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were screwed up, but I wasn’t paying much attention. My headache was back and I was hours and miles away from any possibility of aspirin.
    We were waiting at the stop sign for traffic to clear on Fourth South when George Yamamoto pulled up beside us and honked his horn. I rolled down the window.
    He had changed his mind. “I guess I’ll go with you after all,” he said. “You’ll probably need someone to interpret. Machiko doesn’t speak English very well or at least she didn’t the last time I saw her.”
    â€œYou know how to get to their place?”
    He nodded.
    â€œWe’ll follow you, then. Lead the way.”
    Al waited long enough for George to pull out in front of us. “I could have found it all right, you know,” he said.
    I think he resented George going along, regarded his presence in somewhat the same light as Howard Baker did, as a hindrance rather than a help.
    â€œYes,” I said, “but unless I miss my guess, your Japanese isn’t all that hot. Mine sure isn’t.”
    We drove to Kirkland in relative silence. At midmorning, traffic on the Evergreen Point Floating Bridge was fairly light. The entire trip only took about half an hour.
    As we drove, I couldn’t get the picture of Kimi Kurobashi out of my mind. What monster had reared its ugly head between that happy-go-lucky, horsy kid and her adoring father? What had set them at each other’s throats? Whatever it was, now it was permanent. There would be no more chances for reconciliation. Those were gone. Used up.
    Whatever hidden meaning might be locked in the cryptic message Tadeo Kurobashi had left for his wife or daughter in those final words on hiscomputer screen, the feud between him and his daughter was never going to get any better. Their quarrel would never be over, never be resolved, not as long as Kimiko Kurobashi still lived.
    People die. Quarrels don’t. That inalterable realization made me sad as hell.
    For everyone concerned.

CHAPTER 3
    T HERE ARE A LOT OF THINGS ABOUT THIS job that aren’t wonderful; doing mountains of paperwork and dealing with the media are two items that come immediately to mind. But by far the worst part, bar none, is notifying next-of-kin. Delivering bad news, fatal bad news concerning a loved one, costs everybody—the people receiving it as well as those dishing it out.
    Anyone who knocks on the door and walks into the home of survivors of a homicide victim is walking into an emotional mine field. There’s no way to prepare in advance for what may happen because everyone reacts differently. Some survivors accept the news calmly and quietly, while others burst into hysterics, either crying or laughing. I’ve seen both. On some occasions I’ve been made to feel welcome and even been invited to stay to dinner, while at other times I’ve been bodily thrown out of the house. Once I was assaulted by a grief-crazed widow who held me personally responsible for her husband’s death. She came after me tooth and nail, ready to flay the skin right off my face.
    But all of those are overt reactions—things cops can see for themselves and either accept or avoid by taking some kind of evasive action. For homicide detectives, though, there’s often another dimension, a hidden element of risk.
    Law enforcement statistics show that murder victims are usually killed by someone they know. One way or the other, survivors hold the keys to what went on before the crime. As a consequence, answers to mysteries surrounding murders and often even the killers themselves lurk just below the surface of those initial, painful next-of-kin visits. A detective has to go into those interviews with all his instincts fine-tuned and with his attention to detail honed to a razor-sharp edge.
    And since at that stage of the investigation we didn’t know for sure whether Tadeo Kurobashi had been murdered or if he had died by his own hand, we had to