Eight Million Gods Read online

  “It’s probably the only reason I’m free.” Nikki watched the clerk scan her purchases with shaking hands. What did the police say to the employees? Had they explained the blender? “They really didn’t want to let me go.”

  “I shouldn’t have teased that salaryman. I had no idea that he would take us so seriously!” Miriam cried. “I’m really, really sorry.”

  “It’s not your fault.” Nikki tucked her phone under her chin, dug out her change purse, and counted out thirty thousand yen to cover the major splurge. “This is more than a run-of-the-mill murder. There’s a shitload more.” The clerk’s eyes had gone huge. Apparently he spoke English enough to understand the word “murder.” “Just hold on a minute.”

  Nikki collected her change. She unwrapped a rice ball, took a big bite, and headed out onto the street to get the automatic door between her and the listening clerk. “I’ve got a psycho fan that killed a man using a blender in the apartment building that my character lived in! Get this: a Gregory Winston instead of George Wilson.”

  “Shit!” Miriam said. “What about the others?”

  “Others?” Nikki asked.

  “Well, you’ve killed like three men and two women so far, right? Four men if you count the Brit.”

  Nikki jerked to a halt, and her stomach did a sickening flip. “Oh shit! Oh shit! Oh shit!”

  “Nikki?”

  “Oh shit!”

  “You did talk to the police about the other characters. Didn’t you?”

  “No! Oh shit!” The police were bound to find out. They were crawling all over her website when she left. “Wait! I didn’t blog about them!”

  There was a clicking of keys from Miriam’s side. “Hmm, you’re right. It doesn’t seem as if you did. So you’re good—unless . . .”

  “Unless what?”

  “Well—unless your psycho fan did something like hack your computer.”

  5

  Scary Cat Dude

  She couldn’t hold off the need to write any longer. She dumped her FamilyMart bags right inside the door of her apartment and sat on the floor to fumble through her backpack. She needed her new notebook. Writing on the computer never satisfied the need. Pen and paper was the only way.

  Luckily her hypergraphia liked the small Campus notebooks, approximately five inches by seven inches, which all the Japanese schoolchildren used in class, so they were easy to find. Despite being created for kanji, the lines were nearly the same as college-rule width. She was never without at least one tucked into her bag.

  She found the notebook. With hands shaking, she opened it. She numbered the inside cover and dated it. The smell of ink was pure nirvana to her stressed nerves. She was able to pause, pen hovering over paper, and consider what she should write.

  As Miriam pointed out, she needed a new romantic hero.

  Her problem with characters dying wasn’t new. That was the other damning part of the equation with her hypergraphia. If she wrote about kittens and rainbows, her mother probably wouldn’t be trying to lock her up. Horrible things happened to her nice and not-so-nice and sometimes outright nasty characters. It had been a graphic disembowelment—complete with descriptions of steaming coils of intestines—that triggered her first visit to a psychiatrist. Her novel attempts were usually wastelands of death, ending abruptly as all the characters met their untimely end. The novel she had sold had been a miracle of keeping the hero and heroine alive long enough to reach a happy ending. They died soon afterwards, but she chopped that part off.

  Good for her, since romantic thrillers were big. Bad for her, since it meant that her next book also had to be a romantic thriller, and her publisher had given her only a year to write it. Between the two, Nikki decided to base the heroine on herself. “Natasha” was an up-and-coming-but-still-starving artist deeply in love with Japanese culture. While Natasha was leading a very safe but somewhat uninteresting life exploring Osaka, all her hero candidates had died—violently—without even meeting Natasha. George was just the most recent. Nikki was starting to worry about making her deadline. She needed a hero. A romantic hero. A stud muffin.

  Perhaps that was the problem. She wasn’t creating heavily armed, dangerous survivors. So far all the men were nice, normal people. Salarymen. Unarmed cream puffs. Very dead stud muffins. She needed a hero with a gun who knew how to use it.

  It was time for her to create an ass-kicking, name-taking hero.

