much of a scholar, and so reading a historian’s notes was usually the sort of thing that would put her to sleep, not keep her up. In college she’d majored in journalism, which she defended to this day as the only writing-intensive major that actually left a graduate with legitimate job prospects in her field. She’d always thought of all that “love of learning for its own sake” crap as the lullaby that literature and philosophy majors used to sing themselves to sleep after a tough day of waiting tables. But now she was beginning to understand why Yamada had done what he’d done with his life, pursuing a master’s degree, then a PhD, then tenure, then one book project after another until he could hardly see the pen in his hand. Some of this stuff was honestly interesting in its own right—maybe not worth a college degree, but well worth the lost sleep she was inviting by telling herself “just one more.”
In fact it was three notebooks later that she struck gold. Yamada had ventured to guess that wind and divine wind might be the same thing. Her first thought was that obviously this couldn’t be a reference to the Divine Wind she was investigating, the cult of Akahata and Joko Daishi. Yamada was a historian: in his context, kamikaze—“divine wind”—was either the suicide pilots of World War Two or their namesake, the great typhoons that swamped the fleets of Kublai Khan, drowned his armies, and saved Japan from being just another province of the Mongol Empire. And since he’d already associated the mask with wind, the two typhoons were a sure bet.
But then came the mother lode. It was a tangential comment about the wind creating the mask, and it sent Mariko shuffling through all the notebooks that now lay scattered like playing cards on her bed. She rubbed her eyes, cursed the clock, and at last she found the book with the weird references to wind. If she reread them to say not “wind” but “the Wind,” the most bewildering passages suddenly became clear. The Wind wanted the mask. The Wind sought it out. It all made sense.
And then she reread Yamada’s question: was the Wind the same thing as the Divine Wind? If so, then while this Joko Daishi character was new to the scene, his Divine Wind cult was far older than Mariko could have believed. Whoever Yamada’s Wind were, they dated at least as far back as the 1400s, and prior to that it was a stretch to say that Japan was even Japan. More like a rabble of warlords and petty tyrants trying to snap up as much territory as possible. Only the Three Unifiers had brought all of those daimyo to heel and forged a single empire. Mariko had not forgotten the demon mask’s connection to Toyotomi Hideyoshi, the second of the Three Unifiers, though embarrassingly she could not remember when Hideyoshi was alive. Yamada-sensei would have known. Mariko ballparked it somewhere around the year 1600. If she was right, then in effect the Wind was older than Japan itself.
And if the Wind and the Divine Wind were the same organization, then two things became immediately clear. First, Yamada’s
Was that what all the “liberating souls” business was about? Again Mariko’s thoughts turned to Akahata’s bashed-in face and the mantra on his lips. Hamaya, his lawyer, explaining that his client was praying for Joko Daishi to liberate everyone. There was something sinister there. Mariko was sure of it; “Great Teacher of the Purging Fire” didn’t have a nice ring to it. Did these Divine Wind cultists think of themselves as messiahs? If so, they were dangerous. And brazen too. Theft of police evidence carried a much heavier sentence than a simple burglary, but it took a whole new kind of crazy to take it from the heart of an active crime scene. That was the kind of crazy that thought nothing of swindling a powerful yakuza clan on a drug deal. It was also—and Mariko was afraid even to formulate the thought—the kind of crazy that motivated people to wear suicide vests or fill subway cars with sarin gas.
Thus far, Mariko had no evidence that the Divine Wind was a terrorist organization. She certainly couldn’t prove the cult was a blood relative of a centuries-old criminal syndicate. She had only a gut feeling that Akahata was unstable and violent, and that anyone who sent a lawyer to defend a person like that was probably even more dangerous.
Han would have pushed for the simplest explanation. Some dope rings stole cars to make extra cash; this cult hocked stolen antiques instead. But instinct told Mariko something else. Stealing the mask suggested a fixation with demons. That fixation, coupled with hallucinogens and religious fanaticism, suggested devil worship—or if not devil worship, then at least a cult of personality centered on whoever was wearing the mask. Joko Daishi.
Mariko closed her notebooks. Sooner or later she had to sleep. And she had to face it: she wasn’t going to figure out anything about Joko Daishi tonight. Yamada made no mention of him. If the Wind and the Divine Wind were the same group, and if the Wind was originally a ninja clan, then perhaps the Divine Wind had retained some of the ancient secrets—like how to break into a seventeenth-story apartment with all the doors and windows locked from the inside. That squared nicely with her intuition that it was Joko Daishi who stole Glorious Victory Unsought. But intuition wasn’t evidence, and notes on medieval ninja clans wouldn’t help her solve yesterday’s crimes.
The truth was that she had very little to go on. She didn’t have Joko Daishi’s real name, or a description, or past whereabouts—not a damn thing, really. Her only good leads were Akahata and Hamaya, if only it had been legal to follow up on them. But she’d done the right thing: she hadn’t tailed them when they’d left the hospital. She’d observed their constitutional rights, and now she cursed herself for having done it. She wanted to know who these people were, who they were pushing their drugs on, what sermons they were delivering to the hallucinating masses, what role the demon mask had to play in any of it.
In short, she wanted to know what kind of storm was coming and when it would strike.
29
Lieutenant Sakakibara liked to hold his morning briefings early, a proclivity that made the top brass admire his diligence and made Mariko wish he’d fall over dead. Ever since she’d made Narcotics, she’d been cutting her hair shorter so it would look less rumpled when she dragged her ass in to post. Her attitude toward makeup was indifferent at best—she’d stopped making a fuss over it in high school, specifically to conserve precious minutes of sleep—and under Sakakibara’s command she’d taken to forgoing even a quick dab of mascara.
Orange light streamed in through the briefing room’s tall windows, cut into slices by Venetian blinds. One of those slices slashed right across Mariko’s face, leaving her half-blind and no doubt looking even more tired than she felt. She knew it was the wrong play, knew she was the newest member of Sakakibara’s team, knew she was supposed to make every impression a good one, but at seven o’clock in the damn morning it was hard to care about how she looked. She was well aware of the gossip going around that she was a lesbian, but it was easier to put up with it than to lose ten minutes of sleep every morning to “put her face on.”
That was a strange phrase, one she’d learned as a schoolgirl in the States. There was no equivalent slang in Japanese, though there were plenty of sayings about losing face and saving face. Ironically enough, not putting her face on was the very thing that could cause her to lose face. But this morning there was a more pressing concern when it came to losing face: she’d made no progress on the Joko Daishi case. Her late night reading had been interesting, to be sure, but it hadn’t actually given her any leads. Joko Daishi was an enigma, his lieutenant Akahata was off the leash, and their hexamine was nowhere to be found.
Sakakibara walked into the room, his characteristic long strides clopping like horse’s hooves on the linoleum tile. Everyone snapped to attention, including Mariko, who had to do a little more snapping than average, since she’d been slouching in her chair, ready to nod off. “At ease,” Sakakibara said, and Mariko redeposited herself in her seat in the back row.
Her LT took his customary place behind his lectern, rapped a couple of manila folders on it to straighten their contents, and said, “All right, people, let’s get down to—what the hell, Frodo? Did someone exhume you this morning?”
“Late night, sir.”
“Where’s your partner?”
“Maybe in the grave next to mine, sir. Haven’t seen him yet today.”
Sakakibara ran his fingers through his stiff, wire-brush hair. “Oh, I can’t wait for this status report. What
