He answered his phone with, “He left Sato unguarded, pushed into my space and, kicked my cat. I didn’t shoot him. I could have shot him, dumped his body, and let everyone think Sato had slipped his leash.”
“I’m giving you a chance. Stop pulling guns on people or I’ll have you put down.”
He clenched down on a growl. The kitten climbed up to his shoulder to rumble counterpoint in his other ear.
“You find anything at the girl’s apartment which could tell us where she’s taking the katana?” Ananth asked.
“No.” He had the feeling that it was the other way around. The katana was taking Nikki Delany someplace. If the kami possessed her too long, though, it would kill her. If all the abandoned pieces of her life told a true story, her death would be sad. “I’ll call you if I find her.”
Nikki sat back in the seat, biting down on a groan. If she was writing the truth, then Scary Cat Dude had her wallet and passport. If.
She still needed to go to her apartment. She needed to see for herself what the truth really was.
12
Erased
She got through Umeda in record time as Atsumori guided her. “How do you know your way around better than me?”
“I am a god and you are not.” Atsumori used her mouth to speak. It was a weirdly uncomfortable feeling, and she decided not to ask any more questions.
She dithered on the corner across from her building, pretending to study the selection of drinks in the vending machine. It was a Coke machine with all the familiar soda logos sporting kanji lettering. Her focus, though, was on her balcony. The light was off in her apartment—the last she could clearly remember, it had been on. She didn’t have her keys. If whoever turned off the light also locked the door—Atsumori, the Scary Cat Dude, the police—then she had no way to get in without talking to the landlord. If the landlord wanted to unlock the door herself, there be no way the woman would miss the dead body on the floor.
If it was still on the floor.
Maybe the light bulb had burned out.
She wasn’t accomplishing anything out on the corner. This was the first real concrete proof that what she wrote wasn’t a forgotten news report wrapped in insanity. She had to go and see the truth for herself. The bloody insanity or the clean impossibility. She steeled herself to walk across the street and into her building.
The lobby was empty. A security camera on the elevator fed video to a monitor opposite the elevator’s door. Nikki glanced at the screen as she pushed the call button. The elevator car was up on the ninth floor. Its doors were closing, whoever had gotten off already out of sight.
There was a long pause as the electronics considered possible directions, and then slowly the car started down to the lobby.
“Come on, come on.” Nikki whispered to it, trying to watch both the monitor and the lobby door at the same time.
She was aware of a tension shimmering through her body; Atsumori was readying for a fight. The ritual at Inari’s shrine had apparently eliminated all barriers between them. She felt him merging, with her and she no longer blacked out. It was weirdly uncomfortable—like she suddenly had been made a glove—but she preferred it to losing consciousness.
She wanted to tell him to stay out of her, but she was afraid that she might need him.
The elevator doors opened. A mirror hung on the back wall of the car, probably in an attempt to make the tiny space seem bigger. Her reflection had Atsumori’s fierce brown eyes. She stepped onto the elevator and turned around so she wasn’t facing the mirror. For some odd reason, the security camera hadn’t caught her entering. According to the video monitor, the elevator was empty.
Keeping an eye on the monitor, she stepped closer to the camera and then raised her hand up to cover its lens. The monitor still showed an empty car with the doors standing open.
She smacked the camera lens. “I’m here! Show me!”
The monitor continued to deny her existence as it showed the doors closing.
Had someone looped the video feed? She hit the “Open” button, and the screen showed the doors reopening. No. She just wasn’t there according to the monitor or maybe just her perception of the monitor. Which had gone crazy: her or the universe?
The frightening truth was that it made more sense for it to be her.
She punched the “6” button and rode up to her floor. The dead body of a man she had killed shouldn’t be comforting, but part of her really hoped that was what she would find in her apartment. It would be there, real and undeniable. If it was gone she would be faced with two possibilities: that there had never been a dead man, or that she had written a true account of some secret organization quietly covering up a murder. The first was so much more logical and reasonable than the second.
She felt like she was racing around and around the question of whether she was crazy. It had always been comforting to run through the symptoms of schizophrenia and not find any of them in herself. The last few days had rattled her confidence. Delusions of being possessed, hearing voices, and believing in secret conspiracies were classic symptoms. She knew that schizophrenic patients could weave a tight fabric of delusions that even a sane person couldn’t unravel because of the interdependent logic. “Invisible aliens controlled people via messages hidden in cellphone signals” was impossible to disprove, since the aliens were invisible and the messages concealed. “Japanese spirits living in swords” wasn’t that far removed from invisible aliens.
Was her very attempt to cling to the claim of sanity proof that she was insane?
The elevator dinged as it stopped on the sixth floor. After a pause, the door rolled open. She stepped out, her footsteps loud in the bare concrete hallway.
At her door, she hesitated. Which did she really want? Dead body or clean room? Proof that she’d been attacked or complete lack of evidence?
Taking a deep breath, she opened the door.
The room held the new tatami smell of freshly cut hay. The bathroom door was closed; there was no hole cut through the fabric. The room was cleaner than when she even moved in and certainly the neatest it had ever been while she was living there. Everything was carefully put into place. Her Post-it Notes were all missing, and the wall looked newly painted.
