an irritated glare on her way out the door, and what she saw stopped her dead. Someone else had exactly the same idea about the ladder and the drill. Four empty holes described a rectangle in the wall, maybe ten or fifteen centimeters lower than the camera’s current perch. Someone had elevated it.
Following a hunch, she went outside and looked around for her least favorite traffic camera, the one obstructed by the pigeon’s nest. She spotted it, but not the nest. Only remnants of the nest remained, almost as if they’d been glued to the camera just to obstruct its view of the blind spot.
Just like that, the blind spot became the Blind Spot. It wasn’t bad luck or poor timing or anything else. It was a creation, not an accident. Someone was hiding something here, someone connected to the woman in white. Whoever these people were, they’d taken extraordinary measures not to be found. Deliberately blinding a police surveillance cam was one thing, but it took a new level of paranoia to search the surrounding businesses for additional cameras to reposition.
Wait, Mariko thought. Paranoia? How far down that road had she gone herself?
What lengths would someone have to go to in order to move the hotel camera? Mariko’s earlier fantasy was totally untenable; no business would allow a stranger to barge in toting a ladder and a drill. It would have to be the love hotel’s handyman, or else a technician from the contractor that installed the security system in the first place. And contrary to the trope in so many movies, a person couldn’t just show up with a toolbox and coveralls and expect to be given free rein to start drilling away. There would be bids, work orders, invoices, signatures, entries on the hotel manager’s calendar. Faking all of that would take considerable resources. All so that just in case some bullheaded cop decided to look for one particular taxi stopping along one particular fifty-meter stretch of roadway, she wouldn’t find anything.
That, or a manager decided the lobby would look nicer if the camera were fifteen centimeters higher.
Obviously the second theory was better. Obviously the first one was a textbook case of paranoia. So why was Mariko so sure the first one was correct?
She knew of just two people who might have been able to help her answer that question. One of them was dead. The other was too busy to return her calls. Right then and there, she decided the second one had kept her waiting long enough.
Her phone told her it was eleven o’clock, late enough that it was impolite to call. She called anyway.
“Let me guess,” Han said. “There’s a spider in your apartment and you want a big strong man to kill it.”
“Yeah. You know any?”
“Ouch.” There was a little rasp to his voice, as if she’d just roused him from bed. She knew him well enough to know the opposite was true: he never went to bed before midnight, which meant he was probably still on duty toward the end of a double-shift.
She said, “You heard about St. Luke’s?”
“Mm-hm. You thinking what I’m thinking?”
“It’s him. For sure.”
An ambulance hissed by on rain-slicked tires, running neither lights nor siren. Mariko wondered who was in back, who was driving, whether anyone in there was going to test positive for ricin poisoning in the next day or two. But that was a rabbit hole she couldn’t afford to go down at the moment. Instead she asked, “Did you have a chance to read any of those notebooks I loaned you?”
“Yeah. I’ve been meaning to call you about them, actually. I have some thoughts to bounce off you.”
“Me too. Come down to Kabuki-cho and have a drink with me.”
“Ooooh,” Han said, “Kabuki-cho? I didn’t think you were into nudie bars.”
“Ah, what the hell. Maybe Kusama was right to demote me. Maybe I should explore new career opportunities.”
Han chuckled. “Then allow me to be your guide, my lady. I know all the finest establishments. I can meet you down there in—oh, shit. Mariko, I have to go.”
Mariko heard the squawk of a shoulder mic in the background. “What is it?” she said. “Are you at Terminal 2? What’s going on?”
“I—I have to go. Let’s do breakfast tomorrow. Eight o’clock?”
“Okay.”
The line went dead, reminding Mariko all over again that bringing down Sour Plum and Yuki was child’s play compared to the case she wished she was working. It wasn’t a comforting thought to go to sleep by.
14
Mariko wasn’t