Year of the Demon

when Han opened the door to the master bathroom. The room was sealed as if to remain airtight, or perhaps to contain some other gas used in the orgies.

Another bedroom housed a blown-up photo of a good-looking, middle-aged man with long, windblown hair, standing on a seaside cliff and performing yoga or tai chi or something in between. The photo was framed, and below it was an altar with candles surrounding a wide, shallow bowl full of odds and ends: coins, marbles, eights of hearts from a bunch of different decks of cards, a folded pocket schedule of the Yomiuri Giants season, car keys stripped from their key rings. Of particular interest to the narc’s eye were the ten or twelve little vials of heroin.

“Joko Daishi?” said Mariko, nodding at the poster above the bowl.

“Gotta be,” said Han. “Kind of looks like John Lennon, neh? Except the beard’s more like Jerry Garcia.”

“Or that Aum Shinrikyo guy,” Mariko said. “Remember him?”

“Who could forget?”

Mariko could almost see the shivers running down Han’s spine. She’d been all of twelve years old when the Aum Shinrikyo cult released sarin gas in a Tokyo subway. It made the news even in Teutopolis, Illinois, where she’d been in junior high at the time. Mariko could remember the pictures on TV of the cult leader, Asahara Shoko, with his thick black hair and big, shaggy beard. This Joko Daishi shared the beard but not the caveman chic; his hair was straight and long, almost feminine, much more in keeping with the obsessive-compulsive cleanliness of his headquarters. Mariko might even have said he was handsome but for the fact that she could imagine him standing over her bed in the middle of the night. Was he the one who stole her sword, or had it been one of his devotees? Either way, this was the man who shattered any sense of privacy in her life.

Mariko took the little folded baseball schedule from the altar, careful to handle it only by the edges, where she couldn’t leave a print. The squat, orange, rabbitlike mascot of the Yomiuri Giants smiled up at her from the front cover. She found its grossly oversized eyes creepy instead of cute. Joko Daishi’s eyes blazed with the same kind of inhuman intensity.

She found it strange that it should be the baseball schedule, not the heroin, that captivated her attention so fully that she felt the need to pick it up. Against her better judgment she opened it, pinching only the tips of the corners, hoping now that she wouldn’t smear any useful prints. As the little calendar unfolded, she found someone had written a prayer on it with a fat-tipped Sharpie. She couldn’t make out much of it—on paper this small the writing was tightly cramped—but she did notice today’s date was circled in red. A home game. She wondered what the significance of that might be.

Squinting at the prayer again, she could only identify the characters jo and ko, Purging Fire. She let the calendar fold itself accordion-style back into its original shape, turning her attention instead to the photo of Joko Daishi. Leaning in to get a closer look, she noticed the photo frame concealed a wall panel behind it. It didn’t open readily, so she started fiddling with it. “Han, we need to talk.”

“I know,” he said. “I fucked up. Shino’s dead and it’s my fault.” His voice was laden with remorse. “Poor son of a bitch never had a chance. Parking an old beat-to-hell Cressida in this neighborhood; they must have seen him the instant he got here.”

“You’ve got it wrong. It’s not your fault he’s dead. So far we’ve only got these guys on theft and felony possession. You didn’t know they were going to step it up to homicide.”

“Yeah, but I’m the one who sent him up here.”

Mariko nodded. “And there’s going to be a reckoning for that. It wasn’t right, Han, and you should have told me what you were doing before you did it.”

She could hear him deflating. “I didn’t want to get you involved. This is on me, all right? I’m not going to ask you to back me up on this.”

“What do you want, a medal? You broke the rules, Han. You used a proxy to do what you knew we couldn’t legally do ourselves. And you think you need to ask me not to back you up? You think you were protecting me by hiding this crap?”

“Mariko, I’m sorry—”

“‘Sorry’ isn’t going to cut it. We’re partners, Han, and besides that, I’m the ranking officer on this detail. And you say, ‘I didn’t want to get you involved’? I am involved, Han. My job is to be involved. And now you’ve put my job at risk. Do you have any idea how hard I worked to get here?”

“Mariko, you know I do.”

“Then you know how pissed off I am. When we get back to post our whole world is going to turn to shit, and I don’t want—uh-oh.” The panel behind the photograph popped open with a little click. Mariko didn’t like what she saw behind it.

Morose as he was, chastened as he was, Han shifted right back into high gear the instant he heard Mariko’s tone. “What have you got?”

“I think I know what killed Shino,” she said, “and I think we’re going to need a hazmat team right away.”

31

Follow-up calls to Hazmat and Lieutenant Sakakibara confirmed they were both due to arrive on scene within minutes of each other. Mariko was well aware that she and Han could have used the interim to get their stories straight about Shino. She knew of cops on the force that would have done exactly that. But whatever his faults, Han had honor enough not to suggest it. The two of them didn’t even speak until they could hear the sirens coming.

“Before he gets here,” Han said, “can I just tell you one thing?”

“One thing,” Mariko said. Her anger was burning at a low simmer. She hoped he had sense enough not to spark off another flare-up.

“I’m really sorry for the ‘it’s all my fault’ and ‘I assume full responsibility’ shit. I know it was my responsibility to stay within the lines. I never should have suggested otherwise. And you were right: it was Joko Daishi’s people who killed Shino. Claiming responsibility for that is just playing the martyr. I’m sorry for that.”

Mariko nodded. After a long, pregnant pause, she said, “That’s the tone you want to take with the LT. What you did, you need to own it. Completely. You understand me?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“All right.” Again she paused, trying to sort out her emotions. “I’m still pissed at you. Got it? But all the same, I really do hope they don’t hang you for this.”

Whatever else they might have said would have to wait until later, for the parade of emergency vehicles had arrived. The hazmat team started suiting up and Mariko and Han tracked down Sakakibara and gave him a quick report, starting from the confrontation with Akahata and his lawyer in the hospital. To his credit, Han left out none of the details. Sakakibara sat stone-faced, leaning against the hood of his squad car and taking it all in.

When Han and Mariko were finished, he said, “Explain the cyanide part to me again, Frodo.”

“They’ve got a giant photo of Joko Daishi on the wall upstairs,” Mariko said, “concealing a panel in the wall. Open that panel and you’ve got two big plastic jugs like the ones you’d find in an office watercooler, screwed together like an hourglass and connected by a valve. The top jug is full of pellets of sodium cyanide.”

“Which for some inexplicable reason you recognize on sight?”

“No, sir. Actually, they were kind enough to label it. I guess when you’re in the habit of stocking a bunch of dangerous chemicals, you want to keep them straight.”

“Right,” Sakakibara said. “And this Shino kid, they killed him with the cyanide?”

“Yes, sir. Hard to tell whether they force-fed him or laced it into something else. Not that it matters much.”

“Frodo, let me ask you something. Are you trying to make me look bad?”

“Sir?”

“I’ve trained a hell of a lot of narcs in my day, and not one of them could walk up to a body and identify it