Year of the Demon

HEISEI ERA, THE YEAR 22

(2010 CE)

41

“Do I have to call him?”

“Yeah, pretty much.”

Mariko looked down at the phone in her hand, then looked back at her partner. She and Han sat at their desks in Narcotics, canned coffee at their beck and call. Phones rang, keyboards clicked, desk fans hummed, all background music to the ever-present murmur of a dozen different conversations. In short, the unit was abuzz, as well it should have been given the case Mariko was running. Cultist fanatics were at large in her city, well supplied with drugs, cyanide, and the willingness to distribute them liberally.

Mariko’s sole advantage was a hard-nosed lieutenant who was willing to go to the mat with any commanding officer, anytime, to get what he wanted. Sakakibara reassigned every cop in his unit and commandeered another six or seven detectives besides, handing out orders like a blackjack dealer dealing cards. Back when Sakakibara first gave her this case, Mariko thought she was investigating the Kamaguchi-gumi on a simple trafficking ring. Now she lived under the cold, dark, looming shadow of a potential mass murder. She had two officers in the field trying to track down Akahata. Two others were working on Urano Soseki, the Kamaguchi-gumi’s capo, pressuring him to testify that Akahata was the one who delivered the Daishi. She paired another detective with a lab tech to sort out how much speed they’d seized in the packing plant raid and how to find a line on who cooked it. All of them reported to Mariko.

But there was one lead on the Kamaguchi-gumi that Mariko had to follow herself. She took a deep breath to steel herself, poised her finger over her phone’s keypad, then thought better of it. “Han, you know I hate this guy.”

Han blew his hair away from his face and took a sip of coffee. “Think of it as cultivating a contact,” he said. “This is police work, not a social call.”

And you’ve been coloring outside the lines, thought Mariko. As far as she was concerned, Han’s judgment about good police work was suspect. But in this case he was right. She sighed and dialed the number.

“Well, well, well,” said Kamaguchi Hanzo. “My hot little gokudo cop. I been wondering when I was going to hear from you.”

Mariko already wanted to hang up. “I need you to tell me about your chemical supply company,” she said.

“Fuck that. When are you going to give me my mask?”

Mariko squeezed the phone; the plastic crackled in her grip. “We’re working on it. Tell me what you sold the Divine Wind.”

“Hexa-something. Why ask me? Don’t you detectives keep a notepad or something?”

“Just the hexamine? Nothing else?”

“Nothing else.”

“Don’t hold out on me, Kamaguchi. This is important.”

“Look at the balls on you! What, you want me to sell them something else? I got girls, I got guns, I got whatever. Tell me where these cocksuckers are holed up and I promise I’ll deliver something they won’t forget.”

Mariko rolled her eyes. “Did you sell them sodium cyanide?”

“Hell, no.”

“You sound pretty sure for a guy who only runs a front company. You can’t tell me you memorized every item in your inventory.”

“You’re irritating as hell, you know that?”

“The feeling’s mutual.”

Kamaguchi snorted. “I remember the cyanide because they asked me about it, okay? And I’ll tell you what I told them: I don’t deal in that shit.”

“Why not?”

“Prohibited substances list. There’s no money in it.”

“Why not?”

“Prohibited substances list. You buy that stuff, they watch you. You sell it, they watch you. You use it for anything dodgy, they watch you. Who’s got the time for it? I just sell other shit.”

She cupped the phone against her shoulder. Whispering, she said, “Han, can I please hang up on this asshole now?”

Han gave her a wink and a thumbs-up.

“Good-bye, Kamaguchi-san.”

She resisted the urge to hurl the phone at the wall. Instead she crushed it like a stress ball, squeezing more little crackling noises out of the plastic. “Tell me you got something good on the house,” she said.

Han grinned. “Grand slam. Turns out it belonged to a cult member. She willed it to the Church of the Divine Wind right before she died.”

“Not to Joko Daishi?”

“If only. At least that way we’d have the dude’s real name in the will. But get this: the family got pissed that they didn’t get the house—”

“Figures,” Mariko said. “It’s a nice house.”

“It’s a damn expensive house. So one of the sons gets uppity and demands an autopsy. The rest of the family doesn’t go for it, but they okay some blood work. Guess what? The old bird tested positive for amphetamine.”

A little thrill rippled down Mariko’s spine. “MDA?”

