Eight Million Gods-eARC

by Wen Spencer

  What else could point to the killer having had access to her files? She crept through the apartment, running her flashlight over the contents. It was a clean, simple place, much as she had imagined it. Sleek modern furniture mixed with Japanese antiques in a way that Nikki wished she had the money to emulate. She would give her eyeteeth for the lacquered sword tansu that Gregory was using as a coffee table or the beautiful wedding kimono on the wall.

  In the bedroom was a tall tansu with a dozen drawers standing in as a dresser. In the bottommost drawer was a coil of heavy jute rope. She eyed it without touching it. George had a sick little fetish for tying up schoolgirls; it was what truly lay behind his rape of Yuuka’s body. He liked his sexual partners young and helpless. With Yuuka, he’d discovered the ultimate in helplessness was dead.

  Did Gregory have the same fetish or had the killer put this here? The rope was the type used in the Japanese ancient practice of bondage called kinbaku. She had learned much more than she wanted while researching George’s scenes. She closed the drawer without being able to decide what it meant in terms of her stalker.

  She was about to give up when she saw Isetan Department Store bag in the bedroom trash can. She stared at it, feeling sick. There wasn’t an Isetan in Osaka. There was one in Kyoto, anchoring down half of the sprawling train station. George had gone to Kyoto to steal an antique samurai sword enshrined at a local temple. When he reached the train station, he realized that he had no plan on how to get the sword back to Osaka. He stopped at Isetan’s and bought a case used by high school students to carry wooden practice swords to and from school.

  After he’d stolen the sword and killed Yuuka, he’d taken a crowded express train back to Osaka with the case slung across his shoulders. The whole trip he felt as if he was being watched. By the time he reached Osaka, he wanted to be rid of the incriminating sword, so he left it in one of the coin lockers at the train station. It wasn’t until he reached his apartment that he realized he still had the Isetan bag folded up in his pocket. He’d taken it out and tossed it in the bedroom trash can where it seemed to taunt him with his guilt.

  To anyone else, it was just a simple plastic bag. To Nikki, it was like the blood on Lady Macbeth’s hands. Out, damn’d spot. Out, I say!

  Had Gregory just coincidently been at Kyoto and shopped at Isetan or had his killer left the bag in the trash, slavishly recreating her book? She used facial tissues as impromptu gloves and carefully took it out of the trash. Inside was a sales receipt. It was dated Saturday, a few hours before Gregory had been killed. She took out her phone, scanned the kanji of the item bought and ran it through her translation app. Bamboo sword bag.

  She dropped the receipt in horror, and then hastily picked it back up with the tissue, fumbled it back into the Isetan bag, and shoved both into the bedroom trash can. A minute later she was out of the apartment, and a minute after that, running away from the building.

  “Who in fucking hell is this crazy! What kind of whacko would go through that much fucking trouble? Go to Kyoto, buy a bag . . .”

  Oh god, what else had he done in Kyoto?

  She dug out her ballpoint pen and stood clicking it and practiced her deep breathing as she tried to think in some calm, rational way.

  Data on her Internet searches went onto the net and came back to her. When she was just researching her novel, she never bothered to use a proxy service to disguise her apartment’s IP address. Anyone could have intercepted her searches and deduced information. She’d tried several times to pull up “Isetan Kyoto Fukuro Shinai” before discovering it didn’t mean “bag for bamboo sword” but “bamboo sword wrapped with leather.” After that, she’d searched English sites for “shinai bag.” It wouldn’t take much to realize that she wanted to buy the bag at Isetan in Kyoto.

  What she hadn’t researched on the Internet were the coin lockers. She had sacrificed half an hour and a few hundred yen to find out how they worked. The only place that the exact locker number and pin number for the digital lock was recorded was in her password-protected documents.

  She would have to cross through the train station to find her way back to the subway. She only knew one way to go. It would only take her a minute to check the locker.

  If the killer had left something for her to find, then he was way beyond slightly deranged. How did she attract such a monolithic loon before her first book came out?

  Nikki scurried back through the underground maze linked to Umeda Station. She wasn’t sure how long the locker rental was good for. Eight hours? Only until the last train of the day? A full day? If the killer left something in a locker before he had killed Gregory, it was drawing close to twenty-four hours now.

  There was so much she didn’t know.

  She felt like she was lost in a dark, shifting ocean. All around her were people she couldn’t understand, signs she couldn’t read, as she tried to find her way through the complex of malls and subway stations. So completely lost.

  What the hell was she going to do when she reached the Osaka Station? She had Tanaka’s business card; he had pressed it on her before she left the police headquarters. She could call him and ask him meet her at the station. The digital key meant she didn’t have to mention her little tour of Gregory Winston’s apartment. If she couldn’t get into the locker, she only looked like she was histrionic.

  But what if she could get into the locker? What did she tell Tanaka? How did she explain knowing the PIN? If she told Tanaka that it was in her manuscript but not posted to her blog, then he’d know that she’d been hacked, and would probably get a warrant for her computer. Maybe. More likely, he’d just assume she was working with the killer.

