by Steve Bein
She wasn’t all that fond of her propensity to find reasonable suspicion even in the most innocent of details, like names in the blanks of standard governmental paperwork. The sad truth was that her capacity to see the worst in people made her a better cop. Today it made her unsure about her partner. Despite that idealistic voice in her head, this had never been as simple as standing by a friend. He worked with her and he’d jeopardized their investigation. He reported to her and he’d undermined her authority. And now, at ten minutes to ten, she knew exactly where she needed to be but she didn’t want to go.
It wasn’t her lingering mistrust that told her to find another place to be at ten o’clock. If anything, her cynicism and pessimism would lead her straight to Han’s hearing. But trumping those, overriding her feelings of betrayal, she was torn between wanting to be a source of support for her partner and dreading being there to see his verdict handed down. She wanted to spare him that shame. The tension between those two desires had been building all morning, and now she had to walk it off, pacing up and down from the courthouse to the police headquarters. She’d seen Han pace like this, cigarette smoke trailing him. She’d never had much interest in smoking, but maybe today was the day to start.
Sakakibara caught up with her halfway down the block. “There you are,” he said, walking fast on stilt-straight legs. Obviously he knew where he wanted to be. He hooked her by the crook of the elbow, spinning her on her heel and dragging her toward the courthouse. “Come on. Do you want to see this prick indicted or not?”
A simple indictment wasn’t usually the sort of thing that drew a lieutenant’s attention, or even a sergeant’s for that matter, but Joko Daishi had masterminded a plot to terrorize the city and run up a hell of a body count while he was at it—not fifty-two but hundreds. That train platform would have been packed if he’d had his way. If Mariko hadn’t shot him. If Han hadn’t put her where she needed to be. It had been a fifty-fifty shot as to which one of them would get to Akahata. Han had raced off the same as she did—had volunteered to be on a train platform with a madman and a bomb, the same as she did. It was blind luck that made her the hero instead of him. Again Mariko wondered what Han’s fate should be.
“Sir, it’s over.”
“What?”
“Joko Daishi’s lawyer, Hamaya. He had the case pushed up an hour. Nine o’clock.”
Sakakibara stopped cold. “And?”
“I saw it,” Mariko said. It was sheer luck that she’d been there. She showed up early for Han because she couldn’t sleep, and she happened to see Hamaya Jiro hurrying toward the courthouse. She nearly caught up with him, thought better of it, slipped in the courtroom behind him, and watched the whole proceedings.
Hamaya hadn’t noticed her until afterward. “Sergeant Oshiro,” he’d said. “A fine morning for a trial, wouldn’t you say?”
He’d dropped the word trial on purpose. Joko Daishi wasn’t on trial yet. But Han was. “Do thank your partner for me when you see him,” Hamaya had said. “If it weren’t for him, I can only imagine how difficult it would be for me to mount my client’s defense.”
“That’s because your client is guilty.”
“Only of what you can prove in court, Sergeant. I’m afraid the district attorney will have a tough time of it, once it becomes clear how much evidence is inadmissible. If I’m not mistaken, your entire investigation would have fallen flat if your partner hadn’t illegally tailed Akahata-san.”
He had her on that one. The district attorney chose not to press charges on anything connected to the Kamakura house. The heroin, the cyanide, even Shino’s murder. None of it would stick.
But Mariko wouldn’t let him see the cracks in her resolve. “Too bad you won’t be drawing a paycheck from him anymore. That breaks my heart.”
“I’m sure. No doubt you’re equally heartbroken that Akahata-san is not alive for cross-examination. If not for you and your partner, the case against Joko Daishi would be ironclad.”
Mariko felt herself fuming but refused to rise to Hamaya’s bait. “You’ll wriggle out of a charge here or there, but we’ve got your client dead to rights on the bomb-making factory. We got that from a search warrant on phone records, not from anything Han did. That means we’ve got your client on unlawful use of weapons, and believe me, the DA’s office can turn that into five or six different counts by itself. Then there’s conspiracy, furtherance, public endangerment—and after all that, your client gets to go to federal court, where we’re going to smack him with every last terrorism charge we’ve got a law for. I hope your little cult believes in reincarnation, because Joko Daishi’s looking at back-to-back life sentences from here to eternity. Best of luck with that.”