“Can’t say. Can’t say on cyanide either—they didn’t test for it—but she was a geezer; it wouldn’t be that hard to induce a heart attack with a little speed.”

That thrill chased itself up and down Mariko’s spine again. She felt a little guilty too; it was macabre to take pleasure in a hunch when that hunch was confirmed by a homicide. Nevertheless, she couldn’t help feeling encouraged; this murder reinforced her suspicion that the Divine Wind was willing to use cyanide-laced amphetamines to kill. “What else have you got?”

“On the house? Let’s see.” Han reopened a window on his computer and drained the last of his coffee. “Five hookahs, thirty-eight jabs of heroin, big thing of cyanide. Everything says these guys split in a hurry, neh? I mean, there’s a ton of admissible evidence they could have stashed or destroyed or whatever.”

Mariko nodded. Perps didn’t leave evidence behind if they could help it, and they almost never left expensive evidence behind. Whoever had been in that house, they’d left immediately after killing Shino. The only part Han had wrong was that it was admissible evidence; she and Han had gotten onto the house in violation of Akahata’s civil rights. She was glad they had evidence to draw inferences from, but nothing on Han’s list was worth a damn thing in court.

“How about you?” he said. “You get anything?”

“Pulled a couple of good prints from this,” she said, and she produced a carefully folded Ziploc bag from her back pocket. In it was the little fold-up Giants schedule she’d found next to the heroin on Joko Daishi’s altar.

“Nice grab,” he said, clearly surprised to see the thing. “Where’d you get the Ziploc, by the way? Please don’t tell me you walk around with one in your pocket all day. If you’re going to go all TV cop on me, at least make it an evidence bag and carry a pair of tweezers.”

“You’re a smart-ass.”

“Guilty as charged.”

“I swiped it from her kitchen,” she said. “And by the way, if anyone asks, you’re the one who swiped it from her kitchen. As long as you’re breaking regs, you can take the hit for stealing private property from dead little old ladies.”

“Ouch.”

“Pull that schedule out and tell me what you make of it.”

He did as he was told, and crinkled his eyebrows just as Mariko did when she tried to make sense of the scribbles written on it. “What is this, some kind of prayer?”

“That was my guess too.”

“Look, today’s game is circled. I’ll bet somebody’s got tickets—and hey, if that prayer is for the Giants to win, maybe I’ll start praying to Joko Daishi too. They could use any help they can get.”

“Go back a second,” Mariko said. “Tickets? For today’s game?”

“Yeah, but if you’re thinking we might pull a lead out of that, you’ll have to tell me how we’re going to identify one nut job in a crowd of forty-two thousand.”

Mariko’s fist renewed its stranglehold on her phone. She willed her fist to loosen, then took back the schedule and made a point of folding it slowly and precisely before bagging it again. She hoped it might calm her a bit. It didn’t work.

Neither did angrily jamming it back into her pocket. “Han, I’ll be honest: I’m nervous. My gut tells me these guys are dangerous—a lot more dangerous than they’re letting on. And we have nothing. Akahata’s in the wind, and we haven’t so much as laid eyes on Joko Daishi, whoever the hell he is.”

“So what’s our next move?”

Mariko shrugged, wishing she had more to go on, wishing the caffeine she’d been slamming would hurry up and give her brain the kick-start it needed. “Kamaguchi tells me cyanide is too heavily monitored for him to trade in it.”

“Do you believe him?”

“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 coincidence, Mariko followed up on it, and sure enough, it was the same Akahata she’d met in the hospital, the fanatic who never stopped chanting his mantra.

As soon as she confirmed the match, her heart began to race. A growing dread had been swelling in her gut like a tumor, ever since they’d discovered the cyanide. There might have been some who argued that anyone crazy enough to join the Divine Wind deserved whatever fate Joko Daishi would lead them to, but Mariko didn’t fall in that camp. Mass murder was mass murder, regardless of whether the victim was willing to swallow the poisoned pill. With Akahata out of pocket and Joko Daishi still a ghost, each passing hour amplified her queasy sense of foreboding. Every time she looked at the clock, she wondered how much time she had before the fateful bell would toll.

And since Han was better on the keyboard, Mariko could only stand by and wait as he executed the very same searches she would have done. Once again their likemindedness struck her. There was no point in hunting and pecking her own way through; whatever she might have learned through the computer, Han would learn it first. So Mariko made what phone calls she could, but her concentration never strayed far from Han.

