by Steve Bein
Though it horrified her to think about it, her mind immediately leaped to modus operandi: how would he go about killing thirteen hundred children? The Nazis could teach him a thing or two. He knew his chemistry; building a gas chamber was well within his expertise. In fact, he’d built one already; Mariko and Han had stumbled across it out in Kamakura. It was a bona fide sex dungeon that doubled as a hermetically sealed suicide chamber for the Great Teacher and his closest disciples. Could that have been just a maquette? Was the full-scale model lying in wait? Or—she could hardly forgive herself for thinking it—was it already jam-packed with frightened kids?
The mental image sickened her, but it also gave her an idea. “What if we’re going about this the wrong way?” she said. “We’ve been thinking about finding someone who saw something. What if we turn it around? He can’t keep these kids just anywhere. He needs a hell of a lot of space.”
“And?”
“He needs to minimize exposure, neh? That rules out a bunch of smaller locations. He’ll want one big location, two at most. Somewhere remote, but easily accessible for vehicle traffic.”
“Not remote. We’re already looking at schools.”
“What? Why?”
“Hiding in plain sight, Detective. It’s his way—or rather, it’s our way, and he learned it all too well. This country has been coping with negative population growth for decades. We’ve closed over a hundred schools in Tokyo alone. Every one of them is specifically designed to contain large groups of children.”
“Come on. Aren’t the locals going to notice a bunch of screaming kids at a school that’s been deserted all year?”
“Dead children don’t scream.”
The thought froze Mariko’s heart. What a perfect image for Joko Daishi’s next sermon: an ordinary school, ordinary classrooms, ordinary little desks, with a dead child sitting at each one. Then logic kicked in: how would he move the children there? Toss the bodies in the back of a van? One of those police choppers would have spotted them by now: a logjam of vans leading straight to an abandoned school. No, don’t go there, she thought. Don’t try to figure it out. Joko Daishi thought all of this through already. You don’t need to understand his logistics; you just need to find the kids.
She started the car. “I’m in Ebisu. Text me an address and I’ll—”
“Don’t bother,” said Furukawa. “We’ve already eliminated all the schools in your area. Continue to work your contacts. What did you hear from Kamaguchi, by the way?”
“Nothing useful. He doesn’t give a shit. Not his kids, not his problem. That’s what he said.”
“Hm. Disappointing.”
“That’s it? ‘Disappointing’?” Mariko picked up the phone and turned it off speaker. “Why don’t you have insiders in the Kamaguchi-gumi? You’re in the king-making business, neh? The yakuzas have kings too. Why don’t you make another magic phone call?”
“Oh, but I have. Detective Oshiro, if you think I am sitting back enjoying a fine whisky and waiting for you to solve all my problems, you’re very much mistaken. You are not alone in this. You are not even very important in this. Please, do your part and I will do mine. Are you certain you can glean nothing more from Kamaguchi?”
“Yes. He left.”
“Then I suggest you visit whoever is next on your list.”
He hung up, leaving Mariko with a dead phone. Not very important, he said. She’d see about that.
42
Despite being a general scumbag, Bumps Ryota had a special place in Mariko’s heart. He wasn’t the first perp she’d converted into a confidential informant, but he was her first narcotics CI, and since Narcotics was her dream job, he was a merit badge of sorts. He’d also leaped to the defense of Mariko’s sister, Saori, in a desperate attempt to prevent the yakuza enforcer Fuchida Shuzo from taking her hostage. Bumps got only partial credit for that; it was brave, but it didn’t offset the fact that he’d sold meth to Saori for years. That said, he’d taken a through-and-through to the gut from Fuchida’s sword, and since Mariko had suffered an identical wound, she supposed that made them scar buddies.
