The Ann Curry Murders

By Jim Van Loozen

In Okinawa, Japan, two policemen are frustrated as the ritualistic murders of three Japanese prostitutes remain unsolved. With only one witness who thinks the killer may have been an American serviceman who has already returned home, the police are eventually forced to close the dormant filesall while hoping they have not unleashed a psychopath on American society. Unfortunately they have no idea that a time bomb is already ticking.

Years later, police detective Kelly Kraft is ready to get back to work after being sidelined because a boy died during one of his drug raids. While progressing through therapy with police psychiatrist Dr. Angela Moore, commissioned to help him root out his deep-seated anger, Kraft soon learns a brutal murder spree is underway. As Kraft, a super cop and remorseless killer in his own right, seeks to sort out the connection among the murders in Okinawa and the current series of murders, a surprise player is unveiled, forcing Kraft to rely on the reluctant Dr. Moore to help him unravel the case.

In this psychological thriller, a serial killer motivated by a chance viewing of a beautiful television newswoman unleashes his fury on innocent victims. Now only time will tell if a police detective and his psychiatrist can stop him before more die.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Feb 13, 2014
• ISBN: 9781491721162

Jim Van Loozen

Jim Van Loozen was a celebrated newspaper reporter and editor in Houston before moving to Washington, D.C., to work for the U.S. Postal Service headquarters in a number of positions. He has won numerous awards and honors for his writing and now resides in Florida with his wife Diane. His novel A Ghost of a Chance also has been published by iUniverse.

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Copyright © 2014 Jim Van Loozen

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ISBN: 978-1-4917-2117-9 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4917-2116-2 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2014902053

iUniverse rev. date: 2/12/2014

Contents

Prologue

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This book is dedicated to Ann Curry.

Her beauty, grace, and intelligence gave Today credibility and inspired this work.

Special thanks to

my brother-in-law Doug Brinkerhoff who provided background on Okinawa.

Prologue

M URDER IS A UNIVERSAL LANGUAGE SPOKEN in all tongues wherever men and women live in allegedly civilized communities. The murders being spoken of in the Judge Advocate General’s office on Okinawa, Japan were brutal, obscene, uncivilized.

The two prefecture police detectives had been polite enough, which was the Japanese way. They bowed in perfect unison, a pair of small men so alike they might have been twins, but weren’t. An undercurrent of tension reflected the cops’ true moods, which could have been accurately described as partly cloudy to surly, hovering as they were almost at the edge of outrage. Had the pair expressed themselves truthfully, they would have roundly condemned the situation, the base, and the American military.

The cops knew, of course, that even before the Americans gave Okinawa back to the Japanese in 1973, the continuing presence of the American military bases had been an issue to be hashed out by the politicians in the Japanese Diet and the U.S. Congress. The Americans still occupied the island, as they had since gaining a bloody toehold near the end of the Second World War.

Some days, it seemed as though the nationalists were fighting to establish a reverse beachhead. They would show up outside the base gates to confront Japanese police officers in full riot regalia with peaceful protests. The speeches would start, the pumps would be primed, and the ranks of protesters would swarm the police lines and the water cannons manned jointly by the cops and the guards on the base. The riots would continue until the media had adequate footage for the evening news. Then they would subside, almost as though somebody threw an off switch or some silent agreement existed between the rioters and the police that declared that everyone would go home after a suitable interval, as though their shifts were over.

For most Japanese, opposing the continuing American occupation was a simple matter of nationalism. It was hard to recover face when your nose was constantly being rubbed in your past. For the Americans, Okinawa had long served as a stepping stone to Southeast Asia and the South Pacific and as a sentinel of sorts to assure that Japan would never fully rearm or pursue imperial expansion again. The U.S. policymakers seemed unaware that both purposes were rapidly becoming anachronistic.

To the American servicemen and women who served there, the island was so far out in the Pacific that it seemed like the end of the civilized world, frustratingly off the beaten path, and desperately isolated. The average hitch, depending on the service branch, would stretch eighteen months to two years, and men especially were known to go stir crazy or at times just plain crazy. They would become bored; they would get drunk; they would lose control of themselves. Rapes and murders were too common not to alarm the authorities of both nations. And whenever a crime of violence involved an American serviceman, it was equivalent to adding a log to the already billowing flames of the protestors’ total American eviction movement.

Crime, not nationalism, was the reason the two cops didn’t like the American bases. Crime grew up around the bases and on them. Often, it spilled over onto the streets and into the cops’ jurisdiction. They resented having to clean up the various messes crime caused. The latest outrage, they explained, was very messy indeed.

