Second Skin (16 page)

Damn Kanda Tōrin and his overweening desire to get the CyberNet on-line, Nicholas thought.
This prosecutor knows more about the partnership deal than I do.

‘If he was, it comes as news to me,’ Nicholas said. ‘If you have done your homework, Prosecutor, you know that I was not involved in the TransRim partnership itself.’

Tanaka Gin’s eyebrows raised slightly. ‘Can this be possible? Your own American computer techs developed the CyberNet technology. How is it possible you have been kept out of the loop?’

Ask Tōrin, Nicholas thought. To Tanaka Gin, he said, ‘Nangi-san made that decision while I was otherwise occupied overseas. As I understand it, the business climate dictated we get the CyberNet on-line as quickly as possible. Since Sato itself was unable to raise that much capital so quickly, Nangi-san decided to turn to outside partners. I think it was a good idea. Right now the
keiretsu
can ill afford to take on the onerous debt the TransRim start-up costs would impose.’

Tanaka Gin made no reply, but walked toward the wall. ‘I wonder whether it was here, near the bar. In any case, some wicked blade – nothing our people have ever seen before – pierced his flesh, not once, but many times. Over and over.’

‘A slasher.’

Without turning around Tanaka Gin slipped a couple of photos out of his breast pocket, handed them to Nicholas. They were of Rodney Kurtz’s corpse in situ, Nicholas saw by the light of one of the bronze lamps. Close-ups of his face, neck, and shoulders.

‘Where did you find the body?’

‘Not here in the house. He had been dumped near Tsukiji.’ Tanaka Gin meant Tokyo’s enormous fish market. The light, brighter now with Tanaka Gin’s proximity, wavered slightly. ‘Arcane weapons, I believe, are a specialty of yours, Linnear-san. Can you tell me what kind of weapon the murderer used, a spike or –’

‘Not from these photos. This body is too ripped up to make a guess. But if you’d keep your people on the lookout for any new murders that fit this pattern –’

‘Done,’ Tanaka Gin said, making a note on a slim pad. ‘Perhaps not a slasher, then. There is a pattern carved into his forehead.’

Indeed, there was. ‘A vertical crescent,’ Nicholas said, studying the photos in greater detail.

‘Precisely.’

In one of them, Nicholas saw the beginning of a curious dark blotch in the lower right corner, where Kurtz’s chest began. What could that be? Another wound?

He looked up to see Tanaka Gin watching him. A look of intense curiosity was on the prosecutor’s face.

‘They say that even at the point of death you could will yourself to show no emotion.’ Tanaka Gin cocked his head to one side. ‘Is this true? I wonder.’

Nicholas handed back the crime-scene photos. ‘Why would this concern you?’

‘It is you I am dealing with now, Linnear-san. Before I do, a common ground must be struck.’ Tanaka Gin made a gesture that might be construed to be conciliatory. ‘I think you would agree all relationships work best this way.’

‘All except those with women.’

‘So? I would have said
especially
with women.’

‘I can see you are no romantic, Prosecutor,’ Nicholas said, walking out of the lamplight into the darkness to stand beside the other man. ‘Where love is concerned,
not
knowing what is ahead is often most important.’

‘Ah, I see the difficulty. You were speaking of love and I was referring to sex.’ Tanaka Gin played the beam of light slowly across the speckled wall. ‘Too often the two are not compatible.’

Nicholas took a look around the room. ‘Gin-san, I wonder whether you would allow me access to the rest of the house?’

‘As you wish. I have no objection. The place has already been dusted for fingerprints and photographed.’

Nicholas went off through the house. He looked through rooms filled with a mortal silence, but in his inner mind he heard a screaming, an echo perhaps of the pain that had existed in this house for some time. He opened his
tanjian
eye, on the lookout for anything out of the ordinary. Black fingerprint powder lay everywhere like soot from a leaky furnace. He went through the dining room, Kurtz’s study, all the bedrooms. The marble master bathroom was ultraluxe. It contained a shower, a Japanese cedar bathtub, and a fiberglass Jacuzzi. The juxtaposition of the traditional and the modern was jarring.

He sat down on the edge of the Jacuzzi. Where it abutted the wall was an access panel for the Jacuzzi plumbing. Something about the panel caught his eye. Bending over, he examined one of the four screws that held it in place. Was that a scratch on the plate near it? No. He unscrewed the screw, saw a human hair carefully wrapped around the threads. Its end, sticking out slightly, had looked like a scratch. There was no doubt in his mind that it had been deliberately set there. Why? To let someone know if the plate had been tampered with?

