him bloody his knuckles on the fiberglass for a while. Then a shomenuchi to the forehead dropped him right on his ass. Her cast was in tatters by the time she was done, but apart from that, she decided she’d logged some good kenjutsu practice tonight.
While the rest of the team searched the Plum for contraband, Mariko hopped onto a stool next to Lee Jin Bao. He sat at his own bar, looking profoundly uncomfortable with his thumbs zip-tied behind him. His breath came loud and angry through his nose. She pulled a couple of hastily folded pages from her back pocket and smoothed them on the spotless countertop. “You ever see this chick before?”
The first page was a grainy black-and-white image captured from a Japan Railways closed-circuit camera, centered on the woman who had kicked Mariko’s ass with the demon mask.
“Couldn’t say.”
Mariko slid the next sheet in front of him: three more pictures of the woman in white, captured from three other security cameras. None of them were high quality, and none of them were head-on. Mariko had a sneaking suspicion that the woman had done that on purpose—that she’d deliberately faced this way or that so the cops couldn’t get a good data set to run facial recognition software.
“How about now?” Mariko said. “Recognize her yet?”
“Couldn’t say.”
“Here, let’s get some of this crap out of your eyes.” She scrubbed Lee’s face with one hand, and not as gently as she could have. Pink flecks of broken cast rained down on the counter. The trickle of blood snaking down from his hairline was now a smear across his forehead. It wasn’t right, taking her frustration out on him, but she’d gone to a lot of work pulling these images and she wanted to see some results.
After getting her ass kicked by the woman in white, Mariko’s first stop wasn’t the ER, but rather the Tokyo Station security office. She knew the station would have dozens of cameras, and she planned to use them to track her assailant out of the building and into the streets. From there she’d hoped to track the woman via traffic camera feed, but by the time she’d climbed the stairs to the security office she felt woozy. After that, her next clear memory was coming to in the back of an ambulance.
No one would have blamed her for taking the rest of the day off. Even if she wasn’t sporting a grade two concussion, the relief work at Haneda had driven her to the brink of exhaustion. But Mariko knew she couldn’t afford to rest. Most security cameras recorded over their own feed, running a perpetual loop to save on data storage, and the length of the loop varied from one camera to the next. As far as she was concerned, the clock was ticking.
So the moment the ER doc had her stitched up, Mariko rushed straight back to the station security office. A flash of her badge gave her an all-access backstage pass. The Haneda bombing had people scared. They would give a cop anything she asked for, and the thought of a warrant never entered their minds.
The first thing she had to search for was the footage of herself, turtling up while getting beaten half to death. Even watching it from the cold remove of recorded video was enough to make her heart race. From there, with the help of the security staff, she’d jumped from one monitor to the next, finally tracking her perpetrator out of the train station and into a taxicab. Then it was back home for Mariko, where a shower and a change of clothes made her look not quite so much like an exsanguinated corpse. From there she’d run off to post.
Tracking that taxi would have been easy enough for any cop with a smidgen of talent when it came to computers, which was to say anyone on the force except for Mariko. Accessing surveillance camera feed was a simple matter of logging in; she didn’t even need a warrant. But after that Mariko was at sea. She could click through one camera at a time, but there were over a hundred surveillance cameras in greater Tokyo—and that was to say nothing of the traffic cams, weather cams, and privately owned Webcams whose owners streamed their feed online for all the world to see. Mariko’s first instinct was to pull rank and order someone from Evidence Division to run the search for her. Then she remembered: she’d