Flashback

1.05 LoDo, Denver—Saturday, Sept. 11

Sato didn’t take the handcuffs off as he drove north to 20th Street and then east above I-25 again and down into the part of Denver called LoDo. Nick’s wrists were already torn and bloody; the jouncing of the heavy—obviously armored—turd-brown Honda electric tore more flesh off his wrists and made Nick grind his molars rather than cry out again.

He’d wanted to kill Sato before this. Now he vowed to torture the Jap before he killed him.

LoDo was the cute name developers back in the 1980s—or maybe the ’70s—gave to the old Lower Downtown warehouse district of Denver that squatted between the real downtown and the South Platte River. In the 1800s the area had been the site for whorehouses, saloons, saddleries, warehouses, and more saloons. By the middle of the 1900s even the saloons and whorehouses had gone out of business, leaving one saddle-seller, a few working warehouses, a lot of empty warehouses, and hundreds upon hundreds of winos, drug addicts, and street people. In the last decades of the twentieth century, urban renewal—and the city revitalizing itself toward the river—had chased the winos and addicts out to be replaced by upscale eateries and even more upscale condos with brick walls and exposed rafters. By the time the classic-looking Coors Field ballpark opened in 1995, LoDo was in full resurgence. It didn’t begin its decline until after It All Hit The Fan, but by the Year of Clear Vision, LoDo was well on its way to its current state of boasting mostly whorehouses, a few saloons, abandoned condos haunted by flashback and other addicts, whorehouses, and more whorehouses.

Keigo Nakamura had died in a room on the third floor of a three-story building on Wazee Street, a long dark street with two-story whorehouses, saloons, and warehouses on one side and three-story warehouses, saloons, and whorehouses on the other side.

It was full light—or at least as light as it was going to get on this chilly, rainy September morning—when Sato parked the Honda at the curb outside the three-story building that looked exactly like all the other three-story buildings on the south side of Wazee Street. As the security chief came around to unlock the cuffs, Nick considered jumping Sato… then rejected the idea. He was too worn out by the night of flashing, the injections of T4B2T and TruTel, and from the sheer adrenaline of terror.

It would have to be another time.

Sato unlocked the cuffs and, seizing both of Nick’s bleeding wrists in one gigantic hand, pulled an aerosol can from his suit pocket.

Mace! thought Nick and squeezed his eyes shut.

Sato sprayed something cold onto Nick’s lacerated wrists. For a few seconds the pain was so terrible that Nick gasped loudly despite himself. Then… nothing. No pain at all. When Sato released his grip, Nick flexed his fingers. Everything worked fine and despite all the blood on his sweatshirt and the dash and windshield, the lacerations were superficial.

Sato grabbed Nick under the arm, lifted him out of the car, and plopped him down on the curb, steering him toward the old building. Shapes—sleeping flash addicts or winos, Nick assumed—stirred and stood in the dark entrance under the overhang.

Two men stepped out of the shadows but they weren’t winos or addicts. They were well-dressed young Japanese men. Sato nodded to them and one of the athletic-looking young men unlocked the double lock on the door.

“Coming to the crime scene six years after the crime,” said Nick, his voice shaking slightly from the cold and from the roil of fury inside him. “You think seeing this empty building after all this time is going to tell me anything?”

Sato’s only reply was to switch on the lights.

Nick had been to this crime-scene building numerous times five years and eleven months ago, even though he hadn’t been the responding homicide detective first on the scene, and he remembered the totally trashed mess of a site it was: three large rooms filled with couches and chairs and screens and a small kitchen on the first floor, furniture turned over everywhere, flashback vials crushed underfoot, lamps broken in the stampede of the witnesses to get out before the cops arrived that night, even wads of dirty clothing and the occasional used condom in corners.

No longer.

The furniture had been repaired and returned, the lamps were back in place and working, and although every surface was cluttered with dishes and glasses—a huge buffet had been set out down here on the first floor that night as a movie wrap party for Keigo’s Japanese assistants, the interview subjects, and others involved in his documentary film—all three rooms and the kitchen were now clean and in a fairly orderly early-party-stage clutter again.

“I don’t get it,” said Nick.

Sato handed him a pair of stylish wrap-around tactical glasses.

