Year of the Demon

by Steve Bein

  “Call him,” Mariko said. “Make sure he’s all right.”

  “He said he’d call if—”

  Mariko shot him a look that other women might have reserved for a cheating husband who asked for a lift to his floozy’s apartment.

  “Right,” he said. “I’ll just go ahead and make that call, then.”

  “Good idea.”

  Shino didn’t respond to calls or texts. Mariko had half a mind to ask Kamakura PD to send a squad up to check on him, but by the time she got patched through to them and explained her request, she’d almost be at her exit, and from there she’d probably reach her destination before they did. She kept the lights running hot all the way there.

  The there wasn’t what she was expecting. They reached a ritzy neighborhood on a quiet street running the length of a ridge that overlooked Kamakura. In the gaps between houses Mariko could see the ocean, glinting in the morning sun. Some of these backyards would give an overlook on the Great Buddha. The bare fact that they had backyards meant that these people made more money than Mariko would ever see in her lifetime. The hot tubs in this neighborhood were bigger than her kitchen.

  “Are you sure this is the place?” she said.

  “You want see the same text I showed you a minute ago? He’s got to be right around—oh, got him. The shitbox.”

  Mariko looked where Han was pointing, and sure enough, there was a beat-to-hell Toyota Cressida parked along the curb. There was a maxim in police work: shitheads drive shithead cars. Given the choice of two vehicles that were having trouble staying between the lines, you pulled over the beater. That was where a highway patrolman was going to make his lucky drug bust, and that was where a narc was going to put his GPS tracker.

  “Hey, LeBron,” Han said, getting out of the squad to approach the vehicle, “you were supposed to stay awake, buddy.”

  Mariko pulled up on the opposite side of the Cressida. It was empty. “Han, what the hell?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe . . . maybe he got out to take a piss or something.”

  “Where? Look around you.” It was a sunny morning on a beautiful lane bordered by flower gardens, manicured lawns, and trees trimmed by professional gardeners. There was no sign of a public restroom, a Porta Potty, or Han’s CI.

  “You said he’d be okay. You said you told him to stay away from danger.”

  “I did. Come on, help me look for him.”

  Canvassing the area houses went quickly. Han rang the doorbells while Mariko circumnavigated the premises, checking windows. It was on the tenth house that she found something suspicious. “Han, did you say this kid likes basketball?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, there’s a guy in this basement wearing a Lakers jersey.”

  Mariko knocked on the back door, waited all of two seconds, then kicked it in. With Han she cleared the place room by room until they found the way downstairs. The guy in the yellow jersey lay facedown at the foot of the stairs. His skin was bright red, almost as if he’d been sunburned. He was small, just as Han had described Shino, and he wasn’t moving.

  Something about the redness of his skin stirred deep in Mariko’s memory, but she didn’t have time to go fishing for it. She waited only long enough for Han to check Shino’s pulse. “Dead,” Han said, and he and Mariko moved swiftly through the house, clearing it room by room. If the kid’s killer was still on the premises, their first duty was to find him.

  The house was weird as hell. Every room said cult, though not a single aspect of it matched what Mariko imagined they’d be getting into. A cult that pushed ice on its members to “liberate” them conjured images of a meth den in her mind, but this was no sunless, stinking fleapit. If anything, it was too clean, not like a hastily wiped-down crime scene but like an iPod fresh out of the box. Not a speck of dust to be found. OCD clean. Cult clean.

  The basement was huge, a wide, open space of white walls and soft white light. Round cushions stacked in the corner were probably for meditation. Judging by the stack and the floor space, thirty people could sit in seiza down here. Posters adorned the walls: charts of what looked like yoga poses, an arcane calendar based on planetary cycles, paintings of demons and prints of demon statues. Han took pictures of everything with his phone.

