Eight Million Gods-eARC (8 page)

Surely there would be security cameras on the lockers. If Tanaka checked the video from them, he would find out who used the locker last. But what if Tanaka didn’t check them? What if he didn’t believe the killer had hacked into her computer files? It was more logical that she knew the PIN number because she had programmed it in. She couldn’t force them to check the security cameras. She could only count on them weighing the circumstantial evidence, and it made her look like an accomplice.

No. She wouldn’t call the police—unless there was a dead body. A corpse would trump everything. There shouldn’t be any dead bodies, though, if the killer was sticking to script. Japanese were lawful people—surely the killer would keep to her story. Of course, maybe the killer was some imported crazed American serial killer; they couldn’t be trusted.

She was probably on a wild goose chase.

Besides, how would the killer get a dead body into the train station unnoticed?

Body parts, on the other hand, were a possibility.

Her stomach was doing cartwheels by the time she found her landmark niche restaurant. It had closed for the night, a steel gate rolled down over it. Beside it were steps up to the street level. There was probably some underground link to Osaka Station from Umeda Station since it seemed like half of Umeda was tied to the underground complex, but she hadn’t found it yet. Instead she went up the steps and across an alley and into Osaka Station.

At least the coin locker that she wanted was right by the door.

She stood eyeing it nervously. The “in use” light was on. Something was in it. She went to the touch-screen control panel for the bank of lockers, hit the English button, and selected the “take out the baggage” option. It asked her for the key she used. She picked the cash payment option of “key number.” It asked for the locker number and PIN number. Her hand was shaking as she keyed both in.

There was a pause, and the machine asked for eight hundred yen.

“Shit,” she hissed. Did that mean the PIN was right?

Nikki dug out hundred yen coins, dropped the first coin twice before she managed to feed it into the machine. She was short a hundred yen coin, and she mindlessly fed five and ten yen coins in until the machine flashed “Thank you for use” and spit three of her last coins back out at her.

The “in use” light was flashing. The door was unlocked.

“Please,” she whispered. “No body parts.”

She opened up the door.

George had left a
katana
in the locker. She had figured he couldn’t carry a sword on the train without some kind of covering. She had picked out a light brown cotton fabric kendo travel bag with little dragonflies stamped randomly in white and red.

Something tall and skinny leaned in shadows of the locker, wrapped in a tan fabric.

Well, at least it wasn’t a body part.

7

In the Shadow of the Swallowtail

Nikki had been annoyed and dismayed when George stole the antique
katana
in Kyoto. He was supposed to be her romantic interest. There he was splashing kerosene onto the back of a temple’s gift shop to create a diversion for his theft.

Of course, her hypergraphia had just scribbled “the sword” into her notebook without any description. George had been too caught up in the fear and excitement of his escalating crime to even notice what he clutched in his hand. After he killed and raped Yuuka, he nearly left it lying beside her dead body as he staggered away. He came back for it only after the sirens of the fire engines brought him to his senses.

Nikki would have been stuck on the scene until she fleshed out all the little details, so she had thrown herself into researching samurai swords. She learned that the hilt of the
katana
wasn’t one solid piece but nearly a dozen items carefully fitted together. The hand guard, called a
tsuba
, was a disc of metal about three inches across with a slot in the center. Each
tsuba
was a hand-crafted piece of art and often had the samurai’s family crest, called a
mon
, worked into the design. After looking at dozens of web pages, she decided that the stolen
katana
had a
tsuba
made from a metal of gold and copper with a dark blue-purple patina called
shakudo
. It featured a swallowtail butterfly
mon
done in gold leaf against the purple.

Surely the killer hadn’t stuck that closely to script.

Nikki lifted out the bag, undid the ties, and shifted the fabric aside to look closer at the sword inside. Gold swallowtail wings gleamed on a violet field.

She suddenly had an intense feeling that someone was watching her. She glanced around. Hundreds of people flowed around her, coming and going through the gates to the train platforms. Focused on getting to their destinations, none of them seemed to be paying any attention to her.