Even before activating them, Nick noticed how tremendously light they were. The DPD tactical glasses had always seemed to weigh a pound or more and gave their users headaches after ten minutes. Not these glasses. They were as light as regular sunglasses and, being wrap-around, filled his entire field of vision. The DPD glasses had always been an island of virtual sight with a vertigo-inducing reality seeping in all around.

Nick touched the icon on the glasses’ stem and just barely caught himself from exclaiming aloud. He took a few steps to confirm what he now saw.

All three party rooms and the kitchen were suddenly filled with people frozen in mid-stride, mid-conversation, mid-munch, mid-laugh, mid-flirt, and mid-flashback-inhalation. Real faces, real bodies. Real people.

He’d expected the figures to be there—it was what tac-glasses did—but he hadn’t expected this level of reality. The DPD and American military tactical glasses he’d used generated little more than wire-frame stick people with cartoonish and barely recognizable faces floating above the armature bodies like Halloween masks on a stick.

These were real people. The quality of 3D digital rendering was on the level of virtual movies or TV series being streamed these days, including the popular Casablanca series starring Humphrey Bogart, Claude Rains, Ingrid Bergman, and such constant new guest stars as nineteen-year-old Lauren Bacall. And after a while on that series, Nick knew from his late-night viewings, it didn’t seem at all strange to have other guest stars from different eras such as Tom Cruise, Leonardo DiCaprio, Kathleen Turner, Galen Watts, Byron Bezukhov, Sheba Tits, or even all-virt stars such as Natasha Lyubof or Tadanobu Takeshi on the show. They were all equally real.

As real as the people suddenly filling this space and the adjoining rooms.

He took the tac-glasses off and paced through the rooms that circled the central open staircase. Sato followed. The rooms were now empty of anyone but Sato and him. He put the glasses back on and felt the inevitable jolt of vertigo as more than two hundred people reappeared.

Walking closer and inspecting the face of the first witness and interview subject he’d recognized, the former Israeli poet Danny Oz—pores were visible on the haggard man’s face and Nick could see the burst capillaries in Oz’s eyes and nose—he said, “This must have cost Mr. Nakamura a fucking fortune.”

Sato didn’t find that comment worth responding to.

“All three floors virtualized like this?” asked Nick, moving around the room looking closely at the unblinking men and women. He paused to stare down the low bodice of a young blond woman he didn’t recognize, perhaps one of the hookers hired for the party.

“Of course,” said Sato.

Nick looked up at the security chief. Sato didn’t appear any more or less three-dimensional, solid, or real than the other men and women and transvestites and gender-benders in the crowded room. Just broader and thicker than anyone else. Also, Sato was no longer the only Jap in the room. Besides two very young men and a young woman whom Nick recognized as being part of Keigo Nakamura’s video and sound crew, there were three well-dressed bodyguards, also wearing tactical glasses.

Why would they be wearing tac-glasses? wondered Nick but set the question aside for now. His head hurt.

At first, out of practice with tactical and having never practiced with this quality of tactical, Nick made the rookie’s mistake of stepping around and squeezing between the human forms in the crowded room. Then he shook his head ruefully and began walking through them to get where he was headed. The solid-looking three-dimensional digital maquettes didn’t object.

In one corner, a stocky, handsome, sandy-haired former Google exec wearing saffron robes was explaining the karmic glories of Total Immersion to five or six rapt young people. Nick remembered the guy—Derek Somebody. He’d been on Sato’s Top 18 list of witness-suspects yesterday morning… but Nick hadn’t been paying much attention then. He remembered now that he’d had to drive up to Boulder to interview the Buddhist-robed jerkwad at the Naropa Institute there six years ago. Derek Somebody was a total flash addict whose goal was to relive every second of his forty-six years of life in a total-immersion flashback tank. The goal was satori via flashback.

“The murder floor is like this, too?” Nick asked while trying to remember the name of one of the more spaced-out men here standing in the small kitchen area and holding a glass filled with amber liquid that obviously had just come from a solid, real-world bottle of expensive-looking Scotch.

“Yes.”

“Jesus,” said Nick, remembering the crime-scene and autopsy photos. “Wait, has Mr. Nakamura seen all this?”

