel.”
   “And?”
   “Guess who called him all hot and bothered with a question last night? The Weasel. And you want to guess what the question was?”
   I said nothing.
   “The question was, does serving as a police press-officer make an individual a public personality? As in, a public personality who can’t sue for libel?”
   I said, “Jesus.”
   “Right.”
   “And the answer?”
   “Who cares about the answer? You know how this works. All the Weasel has to do is call a few people and say, ‘Hi, this is Bill Wilhelm over here at the L.A. Times. We’re going with a story tomorrow that says Lieutenant Peter Smith is a child molester, do you have any comment on that?’ A few well-placed calls, and the story doesn’t even have to run. The editors can kill it but the damage is already done.”
   I said nothing. I knew what Ken was telling me was true. I had seen it happen more than once.
   I said, “What can I do?”
   Ken laughed. “You could arrange one of your famous incidents of L.A. police brutality.”
   “That’s not funny.”
   “Nobody at this paper would cover it, I can promise you that. You could fucking kill him. And if somebody made a home video? Hey, people here would pay to see it on video.”
   “Ken.”
   Ken sighed. “I can dream. Okay. There’s one thing. Last year, after Wilhelm was involved in the, ah, change of management over in Calendar, I got an anonymous package in the mail. So did a few other people. Nobody did anything about it at the time. It’s pretty dirty pool. You interested?”
   “Yeah.”
   Ken took a small manila envelope from the inside pocket of his sport coat. It had one of those strings that you wrap back and forth to close it. Inside was a series of photos, printed in a strip. It showed Willy Wilhelm engaged in an intimate act with a dark-haired man. His head buried in his lap.
   “You can’t see the Weasel’s face too well in all the angles,” Ken said. “But it’s him, all right. Action snap of the reporter entertaining his source. Having a drink with him, so to speak.”
   “Who is the guy?”
   “It took us a while. His name is Barry Borman. He’s the regional head of sales for Kaisei Electronics in southern California.”
   “What can I do with this?”
   “Give me your card,” Ken said. “I’ll clip it to the envelope, and have it delivered to the Weasel.”
   I shook my head. “I don’t think so.”
   “It’d sure make him think twice.”
   “No,” I said. “It’s not for me.”
   Ken shrugged. “Yeah. It might not work, anyway. Even if we squeeze the Weasel’s nuts, the Japanese probably have other ways. I still haven’t been able to find out how that story ran last night. All I hear is, ‘Orders from the top, orders from the top.’ Whatever that means. It could mean anything.”
   “Somebody must have written it.”
   “I tell you, I can’t find out. But you know, the Japanese have a powerful influence at the paper. It’s more than just the ads they take. It’s more than their relentless PR machine drumming out of Washington, or the local lobbying and the campaign contributions to political figures and organizations. It’s the sum of all those things and more. And it’s starting to be insidious. I mean, you can be sitting around in a staff meeting discussing some article that we might run, and you suddenly realize, nobody wants to offend them. It isn’t a question of whether a story is right or wrong, news or not news. And it isn’t a one-to-one equation, like ‘We can’t say that or they’ll pull their ads.’ It’s more subtle than that. Sometimes I look at my editors, and I can tell they won’t go with certain stories because they are afraid. They don’t even know what they are afraid of. They’re just afraid.”
   “So much for a free press.”
   “Hey,” Ken said. “This is not the time for sophomore bullshit. You know how it works. The American press reports the prevailing opinion. The prevailing opinion is the opinion of the group in power. The Japanese are now in power. The press reports the prevailing opinion as usual. No surprises. Just take care.”
   “I will.”
   “And don’t hesitate to call, if you decide you want to arrange mail service.”


* * *

   I wanted to talk to Connor. I was beginning to understand why Connor had been worried, and why he had wanted to conclude the investigation quickly. Because a well-mounted campaign of innuendo is a fearsome thing. A skillful practitioner—and the Weasel was skillful—would arrange it so that a new story came out, day after day, even when nothing happened. You got headlines like GRAND JURY UNDECIDED ON POLICEMAN’S GUILT when in fact the grand jury hadn’t met yet. But people saw the headlines, day after day, and drew their own conclusions.
