phone. Working the angles.
"Connor," he called, and I turned back into the room.
"Yeah, Mick?"
"Something like this ... we know what we're doin'. Trust me. Talk to Yamashita for us."
I nodded that I would, but I didn't feel too good about it.
NINE
Local Talent
At the heart of both sound and movement there is vibration. Yamashita wants us to be sensitive to sound; he says it has a message. Different types of activity, different places, have distinct aural signatures, he insists. They lay bare the essence of an activity, its spirit. Remaining open to the message that sound sends can help the warrior. Or so my sensei maintains.
The end of the semester at the university has the repressed, tense sound of papers shuffling, like the chitinous noise of frantic insects. I had sensed it all week, even as I grew increasingly distracted by the murder. When I closed my eyes to rest them from the strain of grading papers, I saw the stark finality of Reilly, collapsed and cold at the crime scene. And on the wall, the message that he was here. Ronin. The name spoke of a man adrift. Or free. But from what?
My brother was much more grounded. He was waiting for a DNA report, but it didn't slow him down. While I was still thinking about killers and exotic martial arts techniques, he got right down to the nitty gritty of police work. "It's not like the movies," he preached to me. "Whoever this guy is, he needs to eat. A place to sleep." Micky believed grunt work would eventually lead us to the killer. But there was vibration here as well: the sense of the ticking of a clock, of time slipping away. Because Ronin was out there.
I had taken a quick look at things from my end, trying to get some information on the two victims. Anything that might give us a clue to Romn's identity. And how he chose his victims. The martial arts world is like that of a lot of other fringe interest groups. You'd think it would be a small place, but once you started looking, you found all sorts of organizations, causes, and publications. The mainstream popular martial arts world is pretty well covered by periodicals like Black Belt and Karate/ Rung Fu Illustrated, but there are a host of others that spring up overnight and fade away almost as quickly. I found a library that kept back copies of the most well established and used them as a starting point.
Of course, the library collection was not complete the martial arts reading public is poor but enthusiastic and tends to steal back issues with shocking regularity. I was able to plug some of the holes by consulting the back lists that get included with every month's issue. I used a contact at Dorian's library to request copies of missing back articles I felt might be useful. Like my brother, I would have to wait on some things, but I plowed ahead.
It was a fairly tedious process. I sat at a series of battered wooden tables, leafing through back issues that were limp and slightly aromatic with age. I clacked through innumerable computer search engines and Web sites, using up all my spare change printing relevant articles. It was a familiar sort of grind not much different from academic research, really. By the end of the day, most of the information was coming together.
Ikagi was a fairly prominent karate sensei. The name was vaguely familiar to me even at the onset. There was coverage of him on and off over the years in the magazines I looked at. He had made a big splash when he first came to this country in the
'80s. He had a tremendous pedigree: a gifted fighter and teacher who at one time had been honored by being asked to help train the emperor's guards. In short order he became a well-established instructor in LA. He was a big proponent of introducing weapons training known as kobudo into the more mainstream Japanese karate styles. We already knew that a jagged piece of a training staff had been used to kill him. In the weeks before the killing, Ikagi was in the news for helping out with choreography and
"Connor," he called, and I turned back into the room.
"Yeah, Mick?"
"Something like this ... we know what we're doin'. Trust me. Talk to Yamashita for us."
I nodded that I would, but I didn't feel too good about it.
NINE
Local Talent
At the heart of both sound and movement there is vibration. Yamashita wants us to be sensitive to sound; he says it has a message. Different types of activity, different places, have distinct aural signatures, he insists. They lay bare the essence of an activity, its spirit. Remaining open to the message that sound sends can help the warrior. Or so my sensei maintains.
The end of the semester at the university has the repressed, tense sound of papers shuffling, like the chitinous noise of frantic insects. I had sensed it all week, even as I grew increasingly distracted by the murder. When I closed my eyes to rest them from the strain of grading papers, I saw the stark finality of Reilly, collapsed and cold at the crime scene. And on the wall, the message that he was here. Ronin. The name spoke of a man adrift. Or free. But from what?
My brother was much more grounded. He was waiting for a DNA report, but it didn't slow him down. While I was still thinking about killers and exotic martial arts techniques, he got right down to the nitty gritty of police work. "It's not like the movies," he preached to me. "Whoever this guy is, he needs to eat. A place to sleep." Micky believed grunt work would eventually lead us to the killer. But there was vibration here as well: the sense of the ticking of a clock, of time slipping away. Because Ronin was out there.
I had taken a quick look at things from my end, trying to get some information on the two victims. Anything that might give us a clue to Romn's identity. And how he chose his victims. The martial arts world is like that of a lot of other fringe interest groups. You'd think it would be a small place, but once you started looking, you found all sorts of organizations, causes, and publications. The mainstream popular martial arts world is pretty well covered by periodicals like Black Belt and Karate/ Rung Fu Illustrated, but there are a host of others that spring up overnight and fade away almost as quickly. I found a library that kept back copies of the most well established and used them as a starting point.
Of course, the library collection was not complete the martial arts reading public is poor but enthusiastic and tends to steal back issues with shocking regularity. I was able to plug some of the holes by consulting the back lists that get included with every month's issue. I used a contact at Dorian's library to request copies of missing back articles I felt might be useful. Like my brother, I would have to wait on some things, but I plowed ahead.
It was a fairly tedious process. I sat at a series of battered wooden tables, leafing through back issues that were limp and slightly aromatic with age. I clacked through innumerable computer search engines and Web sites, using up all my spare change printing relevant articles. It was a familiar sort of grind not much different from academic research, really. By the end of the day, most of the information was coming together.
Ikagi was a fairly prominent karate sensei. The name was vaguely familiar to me even at the onset. There was coverage of him on and off over the years in the magazines I looked at. He had made a big splash when he first came to this country in the
'80s. He had a tremendous pedigree: a gifted fighter and teacher who at one time had been honored by being asked to help train the emperor's guards. In short order he became a well-established instructor in LA. He was a big proponent of introducing weapons training known as kobudo into the more mainstream Japanese karate styles. We already knew that a jagged piece of a training staff had been used to kill him. In the weeks before the killing, Ikagi was in the news for helping out with choreography and
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