Year of the Demon

HEISEI ERA, THE YEAR 22

(2010 CE)

28

Mariko ate her ramen and reflected absently on the nature of her missing finger. She was sitting on her bed, a polystyrene container of Cup Noodles in her right hand and chopsticks in her left, because her right hand couldn’t manage the chopsticks anymore. Losing her right forefinger wouldn’t have mattered so much if she weren’t living in a chopstick culture. Forks and knives worked perfectly well in a four-fingered hand.

No matter where she lived, she would have had to retrain herself to shoot left-handed—assuming she still wanted to be a cop, of course. There were plenty of professions in which a missing finger wouldn’t have caused the slightest inconvenience, but Mariko had chosen the one job in which the loss of that particular finger could actually cost her her life. Learning to shoot as a lefty hadn’t been any easier than learning to eat as a lefty. She figured she should have logged enough practice by now—a few thousand rounds on the pistol range, three meals a day for a couple of months—but her marksmanship still wasn’t where she wanted it to be, and eating still made her feel like a clumsy gaijin tourist using chopsticks for the first time.

She supposed that losing a forefinger might have been a particular hassle in the twenty-first century, but Mariko didn’t participate much in the trends that would have been a pain in the ass given the state of her hand. She’d been a ham-handed typist even before her fight with Fuchida. She had no interest in Facebook and Twitter, seeing them as two more items on a to-do list already full to bursting. She didn’t text more than once or twice a day, and then only to her sister, who was living proof that Mariko wouldn’t have needed her forefinger for that: Saori texted at lightning speed using only her thumbs. Mariko had a harder time with old technology: keys, coins, and most importantly, her sword.

She’d skipped her kenjutsu class tonight. It was hard enough to come home and see the empty sword rack where Glorious Victory should have been; its absence would loom all the larger in the dojo, proving more and more distracting with each new drill. And her new sensei, a wizened war veteran named Hosokawa, did not admit distraction in his dojo, least of all from his sole female student. He was of the old guard, the generation that thought it unbecoming to teach swordsmanship to women. His view was hardly unique; for hundreds of years, everyone thought that way. But Hosokawa-sensei had earned his belt ranks under Yamada, and as Mariko had the honor of being Yamada’s last student, Hosokawa had accepted her as a matter of fealty to his late sword master.

But it didn’t follow that he had to be patient with her.

Following along with others wasn’t Mariko’s forte, and taking a formal class didn’t suit her nearly as well as the private lessons she’d started with, alone with Yamada-sensei in his backyard. As that was no longer an option, Mariko trained under Hosokawa for four nights a week, and four nights a week Hosokawa-sensei berated her for her sloppy technique, her wavering focus, and above all for her improper grip.

The right forefinger was of utmost importance in swordsmanship. Highest on the hilt, it was the strongest source of control. Closest to the tsuba, it provided the first point of contact, facilitating a fast and fluid draw. Mariko was handicapped on both counts. Of course it was impossible to know whether Hosokawa-sensei was really so obsessed with form or whether he was merely using it as a convenient ruse to mask his overt sexism. Either way, Mariko felt the same kind of pressure at kenjutsu that she felt on the firing range, an incessant drive to outperform her male counterparts just to be recognized for having done anything right at all.

So, sitting on her bed and eating her ramen, Mariko concluded that of all the people who could ever have lost their right forefinger, the one with the most to lose was a Japanese swordswoman in the TMPD.

Because her left hand was clumsy, she spattered tiny flecks of chicken broth on the notebook she was skimming. It was Yamada’s, one of the hundreds she kept in her stacked columns of banker’s boxes. If there was a system there, Mariko didn’t understand it yet. Some boxes were labeled, others not. Sometimes a box would contain exhaustive notes on a single subject, sometimes a chaotic cornucopia with no unifying theme. It had taken her weeks of filtering to set aside all the books that had details on the obvious starting point for her nightly conversations with her departed sensei: Glorious Victory Unsought.

Though she didn’t ordinarily believe in that sort of thing, Yamada had convinced her that Master Inazuma had folded the forces of destiny into his steel, and so Mariko’s first subject of study was her own sword. It was a subject that appeared in only one library on earth: the one in Mariko’s bedroom, piled up in haphazardly labeled boxes. No one but Yamada believed that Inazuma ever existed, and cryptohistory had no place in the history departments of modern academia. That was why all of these notebooks remained notebooks, not published works, and it was also why Mariko accepted that Kamaguchi Hanzo’s mask and her own Inazuma blade might have shared a connection that she could only describe as magical. Yamada-sensei had amassed too much evidence to dismiss the supernatural.

But though she accepted her intuition about a connection, she knew nothing about the connection itself. She had that feeling she got when she got up from whatever she was working on and went into the next room to get something she needed, only to forget what it was she was there for in the first place. Tonight was like that, but many times more frustrating, since rooting through boxes upon boxes of notes was far more difficult than remembering she’d gotten up to fetch a pen or a screwdriver or something.

By the time she finished her noodles, she still hadn’t run across whatever it was that niggled at her memory. She got to her feet, her thighs and back and shoulders protesting all the way, and traded her current notebook for two new ones. Chasing Nanami through traffic this morning had left a couple of bruises she hadn’t noticed at the time. Settling back down on the bed generated a new litany of complaints from her aching muscles. The thought of ibuprofen appealed to her, but inertia proved to be the more powerful motivator.

She flipped through a volume with notes on Okuma Tetsuro and his sons, Ichiro and Daigoro. All were ill fated, but none of them could hold her interest. They might have done so on another night, but at the moment Mariko was feeling tired and she knew she had many more pages to cover.