“
Sumimasen,
” a
salaryman
apologized as he brushed past her. Before she realized what he was doing, he wedged a piece of luggage into the locker she had left open and shut the door. The “in use” light went on.

“Wait!” she cried.

“
Sumimasen.
” the
salaryman
apologized again, bowed, and hurried out of the train station.

She whimpered as he disappeared. She hadn’t really meant to take the sword out of the locker. She glanced around for another locker and realized that hers had been the only unoccupied one. Every locker in sight had its “in use” light on. The feeling of being watched was still there, even though no one was looking at her. No one was even standing still, pretending to focus on a magazine or telephone conversation or oddly colored piece of floor. Everyone was coming and going, and she alone stood still like a rock in the ocean surf.

What the hell was she supposed to do? George had burned down a temple and killed a girl to get the
katana
. What if her monolithic loon of a fan had done the same? If she called the police, they’d probably arrest her for two murders.

But if she didn’t call the police, she would still have a homicidal maniac stalking her.

She felt someone next to her, staring.

Nikki leapt to the side, bringing up the wrapped sword to block an attack.

There was no one there.

“Shit!” She was shaking, though. For one split second, she could have sworn there was a Japanese teenage boy standing beside her, his dark eyes furious.

She started to walk fast, blindly fleeing into the night.

She was trying not to run. Running would make her easier to track. She walked fast, weaving through the heavy crowds moving through Umeda Station. She didn’t care if she was lost; all that mattered was putting distance between her and Osaka Station. She took random turns, going up escalators and down elevators and in and out of the stores.

Just when she thought she was hopelessly lost, she saw a sign for the Tanimachi subway line. She danced in place as she checked the map to figure out the cost of the ticket, fed a ten thousand yen bill into the ticket machine, grabbed her ticket and change ,and bolted through the gate. There was a train sitting at the platform as she ran down the steps. She made the car just as the “door closing” chime sounded. There was no one else running for the train. The door closed and the train pulled out.

She slumped down on the bench seat and stared at the bundled sword still clutched in her hand. Some loon had hacked her computer, read her book, and was using it as inspiration. He had stuck a blender into Gregory Winston’s stomach and set it to puree. There might be a seventeen-year-old girl dead and raped in Kyoto.

What the hell was she going to do? The police already knew she had a crazy fan. Would telling them about these new twists help them catch the man? Probably. But what could she tell them without making it seem like she had something more to do with the murders?

She could give them a copy of her manuscript on a flash drive. She could even tell them most of the truth. She believed her computer had been hacked, and she was scared. They were cops; they could fit the pieces together without her.

She would have to do something with the sword—like throw it in the canal since it now had her DNA and fingerprints on it. Hopefully it was a replica and not some real and irreplaceable antique. Surely her fan wasn’t so insane that he had stolen something so valuable and then left it in a coin locker.

One thing was for certain—her life was about to get a whole lot crazier.

“Oh, this sucks,” she whispered. “Bad enough that I write this shit, now I have to live it?”

She couldn’t stop writing. Even if she could magically cure her hypergraphia, she still would have to finish the novel. If she didn’t, she would have to give back the money that her publisher had already paid her. All of it—even the part she’d already spent.

She didn’t know how her stalker was hacking her laptop; she thought she had made it secure. She had online “friends” that were computer experts, but none of them were close and trusted. Anyone she asked for help might be the very person who had hacked her computer. She’d never met any of them face-to-face and had to hope what they told her was true. One of them could be lying and lived in Osaka.

There was the little policeman, Yoshida. She could ask him for help.

Now that she thought of it, though, it was weird that of the hundreds of restaurants in Osaka, the one he chose after processing Gregory’s murder was the same one she met Miriam in to talk about her novel. She had emailed with Miriam about where to eat. Could he have intercepted those messages?

