Daughter of the Sword (27 page)

“I have no involvement with selling drugs.” The lie flowed easily; Fuchida’s heart did not quicken. It never quickened, not even when he lied right to the face of an underboss from the Kamaguchi-gumi. The only man he could never lie to was now reduced to ashes in a green plastic box. “Not in any of my neighborhoods. Not anywhere else either.”

Kamaguchi nodded, making the fat of his neck fold around his shirt collar. “That’s good. This is no time to be changing our arrangement with the police, Shūzō-kun. That business a couple of years back with the Takahashi-kai still has the cops on edge. They won’t tolerate another gunfight in the streets. And believe me, drugs bring shooting.”

In other company, Fuchida would have disagreed. The ruckus with the Takahashis was old news, and even then it hadn’t been much of a gunfight; more like an assassination. Only one side did the shooting, and if it happened over people’s lunch hour, so be it; let the people of Tokyo remember why they once feared the
ninkyō dantai
. The last
time Fuchida visited an
onsen
, no one had even taken the trouble to clear out of the bath.

They would have if he’d had the sword with him. He wished he had her now. Even Kamaguchi Ryusuke would think twice about telling him what to do if there were a blade near at hand. But the sword was at home—Fuchida’s mother would have been embarrassed by it, so he’d left it behind—and here was Kamaguchi telling him what to do. The same man who had ordered him to kill his childhood friend, Endo, so many years before; the same man whose commands Fuchida’s father had followed all his life. Once again a Kamaguchi was telling a Fuchida what to do. Fuchida bowed with his head only, and did not bother to get up from his chair.

“So we are in agreement,” Kamaguchi lisped. “Your father was a good earner, Shūzō-kun, and I would like to believe he has passed that on to you. But if I hear one more word of you disrupting the status quo, you’ll have a little green plastic box just like your father’s. You will see to it that no more rumors reach me of your drug peddling.”

“I certainly will,” said Fuchida, and he meant it sincerely. Heads would roll for this.

41

Mariko looked at the medical examiner’s reports with a growing sense of dread. The first of the homicides was a familiar face. Sagamihara Kintarō usually went by “Saga,” and he had been Mariko’s first narcotics arrest. On her first weekend with the Narc guys she’d busted him for possession, a charge that should have stuck on anyone with Saga’s drug priors but one that Saga wriggled out from because he had a baby’s face and an unusually incompetent prosecutor. Now Saga was dead at nineteen, his throat slashed in the garden below Tokyo Tower, with three missing fingers that suggested he’d raised his arms in defense against an edged weapon.

The next homicide, a man named Hitoshi, was probably Saga’s supplier. They seemed to have been killed in the middle of a deal. Murders during drug deals weren’t unheard of, but this one was weird. Usually it was one pusher making a move against another, but this time the evidence suggested the two vics were accosted by an unrelated assailant with a large edged weapon. Homicide’s initial notes said Hitoshi, a chubby little toad of a man, bled out from a pair of stab wounds, one through the belly button and one puncturing the left lung from behind. That didn’t feel right to Mariko, so she called the ME and asked him to see if it was a through-and-through. Her desk phone rang even as she studied the crime scene photos.

“Oshiro.”

“Detective Oshiro, this is Saigō, the medical examiner. We spoke earlier?”

“Yeah.”

“Just wanted to tell you thanks for the beer.”

“Huh?”

“Okada from Homicide happened to be down here when you called about your through-and-through. He’s the lead on the Sagamihara/Hitoshi murders? Well, he’s also the one who said it was multiple stab wounds that killed this fatso, and he bet me a case of Kirin that there was no way in hell this was a through-and-through. Said the murder weapon would have to be a meter long to go all the way through him. I told him he was probably right but I’d take him up on it anyway. So now he’s out buying me a case of Kirin.”

“Really?”

“Yep.” Dr. Saigō sounded quite pleased with himself. “Single wound channel, probably entered through the abdomen. Hell of a nice catch, by the way. What made you think to even ask about it?”

“I don’t know,” Mariko said, cagy about mentioning Fuchida. Ko wouldn’t even approve of this phone call, much less her interest in the murders. “Isn’t it sort of standard procedure? You know, investigating every possibility and all that?”