  Surely there would be security cameras on the lockers. If Tanaka checked the video from them, he would find out who used the locker last. But what if Tanaka didn’t check them? What if he didn’t believe the killer had hacked into her computer files? It was more logical that she knew the PIN number because she had programmed it in. She couldn’t force them to check the security cameras. She could only count on them weighing the circumstantial evidence, and it made her look like an accomplice.

  No. She wouldn’t call the police—unless there was a dead body. A corpse would trump everything. There shouldn’t be any dead bodies, though, if the killer was sticking to script. Japanese were lawful people—surely the killer would keep to her story. Of course, maybe the killer was some imported crazed American serial killer; they couldn’t be trusted.

  She was probably on a wild goose chase.

  Besides, how would the killer get a dead body into the train station unnoticed?

  Body parts, on the other hand, were a possibility.

  Her stomach was doing cartwheels by the time she found her landmark niche restaurant. It had closed for the night, a steel gate rolled down over it. Beside it were steps up to the street level. There was probably some underground link to Osaka Station from Umeda Station since it seemed like half of Umeda was tied to the underground complex, but she hadn’t found it yet. Instead she went up the steps and across an alley and into Osaka Station.

  At least the coin locker that she wanted was right by the door.

  She stood eyeing it nervously. The “in use” light was on. Something was in it. She went to the touch-screen control panel for the bank of lockers, hit the English button, and selected the “take out the baggage” option. It asked her for the key she used. She picked the cash payment option of “key number.” It asked for the locker number and PIN number. Her hand was shaking as she keyed both in.

  There was a pause, and the machine asked for eight hundred yen.

  “Shit,” she hissed. Did that mean the PIN was right?

  Nikki dug out hundred yen coins, dropped the first coin twice before she managed to feed it into the machine. She was short a hundred yen coin, and she mindlessly fed five and ten yen coins in until the machine flashed “Thank you for use” and spit three of her last coins back out at her.

  The “in use” light was
flashing. The door was unlocked.

  “Please,” she whispered. “No body parts.”

  She opened up the door.

  George had left a katana in the locker. She had figured he couldn’t carry a sword on the train without some kind of covering. She had picked out a light brown cotton fabric kendo travel bag with little dragonflies stamped randomly in white and red.

  Something tall and skinny leaned in shadows of the locker, wrapped in a tan fabric.

  Well, at least it wasn’t a body part.

  7

  In the Shadow of the Swallowtail

  Nikki had been annoyed and dismayed when George stole the antique katana in Kyoto. He was supposed to be her romantic interest. There he was splashing kerosene onto the back of a temple’s gift shop to create a diversion for his theft.

  Of course, her hypergraphia had just scribbled “the sword” into her notebook without any description. George had been too caught up in the fear and excitement of his escalating crime to even notice what he clutched in his hand. After he killed and raped Yuuka, he nearly left it lying beside her dead body as he staggered away. He came back for it only after the sirens of the fire engines brought him to his senses.

  Nikki would have been stuck on the scene until she fleshed out all the little details, so she had thrown herself into researching samurai swords. She learned that the hilt of the katana wasn’t one solid piece but nearly a dozen items carefully fitted together. The hand guard, called a tsuba, was a disc of metal about three inches across with a slot in the center. Each tsuba was a hand-crafted piece of art and often had the samurai’s family crest, called a mon, worked into the design. After looking at dozens of web pages, she decided that the stolen katana had a tsuba made from a metal of gold and copper with a dark blue-purple patina called shakudo. It featured a swallowtail butterfly mon done in gold leaf against the purple.

  Surely the killer hadn’t stuck that closely to script.

  Nikki lifted out the bag, undid the ties, and shifted the fabric aside to look closer at the sword inside. Gold swallowtail wings gleamed on a violet field.

  She suddenly had an intense feeling that someone was watching her. She glanced around. Hundreds of people flowed around her, coming and going through the gates to the train platforms. Focused on getting to their destinations, none of them seemed to be paying any attention to her.

  “Sumimasen,” a salaryman apologized as he brushed past her. Before she realized what he was doing, he wedged a piece of luggage into the locker she had left open and shut the door. The “in use” light went on.

  “Wait!” she cried.

  “Sumimasen.” the salaryman apologized again, bowed, and hurried out of the train station.

  She whimpered as he disappeared. She hadn’t really meant to take the sword out of the locker. She glanced around for another locker and realized that hers had been the only unoccupied one. Every locker in sight had its “in use” light on. The feeling of being watched was still there, even though no one was looking at her. No one was even standing still, pretending to focus on a magazine or telephone conversation or oddly colored piece of floor. Everyone was coming and going, and she alone stood still like a rock in the ocean surf.

  What the hell was she supposed to do? George had burned down a temple and killed a girl to get the katana. What if her monolithic loon of a fan had done the same? If she called the police, they’d probably arrest her for two murders.

  But if she didn’t call the police, she would still have a homicidal maniac stalking her.

  She felt someone next to her, staring.

  Nikki leapt to the side, bringing up the wrapped sword to block an attack.

  There was no one there.

  “Shit!” She was shaking, though. For one split second, she could have sworn there was a Japanese teenage boy standing beside her, his dark eyes furious.

