Jimm Juree 01; Killed at the Whim of a Hat

‘orange’ or ‘hat’ in it she’s mine.”
    “Dressed to Kill.”
    “You aren’t serious.”
    “Deadly. There are quotations on there from famous artists calling her a genius and a guru. Andy Warhol said, ‘She has a visual grasp of death so vivid it makes you wonder whether she’s been there.’ Her site gets twelve thousand hits a day.”
    “You’ve seen it?”
    “It’s all there; the old nostalgic roadkill period with her doing V signs behind prostrated elk, crows in tiaras splattered across windscreens, upended coyotes in pale blue baby booties. Then there’s the less obviously dead roadkill pictures. Is the possum in headphones perhaps looking at the camera? Isn’t that a slight blur of movement from the snake in a stocking? I have to admit it all makes spectacular yet stomach-curdling photography. But then we get to the humans.”
    “Oh, don’t tell me.”
    “I don’t know how. Really I don’t. But she got access to morgues. Bodies laid out on their trays in bobble hats with streamers in their mouths.”
    “No.”
    “Striped football socks, boxing gloves – cross-dressing.”
    “That’s got to be illegal.”
    “Unless someone recognizes a near and dear one in a Madonna cone bra she could always claim it was set up, all done with actors.”
    “But you think different?”
    “I’ve seen actors die in TV dramas all the time, even ones who didn’t intend to. I have a nose for bad acting. These were definitely dead bodies.”
    I’d read everything there was to read on criminology in Thai and English. I’d studied all the cases – the famous murders, the notorious serial killers – and one point that cropped up often was that the killers of people often began their careers by practicing on animals. Mika Mikata had started her apprenticeship in the public eye and been encouraged. She’d progressed with adoration through all the stages, and I knew there was only one more level. I knew Mika Mikata was either a potential or a practiced murderer. But there was no connection between her and our slain abbot and I could think of absolutely no reason why she’d come to our little nowhere village to do her nefarious deeds.
    “Is that as far as the site goes?” I asked. “Cadavers?”
    “There are three galleries. There’s the free White Gallery which is all mostly weird but innocent stuff. Then there’s the pay-to-view Black Gallery which wasn’t that hard to get into. That’s where I found the roadkill and the morgue pictures. But then there’s a members-only Orange Gallery.”
    “Bingo. Can you get into that?”
    “It’s not easy.”
    “You’re the maestro of the Net.”
    “Jimm, I’ve been a fly on the wall at a maximum secure video conference link between members of the U.S. Homeland Security. I’ve seen the Queen of England in her pajamas sipping Horlicks on Skype. If I say something’s not easy, it’s not easy. But I’m working on it.”
    “All right, one more question. What does she look like?”
    “Mika? She’s gorgeous on her Web page photo but we both know what that means. Looking back at the early photos she was reasonably bland but bubbly. I imagine she’s in her fifties now, still going for that cutesy manga love doll look.”
    “Any idea what she’d look like now without air-brushing?”
    “ Nong , the longer I spend with the Web Idol people, the more I understand that Granddad Jah could be Brad Pitt in three easy steps. Mika might be the plainest pig in the litter. I imagine she’s got that every-Asian face you could do anything you want with. Look, I’m sending the glamor photo and one of the early ones to your phone.”
    “Thanks, Siss. Anything on the other murders?”
    “You asked me about witnesses for the Guam swimming pool killing. The guy who got his hard hat painted orange. By the time Toshi had flown down, the local police had already done the interviewing. They still didn’t have a suspect. There was one possible eyewitness they hadn’t been able to locate. Some of the engineers said there’d been a reporter at the scene of the crime taking photographs. She had a Japanese press ID. They remarked on how quickly she’d been able to arrive there.”
    “Any description for her?”
    “Conflicting, he said. Some remembered her as young, others as middle-aged. Medium length hair. Toshi checked with immigration. There were no Japanese reporters registered around that time and none of the crime-scene photographs appeared in any