The newcomer’s skin, his hair, his eyebrows, everything about him was white, except his eyes, which were an improbable golden color, with cat-eye pupils. Obviously, they were contacts, the kind worn by cosplayers who dressed like alien characters. But Ghost’s appearance was no costume. Under the contacts, were his eyes . . . pink? Kenji quickly looked away, trying not to stare. He’d seen an albino rabbit before—they’d had one in his second grade class—but he’d never seen an albino person.
“There are actually quite a few of us in Japan.”
Kenji’s head snapped up. Ghost was standing next to his table, a half-smile on his face as he observed Kenji’s discomfort.
“Are you Hornet’s friend, Nakamura?” he asked.
Kenji said he was, forcing himself to make eye contact, trying hard to give the impression he met albino people every day and it was no big deal.
Ghost set his laptop on the table and dropped into the other chair. Up close, he was actually sort of handsome, in a weird manga-like way. His hair was cut in the spiky style favored by DragonballZ characters, and the arm that rested on his laptop case was strung with ropy muscles.
“I do judo,” he said, as if reading Kenji’s mind. “For people like me, the bullying doesn’t stop with middle school. There’s a gym where a lot of cosplayers go, over near the Laox building. Most of them choose to look even weirder than I do, and none of us like to get beaten up by morons.”
Their maid arrived promptly to take Ghost’s coffee order, squealing over the cat-eye contacts he’d worn in honor of Nyan-Nyan Week. She whisked away Kenji’s scraped-clean plate. The hacker unzipped his laptop case to draw out the latest top-of-the-line Sony VAIO. He sat back in his chair and looked at Kenji. “Did Hornet mention . . . ?”
“Yeah. The comic book.” Kenji offered the brown paper bag formally with both hands.
Ghost took it eagerly and broke the seal. He pulled the manga from the bag and his face brightened with delight as he saw the artist’s name scrawled across the front in thick black pen. “I’ve always wanted a signed one!”
His coffee arrived, and he gave the maid his full attention while she doctored it with three sugars and stirred until he cued her to stop by meowing a single “nyan” with an ironic half-smile.
After downing a slug of coffee, he took a last loving look at the cellophane-wrapped comic, slipped it back in the bag, and opened his laptop.
“I understand you need some names,” he said, typing in a complicated password with lightning-fast fingers. “What’s the website address?”
Kenji pulled out his phone and showed him the e-mail with the Whitelight URL and the four user names.
Ghost navigated to whitelight.co.jp site with a few keystrokes, bypassed the entry screens with a few more, and froze. “Uh, this is a . . . suicide website.” He studied the four user IDs, then looked at Kenji, his face troubled. “Are you afraid one of these is a friend of yours?”
“Yeah. I’m pretty sure
“And you’re afraid she’s going to commit jisatsu?”
“She already did.”
Ghost stared at him.
“Yes. But we think that she and
“You mean . . . murdered?”
“That’s what we’re trying to find out.”
“Huh.” Ghost nodded. Then his mouth twisted into a grim smile and he cracked his knuckles. “Yosh’. Let’s play Detective Conan.”
Even Kenji had read that comic book.
Ghost navigated around Whitelight and examined a site map.
“Ah.” Satisfied smile. “E-mail forwarding.” His fingers blurred over the keys and a new window opened up, filled with code. He paused, added another half window of nonsense, then tapped a couple of keys. A long a list of names raced down the screen.
Kenji pulled his chair around.
“This is everybody with whitelight.co.jp e-mail accounts,” Ghost explained. “See, most people who have more than one e-mail address don’t want to check all of them every day, so they forward their messages to one main account. Usually, that’s their phone. That way, they can send e-mail from their Whitelight address without using their real names, but still conveniently receive the replies at their main Inbox. All someone like me has to do is run a little piece of code that backtracks the forwarded mail to their cell phones.”
The list had seventy-three user IDs on it. Near the bottom, Kenji spotted:
Ghost scrolled further down the page. “Now I’ll just match their phone IDs to the names on their billing addresses.” He opened another window filled with numbers and symbols, typing so fast the lines appeared to be scrolling. Finally, he hit Return, then copied and pasted the list of user IDs. Their real names and addresses appeared.
[email protected] Jun Shimada 2-32-12 Sendagi
[email protected] Rika Ozawa 4-14-21 Hon-Komagome
[email protected] Hamada 1-11-2 Shirogane
[email protected] Takahara 5-11-6 Tabata
“Whoa, how did you do that?” Kenji asked.
Ghost frowned.
“Sorry,” Kenji said, “Forget I asked.”
“You want the whole list, or just the four you gave me?”
“As long as you have it, the whole list, please.”
“Give me your e-mail address and I’ll copy it to you.”
Kenji jotted it on a napkin and handed it to Ghost, who flicked his fingers over the keyboard, sat back, and said, “Done.”
Kenji’s phone vibrated, signaling the message had arrived. He checked to make sure. “Got it. Thanks.”
