Flashback

Nick wrote Gang rape on his notebook page. Even six years ago when he’d still been with the Denver force, male flashgangs almost always began with gang rape. They’d relive the violation of some girl, frequently a minor, over and over under the flash. Then the gangs usually moved up to physical violence: tormenting and brutalizing younger kids or winos or other flashback addicts found helpless under the flash. Then—most frequently—murder. Or murder after a brutal rape. The ultimate event to flash on. Two for the price of one.

“Did this Val boy not participate in their flashback use of these… experiments?” asked Nick.

“That is precisely correct,” said Ms. Kschessinska, taking great care not to slur. “William told me that this person wasn’t enough of a man to join in the experiment and wasn’t enough of a friend to join the others when they relived the event as part of their… rite of passage, as it were.”

“What did William say this boy did when they were experimenting?”

“Oh, various excuses,” she slurred, waving her hands as she tried to light a real cigarette, plucking the No-C stick out and flinging it away angrily. “Standing guard. William said the boy always lost his nerve and stood apart, saying he was going to stand guard for the others. That sort of nonsense. The boy was not a true friend of William’s, no matter everything my dear boy tried to do for him. No matter what wonderful gifts William gave him.”

She looked up and Nick thought of shell-less oysters again as the mottled, mucusy gray eyes within their pools of makeup tried to focus on him. “But if he did indeed murder my son, I guess it ghosts… goes, that is… goes without saying that he was no real friend. This Hal Fox was probably always planning to betray and murder William.” She inhaled deeply, held it, and then exhaled smoke through her nose.

“No idea, then, where this boy might be?” asked Nick.

“Nothing more than what I’ve already told your colleagues, Detective… was it Detective Betham? Nick Betham?”

“Yes, ma’am,” said Nick. He’d already checked out the various overpasses and other flashgang hangouts that Ms. Kschessinska had told the LAPD and CHP about. It hadn’t been easy going to those places either, since Leonard’s apartment and the entire neighborhood near Echo Park had been first reduced to rubble and then burned down in the fighting. Aryan B gangs numbering in the hundreds had blown the walls at the Dodger Stadium Homeland Security Detention Center, flooding that entire neighborhood with more terrorists, killers, and self-proclaimed jihadists. The area around Chávez Ravine was not a safe place to spend time this week.

Checking out the storm sewer system, including the area still a crime scene under the Disney Center, had also had its nasty surprises. But none that had given Nick a clue about Val’s current whereabouts.

He’d left Galina Kschessinska Coyne smoking, drinking, sobbing, and hiccupping. With the investigation into the attack on Advisor Omura being called off—due not only to the press of current events but to Omura’s own request that it be discontinued—it was doubtful that any authorities would come to visit Ms. Kschessinska again. Or at least, Nick thought as he let himself out, until some patrol officers, responding to complaints of a terrible smell, someday entered the apartment to find her corpse.

Do you wish any more pepper tuna or sunomono or nabeyaki udon or tako su, Bottom-san?” asked Sato. “Or sake?”

“No, no, no thank you,” said Nick. “Especially no thank you on the sake. I’ve had too much already.”

He was a little drunk. That would be fine if he were just going straight home to his cubie and bed after they landed in Denver in the next hour or so, but Nick wasn’t sure what Sato might have in mind.

“Sato-san,” he said, “tell me again when I’m going to see Mr. Nakamura?”

“You remember me saying, Bottom-san, that Nakamura-sama is scheduled to return to Denver tomorrow night. You are invited to come speak to Nakamura-sama as soon as he arrives home in the evening. He is most eager to hear what you have to say.”

To name Keigo Nakamura’s murderer, thought Nick. If I don’t know by then, I’m expendable. If I do have the murder figured out, I’ll be even more expendable.

“I brought these,” said Sato and set a nylon bag on the side of Nick’s table where it had just been cleared by the kimonoed flight attendants.

Suspicious, Nick unzipped the top. Ten vials of flashback cradled in foam, four of the vials obviously multihour flashes.