Clear Skies Read online

  Clear Skies

  by A.M. Murray

  © Copyright 2018 A.M. Murray

  ISBN 978-1-63393-609-6

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other—except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior written permission of the author.

  This is a work of fiction. The characters are both actual and fictitious. With the exception of verified historical events and persons, all incidents, descriptions, dialogue and opinions expressed are the products of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real.

  Published by

  210 60th Street

  Virginia Beach, VA 23451

  800-435-4811

  www.koehlerbooks.com

  DEDICATION

  To Victoria and Kenneth

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  CHAPTER 26

  CHAPTER 27

  CHAPTER 28

  CHAPTER 29

  CHAPTER 30

  CHAPTER 31

  CHAPTER 32

  CHAPTER 33

  CHAPTER 34

  CHAPTER 35

  CHAPTER 36

  CHAPTER 37

  CHAPTER 38

  CHAPTER 39

  CHAPTER 40

  CHAPTER 41

  CHAPTER 42

  CHAPTER 43

  CHAPTER 44

  CHAPTER 45

  CHAPTER 46

  CHAPTER 47

  CHAPTER 48

  CHAPTER 49

  CHAPTER 50

  CHAPTER 51

  CHAPTER 52

  CHAPTER 53

  CHAPTER 54

  CHAPTER 55

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  CHAPTER 1

  (Tuesday Morning—Nice)

  The client waited for Kan in a secluded corner of the hotel lobby. It was the first time for them to meet. In fact, it was the first time for Kan to meet any of his clients. He had made it a firm rule to make all arrangements for a job through secure emails and burner phones to avoid direct personal contact.

  Though Kan was not his real name, it matched the passport he used in European hotels as confirmation of ID at registration. He’d commissioned the fake document for this purpose a few years ago, during a job in the Philippines. The quality might not pass stringent inspection at an airport immigration counter, but from his experience, hotel receptionists merely glanced at the photo on the first page and never questioned the document’s authenticity. Anyone investigating his whereabouts would face an impasse, as he owned a raft of top-drawer false passports using other names for airline travel.

  Until eight hours ago, he’d been hanging out in a Nice apartment owned by a Frenchman of Algerian descent. He knew the man from a wet job they’d worked on together two years earlier. A few months later, the Frenchman had made a one-eighty-degree change in his line of business and now pimped twenty call girls, claiming it was more fun and less risk. Kan thought it was a wise decision, because, in his view, the man lacked sufficient perspicacity and discipline for his previous work.

  Staying with him had kept Kan under the radar of the authorities until the scheduled meeting with his client, but the girls had brought their johns back to the apartment a few times during the past two days, forcing him out on the street for hours at a time. His nervousness about exposure had peaked, and he had checked into the hotel his client had recommended until their rendezvous.

  Initially, he’d avoided the hotel, fearing a set-up, but given his circumstances, it took him off the street in the few remaining hours. He maintained an extreme level of vigilance, but time passed without issues. He had then left the room to meet his client, reassured their short-term alliance was sound, even if not robust.

  The client’s ivy-league clothes screamed money but looked out of place on his tall, lanky frame. Each man instinctively recognized the other, the only people in the lobby at this early hour. They nodded and walked out to a waiting cab.

  Kan was tempted to relax. He’d completed work for this client and expected a sizable bonus for his trouble. Now they were about to take a short, twenty-minute drive together from Nice to the Monte Carlo Marina for a sea voyage to the UK on a luxury yacht, where Kan would receive his final payment in cash. He’d checked his Seychelles-based bank account via the Internet before leaving his room and had found the first two installments paid as expected. Kan looked forward to his first holiday at sea, mindful of the added bonus of a clandestine departure from France away from the prying eyes of immigration officials.

  Uncharacteristically, he savored the anticipation of sharing rare quality time with like-minded individuals. A loner by necessity in his line of work, he couldn’t take the risk of making friends or even letting anyone come close. Maybe one day, when he’d accumulated enough money to pay for the lifestyle he sought and purged his soul of all memories of his current life, he would settle down and live like everyone else. But not yet.

  Just a few hours past midnight, the moonless sky was black with low clouds blocking light from the stars as well. They approached the cab, and Kan’s alarm meter soared when he saw another man in the front seat beside the driver. The man was a heavyweight, with the type of physique built up by daily, extreme workouts in a gym. His ultra-short, flat-topped hairstyle suggested ex-military. When the man swiveled his head to greet them, Kan recognized him as one of two men sent by the client to provide support yesterday. He hadn’t wanted their help then and didn’t want to see one of them now. Kan disliked unexpected developments, and his body hummed again with anxiety.

  The three men completed the journey to Monte Carlo in uncomfortable silence, all aware of each other’s life-threatening skills and evaluating the other men’s vulnerabilities, in case changing circumstances demanded offensive action. Kan felt exposed: this relationship had not gone on long enough to foster trust. When they pulled up beside the vessel, he saw another car draw away from the area. With growing trepidation, he looked at his client and raised an eyebrow.

