lost her sergeant’s stripes. Pulling rank wasn’t an option anymore.
So she’d spent two laborious days screening all the footage herself. Fortunately, she’d never had much patience for paperwork, which meant she had a perpetual backlog, which gave her an airtight excuse to ride a desk for two days straight. At last she’d tracked the woman in white to a blind spot between two cameras in Kabuki-cho, Tokyo’s red-light district. A third camera was pointing right where she needed it, but karma must have been feeling pissy that morning, because a pigeon had made its nest right in front of the lens. Instead of a visual on where her target went to ground, Mariko had a close-up shot of twigs and molted feathers.
Not to be daunted, Mariko played the last trick in her book. Narcotics kept meticulous records: arrests, convictions, seizures, and—of particular importance for Mariko—addresses. Mariko had only to draw a half-kilometer radius around the blind spot, then check the files for violent crime busts or suspicious person calls within that circle. If the woman in white had priors, maybe she also had criminal friends she could hide out with after assaulting a cop.
The most promising hit had been the Sour Plum, and so here she was, sitting next to the proprietor and poking at the printed screen shots she’d pulled from the various camera feeds. “Does she come here often?” Mariko said. “Did she come here Wednesday morning?”
Lee shrugged. “Couldn’t say.”
Mariko sighed. “And suppose I were to ask you how many fingers and toes you have?”
“Couldn’t say.”
She got the idea. Lee would clam up until he saw a lawyer, and even then he wouldn’t say much. But Mariko had a keen sense for lies. In her line of work, it was an indispensable skill. And that sense of hers said Lee wasn’t lying. He honestly hadn’t seen the woman before.
Mariko could feel her frustration mounting. It stiffened the muscles of her skull, like a giant hand clamping down on her head. She wanted nothing more than to jump behind the bar and pour herself a shot and a beer, but general orders prohibited drinking on duty. She considered violating orders anyway, but then the flat-panel TV mounted over the bar distracted her. Mariko went behind the bar, found the remote control, and turned up the volume.
She instantly wished she hadn’t.
“—eighteen deaths and counting,” the reporter was saying. “Police say the only common thread between them is that all eighteen were employed at St. Luke’s or were patients there.”
Behind him was a towering wall of blue glass that Mariko recognized immediately. The mere sight of it made her shiver like she’d seen a ghost. It was in the operating room of St. Luke’s International Hospital that surgeons had removed a meter of razor-sharp Inazuma steel from her gut. She was almost pronounced dead after Fuchida Shuzo ran her through with Beautiful Singer. Her sole piece of good fortune that day was that he’d gutted her right across the street from a top-notch surgical unit.
Now there were eighteen more ghosts to associate with St. Luke’s. “The cause of death is thought to be ricin poisoning,” the reporter went on. “Because the poison can take as long as five days to kill once it enters a person’s system, it is not known how many others have already been exposed. Hospital authorities and the National Police Agency urge everyone who is experiencing the following symptoms to go to the emergency room immediately—”
The reporter went on, but Mariko wasn’t listening. She was wondering how she could show a connection between the ricin deaths and the Divine Wind. There was no doubt in her mind that Joko Daishi was responsible. He didn’t have his mask anymore, so in all likelihood he believed he’d lost his divine guidance, but he may well have ordered the attack before the mask was stolen. For that matter, he might have authorized high-ranking lackeys to execute such attacks independently. Only one thing was certain: attacking a hospital fit perfectly with Joko Daishi’s modus operandi.
His goal was to enlighten the people, and his method was to disrupt their faith in all of the things that kept life stable and harmonious. That included medical facilities. St. Luke’s was supposed to be a place you went to get better; now going there could kill you. If ricin took days to kill, then everyone who had gone to St. Luke’s this week had to wonder if they had also been poisoned. Everyone who felt