Year of the Demon

“Can’t see why not.”

“Then let’s hope the fact that it’s restricted means we won’t have too many distributors to run down.”

They didn’t. Not for the first time, Mariko wondered how detectives had ever gotten along without the Internet. It would have taken days to make the headway she and Han made in twenty minutes. Han was the faster typist, and not because he had ten fingers to Mariko’s nine; even before her injury she’d always clunked along with two fingers on the keys. His keyboard sounded like little galloping horses; hers clicked and clacked sporadically, like a bag of microwave popcorn right before the ding. She’d always done better with the paperwork you had to fill out by hand.

It was a funny word, paperwork, now that it rarely involved paper anymore. Screenwork was more apropos, or keyboardwork, or something like that. She wondered what Yamada-sensei would have had to say on the matter.

Thinking of him made her think about all those yellowing handwritten notebooks sitting in stacks in her bedroom, and that gave her second thoughts about the cyanide lead. According to Yamada, anyone wearing the mask became obsessed with weapons. Maybe cyanide pills could count as weapons, but they seemed a bit tame compared to cutting someone down with a sword. Mariko suspected Joko Daishi had grander, bloodier visions than that.

“Huh,” Han said, interrupting her reverie. “How about that? Apparently you can use sodium cyanide to mine gold.”

“Yeah, I saw that,” Mariko said.

“Seems like a better use for it than murdering people.”

Mariko chuckled weakly. She’d followed the gold mining trail too. Han was better on the computer, but Mariko had a stronger sense of what might lead where. She supposed it came from putting in time as a detective outside of Narcotics. Han knew exactly where to follow drug leads, but Mariko was better at seeing the overarching patterns, the counterintuitive connections. What seemed like random trivia for Han seemed like dots to connect for Mariko.

And she’d already connected a few. “We’re not exactly mineral-rich as a country, neh? I mean, where do you think the nearest gold mine is?”

Han scrunched his brow and thought about it for a second. “Beats me. Could be California for all I know.”

“Exactly. And we know sodium cyanide is on the prohibited substances list, so you’d need something like a mining license to buy it, neh?”

“That or some other license, maybe for some other kind of industry.”

“Right,” said Mariko. “So I tracked down how many companies are authorized to sell it—”

“Nice.”

“—and the answer is two.”

“Nice!” Han made a fist-pump. “So we just need to figure out who they’ve been selling to—”

“Or who they’ve been selling to under the counter.”

“Exactly. Because these guys have already shown they’re willing to go black market for their dangerous chemicals.”

Mariko used to love the fact that she and Han thought the same way. Now she wasn’t so sure. It made communication a whole lot easier, and it hadn’t been so long ago that she’d also considered it a badge of honor. Han was a good narc, or so she’d been inclined to think, and so if her mind worked like his, she must have been a good narc too. But that was before he’d stepped out of bounds, before he’d sent his CI to do what he couldn’t legally do himself. A vision flashed in her mind: Shino sprawled facedown on the floor, his skin sunburn red against the bright yellow of his Lakers jersey. If Mariko thought like Han, and if Han was capable of getting an innocent person killed, then what did that say about Mariko?

She elected to avoid that question for the present, choosing instead to let the moral questions take a backseat to practicality. With no small amount of trepidation, she called her CO. Sakakibara answered with a growl.

“Good morning, sir.”

“This better be good,” he said.

“Bad morning, sir?”

“Hell, no. It’s not like I’ve been wringing favors out of every last lieutenant in this department to get you the manpower you need. Do you have any idea what this is going to do to my Thursday nights?”

“Sir?”

“Poker, Frodo. Lieutenant Tortoise in Violent Crimes takes for-fucking-ever deciding whether to call or fold. Like we all don’t know what’s coming. It would be easier on everyone if I could just knock him over the head with a baton and take his wallet. But no, the stupid bastard wants in, and thanks to this Divine Wind of yours, I needed to wangle two more detectives to your detail. So you’ve got them, damn you, but it’s going to ruin my Thursdays until I take enough of his money that he needs to start working a night job.”

“You’re a hero and a public servant, sir.”

“How nice for me. Now what the hell are you calling me for?”

Mariko swallowed. “You sound like you could use a way to take out some aggression, sir.”

“Get to the point, Frodo.”

“How would you feel about jumping in the ring with a circuit court judge?”

Sakakibara grumbled. “What do you need?”

“Search warrants, sir. We’ve got two chemical distributors licensed to sell sodium cyanide. And since you just got me two more detectives—”

“Fine. What do you need? Inventory?”

“And shipping manifests. Personnel records. Employee absence reports. Phone and e-mail records if you can get them.”

Sakakibara’s breath came loud through his nose, roaring low like a jet engine flying past his phone’s receiver. “Anything else? Maybe the phone numbers of the companies’ most eligible bachelors?”

“Why not? No workaholics, and if he can cook, that would be a plus.”

“Don’t push me, Frodo.”

“Sorry, sir.”

More growling and grumbling from Sakakibara. At last he said, “Start typing up the paperwork. I’ll have a judge in the unit to sign them within the hour. But I swear to you right now, I’ll smother that son of a bitch with a pillow before I put one more chair around my poker table.”

In the end he only needed half an hour. He stormed out of the elevator with his jaw clenched, the veins bulging in his temples, and a worried-looking judge in tow. Mariko wondered what Sakakibara had told him to put that look on his face. The judge scribbled his signature on everything Mariko put in front of him, taking only a few seconds each to skim the pages. Yet again her thoughts returned to Han, and what a corrupt commanding officer might have been able to get a hurried judge to sign off on. Backdated paperwork okaying Shino to tail the Divine Wind? It wasn’t hard to imagine.

But once again, ruminating about morality and civil rights had to give way to practicality. Mariko had two new detectives and two chemical supply companies to investigate. She reassigned four others to join them, making a total of three detectives per company, and detailed two patrolmen to raid the nearest coffee shop and bring up as much caffeine as the store would sell them.

Part of her hoped her detail wouldn’t find anything until tomorrow. She hadn’t forgotten how hard it had been to drag herself into post this morning, how Sakakibara said she looked like hell. A long, stressful day full of moral conundrums couldn’t possibly have improved her condition. What she really needed was a good meal, a hot shower, and ten or twelve hours of sleep. She didn’t exactly want her team to fail, but she would have been thrilled if they didn’t succeed until noon tomorrow.

Which, given her luck, meant they got a hit on one of her search warrants before she could finish digesting her lunch. She’d tasked one of her detectives with checking calls from Anatole Organics against activity in area cellular towers. He found a number of one-to-one matches on the time stamps, which was inevitable—there would be pizza deliveries, salesmen calling in from the road, corporate reps who got lost on the way to an on-site meeting—but a string of them corresponded with calls from the cell phone of an Akahata Daisuke. Always wary of