  “My associate just boarded. You’ll like her. She’s a charming woman who owns the yacht,” his client said with polite indifference.

  Kan studied the client to measure his sincerity. His finely tuned sense of preservation still felt unsettled. Good wouldn’t hack it. He had to be invincible. Kan knew he was alive because of meticulous planning for every possible contingency. There could be three outcomes for a man in his line of work—kill, be killed, or be caught. He lived and worked under the guiding principle of extreme caution and was still alive to congratulate himself on his accomplishments.

  Despite his growing misgivings, Kan followed his client up the gangway and into the stateroom, with the client’s colleague two feet behind. There, his host waited with her arm outstretched, offering him a long-stemmed glass of champagne. He froze for an awkward moment, and not because of her flawless beauty. This was not their first encounter, and after they’d met just a few days ago, Kan felt sure he’d been the last person to see her alive.

  Confronted by her inconceivable pr
esence, he shuffled toward her to accept the glass. At that moment, his client’s heavyweight companion drove the sharp tip of a custom-made, stainless-steel needle into the base of his neck. Kan’s scream tapered to a gasp. His pupils lost focus and took on a glassy stare as he slipped into unconsciousness and slumped to the floor, dead.

  CHAPTER 2

  (Five Days Earlier— Thursday Morning, Tokyo)

  She lay sprawled across the sofa. A beam from a ceiling spotlight shimmered off a gilded Japanese screen, only to vanish in disheveled strands of golden-blonde hair spilling over her face. Several hours ago, somebody had slashed her dress from neck to hem. That same somebody had also held a gun to the side of her head and shot a single bullet into her brain.

  Dan Slade bent over the body for a closer look at the head wound. “She’d have been dead by the time she hit the sofa.”

  “It’s not your job to second-guess the medical examiner’s opinion. He’s not even seen the body yet.” Kenji Makino, from the homicide division of Tokyo’s Criminal Investigation Bureau, shot him a glance that might have withered his Japanese colleagues but ricocheted off Slade like rain striking a metal roof.

  Thanks for your confidence, Makino. Japanese staff management techniques didn’t sit well with most Westerners, especially not an experienced FBI agent like Slade. Only a month left of this one-year stint in the CIB. Why the hell did I sign up?

  He pulled on rubber gloves to extract a US passport from a purse lying under the coffee table. It said she was Chloe Harris and thirty-three years old, but a model agency brochure on the table placed her as Carol Palmer and owner of the company. The name on the mailbox beside the front door said Carol Palmer lived in this residence. Harris and Palmer were common family names in the US, but here in Tokyo, Slade thought they were linked to a woman who was anything but common. One look at her alive would have changed my day.

  “The foreign journos are going to whip the expats into a frenzy over this,” Slade said, bracing himself for another strike from Makino. He’d spent the first seventeen years of his life in Japan and seen even the most trivial of incidents involving foreigners morph into prime targets for the local media. And the press played them like maestros, to the last hyperbolic note. “The guys upstairs will push the investigation into warp speed just to kill the noise.”

  “That’ll be your problem in International Liaison and your job to keep a lid on it,” Makino said.

  Not that simple, Makino. He could already see the Japan Times headline: American woman slain in brutal sex crime five minutes from the Tokyo American Club. Local police, led by Makino, had responded to a panicked call from the victim’s maid and appeared on the scene shortly after ten in the morning. By the time Slade arrived fifteen minutes later, twenty foreign reporters and the usual ebullient Japanese press contingent were swarming outside trying to talk their way into the building.

  Located in upscale Roppongi Itchome, the condominium was two minutes from the US, Swedish, and Spanish Embassies, the iconic Hotel Okura, and a rash of foreign corporate behemoths. The area was a leafy residential nexus for affluent expats, with their multinational employers more than willing to shoulder the exorbitant costs. It was also just five minutes from the seamier section of Roppongi, known for its sleazy strip clubs, hostess bars, karaoke lounges, and other forms of entertainment popular with foreign and Japanese businesspeople, students, and off-duty US military personnel.

  News of a cold-blooded murder here would fly through every level of the international community at sound-barrier speed. Slade would have to inform the US embassy and give the press a statement fast, but right now, he wasn’t even sure of the victim’s name.

  The tension ebbed when the Japanese detective ambled into the adjoining dining room to take statements from the maid, who’d let herself into the apartment and found her employer shot dead. Makino had brought in a forensic team, but Slade expected him to hand this crime to International Liaison even before the corpse reached the morgue.

  With luck, the case might land on my meager pile of files. The other cases he had weren’t impressive. A clown could solve them standing on his head and spinning a ball on the soles of his feet.

  He leaned over the corpse and examined it again. There are few women whose faces have the peerless quality of porcelain, but the victim was a prime example. Her skin, still unaffected by the waxy, yellow sheen seen on most cadavers, reminded him of a Meissen doll—more like an upmarket store-front mannequin than a corpse. She was a head-swerver he’d have remembered long after passing her in the street.