  He felt like Death. He watched over the dead, dressed in black, wrapped in his own silence that no one disturbed. To those around him on the bystander side of the yellow police tape, the murder scene was strange and new, at once horrifying and fascinating. They were the people that lived in the nearby houses, drawn by the bright carnival of police lights, and now stood watching with eyes round and hands over their mouths.

  He was more familiar with death than even the Kyoto police on the other side of the barrier. The police understood the principles of snapping a neck. They recorded and documented the results with close study of murder victims. They had never reached out, grabbed tight of a living being, and given the hard twist and felt the struggling body go limp.

  He was Death, but this wasn’t his work. There was another killer in Kyoto. So he stood and watched.

  Police had brought in harsh work lights, trying to hold off the night as they investigated the murder scene. The uniformed officers were taking pictures: bright flashes of light against the darkness. A detective in a suit was questioning a woman. The witness was wearing a sheer baby-doll top and a miniskirt that was barely decent. She was dancing in place, trying to keep warm, shaking her head.

  “I told the other officer everything I know,” the witness said. “Can I go? I’m freezing.”

  “Miss Ogawa, I just have a few more questions,” the detective said. “You live near here?”

  “Yes. I told the other officer.” Miss Ogawa rubbed her arms. “I live just down the hill. I thought I heard my neighbor’s kitten crying. I was looking for it when I saw the foot sticking out of the pile of leaves.”

  “What’s your neighbor’s name?” the detective asked.

  “Fujita Yuuka,” Miss Ogawa said. “She’s a shrine maiden at Ikuta Shrine; the one that burned this afternoon.” She pointed up the hill toward the smoldering ruins of a Shinto shrine. “Can we walk down to my apartment, where it’s warm and I can answer these questions? I’ve been out here for hours now.”

  After the heat of the day, the night seemed chilly but it really wasn’t that cold. More likely, she wanted to get away from the dead body. The Japanese believed strongly in ghosts.

  The detective studied the house down the slope from the crime scene and then swept his gaze up the steep hillside to where the body lay. “You came all the way up here because of a cat meowing?”

  The woman missed the importance of the question. It was likely that the police had determined that it was Yuuka under the thin layer of leaves. The detective was trying to figure out if Ogawa had any link to the murder.

  “I heard that Mr. Fujita had been badly burned in the fire,” Miss Ogawa said. “I figured that Yuuka’s at the hospital with him. Poor kid. It would be bad enough to lose the shrine and her father in one blow, but her kitten, too?”

  “And exactly where is the kitten now?” The detective obviously didn’t believe there was a cat.

  Miss Ogawa scanned the woods around them. “It ran off before I could catch it. I hope it’s okay.”

  “When was the last time you saw Yuuka?” the detective asked.

  He could tell the police that the killer had been a large man who had sexually assaulted the dead girl after he killed her. While the police wasted their time, though, questioning Miss Ogawa, he could study the primary crime scene before anyone could disturb it further.

  Careful not to draw attention to himself, he turned and walked away. Once he was cloaked in darkness, he went up the hill toward the burnt shrine.

  Halfway up, he found the kitten. Or perhaps more accuratel
y, the kitten found him. In a sudden rustle of dead leaves, it came bounding out of the undergrowth and started to scale his leg with needle pricks of claws. He reached down and caught it before it reached his knees. It was a tiny orange bundle of fur and sharp claws and a rough purr.

  “What do you think you’re doing?” he asked it.

  It gave a little squeak of meow in answer.

  He shook his head and continued up the hill. He might as well take it with him. If nothing else, it gave him an alibi for poking around the smoking ruins. Besides, if he left the kitten behind, it would get lost again.

  Like most temples, there was a little storefront that sold charms and fortunes that supplemented the offering income. The building had been deliberately set on fire. He could smell the kerosene used as accelerant. The ancient timbers would have gone up like paper. The fire had spread to other buildings. He stalked through the blackened landscape, cinders crackling under his feet.

  His cell phone vibrated quietly, reminding him that he was on a tight leash. He stood a moment, hand clenched tight around his phone as it rang again. Another ring and it would go to voicemail and a timer would start before someone would come hunting him. He was only trusted as long as he stayed on his leash.

  He took a deep breath and accepted the call. “What?”