   The truth was, there was always a way to spin it. At the end of the innuendo campaign, if your subject was found blameless, you could still mount a headline like GRAND JURY FAILS TO FIND POLICEMAN GUILTY or DISTRICT ATTORNEY UNWILLING TO PROSECUTE ACCUSED COP. Headlines like that were as bad as a conviction.
   And there was no way to bounce back from weeks of negative press. Everybody remembered the accusation. Nobody remembered the exoneration. That was human nature. Once you were accused, it was tough to get back to normal.
   It was getting creepy, and I had a lot of bad feelings. I was a little preoccupied, pulling into the parking lot next to the physics department at U.S.C., when the phone rang again. It was assistant chief Olson.
   “Peter.”
   “Yes, sir.”
   “It’s almost ten o’clock. I thought you’d be down here putting the tapes on my desk. You promised them to me.”
   “I’ve been having trouble getting the tapes copied.”
   “Is that what you’ve been doing?”
   “Sure. Why?”
   “Because from the calls I get, it sounds like you aren’t dropping this investigation,” Jim Olson said. “In the last hour, you’ve been out asking questions at a Japanese research institute. Then you’ve interrogated a scientist who works for a Japanese research institute. You’re hanging around some Japanese seminar. Let’s get it straight, Peter. Is the investigation over, or not?”
   “It’s over,” I said. “I’m just trying to get the tapes copied.”
   “Make sure that’s all it is,” he said.
   “Right, Jim.”
   “For the good of the whole department—and the individuals in it—I want this thing behind us.”
   “Right, Jim.”
   “I don’t want to lose control of this situation.”
   “I understand.”
   “I hope you do,” he said. “Get the copies made, and get your ass down here.” And he hung up.
   I parked the car, and went into the physics building.

6

   I waited at the top of the lecture hall while Phillip Sanders finished his lecture. He stood in front of a blackboard covered with complex formulas. There were about thirty students in the room, most of them seated down near the front. I could see the backs of their heads.
   Dr. Sanders was about forty years old, one of those energetic types, in constant motion, pacing back and forth, tapping the equations on the blackboard in short emphatic jabs with his chalk as he pointed to the “signal covariant ratio determination” and the “factorial delta bandwidth noise.” I couldn’t even guess what subject he was teaching. Finally I concluded it must be electrical engineering.
   When the bell rang on the hour, the class stood and packed up their bags. I was startled: nearly everyone in the class was Asian, both men and women. Those that weren’t Oriental were Indian or Pakistani. Out of thirty students only three were white.
   “That’s right,” Sanders said to me later, as we walked down the hallway toward his laboratory. “A class like Physics 101 doesn’t attract Americans. It’s been that way for years. Industry can’t find them, either. We would be up shit creek if we didn’t have the Orientals and Indians who come here to get doctorates in math and engineering, and then work for American companies.”
   We continued down some stairs, and turned left. We were in a basement passageway. Sanders walked quickly.
   “But the trouble is, it’s changing,” he continued. “My Asian students are starting to go home. Koreans are going back to Korea. Taiwanese the same. Even Indians are returning home. The standard of living is going up in their countries, and there’s more opportunity back home now. Some of these foreign countries have large numbers of well-trained people.” He led me briskly down a flight of stairs. “Do you know what city has the highest number of Ph.D.’s per capita in the world?”
   “Boston?”
   “Seoul, Korea. Think about that as we rocket into the twenty-first century.”
   Now we were going down another corridor. Then briefly outside, into sunlight, down a covered walkway, and back into another building. Sanders kept glancing back over his shoulder, as if he was afraid of losing me. But he never stopped talking.
   “And with foreign students going home, we don’t have enough engineers to do American research. To create new American technology. It’s a simple balance sheet. Not enough trained people. Even big companies like IBM are starting to have trouble. Trained people simply don’t exist. Watch the door.”
   The door swung back toward me. I went through. I said, “But if there are all these high-tech job opportunities, won’t they begin to attract students?”
   “Not like investment banking. Or law.” Sanders laughed. “America may lack engineers and scientists, but we lead the world in the production of lawyers. America has half the lawyers in the entire world. Think of that.” He shook his head.
