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 advice. 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.”