  The rooms on the ground floor looked like they belonged to another building entirely. Cute, quaint, lots of floral prints; Mariko’s grandmother could have decorated them. They had a model home sort of feel, more to be seen than to be lived in. And the second floor felt completely different again, as if the whole house were schizophrenic—or, more likely, as if the house was a cult headquarters whose owners intended it to seem perfectly normal to anyone peering in through a window. The master bedroom was clearly well used, designed to serve as part-time opium den, part-time sex dungeon. The paraphernalia amassed there suggested orgy-level participation in both activities. The doors fit so well to their frames that Mariko could feel the air pressure shift when Han opened the door to the master bathroom. The room was sealed as if to remain airtight, or perhaps to contain some other gas used in the orgies.

  Another bedroom housed a blown-up photo of a good-looking, middle-aged man with long, windblown hair, standing on a seaside cliff and performing yoga or tai chi or something in between. The photo was framed, and below it was an altar with candles surrounding a wide, shallow bowl full of odds and ends: coins, marbles, eights of hearts from a bunch of different decks of cards, a folded pocket schedule of the Yomiuri Giants season, car keys stripped from their key rings. Of particular interest to the narc’s eye were the ten or twelve little vials of heroin.

  “Joko Daishi?” said Mariko, nodding at the poster above the bowl.

  “Gotta be,” said Han. “Kind of looks like John Lennon, neh? Except the beard’s more like Jerry Garcia.”

  “Or that Aum Shinrikyo guy,” Mariko said. “Remember him?”

  “Who could forget?”

  Mariko could almost see the shivers running down Han’s spine. She’d been all of twelve years old when the Aum Shinrikyo cult released sarin gas in a Tokyo subway. It made the news even in Teutopolis, Illinois, where she’d been in junior high at the time. Mariko could remember the pictures on TV of the cult leader, Asahara Shoko, with his thick black hair and big, shaggy beard. This Joko Daishi shared the beard but not the caveman chic; his hair was straight and long, almost feminine, much more in keeping with the obsessive-compulsive cleanliness of his headquarters. Mariko might even have said he was handsome but for the fact that she could imagine him standing over her bed in the middle of the night. Was he the one who stole her sword, or had it been one of his devotees? Either way, this was the man who shattered any sense of privacy in her life.

  Mariko took the little folded baseball schedule from the altar, careful to handle it only by the edges, where she couldn’t leave a print. The squat, orange, rabbitlike mascot of the Yomiuri Giants smiled up at her from the front cover. She found its grossly oversized eyes creepy instead of cute. Joko Daishi’s eyes blazed with the same kind of inhuman intensity.

  She found it strange that it should be the baseball schedule, not the heroin, that captivated her attention so fully that she felt the need to pick it up. Against her better judgment she opened it, pinching only the tips of the corners, hoping now that she wouldn’t smear any useful prints. As the little calendar unfolded, she found someone had written a prayer on it with a fat-tipped Sharpie. She couldn’t make out much of it—on paper this small the writing was tightly cramped—but she did notice today’s date was circled in red. A home game. She wondered what the significance of that might be.

  Squinting at the prayer again, she could only identify the characters jo and ko, Purging Fire. She let the calendar fold itself accordion-style back into its original shape, turning her attention instead to the photo of Joko Daishi. Leaning in to get a closer look, she noticed the photo frame concealed a wall panel behind it. It didn’t open readily, so she started fiddling with it. “Han, we need to talk.”
>
  “I know,” he said. “I fucked up. Shino’s dead and it’s my fault.” His voice was laden with remorse. “Poor son of a bitch never had a chance. Parking an old beat-to-hell Cressida in this neighborhood; they must have seen him the instant he got here.”

  “You’ve got it wrong. It’s not your fault he’s dead. So far we’ve only got these guys on theft and felony possession. You didn’t know they were going to step it up to homicide.”

  “Yeah, but I’m the one who sent him up here.”

  Mariko nodded. “And there’s going to be a reckoning for that. It wasn’t right, Han, and you should have told me what you were doing before you did it.”

  She could hear him deflating. “I didn’t want to get you involved. This is on me, all right? I’m not going to ask you to back me up on this.”

  “What do you want, a medal? You broke the rules, Han. You used a proxy to do what you knew we couldn’t legally do ourselves. And you think you need to ask me not to back you up? You think you were protecting me by hiding this crap?”