   “We have four percent of the world population. We have eighteen percent of the world economy. But we have fifty percent of the lawyers. And thirty-five thousand more every year, pouring out of the schools. That’s where our productivity’s directed. That’s where our national focus is. Half our TV shows are about lawyers. America has become Land of Lawyers. Everybody suing. Everybody disputing. Everybody in court. After all, three quarters of a million American lawyers have to do something. They have to make their three hundred thousand a year. Other countries think we’re crazy.”
   He unlocked a door. I saw a sign that said ADVANCED IMAGING LABORATORY in hand-painted lettering, and an arrow. Sanders led me down a long basement hallway.
   “Even our brightest kids are badly educated. The best American kids now rank twelfth in the world, after the industrialized countries of Asia and Europe. And that’s our top students. At the bottom, it’s worse. One-third of high school graduates can’t read a bus schedule. They’re illiterate.”
   We came to the end of the hallway, and turned right. “And the kids I see are lazy. Nobody wants to work. I teach physics. It takes years to master. But all the kids want to dress like Charlie Sheen and make a million dollars before they’re twenty-eight. The only way you can make that kind of money is in law, investment banking, Wall Street. Places where the game is paper profits, something for nothing. But that’s what the kids want to do, these days.”
   “Maybe at U.S.C.”
   “Trust me. Everywhere. They all watch television.”
   He swung another door open. Still another corridor. This one smelled moldy, damp.
   “I know, I know. I’m old-fashioned,” Sanders said. “I still believe that every human being stands for something. You stand for something. I stand for something. Just being on this planet, wearing the clothes we wear, doing the work we do, we each stand for something. And in this little corner of the world,” he said, “we stand for cutting the crap. We analyze network news and see where they have been fucking around with the tape. We analyze TV commercials and show where the tricks are—“
   Sanders suddenly stopped.
   “What’s the matter?”
   “Wasn’t there someone else?” he said. “Didn’t you come here with someone else?”
   “No. Just me.”
   “Oh, good.” Sanders continued on at his same breakneck pace. “I always worry about losing people down here. Ah, okay. Here we are. The lab. Good. This door is just where I left it.”
   With a flourish, he threw the door open. I stared at the room, shocked.
   “I know it doesn’t look like much,” Sanders said. That, I thought, was a serious understatement.
   I was looking at a basement space with rusty pipes and fittings hanging down from the ceiling. The green linoleum on the floor curled up in several places to expose concrete beneath. Arranged around the room were battered wooden tables, each heaped with equipment, and drooping wires down the sides. At each table, a student sat facing monitors. In several places, water plinked into buckets on the floor. Sanders said, “The only space we could get was here in the basement, and we don’t have the money to put in little amenities like a ceiling. Never mind, doesn’t matter. Just watch your head.”
   He moved forward into the room. I am about a hundred and eighty centimeters tall, not quite six feet, and I had to crouch to enter the room. From somewhere in the ceiling above, I heard a harsh rasping sizzle.
   “Skaters,” Sanders explained.
   “Sorry?”
   “We’re underneath the ice rink. You get used to it. Actually, it’s not bad now. When they have hockey practice in the afternoon, then it’s a bit noisy.”
   We moved deeper into the room. I felt like I was in a submarine. I glanced at the students at their workstations. They were all intent on their work; nobody looked up as we passed. Sanders said, “What kind of tape do you want to duplicate?”
   “Eight-millimeter Japanese. Security tape. It might be difficult.”
   “Difficult? I doubt that very much,” Sanders said. “You know, back in my youth, I wrote most of the early video image-enhancement algorithms. You know, despeckling and inversion and edge tracing. That stuff. The Sanders algorithms were the ones everybody used. I was a graduate student at Cal Tech then. I worked at JPL in my spare time. No, no, we can do it.”
   I handed him a tape. He looked at it. “Cute little bugger.”
   I said, “What happened? To all your algorithms?”
   “There was no commercial use for them,” he said. “Back in the eighties, American companies like RCA and GE got out of commercial electronics entirely. My image enhancement programs didn’t have much use in America.” He shrugged. “So I tried to sell them to Sony, in Japan.”
   “And?”
   “The Japanese had already patented the products. In Japan.”
   “You mean they already had the algorithms?”
   “No. They just had patents. In Japan, patenting is a form of war. The Japanese patent like crazy. And they have a strange system. It takes eight years to get a patent in Japan, but your application is made public after eighteen months, after which royalties are moot. And of course Japan doesn’t have reciprocal licensing agreements with America. It’s one of the ways they keep their edge.