He was an anime fan. He might visit the same forums that she did. He could be one of her many online “friends” and she wouldn’t know.

But he was so tiny. The police said—no—
Yoshida
said that the attacker was much taller.

She slipped her cell phone out to call Miriam and then remembered that was against the rules. She eyed the commuters around her, currently ignoring her. She considered texting her. No. That would make Miriam an accomplice to—to—to something. Tampering with evidence? On that thought, she made sure to delete her call to Miriam from her phone’s log.

“You don’t seriously think that a policeman hacked your computer?” She whispered to her phone the conversation she so desperately wanted to have with Miriam. “Why would Yoshida have me arrested? So we could meet while he’s in a position of authority? He honestly seemed terrified of me, but that could have been an act. But why would he put a
katana
into the coin locker? How could he know I’d be crazy enough to go looking for it?”

It was only three stops to Tanimachi 4-chome in Otemae. Far too short a distance to come up with any reasonable answer. She darted off the train and hurried out of the station. If she was being followed, she only had a couple of minutes lead time to get to the safety of her apartment. She could grab her laptop, a change of clothes, and then go someplace else, someplace safe.

But where the hell was that at this time of night?

Her apartment was on the sixth floor, around the corner and down the hall from the elevator. She had never minded before that the bare concrete hallway reminded her of something out of
Ringu
.

She unlocked her door. Opened it. Then realized that the killer could be inside—waiting for her. She stood in the doorway a moment, panting, carefully scanning the small room. She had left the sliding closet door open and the accordion-like door to the bathroom was folded. The studio apartment had no other place to hide. She stepped in, shut the door and locked it behind her.

“Calm down, stay calm.” She kicked off her sandals out of habit. “Psycho fan wants to play. Killing me would stop the game, so I’m probably safe from him. Everyone else is dead meat, but I’m—I’m—I’m scared shitless but probably safe.”

She realized she was still clutching the sword in her left hand. She put it on the table and picked up one of her omnipresent pens. She paced her small studio apartment, clicking nervously.

“Does he know where I live?” She considered. “Well, if he hacked my computer, he knows everything on it. I e-mailed my new address to my editor and my agent, so, yes, he knows where I live.”

The only thing that might save her was an oddity of Japanese urban planning. She was in 4-choma, or the fourth district, and anyone could find that. Her block number would have been assigned by both proximity to the city but also in the order it was settled. Finding the right block was more difficult. The houses on the block were then numbered as they were built. The first house on the block was “one.” There might be a dozen houses between “one” and “two” as newer houses crowded into the space between the original buildings.

Because of this, even housewives had business cards with maps to their houses printed on the back.

Her crazed fan, though, had obviously been stalking her for a long time if he found a
katana
to match the one in her story. He had time to roam her neighborhood and find her apartment building.

She needed to bounce. Usually she just fled with what she was wearing. But she never had so much “her” to leave behind. Never before could she decorate the walls, buy clothes, pick out dishes and pots. Everything in the apartment was seeped with her happiness in setting up her place. The joy in her power to finally make decisions for herself.

She could be packed in thirty minutes.

She had washed her clothes on Saturday and hung them on bamboo poles across her balcony. Luckily everything was dry. She took them down, folded and then rolled them to save space. She only had one suitcase, an ultra cute Hello Kitty trolley that she had bought for her “visa renewal” trips. Maybe she should head to South Korea early.

As she packed, she backed up her novel twice onto flash drives. She could give one to the police so they would have some hope of catching her stalker.

What about the
katana
? She eyed it sitting innocently on her table, still wrapped in fabric. “I can’t explain the sword.”

She would figure that out later. Right now, she needed to pack as quickly as possible. Stopping to think things through would only let stress seep in, and then she be stuck writing until her hypergraphia subsided. Of course, as her suitcase filled up, she couldn’t help but notice what wasn’t going to fit. All her expensive spices. Her new rice cooker. Her body-sized pillow. Her Hello Kitty duvet cover.