Nick looked at the two thousand three hundred and nine books on the shelves. He knew there were precisely two thousand three hundred and nine books on those shelves because he’d had his people look through each and every one of them. The only clues they’d uncovered were three almost-century-old Polaroid snapshots of a naked young man asleep on a couch. The photos had been tucked into a hundred-and-fifty-year-old third volume of The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Since the naked young man in the photos—his face was averted—was sporting a semi-erection, some of Nick’s sharper detectives had deduced some sort of connection with the title of the book. Others had decided that Keigo Nakamura, known both in Japan and the States as a ladies’ man, had been secretly gay and probably killed by one of his young gay lovers.
In the end, neither the DPD’s forensic people nor the FBI’s experts had been able to track down either the photographer or his young subject, but Nick had found the interior designer who’d worked for Keigo Nakamura and the designer had confirmed that he’d bought all the library books by the yard at various California and Colorado estate auctions. And the books had been chosen primarily for the quality of their leather bindings, the interior designer had said.
As far as Nick’s and the FBI’s best analysts could tell, Keigo Nakamura had never cracked a single book on any of these shelves or tables and the naked young man in the Polaroid’s story belonged to some other mystery.
The paperback that Keli Bracque had been reading on the day she was killed—Shōgun—hadn’t come from the library.
Nick unhooked and parted the center set of wooden shutters and looked down at the rain falling on Wazee Street. He set his fingers against the cool glass, trying to fight the strange—almost forgotten—energies rising in him like a sudden spur of hunger.
He was actually beginning to be interested in solving this goddamned murder case. Why? Keigo Nakamura meant less than nothing to him. The arrogant rich kid had probably deserved to be murdered. His little movie documentary about flashback addiction in the United States wouldn’t have been of interest to the Japanese or Americans.
But it was interesting enough to someone that they murdered him because of it, thought Nick. Keigo’s phone and video camera and the camera’s last three fingernail-drives with all the recent interviews on them had been missing. Was there something in those interviews that had doomed Keigo Nakamura?
Personally, Nick liked Hideki Sato as the new prime suspect. It would certainly explain why Sato had gone to such lengths to hide his very existence in the original investigations. As for motive—who would ever know? Keigo Nakamura had made at least one enemy willing and able to cut his throat. Sato would certainly have been capable of that.
And Nick also liked his little speech about the helicopter, the whisper-dragonfly. What had Sato called the silent chopper in Japanese? Sasayaki-tonbo. Nick loved the elegance, the sweet-solution quotient, of a DA explaining to a jury that Chief of Security Hideki Sato had stepped out of a Sasayaki-tonbo to kill his master’s son.
The only problem with the Sasayaki-tonbo part of the theory was that Keigo Nakamura wasn’t the only resident of Wazee Street six years ago who had a hot tub bubbling away on the roof. Both the FBI and the plodding DPD led by Detective Sergeant Nick Bottom had found a certain James Oliver Jackson, who’d been in his rooftop Jacuzzi—along with four young female friends—during the time of the Keigo party and murder. Mr. Jackson’s hot tub was across the street and three buildings east and although that building was only two stories tall and had no view of Keigo’s patio area due to the doorway superstructure and patio fence on the Nakamura building, Jackson and his giggling guests stated that they certainly would have noticed a helicopter hovering over a building so close. James Oliver Jackson’s seat in the hot tub—Nick had checked—did have a perfect view of the airspace over the taller three-story Nakamura building, and Jackson and the co-eds had stated that there’d been a lot of uplight from the street that night, what with all the cars coming and going from Keigo’s party.
But one man, dressed in black, coming down one of those long rappel ropes from a black and silent stealth helicopter? wondered Nick. He had to smile when he imagined any district attorney presenting this James Bond/killer-ninja story to a jury.
He smiled again when he tried to picture the bull-chested mass of Hideki Sato, all dressed up in his ninja-suit and mask, rappelling down a two-hundred-foot-long rope in the night. It had damned well better be a sturdy helicopter.
“Bottom-san, do we await something?” asked Sato from his place just inside the library’s door.
Nick ignored him and ran his finger along the slightly fogged glass of the blastproof, bombproof, bulletproof window. He took the tactical glasses from his pocket and put them on. “You said you have the digital recordings for seven minutes after your Mr. Satoh broke down the door and rushed in to find Keigo’s body. Show me those minutes, please.”
“There were no cameras on this third floor…,” began Sato.
“I know that. I don’t want to be in the re-creation like down below. I just want to see it. Like any video. But I’m interested in a view from an external camera, one as close to this view”—Nick tapped the glass—“as possible.”
“One minute, please,” said Sato and tapped at his phone’s diskey.
Everything shifted again. Suddenly it was night and there was confusion on the dark street three floors below. The viewpoint wasn’t perfect—the camera must be up under the third-floor eaves on the outside of the building—and the effect it created in Nick’s inner ear was that he had instantly swooped up higher and to his right. The exterior cameras were in night-vision mode and things glowed greenly, turning passing headlights into blurred and streaking white-green blobs. Faces of people fleeing the party before the cops arrived were quite visible although the audio pickup would have to be filtered and cleaned up to pull individual voices from the distant babble.
Nick saw an older, bald Naropa Institute savant he recognized, looking cold in his thin cotton robe and rope sandals, running to a waiting van. Four or five of his acolytes, including the sandy-haired Derek Somebody, whom, Nick knew, Keigo had interviewed the day before his death, hurried to keep up.
Derek Dean, thought Nick. The guy’s name was Derek Dean. Shit, I wonder if my passport’s still good. I’ll need it if I go up to Boulder to reinterview him.
Sirens were wailing down Wazee Street now and the rush of people leaving the party became an undignified scramble.
There’s the ex-Israeli poet, Danny Oz, heading for a car with Delroy Nigger Brown. What on earth were those two doing together that night?