Eight Million Gods-eARC (7 page)

There seemed to be only one way to find out if someone had used her story to plan a murder: go to Gregory’s apartment building. What she posted was fairly vague. The actual polished scene had lots of telling details. If those details matched up, then her psychopath fan had full access to her files.

She ate the rice balls as she loaded up her backpack with everything she might need. Subway map. Umbrella. Flashlight. Lock picks. The last thing Nikki did as she left her apartment was make sure she wasn’t being followed.

6

Scene of the Crime

Nikki always got lost in the Umeda Station as it tangled itself in and around several underground malls, the basements of several large department stores, and Osaka Station. None of the maps she’d found thus far covered all of the connected areas, so it remained an unknowable maze. Some of the streets around the station were only crossable via pedestrian bridges, which created their own midair maze. Nikki would surface at various exits, like a confused gopher, get her bearings, and plunge back into the labyrinth.

She finally found one of her landmarks—a literal notch in the wall serving unidentified meat on a stick with a
noren
curtain separating its standing customers from the flow of commuters. From there she found signs for HEP Five. She often suspected she had walked in a big circle, but so far she hadn’t found an easier way through the network of malls and subway lines.

HEP Five was a tall narrow shopping complex with high-end boutiques that cratered to the wealthy twenty-something. George’s building was east of HEP Five. She used her cell phone to guide her to the right set of doors and out onto the street.

There was a KFC at the corner, the Colonel’s familiar face beaming down at her in triplicate.

Nikki’s stomach was doing strange flip flops as she headed toward George’s building. She had no idea what she was walking into—or even if she could. She might not be able to get through the building’s security. As she walked toward it, a woman used keys to unlock the foyer door and walked into the building.

How was she going to get in?

She noticed an American man with a suitcase heading toward the front door. She fell into step behind him, pretending to search her purse for keys.

Don’t mind me. I live here. Just lost my key. See. Harmless. Not wanted for murder at all.

Amazingly, it worked. Being short and harmless-looking had its uses.

The lobby was typical of Osaka: a narrow slit between two restaurants leading back to a tiny elevator.

The man with the suitcase took notice of Nikki as they stood waiting for the elevator. She kept digging in her purse. She made the mistake of peeking up and found him eying her with suspicion.

“I’ve never seen you here before.”

Her heart flipped in her chest. “Um, I’m new. I just moved in the other day.”

“I didn’t know anyone was selling a unit.”

“I’m subletting, actually. It’s a friend of a friend kind of thing.” She fell back to George’s conflict line. “He was here on a sponsored visa and got laid off from work. He’s trying to line up another job, but he had to go home to get a tourist visa, and he decided to spend some time in the States visiting family. It was cheaper for me to sublet than do a weekly mansion.”The fact her appartment was in a no-deposit mansion building was another reason she was having money problems.

“Greg Winston?” The man pointed upwards. “Up on fourteen?”

She nodded.

“That was quick.” The elevator dinged, and the doors slid open. “He was still trying to figure out what he was going to do when I left.” He motioned for her to get on first, and then wheeled in his luggage. “I’m Stewart Robertson. I was just in the States, visiting family and renewing my tourist visa.”

“Small world,” she said.

“Life as an expatriate,” the man said. “Juggling truths and lies to stay in the country.”

He tapped the buttons for the third floor and the fourteenth. “Welcome to the hood. We do mixers Thursday night, but people probably told you that already.”

“Yeah, everyone’s been so nice.”

He got off on the third floor, saying, “See you later.”

Nikki rode up to the fourteenth floor. She had never bothered figuring out what floor George lived on, just that he was high up enough to clear the other buildings between him and the HEP Five. It was really freaking her out that the killer managed to match up a man that lived not only in the right building, but had the identical visa problem.

Only Miriam knew about George’s visa problems. It might be proof that the killer had access to Nikki’s files. The killer could have picked Gregory just because his name was close to George. The visa trouble might have been just coincidence; all expatriates faced endless visa’ struggles unless they married someone who was Japanese. She only had thirty days before she ran into the problem herself. Or maybe Gregory just had the bad luck to be home while someone—like Stewart from the elevator—wasn’t. Hell, her demented fan might have just rung doorbell after doorbell until a man answered.

