Rising Sun: A Novel Read Online Free PDF

have.”

It’d been almost two years since I worked the detective division, and it felt good to be around a homicide again. It brought back memories: the nighttime tension, the adrenaline rush of bad coffee in paper cups, and all the teams working around you—it’s a kind of crazy energy, circling the center where somebody is lying, dead. Every homicide crime scene has that same energy, and that finality at the center. When you look at the dead person, there is a kind of obviousness, and at the same time there is an impossible mystery. Even in the simplest domestic brawl, where the woman finally decided to shoot the guy, you’d look at her, all covered in scars and cigarette burns, and you had to ask, why tonight? What was it about tonight? It’s always clear what you are seeing, and there’s always something that doesn’t add up. Both things at once.
    And at a homicide you have the sense of being right down to the basic truths of existence, the smells and the defecation and the bloating. Usually somebody’s crying, so you’re listening to that. And the usual bullshit stops; somebody died, and it’s an unavoidable fact, like a rock in the road that makes all the traffic go around it. And in that grim and real setting, this camaraderie springs up, because you’re working late with people you know, and actually know very well because you see them all the time. L.A. has four homicides a day; there’s another one every six hours. And every detective at the crime scene already has ten homicides dragging on his backlog, which makes this new one an intolerable burden, so he and everybody else is hoping to solve it on thespot, to get it out of the way. There is that kind of finality and tension and energy all mixed together.
    And after you do it for a few years, you get so you like it. And to my surprise, as I entered the conference room, I realized that I missed it.
    The conference room was elegant: black table, black high-backed leather chairs, the lights of the nighttime skyscrapers beyond the glass walls. Inside the room, the technicians talked quietly, as they moved around the body of the dead girl.
    She had blond hair cut short. Blue eyes, full mouth. She looked about twenty-five. Tall, with a long-limbed, athletic look. Her dress was black and sheer.
    Graham was well into his examination; he was down at the end of the table, squinting at the girl’s black patent high heels, a penlight in one hand, his notebook in another.
    Kelly, the coroner’s assistant, was taping the girl’s hands in paper bags to protect them. Connor stopped him. “Just a minute.” Connor looked at one hand, inspecting the wrist, peering closely under the fingernails. He sniffed under one nail. Then he flicked the fingers rapidly, one after another.
    “Don’t bother,” Graham said laconically. “There’s no rigor mortis yet, and no detritus under the nails, no skin or cloth fibers. In fact, I’d say there aren’t many signs of a struggle at all.”
    Kelly slipped the bag over the hand. Connor said to him, “You have a time of death?”
    “I’m working on it.” Kelly lifted the girl’s buttocks to place the rectal probe. “The axillary thermocouples are already in place. We’ll know in a minute.”
    Connor touched the fabric of the black dress, checked the label. Helen, part of the SID team, said, “It’s a Yamamoto.”
    “I see that,” Connor said.
    “What’s a Yamamoto?” I said.
    Helen said, “Very expensive Japanese designer. This little black nothing is at least five thousand dollars. That’s assuming she bought it used. New, it’s maybe fifteen thousand.”
    “Is it traceable?” Connor asked her.
    “Maybe. Depends on whether she bought it here, or in Europe, or Tokyo. It’ll take a couple of days to check.”
    Connor immediately lost interest. “Never mind. That’ll be too late.”
    He produced a small, fiber-optic penlight, which he used to inspect the girl’s scalp and hair. Then he looked quickly at