“Got it!” he said. “Rented storefront in Bunkyo. Tax-exempt status, leased to the Church of the Divine Wind.” He released a sigh he seemed to have been bottling up for some time; evidently he was every bit as nervous as Mariko was. “I figured we were going to get a front company, you know? But I guess the regs on prohibited substances are too strict for that. This isn’t a front; it’s the real deal.”

“Let’s move,” said Mariko.

42

She’d never commanded a raid before. The decision didn’t come easily, either. The biggest part of her wanted to wait for Lieutenant Sakakibara, but he was busy unruffling the feathers of all the circuit court judges he’d pissed off in railroading his warrants through the system, and Mariko’s growing sense of dread wouldn’t accept unnecessary delays. She might have asked SWAT to take command, but their reputation in Narcotics was that they were too slow to respond. The SWAT guys would have cast it in a different light, to be sure: you couldn’t prep an assault on a target in a matter of minutes, and barging in without a plan was a good way to get people killed. Asking them to launch a raid in less than an hour would be like asking a drunk surgeon to operate before sobering up. The right thing to do—the professional thing to do—was to say no.

So, since Sakakibara had already assigned a small army to report directly to Mariko, she decided to deploy it. Borrowing heavily from SWAT’s playbook, she found electronic maps of the Divine Wind’s rented storefront-become-church and studied the layout carefully. She chose a staging ground in a parking lot half a kilometer away from the target building, where she could convene everyone in her command. And now she stood in a circle with them, with all of them looking expectantly at her. It was discomfiting, having twenty cops glued to her every word. She couldn’t help noticing that, as usual, she was by far the smallest one in the group.

“Listen up,” she said, too quietly if she wanted to command as much authority as Sakakibara would have done. That was a lot easier at his size than at hers, and until she’d worked with them long enough to earn their respect, most guys in the department treated her not as a cop but a girl cop. She wasn’t off to a great start, but she had no choice but to raise her voice and soldier on. “I’m not going to try to stage this like the SWAT guys would. We’re just going to do good old-fashioned police work. Treat this like you did it back in academy, when you focused on the fundamentals. Watch your corners, clear your doorways, nobody enters a room by himself. Got it?”

“Yes, ma’am,” her twenty officers said, much louder than she’d anticipated. She entertained the thought that maybe this wasn’t going as poorly as she thought—or maybe her nervousness just made everything bad seem worse and everything good seem as thin as Han’s cigarette smoke.

“Consider our targets to be armed and dangerous,” she said. She meant the chemicals, not guns and knives, and now she wished she’d remembered to requisition gas masks for everyone. SWAT wouldn’t have forgotten that. “Remember, on paper this place qualifies as a church. That means we might be seeing parishioners in there, not just bad guys. But we know our bad guys have killed at least once using cyanide, maybe using a laced pill, and we suspect they’re willing to kill a lot more. If you see civilians trying to pop pills, do what you can to stop them—but don’t let that compromise officer safety, understand?”

Her chorus boomed, “Yes, ma’am!”

“All right. Let’s hit it.”

When they breached the building, it was nothing like the SWAT raid of Kamaguchi’s shipping company. There, four teams had hit four sides of the target in the same instant. Here, Mariko heard shouts from inside before she even reached the front door. She, Han, and the four cops with them broke into a dead sprint.

The target used to be a discount mattress retailer, which meant it was big. The commotion was coming from somewhere to Mariko’s left—what SWAT would have called the B-side of the target—but she repressed the urge to head that way. One of the officers with her did not. She didn’t bother to call after him; she’d have words with him later about breaking ranks, but for now she only had eyes for her own objective.

Han reached the door before she did and put his boot into it. It burst open and Mariko was through. She’d expected to see what was happening on the B-side, but to her left was a flat wall. The room she was in—probably the showroom floor at one time—was now empty and dimly lit. B-team must have hit offices or a stockroom, something on the opposite side of that wall. She couldn’t help them. She could only clear the area in front of her.

An exit sign glowed green on the back wall, with a steel door beneath it. On the other side of that door, a motorcycle engine roared to life, followed by another. Mariko’s team declared the vacant showroom clear. Mariko couldn’t even remember any details of the area; she knew only that wherever she pointed her SIG, there was nothing dangerous to be found.

