Flashback

1.06 Wazee Street, Denver—Saturday, Sept. 11

It was raining harder but the clouds and fog had lifted. To the east rose the shrouded towers of downtown Denver; to the west the condo towers clustered along the river; to the south the large masses of the Pepsi Center and Mile High DHS Detention Center; to the north more low buildings and the two-hundred-foot-tall spike that anchored a pedestrian overpass connecting LoDo to the river region over train tracks. West of everything, just visible through the low clouds, were the foothills. The high peaks were absent this morning.

There was nothing special about the rooftop of Keigo Nakamura’s three-story building here on Wazee Street. A patio/garden area was delineated by a slightly raised wooden floor and vined latticework on two sides to give some privacy to the hot tub. On that October night six years ago, Nick knew, the hot tub had been burbling and preheated to the proper temperature—but unused by the victims, the coroners stated—but this mid-September morning it was cold and covered by a mildewing yellow tarp. The garden part of the rooftop was represented by several long planters lining the edge of the patio area and made of the same light wood, but no one had been gardening up here in recent years. There were a few weeds still growing and the desiccated skeletons of nobler plants.

Sato grunted as he leaned over to tie his polished black shoes.

Nick struggled to remember the security details of this unprepossessing rooftop. He recalled that there were multiple-wavelength invisible sensor-beams and waveguides extending ten feet high around the full perimeter… yes, there were the poles at the corners holding the projectors and equipment… and pressure sensors everywhere on the tarpaper and gravel rooftop except for the raised wooden patio area.

“Someone could have pole-vaulted in from the neighboring rooftops,” Nick muttered. Sato ignored him.

Yes, someone could have pole-vaulted in, but unless they’d landed on the wooden patio, the pressure sensors would have recorded their landing. And none did.

But the doors…

“The doors were open… what?” said Nick, expecting an answer this time. “Two and a half minutes?”

“Two minutes and twenty-one seconds,” said Sato.

Nick nodded. He remembered joking with his partner, then detective sergeant (now lieutenant) K. T. Lincoln, that he could kill a dozen Keigo Nakamuras in two minutes and twenty-one seconds.

“Speak for yourself” had been K.T.’s response. “I could kill a hundred fucking Keigos in two minutes and twenty-one seconds.”

Nick remembered thinking that she probably could. K.T. was half-black, a bit more than half-lesbian, a fiercely secular converted Jew who had worn black in civilian life ever since the death of Israel, a beautiful woman in her own scowling way, and probably the best and most honest cop he’d ever worked with. And for some reason she hated Japs.

Now standing in the rain and looking at the unused patio and rooftop, Nick said, “I think I’ve solved the murder.”

Sato leaned on the hot tub and cocked his head to show he was listening.

“There was all that newsblog blather about a locked-room mystery,” continued Nick, “but the goddamned room wasn’t even locked when the murders happened. Keigo unlocked the lower door, climbed the stairs, unlocked the upper door, and came out here. Wherever you were—a van, command post RV, a goddamned blimp—the remote door alarms showed you he’d opened them and you must have phoned Keigo to check that everything was all right.”

Sato grunted. But this time Nick needed more than that.

“Did you phone him? Or contact him some other way?” he demanded.

“How do you say it,” growled Sato, “when you interrupt static on an open line without speaking?”

“Breaking squelch,” said Nick. At least that’s the way he and a lot of former-military Denver cops had said it. Breaking squelch—just clicking to interrupt the carrier static—was as old as radios. When he’d been a patrolman, the guys out in their patrol cars had an entire code of breaking squelch—ways to tell each other things that no one wanted the dispatcher to hear or record.

Sato grunted again.

“So you broke squelch and Keigo broke squelch back and you knew he was okay when the doors opened,” said Nick. “One interrogative break and two back?”

“Two interrogative and three back, Bottom-san.”

“How many times did you do that before he quit answering because he was dead?”

“Twice.”

“How long before he quit answering was the second query and answer… how long before you had Satoh break the door down and check on him?”

“One minute, twelve seconds.”

