hold him. So unless you have further evidence . . .”
Sakakibara leaned in a few centimeters closer. Hamaya shrank back. Kusama imagined he could hear the window flexing under the man’s weight. “Further evidence?” Sakakibara snorted at him like a bull preparing to charge. “How about boasting about his goddamned ‘sermons’? Your client just admitted to twenty-three counts of murder at St. Luke’s alone.”
“No. He spoke of the sermons, not his sermons.”
“Says you. Maybe I remember something different.”
“Then the digital record will prove you wrong.” Hamaya smiled feebly. “I took the precaution of wiring myself for sound.”
A rumbling like distant thunder welled up from somewhere in Sakakibara’s chest. He looked the cringing man up and down like a K-9 dog sniffing for drugs. His right hand rose high as if to deliver a backhanded slap, but instead of striking Hamaya he brushed his necktie aside to reveal a tiny microphone from one of those spyware/surveillance shops, clipped through one of the buttonholes in his shirt. Kusama immediately shifted his attention to Joko Daishi. If the madman was wired, there was no hope of spotting it in that thicket of a beard.
“You need a better attorney,” Kusama told the terrorist sitting in front of him. “Any breach of the peace that alarms and disturbs the citizenry constitutes disorderly conduct. I’d say Lieutenant Sakakibara looks alarmed and disturbed, wouldn’t you?”
Joko Daishi replied with one of his childlike smiles. Hamaya wasn’t quite so cheerful. “He looks that way,” the lawyer said, still cringing. “But legally, police officers cannot be ‘alarmed and disturbed.’ It’s an important check on your abuse of authority, as I’m sure your lieutenant understands. I can quote the case law if you like.”
“No need,” Kusama said. He knew the law as well as anyone. “At ease, Lieutenant.”
Sakakibara growled and fumed, but in the end he stood down. He left his feet planted right where they were, though, so Hamaya had to squirm awkwardly around him to find a less compromising place to stand.
“If you didn’t come to confess,” Kusama asked, “why are you here?”
“To bring you to the light.” Joko Daishi leaned forward a little in his chair, as if sharing a secret. The truth was that he couldn’t lean back—not with his hands cuffed behind his back—but even so, his posture suggested intimacy, even across the vast expanse of Kusama’s desk.
“You think you protect your city with your lies,” the lunatic said. “Instead you only help to fan the flames of the Purging Fire. Today those flames illuminate the truth. Today the people will learn the Haneda sermon was not the false teaching of some foreign terrorist. They will see your forked tongue for what it is. When they learn you have deceived them from the beginning, you will lose their trust. I will expose you all as the defenders of delusion—”
And there’s not a goddamn thing I can do about it, Kusama thought. Not legally, anyway. The son of a bitch was right. Worse yet, Oshiro was right. She’d warned him against implicating Jemaah Islamiyah. She told him this day would come. When the public learned the full truth about Joko Daishi, it would be the most scathing scandal the TMPD had ever seen. As soon as it came out that Kusama had a Japanese suspect for Terminal 2, the media would ask how he’d known. That would expose the cover-up of the attempted Korakuen station bombing. Then it would come out that Joko Daishi was released from custody just hours before the first bomb went off at Haneda. Now the prime suspect would walk again, even as reporters flooded through the front door to attend Kusama’s press conference. Some of them might literally bump into Joko Daishi as he left the building.
And then, goddamn her, Oshiro would regain her celebrity. The woman didn’t have the patience to fend off a lengthy siege. The reporters would hound her day in and day out, demanding to know why her superiors dragged her name through the mud after Korakuen. Sooner or later she would lose her composure and mention Kusama by name. That would spell the end of his career. He had willingly besmirched the name of a hero. What did it matter that he outranked her? What did it matter that she was legitimately a pain in the ass? Insubordination paled in comparison to a deliberate assault on her honor.
Kusama wished he believed in the seven gods of good fortune. If he started praying now, maybe they would bring