Including you, Mariko told herself. Furukawa’s math was perfectly clear: one living cult leader equals dozens of dead civilians. Mariko was no assassin, but she had to accept the consequences that came with that decision.
“Come on, let’s go inside,” she said. “Let me fix you some tea.”
Once they were in the house, Shoji’s domestic instincts kicked back in. Under her roof, she would be the one to make the tea. She was most insistent, so Mariko wandered into the sitting room.
She loved this room. This was where she’d had her most important conversations with Yamada-sensei. It was where he became a grandfather to her. It even still smelled like him—or rather, it was redolent of old books, a smell she would forever associate with him. Bookshelves lined the walls, and technically every last volume belonged to Mariko. Yamada-sensei had left everything to Shoji in his will, but since none of the books were in Braille, she’d given them all to her old friend’s protégé. Shoji insisted on keeping them here since she knew Mariko’s apartment was far too small to house them all. “I’ll be your library,” she’d said at the time. “That way you’ll be sure to come visit.”
Mariko didn’t visit as often as she’d like. Shoji-san had been a friend to Mariko when no one else was there. They’d met soon after Yamada-sensei’s murder, right in the morgue. She had invited Mariko to tea and Mariko said yes. That had evolved into an invitation to come home with her and catch a nap and a shower. Again Mariko had agreed. It ran totally against Mariko’s nature to leave herself vulnerable in a strange place, but she’d done it anyway. Somehow it felt as if she and Shoji had known each other for decades.
In fact, there was a sense in which they had—a very weird sense, but then everything was weird when it came to Shoji’s senses. She was a goze, a seer, possibly the only one alive. There was a time when Mariko put as much stock in goze as she had in space aliens, but as a detective, she had to accept whatever the evidence told her. If little green men beamed down and bowed to her, Mariko would have bowed back, and if a little blind lady foretold her future, then Mariko would listen.
“Shoji-san,” Mariko said, drifting toward the kitchen, “does the name Furukawa Ujio mean anything to you?”
“Hm. That’s not a name I expected to hear from you.”
“So you know him?”
“I used to. He was . . . well, you could say he was my son’s doctor.”
Mariko’s brain did a stutter step. “I didn’t know you had a son.”
“No? I guess not. We don’t talk much about family, do we, dear?”
“No . . .” Mariko trailed off; most of her attention was dedicated to catching up with her own thoughts. Shoji knew Furukawa. Furukawa was—how did she put it? Her son’s doctor. Not our family doctor, which would have suggested a general practitioner. A specialist, then. Was he a pediatrician? Or did her son have special medical needs? How rude was it to ask? More to the point, Mariko asked herself, how rude am I willing to be?
Shoji came into the sitting room carrying a platter with a steaming tetsubin pot, two matching teacups, two tea bags, and a little plate of sandwich cookies. She walked slowly but surely, without the aid of her cane. Carrying out domestic duties seemed to have bolstered her spirits; she was totally unlike Mariko in that respect. “There,” she said, “let’s sit. Now why should you have run across the name Furukawa Ujio? Is he in trouble?”
That sounded alarm bells in Mariko’s mind. “Why do you ask?”
“Because you’re a police detective. Don’t sound so suspicious. If you must know, I’ve been quite glad not to hear from Furukawa-san. It’s about time he ran afoul of the law.”
San, not sensei, Mariko thought. Doctors always received the honorific sensei, even the ones who deserved to go to prison. Well-mannered women of Shoji’s generation would never make that slip. The only reason she didn’t refer to Yamada as sensei was that she thought of him as her old friend Keiji, not the PhD from Todai. So what did that mean about Furukawa? A doctor without a doctorate?
“He’s not dead, is he?”
“What?” Mariko said.
“Furukawa-san. He wasn’t killed in one of those automobile accidents, was he? Or in that horrible business at St. Luke’s?”
“No.”
“It’s been a long time since I’ve been grateful to