saw it just once, but maybe they’d pick up on if they had some backlogged tape to study.”
“Okay, back to the other thing. We’ve got an unknown assailant, attacking you for unknown reasons, with no perceptible motive, and disappearing to an unknown location, also for reasons unknown. Is that pretty much where we are?”
“You mean fucked? Yeah.”
As they both gazed out the window, a pair of high school girls walked by their window, both of them wearing the ubiquitous tartan Burberry scarf that, by Mariko’s estimation, must have been an obligatory purchase for every Japanese girl above the age of twelve. These two joined the small army of girls that had passed by a little earlier. They had encamped on a large flower planter not far from the front door of the love hotel whose camera Mariko wanted to reposition.
The sight of them suddenly wakened a memory in Mariko’s subconscious: a black-and-white image of matching shoes and matching socks on matching skinny legs. Where had she seen it? On a CCTV feed. In fact, on the love hotel’s CCTV feed; that was the only one pointed so low that it would capture just the legs. . . .
“That’s it!” Mariko said. “Come on. I know how we’re going to find where that bitch went to ground.”
They quickly paid their bill, and Han had to hurry to keep up with Mariko. “Where are we going?” he said.
“To see the girls you wished you went to high school with. No asking for blow jobs.”
She expected some witty repartee, but Han was too confused. “Do you mind telling me how a random group of girls suddenly became persons of interest?”
“I think they were here the morning after the bombing. At exactly the same time your favorite ninja chick was here.”
“What?” Han thought about it for a second. “No way. That was a Wednesday. They would have been in school.”
“Nope. All the schools were closed. Citywide.”
“Huh.” After a few strides, he added, “Good point. But so what?”
“So times have changed and all that. This generation is so different, blah blah blah.”
“Still not following you.”
They’d almost reached the girls, so Mariko slowed to a walk and lowered her voice. “When we were kids, you and I weren’t tethered to a cell phone. We still talked to our friends instead of texting them. And we didn’t have a camera in our pocket every second of every day.”
Now the cartoon lightbulb lit up over Han’s head. “Good call! Let’s do this.”
Mariko didn’t need to fill in the rest. As they closed the last few meters, she wondered whether it was possible to boil down a teenager’s incessant need to take frivolous pictures into some kind of mathematical formula. Oshiro’s Postulate: for every student added to the group, the likelihood that one of them was taking a photo of another one multiplied exponentially, until at critical mass it was a metaphysical certainty that every one of them had been photographed by every other one of them from every possible angle. Mariko had no idea what they did with all the pictures, but she knew the sheer data storage required must have been driving up cell phone prices for years.
“Hello, ladies.” Mariko flashed her badge as she reached the group. Han stood back and let her do the talking. “I wonder if you’d be willing to help us out,” she said. “There was a crime committed in this area and I’m guessing one of you may have inadvertently caught the suspect in the act. Would it bother you if I clicked through some of your pictures?”
Had the girls been of Mariko’s generation, one of them might have been savvy enough to know Mariko needed a warrant. But these girls were raised on Facebook and Twitter. They had no sense of privacy, nor even any sense that privacy was desirable. Their lives were open to the world. They were perfectly happy to let a couple of cops shuffle through their photo albums, and even to watch over Mariko’s and Han’s shoulders, giggling and reminiscing as the pictures flashed by.
In the end they captured three usable images. All three were pixelated and indistinct, mere slivers caught between the girls posing in the foreground. But there she was: the woman in white. In one image she stood in front of a storefront wall. In the next, captured on the same phone just a few seconds after the first one, the wall was there but she was gone. The third, taken by a