“Damn you,” she whispered.
Fighting to control her anger, she stepped into her apartment and closed the door.
“What is wrong?” Atsumori asked.
“I almost died here. I killed a man. And they erased it all until only the absence of dirt stands as evidence.”
“Who are they?”
“I don’t know.”
Her keys sat on her table, in full view of the door, beside her purse. Anyone else would have thought she had just stepped out for some harmless errand—like taking out the trash—and just never came back. Whispering curses, she snatched up her purse and rooted through it. The useful clutter of her life—her iPod, packs of tissues, and city maps—was all there. Her passport, driver’s license, and credit cards were all gone.
The Scary Cat Dude had taken them. Somehow, she had to get them back.
13
The Castle
Still shaking with anger, Nikki stripped off her borrowed yukata, pulled on underwear, dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, quickly packed her suitcase with the rest of her clothes, and then fled. She had planned to go straight to the train station and go to Nara, where Pixii lived. She couldn’t leave, though, until she managed to get back her passport and wallet.
Osaka Castle sat in the heart of the city, a pocket left over from the past, surrounded by a nearly half-square-mile park. Around it was a deep moat filled with jade-green water. Wide stone ramps led up to great iron-clad wood gates looking big enough for elephants to pass through. A cobblestone road wound uphill, between walls of massive stones fitted together like the building blocks of a giant child. Beyond a second gate were a dojo and a Shinto shrine and yet a third gate leading to a courtyard at the foot of the towering castle. Dusk was racing
toward night. She’d been to the castle enough times to know that the little gift shops and food stands in the stone courtyard were still open but the entire park area would be practically deserted. She hit the stand selling fried octopus dumplings, takoyaki, and retreated to the shrine to think.
Who were these bastards? What right did they have to come into her apartment and erase all evidence that she had fought for her life against a supernatural monster? Okay, maybe it was a good thing that they’d taken away the body. A dead raccoon dog in a business suit would have been hard to explain to the landlord.
Why did the tanuki attack her?
In her novel, Harada worked for a yakuza crime boss. Harada had heard about the shrine fire, gone to Gregory Winston’s apartment to collect the katana, and lost his temper when Gregory told him that he didn’t currently have the sword. How did Harada end up at her apartment? Had he followed her from the train station? No, he’d come disguised as Tanaka, so he must have known the detective had questioned her. It suggested that the yakuza had access the police records but not necessarily cooperation, or Tanaka would have come himself.
When had Harada taken over Tanaka’s identity?
It was possible that the person that arrested her had been Harada all along. Once she considered the possibility, though, it seemed more likely that she had been questioned originally by the real Tanaka. Harada would never have taken her to the police station in the first place.
“What’s wrong?” Atsumori interrupted her thoughts.
She blinked, and realized she was sitting with a takoyaki halfway to her mouth. “Huh?”
“You—you made a noise.”
“Oh, um, I thought of something.”
She had chosen to hide at the Hokoku Shrine inside the castle’s compound so she could see Atsumori when he spoke to her. She didn’t need her sanity rattled any more than it already was. They were in the back of the shrine in a secluded rock garden, well out of sight of the gate. The boy god had been pacing restlessly around the small grassy islands that the rocks sat on. It felt like they had slipped into a twilight world, the setting sun spilling gold light over the rock garden and the thick castle walls secluding them from the distant traffic. The only sound she could hear was his footsteps crunching on the gravel and the caws of crows.
“What did you think of?” he asked.
She gave a bitter laugh and lowered her chopsticks, resting the octopus dumpling back with its brethren. “Oh, it just occurred to me that if I had done the sane thing, I wouldn’t have had you with me when Harada came to my apartment. I would have been sitting there, sorting through all the bric-a-brac of my life, thinking that the only peerson I needed to stay one step ahead of was my mother.”
He frowned slightly. “You are running from your mother?”
“She thinks I’m crazy.” She laughed bitterly again. “If I tried to explain any of the last twenty-hours to her, she’s going to know I’m crazy.”
“You are not insane.”
“Says the god,” Nikki murmured and picked the takoyaki back up with her chopsticks. “Are you hungry? Do you eat?”
“I feed upon the spirit of the offering.”
She winced. Put that way, it made him sound like a vampire. She understood what he really meant. Maybe. She believed that he was nourished not by the food but the goodwill behind it. “Here. You can have the rest of these.” The takoyaki were good but rich and slathered with sauce and mayonnaise. They were only sold in eight packs as a traditional pun on the fact that octopi had eight tentacles. “I’m stuffed.”
He came to sit beside her, the takoyaki on his lap as if he was about to open them up and eat them. She lay back on the stone patio and watched the sunlight fade out of the sky.
Good news: she didn’t have a homicidal stalker hacking her data files, and the slightly unhinged shape-changing assassin was dead. There were, however, two organizations moving through the shadows, both possibly criminal in nature, looking for the katana. The yakuza had proven that they were willing to kill to get it. The other one had a weird “James Bond” feel to it—as if the British Secret Service were employing Frenchmen and monsters.
