The table was empty. Waiting. For him.
“No!” Sano screamed.
The watcher stealthily mounted the stairs of the veranda outside Sano’s door. His straw sandals made no noise, but each footfall produced a soft creak as his weight bore down on the wooden planks. He tried the door.
Locked. He unsheathed his dagger. Sliding it between door and frame, he pushed on the catch. It gave way with a crack that almost startled him into dropping the dagger. He froze, listening.
Only muffled snores came from inside the room. The noise hadn’t awakened them. Slowly, carefully, the watcher slid back the door. Dagger in hand, he squinted into the darkness of the room. There he could barely make out the two sleeping forms.
Now…
A loud gurgling sound awoke Sano. Suddenly Ogyu, Mura, Dr. Ito, and the morgue vanished. Sano gave a hoarse yell of surprise as he sat bolt upright in the darkness. Through the clinging haze of sleep, he saw a shadowy figure moving toward him. He cried out again, this time in sheer terror, as he instinctively lashed out at it with the sword that he still gripped in his hand. The figure leaped backward, turned, disappeared. Sano’s blade sliced empty air. Running footsteps shook the floor, then faded into the distance.
Sano struggled free of the tangled bedcovers and jumped to his feet, sword ready. Fully awake now, he strained to see his surroundings and remember where he was. His heart still pounded; the lurid dream images of Edo Jail and the menacing intruder were still vivid in his memory. In his confusion, it took him a moment to recognize the dim confines of his room at the inn. All was quiet and peaceful. His fear should have subsided, yet he experienced the frightening conviction that something was very wrong. Every fiber of his being vibrated in alarm.
The room felt oddly cold. An icy draft stirred the air, but didn’t obliterate the strong metallic odor that made Sano’s nostrils flare. Another peculiar scent-fainter, and musty, like dried herbs- prickled his throat and forced a sneeze from him. And there was something else different about the room, something missing.
Tsunehiko’s snores. Sano no longer heard them-or any sound at all from the inert form next to him.
“Tsunehiko?” he called.
Bending over, he touched his secretary. And gasped, jerking his hand away. Something warm, wet, and faintly sticky coated the quilt. Filled with dread, he dropped his sword and groped around on the floor for the lamp and matches. It took his shaking hands three tries to light the wick. The lamp guttered, then flared into brightness. Sano looked at Tsunehiko.
Shock stopped his heart, froze the words on his tongue. His lungs sucked in breath with a long, sharp hiss.
Tsunehiko lay face up on the futon, the quilt pulled back to expose his neck and shoulders. Blood from the cruel gash in his throat, red and lustrous in the lamplight, stained his bedding and nightclothes. His sightless eyes gazed at the ceiling. He did not move, or speak, or make a sound.
Chapter 15
No!” Sano cried.
Moaning, he knelt beside Tsunehiko. He ripped off his robe and pressed it to the terrible wound, trying to stanch the flow of blood that had already ceased. He slapped the boy’s cheeks in a desperate effort to revive him. But he knew in his heart that Tsunehiko was dead. That first horrifying look had told him.
Now he understood the significance of the intruder, the strange gurgle, and the departing footsteps. He hadn’t dreamed them after all. Half asleep, oblivious to the danger, he’d heard Tsunehiko cry out as his throat was cut, and let the murderer escape afterward.
“No!”
Grief and rage exploded in Sano’s chest as he thought of Tsunehiko’s youthful innocence and cheerfulness. Not bothering to dress, he seized his sword. He registered the open door and splintered catch in the moment it took to hurl himself outside. The murderer-was it the mysterious watcher?-had entered and killed without difficulty. But he wouldn’t get away! A monstrous craving for vengeance howled inside Sano, one for which he hadn’t known he possessed the capacity. He wanted blood for blood. He wanted to call down the wrath of the gods. Barefoot, clad only in his loincloth, he stumbled into the freezing darkness of the garden. He thrashed his way blindly around the guest quarters, sword raised.
“Stop! Murderer!” he shouted.
As if in reply, rapid hoofbeats pounded away from the village and into the night.
“Stop! Murderer!”
Lights began to appear in the inn’s windows as Sano charged past them. He heard the guests stirring inside their rooms, and heard excited voices asking, “What is it? Who’s shouting?” But where was the nightwatchman? Having failed to keep the intruder away, he should now be summoning the checkpoint guards and village police with his clappers.
Sano found no one lurking outside the guest quarters. Then, as he ran through the garden, his foot struck something. He tripped and went sprawling facedown. He gasped as his body hit not cold, hard ground, but something warmer and more yielding. Someone rushed up with a lantern and began to scream. Righting himself, Sano saw an old woman standing over him, her face stricken.
“Jihei!” she screamed. “My son!” She burst into sobs.
Sano looked at the thing he’d tripped over, and understood why the nightwatchman hadn’t sounded the alarm. Gorobei’s son lay motionless on his back. His terror-filled but lifeless eyes bulged; his tongue, protruding from between clenched teeth, oozed blood. Dark bruises encircled his throat. He was dead; strangled-probably by the same man who had killed Tsunehiko. Sano closed his eyes as the dizzying horror washed over him again. The woman’s sobs echoed his own anguish. He heard running footsteps and men’s voices. He opened his eyes to see his fellow guests, the samurai and priests, gathered around him.
“Stay with her,” he ordered the priests, pointing at the distraught woman. To the dazed, bleary-eyed samurai: “Come with me! We have to catch the killer!”
Without waiting for a response, he ran for the stables. The samurai, pudgy from easy living and the worse for tonight’s drinking, nevertheless rose to the challenge. In various states of undress, they panted after Sano, clutching their swords, bellies jiggling.
But although Sano and his helpers searched up and down the road and all through the sleeping village, they found no one. The killer had simply vanished into the night.
The next few hours passed in a blur. Sano endured them with every bit of the self-control and stoicism he possessed. He informed the grieving innkeeper that in addition to his son, a guest had been murdered. He reported the murders to the guards, who summoned the village police, elders, and headman. Everyone trooped over to the Ryokan Gorobei to see the bodies.
“Are you sure he’s dead?” the headman kept asking anxiously as he hovered over Tsunehiko’s corpse.
Sano knew that the death of an upper-class traveler meant much trouble and expense for a post town. It meant sending reports to the central highway administration in Edo, holding an inquest, notifying the next of kin, arranging for cremation of the body or its transportation home. But the headman’s idiotic question made Sano’s precarious self-control snap.
“Yes, of course he’s dead, you fool!” he shouted, throwing on his cloak over his shivering body. “So just forget about putting him in a kago and sending him on to the next town so he can die on someone else’s hands!”
The headman gaped at him. Then he frowned. “How do we know you didn’t kill him yourself?”
“This wasn’t robbery-murder,” one of the elders chimed in helpfully as he opened the cabinet and pawed through its contents. “Look, the money’s still here.” He held up Sano’s and Tsunehiko’s cash pouches.
It had occurred to Sano that the officials might suspect him of committing the murders. Now he said, “Look at my weapons- there’s no blood on them. Even if I’d wanted to kill my companion, I wouldn’t have done it in our room. But if I had, I would have sneaked away instead of raising the alarm. I wouldn’t have needed to kill the nightwatchman, or to force the door.