He unscrewed the plate, put it aside. Inside, he found an expensive, hardened-steel combination wall safe. That explained the carefully wound hair. He ran his fingertips around the door and discovered that it was unlocked. He swung it open and peered inside. Empty. Ransacked by Rodney Kurtz’s murderer? It would seem so. And whoever it had been had been meticulous enough not to disturb the hair and clever enough to have seen it.

When he returned to the living room, he found Tanaka Gin standing in exactly the same position.

Tanaka Gin said, ‘There were pubic hairs on the dining room table and on Kurtz’s desk. Curious, don’t you think?’

‘Sex and death. A strong, almost uncontrollable connection among certain people.’

Tanaka Gin turned. ‘Certain people?’ He nodded slowly, as if divining a hidden meaning to Nicholas’s words. ‘Can’t you just see the man as he held Kurtz while he drove the blade in, quite deliberately, again and again. The man was passionate but there was, I think, no red haze, no frenzy. It was all quite well thought out.’

‘Was this before or after he had Kurtz’s wife in the dining room and Kurtz’s office?’

Tanaka Gin appeared to be doing no more than counting the blood spots. He took a deep breath. ‘That depends, doesn’t it?’

‘On what?’

‘Whether or not she was involved in the murder.’ His eyes slid sideways to gather Nicholas into their web. ‘Witnesses to Giai Kurtz’s death say that she was with a man – a Westerner. After the black Mercedes hit her he took off after it and no one saw him again.’

It was at this moment that Nicholas realized just how good a detective this man was. ‘You’re certain it was a Mercedes?’

‘Absolutely. We found it early this morning at a building site in Shibuya, abandoned and burned to a cinder.’ He snapped off the light. ‘By the way, the medical examiner has determined that Kurtz was murdered ten to twelve hours before the wife was struck by the Mercedes.’

‘Do you think she was deliberately killed?’

‘Hit-and-runs are not routine in this city. But perhaps this one was different.’ Tanaka Gin shrugged, his thin frame outlined like a charcoal sketch by the lamplight. ‘This is my working hypothesis, anyway.’

In the dimness, the two men stood shoulder to shoulder, breathing in the scents of sex and death.

‘Tell me, Linnear-san, what does the image of vertical crescent mean to you?’

Nicholas hesitated. He had seen that symbol before. It was
ngoh-meih-yuht,
a phrase in an obscure Chinese dialect that meant ‘the crescent moon.’ It was the Gim, the Two-Edged Sword, the initiation symbol into a cult of myth and magic. It was part of a Vietnamese Nung tribe tattoo he had seen on the Messulethe, Do Duc Fujiro, the man who had tried to murder Mikio Okami. The Messulethe were terrifying psycho-magicians; so ancient legend had it, they were descended from the Cycladeans and the Titans. It was even rumored that their magic had been the precursor to Tau-tau.

But Okami was not a part of this investigation and Nicholas did not want him involved in any way. Also, he had killed Do Duc on Japanese soil and he did not want that incident investigated. He said, ‘I don’t know.’

‘This man who destroyed the Kurtzes, I think, is exceptionally dangerous.’ Tanaka Gin’s head swung around, his eyes glittering in the low lamplight. ‘Would you tell me if it did mean anything to you?’

He was an excellent interrogator, as well, Nicholas thought. ‘Of course. I have nothing to hide.’ But he could not shake the terrible sensation that had hit him like the stink of a charnel house the moment he had stepped through the Kurtzes’ front door: that another Messulethe had been loosed.

He was very close to the blood-spattered wall and he felt himself sinking down, inward toward
kokoro
almost despite himself. Something dark and inexplicable seemed to be calling to him like echoes beneath a deep-water lake.

‘Interesting. I would imagine a man who is sworn to protect the Kaisho would have much to keep secret.’ Tanaka Gin shrugged. ‘But perhaps I am mistaken. After all, what can I, a civil servant, know of such things?’

Nicholas felt a kind of schizophrenia come over him. Part of his mind reacted, dismayed that Tanaka Gin knew something of his relationship with Mikio Okami. That could prove dangerous. But part of him was already adrift from the bonds of time and space.

He had put the flat of his hand against the wall. The fingers, barely curled so their ends made contact, acted like a fiber-optic cable, transmitting data. The world had canted over on its side, diminishing in Akshara as if he were flying away from a spit of land. Time dissolved like a lozenge in the mouth, and he was back in this room as it had been the day before.

