Bad Blood by Anthony Bruno Page A

bodies weren’t quite like anything on file in the National Crime Information Center database. The labs kept insisting that the cuts were done simultaneously with a single blade, and there was nothing like that in the computer. Tozzi had found it hard to swallow when he first heard it, and he was still skeptical. It sounded physically impossible. The ME had to be wrong about that.
    It was getting cold. The wind was beginning to bite. Tozzi shoved his hands in his pockets, wishing he had his trench coat with him, then remembered he didn’t have that coat anymore. He’d have to get a new one. Shit. That was a nice coat, too.
    Walking up Washington Street, he noticed the paper jack-o’-lanterns taped to the window of a very fancy Italian deli. There was a whole rack of designer pastas just inside the door and a freezer case next to it filled with a variety of frozen sauces. In his family, they called it “macaroni” not “pasta,” and “sauce” was “gravy.” He didn’t care much for these nouvelle salumerias that specialized in sun-dried tomatoes and porcini mushrooms. He liked the older places down on the sidestreets where you could get a big ham and mozzarell’ sandwich with sweet red peppers, where they make the mozzarell’ fresh in the back, where you can put a ten-spot on a horse if they know you in some of them. Admittedly, he liked the kinds of places wiseguys liked. Except he wasn’t a wiseguy. He was a fed.
    Elysian Fields Realty was on the next block. Tozzi walked briskly, anxious to get in out of the cold, anxious to find a home. But then his eye caught a small, hand-painted sign hanging over a doorway: HOBOKEN COOPERATIVE SCHOOL OF SELF-DEFENSE . There were a bunch of Japanese or Chinese characters written under the words. Tozzi backed up to the curb and looked up to the second floor of the building over the florist shop on the ground floor. The windows were all brightly lit. He could see several figures in white uniforms moving around up there. Tozzi suddenly thought about the dead couple and the violent blows to the neck that killed them. He glanced down thestreet at the Elysian Fields Realty storefront. That could wait. This was more important. He opened the door and went upstairs.
    There was no one in the small, cheaply furnished waiting room so he poked his head into the studio. It was a big space, just about the entire length of the building, paint peeling off the ceiling, brightly lit. The wood floor was almost entirely covered with big blue mats. There were about a dozen or so people on the mats, mostly guys, four women, a pretty even mix of white belts, orange belts, blue belts, and brown. They were paired off, practicing some kind of move that involved throwing an attacker grabbing you in a choke hold from behind. The teacher—the sensei as Tozzi remembered—was a mellow-looking guy with a full, reddish-brown beard and a receding hairline. He weaved through the pairs, watching them, frequently stopping to correct their mistakes. He was wearing what looked like a pair of full-length, pleated black skirt-pants over his white gi uniform. Tozzi had taken some karate at Quantico as part of his FBI training, a very condensed version modified exclusively for police work. He remembered his sensei only wearing his black belt. These skirt-pants were something new to him.
    As he watched the sensei instruct the class, he soon realized that this wasn’t karate, unless it was one of the more obscure forms. He doubted it, though, because it seemed nothing like karate. There were no kicks or chops. Everyone seemed very calm and poised. Whenever they paired off to practice, the person who initiated the attack invariably lost, usually winding up flat on his back or tumbling headfirst across the mat. The brown belts and some of the blue belts in particular seemed to exert very little effort when they threw their opponents. It almost didn’t seem