A Navy lawyer and a member of the Military Police force who headed up a detail that patrolled the off base bars like guardian angels had listened intently and politely as the two Japanese detectives laid out in flawless English the sad story of the murdered whores. There were three dead prostitutes in all, murdered in quick succession, the work of a serial strangler with a sadistic finishing touch.

One of the three whores, the first of them to die, like all three, was strangled and impaled after death with a long knife or sword bearing no fingerprints. She had worked out of a dingy bar serving the U.S. bases in the American bar section of Koze. The bar was called the Grand Palace, but was neither grand nor palatial. A stout Japanese woman ran the bar. She had sumo features grimly arranged underneath a shock of black hair tied up into a topknot and tipped in pink. The U.S. boys called her Mama Wong, although that nickname would rightly have been hung on a Chinese or maybe a Korean woman.

The prostitute working out of the bar was not the norm. Whorehouses and massage parlors that included sex in their services abounded throughout the district. Most bar girls were working off loans from their bar mothers by shilling for marked up drinks, not selling sex. Hitting up a bar girl for more than a companionable drink or a dance was a bit of an accomplishment. It was not without its attendant risks of disease, but many servicemen tried nightly to score anyway. Like the whorehouses and massage parlors, the bars were 24-hour operations, but unlike the pleasure dens, the little bit of prostitution that was offered through the bars was performed off site and without the explicit sanction of management.

A bar mother was much more likely to pay attention to who escorted a girl out on a date than a housemother sending the clients to the whorehouse bedrooms. That was especially true when the girl was like Uki, who had her hair bleached and her eyes rounded while attending school in America, both early evidence of her troubling wildness and hedonistic bravura, both traits discouraged in proper Japanese girls.

The American boys flocked to Uki, which should have been a problem in narrowing down a list of suspects. But the cops said that Mama Wong remembered that a young American boy with his hair as naturally blonde as Uki’s was phony came into the bar in street clothes, bought Uki a couple of drinks, and left with her in tow. Mama Wong called the boy Whitey, not because of the color of his skin, but because his eyebrows, lashes, and even chin stubble were every bit as blond as his close-cropped hair.

Except for his blondness, she gave the two detectives very little assistance. She offered up a description that was hardly useful.

Definitely gaijin.

Definitely round eye.

Definitely military.

Whitey was all of that. The detectives had zeroed in on the military association. They had asked, Branch of service?

American, Mama had answered. Without a uniform and its attached insignia, she couldn’t distinguish a marine from an army soldier or a naval aviator from an ordinary swabbie. About all that left the two detectives with was conjecture that Whitey, who they considered their prime suspect, in fact their only suspect, had drawn extended duty without leave. Or gone away somewhere. Or been disciplined and confined to base. Or been slapped into the brig for some violation of the Military Code of Justice. Or just sent home. They had an ample supply of each of those to consider. Real needle in the haystack stuff. Whatever, the killings had come in a four-week spree and stopped as quickly as they had begun.

Their speculation was not without cause. They both could remember a time when a sailor, soldier, airman, or marine that had a scrape with the law off base routinely would be recovered from the local authorities, taken to his base, and shipped out as quickly as transport could be arranged. To the two Japanese police officers, this practice was an insult, an immoral attempt by the American military to save face. Their memories of those days were fresh enough that they wanted a look at the base records. Both of them and the lawyer and the MP all knew that wasn’t going to happen in any of their lifetimes.

Had Whitey been in Japanese custody, things might have been different. Prisoner in hand gave the arresting jurisdiction all the leverage in the negotiations between the two allies who often were not on the same page. Had the Americans picked him up, they likely would have allowed the visiting detectives to talk to their suspect in the interest of better relations. But base records were private, and Whitey wasn’t in custody on the base or anywhere in Okinawa.

Unknown to any of them, he actually was on the way home at the end of his hitch.

So this time, the Japanese cops had to settle for the commitment that the Navy would look into the situation and report its findings to them. They knew the commitment wasn’t official or binding or much more than a polite dismissal. But it allowed them to save face.

After the two cops had concluded their interviews and made their exits with stiff bows and even stiffer handshakes, the MP asked the Navy lawyer what he thought. The two worked independently of each other, but cooperation was advantageous to them in most situations. This one was no exception, which is why the MP had brought the detectives to the JAG lawyer in the first place.

One of ours, almost certainly, the lawyer replied. But which one? Those two detectives have done a good job of working their way back to the base. Done some pretty fair guesswork, too. I’d bet on shipped out. You?