  There was silence from the other side except for measured breathing.

  He growled in anger. “Someone set fire to a shrine to cover his tracks. He killed and raped a shrine maiden. Am I done here?”

  “The shrine is dedicated to Taira no Atsumori. He’s enshrined in a katana.”

  He studied the small, upraised building behind the main worship hall. The honden would have housed the god’s shintai. Nothing was left of the building but smoldering timbers. The katana would have been made of the highest quality steel by one of Japan’s legendary sword makers. This one was imbued with the power of a spirit worshiped as a god. It would have easily survived this fire. He should be able to sense the presence of the kami even if the sword was buried in the smoking ashes. “It’s not here.”

  “Any sign of who took the katana?”

  “From what I can tell, it was a lone male. He was a tall, heavy man. He’s about six foot three. Close to two hundred pounds. He’s taken a splash bath in Ralph Lauren’s Polo Black to cover the fact he sweats like a pig. Between his size and grooming habits, I’m going to say he’s American.”

  That triggered a quiet “hmm.”

  He waited, teeth clenched. None of this had anything to do with Simon. The trail was growing colder and colder as he was kept running in circles.

  “A man matching that description was murdered in Umeda district of Osaka last night. The police report mentions that he has a number of antiques in his apartment, but they didn’t catalog them.”

  “If he was killed for the sword, it’s not going to be there.” He didn’t want to waste more time.

  “Go to Osaka. See if this was the same man and find out if the sword is still at his apartment.”

  The need to write satisfied, Nikki flopped back to lie on the floor.

  Ass-kicking: check. Name-taking: check. Hero? Nikki wasn’t sure. The important thing was she could face the rest of the day feeling somewhat sane.

  She flexed her right hand to work out the cramps, and glanced at her wristwatch. She’d been writing for two hours. Out of habit, she written in tiny little neat letters, sandwiching two rows of sentences between the faint blue lines of the notebook paper.

  She finished her writing ritual by picking a Post-It Note color for the new character. For some reason, he felt like a turquoise. Lacking a name for him, she labeled his Post-It: Scary Cat Dude. She added him to the collage on her apartment wall and shifted the note for Yuuka’s kitten to his story thread.

  That done, she stepped back, looked at the wall, and cringed.

  Her collage of Post-It Notes was one of the few organizational tools that worked for her. Her novels were seemingly random scenes of people struggling with day-to-day lives. She needed this vast tree of notes to understand why any one character was part of her story. In light of Gregory Winston’s murder, though, her story tree looked like something a serial killer would produce.

  There were times Nikki wished she were more in control of her writing. She had thought George was a hero. With each scene, though, he’d drifted more and more toward being a villain. In the end, he’d set the fire to the shrine and killed Yuuka. Heroes did not rape dead teenage girls. After George’s binge in villainy, she hadn’t felt bad about his messy death. It had felt somewhat karmic; he nearly deserved it.

  But Gregory Winston hadn’t.

  Probably.

  The police hadn’t told her anything about Gregory. Nor had they mentioned any other murders in the area. The question remained if her stalker had also killed stand-ins for her dead characters. Had he killed a shrine maiden in Kyoto? Kidnapped a British man? Tortured a pregnant woman?

  She pulled out her laptop and did her best to track down recent murder cases in Japan. As always, she found herself fumbling with the language barrier. Tourism sites were expertly translated, as were top stories of world importance. Gregory’s death had made the news wires as “an American expatriate murdered in Osaka,” but the exact details were being kept out of the media. She could find no indication that a teenage girl had been murdered in Kyoto. Yuuka’s body, though, had been hidden away in her novel and found only in the newly written scene. A search for “temple fire” spammed her with hits scattered across the country. Apparently old wooden buildings had a habit of catching fire. “Kyoto,” “temple,” and “arson” got her hits on the Golden Pavilion, but that famous fire had been in the summer of 1950.

  She wasn’t even sure how to track down details matching the other murders she had written. In her scenes, the killings had been in vaguely described locations and the bodies had quietly but mysteriously “disposed.”

  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 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 advantages.

  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 that her apartment 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 nights, but people probably told you that already.”