Two books later she found what she was looking for: a quick note in the margin, scribbled in a wispy hand. First linkage—Glor Vic to mask? On the next page, Mask postdates Glor Vic—how long? 100 years? More? A few pages later, Mask-Glor Vic affinity strongest of all. These were all marginalia, with the majority of the notes being devoted to the puzzle of how best to date Glorious Victory Unsought. He never found the answer in this notebook, but he did answer Mariko’s question, one that had been nagging at her ever since that morning, when she woke to find her sword missing. Kamaguchi’s mask and Glorious Victory Unsought were somehow connected.

She delved deeper into the notes, and the more she read, the weirder it got. Everyone associated with the mask seemed to share a sword fetish. Some were samurai, some were common criminals, but all were killers. Somehow the mask awakened a destructive hunger in whoever touched it, and the need was especially strong for Glorious Victory. Yamada even hypothesized that the mask was a sort of metal detector for Inazuma steel, coded specifically for Glorious Victory Unsought. Mariko couldn’t even imagine how that could be—you couldn’t program raw iron the way you’d program a remote control—but she had to take Yamada at his word. For one thing, he was usually right, and for another, she didn’t have anything else to go on.

At least Yamada had some evidence to work from. A few salvaged pages from a centuries-old diary suggested that the affinity between the mask and the sword was dependent on distance. On its own, the mask inspired an unnameable yearning, like a caged animal’s need to pace, always seeking an exit that wasn’t there. But when Glorious Victory was nearby, that yearning magnified into a craving as powerful sexual lust. If the mask could see the sword, it had to have it.

Whatever that means, Mariko thought. She wished the diary’s author had been a detective; similes of caged animals didn’t show up in Mariko’s case log.

Things got even more bizarre when Yamada started waxing poetical himself. On one page, she read, Wind seeks mask? Why? At the top of the next page, Wind wants Glor Vic, therefore needs mask? It made no sense. Figuratively speaking, Mariko could get her head around a winter wind seeking out the gaps in her clothing, but even at her most abstract she couldn’t see how wind could be said to want anything at all.

His marginal notes developed into paragraphs in the following pages, but the more he developed his thoughts, the more cryptic they became. He developed a bizarre metaphor, likening wind to a shinobi, a ninja. No riddles there—wind was invisible—but then his invisible air currents took on human desires. As if wanting and seeking weren’t bad enough, the wind started planning, designing, orchestrating. Weather just didn’t do that.

The only deduction she could draw for certain was that Yamada-sensei knew a lot more about the mask than he bothered to write down. Most of his notes read like someone else’s grocery shopping list. Items like “lotion” or “food for Buster” might be on the list, but what kind of lotion? Sunblock? Moisturizer? A medicinal cream? And what was Buster? He could be a dog or a parakeet. There was no way to tell. Mariko could read between the lines all she liked and she’d never figure out everything her sensei knew about the mask.

A couple of notebooks and a couple of hours later, she hadn’t clarified much about the mask or the wind, but what little she’d managed to gather had seriously creeped her out. Somewhere along the line, the mask was damaged. Someone had scarred it, and somehow that deformed its enchantment too. Its affinity—or curse, or fetish, or whatever you called it—expanded from swords to all weapons. Yamada even hypothesized about how it might mutate over time, creating a lust for muskets and matchlocks as those came of age, and later semiautomatic pistols, maybe even machine guns. In a modern theater of war, it might have been IEDs. The mask did not discriminate.

Mariko had encountered an artifact like this before: Beautiful Singer, lightest and fastest of all the Inazuma blades. It too infected the wielder’s mind, and Mariko knew all too well how deadly that obsession could be. She’d flatlined on Beautiful Singer’s edge, the very last in a series of bloody murders stretching back almost a thousand years. Unlike a sword, a mask was benign, but perhaps that was what made it so dangerous: it seemed harmless.

If so, then the Bulldog showed remarkable foresight in separating himself from it. That, or else he shared the sixth sense of the alpha male for any threats to his dominance. Kamaguchi was violent, but only on his terms. If simply holding the mask was enough to awaken a deep-seated need for destruction, then Kamaguchi was right to keep it far away, on a high shelf where no one else would ever have reason to touch it. He didn’t even have to know why he did it; alpha male instinct would be enough.

Mariko found the mere thought of it chilling. She wanted to think that the whole story was mere superstition, that while medieval people might have believed in such things, in her world inanimate objects didn’t have such power. Yet as soon as the thought struck her, she knew she was wrong. What, other than “obsessive-compulsive,” was the right term to describe the average schoolboy’s relationship to his video games? Mariko thought of her sister Saori and the four or five thousand texts she sent every month. She thought of her own habits too: feigning kenjutsu strikes while waiting in elevators, oiling her bicycle chain before a ride though she knew full well she’d tuned up the whole bike the day before. How many times had she practiced drawing, aiming, and firing with her left hand? And she’d done the same with her right for years, long before Fuchida had maimed her finger. Was her obsession with marksmanship any less morbid than the hunger to destroy lurking within Yamada’s mask?

It was different. It had to be, or else Yamada would never have made a note of it. He knew obsession all too well. A man did not collect thirty degrees of black belt without admitting obsession into his life. No, this mask was something unusual, something dangerous, and knowing that made Mariko wish she had something more to go on, some way to track the thing down, some means of predicting the bearer’s intentions. But none of the notebooks provided clues.

She looked at the clock. Twelve-oh-eight. She had to work in the morning.

And yet there were two faces she couldn’t get out of her head. One was the Bulldog’s demon mask, stolen so brazenly from the middle of an active crime scene. The other belonged to that lunatic Akahata, his eyes blazing like twin suns in his bruised and battered face, his broken lips incessantly chanting their mantra. Akahata wasn’t the mask thief. He’d been in critical care at the time of the robbery. Mariko remembered the image of the thief, dressed head to toe in SWAT armor, the better to walk through a swarm of cops unnoticed. The feed from the security camera was fairly low fidelity, but now, seeing Yamada-sensei’s notes on the mask, Mariko remembered the thief as clearly as if she’d been standing in the room with him.