  “Mariko, I’m sorry—”

  “‘Sorry’ isn’t going to cut it. We’re partners, Han, and besides that, I’m the ranking officer on this detail. And you say, ‘I didn’t want to get you involved’? I am involved, Han. My job is to be involved. And now you’ve put my job at risk. Do you have any idea how hard I worked to get here?”

  “Mariko, you know I do.”

  “Then you know how pissed off I am. When we get back to post our whole world is going to turn to shit, and I don’t want—uh-oh.” The panel behind the photograph popped open with a little click. Mariko didn’t like what she saw behind it.

  Morose as he was, chastened as he was, Han shifted right back into high gear the instant he heard Mariko’s tone. “What have you got?”

  “I think I know what killed Shino,” she said, “and I think we’re going to need a hazmat team right away.”

  31

  Follow-up calls to Hazmat and Lieutenant Sakakibara confirmed they were both due to arrive on scene within minutes of each other. Mariko was well aware that she and Han could have used the interim to get their stories straight about Shino. She knew of cops on the force that would have done exactly that. But whatever his faults, Han had honor enough not to suggest it. The two of them didn’t even speak until they could hear the sirens coming.

  “Before he gets here,” Han said, “can I just tell you one thing?”

  “One thing,” Mariko said. Her anger was burning at a low simmer. She hoped he had sense enough not to spark off another flare-up.

  “I’m really sorry for the ‘it’s all my fault’ and ‘I assume full responsibility’ shit. I know it was my responsibility to stay within the lines. I never should have suggested otherwise. And you were right: it was Joko Daishi’s people who killed Shino. Claiming responsibility for that is just playing the martyr. I’m sorry for that.”

  Mariko nodded. After a long, pregnant pause, she said, “That’s the tone you want to take with the LT. What you did, you need to own it. Completely. You understand me?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “All right.” Again she paused, trying to sort out her emotions. “I’m still pissed at you. Got it? But all the same, I really do hope they don’t hang you for this.”

  Whatever else they might have said would have to wait until later, for the parade of emergency vehicles had arrived. The hazmat team started suiting up and Mariko and Han tracked down Sakakibara and gave him a quick report, starting from the confrontation with Akahata and his lawyer in the hospital. To his credit, Han left out none of the details. Sakakibara sat stone-faced, leaning against the hood of his squad car and taking it all in.

  When Han and Mariko were finished, he said, “Explain the cyanide part to me again, Frodo.”

  “They’ve got a giant photo of Joko Daishi on the wall upstairs,” Mariko said, “concealing a panel in the wall. Open that panel and you’ve got two big plastic jugs like the ones you’d find in an office watercooler, screwed together like an hourglass and connected by a valve. The top jug is full of pellets of sodium cyanide.”

  “Which for some inexplicable reason you recognize on sight?”

  “No, sir. Actually, they were kind enough to label it. I guess when you’re in the habit of stocking a bunch of dangerous chemicals, you want to keep them straight.”

  “Right,” Sakakibara said. “And this Shino kid, they killed him with the cyanide?”

  “Yes, sir. Hard to tell whether they force-fed him or laced it into something else. Not that it matters much.”

  “Frodo, let me ask you something. Are you trying to make me look bad?”

  “Sir?”

  “I’ve trained a hell of a lot of narcs in my day, and not one of them could walk up to a body and identify it on sight as a cyanide killing. Are you trying to show me up?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Why the hell do you even know what death by cyanide looks like?”

  Mariko shrugged. “My dad was in plastics manufacturing. Cyanide poisoning is a serious risk in that line of work.”

  “Which you know because . . . ?”

  “He died when I was in college. We didn’t know why right away, so I did lots of research on the kinds of things that could kill you at his factory. It wasn’t cyanide that got him, but I remember the bit about the red skin. Something about too much oxygen in the blood.”

  Sakakibara shook his head. “You must be hell to play in Trivial Pursuit. Now do me a favor and apply that weird brain of yours to this case. What can you tell me about this cult?”