Mariko charged the steel door and kicked it with everything she had. It burst open and she breached the next room. Sunlight blinded her. The room was a cavernous expanse, the sun streaming in from the truck-sized door scrolling itself open on the far wall. Han was right on Mariko’s heels, shouting “down, down, down!” at someone off to her right, someone Mariko hadn’t even seen. Her eyes were fixed on the two motorcyclists in front of her.

They were big bikes, maybe fourteen hundred cc’s, and Mariko instantly recognized one of the riders as Akahata. His face, still purple and livid, was too bruised for him to wear a helmet. The man astride the second bike had long black hair and wore an iron demon mask instead of a helmet. He could only be Joko Daishi.

He cut a sharp turn in front of her, filling the air with the stink of scorched rubber. Akahata had already made the same turn, and now he rocketed away. He raced for the loading dock on the far side of the room, where that scrolling door rolled ever higher. Mariko saw five cops—her C-team—converging on the opening door, pistols drawn. Akahata cranked the throttle, jumped the loading dock, and blew past her officers before they could react. Joko Daishi whipped his bike around and gunned it.

Mariko put her front sight on him but hesitated before she took her shot, doubting her aim with her left hand. C-team advanced on the door, closing Joko Daishi’s line of escape.

He put the bike down in a hard spin, forcing a howl out of the back tire and leaving a wide black slash on the concrete floor. His engine roared louder than gunfire. He made for the emergency exit on the B-side, where Mariko’s officers were already embroiled in a fistfight with three or four men in white. Mariko could only assume they were Divine Wind cultists, but whoever they were, their free-for-all blocked the fire exit.

Two of her B-side cops spotted the bike, broke free of the fight, and brought their weapons to bear. Joko Daishi whirled again, leaning so low his knee touched the floor. It was the same squealing spinout as before, only this time he used it as a leg sweep. His back tire arced wide, breaking bones, reaping both cops to the ground. He rammed the throttle again and bore down on Mariko like a charging warhorse.

She didn’t know what happened to the rest of her element. Han was gone. The cops with them were gone. The door behind her was still open; she didn’t know why, didn’t care. For Mariko the whole world was herself and Joko Daishi.

She put her front sight right on that iron demon mask but she couldn’t pull the trigger. It would be the first time she’d ever fired her weapon in the line of duty. She was shooting left-handed and rattled. And she had five cops behind her target. Her training took over; she simply couldn’t risk the shot.

He was nearly on top of her. Her body weight wouldn’t be enough to slow him. He’d blast her right through the open doorway and keep accelerating. There was no one else behind her; she was literally the last line of defense. And she stepped out of the way.

The technique that her TMPD aikido class called irimi-nage looked a lot like the one American pro wrestlers called a clothesline. She caught Joko Daishi with it right under the chin. If she were an American wrestler, it probably would have torn her arm clean off, but she didn’t match her target power to power. She just redirected his momentum upward and backward, absorbing none of it herself. The world went into slow motion. The motorcycle roared past her, loud as machine gun fire. Mariko turned her irimi-nage downward. Joko Daishi hit the floor like a meteor.

43

In the aftermath, coming down from her adrenaline high, Mariko took stock of her surroundings. The giant storeroom—and in a mattress shop the store room was truly gigantic—wasn’t as empty as she’d first thought, though obviously there was room enough to ride a motorcycle. Once there must have been racks or bins big enough to contain mattresses, but those had gone. A couple of forklifts still remained, abandoned in a corner. The right-hand wall was dominated by a production line of sorts, a long string of collapsible tables blocking both fire doors on that side. D-team hadn’t even managed to breach the building; their entries were blocked, locked from the inside, useless.

Near the tables, black steel barrels and plastic drums of a similar size stood like troops in rank and file, festooned with warning labels instead of insignia. At first glance, Mariko had expected to see an assembly line for cyanide-laced MDA. She’d seen enough stash houses to recognize a meth lab for what it was, and this wasn’t that. This room smelled more like motor oil than ammonia. In a quick scan of the folding tables Mariko saw pipe cutters, spools of wire, a cardboard box full of outmoded cell phones, a smaller box full of SIM cards—nothing useful for a meth cook. The only items that made sense to her were the hexamine and sodium cyanide labels on the barrels and drums.

Even in retrospect it took some concentration to string together the chain of events. B-team had been the first to enter, and Joko Daishi’s cultists had mobbed them. It must have been at about that time that someone hit the button to open the big loading dock doors. That might have been Joko Daishi, who would then have gone for his bike.