With all of that in his favor, it still had to be said that he lived in a shithole. Mariko found him just as he was leaving a dingy elevator in the dingy lobby of his dingy apartment building. The instant he saw Mariko, he turned and ran. Since he was tweaking, he didn’t think it through, which didn’t work out all that well for him. He spun face-first into the elevator door just as it was sliding shut. Mariko saw blood and guessed he’d broken his nose. Not to be daunted, and capitalizing on the fact that the impact with his face triggered the door’s retraction reflex, he stumbled into the elevator and stabbed the DOOR CLOSE button with the relentless speed of a sewing machine. It didn’t help him. Mariko calmly walked the three or four meters to the elevator, stepped in beside him, and said, “What floor?”
“Oh. Um. Nine?”
“Nine it is. Looks like you broke your nose, Bumps.”
He touched a bleeding nostril with one hand while the other rubbed absently over his long, perm-stiffened, peroxide-orange hair. Mariko guessed the elevator wouldn’t smell great empty, but standing next to Bumps it stank like the bottom of a sweat-moistened laundry hamper. “Bumps, when’s the last time you changed your clothes?”
“Uh … I’m not for sure on that.”
Mariko shook her head in disgust. As far as she knew, Bumps was playing by the rules of their CI arrangement: he provided regular intelligence leading to arrests and he wasn’t dealing hard stuff on the side. But nothing about their agreement said he had to stay sober.
“Fuck this, we’re getting off here.” She hit the THREE button just in time for the elevator to stop there and open up. The musty carpet in the hallway didn’t smell any better than the cockroach spray in the elevator, but both of them smelled a whole lot nicer than Bumps.
He floated in the hall in that strange, weightless, tweaker way, as if gravity had only a tenuous hold on him. Between the perm and the peroxide, his hair was as stiff as paintbrush bristles, and since it didn’t spill down normally it reinforced the illusion that he might blow away at any moment. “So, uh, what can I do for you, Officer?”
“You spend time by the harbor, neh? Lots of business down that way?”
“Sure. But I’m not, you know, like … I mean, we got that agreement.”
“Yeah, I remember, Bumps. What time did you wake up this morning? Have you even been up long enough to know what’s going on?”
He nodded hugely, his eyes wide. “Those kids? Heavy shit.”
“Yeah. So here’s the thing: the guy who took them, he’s got to be hiding them somewhere. Somewhere with a lot of room, with no windows, ideally with only one exit. And it has to be a place not a lot of people ever have reason to go. You follow me so far?”
“Uh-huh.”
Mariko had her doubts. But she had greater doubts about Furukawa’s reasoning. She could buy Joko Daishi hiding in plain sight; what she didn’t buy was that he’d hide exactly where Furukawa expected him to. The image of a school full of dead kids was terrifying, but she just couldn’t derail the logical part of her mind that wanted to know how he’d get all the kids in there without being spotted. Today of all days, people were going to call 110 if they saw something suspicious going down in a schoolyard.
Maybe there was a decommissioned school being torn down somewhere. Maybe Joko Daishi had planned for that months in advance. With the Wind’s resources, he could have bought out a construction company, secured the demolition contract for a school, and filled the whole job site with his cultists. That would give him a perfect front for moving kids in a few at a time. All of that was possible. Even so, Mariko thought it much more likely that Furukawa’s closed school idea was bogus.
“Here’s my theory,” she told Bumps. “Shipping containers. No windows, one entry, and once it’s locked there’s no way for those helicopters up there to spot the kids.” And easy to fill with cyanide gas, if that was the way Joko
Daishi wanted to play it. She didn’t have the stomach to say that aloud. She felt stupid indulging in a childish superstition like that, but if ever there was a day not to jinx something, today was the day.
Bumps walked to the end of the hall, where a dirty window commanded a less than beautiful view of the harbor. Mariko followed. “A lot of containers down there,” he said.
“Exactly. So get down to the waterfront and talk to your people. Have them talk to their people. I’m interested in unusual traffic patterns. Moving these kids is going to take hundreds of cars, so someone’s got to have seen—hey, are you listening to me?”
“Huh?” Bumps flinched when Mariko snapped her fingers in his ear. “Yeah. I got you. It’s just …” He laughed ruefully, and surprised himself as much as Mariko when a tear rolled down his cheek. “Today’s not going to be a good day to have a drug problem, know what I mean? If shit goes bad, I don’t know if they got enough meth in this city to get me through it.”