Nick rubbed his chin again, hearing the scrape of whiskers.

“You said you had solved the murder,” said Sato.

“Oh, yeah. Keigo didn’t have sex with the girl because he was waiting for someone. Someone to arrive on the roof.”

“Without tripping the perimeter and pressure sensors?”

“Exactly. The person arrived by helicopter and just stepped out onto the patio boards here. No sensors there.”

“This was a busy night on Wazee Street, Bottom-san. Many people coming to and leaving this party alone. You think that they would not have noticed a helicopter hovering above the building?” Hericopter.

“Not if it was a stealth ’copter with that whisper technology that your dragonfly chopper had when you got picked up yesterday. What do you call those machines?”

“Sasayaki-tonbo,” said Sato.

“And what does that mean?”

“Whisper-dragonfly.”

“Okay,” said Nick. “So you’d been holding back, running the security from the background before that night, letting your cutely named Satoh-san appear to be running the show—just for purposes of later interviews should things go south, which they did—but that night you told Keigo that you wanted to meet him at one-thirty a.m…”

“One twenty-five it would have to be,” said Sato.

Nick ignored him. “So Keigo kills some time with his sex toy, who doesn’t even bother to get undressed for the heir apparent, and then comes up on the roof to meet you. You step out of the whisper-dragonfly, which probably goes up to hover until you are done with what you have to do, Keigo unlocks the door to lead you back down into his apartment, and the second you enter the room you shoot the girl in the forehead and then use a big knife on a very surprised Keigo.”

Sato seemed to be considering the explanation. “How did I get back out to the roof, Bottom-san? Only young Mr. Nakamura could open the doors.”

Nick laughed at that. “I don’t know how you got out. Maybe you had an override code on those goddamned doors…”

“Then I would not have required arranging a meeting with young Mr. Nakamura to open them, would I, Bottom-san? I could have surprised him at any time.”

“Whatever,” snapped Nick. “Maybe you just propped the doors open with two of those rocks in the dead planter there. But you had plenty of time to kill both of them and then be airlifted off the roof again—without the whisper-dragonfly tripping any of the alarms up here.”

Sato nodded as if convinced. “And my motive?”

“How the fuck should I know what your motive was?” Nick laughed again. “Sibling rivalry. Something that happened in Japan that we’ll never find out about. Maybe you were sweet on little Miss Keli Bracque…”

“Sweet on her,” repeated Sato, “so I shot her in the head.”

“Yeah,” said Nick. “Exactly.”

“And then murdered young Mr. Nakamura out of some sort of jealousy.”

Nick held up his hands. “I said I don’t know the motive. I just know you had the opportunity and the access to weapons and the technology to get you in and out of Keigo’s apartment.”

“The technology being the Sasayaki-tonbo,” said Sato.

“Yeah.”

“You should really look into whether there were any Sasayaki-tonbo in America six years ago,” said the security chief. “Or in Japan yet, for that matter.”

Nick said nothing. After another minute of looking at the depressing rooftop and depressing low clouds, he said, “Let’s go down and get out of the fucking rain.”

Later, Nick didn’t know why he hadn’t just left the damn building. His work there was done. There was nothing else to be discovered by gawking at the six-year-cold crime scene. He should have just left. Everything would have been different if he’d just left.

But he didn’t.

They came out into the third-floor foyer and once again Nick imagined that he could smell the faded stench of spilled blood and brains from the bedroom two rooms away. Sato turned left toward the exit, but instead of waiting for Sato to unlock the door to the stairway down, Nick turned right in the foyer and then left through the hall doorway into the large room that looked out onto Wazee Street.

This was the library in Keigo Nakamura’s permanent residence during the months he’d spent in the United States before being murdered, and it was the kind of space that young readers could only dream about. The floorboards were Brazilian cherry, the built-in bookcases on three walls were mahogany, the molding was handcrafted, the carpets were Persian, the long tables with their built-in magazine shelves and giant dictionaries atop them looked like they’d come out of Columbus’s map room, and the two tiers of elegant wooden blinds on each of the eight tall windows were also cherry. The huge mahogany desk in front of the windows was regal and solid enough to have served some American president in the Oval Office and the piano on its raised dais was a Steinway. Club chairs scattered around the room and the long couch were of a leather so dark and soft that they looked to have come from some eighteenth-century British club.