However that went down, another mob of cultists had been heading to cut off Mariko’s element at the very instant she booted the door to the storeroom. Even in the heat of the moment, she’d thought the door had given way more easily than it should have. It seemed to have exploded away from her foot. But what probably happened was that one of the cultists was opening the door just as she kicked it in. It must have struck him full in the face, knocking him unconscious. Mariko shot right past him, but the rest of her team had run smack into his cohort of cultists. Han and the others on A-team were mobbed, but they handled their fight better than B-team, which was why Joko Daishi made his run at the A-side door. Mariko just had the bad luck to be the only one left standing in front of it.

The final tally was sixteen Divine Wind cultists, plus their leader and prophet, plus one more unexpected treasure: Glorious Victory Unsought. Mariko spotted the empty scabbard first, lying empty on one of the collapsible plastic tables, and imagined the worst: the cult had sold the sword for drug money. When one of her officers announced he’d found a giant sword, relief surged through Mariko’s veins like morphine. Then she asked where it was, and when he pointed her toward what was left of Joko Daishi’s motorcycle, she thought she might throw up on her shoes. The reason her sword wasn’t in its scabbard was that the cultists had mounted a sheath for it on the bike, and now the bike was a debris field twenty meters long, ending in a crumpled heap wadded up against the wall and suppurating oil.

Emotionally, Glorious Victory Unsought ranked with the few existing pictures of Mariko’s father, who, because he’d always been the family photographer, rarely appeared in their photo albums himself. Sometimes Mariko wondered whether her family would be offended by how much sentimental value she found in Glorious Victory Unsought. She’d only known Yamada-sensei for a matter of weeks, yet somehow he’d become a grandfather to her, a mentor and role model. What did it mean that she held her sensei’s last gift on par with precious family photos? Mariko didn’t even know how she felt about that herself. She only knew that it was true, and that she’d never forgive herself if her Inazuma blade was reduced to a steel ribbon entangled in the remains of the bike.

But she was lucky, or else Master Inazuma’s masterpiece was bound to a different fate. The bike had fallen on its left side and Glorious Victory’s scratch-built scabbard was mounted on the right. Three different colors of fluid leaked from the wreckage, and the air above it shimmered with heat, but the sword sat on top unharmed.

The only other material items in the win column were a couple of mostly empty barrels of hexamine and sodium cyanide. No MDA, no speed, no other drugs. In the loss column she had two cops from B-team nursing leg injuries bad enough to leave them in the fetal position gritting their teeth and awaiting an ambulance. She had no ID on Joko Daishi and he wouldn’t offer any other name. There was no sign of his lieutenant, Akahata, though Mariko had placed an APB on his motorcycle. But her most significant loss was her composure.

She hadn’t backed up her partner in a fistfight, which, technically, was all to the good, since of her element she was the only one able to keep a weapon trained on Joko Daishi. She hadn’t been able to bring herself to shoot, which was also good, since Joko Daishi had—miraculously—survived being snagged by the chin off the back of a speeding motorcycle, and so they now had their prime suspect alive to interrogate. She’d hastily orchestrated a raid that could have gone much worse but didn’t. Her officers were outnumbered because a quarter of their force never actually made it into the building. They were uncoordinated in their movements. It was only because they all performed admirably that no one got shot. In other words, with the lone exception of her perfectly executed irimi-nage, Mariko had fucked up everything she could possibly have fucked up, and yet somehow everything had worked out for the best—or if not for the best, then pretty damn well, all things considered.

Self-confidence didn’t come easily to Mariko. She knew she was good at her job, but the job was relentless. Tiny errors could have major ramifications, and overshadowing that was the constant threat of being seen as incompetent just because she was a woman. Losing her right forefinger had set her at least a year behind on the pistol range, a fact that wouldn’t have mattered much in any other outfit in the country. Most beat cops went from academy to retirement without ever drawing a weapon, because most police work was reactive. Apart from traffic violations, most cops rarely witnessed a crime; the calls always came after the fact. But Narcotics didn’t just react; it initiated action too, and that meant Mariko was might have to draw down on people now and again. How was she going to do that if she couldn’t trust her aim?