“Just one more book,” she said aloud, to Yamada-sensei as much as to herself. Mariko had never been much of a scholar, and so reading a historian’s notes was usually the sort of thing that would put her to sleep, not keep her up. In college she’d majored in journalism, which she defended to this day as the only writing-intensive major that actually left a graduate with legitimate job prospects in her field. She’d always thought of all that “love of learning for its own sake” crap as the lullaby that literature and philosophy majors used to sing themselves to sleep after a tough day of waiting tables. But now she was beginning to understand why Yamada had done what he’d done with his life, pursuing a master’s degree, then a PhD, then tenure, then one book project after another until he could hardly see the pen in his hand. Some of this stuff was honestly interesting in its own right—maybe not worth a college degree, but well worth the lost sleep she was inviting by telling herself “just one more.”

In fact it was three notebooks later that she struck gold. Yamada had ventured to guess that wind and divine wind might be the same thing. Her first thought was that obviously this couldn’t be a reference to the Divine Wind she was investigating, the cult of Akahata and Joko Daishi. Yamada was a historian: in his context, kamikaze—“divine wind”—was either the suicide pilots of World War Two or their namesake, the great typhoons that swamped the fleets of Kublai Khan, drowned his armies, and saved Japan from being just another province of the Mongol Empire. And since he’d already associated the mask with wind, the two typhoons were a sure bet.

But then came the mother lode. It was a tangential comment about the wind creating the mask, and it sent Mariko shuffling through all the notebooks that now lay scattered like playing cards on her bed. She rubbed her eyes, cursed the clock, and at last she found the book with the weird references to wind. If she reread them to say not “wind” but “the Wind,” the most bewildering passages suddenly became clear. The Wind wanted the mask. The Wind sought it out. It all made sense.

And then she reread Yamada’s question: was the Wind the same thing as the Divine Wind? If so, then while this Joko Daishi character was new to the scene, his Divine Wind cult was far older than Mariko could have believed. Whoever Yamada’s Wind were, they dated at least as far back as the 1400s, and prior to that it was a stretch to say that Japan was even Japan. More like a rabble of warlords and petty tyrants trying to snap up as much territory as possible. Only the Three Unifiers had brought all of those daimyo to heel and forged a single empire. Mariko had not forgotten the demon mask’s connection to Toyotomi Hideyoshi, the second of the Three Unifiers, though embarrassingly she could not remember when Hideyoshi was alive. Yamada-sensei would have known. Mariko ballparked it somewhere around the year 1600. If she was right, then in effect the Wind was older than Japan itself.

And if the Wind and the Divine Wind were the same organization, then two things became immediately clear. First, Yamada’s shinobi metaphor wasn’t a metaphor: the Wind was a ninja clan. Second, Kamaguchi Hanzo had it wrong from the beginning. Joko Daishi didn’t name his cult after the suicidal dive-bombers of World War Two; he was the latest leader of a cult named for the typhoons that saved Japan. These days, calling your cult the Divine Wind was gokudo, extreme, badass, like the dive-bombers. But if you went back far enough, calling yourself Divine Wind meant you were the saviors of the country.

Was that what all the “liberating souls” business was about? Again Mariko’s thoughts turned to Akahata’s bashed-in face and the mantra on his lips. Hamaya, his lawyer, explaining that his client was praying for Joko Daishi to liberate everyone. There was something sinister there. Mariko was sure of it; “Great Teacher of the Purging Fire” didn’t have a nice ring to it. Did these Divine Wind cultists think of themselves as messiahs? If so, they were dangerous. And brazen too. Theft of police evidence carried a much heavier sentence than a simple burglary, but it took a whole new kind of crazy to take it from the heart of an active crime scene. That was the kind of crazy that thought nothing of swindling a powerful yakuza clan on a drug deal. It was also—and Mariko was afraid even to formulate the thought—the kind of crazy that motivated people to wear suicide vests or fill subway cars with sarin gas.

Thus far, Mariko had no evidence that the Divine Wind was a terrorist organization. She certainly couldn’t prove the cult was a blood relative of a centuries-old criminal syndicate. She had only a gut feeling that Akahata was unstable and violent, and that anyone who sent a lawyer to defend a person like that was probably even more dangerous.

Han would have pushed for the simplest explanation. Some dope rings stole cars to make extra cash; this cult hocked stolen antiques instead. But instinct told Mariko something else. Stealing the mask suggested a fixation with demons. That fixation, coupled with hallucinogens and religious fanaticism, suggested devil worship—or if not devil worship, then at least a cult of personality centered on whoever was wearing the mask. Joko Daishi.

Mariko closed her notebooks. Sooner or later she had to sleep. And she had to face it: she wasn’t going to figure out anything about Joko Daishi tonight. Yamada made no mention of him. If the Wind and the Divine Wind were the same group, and if the Wind was originally a ninja clan, then perhaps the Divine Wind had retained some of the ancient secrets—like how to break into a seventeenth-story apartment with all the doors and windows locked from the inside. That squared nicely with her intuition that it was Joko Daishi who stole Glorious Victory Unsought. But intuition wasn’t evidence, and notes on medieval ninja clans wouldn’t help her solve yesterday’s crimes.

The truth was that she had very little to go on. She didn’t have Joko Daishi’s real name, or a description, or past whereabouts—not a damn thing, really. Her only good leads were Akahata and Hamaya, if only it had been legal to follow up on them. But she’d done the right thing: she hadn’t tailed them when they’d left the hospital. She’d observed their constitutional rights, and now she cursed herself for having done it. She wanted to know who these people were, who they were pushing their drugs on, what sermons they were delivering to the hallucinating masses, what role the demon mask had to play in any of it.