“Of course,” Sato said in tones that couldn’t get any flatter. “Many times.”

“You did this for your private investigation,” said Nick. He realized how dull-witted he sounded… no, was… but didn’t feel apologetic about that. He had damned good reason to feel a little slow this morning.

Sato nodded ever so slightly. The big security chief was following Nick around the large living area and smaller kitchen space. He showed no hesitation at walking through people.

“In that suit,” said Nick, talking just to shake the cobwebs out of his head, “you remind me of Goldfinger’s guy… Oddjob.”

Sato showed no sign of recognition and Nick mentally kicked himself for trying to make conversation. The rule of cop life—hell, of life—was that you don’t try to converse with your own armpit or asshole, so don’t try with ambulatory surrogates of same.

Nick sighed and said mostly to himself—Still, if Mr. Nakamura keeps seeing all this and visiting his son’s freshly murdered corpse upstairs, it must be…”

Nick froze. He turned slowly to stare at Sato and said, “Why, you miserable motherfucker.”

One of Sato’s dark eyebrows rose a few millimeters in query. Otherwise, the big man showed no expression.

“You sure in hell didn’t get all this detail from witness statements or memory,” said Nick.

“Perhaps some witnesses volunteered to submit to flashback before describing details?” suggested Sato. Detairs.

“My ass,” said Nick.

Sato folded his hands over his crotch in the ancient posture of funeral directors, military men at ease during a dressing-down, and security men trying to disappear into the wallpaper or drapes behind them.

“My ass,” repeated Nick for no other reason than he liked the sound of it. “You were here. You were on all three floors that night. You know how to observe better than any so-called witness there that night. You went under flashback—probably for weeks of sessions—to see and record all this incredible detail so you could give it to the VR programmers. You did.”

Sato said nothing.

“It is illegal for all Japanese nationals to own, sell, possess, or use flashback, either in Japan or when traveling abroad,” said Nick. “And, if convicted of the offense, the only punishment a judge may impose under Japanese law is death by lethal injection.”

Sato stood there calmly.

“You motherfucker,” repeated Nick, also just because he liked the sound of it. And because it was overdue. But he also hesitated in his newfound advantage. Why on earth would Sato give Nick such life-and-death leverage over him?

The answer was—he wouldn’t.

Nick walked quickly from room to room, passing through frozen forms without hesitating. This is simultaneous. In all three rooms and the kitchen, what one could see of the other rooms was occurring at the same instant. Even if Sato had gone under the flash, he couldn’t have recalled what was occurring simultaneously in different rooms here on the first floor, much less what might have been happening on the second and third floors.

Not for the first time this miserable morning, Nick Bottom felt like throwing up.

Sato nodded as if reading Nick’s thoughts (again) and handed Nick two blue-glowing earbuds.

Nick set them in place with a sick dread at what would come next. And it did.

Sato pressed an icon on his phone’s diskey and all the digitally re-created three-dimensional people around him and in the adjoining room came to life. Just the ambient roar of party noise made Nick reflexively throw his hands over his ears. With the tiny earbuds set deep, that obviously didn’t help much.

Nick stood there motionless for a moment and watched the totally natural movement of people and endured the roar. Then he crossed quickly to the couch and leaned down between a far-too-handsome-to-be-natural young blond man who was, in turn, leaning forward to talk intimately with a far-too-beautiful-to-be-real young blond woman.

“I find the cocaine-three, brandy, flash, and fucking go really, really well together when you’re, like, there doing it all,” the male was whispering, “but you don’t, like, get the buzz when you go back to it under the flash again.”

“My experience also, like, you know, I mean, totally,” said the female blonde while leaning literally into and through Nick to afford her blond interlocutor a better view of her breasts.

“Shit,” whispered Nick as he stood upright, walked from room to room while watching and listening to more than two hundred people partying, and then stopped and stared at Sato. “It was all recorded at the time. Hidden cameras upstairs, too?”

The security chief gestured to the stairway and Nick led the way. A fourth Japanese security man in tac-glasses stood in front of a locked door on the landing. Nick stepped aside as Sato reached through the seemingly solid man to unlock the locked-in-the-real-world door with a real-world key.

The second-floor door was also locked and when Sato opened it, the door swung through a fifth young security man. Nick was taking off his glasses from time to time to make sure that none of these new security guards was real.

