Jeffery Deaver - Solitude Creek

Finally they turned off the highway and took the driveway to the parking lot; the roadhouse was boarded up. The trucking business was operating but Dance wondered for how long: she remembered the story on the news about the company’s probable bankruptcy.

O’Neil was about to stop but Nashima directed him to the end of the lot, not far from where Dance had discovered the path that led to where she’d found the witness in the trailer, Annette, addicted to cigarettes and music.

‘Let’s take a walk,’ Nashima said.

Dance and O’Neil exchanged glances as together they climbed from the car and followed Nashima as he started along the path. Stemple plodded behind, boot falls noisy on the gritty asphalt. Both he and O’Neil kept their hands near their weapons. The unsub, armed with at least one nine-millimeter pistol, was still at large, of course.

Was he headed for the cluster of residential houses? And why did he seem to have no interest in the roadhouse itself?

I’ll confess...

He didn’t get far along the path, however, before he turned left and walked toward Solitude Creek, through the grass and around the ruins she’d seen earlier, the remnants of concrete floors, fences, walls and posts. As they got closer to the water, she found a barrier of rusting chain-link separating them from the glistening creek.

He turned to them. ‘When I said I didn’t know if the lawyer made an offer, that’s because of a blind trust.’

‘We know about it,’ Dance said.

‘I put all my assets in it when I took office. Barrett controls everything as trustee. But he knows my general investment and planning strategies. And when he heard about the roadhouse, I imagine he made the offer because he knew I was interested in all the property here.

‘But the trust sets out the guidelines he has to follow in purchasing property and he’ll stick to those. He’ll buy it if the conditions are right; he won’t if they’re not. I can’t tell him to do anything about it.’

Dance was beginning to feel her A-to-B-to-Z thinking might end up short of the twenty-sixth letter.

The Congressman said, ‘If you know about the trust then you know about the company it owns. The LLC in Nevada.’

‘Yes, planning to do some construction here.’

‘That company also owns all of this.’ He waved his hand. He seemed to indicate everything from the parking lot, along the shore of Solitude Creek almost to the development where Dance had discovered Annette.

Nashima continued, ‘The company I’m referring to is Kodoku Ogawa Limited. The Japanese words mean “Solitude Creek”.’ He fell silent momentarily. ‘Curious about the word for “solitude”, though. In Japanese, it also means isolation, desolation, detachment. “Solitude” in English suggests something healthy, regenerative.’ He turned to them with a searing gaze. ‘Have you figured out the purpose of Kodoku Ogawa Limited yet?’

No one responded. Stemple was gazing out over the grassy expanse, arms crossed.

Nashima walked to an ancient fencepost topped with rusted barbed wire. He touched it gingerly. ‘In nineteen forty-two, President Franklin Roosevelt signed Executive Order Ninety Sixty-six, which gave military officers the right to exclude any person they saw fit from quote “designated military areas”. You know what those military areas were? All of the state of California and much of Oregon, Washington and Arizona. And who got excluded? People of Japanese ancestry.’

‘The internment,’ Dance said.

Nashima muttered, ‘A nice word for pogrom.’ He continued, ‘Nearly one hundred and twenty thousand people were forced out of their homes and into camps. Over sixty percent were US citizens. Children, the elderly, the mentally handicapped among them.’ He laughed harshly. ‘Spies? Saboteurs? They were as loyal as German Americans or Italian Americans. Or any Americans, for that matter. If there was such a risk, then why in Hawaii, where only a small minority of Japanese were rounded up, was there no espionage or sabotage among the tens of thousands who remained free?’

‘And this was one of those camps?’

‘The Solitude Creek Relocation Center. It extended from that crest there all the way to the highway. It was a charming place,’ he said bitterly. ‘People lived in large barracks, divided into twenty-foot apartments, with walls that didn’t go up all the way to the ceiling. There were only communal latrines, not separated by gender. There was virtually no privacy at all. The camp was surrounded by barbed wire, five strand, and there were machine-gun towers every few hundred feet.

‘There was never enough food — diet was rice and vegetables, and if the prisoners wanted anything more than that, they had to grow it themselves. But, of course, they couldn’t just stroll down the road and buy a couple of chickens, could they? And they couldn’t fish in the creek because they might swim away and slit the throats of Americans nearby or radio the longitude and latitude of Fort Ord to the hundreds of Japanese submarines in Monterey Bay just waiting for that information,’ he scoffed.

He strode to a reedy plot of sand. ‘I’ve reconstructed about where my relatives were incarcerated.’ He looked the spot over. ‘It was here that my grandfather died. He had a heart attack. The doctor wasn’t in the camp that day. They had to call one from Fort Ord. But it took a while because, of course, the yellow menace would feign a heart attack to escape, so they had to find some armed soldiers to guard the medical workers. He was dead before help arrived.’

‘I’m sorry,’ O’Neil muttered.

‘He, like my grandmother, was a nisei — second generation, born here. My father was a sansei , third generation. They were citizens of the United States.’ He looked at them with still, cool eyes. ‘We need to keep the memory of what happened here alive. I’ve always planned to build a museum to do that. On this very site, where my relatives were so badly treated.

‘The sign at the entrance will read “ Solitude Creek Kyōseishūyōsho Museum and Memorial ”. That means “concentration camp”. Not “relocation center”. That’s not what it was.’

Almost as an afterthought he said, ‘Before you go to a judge to get warrants to arrest me, look up the corporate documents for Kodoku. It’s a non-profit. I won’t make a penny on it. Oh, and about murdering people to buy some property cheap? You’ll see from the plans we’ll be filing for permits, I don’t need the roadhouse. If Sam Cohen sells we’d just doze the club down for an extension of the parking lot. If not, we’ll buy some of the property closer to Highway One. Or, if Sam would like to keep the land, he could tear down the building and put up a restaurant.’ The Congressman cocked his head. ‘I can guarantee him a good supply of clientele if he puts sushi and sashimi on the menu.’ His eyes strayed to the waving grasses, the ripples on gray Solitude Creek.

‘I know what you’re thinking: I could have told you this in my office, yes. But I don’t think we can ever miss an opportunity to remind ourselves that hate persists. What happened here happened only seventy years ago.’ A nod at the concrete borders along Solitude Creek. ‘That’s a drop in the bucket of time. And look now, on the Peninsula. Those terrible hate crimes over the past month. Synagogues, black churches.’

He shook his head and turned back toward the parking lot. ‘We haven’t learned a thing. I sometimes doubt we ever will.’

‘That didn’t go well,’ Dance muttered.

She and O’Neil were in her office.

‘Better than it could have gone. I don’t think there’ll be any lawsuits for... Well, I don’t know what Nashima would sue for.’