of the sermon at the hospital. And so yes, Kusama Shuichi, I weep for you. My very body weeps for you. You are a drowning man swimming ever deeper into darkness. Come back to the light.”
Kusama found himself looking to Lieutenant Sakakibara again. Joko Daishi snickered to see it. It was not often that Captain Kusama found himself speechless. He was keenly aware of his silence now. Despite all the talk of sermons and prophecies, he found he’d fixated on only one thing. “Woman? Which woman?”
Joko Daishi giggled. “The swordswoman. Who else?”
“Oshiro?” Kusama didn’t mean to sound so offended. With half a second’s hindsight he knew it wasn’t Joko Daishi who had given offense. There was no derision to his laughter; it was childlike, even innocent, if that was something one could say of a mass murderer. No, what offended Kusama was that somehow Detective Oshiro managed to wheedle her way right into the middle of this again. She wasn’t in the room. She wasn’t even in the building. So how the hell had she inserted herself into the conversation?
He couldn’t help but notice a self-satisfied gleam in Sakakibara’s eye. Oshiro was his pet. They weren’t fucking, so far as Kusama knew; that was the kind of thing he’d have heard about. Closer to say she was his circus dog. It wasn’t natural, making a woman behave like a man, but Oshiro had a gift for it. Clearly Sakakibara enjoyed showing off how well he’d trained her to prance around on her hind legs.
There was a time when Kusama himself had hoped to use the performing dog to the department’s advantage, but that was before he learned that no one had ever trained her not to bark. Sakakibara must have found her misbehavior endearing, or else he’d have whipped it out of her. His greater offense was that he’d been there when Kusama tried to discipline the bitch himself. The first time Kusama demoted Oshiro, it had been for good cause. The second time—well, he remembered that one only too clearly. He had been at his wit’s end. Exhausted, angry, more than a little scared. The smoke in Terminal 2 was literally rising from the ashes even as he and Oshiro spoke. And then she barked one time too many.
Captain Kusama knew his reaction was petty. Even in the moment he knew it. If he and Oshiro had been alone, he might have found some way to lift his punishment and still save face. But with Sakakibara there, Kusama had no room to backpedal. Oshiro was popular with the rank and file—more so than she even understood herself—and Kusama had punished her unjustly. If he was honest with himself, he hadn’t stopped punishing her. He still blamed her for putting him in the position to do what he did. It was unfair and he damn well knew it, and so now whenever he thought of that woman, he tasted the bile boiling up in the back of his throat.
So it sure as hell didn’t help her case when the most dangerous criminal in the whole damn country came knocking on the front door, looking for a disgraced and uppity ex-sergeant and having to content himself with a highly decorated captain instead. The son of a bitch never even noticed the view.
“Detective Oshiro isn’t here right now,” Kusama said. He managed not to growl. “Not that it matters. Wanted men don’t get to choose which detective interrogates them.”
“My client hasn’t been accused of anything,” Hamaya said.
Kusama snapped his head around so fast he could have given himself whiplash. In truth he’d forgotten the lawyer was there. Hamaya stood in the far corner of the room, gazing down at the city, the traffic, the first yellow tinges of autumn. He’d chosen a black pinstriped suit to match the sling of fine black mesh that cradled his right arm. Kusama couldn’t help but admire the fashion choice.
Sakakibara felt otherwise. He stalked up to stand chest to chest with Hamaya. “You want to say that again?”
The lawyer shrank away from him, having nowhere to go except to lean against the thick windowpane. The glass was engineered to withstand the shear forces of an earthquake, but even so, Hamaya must have been wondering whether it could support his weight. “You held my client on every charge you could,” he peeped. His mousy, frightened eyes flicked like Ping-Pong balls between Sakakibara and the precipitous drop. “Then you let him go, because you had insufficient evidence to