   “Anyway, when I got to Japan I found Sony and Hitachi had some related patents and they had done what is called ‘patent flooding.’ Meaning they covered possible related uses. They didn’t have the rights to use my algorithms—but I discovered I didn’t have the rights, either. Because they had already patented the use of my invention.” He shrugged. “It’s complicated to explain. Anyway, that’s ancient history. By now the Japanese have devised much more complicated video software, far surpassing anything we have. They’re years ahead of us now. But we struggle along in this lab. Ah. Just the person we need. Dan. Are you busy?”
   A young woman looked up from the computer console. Large eyes, horn-rim glasses, dark hair. Her face was partially blocked by the ceiling pipes.
   “You’re not Dan,” Sanders said, sounding surprised. “Where’s Dan, Theresa?”
   “Picking up a midterm,” Theresa said. “I’m just helping run the real-time progressions. They’re finishing now.” I had the impression that she was older than the other students. It was hard to say why, exactly. It certainly wasn’t her clothes: she wore a bright colored headband and a U2 T-shirt under a jeans jacket. But she had a calm quality that made her seem older.
   “Can you switch to something else?” Sanders said, walking around the table to look at the monitor. “Because we have a rush job here. We have to help out the police.” I followed Sanders, ducking pipes.
   “Sure, I guess,” the woman said. She started to shut down units on the desk. Her back was turned to me, and then finally I could see her. She was dark, exotic-looking, almost Eurasian. In fact she was beautiful, drop-dead beautiful. She looked like one of those high cheek-boned models in magazines. And for a moment I was confused, because this woman was too beautiful to be working in some basement electronics laboratory. It didn’t make sense.
   “Say hello to Theresa Asakuma,” he said. “The only Japanese graduate student working here.”
   “Hi,” I said. I blushed. I felt stupid. I felt that information was coming at me too fast. And all things considered, I would rather not have a Japanese handling these tapes. But her first name wasn’t Japanese, and she didn’t look Japanese, she looked Eurasian or perhaps part Japanese, so exotic, maybe she was even—
   “Good morning, Lieutenant,” she said. She extended her left hand, the wrong hand, for me to shake. She held it out to me sideways, the way someone does when their right hand is injured.
   I shook hands with her. “Hello, Miss Asakuma.”
   “Theresa.”
   “Okay.”
   “Isn’t she beautiful?” Sanders said, acting as if he took credit for it. “Just beautiful.”
   “Yes,” I said. “Actually, I’m surprised you’re not a model.”
   There was an awkward moment. I couldn’t tell why. She turned quickly away.
   “It never interested me,” she said.
   And Sanders immediately jumped in and said, “Theresa, Lieutenant Smith needs us to copy some tapes. These tapes.”
   Sanders held one out to her. She took it in her left hand and held it to the light. Her right hand remained bent at the elbow, pressed to her waist. Then I saw that her right arm was withered, ending in a fleshy stump protruding beyond the sleeve of her jeans jacket. It looked like the arm of a Thalidomide baby.
   “Quite interesting,” she said, squinting at the tape. “Eight-millimeter high density. Maybe it’s the proprietary digital format we’ve been hearing about. The one that includes real-time image enhancement.”
   “I’m sorry, I don’t know,” I said. I was feeling foolish for having said anything about being a model. I dug into my box and brought out the playback machine.
   Theresa immediately took a screwdriver and removed the top. She bent over the innards. I saw a green circuit board, a black motor, and three small crystal cylinders. “Yes. It’s the new setup. Very slick. Dr. Sanders, look: they’re doing it with just three heads. The board must generate component RGB, because over here—you think this is compression circuitry?”
   “Probably digital to analog converter,” Sanders said. “Very neat. So small.” He turned to me, holding up the box. “You know how the Japanese can make things this way and we can’t? They kaizen ‘em. A process of deliberate, patient, continual refinements. Each year the products get a little better, a little smaller, a little cheaper. Americans don’t think that way. Americans are always looking for the quantum leap, the big advance forward. Americans try to hit a home run—to knock it out of the park—and then sit back. The Japanese just hit singles all day long, and they never sit back. So with something like this, you’re looking at an expression of philosophy as much as anything.”