In short, she wanted to know what kind of storm was coming and when it would strike.

29

Lieutenant Sakakibara liked to hold his morning briefings early, a proclivity that made the top brass admire his diligence and made Mariko wish he’d fall over dead. Ever since she’d made Narcotics, she’d been cutting her hair shorter so it would look less rumpled when she dragged her ass in to post. Her attitude toward makeup was indifferent at best—she’d stopped making a fuss over it in high school, specifically to conserve precious minutes of sleep—and under Sakakibara’s command she’d taken to forgoing even a quick dab of mascara.

Orange light streamed in through the briefing room’s tall windows, cut into slices by Venetian blinds. One of those slices slashed right across Mariko’s face, leaving her half-blind and no doubt looking even more tired than she felt. She knew it was the wrong play, knew she was the newest member of Sakakibara’s team, knew she was supposed to make every impression a good one, but at seven o’clock in the damn morning it was hard to care about how she looked. She was well aware of the gossip going around that she was a lesbian, but it was easier to put up with it than to lose ten minutes of sleep every morning to “put her face on.”

That was a strange phrase, one she’d learned as a schoolgirl in the States. There was no equivalent slang in Japanese, though there were plenty of sayings about losing face and saving face. Ironically enough, not putting her face on was the very thing that could cause her to lose face. But this morning there was a more pressing concern when it came to losing face: she’d made no progress on the Joko Daishi case. Her late night reading had been interesting, to be sure, but it hadn’t actually given her any leads. Joko Daishi was an enigma, his lieutenant Akahata was off the leash, and their hexamine was nowhere to be found.

Sakakibara walked into the room, his characteristic long strides clopping like horse’s hooves on the linoleum tile. Everyone snapped to attention, including Mariko, who had to do a little more snapping than average, since she’d been slouching in her chair, ready to nod off. “At ease,” Sakakibara said, and Mariko redeposited herself in her seat in the back row.

Her LT took his customary place behind his lectern, rapped a couple of manila folders on it to straighten their contents, and said, “All right, people, let’s get down to—what the hell, Frodo? Did someone exhume you this morning?”

“Late night, sir.”

“Where’s your partner?”

“Maybe in the grave next to mine, sir. Haven’t seen him yet today.”

Sakakibara ran his fingers through his stiff, wire-brush hair. “Oh, I can’t wait for this status report. What the hell, why don’t we start with you, and we’ll just get the embarrassment over with?”

Mariko swallowed. “Not much to report, sir—”

“Except that our investigation is rolling right along,” said Han. He pushed through the door in midbow and made repeated apologetic bows on his way to the seat next to Mariko’s. Walking while bowing while sitting was a tricky bit of choreography, and it made him look a little like a limping chicken.

“Well, if it isn’t the late Detective Han. Sit your ass down.”

Han immediately abandoned his course toward Mariko and zipped into the nearest empty seat. “Sorry, sir.”

“Well? Status report. Out with it.”

Han nodded, his floppy hair catching a little luff with each rise and fall. “Followed up on that supplier from that raid the other night. Remember him? Akahata? He’s the one the Kamaguchi boys tuned up. Easy to see why. Dude’s as crazy as they come, wrapped up in some weird-ass cult. So I did some background research on him. He’s a sanitation worker for JR, which—well, correct me if I’m wrong, Mariko—I’m thinking probably jibes pretty well with the whack-job cultist angle. Menial position, probably wants to feel like part of something larger than himself, wouldn’t even have to be a hundred percent sane to hold down the job, neh?”

He looked across the room at Mariko, who nodded and said, “Agreed.” She didn’t like Han’s tone. He was going somewhere with this, and Mariko had a sneaking suspicion where.

“Anyway,” Han said, “he lawyered up yesterday—or the cult sent its lawyer, anyway—and we thought he was out of pocket for good. But last night I caught a lucky break: one of my CIs fingered the guy. He’s holed up in a place in Kamakura, and right now he’s got no idea that we’re on him.”

Mariko deliberately averted her gaze, looking at the floor lest she accidentally make eye contact with her lieutenant or her partner. Sakakibara would see guilt in her face, and Han would see a bitterness that would rapidly reach a boil. She knew exactly why Han “caught a lucky break.” He’d broken the law. He must have tailed Akahata and his lawyer, Hamaya Jiro, from the hospital, even though Hamaya had made it perfectly clear that doing so was illegal. Akahata wasn’t officially a suspect. His only direct connection to a crime at this point was as the victim of a host of assault and battery charges. Mariko had considered tailing him anyway, because just like Han, she’d known Akahata was their best lead, and letting him disappear would douse what glimmers of hope they had in their investigation. But unlike Han, Mariko hadn’t followed him. Now it made her angry just to be in the same room with him.

“Hell of a catch,” said Sakakibara, his tone suspicious. Mariko didn’t know what to hope for. Did the LT know the same background information Mariko knew? If so, the whole unit was about to see Sakakibara slam Han on his back, grab him by the throat, and show him who was leading the pack around here and whose rules they were going to follow. Sakakibara might have been a prick, but he was good police, and he hated seeing perps slip away because one of his officers took liberties with search and seizure.

But if that happened, questions would come Mariko’s way. She’d have no choice but to answer them honestly, and that would sink Han’s career. Up until ten seconds ago, Mariko had trusted Han implicitly, unwaveringly. He didn’t deserve a torpedo from his own partner.

“You got anything on this guy that’ll stick?” said Sakakibara. Mariko tried to read his tone and couldn’t. Was it a commanding officer’s legitimate question at a morning roll call or was he trying to trick Han into setting himself up for the kill? How much did Sakakibara know about their investigation?