Nick looked at the two thousand three hundred and nine books on the shelves. He knew there were precisely two thousand three hundred and nine books on those shelves because he’d had his people look through each and every one of them. The only clues they’d uncovered were three almost-century-old Polaroid snapshots of a naked young man asleep on a couch. The photos had been tucked into a hundred-and-fifty-year-old third volume of The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Since the naked young man in the photos—his face was averted—was sporting a semi-erection, some of Nick’s sharper detectives had deduced some sort of connection with the title of the book. Others had decided that Keigo Nakamura, known both in Japan and the States as a ladies’ man, had been secretly gay and probably killed by one of his young gay lovers.

In the end, neither the DPD’s forensic people nor the FBI’s experts had been able to track down either the photographer or his young subject, but Nick had found the interior designer who’d worked for Keigo Nakamura and the designer had confirmed that he’d bought all the library books by the yard at various California and Colorado estate auctions. And the books had been chosen primarily for the quality of their leather bindings, the interior designer had said.

As far as Nick’s and the FBI’s best analysts could tell, Keigo Nakamura had never cracked a single book on any of these shelves or tables and the naked young man in the Polaroid’s story belonged to some other mystery.

The paperback that Keli Bracque had been reading on the day she was killed—Shōgun—hadn’t come from the library.

Nick unhooked and parted the center set of wooden shutters and looked down at the rain falling on Wazee Street. He set his fingers against the cool glass, trying to fight the strange—almost forgotten—energies rising in him like a sudden spur of hunger.

He was actually beginning to be interested in solving this goddamned murder case. Why? Keigo Nakamura meant less than nothing to him. The arrogant rich kid had probably deserved to be murdered. His little movie documentary about flashback addiction in the United States wouldn’t have been of interest to the Japanese or Americans.

But it was interesting enough to someone that they murdered him because of it, thought Nick. Keigo’s phone and video camera and the camera’s last three fingernail-drives with all the recent interviews on them had been missing. Was there something in those interviews that had doomed Keigo Nakamura?

Personally, Nick liked Hideki Sato as the new prime suspect. It would certainly explain why Sato had gone to such lengths to hide his very existence in the original investigations. As for motive—who would ever know? Keigo Nakamura had made at least one enemy willing and able to cut his throat. Sato would certainly have been capable of that.

And Nick also liked his little speech about the helicopter, the whisper-dragonfly. What had Sato called the silent chopper in Japanese? Sasayaki-tonbo. Nick loved the elegance, the sweet-solution quotient, of a DA explaining to a jury that Chief of Security Hideki Sato had stepped out of a Sasayaki-tonbo to kill his master’s son.

The only problem with the Sasayaki-tonbo part of the theory was that Keigo Nakamura wasn’t the only resident of Wazee Street six years ago who had a hot tub bubbling away on the roof. Both the FBI and the plodding DPD led by Detective Sergeant Nick Bottom had found a certain James Oliver Jackson, who’d been in his rooftop Jacuzzi—along with four young female friends—during the time of the Keigo party and murder. Mr. Jackson’s hot tub was across the street and three buildings east and although that building was only two stories tall and had no view of Keigo’s patio area due to the doorway superstructure and patio fence on the Nakamura building, Jackson and his giggling guests stated that they certainly would have noticed a helicopter hovering over a building so close. James Oliver Jackson’s seat in the hot tub—Nick had checked—did have a perfect view of the airspace over the taller three-story Nakamura building, and Jackson and the co-eds had stated that there’d been a lot of uplight from the street that night, what with all the cars coming and going from Keigo’s party.

But one man, dressed in black, coming down one of those long rappel ropes from a black and silent stealth helicopter? wondered Nick. He had to smile when he imagined any district attorney presenting this James Bond/killer-ninja story to a jury.