The elevator stopped on fourteen, and the door opened. She hesitated until the door started to close again, and then she hopped out. Around the corner from the elevator, the door to 1401 had police tape across it.

At that point Nikki went into a major debate with herself. She should just leave. She was scared. She was in enough trouble with the police; crossing a police barrier to a murder scene where she was a suspect would be dumb. She could end up in prison just for breaking and entering. True, it meant someone else would pay for her housing and food, but she was fairly sure the food would be bad and the sheets would have a low thread count. And God, the hypergraphia in a true prison might be impossible to deal with.

The only way Nikki was going to see if her psychopath had copied her novel was to see the murder scene.

But she was scared.

It was scarier, though, to stay clueless to whether or not someone who could kill a man with a blender had full access to her computer files.

Oh God, I’m going into this apartment.

Nikki wasn’t sure if she had won or lost the debate; but that was always the problem of fighting with herself.

She took out her lock picks. It seemed to take forever to pick the lock, even though Nikki knew it couldn’t have been more than two minutes. It was the longest two minutes of her life. She kept expecting the elevator to ding, signaling someone’s arrival, or one of the neighboring doors to open. But she got the door open, slipped into the unlit apartment, and shut the door without being caught.

In the dark, the coppery smell of blood pressed in on Nikki, heavy and thick as a blanket. The stench was so oppressive it seemed as if she had to be standing in blood. Fear prickled the hair on her arms, and she shifted her feet, expecting a horrible stickiness underfoot. The tile under her feet, though, was clean.

Across the apartment, framed by glass doors to the balcony, the framework of the HEP Five Ferris wheel gleamed blood red like a giant demonic spider web. It was nowhere near as romantic as she had thought it would be.

Slowly her eyes adjusted to the dark. She was in a foyer, with the kitchen directly to her right. A door to her left stood open to a bathroom dark as a cave. The apartment was all shadows and pools of darkness, evidence of violence—beyond the smell of blood—cloaked.

Nikki fumbled for the light switch, found it, and turned on the light.

More than the countertops had been white. The floor and the cabinets were white. Blood splattered everything, from the floor to the ceiling, dried to ruddy red, stark against the white.

Too scary
. She turned the light off and then wiped it clean of fingerprints. It was a good thing she had just had a massive writing session, because otherwise she’d be digging for her retractable pen.

What was she doing there? What did she want to find again? Oh, yes, she was trying to see if the killer had copied elements of her book that she hadn’t made public. She leaned against the door, eyes closed, trying to figure out what she had written that
could
be copied.

In the kitchen with a blender: check. But she had posted that.

A man with the initials GW living in this building: check. But that she had posted that, too.

Sake cup on the counter.

Nikki fished her flashlight out of her bag to avoid turning on the overhead light. There was no
sake
cup on the blood-splattered counter. She felt relieved until she realized that the police might have taken it as evidence.

What else could point to the killer having had access to her files? She crept through the apartment, running her flashlight over the contents. It was a clean, simple place, much as she had imagined it. Sleek modern furniture mixed with Japanese antiques in a way that Nikki wished she had the money to emulate. She would give her eyeteeth for the lacquered sword
tansu
that Gregory was using as a coffee table or the beautiful wedding kimono on the wall.

In the bedroom was a tall
tansu
with a dozen drawers standing in as a dresser. In the bottommost drawer was a coil of heavy jute rope. She eyed it without touching it. George had a sick little fetish for tying up schoolgirls; it was what truly lay behind his rape of Yuuka’s body. He liked his sexual partners young and helpless. With Yuuka, he’d discovered the ultimate in helplessness was dead.

Did Gregory have the same fetish or had the killer put this here? The rope was the type used in the Japanese ancient practice of bondage called
kinbaku
. She had learned much more than she wanted while researching George’s scenes. She closed the drawer without being able to decide what it meant in terms of her stalker.