She should have taken the shot. Joko Daishi had come within a millisecond of killing her. She could have changed her angle; even crouching down and firing upward would have been enough to take C-team out of harm’s way. That should have been her instinctual response, but instead she’d committed an egregious mistake: she thought about it.

She remembered Yamada-sensei’s term for that. Paralysis through analysis. Han would say the same thing about baseball that Yamada said of swordsmanship: hitting a moving target had to be done automatically or not at all. Deliberate concentration could only screw it up. Marksmanship was no different. Yamada-sensei once told her it was better to drop the weapon than to get tangled up in thinking. At least that way no one would get hurt.

That meant the next best alternative was to quit Narcotics and start working a beat instead. Go the rest of her career without any real risk of shooting or being shot at. Her mother would have loved it. And Mariko would have given up everything she’d worked so hard for, for so many years.

She could have missed with her irimi-nage. She could have broken every bone in her arm. She could have killed Joko Daishi, just the same as if she’d shot him, but with a lot more risk to herself and her fellow officers. So much had been at stake, and Mariko’s nerve had failed. Paralysis through analysis. She wasn’t sure she’d ever forgive herself.

“Hey,” said Han, “you okay?”

“What?” Mariko paid only enough attention to know he was there. “Yeah,” she said distantly, “I’m fine.”

Han clapped her on the shoulder. “This was a win, Mariko. Come on, we’ve got a crazy-ass cult leader to interrogate.”

That snapped her out of her reverie. “He’s conscious?”

“Conscious? Hell, he’s walking around.”

It was impossible. Joko Daishi must have hit a hundred kilometers an hour by the time she ripped him off the bike. So when she saw him walking, a cop pushing him by his handcuffed wrists, the demon mask pushed up onto the top of his head, all she could say was, “You should be dead.”

He laughed—a good-natured laugh, amiable, not forced. “You cannot kill me. It is not yet my time.”

Han aped his laugh right back at him. “If you’d have landed on your head instead of your shoulders, it would have been your time, all right. We’ve got a couple of murders to pin on you—a kid named Shino and the little old lady whose house you killed him in—but when it comes time to charge you, I’ll make sure riding without a helmet makes the list.”

“I have seen the hour of my death,” said Joko Daishi, “and also the manner. I shall die by the sword.”

Mariko didn’t care if that was a biblical reference, a deliberate jab at her famed samurai showdown, or just the ramblings of a grade-one concussion. One way or the other, the guy was a nutcase.

He was smaller than she’d thought. He’d been downright terrifying on that motorcycle, his beard and hair streaming from his devil’s face as if his head were ablaze and trailing black smoke. He did not look at them when he spoke, but rather stared off into the distance, his tone reverent, as if there were a god in the room for him to talk to. Again Mariko reached the same conclusion: nutcase.

Something about him was familiar, but she couldn’t put her finger on it until they’d walked him all the way to the wall. They put his shoulder blades against the dusty cinder blocks and made him sit, hands cuffed behind his back, and every last movement should have hurt like hell. He was lucky to be alive. He wore white clothes, loose but otherwise nondescript, certainly not padded like motorcycle leathers. Given how he’d landed off the bike, his entire back should have been in spasms.

Mariko could explain that away easily enough: his cult gave him easy access to kilos upon kilos of speed. He’d feel pain when he came down off his high, but not until. Yet he limped, an odd, rolling gait that couldn’t have come from Mariko’s high-speed takedown. If it wasn’t from pain, it must have been from a pre-existing injury, and Mariko would have sworn she’d seen that limp before.

Sudden insight flashed. She had seen it before, only a grainy image of it, on a low-fidelity security camera feed. “You’re the one who stole the mask,” she said.

“He is?” Han blurted.

“I saw him on the Bulldog’s security camera tape. He walked right past us to steal that mask from Kamaguchi Hanzo. Dressed head to toe in SWAT armor, remember?” She rounded on Joko Daishi. “That was a nice touch.”

“There is no place the Wind cannot reach,” he said.

“And I’m guessing you’re the same son of a bitch who broke into my apartment and stole my sword.”

He responded with an eerie, peeping-through-the-window kind of smile that gave Mariko the creeps. She’d been eyed up and down like a piece of meat before. Guys did that all the time, responding with an “I’d hit that” smile when they liked what they saw. This wasn’t like that. This was the smile of a serial rapist, one who was willing to kidnap and batter and bury alive because he didn’t really understand that other human beings were real. The “I’d hit that” guys viewed women as sex toys; Joko Daishi saw people as children’s toys: fascinating in their own way, but hollow, incapable of pain or fear, worth only as much as he valued them. And he had watched Mariko in her sleep.

