Flashback

all the layers of active filters and screens. Nick held his hand close. The air was moving so the central system was still active.

“So Keigo and his hired girlfriend weren’t up here screwing,” Nick said to himself. “Maybe Keigo was just waiting for someone.”

“Waiting for whom?” Sato asked in low tones.

Without putting on his glasses to look at the victims a last time—but carefully steering wide of the bloodstained tatami and the invisible corpse of Keigo on the floor—Nick said, “Let’s go up on the roof.”

In the foyer, Nick paused to study the door to the stairway to the roof. Except for little black boxes at both top corners and one on the side where a card-swiper would be, it looked like any other metal door. But Nick knew that the damned thing cost more than he earned in ten years. It not only checked retina and fingerprints—how many movies had Nick seen where the good guy or bad guy just brought along someone’s hand or eyeball to defeat those simple security checks?—but scraped and sniffed the person’s DNA, measured his brainwaves, and performed about a dozen other acts of identification that would only work with a living, breathing person. Six years ago this coming October, all that technology had been keyed on Keigo Nakamura’s retina, prints, DNA, brainwaves, and all the rest.

Now it seemed to be keyed on Hideki Sato. At least the heavy door clicked open after Sato had leaned close to one of the black boxes, scraped his thumb against it, and made his other contacts and magical passes. At the top of the stairway, he did the same thing with the magic door there.

Nick asked the same question he’d asked six years ago. “How do the maids and janitors get in and out of this apartment?”

There had been no answer from anyone six years ago and Sato did not answer now.

1.06 Wazee Street, Denver—Saturday, Sept. 11

It was raining harder but the clouds and fog had lifted. To the east rose the shrouded towers of downtown Denver; to the west the condo towers clustered along the river; to the south the large masses of the Pepsi Center and Mile High DHS Detention Center; to the north more low buildings and the two-hundred-foot-tall spike that anchored a pedestrian overpass connecting LoDo to the river region over train tracks. West of everything, just visible through the low clouds, were the foothills. The high peaks were absent this morning.

There was nothing special about the rooftop of Keigo Nakamura’s three-story building here on Wazee Street. A patio/garden area was delineated by a slightly raised wooden floor and vined latticework on two sides to give some privacy to the hot tub. On that October night six years ago, Nick knew, the hot tub had been burbling and preheated to the proper temperature—but unused by the victims, the coroners stated—but this mid-September morning it was cold and covered by a mildewing yellow tarp. The garden part of the rooftop was represented by several long planters lining the edge of the patio area and made of the same light wood, but no one had been gardening up here in recent years. There were a few weeds still growing and the desiccated skeletons of nobler plants.

Sato grunted as he leaned over to tie his polished black shoes.

Nick struggled to remember the security details of this unprepossessing rooftop. He recalled that there were multiple-wavelength invisible sensor-beams and waveguides extending ten feet high around the full perimeter… yes, there were the poles at the corners holding the projectors and equipment… and pressure sensors everywhere on the tarpaper and gravel rooftop except for the raised wooden patio area.

“Someone could have pole-vaulted in from the neighboring rooftops,” Nick muttered. Sato ignored him.

Yes, someone could have pole-vaulted in, but unless they’d landed on the wooden patio, the pressure sensors would have recorded their landing. And none did.

But the doors…

“The doors were open… what?” said Nick, expecting an answer this time. “Two and a half minutes?”

“Two minutes and twenty-one seconds,” said Sato.

Nick nodded. He remembered joking with his partner, then detective sergeant (now lieutenant) K. T. Lincoln, that he could kill a dozen Keigo Nakamuras in two minutes and twenty-one seconds.

“Speak for yourself” had been K.T.’s response. “I could kill a hundred fucking Keigos in two minutes and twenty-one seconds.”

Nick remembered thinking that she probably could. K.T. was half-black, a bit more than half-lesbian, a fiercely secular converted Jew who had worn black in civilian life ever since the death of Israel, a beautiful woman in her own scowling way, and probably the best and most honest cop he’d ever worked with. And for some reason she hated Japs.

Now standing in the rain and looking at the unused patio and rooftop, Nick said, “I think I’ve solved the murder.”

Sato leaned on the hot tub and cocked his head to show he was listening.

“There was all that newsblog blather about a locked-room mystery,” continued Nick, “but the goddamned room wasn’t even locked when the murders happened. Keigo unlocked the lower door, climbed the stairs, unlocked the upper door, and came out here. Wherever you were—a van, command post RV, a goddamned blimp—the remote door alarms showed you he’d opened them and you must have phoned Keigo to check that everything was all right.”

Sato grunted. But this time Nick needed more than that.

“Did you phone him? Or contact him some other way?” he demanded.

“How do you say it,” growled Sato, “when you interrupt static on an open line without speaking?”

“Breaking squelch,” said Nick. At least that’s the way he and a lot of former-military Denver cops had said it. Breaking squelch—just clicking to interrupt the carrier static—was as old as radios. When he’d been a patrolman, the guys out in their patrol cars had an entire code of breaking squelch—ways to tell each other things that no one wanted the dispatcher to hear or record.

Sato grunted again.

“So you broke squelch and Keigo broke squelch back and you knew he was okay when the doors opened,” said Nick. “One interrogative break and two back?”

“Two interrogative and three back, Bottom-san.”

“How many times did you do that before he quit answering because he was dead?”

“Twice.”

“How long before he quit answering was the second query and answer… how long before you had Satoh break the door down and check on him?”

“One minute, twelve seconds.”

Nick rubbed his chin again, hearing the scrape of whiskers.

“You said you had solved the murder,” said Sato.

“Oh, yeah. Keigo didn’t have sex with the girl because he was waiting for someone. Someone to arrive on the roof.”

“Without tripping the perimeter and pressure sensors?”

“Exactly. The person arrived by helicopter and just stepped out onto the patio boards here. No sensors there.”

“This was a busy night on Wazee Street, Bottom-san. Many people coming to and leaving this party alone. You think that they would not have noticed a helicopter hovering above the building?” Hericopter.

“Not if it was a stealth ’copter with that whisper technology that your dragonfly chopper had when you got picked up yesterday. What do you call those machines?”

“Sasayaki-tonbo,” said Sato.

“And what does that mean?”