Collector of Secrets (11 page)

Max rolled onto his side. “Hey, I only had a couple of beers. You calling me a lightweight?”

“No, I just thought . . .”

“Just kidding. I don’t need any. Thanks.” He sniffed tentatively at his armpit. “But, phew, I could really use a shower.”

“So desu ne.”
Kenji nodded in agreement as he lifted the blinds to open the window. “I’ll make breakfast.”

T
he two sat facing each other at the corner table in the apartment kitchen, drinking coffee. Max struggled to force his ruminating mind away from his now damaged relationship with Tomoko. “Have you ever seen any photos of Yoko and Mr. Murayama together?”

“Yes. Of course.”

“Any old ones?”

Kenji stopped chewing his toast. “A few. Why?”

“Any before 1985?”

“I don’t know—the pictures in the office don’t have dates.” A puzzled look replaced Kenji’s almost permanent grin. “That was the year I was born.”

Max pressed on, refusing to reveal his motivation. “All right, so how about pictures of Mr. Murayama with Yoko when she was little?”

“Hmmm . . .” Kenji pondered awhile longer. Finally he shook his head. “No, I don’t think so.”

Max took another sip.. It wasn’t conclusive proof either way. But why lie about Mr. Murayama being Yoko’s father? Max decided there was no point pressing the question. In two weeks, when he was finished teaching at the school, it wouldn’t matter, anyway. “Never mind. Forget about it.”

Kenji shrugged. “I need to clean up the beds. My parents are coming to stay for a few days.” Lifting his jacket from the kitchen floor, he emptied the pockets into a ceramic bowl next to the sink before continuing the conversation from the next room. “So why did you quit the school?”

“You’ve dealt with Yoko a lot longer than I have. I should ask why you bother to stay. You know, she won’t give me back my passport.”

“Yes, I know.” Kenji reappeared, wearing a sheepish expression on his cherub face. “I feel very bad. It’s not right.”

Max stared at his friend. “It’s not your fault. You didn’t make her into what she is.”

Kenji mumbled something half coherently at the ground.

“Excuse me?” Max was sure he’d heard a confession of sorts, but he needed to clarify.

“I said she’s keeping your passport in the drafting cabinet in Mr. Murayama’s office—fourth drawer from the top.”

“Are you serious?” Max set down his coffee. “How long have you known?” He couldn’t help feel betrayed, and it showed. “You know how much this has been driving me crazy.”

“I only learned last week. She thought you might look for it in her office. She said you would get it back once the investors paid all their money.” Kenji’s slender eyes suddenly grew round. “You can’t tell her I told you.” An unspoken apprehension of the Dragon Lady passed between them.

“No, don’t worry. I won’t say anything.” Max shook his head. “I can’t believe it’s been sitting right there.”

Kenji ducked back into the living room and a vacuum roared to life.

Max stood to place the dishes in the kitchen sink and his eyes came to rest on the adjacent ceramic bowl. The plastic Ferrari keychain was familiar—he’d watched Kenji pocket it after locking up the office.
I would just be borrowing it.
He tried to push away the wicked thought blooming in his mind. It was immoral, and a feeling of guilt gripped him. But everything about the whole situation with Yoko seemed wrong, and besides, he would only be retrieving what was his already. Plus, Kenji owed him—and maybe, in this case, two wrongs would make a right. Holding his breath, Max slowly closed his fingers around the keys. They slid easily into the pocket of his jeans. Instantly, he was overwhelmed by the urge to depart, and he shouted over the noise. “I’d better get rolling.” Stepping into the nearby alcove, he bent over, wriggling his feet into his tennis shoes.

The vacuum’s roar died down as Kenji reappeared. “I’m sure Yoko will give you back the passport soon.”

“Yeah, for sure. And thanks for the karaoke last night, and for letting me crash here. I needed to take my mind off things.” The gratitude was delivered with a quick head bob. “Didn’t feel much like going home after everything that happened with Tomoko.” He tried hard to push the memory of the disappearing taxi from his mind.

“Douitashimashite.”

Max opened the door and made it halfway down the hallway before Kenji’s shout forced him to a stop. He cringed and turned around, the office key weighing heavily in his pocket.

“Wait! There is one picture of them both on the office wall. It’s Mr. Murayama pushing Yoko on a swing—I recognize the birthmark on her arm. She looks very young.”

“Thanks buddy. See you later.”

The apartment door clicked shut.

If Kenji was right, there was concrete proof that Yoko was Murayama’s daughter. But he still needed to retrieve his passport. And now, thanks to Kenji, he knew exactly where to find it.

THE OFFICE lady’s perfect hips swayed rhythmically while she maneuvered a rolling cart through the islands of desks. With a demure smile and soft touch, she loaded and unloaded neat stacks of National Police Agency case files.

As she passed through a group of seated detectives, they stared at the lines of the navy blue polyester skirt that hugged her slender waist and curved over her well-formed buttocks. Shoulder-length black hair, a long-sleeved white blouse, matching blue vest, and short-heeled pumps completed the uniform. Like paper dolls, office ladies, or OLs, were normally clone-like, unknown in identity. However, this woman’s appearance was something special. She had a perfectly tight body, dazzling almond-shaped eyes, and flawless cheekbones.

