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hospital?” But right to the heart of the matter: “Is he dead?”
    â€œYes.”
    Her wide-set eyes, so brown they were almost black, filled quickly with tears. She stiffened and backed away, brushing the tears away quickly, fiercely. Several feet away from all of us, she stood with her arms crossed, face averted, holding herself aloof from George’s murmured expressions of sympathy. Her reaction appeared to be nine-parts anger and one-part grief.
    â€œWhen?” she asked.
    â€œLast night sometime,” George answered slowly, fighting to control the timbre of his voice, trying to keep it from cracking. “We don’t know exactly.”
    â€œHow?” Single-word questions seemed to be all she could manage.
    â€œKimi, I—” Unable to go on, George stopped and shook his head helplessly.
    â€œTell me!” Kimiko demanded. She steppedtoward him, her voice dropping to a strangled whisper. “Did he do it himself?”
    George shrugged his shoulders. “We don’t know yet.”
    â€œYes you do. You must. Tell me the truth! Did he?”
    George was not a tall man, and Kimi Kurobashi was smaller still, but she seemed to grow taller as she stood there staring at him while her whole body vibrated with barely controlled fury. George faltered under the weight of her withering gaze. I would have, too.
    â€œMaybe,” he answered reluctantly. “Dr. Baker seems to think so, but I don’t.”
    Kimi turned away from him again. She stood hunched over and trembling, her white-knuckled fingers biting deep into the plaid material of the shirt that covered her upper arm.
    â€œThat son of a bitch!” I heard her mutter. “That no good son of a bitch!”
    Shocked, George Yamamoto reacted instantly. “Kimi! He was your father. You mustn’t talk about him that way.”
    â€œI’ll talk about him any damned way I please,” she blazed back at him. “Don’t tell me what I can and can’t say.”
    â€œBut Kimi—”
    â€œI asked him straight out,” she continued, “and he lied to me. He lied!”
    While listening to this heated exchange, I was still busily processing her initial reaction. “What did you ask him?” I interjected. “And when?”
    She shuddered and let out a jagged breath. “Last night. I asked him last night, at his office.”
    â€œYou went there?”
    â€œYes.”
    â€œWhy?”
    â€œTo find out what was going on.”
    â€œI don’t understand.”
    â€œI didn’t either. He called me yesterday morning at home. They had to call me in from the barn. He told me to come home right away and get my mother. He said it was urgent.”
    â€œDid he say why?”
    â€œNo. I tried to ask him while we were still on the phone, but he said there wasn’t time, that he wanted her away from here when it happened. He wanted her to go home with me to eastern Washington. He said she was pretty much packed and that she should stay with me until all this blew over.”
    â€œUntil what blew over?
    â€œI don’t know, not for sure. They were having difficulties evidently. Money difficulties of some kind. He told me that the house had been sold but that he owed more on it than they would get.”
    â€œDid he tell you he was filing for bankruptcy?”
    Although Kimiko Kurobashi had been answering my questions for several minutes, now she looked at me as if my presence had finally registered. “Who are you?” she asked.
    I fumbled out my ID and showed it to her. “Detective J.P. Beaumont of the Seattle Police Department. This is my partner, Detective Allen Lindstrom. We’re investigating your father’s death.”
    She glanced at George Yamamoto, who nodded a verification.
    â€œNo,” she answered finally. “He didn’t tell me that, but I knew anyway. I figured it out.”
    â€œHow?”
    â€œHe told me my