“Now for the e-mail.” Ghost’s fingers flew over the keys again, then he stared at the blinking cursor as the scrolling came to a dead stop. He opened another window and tried something else, typing furiously until he reached another dead end. He flopped back in his chair and frowned, then looked at Kenji. “Did someone warn the site administrator you were interested in e-mail from Whitelight users?”
“Uh, maybe,” Kenji said, remembering that
“It looks like someone went in at 17:03:23 today and wiped the entire archive. Not only wiped it, scrambled it.”
“There’s nothing left?”
Ghost shook his head. “Whoever did it knew what he was doing.”
“Well, at least we know they had something to hide. Thanks for trying.”
“Anytime. Sorry you had to buy me that Appleseed just to get a few names.” As Kenji stood and grabbed his jacket from the back of the chair, Ghost added, “Let me know what you find out. If you need anything else, e-mail me. I’ll give you a freebie.” He grinned. “This is a lot more interesting than fighting Elder Dragons.”
Chapter 34
Friday, April 12
8:00 A.M.
Kenji
“Thanks for coming in early, Suzuki-san,” Kenji said, as the night guard relocked the front door of the Komagome Police Station behind them. While they ascended to the third floor, he filled Suzuki in on what he’d learned at the Mad Hatter and from Ghost.
A sealed manila envelope stamped “Tokyo University School of Legal Medicine” had been left on his chair. A sticky note attached to the front read, “I delayed this as long as I could so you could get a head start on finding your perp, but since a copy will arrive downtown sometime this morning, I thought you ought to have a few hours to look it over before your section chief gets a call about it. Good luck.�
� It was signed with the initials TL.
Kenji slit open the envelope. Rika Ozawa’s post-mortem. Suzuki pulled up a chair and watched his superior frown over the difficult document. The forms were filled with unusually complex kanji characters.
Kenji began with an easy one: “Cause of Death.” It read, “Heart Failure,” like most Japanese death certificates. It was an unassailable, if unenlightening, verdict; no matter what caused someone’s heart to stop, nobody lived beyond that event.
He was slowly wading through the first section of findings when Suzuki cleared his throat. “Sir?”
Kenji looked up, marking his place with a finger.
“Would you like me to do that while you attend to something more important?”
“I don’t know, it’s pretty rough going. I think these kanji were invented just to confuse anyone who doesn’t have an M.D.”
“I could give it a try, sir. I was the All-Kanto Kanji Champion for two years in high school.”
“All-Kanto?” That was a region bigger than Tokyo.
Suzuki dipped his head modestly. Kenji pushed the report over to him without another word. He shouldn’t have been surprised—Suzuki was exactly the sort who would never confuse the fourteen-stroke character for “currency” with the extremely similar fourteen-stroke character for “evil practice.”
Kenji went to brew a pot of tea and when he returned, Suzuki had reached the last page. He handed the report back to Kenji and confirmed what Loud had leaked earlier: no drugs, negligible alcohol, subject died of asphyxiation. Estimated time of death: between 7:00 P.M. and midnight on Friday, April 5.
“Thank you, Suzuki-san,” Kenji said, slipping the report back into its envelope. He regarded it with a frown. “When Section Chief Tanaka arrives, I’m going to have to show him. It’s probably only a matter of time before the murder squad arrives from the main office to take over the case.” Kenji checked the time. “But we still have an hour before anybody shows up. While I write up what we’ve got so far, could you push ahead with the information I got last night? The more solid leads we have to serve up to the big boys, the better we’ll look.”
“Of course, sir. What would you like me to start with?”
“Our killer is most likely someone Ozawa-san met online or someone who followed her from the bar. While I write up our findings to date, can you find out the real name of the proprietor of the Mad Hatter in Jingu-mae? Then run him, see if anything pops up. There must be a reason he didn’t want me to think he knew the man who was in the bar at the same time as Rika Ozawa.”
“Of course, sir. Right away.”
Kenji opened a new document and began writing up everything they’d discovered to date, finishing with an outline of the next steps he planned to take. He printed out two copies and stapled the corners, then laid one squarely on Tanaka’s desk.
At 9:45, the chief walked in and hung up his coat. Kenji put his jacket back on and straightened his tie. Twenty minutes later, Tanaka had agreed to allow Oki to help investigate the Hamada-Ozawa case until the First Investigative Division arrived in force to take over.
The big detective angled his chair toward Kenji’s, his hand dwarfing his teacup. He set up his laptop and turned it on. “Thanks for rescuing me from the Fujimoto burglary. We’ve run out of leads and unless something breaks, we’re going to have to shelve it. I wasn’t looking forward to having that conversation with Tanaka-san.”
Kenji gave him an update, pulling up the Whitelight website and pointing out the topics he wanted the older detective to read. While Oki worked his way through the site, Kenji went to check on Suzuki’s progress.
As he approached the assistant detective’s seat, Suzuki held out a folder. “Here’s the Mad Hatter information, sir.”
Kenji read the top sheet. “Huh. His name really is Boshi. Burglary?”
Suzuki nodded. “Five years ago, Taro Yamaboshi was tried for a series of thefts. He got off, but his brother Jiro went to prison. He’s been out since the end of June. But that’s not the interesting part. Look here. The brother’s rap sheet says he’s one hundred fifty-three centimeters, forty-seven kilos. Sounds sort of like the guy who was arguing with Boshi-san at the Mad Hatter.”