Oh hell yes, the MP responded. He offered a wry smile that made his blue eyes sparkle. The way they described the crimes, they were not the kind of thing somebody would turn on and off like a light switch. For the killings to stop that suddenly, he was either intent on killing one and doing the others for cover, which is about as likely as me being promoted to the rank of Admiral, or he was on a thrill fling. He probably got on the transport, and flew the coop. Are you going to look into the records?

I’ll have to under the circumstances. The relations between the base and the community have become the proverbial political football. Doesn’t mean, of course, that anything’s going to come of it, the lawyer surmised. He turned up his palms and shrugged. The last murder was a while ago. If he hasn’t flown the coop, there must be tens of thousands of guys in base housing and the apartment buildings scattered about the countryside. How many of them are blondes?

I don’t know. How many holes in sieve? the MP agreed. For emphasis, he ran his hands through his burr cut blonde hair. On the plus side, there aren’t that many guys ending hitches and shipping out on a weekly basis this far out in the world. How many of them can be so blonde that the bar maven calls them Whitey from memory? We might be able to pin him down.

That assumes, of course, that she had it right, and the military records are right, and the planets are in the right positions in the Zodiac, the lawyer admitted. Or that the base politics allow us to do anything but bury this shit. Whatever, we’ll get orders to do what we can and try to wrap this up quickly.

The two were pensive until the MP broke the silence.

Let’s face reality. You’re probably right about the politics. Maybe it’s more trouble than it’s worth. If he was on a plane back to the world, by now, he’s long gone. If he’s still in Japan, we don’t have much to go on. We don’t have or want the jurisdictional authority to get after this thing on the ground. I don’t want to go down to the bars and ask questions the Japanese already have asked. Those cops already have done the legwork, and although they’ve got their tits in a wringer with pressure from higher ups, this, too, shall pass. They probably figure anyway that if they couldn’t turn up a specific suspect, we aren’t likely to succeed where they have failed.

The lawyer stood and frowned. Locking his fingers behind his back, he stretched to relieve the tension that had built up during the meeting.

The MP shrugged and continued. If we go through the motions and write them a nice report, nothing has to come of it. They save face. The killings have stopped, and the victims were whores, after all.

Yeah, and Japanese whores at that, the lawyer said cynically. Damn. The bothersome thing is that we may end up turning a psychopath loose on society, likely American society.

The MP rubbed his chin with two fingers of his right hand, thinking about that one. He walked to a window and looked out at the empty spaces in the direction the policemen had gone.

One more psychopath won’t make much of a difference to American society, he said bitterly. If that’s really what we have on our hands, he’s a walking, talking time bomb. Sooner or later, you know, he’ll do it again. Somewhere, someday; you can bet on it. Eventually he’ll fuck up, and some American cops will run him to ground. He ought to be thankful those two Japanese detectives didn’t catch him. They impressed me as nasty little people.

Proud, not nasty, the lawyer corrected, his brow wrinkling and his dark eyes carrying an expression of growing fatigue. There was a time their leaders thought they would rule the world and enslave inferior beings like us. I imagine they’ve had their fill of being reminded they lost the war.

As it turned out, the records search surfaced several blond haired men who had shipped out since the murders ended. More than a dozen more blondes were in the brigs now, and nearly a hundred more had served at least a night behind bars.

At the Navy lawyer’s behest, the MP accompanied the two Japanese detectives to visit Mama Wong. They showed her file photos of persons of interest, those who had been detained for violent acts like bar fights. The bar mother looked at the photos of the crew cut, thick-necked, American fighting men who from all appearances might have been brothers for all she knew. They looked a little like the Whitey in her memory, but she was anything but certain. She might as well have said, All these gaijin look alike to me.

Cursory communications followed, going out through channels, and the appropriate authorities interviewed men before they were processed out of their respective services or sent to new billets. The investigators at the processing centers considered the whole thing a nuisance. Their charges had done their duty to God and country out at the end of the world and deserved better than harassment. Nonetheless, they went through the necessary motions.

None of them recalled the Grand Palace by name, although they might have been there. It seemed as if every bar on Okinawa that wasn’t named Morning Something was named Something Palace. Everyone had bought plenty of drinks in places like that in exchange for many a bar girl’s company, but nobody admitted to using whores in Japan. Their final physicals and short arm inspections revealed nothing to contradict their claims. Nobody was bringing a dose home.

The murder cases went dormant, and eventually the files closed and left the deaths of the three prostitutes officially unsolved. By the time their deaths became an issue again, a decade had