by Wen Spencer
She went up a level to the public front page that featured her first novel. Luckily, her publisher hadn’t gone with the cover that was splattered with blood. “This is my book. I wrote it.”
See, I’m a writer, really I am!
Nikki dropped down to her blog, and they read over her Saturday together. Yoshida translated for Tanaka, animating parts with his bird-delicate hands. First post of the day was about the panda-blood cookies. In the second, she ranted on about her love/hate relationship with the Japanese concept of laundry. Hanging everything on bamboo poles on the balcony of her apartment was alternately charming and annoying as hell. Third post was a snippet from her day’s work. It was a short chunk of the scene, really just a teasing of fiction. Blood splattering across white countertops. The whirl of a blender. The killer leaning over the dead body, dripping with cast-off blood.
Tanaka gave a slight cry of dismay and pointed at the comment counter. “One hundred and five comments?”
“I have a lot of fans,” Nikki temporized. There had been only thirty comments that morning. What had made them triple in number? She scanned anxiously ahead as Tanaka scrolled through them.
Comment thirty-one was from Miriam, using her handle of “SexyNinja.” She had posted from her phone “OMG, ThirdEye has been arrested for murder!” Nikki locked down on a groan. Miriam must have gone to Nikki’s blog to read the snippet and then posted to it by mistake instead of to the Team Banzai secret forum. There were a half-dozen posts of “Who did she kill?” that did nothing to establish her credibility with the police. Pixii then turned the thread’s focus with “George Wilson with a blender!” and that started people posting her memorable murders. The most recent post stated simply, “Dupont, Louisiana, population 1,965.” Nikki winced; her friends were not helping. When the list updated with “Dupont, Louisiana, population zero,” she reached out and tapped back to the snippet.
Tanaka had been discussing something with Yoshida in Japanese. He turned to her and stated in English, “You posted your blog four hours before Gregory Winston was murdered. The first comments were minutes later.”
She nodded, unsure if this was good news or bad.
“Do you have access to the data on who reads this?” Yoshida asked.
“Yes.” She logged on to her online analytic software.
Tanaka gave another cry of dismay as the world map showed her hits. “You have fans in Japan?”
“Yes.” When she first started to write, she couldn’t lock down on any one set of characters and follow their lives to any meaningful end. She’d been depressed by her failures until she started to post them with names changed to that of the anime and manga characters they most resembled. The fan fiction community embraced unfinished work. Thus her audience was worldwide, as the world map clearly showed.
“These hits.” Tanaka pointed at Japan on the map. “How many are from Osaka?”
She drilled down a level to get hits from Osaka. On average, there were three dozen hits a day. She frowned at the number. She hadn’t checked her statistics for months. She knew that some were Miriam checking in on her. Pixii would have registered as Nara. They didn’t account for all of the hits. Who else was reading her blog from Osaka?
“Did you post other things about this character before this?” Tanaka asked. “What he looked like? Where he lived?”
“Yes, lots of stuff.” Her muse poured out a rough story. There was always the need, however, for her to fill in details to knit the bare bones into a logical narrative. In the past, she often ended up with writer’s block over specifics. Who was this person? What did they look like? What was their name? Where was this scene taking place? How did the character get there? And most importantly, how did this fit in with the rest of the book?
She constantly had to dig through the Internet, looking for the stupidest information. Little things that most readers would never know if she got wrong. How many people that read Dupont would know if she got the type of bleachers wrong at the high school football field? Yet she’d been stalled for a week until she found a random photo on someone’s Facebook page that was set as public.
She discovered if she visited the story’s setting, she could quickly pick out most of the details to flesh out the rough scene. It was the main reason she set the book in Japan. (It also meant she could tax-deduct all of her travel and any entrance fees.) Knowing that many of her readers loved all things Japanese as a by-product of being fans of anime and manga, she blogged extensively about her research trips to promote both books. “I could show you the posts.”
She worked back through her blog to find the public debate with herself over where George Wilson should live. She’d locked onto the Umeda district quickly but wasn’t sure where. There were the twin towers of the Umeda Sky Building with the rooftop observatory suspended between them. She toured the skyscrapers and had been impressed with the panoramic views, but it hadn’t felt right. The Japanese had a love affair with Ferris wheels and thus they appeared often in anime. The HEP Five building had one on its rooftop. For some reason she felt as if George’s apartment should feature a window that framed the Ferris wheel until it was larger than life. She decided to work backwards by taking a ride on the Ferris wheel to see which apartment buildings had a view of the structure. Of course only a handful of her readers would ever know if she got it right—but she would be stuck until she figured it out for herself. She couldn’t afford the delay.
What she hadn’t realized was that her fear of heights would kick in on the Ferris wheel. She’d been fine during her visit to the rooftop of the Umeda Sky Building; her only shaky moment had been on the steep escalators that crossed from one tower to the other, seventy-eight floors above the street. It hadn’t helped that Miriam decided to torture Nikki on the Ferris wheel.