The second floor was just as Nick remembered it from his visits to the crime scene, except that it had been empty and totally trashed then. Now it was merely messy and very, very crowded.

Eight bedrooms ran off the central waiting area on this floor and all of the bedrooms were occupied. None of the doors here was locked. Nick chose a room at random and walked in.

A short, skinny felon whom Nick instantly recognized as Delroy Nigger Brown was in bed having sex with three white girls. None of the girls, Nick knew from his memory of the files at the time, was older than fifteen, and two of them had died of natural causes—if one considers being knifed by one’s pimp or overdosing on heroin-plus-flash “natural causes”—within four months of Keigo’s murder. Nick also knew that the pimp and drug supplier, Delroy N., should still be serving time at Coors Field… but not for the death of either of these particular girls. With another surge of nausea, Nick realized that if he was forced to go ahead with this investigation, he’d have to visit Delroy N. as one of the witnesses who were the last to see Keigo alive.

The felon had been Keigo’s prime supplier of flashback and other drugs while the rich boy had been in Denver.

Nick confirmed that all the bedrooms were occupied and that many of the men in the other rooms were not as punctilious about not having sex with other males around as Delroy N. was. The energetic combinations in the eight rooms combined accounted for another forty or so party guests and with the twenty-some hookers and guests waiting in the center area, the total number of invited partiers, party crashers, caterers, prostitutes, and security guards seemed about right.

Not yet counting the two bodies upstairs.

By the time he’d looked in on all eight bedrooms—and wished he’d skipped at least three of them—Nick realized that the noise and motion had continued for more than ten minutes.

This had taken an astounding amount of supercomputer time to generate. These ten minutes alone created for the tac-glasses must have equaled the cost of a comparable amount of time in a high-budget Hollywood all-digital movie.

“How long is the play loop?” Nick asked.

“One hour, twenty-nine minutes,” said Sato.

“And it’ll end when the bodies are discovered and everyone stampedes?”

“Plus seven minutes after young Mr. Nakamura’s body—and the lady’s—are discovered, yes.”

Nick’s jaw sagged. “You didn’t have cameras up…”

“No.”

It had been a stupid question and idea. If there had been cameras on the third floor, in Master Keigo’s bedroom, there’d be no mystery.

Unless a certain security chief had destroyed the recordings. Right now, Hideki Sato was former homicide detective Nicholas Bottom’s number-one suspect.

In front of the locked door that led to the staircase to the third floor was the digital Exhibit A in any prosecution of Sato for murder.

The broad-shouldered Japanese man wearing tactical glasses and standing with his hands folded over his crotch as he guarded the door might have been Sato’s twin brother, even allowing for some age difference.

Through his headache and nausea, Nick racked his ravaged memory. “Takahishi Satoh,” he said softly. “With an ‘h.’ Any relation to you, Hideki-san?”

“No.”

“I remember him now. He was a little taller than you, but he could have been your double.”

“Yes.”

“He was in charge of security, is what he told us.”

“Not quite, Bottom-san. He told you that his title was commander of security and that he was in charge of the five security men on Keigo Nakamura’s U.S. security detail. This was true.”

“But he didn’t tell us that he took orders from you. That you were the real security chief.”

“None of you asked Satoh-san if he had a superior… other than Mr. Nakamura Senior, I mean,” said Sato.

“So when witnesses like Oz and the others described the big sumo-wrestler security chief with Keigo, it could have been you or could have been your pal here. They said ‘Mr. Satoh.’ Just too fucking cute for words, Hideki-san.”

Sato said nothing.

“You realize, of course,” spat Nick, “that this opens you up to charges of obstructing justice and lying under oath.”

“I never lied under oath, Bottom-san.”

“No, you didn’t, because we didn’t know you fucking existed,” Nick said, turning from the projection of Satoh in his glasses to look at Sato wearing his glasses.

“Still…,” began Sato. Stirr. “… if you examine the testimony of the five security men you and your officers interviewed six years ago, you will find that none of them lied to you.”

“They damned well lied by omission,” shouted Nick. He ran his hands through his hair. Shouting hurt his head. “They obstructed justice!”

