Year of the Demon

his attention.

“Mass murder,” Mariko said. “Mass destruction. Maybe killing your own people. Definitely hitting your own hometown. He thinks he needs the mask to make it happen. You want that?”

“Honey, I’m a gangster. I see a chance to make money, I take it. Shit happens to my people, I deal with it. Shit happens to other people, I let you deal with it.”

Mariko couldn’t believe her ears. All the work she’d put in, all the man-hours allocated by her department, all the fear, the tension, the worry, to say nothing of the quagmire Han had sunk himself into—all of it for nothing. For the second time in as many days, she’d surprised herself with her loyalty to a city that so often made her feel alien. Joko Daishi wasn’t just another criminal. His bombs weren’t just a menace to the general public. He’d threatened Tokyo, damn it, Mariko’s city, Kamaguchi’s city, and Kamaguchi couldn’t even be bothered to turn down the volume to hear her out.

All she could think of to say was “You selfish son of a bitch.” There was nothing left to do but walk away.

63

Joko Daishi’s indictment was the following Friday. His legal name was Koji Makoto. Age fifty-one, though he looked a lot younger. A history of petty crimes in his youth, all linked to mental illness, resulting in some court- ordered psychiatric care but not a day of incarceration. No known residence, no known relatives. If he had a source of income, the National Tax Agency didn’t know about it. As far as the bureaucracy was concerned, he’d stepped out of a psychiatric ward on the morning of his eighteenth birthday and simply ceased to exist.

The indictment was supposed to be at ten o’clock, on the first floor of a district courthouse around the corner from TMPD headquarters in the heart of Kasumigaseki, a neighborhood as schizophrenic as they come. The Metropolitan Police HQ was an enormous postmodern thing with a tower coming out the top that was striped like a candy cane. Across the street was the Ministry of Justice, Italianate, only three stories tall. Both of those fronted a moat of the Muromachi era, on the other side of which was the five-hundred-year-old sloping stone foundation of an Imperial Palace still decades shy of its one-hundredth birthday. Firebombing had eradicated the old palace, but the foundation had endured the bombers and worse—earthquakes, floods, erosion, an economy that valued downtown real estate over obsolete political heirlooms—emerging with a little more moss but otherwise hardly the worse for wear. Now that foundation was surrounded by brand-new skyscrapers, cell phone towers, hybrid electric vehicles, invisible waves of Wi-Fi. It stood stoically in their midst, unchanged.

Mariko wished she could say the same, caught in the midst of her swirling emotions. From the moment she woke up that morning, Mariko didn’t know where she needed to be. Her friend and partner had a hearing before Internal Affairs. It was scheduled for ten o’clock, the same time Joko Daishi’s indictment was supposed to take place. Part of her wanted the decision to be as easy as supporting a friend, doing the right thing, letting the job come second. It was the same part of her that wished she thought of Joko Daishi as Koji Makoto, not the religious title he’d given himself. It was the more charitable way to identify him—innocent until proven guilty and all that— but in her mind he remained the heartless cult leader, not the psychiatric case with a troubled childhood.

Her more cynical side doubted that Koji Makoto was even his real name at all. Most of her colleagues would have said she was grasping at straws, but they only thought in Japanese. Mariko read kanji characters as a native and as a gaijin, and the English-speaking part of her mind saw that, literally translated, Koji Makoto meant Short Path to the Truth. Too poetic to be coincidental, Mariko thought.

She wasn’t all that fond of her propensity to find reasonable suspicion even in the most innocent of details, like names in the blanks of standard governmental paperwork. The sad truth was that her capacity to see the worst in people made her a better cop. Today it made her unsure about her partner. Despite that idealistic voice in her head, this had never been as simple as standing by a friend. He worked with her and he’d jeopardized their investigation. He reported to her and he’d undermined her authority. And now, at ten minutes to ten, she knew exactly where she needed to be but she didn’t want to go.

