sheathed her Inazuma blade and quickly collected her things. As she did so, she saw she’d received a voice mail from an unknown caller.
She listened to the message as she rode the elevator back down to her mother’s apartment. “Detective Oshiro, this is Captain Kusama,” the little speaker said. “I want you at headquarters right this minute.”
She checked the time stamp on the message. Twenty right-this-minutes ago.
Great, she thought. Yet another wonderful day in the life of Oshiro Mariko.
* * *
By the time she rolled in to post, Mariko’s eyelids felt like they were made of sandpaper. Her most optimistic estimate said she’d logged three hours of sleep. She paused before her reflection in the door and tried to make something of her hair. That was when she noticed the tank.
She turned around and blinked hard, but the tank was still there. It rested on its massive treads in front of the entrance to the Imperial Palace, which stood just across from TMPD HQ. The tank’s cannon pointed not straight ahead but angled benignly upward, as if to suggest that nothing was amiss, that perhaps the tank was parked there as a sort of curiosity, to give camera-happy tourists something other than the palace to shoot. But the truth was clear. There would be other tanks, one at each entrance to the palace, and maybe the National Diet Building too, or city hall, or the governor’s mansion. Paranoia had gripped the highest halls of power.
Mariko was too tired to think about what that meant. She ambled into the elevator, thumbed the button for the eighteenth floor, and leaned in the back corner for the briefest of naps.
“Detective Oshiro to see Captain Kusama,” she told the secretary.
“Go right in.”
Uh-oh, Mariko thought. Having a captain lie in wait for her could not be good. She felt like the goat in Jurassic Park, chained to a post and waiting for the T. Rex.
Kusama was on the phone, but he surprised her with a polite smile and motioned her toward one of the chairs in front of his desk. It was the same one she’d sat in when he’d held her maimed hand, the same one she’d fallen back into after he stripped her of her rank.
Mariko sat in the other chair and waited for him to finish his call. She’d forgotten how handsome he was. Of course, it wasn’t easy to remember the good things about the man who had taken a hatchet to her career.
“Detective Oshiro,” he said, nesting the phone back in its cradle. “You look tired, if you’ll pardon me for saying so. Let me get you a drink. Coffee? Tea?”
“Thank you, sir, but no.”
“Nonsense. Here, I’ll have one myself.” He rang his secretary, who materialized as if by magic with two coffees. Mariko’s was black, one sugar, just how she liked it. She knew Kusama kept tabs on her, and even on her sister’s progress in rehab, but she hadn’t guessed his notes went all the way down to how she took her morning coffee.
“All right, Detective. Let’s get down to business. I’d like to know which reporters you’ve been talking to, and why you thought it was a good idea to start doing my job as well as your own.”
“Sir?”
“Forgive me. You look so tired; perhaps you didn’t notice this on your way in.” He slid a copy of the Daily Yomiuri across the broad, polished surface of his desk.
It was clear that he was trying to keep Mariko off-balance. Forcing her to accept the cup of coffee was old-school alpha male bullshit. Switching between the nice guy stuff and the personal attacks was a newer tactic, but it wasn’t new to Mariko. She used it herself in questioning a suspect. She knew the right way to respond, too: don’t get flustered. Pick a point on the table and stare at it. Talk to it, not to the person asking the questions. Stay distant.
She knew that was what she was supposed to do, but even so, she blanched when she saw the headline. TMPD INSIDER: JEMAAH ISLAMIYAH CONNECTION “TOTALLY BASELESS.”
“I seem to remember a certain conversation,” Kusama said. He spoke in that tone parents took in public with their misbehaving kids: quiet, clipped, each word boiling over with anger. “A private conversation with a very small audience. Only four of us. Back in a dark, secluded corner of Terminal 2. Do you remember it?”
“Yes, sir.” It was a hard one to forget; she’d regained her sergeant’s bars, only