   He talked like this for a while, pivoting the cylinders, admiring it. Finally I said, “Can you copy the tapes?”
   “Sure,” Theresa said. “From the converter, we can run a signal out of this machine and lay it down on whatever media you like. You want three-quarter? Optical master? VHS?”
   “VHS,” I said.
   “That’s easy,” she said.
   “But will it be an accurate copy? The people at JPL said they couldn’t guarantee the copy would be accurate.”
   “Oh, hell, JPL,” Sanders said. “They just talk like that because they work for the government. We get things done here. Right Theresa?”
   But Theresa wasn’t listening. I watched her plugging cables and wires, moving swiftly with her good hand, using her stump to stabilize and hold the box. Like many disabled people, her movements were so fluid it was hardly noticeable that her right hand was missing. Soon she had the small playback machine hooked to a second recorder, and several different monitors.
   “What’re all these?”
   “To check the signal.”
   “You mean for playback?”
   “No. The big monitor there will show the image. The others let me look at the signal characteristics, and the data map: how the image has been laid down on the tape.”
   I said, “You need to do that?”
   “No. I just want to snoop. I’m curious about how they’ve set up this high-density format.”
   Sanders said to me, “What is the actual source material?”
   “It’s from an office security camera.”
   “And this tape is original?”
   “I think so. Why?”
   “Well, if it’s original material we want to be extra careful with it,” Sanders said. He was talking to Theresa, instructing her. “We don’t want to set up any feedback loops scrambling the media surface. Or signal leaks off the heads that will compromise the integrity of the data stream.”
   “Don’t worry,” she said. “I got it handled.” She pointed to her setup. “See that? It’ll warn of an impedance shift. And I’m monitoring the central processor too.”
   “Okay,” Sanders said. He was beaming like a proud parent.
   “How long will this take?” I said.
   “Not long. We can lay down the signal at very high speed. The rate limit is a function of the playback device, and it seems to have a fast-forward scan. So, maybe two or three minutes per tape.”
   I glanced at my watch. “I have a ten-thirty appointment I can’t be late for, and I don’t want to leave these…”
   “You need all of them done?”
   “Actually, just five are critical.”
   “Then let’s do those first.”
   We ran the first few seconds of each tape, one after another, looking for the five that came from the cameras on the forty-sixth floor. As each tape started, I saw the camera image on the central monitor of Theresa’s table. On the side monitors, signal traces bounced and jiggled like an intensive care unit. I mentioned it.
   “That’s just about right,” she said. “Intensive care for video.” She ejected one tape, stuck in another, and started it up. “Oops. Did you say this material was original? It’s not. These tapes are copies.”
   “How do you know?”
   “Because we got a windup signature.” Theresa bent over the equipment, staring at the signal traces, making fine adjustments with her knobs and dials.
   “I think that’s what you got, yes,” Sanders said. He turned to me. “You see, with video it’s difficult to detect a copy in the image itself. The older analog video shows some degradation in successive generations, but in a digital system like this, there is no difference at all. Each copy is literally identical to the master.”
   “Then how can you say the tapes are copies?”
   “Theresa isn’t looking at the picture,” Sanders said. “She’s looking at the signal. Even though we can’t detect a copy from the image, sometimes we can determine the image came from another video playback, instead of a camera.”
   I shook my head. “How?”
   Theresa said, “It has to do with how the signal is laid down in the first half-second of taping. If the recording video is started before the playback video, there is sometimes a slight fluctuation in the signal output as the playback machine starts up. It’s a mechanical function: the playback motors can’t get up to speed instantaneously. There are electronic circuits in the playback machine to minimize the effect, but there’s always an interval of getting up to speed.”
   “And that’s what you detected?”
   She nodded. “It’s called a windup signature.”
   Sanders said, “And that never happens if the signal is coming direct from a camera, because a camera has no moving parts. A camera is instantaneously up to speed at all times.”
   I frowned. “So these tapes are copies.”
   “Is that bad?” Sanders said.
   “I don’t know. If they were copied, they might also be changed, right?”
   “In theory, yes,” Sanders said. “In practice, we’d have to look carefully. And it would be very hard to know for certain. These tapes come from a Japanese company?”
   “Yes.”
   “Nakamoto?”