“Still working on that, sir,” said Han. “Obviously we’ve got him at the packing company, and somebody over there is guilty of felony possession. All that speed has to belong to someone.”

“Akahata?”

“Right now everything we’ve got on him is circumstantial, but we think we’ll find more. Oshiro figures we can connect him to a string of hexamine buys. We’re thinking MDA.”

That got an approving nod from the LT. “Nice. Both of you, well done. Keep me posted.”

And then the meeting went on. Kamaguchi Hanzo’s packing company was front and center, and most of the updates had to do with the raid and its various follow-up investigations. Mariko listened to none of them. She kept her gaze studiously on the windows, preferring the sun’s glare to glaring at her partner.

But she could only avoid him for so long. Soon enough the meeting adjourned, the troops filed out, and Mariko was left alone in the room with Han. “So,” he said, “you want to get a donut or a coffee or something? I didn’t eat breakfast.”

“Eat shit,” she said.

“Huh?”

“You tailed him? What’s wrong with you?”

Han looked hurt. “Hey, it’s not like that.”

“You can’t expect me to believe this. You just so happened to hear from a CI who just so happened to, what, park his car across the street from Akahata?”

Han shrugged and smiled. “Actually, that’s pretty close to it.”

“And then for no particular reason your CI calls and says, ‘Hey, is this guy a person of interest for you, by any chance?’ Because I’m sure that happens all the time, Han. Perps who slip through the system suddenly get ID’ed even when no evidence points us back in their direction.”

Now Han looked sincerely wounded, and embarrassed besides. “Mariko, will you keep it down? Let me explain—”

Mariko pushed him away. “I trusted you.”

“And you’re right to. I swear to you, Mariko, I didn’t tail him.”

It came as a splash of cold water in the face of her burning resentment. He was telling the truth. Mariko prided herself on knowing when people were lying, and Han wasn’t. That fact wasn’t enough to calm her, but it was enough to make her sit back down. “You’ve got ten seconds. Start talking.”

Han sighed, relieved. “What’s the last thing I told you before I walked out of Akahata’s hospital room?”

“I think you told the lawyer to go fuck himself.”

“Okay, before that.”

“I don’t know. Something about how Hamaya was aiding and abetting a criminal and you weren’t going to stand for it.”

“Right.”

“So you tailed him? Knowing we didn’t have probable cause? Knowing it was illegal?”

Han sighed again. “For us. It’s illegal for us to follow him. But not for one of my CIs. And I’ve got loads of them. Plenty of them want me to owe them a favor. So I made a couple of calls and I watched Hamaya and his client fly off into the wind. Just like you did. Only I got a phone call a few hours later.”

“Han—”

“What? What laws did I break? What regs? An ordinary citizen followed another one. That’s not illegal. Hell, if I’d hired a private eye, it would have been a cliché.”

Mariko sank back into her chair, heavy with frustration and fatigue. She pressed her palms to her eyes and let her head sag until it hit the top of the backrest. “Do you really want to try explaining the difference between violating civil rights and violating civil rights by proxy?”

“If it helps, I told my guy to stay well away. Keys in the ignition, doors locked, ready to drive off if anything looked fishy. All I wanted was eyes on the target.”

“I don’t know, Han.”

“Think of it like hiring a private investigator. I just did it cheaper than that. And a little faster. And if it was a PI, I wouldn’t have had to promise to look the other way on a possession charge or two.”

Mariko burst out of her chair, ready to deck him. “Damn it, Han—”

“Joking! Just joking!” Han hopped back and landed in a wrestler’s crouch, hands up high to defend against a sudden swing. “Sorry. Maybe not the best comic timing there.”

Mariko gave serious thought to kicking him in the crotch. Then she thought better of it. It wouldn’t hurt enough. She pulled the stun gun off her belt. “You know, I’m pretty sure I could neuter you with this thing.”

Han took an extra step back. “Sorry. Very sorry. I swear.” He relaxed his defensive posture, pulled one of the chairs around, and sat opposite Mariko. “So, you know, seriously, are we cool?”

“Han, I don’t know. I don’t like you cutting it so close to the edge.”

“This is narcotics, not beat cop stuff. We work with dirty people. Sometimes we need them to dime each other out, and we have to get out of their way and let them do it.”

“And sometimes we need to put them on their way to doing it?”

“Now and then, yeah, we do. Mariko, I know where the lines are. I might get close to them sometimes, but I promise you, I’m never going to cross them. Not while we’re partners. Okay?”

Mariko looked at the floor and took a moment to think. Then, with a weary sigh, she looked back at Han. “Fine. But the coffee and donuts are on you.”

“Extra coffee in your case. You look like you could use it.”

30

Mariko insisted on doing the driving, needing to feel at least that much control over how things were going. She had to admit that if Han hadn’t strayed so close to the edge, they’d have no leads at all. Kamaguchi Hanzo had already given her everything he knew. National Health Insurance had an address on Akahata, but until Mariko could charge him with something, there was nothing she could do with it. The same went for the address and phone number on Hamaya Jiro’s business card: there would be no wiretaps and no stakeouts without probable cause. If it weren’t for Han’s CI, they’d have nothing.

“Tell me again about this CI of yours?”

“Name’s Shino,” Han said around a mouthful of danish. “Weird kid. Totally obsessed with basketball.”

“What’s weird about that?”

“He’s not even your height. The kid couldn’t palm this coffee cup. But man, he sure likes wearing those jerseys. When you meet him, don’t call him Shino. Call him Shaq. Or LeBron. He’ll love you for that.”