“The best of luck, indeed,” Hamaya had said, giving her a little bow by way of a farewell. “I have no doubt of it.”
That was nine thirty. Now, at nine fifty-one, Mariko’s frustration hadn’t cooled in the slightest. “He’s going to walk on almost all of it,” she told Sakakibara. “How many charges should we have nailed him on just for the dope? Precursor chemicals, manufacturing, intent to distribute, you name it. Plus the two homicides, plus all the prohibited substances charges . . . I don’t know what you charge someone with for having a gas chamber in his bedroom, but I sure as hell hope we’ve got a law against it.”
“We probably do.”
“And what does it matter?” Mariko clenched her fists, wishing she had a bokken in her hands and something to smash with it. “None of it’s going to stick. I was thinking we had a lock on terrorism and conspiracy, but that cocky bastard Hamaya seems to think otherwise. He’s a slippery little fucker. He’s looking for ways out already.”
“That’s his job,” said Sakakibara. “You know that.”
“Yes, sir,” she said, and she told him about what else was on her mind. Kamaguchi Hanzo. The mask. How Hamaya might already be on his way to file some paperwork Mariko had never heard of, something that would release the mask from police custody so he could hand-deliver it to Joko Daishi.
It ended up becoming more of a tirade than an explanation, and at the end of it she felt deflated. She slumped against the side of the HQ building and threw up her hands. “What the hell have we accomplished, sir? Joko Daishi will see some time—I hope. But after that, he’s still got his mask and his cult, and we didn’t even seize all of the explosives. He’s got more people out there. We have no guesses about who they are. He’ll have more targets. We have no idea where. And for all of this, I get my name dragged through the muck and maybe Han loses his badge. So what the hell was the point?”
Sakakibara grimaced at her, his thick Sonny Chiba eyebrows scrunching toward each other like hairy black caterpillars. “We’re cops, Frodo. Not lawyers; not judges; cops. That makes us goalkeepers, and the simple truth is that sometimes the bad guys get one through.”
He took her by the chin—an astonishingly gentle gesture coming from him, almost fatherly—and raised her eyes to meet his. “What did you think when you took this job? That we were going to stop every crime in the city? We stop the ones we can, but some of them are going to get by us. If you can’t live with that, just hand me your badge right now. I’ll fill out the paperwork for you.”
“Sir, you know I can’t—”
“Can’t what? Take a cushy desk job for the same pay? Get off the streets, rest your feet for a minute? Sure you can. You don’t need to be in the dirty little corners where the lines get blurry, where it’s hard to tell right from wrong. Go take a job in a police box in the suburbs, where the worst problem you’ll have for the rest of your career is not knowing the answer when someone stops in to ask for directions. How many COs have you served under who told you to do exactly that?”
Mariko couldn’t help smiling a little. “Actually, sir, the last one told me he’d have me working the precinct coffeemaker.”
Somehow he’d made the shift from concerned father to stern father and back to bitter, grumpy commanding officer. “Fine. Go take his a
dvice. Or stop pitying yourself and recognize you did something magnificent. You saved fifty-two lives. You put a very bad man in the ground and you put another one in a cell. The day that’s not good enough for you, just hand me your badge and I’ll fill out the paperwork.”
Mariko looked back down for a minute, then found his gaze again. “Thank you, sir.”
“You know what happens now?”
“Sir?”
“The same thing that happens in any other sport with a goalkeeper. The other team gets the ball back and they try to score again. Now, are you ready to do your damn job?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Good. Let’s go to your partner’s hearing.”
Mariko glanced at Sakakibara’s huge black diver’s watch. “We’re running late for that, sir. Do you think they’ll let us in after—”
“They haven’t started yet. I told them to hold off until I got there.”
