“Where are the cameras?” he demanded.
Sato released the doorknob and took his phone out of his suit pocket. A laser pointer stabbed at least nine locations in the ceiling and walls and light fixtures.
“And at least four cameras in each bedroom and bathroom,” said Sato. “There were a total of sixty-six cameras on this floor. Two hundred and thirty in the building.”
Nick walked over to one of the walls.
“Show me again.”
The laser dot winked on again.
“The lens is tiny or invisible,” said Nick. “But, of course, you removed all the cameras after the murder.”
“Of course,” said Sato. “But you are looking at the wall through your glasses, so you see it as it was the night of the murder. The video pickups are… ah… very discreet.”
Nick laughed at this, although whether it was the idea of two hundred and thirty video cameras in a flashcave-cum-drugpad-cum-whorehouse being discreet or just at how stupid he was this morning, he couldn’t tell and didn’t care.
He swung back to the real Sato and his digital Doppelgänger and said, “All right. Let’s go upstairs.”
Sato turned off the noise and movement of the party behind him as they climbed up the wide, steep staircase.
The four rooms on the third floor had not been tidied up as had the first two floors of the building. They were still as they had looked on the night of the murder almost six years earlier. Nick and Sato both removed their tactical glasses before coming through the door at the top of the stairs and they kept them off as Nick led the way.
They emerged into a formal foyer with an open door to the small kitchen leading off this west end to their left—the DPD investigators had found the kitchen serviceable but almost unused, the fridge holding only a few bottles of beer and champagne—and on the south wall to their right, another high-tech door that opened onto a staircase to the rooftop.
One glance showed Nick that the kitchen looked untouched, but the foyer itself was still littered with the inevitable paper and plastic needle-cover detritus of the EMTs. Why they’d attempted resuscitation on an obvious corpse—other than the fact that the corpse and its father were worth billions of dollars—Nick had no idea. But they had, and some of the mess had spilled out of the bedroom through the living room and into this foyer. The expensive tiles in the foyer and frame of the wide door to the double stairway—there was no elevator, so all the furniture, kitchen appliances, and other large stuff on this floor had been carried up these stairs—were streaked and cracked where the paramedics’ and then the coroner office’s gurneys and equipment had left tracks and gouges. Some slob had stubbed out a cigarette on the tiles.
The foyer narrowed into a short hallway festooned with expensive art. The wide glass-paned doors in the hall led left to the library and straight ahead into the living area and through there into the bedroom.
“Does Bottom-san wish to see any room before we go into the bedroom?” asked Sato.
“Anyone murdered in any of the rooms besides the bedroom?”
“No.”
“Then let’s start with the bedroom,” said Nick.
Sato removed his shoes and left them in the tiled foyer. Nick left his shoes on. He was a cop… had been a cop, at least… not a guest for some fucking Tea Ceremony. Besides, Keigo Nakamura was beyond being offended by some gai-jin barbarian keeping his shoes on in his personal living space. (But Nick was counting on it offending the hell out of Hideki Sato.)
Nick saw that the living room was as large and littered as it had been six years ago. The double bedroom doors were wide open. The trail of paramedic debris seemed to lead to it rather than away from it.
The tac-glasses still in his hand, Nick walked in.
The expansive bedroom still stank of dried blood and brain matter. After all these years? thought Nick. Not likely.
But it did.
Instead of carpet, the floor was covered with rectangles of tatami. Nick had learned when he was a cop that the Japanese still tended to express the size of their rooms in units of the three-by-six-foot mats. A bedroom or tea room, Nick recalled, was often a four-and-a-half-mat room. All sorts of rules applied as to how the mats could meet—never in a grid pattern, he remembered, and there was some rule that in any layout there should never be a point where the corners of three or four mats touch. This bedroom was huge—maybe a thirty-mat room. Only these tatami didn’t smell sweetly of dried grass like the floor of Mr. Nakamura’s office.
The first patch of blood that caught the eye was on the big bed where the crumpled sheets had a dried splatter but the pillows and headboard and a bit of wall showed a head-sized red blotch. This was where the hooker had died. The larger patch of dried blood was on the floor, surrounded by discarded syringe covers and more paper and plastic paramedic detritus. This dried puddle covered all of one tatami and had blobbed over onto two adjacent ones.
Nick glanced into the master bedroom’s large bathroom, checked the four windows, and then came over to stand next to the stained tatami.
“Would you move, please, Bottom-san?”
Sato had his glasses on and now Nick donned his and looked down. He was standing calf deep in Keigo Nakamura’s naked loins. Nick stepped aside but couldn’t resist grinning. He’d done that on purpose.
Keigo’s corpse was naked. The young woman’s corpse on the bed was dressed in jeans and a black bra. Keigo’s throat had been slashed almost all the way through. The young woman—her name was Keli Bracque, Nick remembered—had been shot once in the middle of the forehead. Taking care not to step on or in Keigo again, Nick leaned closer to study Keli’s wound. The .22-caliber round had left a tiny, clean, blue-rimmed hole in her pale forehead but had done its usual damage rattling around in her skull. Twenty-two’s were still one of the weapons of choice for professional assassins, and several of Nick’s DPD investigators had thought this suggested a professional hit.
Nick took two steps back and looked down. If her hit was by a cool professional, then why this messy, rage-driven, amateur-looking job on Keigo? Sending a message? But a message to whom? Mr. Nakamura, obviously. Or maybe all the violence expended in Keigo’s near-decapitation was merely a ruse to throw off investigators from how dispassionate and professional this hit actually was.
There was a red paperback copy of a twentieth-century novel titled Shōgun open on the bedside table only inches from Keli Bracque’s hand.
“These images are better than the death-scene photos I had,” Nick said to Sato. “Who took them?”
“I did. Before the authorities arrived.”
“Better and better,” laughed Nick. “Not only leaving the scene of a crime, but concealing evidence… the video-camera recordings, these photos, the fact of your very existence as Keigo’s head of security. You’ll serve time for sure when an American court is through with you, Hideki-san.”
Nick knew that he was repeating himself but he enjoyed hearing the charges again. Sato showed no more response than he had the first time.
“You’re sure there are no animated tac images this time?” asked Nick.
“As I said, we had no cameras on the third floor, Bottom-san,” Sato said.
“Yeah,” said Nick, letting the sarcasm drip. He walked back to the bed, stepping on and through Keigo’s head this time. If Sato was squeamish, fuck him.
Nick rubbed both of his temples as he looked at the dead girl’s face and tried to remember her dossier. She was young—nineteen—and blond. And American. And tall. Almost a foot taller than Keigo at his diminutive five-foot-one height. All the Jap males seemed to have a thing about tall American blondes.