Nikki had uploaded a video she had shot during the ride. It was embarrassing, but she did make the funniest squeaking noises every time Miriam made the car sway. She had edited in a pointer to the video so viewers could see the building that she eventually picked out.
Tanaka shook his head through the entire video. When it ended, he said, “So, everyone knows that your character lives in that building?”
She nodded, and then it hit her. She looked down at the photograph of the dead man. “He lived in the same building?”
Tanaka nodded. “Miss Delany, is it possible that you have a very disturbed fan?”
4
Little Bighorn
Nikki wasn’t sure if having a psycho fan was a good thing. Actually she was fairly certain it was a bad thing, but at least it meant she was off the hook for the murder of Gregory Winston. At least, that’s what she assumed for a few minutes. The police, however, showed no signs of planning to let her go.
Just as it was becoming clear that they meant to hold her, the door opened and a female police officer stepped into the room. She bowed, apologized for interrupting with “Gomenasai.” The reason for her interruption was hovering right behind her, a man in a hand-tailored, pinstripe suit whose appearance screamed “American.” He was tall and broad, as only a steak-fed male could be.
The American went through the elaborate formal introduction with Tanaka and Yoshida. Business cards were exchanged and carefully studied.
Nikki knew a handshake was coming—politicians lived on their handshake—so she tucked away her stolen pen and braced herself.
“Miss Delany? I’m Terrence Walcott.” He bowed first, out of habit, which meant he’d been in Japan for a long time. He had a very faint Southern accent, which was ironic, because Osaka natives had a similar slight drawl to their Japanese. He held out his hand. She gave him a “we are close allies” firm shake that ended with her left hand covering their joined hands, just for a few seconds, enough to imply a warmth and intimacy of close association. She read it striking home with a slight shift in his face.
“I’m with the consulate here in Osaka,” he said. “I’m sorry we have to meet under such circumstances. We had a call—�
� He paused to change what he was going to say. “I understand you were arrested in the murder of Gregory Winston?”
Miriam must have found out that there was an actual murder attached to Nikki’s arrest. Only something as serious as Nikki being railroaded for murder would have made Miriam call the American embassy. What exactly had Miriam told them? Not the whole truth, or the man would have addressed Nikki as a senator’s only child, not as one of the questionable masses. Judging by what he almost said, Miriam only told them enough to get him to the police.
Nikki doubted that she could keep Walcott from finding out who her mother was eventually, but she certainly wasn’t going to tell him at this point. She kept to what he needed to know to get her released. “I’m a published author researching a novel already under contract that is set in Japan. I never met Gregory Winston. I was never in the building where he lived. I have an alibi for the time of his death. I was in Otemae at the time of the murder. I’ve already presented proof of that.”
He nodded along with her bullet points. “Please, Miss Delany, let me get caught up and then I’ll see about getting them to release you.”
Walcott and Tanaka engaged in an epic Japanese conversation with occasional tangents with Yoshida riddled with English computer terms. Obviously they were telling Walcott about her website. They didn’t actually tell him the url or her pen name. She took out her stolen pen and clicked it quietly, trying not to think of standard embassy protocol that basically would fire off a signal flare through the US State Department with her present location.
At the end, Walcott turned to her and asked, “Miss Delany, have you had previous problems with stalkers?”
Only my mother. “No.”
“The police say Gregory Winston’s neighbors called 119 before he was actually killed. There was a fight that started with someone coming to his door and ringing his doorbell. The call has his screams recorded in the background. The police know the exact time of his death, and you were in Otemae during this time. Officer Yoshida says that the attacker was much taller than you.”
It never even occurred to her to ask anything about the actual murder. She simply assumed they wouldn’t tell her. Then again, they probably wouldn’t have told her.
“And I’m still here—why?”
“They’re not discounting that you might know the attacker.”
“I don’t know anyone in Japan.” Wait, Yoshida and Tanaka had seen Miriam. “Except for the girl I was having lunch with.” Shit, she couldn’t let them think that Miriam had anything to do with this. “And she’s only an inch or two taller than me.” And could totally kick ass when it came to fighting. “I’ve been posting information on my character George for three weeks. If some nutcase reads my blog, they could have already picked out Gregory as the closest matchup to my character a long time ago. One of the reasons I put George in Umeda was because of the number of expats living there. The police said I posted that snippet four hours before Gregory Winston was killed. That would give this psycho fan enough time to get to George’s—to Winston’s apartment and murder him.”
“Do you have any fans that may be that crazy?”
She stopped and gave it a long, honest consideration. She was writer; written words revealed more to her than to the normal person. Had she ever read any blog comments that even suggested homicidal tendencies? Any off-the-wall remarks on her twitter feed? Nothing came to mind. “No. I don’t know who is reading my blog here in Osaka. I honestly wasn’t aware of the number of hits. I used to compulsively check my stats before my first novel sold; it was a way to stroke my ego. I stopped needing that kind of egoboo when I got my first check.”
Walcott nodded and turned back to the policeman and the discussion continued in Japanese. Nikki closed her eyes, and thought of tropical beaches, and clicked her stolen pen. She needed to write soon or she was going to explode. Maybe she should ask to go to the bathroom and . . .