Tanaka Gin was right in at least part of his hypothesis. ‘He was here,’ Nicholas whispered.

Tanaka Gin’s torso swayed forward as if drawn by the suck of time collapsing in upon itself. ‘Who? Who was here with Giai Kurtz? Her husband?’

‘At first, yes. Then, later…’

Tanaka Gin was breathless. He had heard of Nicholas Linnear’s arcane powers, but he had been loath to believe the stories. However, looking at Nicholas’s drawn face, he knew this was no illusionist, no rigged freak-show exhibit. Whatever was happening was real, and he thought,
there is real hope here for me.
‘Yes, what happened later?’

‘Kurtz was murdered here.’

‘In this house, you mean.’

‘Right here.’ Nicholas moved his hand over the wall. His face seemed even more twisted, deformed, as if it were being illuminated from below. ‘Someone else. Some...’ Abruptly, he shuddered. He was quite white.

‘Linnear-san, are you all right? What is it you saw?’

‘I...’

‘Who was with Giai Kurtz?’

‘The same person who murdered her husband.’

Tanaka Gin emitted the smallest sigh. ‘Did you see him?’

There it was again, that familiar static in his mind that he associated with Mick Leonforte and with – what? – a feeling or sensation like a host of insects crawling inside him, tiny pincers clipping his flesh. Perhaps dark presentiment described it best. But he could not say any of this to Tanaka Gin. ‘I saw... something.’

‘What was it, a shadow?’
He is still not himself,
Tanaka Gin thought. What had happened to him? ‘Linnear-san, you must tell me everything.’

Nicholas stared at the prosecutor for a long time, but his eyes were oddly focused, as if he saw something
inside
Tanaka Gin’s body. Outside, cars hissed by and trucks making nighttime deliveries ground their gears and passed on to unknown destinations.

‘You can trust me, Linnear-san. This I swear to you.’

Nicholas nodded, a spastic jolt of his head.

‘Tell me what your Tau-tau revealed to you. We will come to an understanding, you and I, because I think we can help one another.’

Nicholas was staring out the jalousied window where lights sparked and danced on the river. ‘How can I help you?’

Tanaka Gin lifted his arm. ‘Shall we sit down a moment?’

They sat on a rattan sofa, while the light from the Golden Turd across the Sumida filtered through the jalousies.

But almost at once, Nicholas jumped up. ‘This is a violent place, filled with hatred and rage.’

‘So I’ve heard. There are rumors that Mr Kurtz beat his wife.’

‘Did she ever file charges?’

‘No. But unfortunately that is the norm in pattern physical-abuse cases.’

Nicholas, silhouetted by the lights, seemed all alone and a little bit lost. Tanaka Gin could understand just how he felt. It had only been a month since Ushiba’s death. Friendship such as theirs had been should not be so abruptly severed. He was still trying to recover.

‘I want to trust you,’ Nicholas said. ‘Now is a time when I must trust
someone.’

‘About Kurtz. There’s something about the body I haven’t told you.’ Tanaka Gin’s steady gaze regarded Nicholas with equanimity. ‘Some of his organs were missing – heart, pancreas, liver.’ So that explained the dark smudge at the bottom of one of the photos, Nicholas thought. It had been part of the hole through which the organs had been removed. ‘They had been excised with surgical precision, the medical examiner assured me. The vertical crescent, the missing organs, do these mean anything to you?’

They did. Dominic Goldoni’s heart had been taken from him when the Messulethe killed him, but Nicholas was not going to tell Tanaka Gin about that. ‘No, but I’m willing to do some research.’

‘That would undoubtedly be helpful.’

Nicholas wondered how much irony to read into that comment. Again, he had the impression that the prosecutor knew more than he was letting on. But he had not time to dwell on this because he was trying to work out something significant. And physically shocked as he was, he knew he needed to solve this problem to clear his head, to try to forget what he had seen while he had been in contact with the death wall. It was like a new wound, pulsing in the center of his mind.

We will come to an understanding, you and I, because I think we can help one another.
That was what Tanaka Gin had said, and Nicholas could see his point: this was no ordinary murderer and the prosecutor’s instincts had told him so. Obviously, he knew something about Tau-tau, knew some potent stimulus left at what he believed to be the murder site might bring on the psychic dislocation of time and space that allowed Nicholas to ‘see’ what had happened here. That was why he had asked Nicholas to meet him here at the Kurtzes’ instead of at his office, which would have been standard operating procedure.