   I nodded. “Yes.”
   “Frankly I’m not surprised they gave you copies,” Sanders said. “The Japanese are extremely cautious. They’re not very trusting of outsiders. And Japanese corporations in America feel the way we would feel doing business in Nigeria: they think they’re surrounded by savages.”
   “Hey,” Theresa said.
   “Sorry,” Sanders said, “but you know what I mean. The Japanese feel they have to put up with us. With our ineptitude, our slowness, our stupidity, our incompetence. That makes them self-protective. So if these tapes have any legal significance, the last thing they’d do is turn the originals over to a barbarian policeman like you. No, no, they’d give you a copy and keep the original in case they need it for their defense. Fully confident that with your inferior American video technology, you’d never be able to detect that it was a copy, anyway.”
   I frowned. “How long would it take to make copies?”
   “Not long,” Sanders said, shaking his head. “The way Theresa is scanning now, five minutes a tape. I imagine the Japanese can do it much faster. Say, two minutes a tape.”
   “In that case, they had plenty of time to make copies last night.”
   As we talked, Theresa was continuing to shuffle the tapes, looking at the first portions of each. As each image came up, she’d glance at me. I would shake my head. I was seeing all the different security cameras. Finally, the first of the tapes from the forty-sixth floor appeared, the familiar office image I had seen before.
   “That’s one.”
   “Okay. Here we go. Laying it onto VHS.” Theresa started the first copy. She ran the tape forward at high speed, the images streaky and quick. On the side monitors, the signals bounced and jittered nervously.
   She said, “Does this have something to do with the murder last night?”
   “Yes. You know about that?”
   She shrugged. “I saw it on the news. The killer died in a car crash?”
   “That’s right,” I said.
   She was turned away. The three-quarter profile of her face was strikingly beautiful, the high curve of her cheekbone. I thought of what a playboy Eddie Sakamura was known to be. I said, “Did you know him?”
   “No,” she said. After a moment she added, “He was Japanese.”
   Another moment of awkwardness descended on our little group. There was something that both Theresa and Sanders seemed to know that I did not. But I didn’t know how to ask. So I watched the video.
   Once again, I saw the sunlight moving across the floor. Then the room lights came up as the office personnel thinned. Now the floor was empty. And then, at high speed, Cheryl Austin appeared, followed by the man. They kissed passionately.
   “Ah ha,” Sanders said. “Is this it?”
   “Yes.”
   He frowned as he watched the action progress. “You mean the murder is recorded?”
   “Yes,” I said. “On multiple cameras.”
   “You’re kidding.”
   Sanders fell silent, watching events proceed. With the streaky high-speed image, it was difficult to see more than the basic events. The two people moving to the conference room. The sudden struggle. Forcing her back on the table. Stepping away suddenly. Leaving the room in haste.
   Nobody spoke. We all watched the tape.
   I glanced at Theresa. Her face was blank. The image was reflected in her glasses.
   Eddie passed the mirror, and went into the dark passageway. The tape ran on for a few more seconds, and then the cassette popped out.
   “That’s one. You say there are multiple cameras? How many all together?”
   “Five, I think,” I said.
   She marked the first cassette with a stick-on label. She started the second tape in the machine, and began another high-speed duplication.
   I said, “These copies are exact?”
   “Oh, yes.”
   “So they’re legal?”
   Sanders frowned. “Legal in what sense?”
   “Well, as evidence, in a court of law—“
   “Oh, no,” Sanders said. “These tapes would never be admissible in a court of law.”
   “But if they’re exact copies—“
   “It’s nothing to do with that. All forms of photographic evidence including video, are no longer admissible in court.”
   “I haven’t heard that,” I said.
   “It hasn’t happened yet,” Sanders said. “The case law isn’t entirely clear. But it’s coming. All photographs are suspect these days. Because now, with digital systems, they can be changed perfectly. Perfectly. And that’s something new. Remember years ago, how the Russians would remove politicians from photographs of their May Day line ups? It was always a crude cut-and-paste job—and you could always see that something had been done. There was a funny space between the shoulders of the remaining people. Or a discoloration on the back wall. Or you could see the brush-strokes of the retoucher who tried to smooth over the damage. But anyway, you could see it—fairly easily. You could see the picture had been altered. The whole business was laughable.”