Mariko laughed and shook her head. Her world was full of nicknames. Kamaguchi Hanzo was the Bulldog. Shino was LeBron. Han’s real name wasn’t even Han. It was Watanabe, but four or five years ago Sakakibara saw his floppy hair and long sideburns and called him Han Solo, and everyone had called him Han ever since. Mariko assumed she’d be wearing the Frodo badge for at least that long.

She found it strange how important naming a thing could be. It was illegal for her to keep tabs on the house Shino was staking out for them, but she was well within her rights to check up on a CI and make sure he was okay. Han seemed to look at his decision to deploy Shino the same way: perfectly fine if you called it this, against regulations if you called it that, clearly illegal if you called it some other thing.

She didn’t like the thought of Shino sitting out there exposed, so she decided to shave some time off their drive by running code. There was no getting to him quickly; as ever, half of the drivers never noticed the lights and siren, and even if they had, the text from Shino said he was all the way out in Kamakura.

“Call him,” Mariko said. “Make sure he’s all right.”

“He said he’d call if—”

Mariko shot him a look that other women might have reserved for a cheating husband who asked for a lift to his floozy’s apartment.

“Right,” he said. “I’ll just go ahead and make that call, then.”

“Good idea.”

Shino didn’t respond to calls or texts. Mariko had half a mind to ask Kamakura PD to send a squad up to check on him, but by the time she got patched through to them and explained her request, she’d almost be at her exit, and from there she’d probably reach her destination before they did. She kept the lights running hot all the way there.

The there wasn’t what she was expecting. They reached a ritzy neighborhood on a quiet street running the length of a ridge that overlooked Kamakura. In the gaps between houses Mariko could see the ocean, glinting in the morning sun. Some of these backyards would give an overlook on the Great Buddha. The bare fact that they had backyards meant that these people made more money than Mariko would ever see in her lifetime. The hot tubs in this neighborhood were bigger than her kitchen.

“Are you sure this is the place?” she said.

“You want see the same text I showed you a minute ago? He’s got to be right around—oh, got him. The shitbox.”

Mariko looked where Han was pointing, and sure enough, there was a beat-to-hell Toyota Cressida parked along the curb. There was a maxim in police work: shitheads drive shithead cars. Given the choice of two vehicles that were having trouble staying between the lines, you pulled over the beater. That was where a highway patrolman was going to make his lucky drug bust, and that was where a narc was going to put his GPS tracker.

“Hey, LeBron,” Han said, getting out of the squad to approach the vehicle, “you were supposed to stay awake, buddy.”

Mariko pulled up on the opposite side of the Cressida. It was empty. “Han, what the hell?”

“I don’t know. Maybe . . . maybe he got out to take a piss or something.”

“Where? Look around you.” It was a sunny morning on a beautiful lane bordered by flower gardens, manicured lawns, and trees trimmed by professional gardeners. There was no sign of a public restroom, a Porta Potty, or Han’s CI.

“You said he’d be okay. You said you told him to stay away from danger.”

“I did. Come on, help me look for him.”

Canvassing the area houses went quickly. Han rang the doorbells while Mariko circumnavigated the premises, checking windows. It was on the tenth house that she found something suspicious. “Han, did you say this kid likes basketball?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, there’s a guy in this basement wearing a Lakers jersey.”

Mariko knocked on the back door, waited all of two seconds, then kicked it in. With Han she cleared the place room by room until they found the way downstairs. The guy in the yellow jersey lay facedown at the foot of the stairs. His skin was bright red, almost as if he’d been sunburned. He was small, just as Han had described Shino, and he wasn’t moving.

Something about the redness of his skin stirred deep in Mariko’s memory, but she didn’t have time to go fishing for it. She waited only long enough for Han to check Shino’s pulse. “Dead,” Han said, and he and Mariko moved swiftly through the house, clearing it room by room. If the kid’s killer was still on the premises, their first duty was to find him.

The house was weird as hell. Every room said cult, though not a single aspect of it matched what Mariko imagined they’d be getting into. A cult that pushed ice on its members to “liberate” them conjured images of a meth den in her mind, but this was no sunless, stinking fleapit. If anything, it was too clean, not like a hastily wiped-down crime scene but like an iPod fresh out of the box. Not a speck of dust to be found. OCD clean. Cult clean.

The basement was huge, a wide, open space of white walls and soft white light. Round cushions stacked in the corner were probably for meditation. Judging by the stack and the floor space, thirty people could sit in seiza down here. Posters adorned the walls: charts of what looked like yoga poses, an arcane calendar based on planetary cycles, paintings of demons and prints of demon statues. Han took pictures of everything with his phone.

The rooms on the ground floor looked like they belonged to another building entirely. Cute, quaint, lots of floral prints; Mariko’s grandmother could have decorated them. They had a model home sort of feel, more to be seen than to be lived in. And the second floor felt completely different again, as if the whole house were schizophrenic—or, more likely, as if the house was a cult headquarters whose owners intended it to seem perfectly normal to anyone peering in through a window. The master bedroom was clearly well used, designed to serve as part-time opium den, part-time sex dungeon. The paraphernalia amassed there suggested orgy-level participation in both activities. The doors fit so well to their frames that Mariko could feel the air pressure shift when Han opened the door to the master bathroom. The room was sealed as if to remain airtight, or perhaps to contain some other gas used in the orgies.

Another bedroom housed a blown-up photo of a good-looking, middle-aged man with long, windblown hair, standing on a seaside cliff and performing yoga or tai chi or something in between. The photo was framed, and below it was an altar with candles surrounding a wide, shallow bowl full of odds and ends: coins, marbles, eights of hearts from a bunch of different decks of cards, a folded pocket schedule of the Yomiuri Giants season, car keys stripped from their key rings. Of particular interest to the narc’s eye were the ten or twelve little vials of heroin.

“Joko Daishi?” said Mariko, nodding at the poster above the bowl.