Chills washed over Mariko like an icy wave, raising goose bumps all over her body. A vision flashed in her mind: Joko Daishi looming over her bed, silent, ghostly, masked behind the iron face of a demon. He had the sinister patience of a stalker, an invisible, disquieting, perpetual presence. It was every woman’s deepest dread: the ex-boyfriend who would never relent, never disappear, never let her go.

“Is that true?” Han demanded, snapping Mariko out of her nightmare. “Did you break into my partner’s apartment?”

There was that smile again. “There is no place the Wind cannot reach.”

“The same goes for the Kamaguchi-gumi,” Mariko said, feigning a cocksure confidence she did not feel. “Remember that sword you saw yourself dying on? The Bulldog’s going to be the one who rams it through your chest.”

“Kamaguchi did not respond quickly enough for our needs. The New Year approaches. The appointed hour is at hand. Securing the mask was necessary to usher in the Year of the Demon.”

Mariko and Han shared a glance. He could see in her what she saw in him: this man scared the hell out of both of them. But rather than revealing that fact, Han said, “Is this dude turning you on?”

“Big-time.”

Turning to their suspect, Han said, “See how that big loading dock door is open and we’re not freezing our balls off? That’s because it’s summer out there. We’ve got a few months until New Year’s, buddy.”

Mariko remembered the calendars in the basement where they found Shino. She wasn’t able to make much sense of them at the time, but she did remember that they seemed to be based on planetary cycles, not the Chinese or Western calendars. Not that it mattered. For all she cared, he could hang his pretty calendars in his rubber room in the asylum. In any case, she had bigger fish to fry. “I want you to tell me where the MDA is,” she said.

He blinked. Frowning, confused, he said, “I cannot help you.”

“MDA,” Han said. “Psychedelic amphetamines. You know how to cook them—or your people do anyway. Maybe your boy Akahata, neh?”

“Akahata-san is a servant of the Purging Fire,” said Joko Daishi. “He carries out his divine duty.”

“Right now?” Mariko felt something cramp up in her as she said it. Had she executed her sting more professionally, Akahata wouldn’t have escaped. C-team hadn’t been in position. Mariko wondered if she should have waited for SWAT after all.

“You cannot stop him,” Joko Daishi said. “He is bound on his holy errand.”

“And what might that be?” said Mariko.

“Purging society of its impurities.”

His serenity gave Mariko chills. “With MDA or with cyanide?” she said. “It’s both, isn’t it? How many people worship the great Joko Daishi? How many did you talk into following your path?”

“Do you even have the stones to follow it yourself?” said Han. “No. When we came, you tried to run. You’re not the type to go down with the ship, are you? You’re going to let all your people kill themselves and then you’re going to go recruit another batch.”

Joko Daishi cackled, not like a cartoon evil genius but like a little boy watching the cartoon. “You understand nothing. But soon you will. The Wind is coming. There is no place it cannot reach.”

Mariko inspected the table next to him. She saw nuts, bolts, rubber bands, all in little piles; sheets of foil, boxes of stainless steel BBs; duct tape, wire strippers, lengths of copper pipe. None of it was standard fare for making speed or Ecstasy. All in all it seemed less like a meth lab and more like the back room of a small appliance repair shop. And above it all, hanging on the wall, was another copy of that weird planetary calendar, just like the one from the house where they found Shino’s body. The calendar was all off—twenty-four months instead of twelve, ellipsoid instead of linear, festooned with astrological markers—but only one day was circled on it, and Mariko had a good guess about what that day might be: New Year’s Day of the Year of the Demon.

You understand nothing. That’s what Joko Daishi had said. It made Mariko think of the knowing laugh she’d heard from the lawyer, Hamaya Jiro, right before Han stormed out of that hospital room, right before Akahata slipped out of the TMPD’s grasp. She remembered with perfect clarity how that laugh had chilled her. That was the moment she realized the Divine Wind were dangerous. The cyanide cinched it. Coupled with her MDA theory, everything pointed to poisoned pills. A Jim Jones–style mass homicide, masked as a mass suicide. But Joko Daishi seemed sure that she and Han had it all wrong.