Sato unlocked the door and opened it but Nick wasn’t ready to go upstairs yet.

“Was this fake security chief’s name even Satoh?”

“Of course it was.”

“How long did it take you to find a look-alike security guy with a name that sounded just like yours, Hideki-san?”

Sato stood there holding the door open and waiting.

“Were you ever by Keigo’s side in public during the months you were guarding him here?” asked Nick.

“A few times. Very rarely.”

“Where’d you watch this party from, Hideki-san? From inside a van parked outside somewhere? A van full of screens? From a helicopter? From orbit?”

Sato waited.

Nick was not finished on the second floor yet. Or perhaps he just wasn’t ready to see what was waiting for him upstairs.

“Where are the cameras?” he demanded.

Sato released the doorknob and took his phone out of his suit pocket. A laser pointer stabbed at least nine locations in the ceiling and walls and light fixtures.

“And at least four cameras in each bedroom and bathroom,” said Sato. “There were a total of sixty-six cameras on this floor. Two hundred and thirty in the building.”

Nick walked over to one of the walls.

“Show me again.”

The laser dot winked on again.

“The lens is tiny or invisible,” said Nick. “But, of course, you removed all the cameras after the murder.”

“Of course,” said Sato. “But you are looking at the wall through your glasses, so you see it as it was the night of the murder. The video pickups are… ah… very discreet.”

Nick laughed at this, although whether it was the idea of two hundred and thirty video cameras in a flashcave-cum-drugpad-cum-whorehouse being discreet or just at how stupid he was this morning, he couldn’t tell and didn’t care.

He swung back to the real Sato and his digital Doppelgänger and said, “All right. Let’s go upstairs.”

Sato turned off the noise and movement of the party behind him as they climbed up the wide, steep staircase.

The four rooms on the third floor had not been tidied up as had the first two floors of the building. They were still as they had looked on the night of the murder almost six years earlier. Nick and Sato both removed their tactical glasses before coming through the door at the top of the stairs and they kept them off as Nick led the way.

They emerged into a formal foyer with an open door to the small kitchen leading off this west end to their left—the DPD investigators had found the kitchen serviceable but almost unused, the fridge holding only a few bottles of beer and champagne—and on the south wall to their right, another high-tech door that opened onto a staircase to the rooftop.

One glance showed Nick that the kitchen looked untouched, but the foyer itself was still littered with the inevitable paper and plastic needle-cover detritus of the EMTs. Why they’d attempted resuscitation on an obvious corpse—other than the fact that the corpse and its father were worth billions of dollars—Nick had no idea. But they had, and some of the mess had spilled out of the bedroom through the living room and into this foyer. The expensive tiles in the foyer and frame of the wide door to the double stairway—there was no elevator, so all the furniture, kitchen appliances, and other large stuff on this floor had been carried up these stairs—were streaked and cracked where the paramedics’ and then the coroner office’s gurneys and equipment had left tracks and gouges. Some slob had stubbed out a cigarette on the tiles.

The foyer narrowed into a short hallway festooned with expensive art. The wide glass-paned doors in the hall led left to the library and straight ahead into the living area and through there into the bedroom.

“Does Bottom-san wish to see any room before we go into the bedroom?” asked Sato.

“Anyone murdered in any of the rooms besides the bedroom?”

“No.”

“Then let’s start with the bedroom,” said Nick.

Sato removed his shoes and left them in the tiled foyer. Nick left his shoes on. He was a cop… had been a cop, at least… not a guest for some fucking Tea Ceremony. Besides, Keigo Nakamura was beyond being offended by some gai-jin barbarian keeping his shoes on in his personal living space. (But Nick was counting on it offending the hell out of Hideki Sato.)

Nick saw that the living room was as large and littered as it had been six years ago. The double bedroom doors were wide open. The trail of paramedic debris seemed to lead to it rather than away from it.

The tac-glasses still in his hand, Nick walked in.

The expansive bedroom still stank of dried blood and brain matter. After all these years? thought Nick. Not likely.

But it did.