“Gotta be,” said Han. “Kind of looks like John Lennon, neh? Except the beard’s more like Jerry Garcia.”

“Or that Aum Shinrikyo guy,” Mariko said. “Remember him?”

“Who could forget?”

Mariko could almost see the shivers running down Han’s spine. She’d been all of twelve years old when the Aum Shinrikyo cult released sarin gas in a Tokyo subway. It made the news even in Teutopolis, Illinois, where she’d been in junior high at the time. Mariko could remember the pictures on TV of the cult leader, Asahara Shoko, with his thick black hair and big, shaggy beard. This Joko Daishi shared the beard but not the caveman chic; his hair was straight and long, almost feminine, much more in keeping with the obsessive-compulsive cleanliness of his headquarters. Mariko might even have said he was handsome but for the fact that she could imagine him standing over her bed in the middle of the night. Was he the one who stole her sword, or had it been one of his devotees? Either way, this was the man who shattered any sense of privacy in her life.

Mariko took the little folded baseball schedule from the altar, careful to handle it only by the edges, where she couldn’t leave a print. The squat, orange, rabbitlike mascot of the Yomiuri Giants smiled up at her from the front cover. She found its grossly oversized eyes creepy instead of cute. Joko Daishi’s eyes blazed with the same kind of inhuman intensity.

She found it strange that it should be the baseball schedule, not the heroin, that captivated her attention so fully that she felt the need to pick it up. Against her better judgment she opened it, pinching only the tips of the corners, hoping now that she wouldn’t smear any useful prints. As the little calendar unfolded, she found someone had written a prayer on it with a fat-tipped Sharpie. She couldn’t make out much of it—on paper this small the writing was tightly cramped—but she did notice today’s date was circled in red. A home game. She wondered what the significance of that might be.

Squinting at the prayer again, she could only identify the characters jo and ko, Purging Fire. She let the calendar fold itself accordion-style back into its original shape, turning her attention instead to the photo of Joko Daishi. Leaning in to get a closer look, she noticed the photo frame concealed a wall panel behind it. It didn’t open readily, so she started fiddling with it. “Han, we need to talk.”

“I know,” he said. “I fucked up. Shino’s dead and it’s my fault.” His voice was laden with remorse. “Poor son of a bitch never had a chance. Parking an old beat-to-hell Cressida in this neighborhood; they must have seen him the instant he got here.”

“You’ve got it wrong. It’s not your fault he’s dead. So far we’ve only got these guys on theft and felony possession. You didn’t know they were going to step it up to homicide.”

“Yeah, but I’m the one who sent him up here.”

Mariko nodded. “And there’s going to be a reckoning for that. It wasn’t right, Han, and you should have told me what you were doing before you did it.”

She could hear him deflating. “I didn’t want to get you involved. This is on me, all right? I’m not going to ask you to back me up on this.”

“What do you want, a medal? You broke the rules, Han. You used a proxy to do what you knew we couldn’t legally do ourselves. And you think you need to ask me not to back you up? You think you were protecting me by hiding this crap?”

“Mariko, I’m sorry—”

“‘Sorry’ isn’t going to cut it. We’re partners, Han, and besides that, I’m the ranking officer on this detail. And you say, ‘I didn’t want to get you involved’? I am involved, Han. My job is to be involved. And now you’ve put my job at risk. Do you have any idea how hard I worked to get here?”

“Mariko, you know I do.”

“Then you know how pissed off I am. When we get back to post our whole world is going to turn to shit, and I don’t want—uh-oh.” The panel behind the photograph popped open with a little click. Mariko didn’t like what she saw behind it.

Morose as he was, chastened as he was, Han shifted right back into high gear the instant he heard Mariko’s tone. “What have you got?”

“I think I know what killed Shino,” she said, “and I think we’re going to need a hazmat team right away.”

31

Follow-up calls to Hazmat and Lieutenant Sakakibara confirmed they were both due to arrive on scene within minutes of each other. Mariko was well aware that she and Han could have used the interim to get their stories straight about Shino. She knew of cops on the force that would have done exactly that. But whatever his faults, Han had honor enough not to suggest it. The two of them didn’t even speak until they could hear the sirens coming.

“Before he gets here,” Han said, “can I just tell you one thing?”

“One thing,” Mariko said. Her anger was burning at a low simmer. She hoped he had sense enough not to spark off another flare-up.

“I’m really sorry for the ‘it’s all my fault’ and ‘I assume full responsibility’ shit. I know it was my responsibility to stay within the lines. I never should have suggested otherwise. And you were right: it was Joko Daishi’s people who killed Shino. Claiming responsibility for that is just playing the martyr. I’m sorry for that.”

Mariko nodded. After a long, pregnant pause, she said, “That’s the tone you want to take with the LT. What you did, you need to own it. Completely. You understand me?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“All right.” Again she paused, trying to sort out her emotions. “I’m still pissed at you. Got it? But all the same, I really do hope they don’t hang you for this.”

Whatever else they might have said would have to wait until later, for the parade of emergency vehicles had arrived. The hazmat team started suiting up and Mariko and Han tracked down Sakakibara and gave him a quick report, starting from the confrontation with Akahata and his lawyer in the hospital. To his credit, Han left out none of the details. Sakakibara sat stone-faced, leaning against the hood of his squad car and taking it all in.

When Han and Mariko were finished, he said, “Explain the cyanide part to me again, Frodo.”

“They’ve got a giant photo of Joko Daishi on the wall upstairs,” Mariko said, “concealing a panel in the wall. Open that panel and you’ve got two big plastic jugs like the ones you’d find in an office watercooler, screwed together like an hourglass and connected by a valve. The top jug is full of pellets of sodium cyanide.”

“Which for some inexplicable reason you recognize on sight?”