  Up close like this, though, the smell made him gag, and he put the time of death around the night before last at the latest.

  Slade eased past the police photographer shooting from beside the victim and gave the customary Japanese nod of acknowledgment to three forensic officers taking fingerprints from the furniture. He skirted another officer vacuuming the floor around the body.

  “You won’t find much here,” Slade motioned across the room. “This is the work of a pro.”

  The leader of the forensic team nodded. “I think you’re right. Nothing’s turned up yet, though we’ll know more after we get this lot back to the lab.”

  Slade scanned the living room and shook his head. A standard Japanese apartment could fit in here with space left over, and this was just one room. In every detail, the standard for the décor was luxury.

  He walked toward a vintage blue and white ceramic hibachi, a Japanese brazier, surrounded by flat cushions on the floor and ran his fingers over the jagged remains of charcoal inside. He pictured a samurai with his inner circle of henchmen warming their hands over the glowing coals centuries ago while they planned the next ironfisted strategy to boost their clan’s wealth and power base.

  An apt image, perhaps. Slade’s sixth sense stirred, pushing rational thought just beyond the limits of ordinary perception. Maybe the victim was part of a modern-day samurai group—a high-stakes criminal cabal—and she’d fallen out with her co-conspirators.

  He edged past the hibachi, his legs touched by a band of the sun’s heat penetrating the handmade paper of sliding shōji screens pulled across the windows. Pale silvery light, coruscating through the screens in rhythm with the movement of trees outside, bathed the room in a flickering otherworldly glow.

  His father’s collection of Japanese antiques had piqued Slade’s interest as a teenager, and he’d collected a few items of his own since then. He stepped toward a black lacquer stand displaying an ōyoroi or Japanese armor. It looked like a valuable collector’s item from the late Muromachi period. The armor’s intricate meshing of iron, leather, lacquer, silk, wood, and gold leaf would resist fatal thrusts of arrows and swords, and its five-hundred-year patina slid under Slade’s fingers like satin. Another vivid image of a samurai, this time on horseback dressed for battle, faded to a dim recollection of a similar piece in a corner of his childhood home.

  “We had something like this when I was a kid,” he said to the nearest forensic officer.

  “It must be worth big bucks now if you sell it.”

  “Probably, but my mother tossed out dad’s Japanese antiques when he died, so I’ll never know.” It might even have been a reproduction, a fake like our family life. She should have kept everything, let the collection’s value appreciate, and ignored the angst.

  Looking at the artifact awakened leaden memories of that day in Tokyo when he’d come home from his high-school graduation to find his dad slumped at his desk, a handgun by his side. They hadn’t even known he had owned the weapon, but it confirmed the young Slade’s suspicion of a well-hidden, unsavory aspect of his father’s life. He normally kept this recollection locked down in the dark, far from conscious thought. One day, he’d drill down to uncover the truth, but even now, eighteen years later, the memory was still too raw.

  “What do you reckon they paid for all this stuff?” Slade said, shaking off the dismal miasma of retrospection.

  “A hell of a lot more than
you or I can afford on our salaries, that’s for sure.”

  Slade found himself planted again in front of the victim, gazing at the most striking feature of the room. Twenty priceless shunga ukiyo-e or erotic woodblock prints, created in the late eighteenth century by famed print masters Hokusai and Utamaru, clung to the long wall behind the sofa in two rows. The artwork depicted courtesans and samurai in riveting coital positions, providing an ironic backdrop for the near-naked woman underneath, the vibrant neon pink of her dissected dress at odds with her lifeless form.

  Other than her sexual pose, Slade saw no other disturbance suggesting a crime of passion, and he’d bet on the killer slitting the dress and arranging the body to distract investigators from his real motive. He checked for the usual signs of a robbery and found none. The victim’s wallet—still stuffed with money and credit cards. Her jewelry—plump diamonds glittered on her fingers and wrists, showing more life than the body they decorated. The treasures in this room—untouched. There was no way the killer had come here for sex or to steal the victim’s valuables and priceless antiques.

  Slade scanned the room one more time. He couldn’t throw off an insistent foreboding that a deadly power game was beginning, one with higher stakes than an execution-style killing of a foreign woman in Tokyo.

  CHAPTER 3

  (Thursday Morning—Tokyo)

  Slade followed an acrid smell to the kitchen and found the dishwasher stacked with unwashed crystal wine glasses and expensive tableware. Their clatter when he pulled the tray out and pushed it back into the machine shattered the silence in the room.

  The rustling of paper covers on Makino’s shoes when he shuffled into the kitchen from the dining room caused Slade to turn.

  “She had dinner guests recently.” Slade pointed to the dishwasher. “You’ll need to ID whoever came to dinner in the last few days.”

  “I’ll submit a crime scene report by the end of the day and recommend you take the lead on this case, so that will be your call. We’ll provide support,” Makino said in a friendly way that fitted him as awkwardly as his suit.