Instead of carpet, the floor was covered with rectangles of tatami. Nick had learned when he was a cop that the Japanese still tended to express the size of their rooms in units of the three-by-six-foot mats. A bedroom or tea room, Nick recalled, was often a four-and-a-half-mat room. All sorts of rules applied as to how the mats could meet—never in a grid pattern, he remembered, and there was some rule that in any layout there should never be a point where the corners of three or four mats touch. This bedroom was huge—maybe a thirty-mat room. Only these tatami didn’t smell sweetly of dried grass like the floor of Mr. Nakamura’s office.

The first patch of blood that caught the eye was on the big bed where the crumpled sheets had a dried splatter but the pillows and headboard and a bit of wall showed a head-sized red blotch. This was where the hooker had died. The larger patch of dried blood was on the floor, surrounded by discarded syringe covers and more paper and plastic paramedic detritus. This dried puddle covered all of one tatami and had blobbed over onto two adjacent ones.

Nick glanced into the master bedroom’s large bathroom, checked the four windows, and then came over to stand next to the stained tatami.

“Would you move, please, Bottom-san?”

Sato had his glasses on and now Nick donned his and looked down. He was standing calf deep in Keigo Nakamura’s naked loins. Nick stepped aside but couldn’t resist grinning. He’d done that on purpose.

Keigo’s corpse was naked. The young woman’s corpse on the bed was dressed in jeans and a black bra. Keigo’s throat had been slashed almost all the way through. The young woman—her name was Keli Bracque, Nick remembered—had been shot once in the middle of the forehead. Taking care not to step on or in Keigo again, Nick leaned closer to study Keli’s wound. The .22-caliber round had left a tiny, clean, blue-rimmed hole in her pale forehead but had done its usual damage rattling around in her skull. Twenty-two’s were still one of the weapons of choice for professional assassins, and several of Nick’s DPD investigators had thought this suggested a professional hit.

Nick took two steps back and looked down. If her hit was by a cool professional, then why this messy, rage-driven, amateur-looking job on Keigo? Sending a message? But a message to whom? Mr. Nakamura, obviously. Or maybe all the violence expended in Keigo’s near-decapitation was merely a ruse to throw off investigators from how dispassionate and professional this hit actually was.

There was a red paperback copy of a twentieth-century novel titled Shōgun open on the bedside table only inches from Keli Bracque’s hand.

“These images are better than the death-scene photos I had,” Nick said to Sato. “Who took them?”

“I did. Before the authorities arrived.”

“Better and better,” laughed Nick. “Not only leaving the scene of a crime, but concealing evidence… the video-camera recordings, these photos, the fact of your very existence as Keigo’s head of security. You’ll serve time for sure when an American court is through with you, Hideki-san.”

Nick knew that he was repeating himself but he enjoyed hearing the charges again. Sato showed no more response than he had the first time.

“You’re sure there are no animated tac images this time?” asked Nick.

“As I said, we had no cameras on the third floor, Bottom-san,” Sato said.

“Yeah,” said Nick, letting the sarcasm drip. He walked back to the bed, stepping on and through Keigo’s head this time. If Sato was squeamish, fuck him.

Nick rubbed both of his temples as he looked at the dead girl’s face and tried to remember her dossier. She was young—nineteen—and blond. And American. And tall. Almost a foot taller than Keigo at his diminutive five-foot-one height. All the Jap males seemed to have a thing about tall American blondes.

But, as was true of much of the food that Keigo Nakamura had eaten at home while he was in the States, Ms. Keli Bracque had been brought over from Japan. The orphan daughter of two American missionaries there, the girl had more or less been raised by the entertainment-and-relaxation branch of Nakamura Heavy Industries. In the old days, Nick knew, Japanese businesses had sent their execs on sex holidays to Bangkok… not to the Patpong sex district that men from other nations flocked to, but to a more rigidly monitored sex district catering only to the Japanese. Even then, the HIV problem had gotten serious enough there that the big Japanese corporations had given up on Thailand and raised their own hookers. The dossier on Keli Bracque that Nakamura’s firm had finally—reluctantly—surrendered hadn’t said it outright, but odds were great that Keli had been sexually satisfying top execs there since she was a pre-teenager.

Or, thought Nick as he studied her dead face, maybe not.

Maybe this one had been saved for the boss’s son. Or the boss and his son.

“She’s half-dressed; he’s still naked,” he said aloud.

“Yes,” said Sato.

