Flashback

Now what? He was sure that he had all the facts he needed to come up with a solution to this crime, but even the goddamn facts kept shifting and blurring. Nick felt like a blind artist trying to sculpt with a heap of marbles. For the most part he was where he and his investigative team had been six winters ago when they’d decided that while it could have been one of the witnesses who snuffed Keigo and, perhaps as an afterthought, Keigo’s girlfriend Keli Bracque—the poet Danny Oz, who had the logically weak but strong-enough-for-murder-in-the-real-world motive of his general smoldering anger and incipient insanity; the thief and drug dealer Delroy Nigger Brown, maybe because of something he said while he was high and being interviewed by Keigo which he didn’t want shown in the finished documentary; the addict and dealer Derek Dean, who was currently rotting in full-time flash immersion up at the People’s Republic of Boulder’s Naropa Institute, possibly killing Keigo just for the flashback fun of it; or Don Khozh-Ahmed Noukhaev for a dozen reasons, half of which he’d teased Nick about when they’d met in Santa Fe—the best chance was that it had been a hit team from Japan, ninja assassins from one of the eight keiretsu or zaibatsu (actually seven kereitsu and zaibatsu not counting Nakamura’s) and seven daimyos who headed those clan-company confederations. Seven deadly daimyos, including kindly old bald-as-an-egg Daichi Omura, whom Nick, in his fatigue and posttraumatic stress after his fun five days in L.A., had honored every way short of kissing the Jap runt’s ass… seven deadly daimyos, each of whom was egomaniacally sure that his nation’s and the entire world’s survival depended upon him, that one man, becoming Shogun. Seven deadly daimyos each willing to kill a thousand Keigo Nakamuras and Keigo-ish sex-slave girlfriends to see that his Shogunate dreams of power came true.

This is where Nick and K. T. Lincoln had ended up in their investigation six winters ago, and this is where most tracks, new and old, seemed to lead again.

Almost, thought Nick. Not quite.

Denver from the capitol hill didn’t look like a city about to explode in racial and ethnic violence. Some of the leaves in the tree-filled park below the capitol were beginning to change color. The temperature was perfect—low seventies—and the sunlight had that clear, pure, crystalline, late-September quality that made residents of Colorado want to live there forever. (Or at least until the arrival of shitty springs with no spring weather, offering up winter until June’s heat.)

Nick tried to clear his mind of any thoughts about the case as he stared at the city buildings below. It used to help when he just let his subconscious weave threads together without any deliberate herding of facts.

Nestled in the little patches of park below was the city library, thrown up by some hotshot postmodern architect in the 1990s. The cuteness of the tower that looked sort of like a pencil—or maybe a crayon—had worn off before the last century was over. Beyond the library was the main part of the art museum, made to look “modern” but more than sixty years old now, Nick thought, which still looked like some tiled and parapeted castle huddling against its neighbors. Its windows were tiny, oddly shaped, and scattered almost at random around the building.

Nick remembered his mother, who’d loved art, taking him to the museum when he was a little kid and pointing to the windows and telling him, “The man who designed this building in the early nineteen-seventies, Nicky, made these windows in the shape they are—and put them where they are—to frame beautiful views of the mountains and foothills as if they were paintings on the walls, too. Clever, don’t you think? But what the architect didn’t take time to think out was that newer, taller buildings would pop up all around and hide those views… making these windows-as-frames silly.”

Leonard had once talked to Nick, after a few drinks, about some scholarly mentor of his who’d called such inevitabilities the Iron Law of Unintended Consequences. As if a college professor had to explain to a cop and a son of a cop anything about the tyranny of unintended consequences.