On the same floor, Masami Ishi, superintendent of the Criminal Investigation Bureau, sat behind his desk in one of the few private offices in the NPA’s Tokyo head office. Outside the window behind him, low gray clouds spread into the distance over the sprawling city. He normally didn’t work on the weekends, but this was an exception. Already, more than forty-eight hours had passed since the murder of Kazue Saito, and the first official report was just being delivered. It was a pitifully slow performance for the Agency in such a high-profile case. Several phone calls had already been received from prominent government officials. They were making rumblings about the need for a Senate investigation. He would have to personally reprimand the officers involved, but first he wanted to see the results.

The superintendent adjusted the thick, wire glasses resting against the pockmarked skin of his round cheeks. His shoes barely touched the floor. The comb-over on his balding scalp slid down his forehead, and he swept it back into place. Leaning back in his chair, he opened the Sunday newspaper.The OL quietly entered Masami’s office, holding a single file in the crook of her slender arm. Walking with her eyes cast down, she moved robotically toward the oversized mahogany desk and gently placed the file down before bowing and backing out of the room.

She was definitely above average, and he’d have to see to it that she was transferred to the weekday shift. Masami Ishi’s overbite showed more prominently as he smiled to himself.

Opening the file, he scanned the page. He’d already seen most of the summarized details from the crime scene, and all the forensic evidence. The information he was specifically looking for was the results of the cell-phone analysis. SoftBank Mobile was notoriously slow at providing call-record details, so the police lab had been tasked with extracting information from the smashed remains of Kazue Saito’s cell phone.

The last connection had been made at 11:41 p.m. on Thursday, April 19, to a cell phone registered to Takahito Murayama. He was curious to see that it wasn’t a call, but a text. Flipping the page, he read the message. It was brief—just three numbers followed by two Latin characters—but it spoke volumes.

Masami Ishi leaned back in his chair. Rubbing his forehead with the palms of both hands did little to reduce his creeping anxiety. This situation was growing uglier by the minute.

Grabbing a marker, he paused, then blacked out the contents of the short text message. Under no circumstances could the politicians see this information right now, at least not until he could piece together why the dead diplomat had shattered his cell phone before dying.

MAX’S SHORT letter described the situation in clear and simple terms. The first line read, “To the Dear Ladies.” It would need to be translated into Japanese. It detailed the false, excessive invoicing of school tuition and expenses, personal spending of investment funds, and suspicion of planned fraud on Yoko’s part. He acknowledged that he couldn’t prove it all, but they needed to be warned. Sealing the envelope felt like purging something evil from his soul. After tonight, Max knew there wouldn’t likely be a chance to speak again with his students’ mothers. If everything went as expected, he would have his passport back and Yoko would be furious beyond words.

“Why not wait until tomorrow and just ask the old man to get the passport for you?” Zoe was propped against the floor pillows in her usual corner of the TPH living room, eyes glazed from the previous night’s drug-fest. The nearby electric heater, nestled beneath the television, buzzed and clicked as a subtitled Matt Damon recklessly raced a car through a Moscow tunnel.

“Murayami doesn’t go to his office every day.” Max lay shirtless, soaked in sweat on the living room floor. An hour-long run, intended to clear his head, had served only to give him a painful side-stitch. “What if the Dragon Lady moves it in the meantime? Now that I know where it is, I don’t want to miss my chance to get it back.”

“You’re paranoid.”

Max craned his head to take a gulp of Pocari Sweat. “I have the office key, but that’s it. Once I smash the lock on the drafting cabinet, it’ll be breaking and entering, whether it’s my passport or not.”

Zoe’s contemptuous snicker prompted him to lift his head quizzically. “What was that for?”

“You—Saint Max, the patron saint of the Tokyo Poor House—are actually going to break into a locked cabinet? Yeah, right.”

“I’m only perfect when compared to you,” he retorted. “And besides, I really upset Tomoko last night. Not very saintly.”

Zoe shrugged. “So you’ll apologize like you always do.”

“Advice from someone whose longest relationship is with a needle?” He turned onto his side and faced the wall. “Your own words, not mine, remember.”

Behind him, he heard Zoe rise and descend the squeaking stairs to the main floor.

Moments later the stairs shuddered again, and Zoe flopped down. “You may not appreciate my wisdom, but you can thank me for this.”

Max felt something solid strike the back of his head. “Ow, what the hell?” He rubbed the spot of impact before turning back over. He retrieved a thick, shiny pen from the straw floor.

“Nice Waterford knock-off, but you’ve lost me.”

Zoe crawled forward, taking the pen from Max’s hand. She unscrewed the two halves of the burgundy casing and let the slender silver contents scatter on the floor. “This is a 38-gram ballpoint pen, lock-pick special. The carbon steel ‘tension wrench’ is the clip—here—and it holds nine different steel picks.”

“You’re joking, right? Where’d you get this?”

“Never mind. You want to know how to use it or not?”

“Yeah. Of course.”

Zoe demonstrated with an old lock. “Most have a pin-and-tumbler design. Visualize a lock like a solid metal pipe surrounded by a metal tube. There’s nothing stopping the pipe from spinning freely. Now imagine you drill a line of five holes through the tube and into the pipe. You place five pins into all five holes. Can the pipe spin freely anymore?” Max was sure it was a rhetorical question as he watched her shake her head. “Pull out all five pins, and the pipe is free to spin again. That’s the basic concept.”