8
Blackout
The night became an odd stuttering movie with her jerking through it like a broken puppet. One minute she was in her apartment, staring down at the dead man, and the next she was walking through a crowded underground mall. She paused, feeling oddly hollow, light and a touch feverish.
How did she get there? Had she gone into shock or something and walked out of her apartment, leaving a dead man sprawled on the floor? Did she remember to pick up her . . .
. . . and she was on a nearly empty train, speeding through the night. The overhead fluorescents turned the windows into mirrors, and she stared at her reflection as her eyes shifted from brown to blue.
What was happening to her? Had she killed Detective Tanaka? Was it really some kind of animal in a business suit on her floor or simply a delusion to make killing Tanaka acceptable? Had she snapped before he attacked her or after? Had he really attacked her or was that part of her delusion? Was this the onset of madness that her mother always braced against?
And where the hell was she going?
Over the door of the train car a digital sign scrolled out kanji. She waited for the English translation to appear. Kyoto. She was heading toward Kyoto. They passed a small deserted station without slowing. She was on the express to Kyoto. It was a forty minute trip.
What was wrong with her? Her doctors had often suspected her hypergraphia was related to temporal lobe lesions, because it was the least serious possible cause of her symptoms. Thought to be genetic in nature, the lesions ran in families and often accompanied epilepsy—which she had never showed signs of having before. Unfortunately, her doctors could never find signs of lesions, and hypergraphia was also caused by bipolar disorder, frontotemporal dementia, and schizophrenia.
So why was she blacking out? She was fairly sure that in the middle of an epileptic seizure, you couldn’t operate a Japanese ticket machine. It was sad and scary to suddenly want to be bipolar, but it was the lesser of two evils at the moment.
The fabric-encased katana lay across her lap. Her backpack rested at her feet. She snatched up her bag. She’d been transferring things into her purse. Where was it? Surely she hadn’t left it in her apartment, or worse, lost it somewhere along the way. Maybe she simply shoved everything back into her backpack. She opened her backpack and took inventory. Her laptop was in it, her flashlight, two notebooks, five pens, but nothing else. Not even a single pack of tissues. She unzipped all the various compartments and felt down to the bottom. Nothing. Not her change purse. Not her cell phone. Not her driver’s license or passport or bank card.
“Oh God.” She slapped her pockets, full panic setting in. In her right jeans pocket was a wad of hundred thousand yen, each worth around a hundred US dollars. Where had it come from? She didn’t keep this much cash on hand, and she didn’t have her bank card. Had she withdrawn the money and left the card in the machine? She gripped the bills tightly. She was so screwed if she’d lost her bank card. She carefully tucked the money back into her pocket.
The need to write washed over her. She fumbled with her backpack to get out her notebooks. To her dismay, the first was already filled. The second one was her current working notebook. She turned through the pages with trembling fingers, found the first blank sheet, and submerged herself into the calmness of writing.
More than ever, she needed a hero.
He was too late.
The hallway was full of the coppery richness that came from only a full body’s worth of blood spilled out onto stone. He could smell it as soon as he stepped off the elevator. The stench grew stronger as he walked cautiously down the hallway, pistol in hand. The girl’s name was printed on the plaque beside the last apartment: Demming Natasha.
He sighed. Something bad had found the girl before he could.
He tried the doorknob. The door wasn’t locked. He pushed it open, bracing himself for a body on the floor beyond. He wasn’t disappointed, but it wasn’t what he had expected. A tanuki lay sprawled in a pool of blood.
He stood in the doorway a moment, surprised, and then stepped into the apartment and quietly shut the door behind him.
The mix of coppery blood, musky tanuki, and girl’s sweetness was familiar. All three had been in Gregory Winston’s apartment. It wasn’t surprising that they’d come together again here, just that it was the girl who’d apparently walked away unscathed. But how? The police reports claimed that the girl was young and seemingly harmless. Appearances, though, could be misleading.
The fabric folding door to the bathroom was sliced in half. Judging by the way the tanuki lay and the blood trail, he had cut his way into the tiny space only to come face-to-face with his killer. The shape-shifter had been killed with a single stab wound through the heart—quick and clean. There was a bloody towel on the bathroom’s floor from the killer cleaning his weapon and the tanuki’s wallet, emptied of cash.
To the victor go the spoils. According to the driver’s license inside the wallet, the creature was using the name of Harada Hayashi.
He breathed out disgust; the most dangerous of the monsters were the ones that could use the weapons of men along with their own natural talents. Either Hayashi had gotten clumsy with its excitement or there was more to this girl than reported.
There was a purse on the table with her wallet and passport, along with the impression of a long thin blade painted in blood. A Hello Kitty duvet covered a half-packed suitcase in the middle of the floor. Around it were small piles of items. The girl had been packing when the tanuki arrived. Where was she now?
He picked through the suitcase and things she’d left unpacked. Size-small, bright-colored T-shirts. Manga. Festival fans. Anime figures from out of Gacha vending machines. Everything hinted at a young, whimsical girl.
