waiting for the hammer to fall. She knew exactly how Captain Kusama had come to learn of her efforts to track the woman in white. Someone had tipped him off. The same someone had been stalking her electronically for almost a week. Two days ago her stalker had tipped his hand. Deliberately. When she discovered the underground command center below the Blind Spot, she found a step-by-step report of her search for the woman in white. Dates, times, camera locations, informant files accessed, warrants requested, incident reports in various stages of completion. All of it.
Now her stalker must have delivered that report to Captain Kusama. Mariko had foreseen that possibility from the moment she and Han discovered the report. Since that day, she hadn’t had a good night’s sleep. But now the hammer was finally falling—right on her head, but at least the waiting was over. Kusama would do his worst, and then Mariko wouldn’t have to imagine what the worst might look like.
“I assigned a few officers from Internal Affairs to study your traffic camera feed. They could find no connection to any of the narcotics cases you’re supposed to be working.”
“We nailed Lee Jin Bao on a buy-bust at the Sour Plum—”
“Unless you want to lose your detective assignment and spend the rest of your career as a meter maid, you will not interrupt me again. Is that clear?”
“Yes, sir,” she told the knot of cherry wood.
“No connection. That’s what they told me. And since I assigned you specifically to work only narcotics cases, I now have no choice but to reprimand you.”
That was bullshit and Mariko knew it. A captain in the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department had enormous power over the system. He could do more or less whatever he wanted. But Mariko chose to keep this to herself.
“As of this moment you are relieved of duty,” Kusama said. “I think two weeks without pay is a good start. I may extend that if Internal Affairs requests more time to investigate your indiscretions. Any questions?”
Just one, Mariko thought. Who gave you that list? It was that person, not Kusama, who had forced the issue of her suspension. Kusama was jerking around at the end of someone else’s string.
Ever since she got mugged, Mariko had been trying to figure out who the puppet master was. The woman in white had been her best lead—her only lead, in fact, and she’d already followed it as far as it would go. Getting suspended was almost a blessing; if she couldn’t continue the investigation, she couldn’t fail at it day after day.
“Good,” the captain said, misinterpreting her silence. “You have one hour to make all the necessary arrangements. After that, you will have no further access to departmental resources.”
Fine, Mariko thought. I haven’t accomplished anything with them anyway.
She left Kusama’s office as gracefully as she could. The “necessary arrangements” he’d spoken of were few. She had to check in her badge and she had to inform Lieutenant Sakakibara just how far the captain had kicked his boot up her ass. Her service weapon was already locked up, leaving Mariko to wonder what she’d do if she suddenly found she needed a gun. If her electronic stalker decided to do some physical stalking, she could only hope he preferred a sword fight to a drive-by.
Sakakibara wasn’t in, which was the first stroke of luck she’d had all week. She’d send him the news via e-mail and avoid the verbal curb-stomping he’d have dished out if she’d told him face-to-face. Agonizing over just how to phrase it took about seven minutes. Aborting that plan and just blurting everything that needed to be said took less than two minutes. Kusama had given her an hour to leave the building, of which she had fifty-one minutes left to find the Wind.
But how? She had Google and her own two feet, and beyond that her search capabilities were limited. The department had many more tools at its disposal, but Mariko had exhausted them already. She’d identified the man who owned the strip club that sat atop the underground command center. He paid weekly protection money to the local boryokudan strongman, but that was his only illegal activity. According to public records, the command center didn’t even exist. Mariko had gone so far as to track down which electrical cables supplied the strip club and which supplied the command center, and followed up on who was paying the command center’s bills. She learned that the bills were