Flashback

The tac-glasses still in his hand, Nick walked in.

The expansive bedroom still stank of dried blood and brain matter. After all these years? thought Nick. Not likely.

But it did.

Instead of carpet, the floor was covered with rectangles of tatami. Nick had learned when he was a cop that the Japanese still tended to express the size of their rooms in units of the three- by-six-foot mats. A bedroom or tea room, Nick recalled, was often a four-and-a-half-mat room. All sorts of rules applied as to how the mats could meet—never in a grid pattern, he remembered, and there was some rule that in any layout there should never be a point where the corners of three or four mats touch. This bedroom was huge— maybe a thirty-mat room. Only these tatami didn’t smell sweetly of dried grass like the floor of Mr. Nakamura’s office.

The first patch of blood that caught the eye was on the big bed where the crumpled sheets had a dried splatter but the pillows and headboard and a bit of wall showed a head-sized red blotch. This was where the hooker had died. The larger patch of dried blood was on the floor, surrounded by discarded syringe covers and more paper and plastic paramedic detritus. This dried puddle covered all of one tatami and had blobbed over onto two adjacent ones.

Nick glanced into the master bedroom’s large bathroom, checked the four windows, and then came over to stand next to the stained tatami.

“Would you move, please, Bottom-san?”

Sato had his glasses on and now Nick donned his and looked down. He was standing calf deep in Keigo Nakamura’s naked loins. Nick stepped aside but couldn’t resist grinning. He’d done that on purpose.

Keigo’s corpse was naked. The young woman’s corpse on the bed was dressed in jeans and a black bra. Keigo’s throat had been slashed almost all the way through. The young woman—her name was Keli Bracque, Nick remembered—had been shot once in the middle of the forehead. Taking care not to step on or in Keigo again, Nick leaned closer to study Keli’s wound. The .22-caliber round had left a tiny, clean, blue-rimmed hole in her pale forehead but had done its usual damage rattling around in her skull. Twenty-two’s were still one of the weapons of choice for professional assassins, and several of Nick’s DPD investigators had thought this suggested a professional hit.

Nick took two steps back and looked down. If her hit was by a cool professional, then why this messy, rage-driven, amateur-looking job on Keigo? Sending a message? But a message to whom? Mr. Nakamura, obviously. Or maybe all the violence expended in Keigo’s near-decapitation was merely a ruse to throw off investigators from how dispassionate and professional this hit actually was.

There was a red paperback copy of a twentieth-century novel titled Shogun open on the bedside table only inches from Keli Bracque’s hand.

“These images are better than the death-scene photos I had,” Nick said to Sato. “Who took them?”

“I did. Before the authorities arrived.”

“Better and better,” laughed Nick. “Not only leaving the scene of a crime, but concealing evidence… the video-camera recordings, these photos, the fact of your very existence as Keigo’s head of security. You’ll serve time for sure when an American court is through with you, Hideki-san.”

Nick knew that he was repeating himself but he enjoyed hearing the charges again. Sato showed no more response than he had the first time.

“You’re sure there are no animated tac images this time?” asked Nick.

“As I said, we had no cameras on the third floor, Bottom-san,” Sato said.

“Yeah,” said Nick, letting the sarcasm drip. He walked back to the bed, stepping on and through Keigo’s head this time. If Sato was squeamish, fuck him.

Nick rubbed both of his temples as he looked at the dead girl’s face and tried to remember her dossier. She was young—nineteen—and blond. And American. And tall. Almost a foot taller than Keigo at his diminutive five- foot-one height. All the Jap males seemed to have a thing about tall American blondes.

But, as was true of much of the food that Keigo Nakamura had eaten at home while he was in the States, Ms. Keli Bracque had been brought over from Japan. The orphan daughter of two American missionaries there, the girl had more or less been raised by the entertainment-and-relaxation branch of Nakamura Heavy Industries. In the old days, Nick knew, Japanese businesses had sent their execs on sex holidays to Bangkok… not to the Patpong sex district that men from other nations flocked to, but to a more rigidly monitored sex district catering only to the Japanese. Even then, the HIV problem had gotten serious enough there that the big Japanese corporations had given up on Thailand and raised their own hookers. The dossier on Keli Bracque that Nakamura’s firm had finally— reluctantly—surrendered hadn’t said it outright, but odds were great that Keli had been sexually satisfying top execs there since she was a pre-teenager.

Or, thought Nick as he studied her dead face, maybe not.

Maybe this one had been saved for the boss’s son. Or the boss and his son.

“She’s half-dressed; he’s still naked,” he said aloud.

“Yes,” said Sato.

Nick waited for the derision that such a statement of the obvious by a trained detective deserved, something along the lines of No shit, Sherlock, but Sato let the single flat syllable suffice.

“My point,” Nick said finally, “is that Keigo and Ms. Bracque were up here alone for—what?—thirty-nine minutes? Forty?”

“Thirty-six minutes and twenty seconds before Mr. Satoh broke down the door after young Mr. Nakamura did not respond to his page,” said Sato.

“Long enough to have sex,” said Nick. He knew that “broke down the door” hadn’t been quite accurate since the door at the head of the stairs could have resisted any number of battering rams. Security man Satoh had carried a tiny but powerful shaped charge, no larger than a kneaded eraser, for just such entry emergencies. But that was irrelevant.

“But,” continued Nick, rubbing his stubbled cheek and looking through his glasses at the two dead bodies, “both autopsies showed that they hadn’t had sex, even though that was the reason Keigo said he wanted the privacy up here during the party. Hell, I don’t think Keli was getting dressed after some messing around between the two. I don’t think she ever got undressed, except to take her blouse and boots off.”

“Perhaps young Mr. Nakamura and the young lady were chatting,” said Sato.

Nick snorted. “Are NakamuraCo living sex toys famous for their conversational abilities?”

“Yes,” said Sato. “Like the geisha, all Nakamura employees in the recreational division are trained to please by intelligent conversation, the playing of musical instruments, by knowing the proper technique of preparation and pouring in the Tea Ceremony… a wide range of abilities beyond mere… gratification of physical pleasure.”

Nick was barely listening to the security chief. He pointed to the open paperback. “I think Ms. Bracque was reading her book when the killer entered the room. She only just had time to set it facedown, marking her place, when the assailant shot her.”

Sato waited.

“Whoever it was, she wasn’t alarmed by his or her sudden arrival,” mused Nick. This was old ground for him, but he was rediscovering it as he went. It had been years since he’d mulled over the details of this murder. “You don’t take time to mark your place in a book when someone who frightens you suddenly looms up in your bedroom.”

“Bottom-san, you are saying that Miss Bracque knew her killer.”

Nick was too lost in thought even to nod. Taking off his tactical glasses, he walked to the window nearest to the bed, nearest to the blood on the tatami and headboard, and touched the glass that wasn’t quite glass. Sealed. Bulletproof. Blastproof for all but the most intense blasts. When Nick had read the specs six years earlier, he’d had the image of a major bombing event where the building here on Wazee was rubble but the windows remained, hanging in air like transparent Druid stones.

Since they couldn’t be opened, the third-floor rooms were constantly refreshed by the whisper of forced air from ventilators. Tiny ventilators. A tiny ninja-assassin mouse might get in through those ventilators if it weren’t for