Mariko was glad he’d already started walking so he couldn’t see her jaw drop. She knew her lieutenant had some swat, but she didn’t know his arm reached that far. It made her wonder if IAD would allow him to get involved in their decision too, made her wonder whether Sakakibara would push to get Han off or see him hang.
True to his word, it was Sakakibara who unofficially began the hearing when he walked through the door. Mariko found it embarrassing, seeing Han being deposed, and she could only imagine what he was feeling. She thought of Saori, who, somewhere along the way of her Twelve Step program, had to make a list of everyone she’d every wronged while she was using, and then had to go out and apologize for each offense. It was no easy thing, admitting you were wrong. It took a kind of strength not a lot of people had. Saori didn’t have it; she’d had to build it from scratch. It made Mariko proud to see Han push ahead, explaining everything he’d done and leaving nothing out. He held no one else to blame, nor did he shield anyone else from blame. If IAD found reason to investigate Mariko as well, it would start with Han telling them the truth as plainly as he could.
For an event that would see Han’s whole career hang in the balance, the hearing was surprisingly brief. The review board adjourned after only an hour, sequestering themselves to make their judgment. Mariko found herself sagging back into her seat, and until then she hadn’t even noticed she’d been sitting forward, hands gripping her knees, waiting for the board’s ruling. Now she wanted to know how long review boards generally took to make their decisions—or, more precisely, how long she’d have to be waiting on the edge of her seat, tense as the skin of a drum.
And since she lacked anything even approximating the proper sense of decorum for a woman of her rank and station, she asked. The chair of the review board, a commander she hadn’t met before, gave her the same kind of frown he’d have given a Tokyo Disney mascot walking into the room, a blend of puzzlement and offense. “Fifteen minutes,” he said, making it clear that he was doing her a great honor even in recognizing her existence, and closed the door behind him.
Mariko found herself immediately at Han’s side, which surprised her. The part of her that was still pissed off at him still had a loud voice, but it had lost its majority. “Fifteen minutes?” she said. “You’d think they’d take longer than that for something this important.”
“Yeah,” said Han. “You’d think your partner wouldn’t say anything to ruffle their feathers before they made their ruling, too.”
She blushed for a second, but he winked at her and even gave her a little grin. “You look awfully relaxed,” she said.
“What’s there to be nervous about? The worst part’s over.”
Mariko hadn’t realized that was true, but now that she thought about it, it was almost self-evident. Working up the courage to make a full confession was agonizing work. After that, taking your licks was easy. Han had just looked his own guilt full in the face; he knew he deserved punishment and he’d already resigned himself to accept it, however harsh it might be.
A few minutes later the review board returned to render its verdict, and again, paradoxically, Mariko found herself more nervous about it than Han. The chairman sat down with what looked like a sheet of prepared notes that he didn’t bother looking at, making Mariko so curious she wanted to jump out of her seat to see what it said.
His ruling was short and to the point: Han had violated Akahata’s right to freedom from unlawful search and seizure; he had transgressed the boundaries of probable cause, though not the boundaries of reasonable suspicion; he had placed his CI, Shino, in a situation that might have become dangerous. All of that was clear. But there was no indubitable proof that he had directly endangered Shino’s life. He would not be charged criminally, and that meant he’d get to keep his badge. But the board found him guilty of violating eight general orders regarding the proper handling of covert informants, and that meant his life in Narcotics was over. The review board busted him back down to general patrol, where every time he walked into a roomful of cops it would be like showing up to a black tie affair with a nice tuxedo and his pants around his ankles. Sooner or later things would get back to business as usual, but for years to come there would be stares and whispers everywhere he went.
As the members of the review board packed up their things, Sakakibara offered Han his stern congratulations; Mariko thought he seemed grimly pleased with the ruling. Afterward he offered to buy Mariko and Han a cup of coffee—or rather, he ordered them to sit down to coffee with him; lieutenants did not offer invitations to their subordinates. All the same, sitting down to coffee outside of their post felt like Mariko’s father taking her out for ice cream after she’d run hard in a track meet and still finished second. That marked it as another fatherly gesture from Sakakibara, both the second Mariko had seen from him this morning and the second one she’d seen from him, period.