  She started to walk fast, blindly fleeing into the night.

  She was trying not to run. Running would make her easier to track. She walked fast, weaving through the heavy crowds moving through Umeda Station. She didn’t care if she was lost; all that mattered was putting distance between her and Osaka Station. She took random turns, going up escalators and down elevators and in and out of the stores.

  Just when she thought she was hopelessly lost, she saw a sign for the Tanimachi subway line. She danced in place as she checked the map to figure out the cost of the ticket, fed a ten thousand yen bill into the ticket machine, grabbed her ticket and change ,and bolted through the gate. There was a train sitting at the platform as she ran down the steps. She made the car just as the “door closing” chime sounded. There was no one else running for the train. The door closed and the train pulled out.

  She slumped down on the bench seat and stared at the bundled sword still clutched in her hand. Some loon had hacked her computer, read her book, and was using it as inspiration. He had stuck a blender into Gregory Winston’s stomach and set it to puree. There might be a seventeen-year-old girl dead and raped in Kyoto.

  What the hell was she going to do? The police already knew she had a crazy fan. Would telling them about these new twists help them catch the man? Probably. But what could she tell them without making it seem like she had something more to do with the murders?

  She could give them a copy of her manuscript on a flash drive. She could even tell them most of the truth. She believed her computer had been hacked, and she was scared. They were cops; they could fit the pieces together without her.

  She would have to do something with the sword—like throw it in the canal since it now had her DNA and fingerprints on it. Hopefully it was a replica and not some real and irreplaceable antique. Surely her fan wasn’t so insane that he had stolen something so valuable and then left it in a coin locker.

  One thing was for certain—her life was about to get a whole lot crazier.

  “Oh, this sucks,” she whispered. “Bad enough that I write this shit, now I have to live it?”

  She couldn’t stop writing. Even if she could magically cure her hypergraphia, she still would have to finish the novel. If she didn’t, she would have to give back the money that her publisher had already paid her. All of it—even the part she’d already spent.

  She didn’t know how her stalker was hacking her laptop; she thought she had made it secure. She had online “friends” that were computer experts, but none of them were close and trusted. Anyone she asked for help might be the very person who had hacked her computer. She’d never met any of them face-to-face and had to hope what they told her was true. One of them could be lying and lived in Osaka.

  There was the little policeman, Yoshida. She could ask him for help.

  Now that she thought of it, though, it was weird that of the hundreds of restaurants in Osaka, the one he chose after processing Gregory’s murder was the same one she met Miriam in to talk about her novel. She had emailed with Miriam about where to eat. Could he have intercepted those messages?

  He was an anime fan. He might visit the same forums that she did. He could be one of her many online “friends” and she wouldn’t know.

  But he was so tiny. The police said—no—Yoshida said that the attacker was much taller.

  She slipped her cell phone out to call Miriam and then remembered that was against the rules. She eyed the commuters around her, currently ignoring her. She considered texting her. No. That would make Miriam an accomplice to—to—to something. Tampering with evidence? On that thought, she made sure to delete her call to Miriam from her phone’s log.

  “You don’t seriously think that a policeman hacked your computer?” She whispered to her phone the conversation she so desperately wanted to have with Miriam. “Why would Yoshida have me arrested? So we could meet while he’s in a position of authority? He honestly seemed terrified of me, but that could have been an act. But why would he put a katana into the coin locker? How could he know I’d be crazy enough to go looking for it?”

  It was only three stops to Tanimac
hi 4-chome in Otemae. Far too short a distance to come up with any reasonable answer. She darted off the train and hurried out of the station. If she was being followed, she only had a couple of minutes lead time to get to the safety of her apartment. She could grab her laptop, a change of clothes, and then go someplace else, someplace safe.

  But where the hell was that at this time of night?

  Her apartment was on the sixth floor, around the corner and down the hall from the elevator. She had never minded before that the bare concrete hallway reminded her of something out of Ringu.

  She unlocked her door. Opened it. Then realized that the killer could be inside—waiting for her. She stood in the doorway a moment, panting, carefully scanning the small room. She had left the sliding closet door open and the accordion-like door to the bathroom was folded. The studio apartment had no other place to hide. She stepped in, shut the door and locked it behind her.

  “Calm down, stay calm.” She kicked off her sandals out of habit. “Psycho fan wants to play. Killing me would stop the game, so I’m probably safe from him. Everyone else is dead meat, but I’m—I’m—I’m scared shitless but probably safe.”

  She realized she was still clutching the sword in her left hand. She put it on the table and picked up one of her omnipresent pens. She paced her small studio apartment, clicking nervously.

  “Does he know where I live?” She considered. “Well, if he hacked my computer, he knows everything on it. I e-mailed my new address to my editor and my agent, so, yes, he knows where I live.”

  The only thing that might save her was an oddity of Japanese urban planning. She was in 4-choma, or the fourth district, and anyone could find that. Her block number would have been assigned by both proximity to the city but also in the order it was settled. Finding the right block was more difficult. The houses on the block were then numbered as they were built. The first house on the block was “one.” There might be a dozen houses between “one” and “two” as newer houses crowded into the space between the original buildings.