“No, sir. Actually, they were kind enough to label it. I guess when you’re in the habit of stocking a bunch of dangerous chemicals, you want to keep them straight.”

“Right,” Sakakibara said. “And this Shino kid, they killed him with the cyanide?”

“Yes, sir. Hard to tell whether they force-fed him or laced it into something else. Not that it matters much.”

“Frodo, let me ask you something. Are you trying to make me look bad?”

“Sir?”

“I’ve trained a hell of a lot of narcs in my day, and not one of them could walk up to a body and identify it on sight as a cyanide killing. Are you trying to show me up?”

“No, sir.”

“Why the hell do you even know what death by cyanide looks like?”

Mariko shrugged. “My dad was in plastics manufacturing. Cyanide poisoning is a serious risk in that line of work.”

“Which you know because . . . ?”

“He died when I was in college. We didn’t know why right away, so I did lots of research on the kinds of things that could kill you at his factory. It wasn’t cyanide that got him, but I remember the bit about the red skin. Something about too much oxygen in the blood.”

Sakakibara shook his head. “You must be hell to play in Trivial Pursuit. Now do me a favor and apply that weird brain of yours to this case. What can you tell me about this cult?”

“Not as much as I’d like. We know what their leader looks like but not his real name. We know the names of two associates but not where they are. We know they can cook meth, we’re assuming they can cook MDA, and we know they’ve got no troubles acquiring all kinds of dangerous chemicals.”

“All right. What do we know about the house?”

“It’s rigged to blow,” said Han. When he saw a hazmat guy whip his head around, he quickly added, “You know, so to speak. Jug number one is sodium cyanide, neh? Jug number two is full of hydrochloric acid. You open the valve connecting them with a little knob in the cult leader’s Throne Room of Carnal Pleasures.”

“Excuse me?”

“Bedroom, sir. Oshiro’s the one who figured it out. Open the valve, let the acid mix with the cyanide, and you get a big cloud of hydrogen cyanide gas.”

“Cute.” Sakakibara switched his focus to Mariko. “You remembered all of this from your college chemistry notes, I assume?”

“Google, actually. Looked it up on Han’s phone while you were en route.”

“Aha.” Sakakibara scratched the back of his head, making his hair shift on his head as a single unit, as if it were a helmet. “So you’re thinking what? Crazy-ass cult leader rigs his headquarters so he can stage a mass suicide if a police raid goes Waco?”

“That’s about the size of it, sir,” said Mariko.

“How does that explain the dead kid?”

“Obviously they didn’t kill him with the gas,” Han said, “since we found him in the basement.”

“Which your dumb ass sent him to,” said Sakakibara.

“Yes, sir.” Han tried to stay professional, not morose. “The bedroom’s hermetically sealed. The basement isn’t. We’re guessing only a special chosen few get to die with Joko Daishi. Everyone else probably commits suicide downstairs.”

Sakakibara frowned. “So what, they drag this poor kid into the house and cram a fistful of cyanide down his throat?”

“Probably not,” Mariko said. “We think they’ve got another supply, probably something portable.”

Her LT’s scowl deepened, forming two deep furrows between his thick black eyebrows. “How’s that?”

“Our suspect, the one who calls himself Joko Daishi, he sees himself in the business of liberating souls. When we first got onto the hexamine, we were thinking MDA, so ‘liberating’ means getting people high—bringing them into a hallucinatory state, neh? But lacing the MDA with cyanide, that’s a different story. In that story, ‘liberating’ means inducing hallucinations and then inducing heart failure.”

Sakakibara crossed his long arms in front of his chest and looked at the house. “You find any evidence that they’re cooking in there?”

“No, sir,” said Han. “The house seems to be a base of operations, kind of spiritual headquarters. We’re thinking they must have some other place to cook their meth and MDA.”

“And lace it with cyanide.”

“Yes, sir.”

Sakakibara’s frown returned. “So somewhere out there, there’s a band of nut jobs with another barrel of cyanide.”

Mariko nodded. “We think so, sir.”

“And they’re not a hey-look-at-the-pretty-lights kind of cult, are they?”

“More like a hey-let’s-all-drink-the-Kool-Aid kind of cult, sir.”

“Then you two have your work cut out for you,” said Sakakibara. “Don’t waste your time talking to me; get your asses moving.”

Mariko blinked and looked at him. “I’m not sure we can, sir.”

Sakakibara squinted at her. “Excuse me?”

“Sir,” she said, “we’re onto this house because of the Shino tip, and that violated search and seizure. Because of the house we’re onto the cyanide, but if we follow that lead, we’re still in violation. Anything we find is inadmissible. Isn’t it?”

“Yeah,” said Han, shamefaced, “and I was kind of thinking you were going to suspend me.”

Sakakibara growled, almost like a bear. “Suspend you? I ought to burn you at the stake.” He gazed pensively at the ground and ran his fingers through his wire-stiff hair. After a long, tense, uncomfortable silence he said, “Do we know for a fact that your guy Shino didn’t walk into this house looking to score?”

“Sir?” Han said.

“He’s a junkie, right? That’s how you know him? That’s why he was useful as a CI?”

“Yes, sir.”

“So? Can you say for a fact that he didn’t get bored, figure out your suspects were dealing, and walk into that house looking to score?”

“Well, no, not if you put it that way.”

“Then I don’t have to suspend you. Yet.” Sakakibara turned to Mariko. “If you haven’t noticed, Sergeant, there’s a major case here for you to solve. We’ve got a bunch of crackpots in this city who want to commit mass murder. So go do your job and catch them. We’ll sort out the due process questions after you’re done. Frankly, I don’t give a shit if we don’t get a single conviction, so long as we prevent a string of homicides. And you,” he said, rounding on Han, “I’ll wait until after you’ve closed this case before I skin you alive.”