“Yeah, maybe, but Okada and his partner have both been on Homicide for, like, ten years, and neither of them thought of it. So, you know, thanks for the beer.”

Mariko laughed. “You’re welcome. Set aside a couple for me.”

“Oh. Uh…I’ll have them in the cooler when they get here.”

“So?”

“Uh. The cooler’s where we keep, you know, dead people.”

“Right. I’ll take a rain check. Thanks, Dr. Saigō.”

Mariko hung up the phone, not knowing how to feel. Outdoing the Homicide guys was thrilling; knowing word of it might get back to Ko made her gut freeze solid. Ko would insist these murders had nothing to do with the attempted sword theft he’d assigned her, and
Mariko had nothing in the way of a counterargument. Why would Fuchida stage a random assault against a pair of drug dealers? If there was any connection to Yamada’s sword, Mariko couldn’t see it. Her best hope was that the newest homicides were the aftermath of a turf war. If so, then at least she’d know Tokyo Tower was within Fuchida’s territory. That would be her first hint as to his whereabouts, and Mariko had logged too many hours looking for this shithead to remain empty-handed.

Her lack of progress on Fuchida frustrated her to no end. His wanton violence made her want to redouble her efforts, but she had so damned little to go on. Everything Tokyo’s
bōryokudan
unit had on Fuchida was dated and petty; the man hadn’t seen face time with a cop for almost ten years. Fuchida made no appearance in Yokohama’s police records, nor in the files of any nearby city whose records she could get a warrant to search.

She did find a few cases connected to Fuchida’s father—none related to narcotics, but it seemed the Fuchida family had been selling stolen merchandise for the Kamaguchi-gumi since at least the 1960s, and carrying out executions when Kamaguchis didn’t care to send their own muscle. The elder Fuchida seemed to share his son’s knack for lying low: he hadn’t set foot in a courtroom in over thirty years, and even back then he managed to outmaneuver his prosecutors. He’d collected four acquittals in four years, and in each case a key witness disappeared just before giving testimony. After that the old man vanished from the justice system entirely.

Mariko cursed her luck when she read about the elder Fuchida’s death. She couldn’t have asked for an easier opportunity to catch her lead suspect than at his own father’s funeral, but she only learned of the funeral after the fact. There hadn’t been an obituary; she’d only got word of the old man’s passing because someone with the National Health Insurance mistakenly forwarded her his death certificate. The fact that she’d missed the funeral made her feel guilty. Fuchida didn’t commemorate his father by going out and getting blitzed that night like
the rest of his gangster buddies. Instead, he murdered two pushers for no apparent reason. Without any hard evidence, Mariko couldn’t have done anything at the funeral except take photos, but still the guilt gnawed at her, and more than once she’d racked her brain trying to figure out a way she could have saved poor, baby-faced Saga from having his throat slashed open at the age of nineteen.

Fuchida Shūzō was nonexistent on Google. He didn’t pay taxes or claim health insurance benefits. He’d paid his tuition to Tōdai in cash. No car had ever been purchased in his name; ditto with airfare; ditto with houses, apartments, condos, storefronts, retail spaces, or empty lots. He had no bank accounts, no post office boxes, no landlines or cell phones under his name. Apart from a few dated police records, she hadn’t produced so much as a single receipt with his name on it.

Mariko knew she’d never get back to Narcotics until she put Dr. Yamada’s sword case behind her, which of course was exactly the reason Lieutenant Ko had given her the case in the first place. He couldn’t have guessed that Fuchida was an electronic ninja, master of the art of bureaucratic invisibility, but he’d known full well that property crimes like this were damn near impossible to solve. The clock was ticking: her probationary period on Narcotics was dwindling away day by day, and if at the end of the year her arrest record wasn’t impressive enough, Ko would be well within his rights to deny her transfer.

If there were any justice in the world, then if she couldn’t hunt down Fuchida, at least she could have found Saori. But there was no justice, and no luck either, because Saori was still a phantom. Their mother was a nervous wreck, and as she had no one else to call, Mariko was the one to absorb all the fallout. Dealing with her mother’s stress left Mariko no energy to cope with her own.