Mariko took a step back. She actually needed to find her balance; his words struck her like a tsunami. Somehow she’d just assumed that people like Bumps were disconnected from current events, and that these attacks on her city passed right over their heads. Bumps showed her a deeper truth: Joko Daishi had shaken her city all the way down to the gutters. But if even Mariko and Bumps were on the same side against him, he’d also created a sort of citywide unity.
“Let me know what you hear, Bumps. And do it fast; the clock is ticking.”
“Yeah. Totally. Wait … does it have to be shipping containers?”
“No. That’s just a pet theory.”
Bumps chewed his lower lip with his gray meth-mouth teeth. “How about train cars?”
“Maybe, yeah. What are you thinking?”
“I know a guy. A car thief. Specializes in rental cars. Because the insurance is good, neh? The customers don’t take it personal, and—”
“Get to the point, Bumps.”
“Okay, you know what an Elf is? Like, an Isuzu Elf? Boxy little truck?”
“Sure.”
“Well, my guy has a thing for them. They’re super-popular rentals. The chop shops give him a real good price on—”
“The point, Bumps.”
“His girlfriend likes E. He used to buy from me. This morning he calls me and says he wants to buy everything I got. She has some friends coming over or something, and they like to party, and he’s all excited because he’s got a line on all these Elfs. They’re coming by Shinagawa Station one after the other. That’s where he lives, down by the rail yard—”
Mariko’s least favorite part about dealing with meth-heads was that when they were tweaking they just couldn’t shut up. “Did he see any kids in these trucks?”
“Well, you can’t really see inside them. The back is just a big box, you know?”
“Exactly. Did he see them stop anywhere?”
“He didn’t see them, no… .”
“So he didn’t see anyone take a bunch of kids out of the back, did he?”
“Um …”
Mariko wanted to smack him in the head. “Then what the hell does this have to do with anything, Bumps? I told you the clock is ticking.”
“Oh yeah, the train cars. See, there’s a bunch of them in the rail yard. Like, hundreds. Parked, just sitting there, you know? No one ever goes back there, because why would they? The cars are all empty. So my guy, he’s wondering, how come all those Elfs are going into the rail yard if there’s nothing back there?”
Bingo, Mariko thought. Hiding in plain sight, but not where Furukawa expected. And who would suspect foul play if they saw delivery trucks coming to meet cargo trains? The two went together like rice and shoyu.
She punched the elevator call button, then decided that way was too slow; she’d take the stairs. “Shinagawa rail yard. You’re positive?”
“Yeah, pretty much.”
She wasn’t going to get anything more conclusive than “pretty much” from a tweaker. “Thanks, Bumps. Be seeing you.”
She sprinted down the stairs, jumped in the car, and gunned it. Shinagawa Station was well within Bumps’s turf, just a few blocks away from his rattrap apartment. When she got there, she pulled onto a skinny, little-used frontage road running parallel to the train tracks. It occurred to her that she’d spent her entire adult life in Tokyo and she’d never been here before. She passed through Shinagawa Station dozens of times a year, yet she’d never ventured as far as the rail yard, just a few hundred meters north of it. Not that there was much cause to come. There was nothing to do, no one to meet, nothing to shop for. The sightseeing consisted of dirt, gravel, weeds, kilometers of steel rail, and a few hundred train cars. It was all fenced in, and she had to drive around a bit before she got to a place where authorized personnel could pass through a gate and get into the yard itself.
Beside the gate, a uniformed rent-a-cop sat in a box not much bigger than one of those huge American refrigerators, manning a radio and minding his own business. At the sight of him it dawned on her that she had no idea how to proceed. Usually she’d have her badge, gun, radio, and probably a partner. Had she come in a squad car, dispatch would know right where she was, and given the severity of the situation, by now she probably would have called for a tactical team. As a civilian, she had none of those assets. The safest thing to do—in fact, the only intelligent thing to do—was to dial 110 and wait.