Nick waited for the derision that such a statement of the obvious by a trained detective deserved, something along the lines of No shit, Sherlock, but Sato let the single flat syllable suffice.

“My point,” Nick said finally, “is that Keigo and Ms. Bracque were up here alone for—what?—thirty-nine minutes? Forty?”

“Thirty-six minutes and twenty seconds before Mr. Satoh broke down the door after young Mr. Nakamura did not respond to his page,” said Sato.

“Long enough to have sex,” said Nick. He knew that “broke down the door” hadn’t been quite accurate since the door at the head of the stairs could have resisted any number of battering rams. Security man Satoh had carried a tiny but powerful shaped charge, no larger than a kneaded eraser, for just such entry emergencies. But that was irrelevant.

“But,” continued Nick, rubbing his stubbled cheek and looking through his glasses at the two dead bodies, “both autopsies showed that they hadn’t had sex, even though that was the reason Keigo said he wanted the privacy up here during the party. Hell, I don’t think Keli was getting dressed after some messing around between the two. I don’t think she ever got undressed, except to take her blouse and boots off.”

“Perhaps young Mr. Nakamura and the young lady were chatting,” said Sato.

Nick snorted. “Are NakamuraCo living sex toys famous for their conversational abilities?”

“Yes,” said Sato. “Like the geisha, all Nakamura employees in the recreational division are trained to please by intelligent conversation, the playing of musical instruments, by knowing the proper technique of preparation and pouring in the Tea Ceremony… a wide range of abilities beyond mere… gratification of physical pleasure.”

Nick was barely listening to the security chief. He pointed to the open paperback. “I think Ms. Bracque was reading her book when the killer entered the room. She only just had time to set it facedown, marking her place, when the assailant shot her.”

Sato waited.

“Whoever it was, she wasn’t alarmed by his or her sudden arrival,” mused Nick. This was old ground for him, but he was rediscovering it as he went. It had been years since he’d mulled over the details of this murder. “You don’t take time to mark your place in a book when someone who frightens you suddenly looms up in your bedroom.”

“Bottom-san, you are saying that Miss Bracque knew her killer.”

Nick was too lost in thought even to nod. Taking off his tactical glasses, he walked to the window nearest to the bed, nearest to the blood on the tatami and headboard, and touched the glass that wasn’t quite glass. Sealed. Bulletproof. Blastproof for all but the most intense blasts. When Nick had read the specs six years earlier, he’d had the image of a major bombing event where the building here on Wazee was rubble but the windows remained, hanging in air like transparent Druid stones.

Since they couldn’t be opened, the third-floor rooms were constantly refreshed by the whisper of forced air from ventilators. Tiny ventilators. A tiny ninja-assassin mouse might get in through those ventilators if it weren’t for all the layers of active filters and screens. Nick held his hand close. The air was moving so the central system was still active.

“So Keigo and his hired girlfriend weren’t up here screwing,” Nick said to himself. “Maybe Keigo was just waiting for someone.”

“Waiting for whom?” Sato asked in low tones.

Without putting on his glasses to look at the victims a last time—but carefully steering wide of the bloodstained tatami and the invisible corpse of Keigo on the floor—Nick said, “Let’s go up on the roof.”

In the foyer, Nick paused to study the door to the stairway to the roof. Except for little black boxes at both top corners and one on the side where a card-swiper would be, it looked like any other metal door. But Nick knew that the damned thing cost more than he earned in ten years. It not only checked retina and fingerprints—how many movies had Nick seen where the good guy or bad guy just brought along someone’s hand or eyeball to defeat those simple security checks?—but scraped and sniffed the person’s DNA, measured his brainwaves, and performed about a dozen other acts of identification that would only work with a living, breathing person. Six years ago this coming October, all that technology had been keyed on Keigo Nakamura’s retina, prints, DNA, brainwaves, and all the rest.

Now it seemed to be keyed on Hideki Sato. At least the heavy door clicked open after Sato had leaned close to one of the black boxes, scraped his thumb against it, and made his other contacts and magical passes. At the top of the stairway, he did the same thing with the magic door there.

Nick asked the same question he’d asked six years ago. “How do the maids and janitors get in and out of this apartment?”

There had been no answer from anyone six years ago and Sato did not answer now.