He smiled again when he tried to picture the bull-chested mass of Hideki Sato, all dressed up in his ninja-suit and mask, rappelling down a two-hundred-foot-long rope in the night. It had damned well better be a sturdy helicopter.

“Bottom-san, do we await something?” asked Sato from his place just inside the library’s door.

Nick ignored him and ran his finger along the slightly fogged glass of the blastproof, bombproof, bulletproof window. He took the tactical glasses from his pocket and put them on. “You said you have the digital recordings for seven minutes after your Mr. Satoh broke down the door and rushed in to find Keigo’s body. Show me those minutes, please.”

“There were no cameras on this third floor…,” began Sato.

“I know that. I don’t want to be in the re-creation like down below. I just want to see it. Like any video. But I’m interested in a view from an external camera, one as close to this view”—Nick tapped the glass—“as possible.”

“One minute, please,” said Sato and tapped at his phone’s diskey.

Everything shifted again. Suddenly it was night and there was confusion on the dark street three floors below. The viewpoint wasn’t perfect—the camera must be up under the third-floor eaves on the outside of the building—and the effect it created in Nick’s inner ear was that he had instantly swooped up higher and to his right. The exterior cameras were in night-vision mode and things glowed greenly, turning passing headlights into blurred and streaking white-green blobs. Faces of people fleeing the party before the cops arrived were quite visible although the audio pickup would have to be filtered and cleaned up to pull individual voices from the distant babble.

Nick saw an older, bald Naropa Institute savant he recognized, looking cold in his thin cotton robe and rope sandals, running to a waiting van. Four or five of his acolytes, including the sandy-haired Derek Somebody, whom, Nick knew, Keigo had interviewed the day before his death, hurried to keep up.

Derek Dean, thought Nick. The guy’s name was Derek Dean. Shit, I wonder if my passport’s still good. I’ll need it if I go up to Boulder to reinterview him.

Sirens were wailing down Wazee Street now and the rush of people leaving the party became an undignified scramble.

There’s the ex-Israeli poet, Danny Oz, heading for a car with Delroy Nigger Brown. What on earth were those two doing together that night?

Remembering that Delroy was the major street vendor for drugs in this LoDo area, Nick figured that might answer his question. Patrol cars were arriving from opposite directions now and Nick recognized the white-blob faces of several patrolmen whose semi-intelligible reports were the first to be read in the giant pile that would become the K. Nakamura Murder Book. Nick had seen almost everything he’d wanted to see, but he kept the glasses on as the first ambulance arrived and EMTs boiled out of it in a totally unnecessary rush.

“Do I get my gun back?” asked Nick as he kept watching.

“Ah, so sorry,” said Sato. “The weapon you brought to the flashback cave is no longer available. But you have several at your shopping mall home, I trust.”

“What about the cash I had at Mickey’s?”

“So sorry,” repeated Sato. “The money there was left with the proprietor to cover any damages or medical bills for his bouncer.”

“Did you at least keep the flashback vials I bought?” asked Nick, feeling his anger beginning to burn again. If Sato did his Mr. Moto routine with that So sorry one more time, Nick thought he might go for the man’s throat.

“No,” said Sato. “The illegal drugs were also left behind.”

“Well, I’m going to need some of those illegal drugs if I’m going to do the research for the interviews I wanted to do later today,” snapped Nick.

“Whom do you think you will interview today, Bottom-san?”

“Oz, the writer, for sure,” said Nick. “But I want to prepare for the Boulder fruit fly, Derek Dean, and drop in to see my old friend Delroy at Coors Field. That’s three hours there, plus another two or three hours to flash on the reports themselves…”

“Four thirty-minute vials will be made available to you today,” said Sato. “And, of course, this complete video and digital reconstruction is being downloaded to your phone site as we speak.”

Swallowing his anger, Nick was reaching up to pluck off the glasses when he froze in place.

“Stop the recording!” he shouted. “Back it up… no, forward a little… back again… there! Stop!”

Sato put his glasses back on. “What is it, Bottom-san?”