Mariko wasn’t very good at waiting.
Furukawa could fake the dispatch call and get a tac team down here. But he might send assassins instead. Besides, Mariko wanted this to be a win for the TMPD, not the Wind. She called Han.
“Hey,” he said, “what’s up?”
“You said quid pro quo, neh? I’ve got something for you. Shinagawa rail yard, lots of trucks moving in and out all morning. I’m sitting outside a gate looking at about a million tire tracks leading in and out of the yard—”
“And you’d badge your way through it and go snooping around, except you’re not carrying a badge today. Got it. I’ll be there as soon as possible.”
“Call—”
“SWAT,” he said. “I know.”
“I was going to say HRT. Well, SWAT too, but if we’re lucky and this is a hit, it’s really a job for hostage rescue.”
“Good idea. I’m on my way. Oh, and Mariko?”
“Yeah?”
“Ahh, never mind. I was going to tell you to do yourself a favor and don’t go in there. No chance of that, huh?”
“Nope.”
“Then do yourself a different favor: don’t get caught.”
43
Mariko’s method of not getting caught was a little unorthodox. She drove right up to the gate guard and said, “Hey, I’m pretty sure I heard a crying kid back there.”
He looked down at her with an apprehensive look, but not the kind she expected to get. He wasn’t worried about a kid in danger, or how a kid got past him, or how completely screwed he’d be if his boss found out a kid got past him. Mariko would have read any of those easily enough, and she’d have sympathized with all of them. This was different. He seemed more concerned about Mariko than anything else.
Usually flashing a badge sped things along in this sort of situation, but this guy was giving her a different vibe. She leaned in, lowered her voice a bit, and said, “We don’t want anyone hearing those kids, do we?”
“What?”
Uh-oh, Mariko thought. Maybe she’d misread him entirely. But she’d already grabbed the tiger by the tail; the only thing to do was hold on. “What if some random person on the street hears one of the kids? That could ruin everything, neh? So maybe one of us ought to head back there and have a look around.”
His suspicion deepened. “Who are you?”
“Relax,” she said, saying it as much to herself as to him. She’d read him correctly after all. “I’m with you, brother. A servant of the Purging Fire.”
He loosened up, but only for an instant. The two of them spoke the same l
anguage; that was what set him at ease. But he had been placed here to carry out his holy errand; the thought of duty strengthened his resolve.
“Say the words,” he said.
Mariko gulped. Her only weapon was her Pikachu, but the cultist was well out of reach. He was armed with a radio. That was all he’d need to contact whoever was watching the children. Mariko was certain this gate guard wasn’t alone. He would have been the one to admit all the trucks, but there had to be someone on the other end to direct them. One quick call and all of those kids were as good as dead—if they weren’t dead already.
“Say the words.” His voice was ice cold. He picked up the radio.
“There is no place the Divine Wind cannot reach?”
Mariko’s breath froze in her lungs. He put the radio to his mouth. “One coming down,” he said. Then, to her, “Car thirteen oh four. You can’t drive that, though. People will see. Take one of the carts.”
She looked in the direction he was pointing, and used the brief moment facing away from him to recover from fright. Her situation wasn’t rosy yet, but at least she’d kept it from going right to hell. She gave the guard a nod, then pulled the BMW into line with the row of little electric carts he’d indicated. They bore Japan Railways logos and they all had keys in the ignition. Mariko hopped in the first one and zipped off into the rail yard.
It occurred to her as she drove along that a lone undercover officer posing as a cultist might actually have been the TMPD’s best bet against that gate guard. Much safer than a fully armed tac team, she figured. Cops weren’t military; they weren’t allowed to shoot just because a suspect raised a radio to his mouth. Joko Daishi had trained his people with code phrases; surely they’d have one that meant “kill the hostages.” Mariko had seen his handiwork at the house in Kamakura. Pull one lever and the death chamber flooded with hydrogen cyanide gas. There was no reason he couldn’t rig a train car the same way.