“Huh.” Kenji flipped to the mug shots under the report. He held up the photo of the younger brother. “I agree with our witness—he’d look better without the goatee.”
Kenji put everything back in the folder. “Good work, Suzuki-san. Thank you. Can you get me five or six other pictures so we can ask our witness if she can identify our Mad Hatter mystery man?”
“No problem, sir.”
When he returned to his desk, Oki was still reading. Kenji took out his phone and scrolled through his contacts. After four rings, a groggy-sounding Coco answered.
“Good morning, this is Kenji Nakamura.” He explained that he had some pictures for her to look at and asked when it would be convenient to show them to her. She suggested 11:00 at Matsumoto’s in a way that was so flirtatious he immediately decided to send Suzuki.
Oki was sitting back in his chair with steepled fingers, thinking. He looked up at Kenji and said, “I think we should pay a visit to
Chapter 35
Friday, April 12
10:30 A.M.
Yumi
“Moshi-moshi,” Yumi muttered, fumbling with her phone. She squinted at her bedside clock. Had she really slept until 10:30?
“Ohayo!” It was Coco. “You’ll never guess who just called and asked me to meet him this morning!”
Yumi shut her eyes against the cruel morning light. Her head hurt. Why did people drink red wine? “Maybe you could just tell me.”
“Ken-ji Na-ka-mu-ra,” sang her friend.
Yumi sat up. “What? Why?”
“Well, he said it was to look at some mug shots, but . . . What do you think I should wear?”
Yumi flopped back on her bed. “I don’t know, Coco. You woke me up and I’ve got a wicked hangover.”
“Late night, huh? Were you out on another date with Mr. Son-of-the-Zaibatsu? How was the party at the Roppongi Hills Club? Did he ask you to marry him yet?”
Yumi groaned. She was in no shape to have that conversation. “Ask me later when I’m feeling human.”
“Okay, go back to sleep if you must. He’s not married, is he?”
“Who? Ichiro?”
“No! Kenji.”
“No.” It came out more annoyed than she’d intended.
“Girlfriend?” Coco persisted.
“Why don’t you ask him yourself?”
“Okay, I will. Call you later. Mata ne!”
Blessed silence. But now she was awake. Yumi dragged herself to the bathroom. She had to make those calls about Rika’s funeral today. And tonight was the Lolita event.
She dressed and padded to the kitchen; her mother had left some rice for her on the rice cooker’s “Keep Warm” setting. She packed a dollop into her favorite bowl and shot a stream of near-boiling water from the hot water pot into a bowl of instant miso soup. Settling herself at the table, she picked up the newspaper, but didn’t feel up to struggling through the kanji this morning.
“Ohayo gozaimasu,” her mother said, nudging the door open with her foot as she carried in two bulging string bags filled with the morning’s shopping. She set them on the counter and asked, “Did you have a nice time last night?”
Yumi described the Shinjuku restaurant where she and Ichiro had been joined by six of his friends, then asked, “Is Dad at work?”
Mrs. Hata’s face clouded. She lowered her voice and said, “He’s going in later for a meeting. I think he’s in the other room, working on his book.”
“Oh no,” Yumi whispered. “Did they decide?”
Her mother shook her head and whispered, “No
t yet.” In her regular voice she said, “Have you called people about Rika’s funeral yet?”
“No, I’m going to do that this morning as soon as I finish my breakfast.”
“Would you like me to help?”
“No, that’s okay. There aren’t many who don’t know yet.”
Yumi finished her soup, made herself a pot of tea, and carried it back to her room. She straightened her futon cover and lay back against the pillows with her phone.
Half an hour later, she was down to one name. Kodama, with a 080 cell phone prefix. She punched it in.
It rang twice and a male voice answered, “Flash mob.”
Flash mob? Oh. FlashMob. Stacks of the underground freebie sat on café counters all over Harajuku and Shibuya.
“May I speak with Kodama-san?”
“He’s out right now, but he should be back in a half hour or so. Would you like to leave a message?”
“No, I’ll try later. Thank you.”
She hung up. FlashMob had started as a guerilla guide to street-corner concerts and fringe-y events but had expanded to include edgy news items. Yumi rummaged through her bag and found the issue she’d picked up at the Tea Four Two. Kodama was the editor. Had Rika been writing the suicide article for him? FlashMob wasn’t the International Herald Tribune, but it was a step up from GothXLoli for someone who wanted to be a real journalist.
Yumi typed FlashMob’s address into her phone’s GPS and went to her closet to pick out something appropriate for meeting the man who’d paid Rika to make a date with death. He was going to have to talk to her face to face.
Chapter 36
Friday, April 12
10:30 A.M.
Yumi
Forty minutes after changing into her most businesslike skirt and blouse, Yumi was sitting in a cramped room on the third floor of a building in Harajuku while the assistant editor of FlashMob hammered away at his keyboard less than a meter away. Kodama had not yet arrived.
Nightshade Page 17