Another patrol car had arrived as well as the unmarked GoMo Volta carrying the two plainclothes detectives on duty that night—Kendle and Sturgis. Cars that had been parked along the curb were driving up on the broad sidewalk to get past the growing cluster of emergency vehicles before they were hemmed in for good. Some people were just running away down the sidewalks to escape before the interviewing and ID’ing of witnesses began.

But Nick was looking at none of this.

Nick’s attention was focused on a small white twin-blob of a forehead and forearm appearing over the top of a parked car half a block to the east.

The lower part of this person’s face was hidden by the forearm and car roof, the person’s hair hidden by darkness, the rest of the form simply not visible.

Dara, thought Nick and felt literally dizzy for a second.

What the hell was his wife doing there that night? This wasn’t possible.

“Sato… forward a bit. Freeze. A little more now. Freeze again. Back…”

“Do you see someone, Bottom-san?”

Nick Bottom thought of his master’s degree work and heard some long-forgotten professor’s voice explaining that five million years and more of evolution had honed a Homo sapiens ability to distinguish a human face, however camouflaged or disguised, from its surroundings. The greatest enemy of man had always been man, said the professor, and the human mind was able to see another human face in even the most visually cluttered and ill-lit surroundings with more accuracy than one would think possible. The first thing a human infant can make out is his mother’s face—more specifically, his mother’s eyes and smile.

Nick saw no eyes or smile on this distant shape, only the white blur of a forehead, the white oblong of a forearm coming out of a dark coat to rest on the roof of a car, but he was certain it was his wife.

Dara?

Nausea and confusion rose in him. His first impulse was to rush Sato, take the big man down through the sheer kinetic energy of his assault, get his pistol, and hold the muzzle against the security chief’s head until he admitted what he’d done here and told Nick why.

Why would they fake this fuzzy image of Dara and insert it in the video?

To get Nick sucked into the investigation. To get him personally involved. To set him up somehow?

“Run it forward again… please,” said Nick.

The forehead bobbed down and out of sight. Was there a second person in the shadows with Dara or just refugees from the party moving past her in a hurry? The dark forms moved out of sight east along the sidewalk. Nick wasn’t even able to make out the form of a woman. His headache had returned and now joined with the sense of vertigo from the glasses to increase his nausea. Could he enhance that first frozen image? Probably, but the recording already looked to be at the end of its pixel-enhancement range for such a distant, dark shot. He could try with these glasses and phone interfaced with his own 3D-high-def displays at home.

He tugged off the glasses and slid them in his pocket. “Nothing. I thought I saw someone… but it wasn’t anyone. I’m tired. I need some rest and to get into the flashback of the interviews and documents.”

“You can take the Honda electric back to your lodging,” said Sato as he led the way out of the library to the foyer.

“So you can show off again by swooping away in your damned Sasayaki-tonbo?”

Sato shook his massive head. “I was thinking of calling for a taxi.”

“I don’t want your goddamned Honda electric, Hideki-san.”

“Mr. Nakamura thought it might be more reliable than your current vehicle for your…”

“I said I didn’t want your fucking Honda!” shouted Nick. His head was pounding with pain and the shouting made it worse. “Give me a ride home if you want, but I’ll use my own car.”

“As you wish,” said Sato and waved Nick ahead of him through the door. The two men clattered down the wide stairway. Sato got them through the lower door and they crossed the cold, empty living area without speaking.

Outside, Sato handed the physical key for the outside door to one of the two Japanese men waiting. It was still raining.

Before getting into the passenger side of the Honda, Nick looked east down the street as if Dara might still be standing there.

What are you bastards up to? he wondered as he felt the car bob to Sato’s weight. Nick ran both palms across the roof of the car and rubbed the cold water into his face before sliding into the passenger seat. Every part of Nick that could hurt did hurt, including his heart.

Neither man spoke during the fifteen-minute ride to Cherry Creek.

As Nick was getting out of the car at the shopping mall condos, Sato said softly, “Bottom-san, please to understand, if you call me ‘motherfucker’ again, I shall be forced to kill you.”