Flashback

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.”