How could such a girl kill a cunning monster?
There was a frenzy of Post-it Notes on the wall in a kaleidoscope of colors. A turquoise-color Post-it Note caught his eye. It read “Shiva? Vishnu? Kali?” with the “Shiva” underlined multiple times. Below it were two more turquoise-colored notes. “The Brit” and “JFK to Osaka. Hotel Nikko Kansai Airport, Osaka. Walk to train station, airport to Umeda, express to Izushi, Nishimuraya Honkan.” It was the exact travel itinerary for Simon before he disappeared. The last turquoise note had a variation of the smiley face, x’s for the eyes, a squiggle for a mouth, and several question marks surrounding the face. What did that mean?
He scanned the wall for more turquoise notes. There was one off to the side, down low. It read: “Scary Cat Dude.” Was that supposed to be him? Under it was a flash of pink. He lifted up the note. The Post-it Note underneath read: “Kitten.”
How could she know about the kitten? He hadn’t mentioned it to anyone.
He stepped back, eyes widening, to actually look at the collage in front of him. Ananth had said the police had Natasha as “a person of interest” in Gregory Winston’s murder, which was shorthand for “we think she’s involved but we can’t prove it.” There had been no explanation, though, in the police reports as to why they suspected the girl. He studied the other colorful scraps of paper, trying to find a pattern. Slowly, he managed to see the underlying order. It was tracking dozens of people and objects as they intertwined. Each person had a different color, although there was some overlap, since she had only a dozen or so to choose from. Several colors trailed down to end in a frowny face with x’s for eyes. A “GW” was tracked in violet on the wall. He brought YF’s pink to an end before his own color stopped with a death mask and two words: “Harada.” “Blender.”
Half-hidden under Gregory’s death mask was another flash of pink. He lifted the frowning face to read the note: “Katana, Osaka Station, locker 1601, PIN 108.”
That would explain why the sword hadn’t been in Gregory Winston’s apartment. The lockers were emptied after three days of nonpayment. The sword would be still there. Unless . . .
He glanced at the bloody blade impression on the table. It was the right shape for a katana. If the girl knew where Winston had hidden the sword, then she could have retrieved it and killed the tanuki with it. What happened, though, afterwards? Why had she left without her purse and suitcase? Did someone take her?
He sniffed, pulling in the blood-drenched air, testing it for a more elusive scent. There was a slight tinge of ozone, like lightning had passed through the room.
His phone vibrated. He growled softly and took it out to look at the number. Ananth. He glanced at the turquoise Post-it Notes on the wall. It was a tenuous lead at best, but it was the only one he’d found since arriving in Japan. He needed to find this girl. He couldn’t let Ananth order him off on another wild-goose chase. He considered what to tell the Director and what to keep to himself.
He took a deep breath and answered with “Yes?”
“What did you find?”
“I’m going to need a cleanup at the girl’s apartment.”
“You killed her?”
He barely controlled the impulse to fling his phone against the wall. He forced himself to count to ten before answering. “No. There’s a dead tanuki here; it’s the same one that was at Gregory Winston’s place. The girl isn’t here. I think she bolted.”
He considered offering to track her and decided against it. Ananth didn’t trust him. If he seemed too eager, the Director might yank him off the hunt. He waited for the man to think through the options and come to the logical conclusion.
“Find her.” Ananth ordered after a moment of silence. “But make sure you don’t kill her until we’ve had a chance to question her.”
Nikki stared at her notebook. What the hell was she writing?
Harada was the name she had given the assassin that killed George Wilson. He’d showed up at George’s apartment disguised as one of George’s friends. Only after George had opened the door did he realize his mistake . . .
Much like what had happened to her.
After a long discussion with her editor, Nikki had put Natasha in a nicer building than hers and given her a spacious one-bedroom penthouse with a clear view to Osaka Castle. At night, they shined great spotlights up onto the gleaming white stones and gold edged pagodalike roofs. Surrounded by dark gardens, the castle looked as if a hole had opened up to another time.
Natasha’s walls were covered with sketches and paintings, not post-it notes, and there was no dead body at Natasha’s. Or at least, Nikki didn’t think there was. She hadn’t written anything about the quiet artist for almost a month. Trying to write a more glamorous version of her life was like pulling teeth, as if her whole being refused the lie. What her hypergraphia had spit out since the conversation with her editor had been utterly lacking in detail, as if Natasha lived in a white void.
This scene was full of details—only they were details of Nikki’s apartment.
And the Scary Cat Dude had used Gregory Winston’s name instead of George’s.
First the blackouts and now this—so not good. She was blurring reality with her story; not a good sign. How much of the scene was actually suppressed memories of what happened during her blackout? It would explain the mysterious hundred thousands of yen in her jacket pocket.
The train started to slow down, and the loudspeaker announced, “Kyoto desu, Kyoto desu.”