She was about to give up when she saw Isetan Department Store bag in the bedroom trash can. She stared at it, feeling sick. There wasn’t an Isetan in Osaka. There was one in Kyoto, anchoring down half of the sprawling train station. George had gone to Kyoto to steal an antique samurai sword enshrined at a local temple. When he reached the train station, he realized that he had no plan on how to get the sword back to Osaka. He stopped at Isetan’s and bought a case used by high school students to carry wooden practice swords to and from school.

After he’d stolen the sword and killed Yuuka, he’d taken a crowded express train back to Osaka with the case slung across his shoulders. The whole trip he felt as if he was being watched. By the time he reached Osaka, he wanted to be rid of the incriminating sword, so he left it in one of the coin lockers at the train station. It wasn’t until he reached his apartment that he realized he still had the Isetan bag folded up in his pocket. He’d taken it out and tossed it in the bedroom trash can where it seemed to taunt him with his guilt.

To anyone else, it was just a simple plastic bag. To Nikki, it was like the blood on Lady Macbeth’s hands.
Out, damn’d spot. Out, I say!

Had Gregory just coincidently been at Kyoto and shopped at Isetan or had his killer left the bag in the trash, slavishly recreating her book? She used facial tissues as impromptu gloves and carefully took it out of the trash. Inside was a sales receipt. It was dated Saturday, a few hours before Gregory had been killed. She took out her phone, scanned the
kanji
of the item bought and ran it through her translation app.
Bamboo sword bag.

She dropped the receipt in horror, and then hastily picked it back up with the tissue, fumbled it back into the Isetan bag, and shoved both into the bedroom trash can. A minute later she was out of the apartment, and a minute after that, running away from the building.

“Who in fucking hell is this crazy! What kind of whacko would go through that much fucking trouble? Go to Kyoto, buy a bag . . .”

Oh god, what else had he done in Kyoto?

She dug out her ballpoint pen and stood clicking it and practiced her deep breathing as she tried to think in some calm, rational way.

Data on her Internet searches went onto the net and came back to her. When she was just researching her novel, she never bothered to use a proxy service to disguise her apartment’s IP address. Anyone could have intercepted her searches and deduced information. She’d tried several times to pull up “Isetan Kyoto
Fukuro Shinai
” before discovering it didn’t mean “bag for bamboo sword” but “bamboo sword wrapped with leather.” After that, she’d searched English sites for “shinai bag.” It wouldn’t take much to realize that she wanted to buy the bag at Isetan in Kyoto.

What she hadn’t researched on the Internet were the coin lockers. She had sacrificed half an hour and a few hundred yen to find out how they worked. The only place that the exact locker number and pin number for the digital lock was recorded was in her password-protected documents.

She would have to cross through the train station to find her way back to the subway. She only knew one way to go. It would only take her a minute to check the locker.

If the killer had left something for her to find, then he was way beyond slightly deranged. How did she attract such a monolithic loon before her first book came out?

Nikki scurried back through the underground maze linked to Umeda Station. She wasn’t sure how long the locker rental was good for. Eight hours? Only until the last train of the day? A full day? If the killer left something in a locker before he had killed Gregory, it was drawing close to twenty-four hours now.

There was so much she didn’t know.

She felt like she was lost in a dark, shifting ocean. All around her were people she couldn’t understand, signs she couldn’t read, as she tried to find her way through the complex of malls and subway stations. So completely lost.

What the hell was she going to do when she reached the Osaka Station? She had Tanaka’s business card; he had pressed it on her before she left the police headquarters. She could call him and ask him meet her at the station. The digital key meant she didn’t have to mention her little tour of Gregory Winston’s apartment. If she couldn’t get into the locker, she only looked like she was histrionic.

But what if she could get into the locker? What did she tell Tanaka? How did she explain knowing the PIN? If she told Tanaka that it was in her manuscript but not posted to her blog, then he’d know that she’d been hacked, and would probably get a warrant for her computer. Maybe. More likely, he’d just assume she was working with the killer.