Flashback

“Anyone murdered in any of the rooms besides the bedroom?”

“No.”

“Then let’s start with the bedroom,” said Nick.

Sato removed his shoes and left them in the tiled foyer. Nick left his shoes on. He was a cop… had been a cop, at least… not a guest for some fucking Tea Ceremony. Besides, Keigo Nakamura was beyond being offended by some gai-jin barbarian keeping his shoes on in his personal living space. (But Nick was counting on it offending the hell out of Hideki Sato.)

Nick saw that the living room was as large and littered as it had been six years ago. The double bedroom doors were wide open. The trail of paramedic debris seemed to lead to it rather than away from it.

The tac-glasses still in his hand, Nick walked in.

The expansive bedroom still stank of dried blood and brain matter. After all these years? thought Nick. Not likely.

But it did.

Instead of carpet, the floor was covered with rectangles of tatami. Nick had learned when he was a cop that the Japanese still tended to express the size of their rooms in units of the three-by-six-foot mats. A bedroom or tea room, Nick recalled, was often a four-and-a-half-mat room. All sorts of rules applied as to how the mats could meet—never in a grid pattern, he remembered, and there was some rule that in any layout there should never be a point where the corners of three or four mats touch. This bedroom was huge—maybe a thirty-mat room. Only these tatami didn’t smell sweetly of dried grass like the floor of Mr. Nakamura’s office.

The first patch of blood that caught the eye was on the big bed where the crumpled sheets had a dried splatter but the pillows and headboard and a bit of wall showed a head-sized red blotch. This was where the hooker had died. The larger patch of dried blood was on the floor, surrounded by discarded syringe covers and more paper and plastic paramedic detritus. This dried puddle covered all of one tatami and had blobbed over onto two adjacent ones.

Nick glanced into the master bedroom’s large bathroom, checked the four windows, and then came over to stand next to the stained tatami.

“Would you move, please, Bottom-san?”

Sato had his glasses on and now Nick donned his and looked down. He was standing calf deep in Keigo Nakamura’s naked loins. Nick stepped aside but couldn’t resist grinning. He’d done that on purpose.

Keigo’s corpse was naked. The young woman’s corpse on the bed was dressed in jeans and a black bra. Keigo’s throat had been slashed almost all the way through. The young woman—her name was Keli Bracque, Nick remembered—had been shot once in the middle of the forehead. Taking care not to step on or in Keigo again, Nick leaned closer to study Keli’s wound. The .22-caliber round had left a tiny, clean, blue-rimmed hole in her pale forehead but had done its usual damage rattling around in her skull. Twenty-two’s were still one of the weapons of choice for professional assassins, and several of Nick’s DPD investigators had thought this suggested a professional hit.

Nick took two steps back and looked down. If her hit was by a cool professional, then why this messy, rage-driven, amateur-looking job on Keigo? Sending a message? But a message to whom? Mr. Nakamura, obviously. Or maybe all the violence expended in Keigo’s near-decapitation was merely a ruse to throw off investigators from how dispassionate and professional this hit actually was.

There was a red paperback copy of a twentieth-century novel titled Shgun open on the bedside table only inches from Keli Bracque’s hand.

“These images are better than the death-scene photos I had,” Nick said to Sato. “Who took them?”

“I did. Before the authorities arrived.”

“Better and better,” laughed Nick. “Not only leaving the scene of a crime, but concealing evidence… the video-camera recordings, these photos, the fact of your very existence as Keigo’s head of security. You’ll serve time for sure when an American court is through with you, Hideki-san.”

Nick knew that he was repeating himself but he enjoyed hearing the charges again. Sato showed no more response than he had the first time.

“You’re sure there are no animated tac images this time?” asked Nick.

“As I said, we had no cameras on the third floor, Bottom-san,” Sato said.

“Yeah,” said Nick, letting the sarcasm drip. He walked back to the bed, stepping on and through Keigo’s head this time. If Sato was squeamish, fuck him.