“And what did your lieutenant do, noble man that he is? He kept your partner in the field as long as possible. Then he promoted him to detective again at the first opportunity. And your captain? He was complicit in that promotion. He demoted you without cause. And lest we forget, he has been deliberately deceiving this city for a week straight. Jemaah Islamiyah!” He scoffed. “There isn’t a journalist in the country who could make that story stand—not without evidence, and of course there isn’t any. Only a policeman could get away with such a lie.”
“Look, I told him not to say that stuff—”
“Oh, yes? You and how many others? Where are the legions of officers coming forward to speak the truth? Hundreds could do it, and how many have we seen? Not one. To a man, they stand behind your captain’s lie. And you preach to me about the ethics of your profession.”
Mariko’s cheeks burned. He was right. She could have gone straight to the press with what she knew, but she’d chosen silence instead. This was not the first time Furukawa had showed her an ugly truth about her profession that Mariko hadn’t seen herself. Maybe she’d suspected its existence, but she’d always chosen to look away rather than stare it in the face. She asked herself—not for the first time—how this man could know her own job better than she knew it herself.
“I’ll thank you to listen,” Furukawa said, “and to think carefully before you speak. We did not have a deranged cult leader to abuse as we saw fit. We had a brilliant young man who appeared to have his schizophrenia fully under control. He cultivated that appearance very carefully over the years. You must understand, Detective, Koji-san is a master manipulator. In his presence, you believe what he wants you to believe.”
“Bullshit. I’ve seen him. I’ve talked to him. He’s out of his mind.”
“You saw what he wanted you to see. You underestimated him, you let him loose, and he made you pay the price for that. I do not say this as an insult, Detective Oshiro. He duped me just as he duped you.”
“Then you’re not half as smart as you think you are. I only talked to him once. You worked with him for decades. How did he fool everyone in your organization?”
“By getting results.” As if to accentuate the point, Furukawa sank the eight ball with a hard, stabbing shot. “You must understand, Detective, the border between genius and lunacy is a hazy line at best. True, Koji-san’s methods were unorthodox, but so long as he delivered everything we asked of him, what need was there to question his motives?”
“Come on. The guy founded a cult. That didn’t make you a little curious?”
“Oh, quite the contrary: we marveled at it. It was a ploy so ingenious that it never occurred to any of the shonin. Koji-san’s principal task in recent years was to upset the balance of power in the drug trade—a regular occurrence, you understand. Routine maintenance.”
“Sure. Like an oil change.”
Furukawa ignored her cynicism. “The black market is like any other market: supply and demand reign supreme. Tinker with one or the other and everything changes. Koji-san adopted a radical new approach: the Divine Wind. So long as the cult’s allegiance was to him and not to profit, it could act in unprecedented ways. You saw one instance of that: by flooding the streets with the drug known as Daishi, he flipped the entire amphetamine trade on its head. Ordinarily such gross actions draw scrutiny, and that is something the Wind prefers to avoid. But this new cult leader was not a hidden power to be rooted out; he was an easy mark. If an underboss like Kamaguchi Hanzo took advantage of him, no one would question it.”
“But he didn’t just play Kamaguchi. He played you.”
“It shames me to admit he did. Such is the force of his personality. When he looks you in the eye, you have the distinct sense that he can see into your soul.”
Mariko rolled her eyes. She didn’t believe in souls. She knew all about that zealous look, though. She remembered standing nose to nose with Joko Daishi, gripping two fistfuls of his wiry black beard, looking him in the eye behind that eerie mask of his. Furukawa was right: Joko Daishi’s eyes were different. Darker. Deeper. Like bottomless wells. But Mariko didn’t see genius in there. She just saw