All the same, Mariko still thought she should have had the right to make the choice herself. Now and again, even all these years later, she tried to imagine the room where he died. There were no photographs. It wasn’t the sort of event you broke out the cameras for. Mariko had never asked her mom to describe it—nor her sister, now that she thought about it, though Saori was younger, so she’d been there until the end. For all Mariko knew, the room where her dad had died looked exactly like the room she was standing in now.
She’d never seen the man in this room before, but she’d seen plenty of battery victims in her time. He seemed to sink into his bed. Both eyes were blacked. A huge swollen dome dominated the right side of his face from eyebrow to hairline, obviously the result of some massive blunt force trauma; it looked like someone had managed to shove a hamburger bun up under one of his eyelids. A neck brace squished wrinkles into his unshaven cheeks. Both lips were punctuated with cuts. His forearms were nothing but knotted, swollen bruises—almost certainly defensive wounds—but neither was broken. In short, by the standards of the Kamaguchi-gumi, he’d gotten off light. He’d stay under observation for a few days, but he wouldn’t spend the rest of his life in a wheelchair.
The suspect’s mouth moved constantly. At first Mariko thought he was delirious, but after a while she saw he was chanting the same words over and over again. A mantra. His eyes blazed at her, the whites as brilliant as the full moon, unnaturally bright thanks to the red and purple contusions that surrounded them. Mariko could barely hear him, but given the way he stared at her, it seemed he meant to speak directly to her. And that wasn’t what she found weird; the weird part was her sneaking suspicion that this man looked at everyone with that same thousand-yard stare. It made her not want to get close enough to hear that mantra of his.
The only other person in the room was SWAT’s tactical medic, who was so obviously exhausted that Mariko wasn’t sure he’d be safe to drive himself home. “He’s been spouting that same line ever since we put him in the ambo,” the tac medic said. “Never stops, never sleeps.”
“That’s speed for you,” Han said.
Mariko had reached the same conclusion. Staying up for days on end was probably just another day at the office for a cult that cooked massive quantities of amphetamines. On the other hand, selling that much product probably left a good amount of cash on hand for legal fees.
The lawyer was already reaching into his pocket for his business card as he walked into the room. “Officers,” he said, giving Mariko and Han a short bow. His tone was a little too familiar, his dress a little shy of the immaculate benchmark set by the rest of his profession. His shirt was pressed to perfection, but he hadn’t quite tucked it all the way in. His suit was of second-best quality, which was to say far more expensive than anything Mariko or even Lieutenant Sakakibara could ever justify putting in their rotation, yet not quite up to snuff in the scrutinizing glare of the courtroom spotlight. If he were a
But it was understated swagger, swagger by implication, just like the quality of the business card he proffered with both hands, one to Han and then one to Mariko. The card was not paper but wood, a veneer thinner than cardstock and smoother than silk. HAMAYA JIRO, it read, ATTORNEY AT LAW.
It was an implicit request for Mariko and Han to offer their own cards, and to be professional they had no choice but to oblige. Hamaya had already set the terms of their relationship. “I’m sure you’ll agree,” he said, “that Akahata-san is not yet in any condition to endure a police interrogation.”
Mariko eyed the man in the bed, whose eyes still blazed like a madman’s. His lips still moved in their playback loop, chanting their mantra. “Akahata, is it? He looks ready to talk to me, Counselor.”
Hamaya gave her an insouciant bow. “He speaks, yes, but not to anyone in this room. He prays for Joko Daishi to liberate our souls.”
Han and Mariko shared a knowing glance. It was the second time they’d across the word
“Joko Daishi, huh?” Mariko eyed the tweaker in the hospital bed. “Let me guess: he’s the leader of your Divine Wind?”
“The very same,” said Hamaya, bowing, his eyes closing, his voice full of reverence. Akahata’s chanting went from a silent mouthing to a barely audible whisper. His lips redoubled their pace.
Not seeing the kanji for Joko, Mariko couldn’t do anything with the name. It would have been nice to have something to plug into a search engine. She’d have liked to wheedle the name the old-fashioned way too, but somehow she didn’t think it would fly if she suddenly expressed interest in joining the Divine Wind and asked Hamaya to write down his whack-job leader’s name and home address.
The latter might well have been a psychiatric ward. There was no doubt in her mind that this Joko Daishi was a loony and an extremist. It took an extremist to command such loyalty from Akahata, a brand of loyalty that was almost literally undying: that head trauma might easily have killed him, and if it had, he’d have gone to his grave with Joko Daishi’s name on his lips. Nor did Mariko harbor any doubt that the Daishi pills that Nanami was popping these days were directly connected to the man called Daishi that Akahata prayed to. One glance at Han told her he was thinking the same thing.
“Good to know,” Han said. “Now let me take a wild guess and say the way Joko Daishi liberates our souls is to get us all high.”
Hamaya admitted the smallest of smirks. “That would be illegal, Detective.”
“Now, what if the thing he was using to do the liberating was MDA?” Mariko said, making Hamaya shift his attention to her. She and Han made a habit of speaking in turns. They had a good rapport that way, each anticipating where the other was going, riffing off each other, always redirecting a suspect’s focus, never letting him feel settled. It worked on suspects’ lawyers too. “A nice high with some gentle hallucinations—good spiritual stuff, that. Pass enough of that around and you could probably start a cult.”
“Maybe so,” said Han. “Of course, he’d need a steady supply to make enough MDA for a whole cult to take part.”
“But wait,” said Mariko, “hasn’t your client been making deals with the Kamaguchi-gumi for whole barrels of hexamine?”
“That’s right,” said Han. “He’s been doing that for months, hasn’t he? Do you know what you can make with hexamine, Hamaya-san?”
“I’m sure I have no idea.”
“Well, your client does,” said Mariko. “I mean, he’d have to. He knows how to cook speed, after all. Lots of it. Enough to make himself very rich—rich enough to purchase expensive antiques, for instance. Masks, swords, that kind of thing. If he didn’t feel like stealing them, of course.”
Han poked Hamaya on the shoulder and whispered, “This is the part where you say, ‘Allegedly.’”
“Now, why would a guy who likes to cook amphetamines give a whole bunch of his product away?” said Mariko, laying claim to Hamaya’s most obvious legal riposte. She figured they might as well get a good look at it now, before the case went to court. Urano Soseki, the capo that oversaw the Kamaguchi-gumi’s shipping and packing plant, had claimed the same defense right from the outset, just minutes after Mariko had blasted him through that door: there was never any dope deal. No money had changed hands. In court Hamaya could make a mirroring claim on Akahata’s behalf: since the speed was in the Kamaguchi-gumi’s possession, it clearly belonged to them. A buy wasn’t a buy until someone paid for something.
That wouldn’t wash for Urano’s crew. Just having the speed on the premises was more than enough to convict them. But Akahata was innocent until proven guilty. Unless Mariko and Han could prove he’d been involved in the deal—and holding a big wad of dope money was the usual proof in these cases—Akahata’s only criminal activity that night had been as the victim of aggravated battery. She and Han always had the option of getting Urano to dime out Akahata, but Urano’s credibility as a witness wouldn’t hold up under scrutiny. Mariko could take her turn on the stand, but she’d have a hard time convincing a jury why Akahata would use fifty or sixty kilos of