They sat down and Mariko and Han waited for Sakakibara to speak. Coffee shop or not, this wasn’t exactly a social call. “Han, I don’t want you coming in to clear out your desk until second shift. Wait until the unit’s down to a skeleton crew. Save yourself that embarrassment, all right? Hell, save me the embarrassment.”
Han swallowed. Mariko gave him an “it’s okay” sort of nod, the kind no one really meant, the kind oncologists everywhere gave their patients when the news wasn’t good but the prognosis wasn’t terminal. “I worked general patrol for a long time, Han. It’s a good job. An important job.”
“And it’s not Narcotics.” He sighed and gave a defeated shrug. “At least one of us still has a spot in the lineup, neh? I’m really, really glad they didn’t drag you down with me.”
“I am too,” said Sakakibara. “I’m shorthanded enough as it is. But you two need to learn a lesson from this whole fiasco. When you do the right thing and you break the rules, sometimes you need to ask yourself what that says about the rules.”
“Sir?” said Han.
“Sometimes you admit you’re in the wrong. Like your hearing today. You did your job. You did the right thing. But sometimes the rules aren’t what they should be.”
Han’s eyes flicked between Sakakibara and Mariko, and Mariko felt her face go sour when she met his gaze. “What?” Han said. “Oh, hell. You went to Joko Daishi’s indictment, didn’t you?”
Mariko had a decent poker face, but not for Han. She tried to hold his stare but couldn’t. “No,” he said, and in that incredulous, angry tone it came out as a curse word. “He’s going to walk?”
“On most of it,” Mariko said. “They didn’t even bother to charge him with Shino’s murder.”
“Because he murdered the only eyewitness who can put him on the scene.”
“Yep.”
Han was crestfallen. “So the same circumstantial shit that lets me keep my badge—”
“Gets Joko Daishi off the hook, yeah,” said Mariko. She broke down the rest of the details for him. “In the end, we’re thinking—hoping—the terrorism charges will stick, but that’ll be a federal thing, out of our reach.”
Mariko hadn’t
thought it possible for Han to deflate any further. His color drained from him; he seemed to diminish in his chair.
Mariko knew the feeling.
Somehow, through heroic effort, Han mustered the energy to speak. “So what the hell did we accomplish?”
“A lot,” Sakakibara said, “and don’t you dare lose sight of it. You’ve both been at this far too long not to have figured this out by now: we don’t have the luxury of total victories in this profession. You think we’re in Narcotics so we can put a stop to illegal drugs? No. We stop one dealer. Then we go stop another one. If the first guy’s out on the streets already, we go back and get him again. This is the game, boys and girls—the game you signed up to play. And you know what happens next?”
Han’s gaze shifted from Sakakibara to Mariko and back, wavering, just as unstable as his own resolve. But Mariko felt steadier. She’d lost her composure when she couldn’t pull the trigger on Joko Daishi, felt it crumble, shot through with a million fractures. Even her victory over Akahata wasn’t enough to restore it. But Sakakibara’s words were like glue, seeping into the cracks, bleeding deeper into them, finding more, binding it all together, making her stronger.
“I do,” she said. “I know what happens next. Their team gets the ball back. They try to get one by us again. And we block it, again and again.” She looked at her partner. “Narcs, patrolmen, paper pushers, it doesn’t matter. It’s all the same job. We’re goalkeepers, Han. This is what we do.”
Han slumped. “And I was always a baseball guy. I guess I’m not cut out for soccer.”
“Han,” Mariko said, “you know that’s not what I mean. I’m trying to say—”
“I get what you’re saying. But the truth is, this goalie got benched, and now he’s getting reassigned to direct traffic in the parking lot. It’s fine. Seriously. It’s no more than I deserve.”
“Han—”
