The man actually nodded in agreement at that until I pulled out my gun and sent it clanging against the side of his head. Not hard enough to knock him out, but enough to rattle a memory loose.
“Tell me about Riku,” I said.
“Doesn’t sound familiar.”
I hit him again. “How about now?”
He said something in Japanese that my rudimentary knowledge of that language couldn’t translate. It had the cadence of an old proverb, and didn’t involve any names I recognized. Then he started singing what sounded like a children’s song.
I turned to Mat, who tried to hide his frustrated laughter. “You had to capture the team’s nutjob?”
He raised his hands in a gesture of surrender. “Hey, you’re the one who just knocked his brains loose. I’ve been avoiding the head.”
“Yeah, looks like you did a great job.”
We both scowled at the battered man until he wore himself out and stopped singing, his chin falling to his chest. Mat apologized for wasting my time, clearly wanting to get back to his wife, CJ, who had come down to LA with him.
“Sorry to interrupt your vacation,” I answered drily.
“I know this is serious,” he said. “We’re not here just to visit, you know. Shit’s happening up in Silicon Valley and San Francisco, too.”
I clapped him on the shoulder and then decided to try something different. Leaning over the bound man, I spoke in a friendly tone. “You can leave here alive, you know. I’m the one you asked to see. Konstantin Fokin. What’s your message for me? Then we can let you go.”
Hey, even the police were allowed to lie during an interrogation.
He slowly raised his head again and spat out a mouthful of blood. Then he started laughing.
“Konstantin. A dead man,” he said through his cackles. “But not before you have to watch it all burn down. Dead, dead, dead.”
“He’s useless,” Mat said.
I had to keep trying. “Tell me what you know about Grigor. Grigor Kanatova.”
The craziness cleared from his eyes, and he stopped laughing. “He’s the reason you’re dead.”
What the hell did that mean? I asked if Grigor was still alive, if he knew his location, if he was working directly with the Yakuza or on his own. The man refused to speak, not even to annoy me with another nursery rhyme, no matter what kind of encouragement we gave him.
Mat was getting pissed off, and I finally called it. “We’re done here. You’re right. He’s useless.”
I followed him outside, where he told the guard to take care of what was left of the prisoner.
The lights from the back of the house and surrounding the pool area were welcoming and bright, and it didn’t seem right to go inside with so much blood on my hands. We paused at the poolhouse to wash up before dragging in the filth of what we did to maintain such a life, and I turned to Mat.
“Can you give this to CJ?” I asked, holding out Tati’s phone.
I had already scoured all the messages, but it didn’t seem feasible that the man who spoke or messaged with her every day had gone radio silent even before he disappeared. Either she had deleted messages, or Grigor had planned his disappearance instead of being grabbed without any warning.
“Sure,” he said, pocketing the phone. “What do you want her to look for?”
CJ was the child of a computer genius who’d thankfully only inherited his ability with code and not his greed. A greed that landed her with Mat, and since they were both stupidly happy together, he could probably be forgiven.
“Anything she can find. It’s Grigor’s daughter’s phone, and something useful might be hiding on there.”
He raised his brows. “How did you get her phone?”
“Never mind about that,” I told him in a tone that had him dropping the subject.
We were both tired from the workout of trying to extract nonexistent answers from a man who’d long ago decided he hadnothing to live for and was just out there having fun. He didn’t have any now, if the guard hadn’t already finished him off.