It wasn’t her lingering mistrust that told her to find another place to be at ten o’clock. If anything, her cynicism and pessimism would lead her straight to Han’s hearing. But trumping those, overriding her feelings of betrayal, she was torn between wanting to be a source of support for her partner and dreading being there to see his verdict handed down. She wanted to spare him that shame. The tension between those two desires had been building all morning, and now she had to walk it off, pacing up and down from the courthouse to the police headquarters. She’d seen Han pace like this, cigarette smoke trailing him. She’d never had much interest in smoking, but maybe today was the day to start.

Sakakibara caught up with her halfway down the block. “There you are,” he said, walking fast on stilt- straight legs. Obviously he knew where he wanted to be. He hooked her by the crook of the elbow, spinning her on her heel and dragging her toward the courthouse. “Come on. Do you want to see this prick indicted or not?”

A simple indictment wasn’t usually the sort of thing that drew a lieutenant’s attention, or even a sergeant’s for that matter, but Joko Daishi had masterminded a plot to terrorize the city and run up a hell of a body count while he was at it—not fifty-two but hundreds. That train platform would have been packed if he’d had his way. If Mariko hadn’t shot him. If Han hadn’t put her where she needed to be. It had been a fifty-fifty shot as to which one of them would get to Akahata. Han had raced off the same as she did—had volunteered to be on a train platform with a madman and a bomb, the same as she did. It was blind luck that made her the hero instead of him. Again Mariko wondered what Han’s fate should be.

“Sir, it’s over.”

“What?”

“Joko Daishi’s lawyer, Hamaya. He had the case pushed up an hour. Nine o’clock.”

Sakakibara stopped cold. “And?”

“I saw it,” Mariko said. It was sheer luck that she’d been there. She showed up early for Han because she couldn’t sleep, and she happened to see Hamaya Jiro hurrying toward the courthouse. She nearly caught up with him, thought better of it, slipped in the courtroom behind him, and watched the whole proceedings.

Hamaya hadn’t noticed her until afterward. “Sergeant Oshiro,” he’d said. “A fine morning for a trial, wouldn’t you say?”

He’d dropped the word trial on purpose. Joko Daishi wasn’t on trial yet. But Han was. “Do thank your partner for me when you see him,” Hamaya had said. “If it weren’t for him, I can only imagine how difficult it would be for me to mount my client’s defense.”

“That’s because your client is guilty.”

“Only of what you can prove in court, Sergeant. I’m afraid the district attorney will have a tough time of it, once it becomes clear how much evidence is inadmissible. If I’m not mistaken, your entire investigation would have fallen flat if your partner hadn’t illegally tailed Akahata-san.”

He had her on that one. The district attorney chose not to press charges on anything connected to the Kamakura house. The heroin, the cyanide, even Shino’s murder. None of it would stick.

But Mariko wouldn’t let him see the cracks in her resolve. “Too bad you won’t be drawing a paycheck from him anymore. That breaks my heart.”

“I’m sure. No doubt you’re equally heartbroken that Akahata-san is not alive for cross-examination. If not for you and your partner, the case against Joko Daishi would be ironclad.”

Mariko felt herself fuming but refused to rise to Hamaya’s bait. “You’ll wriggle out of a charge here or there, but we’ve got your client dead to rights on the bomb-making factory. We got that from a search warrant on phone records, not from anything Han did. That means we’ve got your client on unlawful use of weapons, and believe me, the DA’s office can turn that into five or six different counts by itself. Then there’s conspiracy, furtherance, public endangerment—and after all that, your client gets to go to federal court, where we’re going to smack him with every last terrorism charge we’ve got a law for. I hope your little cult believes in reincarnation, because Joko Daishi’s looking at back-to-back life sentences from here to eternity. Best of luck with that.”

“The best of luck, indeed,” Hamaya had said, giving her a little bow by way of a farewell. “I have no doubt of it.”