Not for the first time, Mariko wished she was back at academy, for that was the one time in her life where bashing something with a stick had been a regular part of her day. She remembered it fondly, that satisfying shudder moving up the baton and into the bones of her arm.
She was all too aware that all she had to do was pop by Dr. Yamada’s and she could start a brand-new phase of combat training. But that would expose her to another talk about magic and destiny and all that crap, and she liked Yamada too much to tell him to shut the hell up.

It was ultimately the little things that broke her. Three minutes after she hung up the phone with Dr. Saigō, the computer in her cubicle crashed. It was annoying but manageable: leaving the baby-faced photos of Saga on her desk, she tried calling the
bōryokudan
unit across town to talk about which yakuzas controlled the territory around Tokyo Tower. No sooner did they pick up than her line went dead. Then she remembered the morning’s briefing: an IT crew was finally upgrading the precinct’s DSL service to fiber, so lines would be cutting in and out all day.

Again, annoying but manageable. She figured a good walk might get the stress out her system anyway, so she went to take a train across town to the
bōryokudan
unit. It took two trains to get there, and both times she sprinted up to the platform only to watch the doors slide shut right in front of her face. She felt her blood pressure rising as she called her contact in the
bōryokudan
unit to tell him she’d be late—to beg him, in fact, to stay on a little while after his shift ended. But an automated message answered instead, telling her that her own phone number was no longer in service.

“Great,” she said to herself. It was a computer snafu, easy enough to fix if only she could give Docomo a call. But this was her only phone, and she couldn’t just head back to precinct to take care of it. Even if the IT guys had finished, Ko forbade personal calls at work. Leave it to a damn cell phone company to highlight yet one more way her CO could piss her off.

She didn’t have the patience to go all the way to the
bōryokudan
unit just to find out her contact there had already left for the day, nor did she have the patience to go back and try to deal with a tetchy office computer and its spotty Internet access. “Fuck it,” she said to herself in English. She resolved to get on the next train, wherever the hell it
was heading, and just sit on it for a few minutes and try to get her heart rate to simmer down.

The next train in the station was bound for Machida. Yamada’s neighborhood. Destiny.

So it was that she found herself breathing the cool air of Yamada’s backyard, trying to enjoy it, trying to leave the rest of the world outside. Her fingers wrapped tightly around the haft of the heavy Inazuma sword, feeling oddly natural there. Her toes dug into the cold grass. A high slat fence surrounded her on three sides, with the back of the house on the fourth. The fence was the color of milk tea, overgrown in places with clematis and climbing fern. A wooden lattice arched behind her, all but invisible beneath the luxurious wisteria that hung from it like white clouds in a perfect summer sky. Her forearms ached with the weight of the blade, and she’d only been holding it for a few minutes.

“Shoulders over your hips,” Yamada said. He was sitting on a stone bench settled within a species of chrysanthemum different from the one growing along the front of the house. Those were pink; these were white. “Settle your weight.”

“If you say so,” Mariko said. She didn’t see how her weight could be anything but settled. What else was it supposed to do, float?

“The correct response is, ‘Yes, Sensei.’ If you want to train, do it seriously.”

But I don’t want to train, some part of Mariko’s mind responded. But here you are training, another part said; do as you’re told.

“Better,” Yamada said. He stood, unsheathed the sword he’d had lying across his lap—the old man had a small arsenal in the house—and stood in front of her. She mirrored his stance, then aped his movements as he led her through the first drill. Stepping and striking, stepping and striking, back and forth, over and over. In ten minutes her bruised ribs felt like coals in a fire—the idea of stopping in for an X-ray seemed better and better by the minute—and her thighs burned hotter still.

“This sword is too big for me,” she said, eyeing the smaller blade Yamada held so easily.

“That sword is too big for everyone.”

“Then let me use yours.”

Yamada clicked his tongue.

“Sensei,” she added hastily.

“Swords are not like shoes; one does not break them in. You must accustom yourself to the weapon. Again.” And he led her through the exercise once more.

“Sloppy,” Yamada said, watching her.

My arms are tired, Mariko thought. What do you expect? But she said nothing.

“Getting sloppier,” he said. “You’re just swinging it now.”

This time she almost spoke her mind. She caught herself with her mouth open, took a panting breath instead, and consciously avoided his gaze. If she looked at him, she thought the next chop might come down on his stubbly head.