Oh damn, this was Japan; public restrooms didn’t have toilet paper or paper towels. She flinched as the “OMG” baseball bat of cultural shock hit her.
Walcott turned back to her, his face warning her that she wasn’t going to like what he was about to say. “If you cooperate, the police will let you go. I recommend that you cooperate fully.”
“And what exactly is cooperating?”
“They’ll need your DNA and fingerprints to compare with unknowns found at the murder scene. And they want your password for your analytical software so they can track hits to your blog. And they want you to take down the scene.”
They weren’t going to find any matches to her fingerprints because she’d never been in any of the private buildings in Umeda. Same with DNA. Giving away her password was annoying, but she kept all her websites carefully compartmentalized so discovery of one wouldn’t compromise the others.
Most importantly, a real man was dead and chances were good that someone with very violent antisocial tendencies had been following her every move.
“Okay. I’ll cooperate.”
Dusk was falling when she and Walcott finally walked out of the police headquarters. She was starving, and she desperately needed to write. For the last half hour, between chewing on her fingernails, she’d been madly clicking her pen and cycling through every single deserted-island fantasy she’d ever constructed. She needed to scrape off Walcott, find something to eat before the need to write completely took her, and then let the muse run loose.
Rush hour was starting, filling the streets with tiny cars and miniature trucks and office workers on town bicycles. The subway station was down the hill, the same direction as her apartment building, so Terrence walked with her. They were the only non-Asians on the street. Everyone moving purposely around them was short, slim, dark-haired, and dark-eyed.
“Are you going to be safe?” Mr. Walcott asked.
It was hard not to be angry with him; he was about to unknowingly bring her mother down on her. Nikki reminded herself that he did get her away from the Japanese police. Play nice with the man; he could be an ally in the coming war.
“Yes, I’ll be fine. I’m very capable of taking care of myself.” I’ve been doing it off and on since I was eight.
He looked down at her, worry written all over his face. “It’s just that you’ve posted a lot of personal information.”
Nikki laughed. “Not really!” Of course she hadn’t; her mother had trained her well. “It only seems like it. Yes, I talked about getting my apartment. How small it is. That it doesn’t have an oven. That it has an on-demand hot-water heater. I even posted pictures of the interior. I didn’t mention that I was in Otemae neighborhood, that I’m in a building that caters to gaijin, or that I’m on a monthly lease. None of the photos showed the exterior of the building or even the view from my balcony. When I post that I’ve gone someplace—like the Hanshin department store that’s in Umeda—I don’t say if I took the subway or just walked across the street.”
Nor could anyone trace her via her apartment IP address—as she always used an anonymous proxy service that masked her location.
“I see. That makes me feel better. Please, be very careful.” He shook her hand firmly and then went down the steps into the subway.
She went to the corner. There was a rare break in the traffic, but no one moved to cross the street until the walk light came on. She had discovered quickly that the Japanese always waited for the walk light and always crossed at the corner. She had seen people stop in the middle of the night and wait on deserted street corners for the walk light to give them permission to cross. Jaywalking was simply not done. Terrence Walcott was getting on to a subway train full of people texting like mad because talking on cell phones was against the rules. No one would be eating or drinking. There was no graffiti on any of the walls, all posters were carefully placed in accordance with the law, and people carried little portable ashtrays for their cigarette butts.
How did she find—in this city full of obedient, lawful people—a person looking for i
nspiration to kill?
Despite her screaming need to write, she stopped at FamilyMart to pick up dinner. She had learned the hard way that the hungrier she was, the longer her hypergraphia took to burn out.
News that the strange American woman was linked to a murder must have filtered through the employees. The male cashier startled visibly when she came through the door. He watched her nervously as she picked up a basket and walked to the ready-made meals. She picked up a pre-cooked okonomiyaki to make up for the one left behind with Miriam. The rice balls looked good, so she got three of those. She added two of her favorite filled buns to her basket before she realized that hunger and stress were nose-diving her into a major pig-out.
But if being stalked by a killer wasn’t justification for a pig-out, nothing was. Generally she avoided alcohol, but she was feeling the need for some medicine-induced calm. She studied the alcohol selection. Between her lack of experience in drinking and the labels in Japanese, she had no clue if she would like the liquid inside.
Miriam picked up on the first ring. “Where are you? Are you okay?”
“What is decent to drink here?” She turned her cell phone’s camera on to the wine selection.
“Oh, good, they let you go!” Miriam said. “You would like the stuff in the little dark green bottles. It’s a plum wine. It’s very sweet and mild.”
“Yes, I’m free.” Nikki picked up the miniature bottle of wine. The label claimed that it held two hundred milliliters; she probably could down it in three swallows. Not really enough, it seemed, for self-medication. She added a second bottle to her basket and headed for the check-out counter. She picked up a Snickers and a Kit Kat as she passed through the candy aisle.
“I’m so sorry,” Miriam said. “I called the consulate. I was really worried that you would end up in prison.”