Scary Cat Dude was right that, with cash, she could make her way to any point in Japan without leaving a paper trail. She could most likely bolt to Tokyo without fear of trouble following.
While she had a thousand dollars worth of yen in hand, she would need access to her bank accounts sooner or later. Without proof of identification, she couldn’t replace her bank card. And there was the small technicality that she was only legally in the country for another thirty days.
She needed to get her passport back. In the United States, she could have breezed through life without it. In Japan, though, everyone who looked at her knew that she didn’t belong. Everything from the shape of her eyes to the color of her hair marked her as a foreigner.
So how did she go about contacting Scary Cat Dude?
He had a cell phone. If she could find out his number, she could call him. She didn’t know his real name. He was, however, one of her characters. She might be able to write a scene where he told someone his phone number.
She sat up, dug out her notebook and pen, and, in the gathering darkness, started to write.
It took him the rest of the day to find out anything about Nikki Delany. She hid everything about herself behind an impenetrable wall of secrecy. Both her phone and her flash drive were protected with passwords. In the case of the flash drive, it was ten characters of upper-and lower-case letters mixed heavily with numbers. He needed to call in a favor to have both passwords cracked. The flash drive had word-processing documents; the handwritten information in the notebooks typed in and embellished. There was nothing of her: no address book or e-mails or calendar.
The prepaid cell phone had been decorated with cherry-blossom stickers and a half-dozen overly cute charms dangling from straps. It looked like a phone that any Japanese teenage girl would be carrying. It was utterly devoid, though, of personal data. There were no numbers in the contact list. Despite Nikki obviously bolting from her apartment, the incoming and outgoing call logs were all scrubbed clean. If he hadn’t taken it from her purse, he wouldn’t have been able to guess it belonged to her.
Who was this girl? Why was she so careful?
The phone did have dozens of photos, but only of manhole covers, vending machines, and bicycle chains. He thumbed through a collection of links, sprockets, and chain guards from various city bikes, wondering at her fascination. What did they have to do with a kami enshrined in a stolen katana and a dead tanuki?
He was about to abandon the phone when it rang. He read the caller ID as he waited for the call to drop to voice mail. It was a local number; Nikki Delany knew at least one person in Osaka.
Luckily Miriam Frydman wasn’t as secretive as Nikki Delany. By the start of evening rush hour, he knew her life history. Miriam was the middle child of four siblings, and yet the only one that attended a boarding school. That hint of her being a problem child was smoothed over by the fact that she had no criminal record, had graduated from high school with honors, and had been accepted to Princeton University’s East Asian Studies Department. She was in Japan on a work visa, employed as a translator by the gaming company Capcom and living in Osaka. By his standards, she was squeaky clean.
Miriam called Nikki’s phone a dozen more times; she obviously didn’t know that Nikki had abandoned her ID and cell phone at her apartment. If that was the case, she also didn’t know that Nikki had bolted. Most likely, Miriam’s next step would be to visit Nikki’s apartment. Sooner or later, the people who sent the tanuki after Nikki would be looking for their “man.” It would be best if squeaky clean didn’t cross paths with monsters; human or otherwise.
He caught up to Miriam as she stepped onto the subway train. She sensed him before she even saw him moving toward her and shied away, scanning the other passengers with wide frightened eyes until she spotted him. And then her eyes went even wider, as i
f she knew what he was.
He should have guessed that Miriam Frydman would be a Sensitive. Talents like Nikki Delany were like metaphysical bonfires to spiritual moths.
“Ms. Miriam Frydman, I’m with the FBI.” He flashed a badge to prove it, but she didn’t believe him. Even a normal person would have trouble lying to a Sensitive.
She edged toward the door, trying to flee. “I didn’t think FBI had jurisdiction overseas.”
“The FBI investigates any murder of an American citizen abroad,” he stuck as close to the truth as he could. “I’m looking into the murder of Gregory Winston on Saturday night.”
She hit the closed door, and her eyes widened even more. “I don’t know anything about it. Really. My friend is writing a horror novel, and some psycho fan copied one of the murders from the book.”
“Yes, I know.” He knew that Nikki Delany had written Gregory’s murder hours before it happened. It was the most recent file saved on her flash drive. The wall of Post-it Notes was an accurate portrayal of the current condition of Nikki’s work. The novel wasn’t one solid manuscript but hundreds of scenes labeled by the “character’s” initials and a seemingly random numbering scheme. For some reason, though, she had changed everyone’s names. So far he hadn’t been able to identify what name she’d given Simon.
“We think that Miss Delany might be in danger,” he said truthfully. “Do you know where she is?”
The next station was announced, and she relaxed slightly with the promise of escape. “She’s probably doing research for her book. During the week, she visits locations she’s using for her novel. She goes out to Kobe, Kyoto, and such by train.”
In other words, she could be anywhere. “Is she fluent in Japanese?”
“No, but you really don’t need to be to get around.”
The train was slowing down as it entered the next station. All around them, people shifted, readying themselves for the doors to open. Miriam’s relief grew more profound on her face.