   “I remember,” I said.
   “Photographs always had integrity precisely because they were impossible to change. So we considered photographs to represent reality. But for several years now, computers have allowed us to make seamless alterations of photographic images. A few years back the National Geographic moved the Great Pyramid of Egypt on a cover photo. The editors didn’t like where the pyramid was, and they thought it would compose better if it was moved. So they just altered the photograph and moved it. Nobody could tell. But if you go back to Egypt with a camera and try to duplicate that picture, you’ll find you can’t. Because there is no place in the real world where the pyramids line up that way. The photograph no longer represents reality. But you can’t tell. Minor example.”
   “And someone could do the same thing to this tape?”
   “In theory, any video can be changed.”
   On the monitor, I watched the murder occurring a second time. This camera was from the far end of the room. It didn’t show the actual murder very well, but afterward, Sakamura was clearly visible as he walked toward the camera.
   I said, “The image could be changed how?”
   Sanders laughed. “These days, you can make any damn change you want.”
   “Could you change the identity of the murderer?”
   “Technically, yes,” Sanders said. “Mapping a face onto a complex moving object is now possible. Technically possible. But as a practical matter, it’d be a bitch to do.”
   I said nothing. But it was just as well. Sakamura was our leading suspect and he was dead; the chief wanted the case finished. So did I.
   “Of course,” Sanders said, “the Japanese have all sorts of fancy video algorithms for surface mapping and three-dimensional transformations. They can do things that we can’t begin to imagine.” He drummed his fingers on the table again. “What is the timetable of these tapes? What’s their history?”
   I said, “The murder happened at eight-thirty last night, as shown on the clock. We were told the tapes were removed from the security office around eight forty-five p.m. We asked for them, and there was some back-and-forth with the Japanese.”
   “As always. And when did you finally take possession?”
   “They were delivered to division headquarters around one-thirty a.m.”
   “Okay,” Sanders said. “That means they had the tapes from eight forty-five to one-thirty.”
   “Right. A little less than five hours.”
   Sanders frowned. “Five tapes, with five different camera angles, to change in five hours?” Sanders shook his head. “No way. It just can’t be done, Lieutenant.”
   “Yeah,” Theresa said. “It’s impossible. Even for them. It’s just too many pixels to change.”
   I said, “You’re sure about that.”
   “Well,” Theresa said, “the only way it could be done that fast is with an automated program, and even the most sophisticated programs need you to polish the details by hand. Things like bad blur can give it all away.”
   “Bad blur?” I said. I found I liked asking her questions. I liked looking at her face.
   “Bad motion blur,” Sanders said. “Video runs at thirty frames a second. You can think of each frame of video as a picture that’s shot at a shutter speed of one-thirtieth of a second. Which is very slow—much slower than pocket cameras. If you film a runner at a thirtieth of a second, the legs are just streaks. Blurs.
   “That’s called motion blur. And if you alter it by a mechanical process, it starts to look wrong. The image appears too sharp, too crisp. Edges look odd. It’s back to the Russians: you can see it’s been changed. For realistic motion, you need the right amount of blur.”
   “I see.”
   Theresa said, “And there’s the color shift.”
   “Right,” Sanders said. “Inside the blur itself, there is a color shift. For example, look there on the monitor. The man is wearing a blue suit, and his coat is swinging out as he spins the girl around the room. Now. If you take a frame of that action, and blow it up to its pixels, you will find that the coat is navy, but the blur is progressive shades of lighter blue, until at the edge it seems almost transparent—you can’t tell from a single frame exactly where the coat ends and the background begins.”
   I could vaguely imagine it. “Okay…”
   “If the edge colors don’t blend smoothly, you will notice it immediately. It can take hours to clean up a few seconds of tape, as in a commercial. But if you don’t do it, you will see it like that.” He snapped his fingers.
   “So even though they duplicated the tapes, they couldn’t have altered them?”
   “Not in five hours,” Sanders said. “They just didn’t have time.”
   “Then we are seeing what actually happened.”
   “No doubt about it,” Sanders said. “But we’ll poke around with this image, anyway, after you go. Theresa wants to fiddle with it, I know she does. So do I. Check in with us later today. We’ll tell you if there’s anything funny. But basically, it can’t be done. And it wasn’t done here.”