  “Not as much as I’d like. We know what their leader looks like but not his real name. We know the names of two associates but not where they are. We know they can cook meth, we’re assuming they can cook MDA, and we know they’ve got no troubles acquiring all kinds of dangerous chemicals.”

  “All right. What do we know about the house?”

  “It’s rigged to blow,” said Han. When he saw a hazmat guy whip his head around, he quickly added, “You know, so to speak. Jug number one is sodium cyanide, neh? Jug number two is full of hydrochloric acid. You open the valve connecting them with a little knob in the cult leader’s Throne Room of Carnal Pleasures.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Bedroom, sir. Oshiro’s the one who figured it out. Open the valve, let the acid mix with the cyanide, and you get a big cloud of hydrogen cyanide gas.”

  “Cute.” Sakakibara switched his focus to Mariko. “You remembered all of this from your college chemistry notes, I assume?”

  “Google, actually. Looked it up on Han’s phone while you were en route.”

  “Aha.” Sakakibara scratched the back of his head, making his hair shift on his head as a single unit, as if it were a helmet. “So you’re thinking what? Crazy-ass cult leader rigs his headquarters so he can stage a mass suicide if a police raid goes Waco?”

  “That’s about the size of it, sir,” said Mariko.

  “How does that explain the dead kid?”

  “Obviously they didn’t kill him with the gas,” Han said, “since we found him in the basement.”

  “Which your dumb ass sent him to,” said Sakakibara.

  “Yes, sir.” Han tried to stay professional, not morose. “The bedroom’s hermetically sealed. The basement isn’t. We’re guessing only a special chosen few get to die with Joko Daishi. Everyone else probably commits suicide downstairs.”

  Sakakibara frowned. “So what, they drag this poor kid into the house and cram a fistful of cyanide down his throat?”

  “Probably not,” Mariko said. “We think they’ve got another supply, probably something portable.”

  Her LT’s scowl deepened, forming two deep furrows between his thick black eyebrows. “How’s that?”

  “Our suspect, the one who calls himself Joko Daishi, he sees himself in the business of liberating souls. When we first got onto the hexamine, we were thinking MDA, so ‘liberating’ means getting people high—bringing the
m into a hallucinatory state, neh? But lacing the MDA with cyanide, that’s a different story. In that story, ‘liberating’ means inducing hallucinations and then inducing heart failure.”

  Sakakibara crossed his long arms in front of his chest and looked at the house. “You find any evidence that they’re cooking in there?”

  “No, sir,” said Han. “The house seems to be a base of operations, kind of spiritual headquarters. We’re thinking they must have some other place to cook their meth and MDA.”

  “And lace it with cyanide.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Sakakibara’s frown returned. “So somewhere out there, there’s a band of nut jobs with another barrel of cyanide.”

  Mariko nodded. “We think so, sir.”

  “And they’re not a hey-look-at-the-pretty-lights kind of cult, are they?”

  “More like a hey-let’s-all-drink-the-Kool-Aid kind of cult, sir.”

  “Then you two have your work cut out for you,” said Sakakibara. “Don’t waste your time talking to me; get your asses moving.”

  Mariko blinked and looked at him. “I’m not sure we can, sir.”

  Sakakibara squinted at her. “Excuse me?”

  “Sir,” she said, “we’re onto this house because of the Shino tip, and that violated search and seizure. Because of the house we’re onto the cyanide, but if we follow that lead, we’re still in violation. Anything we find is inadmissible. Isn’t it?”

  “Yeah,” said Han, shamefaced, “and I was kind of thinking you were going to suspend me.”

  Sakakibara growled, almost like a bear. “Suspend you? I ought to burn you at the stake.” He gazed pensively at the ground and ran his fingers through his wire-stiff hair. After a long, tense, uncomfortable silence he said, “Do we know for a fact that your guy Shino didn’t walk into this house looking to score?”

  “Sir?” Han said.

  “He’s a junkie, right? That’s how you know him? That’s why he was useful as a CI?”