Flashback

“Whisper-dragonfly.”

“Okay,” said Nick. “So you’d been holding back, running the security from the background before that night, letting your cutely named Satoh-san appear to be running the show—just for purposes of later interviews should things go south, which they did—but that night you told Keigo that you wanted to meet him at one-thirty a.m…”

“One twenty-five it would have to be,” said Sato.

Nick ignored him. “So Keigo kills some time with his sex toy, who doesn’t even bother to get undressed for the heir apparent, and then comes up on the roof to meet you. You step out of the whisper-dragonfly, which probably goes up to hover until you are done with what you have to do, Keigo unlocks the door to lead you back down into his apartment, and the second you enter the room you shoot the girl in the forehead and then use a big knife on a very surprised Keigo.”

Sato seemed to be considering the explanation. “How did I get back out to the roof, Bottom-san? Only young Mr. Nakamura could open the doors.”

Nick laughed at that. “I don’t know how you got out. Maybe you had an override code on those goddamned doors…”

“Then I would not have required arranging a meeting with young Mr. Nakamura to open them, would I, Bottom-san? I could have surprised him at any time.”

“Whatever,” snapped Nick. “Maybe you just propped the doors open with two of those rocks in the dead planter there. But you had plenty of time to kill both of them and then be airlifted off the roof again—without the whisper-dragonfly tripping any of the alarms up here.”

Sato nodded as if convinced. “And my motive?”

“How the fuck should I know what your motive was?” Nick laughed again. “Sibling rivalry. Something that happened in Japan that we’ll never find out about. Maybe you were sweet on little Miss Keli Bracque…”

“Sweet on her,” repeated Sato, “so I shot her in the head.”

“Yeah,” said Nick. “Exactly.”

“And then murdered young Mr. Nakamura out of some sort of jealousy.”

Nick held up his hands. “I said I don’t know the motive. I just know you had the opportunity and the access to weapons and the technology to get you in and out of Keigo’s apartment.”

“The technology being the Sasayaki-tonbo,” said Sato.

“Yeah.”

“You should really look into whether there were any Sasayaki-tonbo in America six years ago,” said the security chief. “Or in Japan yet, for that matter.”

Nick said nothing. After another minute of looking at the depressing rooftop and depressing low clouds, he said, “Let’s go down and get out of the fucking rain.”

Later, Nick didn’t know why he hadn’t just left the damn building. His work there was done. There was nothing else to be discovered by gawking at the six-year-cold crime scene. He should have just left. Everything would have been different if he’d just left.

But he didn’t.

They came out into the third-floor foyer and once again Nick imagined that he could smell the faded stench of spilled blood and brains from the bedroom two rooms away. Sato turned left toward the exit, but instead of waiting for Sato to unlock the door to the stairway down, Nick turned right in the foyer and then left through the hall doorway into the large room that looked out onto Wazee Street.

This was the library in Keigo Nakamura’s permanent residence during the months he’d spent in the United States before being murdered, and it was the kind of space that young readers could only dream about. The floorboards were Brazilian cherry, the built-in bookcases on three walls were mahogany, the molding was handcrafted, the carpets were Persian, the long tables with their built-in magazine shelves and giant dictionaries atop them looked like they’d come out of Columbus’s map room, and the two tiers of elegant wooden blinds on each of the eight tall windows were also cherry. The huge mahogany desk in front of the windows was regal and solid enough to have served some American president in the Oval Office and the piano on its raised dais was a Steinway. Club chairs scattered around the room and the long couch were of a leather so dark and soft that they looked to have come from some eighteenth-century British club.

Nick looked at the two thousand three hundred and nine books on the shelves. He knew there were precisely two thousand three hundred and nine books on those shelves because he’d had his people look through each and every one of them. The only clues they’d uncovered were three almost-century-old Polaroid snapshots of a naked young man asleep on a couch. The photos had been tucked into a hundred-and-fifty-year-old third volume of The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Since the naked young man in the photos—his face was averted—was sporting a semi-erection, some of Nick’s sharper detectives had deduced some sort of connection with the title of the book. Others had decided that Keigo Nakamura, known both in Japan and the States as a ladies’ man, had been secretly gay and probably killed by one of his young gay lovers.

In the end, neither the DPD’s forensic people nor the FBI’s experts had been able to track down either the photographer or his young subject, but Nick had found the interior designer who’d worked for Keigo Nakamura and the designer had confirmed that he’d bought all the library books by the yard at various California and Colorado estate auctions. And the books had been chosen primarily for the quality of their leather bindings, the interior designer had said.

As far as Nick’s and the FBI’s best analysts could tell, Keigo Nakamura had never cracked a single book on any of these shelves or tables and the naked young man in the Polaroid’s story belonged to some other mystery.

The paperback that Keli Bracque had been reading on the day she was killed—Shogun— hadn’t come from the library.

Nick unhooked and parted the center set of wooden shutters and looked down at the rain falling on Wazee Street. He set his fingers against the cool glass, trying to fight the strange—almost forgotten—energies rising in him like a sudden spur of hunger.

He was actually beginning to be interested in solving this goddamned murder case. Why? Keigo Nakamura meant less than nothing to him. The arrogant rich kid had probably deserved to be murdered. His little movie documentary about flashback addiction in the United States wouldn’t have been of interest to the Japanese or Americans.

But it was interesting enough to someone that they murdered him because of it, thought Nick. Keigo’s phone and video camera and the camera’s last three fingernail-drives with all the recent interviews on them had been missing. Was there something in those interviews that had doomed Keigo Nakamura?

Personally, Nick liked Hideki Sato as the new prime suspect. It would certainly explain why Sato had gone to such lengths to hide his very existence in the original investigations. As for motive—who would ever know? Keigo Nakamura had made at least one enemy willing and able to cut his throat. Sato would certainly have been capable of that.

And Nick also liked his little speech about the helicopter, the whisper-dragonfly. What had Sato called the silent chopper in Japanese? Sasayaki-tonbo. Nick loved the elegance, the sweet-solution quotient, of a DA explaining to a jury that Chief of Security Hideki Sato had stepped out of a Sasayaki- tonbo to kill his master’s son.

The only problem with the Sasayaki-tonbo part of the theory was that Keigo Nakamura wasn’t the only resident of Wazee Street six years ago who had a hot tub bubbling away on the roof. Both the FBI and the plodding DPD led by Detective Sergeant Nick Bottom had found a certain James Oliver Jackson, who’d been in his rooftop Jacuzzi—along with four young female friends—during the time of the Keigo party and murder. Mr. Jackson’s hot tub was across the street and three buildings east and although that building was only two stories tall and had no view of Keigo’s patio area due to the doorway superstructure and patio fence on the Nakamura building, Jackson and his giggling guests stated that they certainly would have noticed a helicopter hovering over a building so close. James Oliver Jackson’s seat in the hot tub—Nick had checked—did have a perfect view of the airspace over the taller three-story Nakamura building, and Jackson