Mariko looked at the table again, then at the madman sitting beside it, then at the barrels of hazardous chemicals arrayed at the end of the line of tables. That motor oil smell permeated her nostrils and seeped into her mouth. She remembered what Joko Daishi said about his lieutenant, Akahata: he is bound on his holy errand. She remembered what Yamada-sensei had written about the mask too, and about the weapon fetish attached to it.

“Han,” she said, “take a walk with me.” When they were well out of their suspect’s hearing, she said, “What do we know about hexamine?”

“Big barrels like those ones make a whole lot of MDA.”

“No, I mean what do we know? What if we don’t assume he’s cooking?”

Han shook his head. “We know he cooks. How else do you explain Akahata carrying fifty kilos of speed?”

“They could be unrelated, neh?”

“What about the Daishi? The drug, not the dude. Word on the street says it’s outselling cigarettes. And we never heard of it until we heard of this idiot.”

“I know,” said Mariko. “Just bear with me. I’m not saying he’s not cooking; I’m just saying he’s not cooking here. Does this place feel like a meth lab to you?”

Han looked around. “Honestly? No.”

“Neh? That’s been bugging me since the minute we kicked down the door.”

“So what are you getting at?”

“Han, what if he’s using the hexamine for something else? What else is it good for?”

He shrugged. “What am I, a pharmacist? I barely passed high school chemistry.”

“But you’ve got a smartphone, neh?”

Han nodded and opened his Web browser, and Mariko headed back toward their suspect. “Joko Daishi,” she said. “Great Teacher of the Purging Fire. Teach me. Tell me what needs cleansing.”

“The mind is in fetters,” he said. Even now he looked past her, up into the distance. “Property. Family. Hope for the future. The people cling to them as if they are lifelines, but in fact they are shackles. The mind is bound by them, constricted, weighed down. You are bound too, drowning, but I can set you free.”

It was clear he’d given this little homily before. Mariko wasn’t interested. “Swell. You do that.”

“You belittle because you do not understand. You dream of stability, order, immortality. It is in the nature of what you do, who you are, but you are living a lie.”

“So enlighten me. Tell me how you rescue all these drowning minds. And don’t waste my time on the pretty speeches; that crap might work on your little Wind cult, but not on me.”

“Divine Wind,” he said. “Born of the Wind and yet not of the Wind.” He seemed to find this funny; it made him giggle like a little boy. “And I am divine,” he said. “My mother is the future and my father is the past. I am come to shatter the fetters, to burst the bonds, to explode the barriers. I am the light, the brightest fire. Stability, permanence, order, belonging, harmony, they are but shadows. Before my light shall they disperse, never to return.”

“Now we’re getting somewhere,” Mariko said. She could see the excitement rising in him, swelling his chest, raising his gaze higher. It got her heart racing as well, but not out of some twisted sympathy inspired by his charisma. She was afraid. He was a zealot, all right, and he was dangerous. “Tell me,” she said. “You want to do away with order and harmony? Tell me how.”

“Still you cling to your fetters. You shy away from the light when in truth the light will set you free. Nothing you can do will stop the Purging Fire.”

“Then you might as well tell me your plan. Your deadline’s coming right up, neh? What did you call it? The hour of the demon?”

“The Year of the Demon,” Joko Daishi said ecstatically. “The appointed hour is at hand.”

“Of course it is.” Mariko tried to remember what else he’d said. “Your friend, Akahata-san, he’s out to do some purifying right now, is he?”

“Soon. Very soon.”

“Right. Because the wind is coming.”

“There is no place the Wind cannot reach.” He said it as if singing a hymn.

“Mariko!” Han shouted. She turned to see him running toward her with his phone outstretched. She ignored the phone, her attention captured by the look on his face. He was terrified.

He forced the phone into her hand and see saw the screen. “Holy shit,” she said.

“Bombs,” Han said, panting. “The hexamine. You can use it to make high explosives.”

“There is no place the Wind cannot reach,” Joko Daishi said joyfully. “The appointed hour is at hand.”

Mariko grabbed him by the beard and jerked him to his feet. “Where’s Akahata? Where are the bombs, you crazy son of a bitch?”

As she lifted him up, the demon mask slid down over his face. He locked eyes with her, his nose not a millimeter away from hers, looking at her from behind the crazed iron visage of the mask. “The Year of the Demon,” he whispered. “The appointed hour is at hand.”