Eight Million Gods-eARC Read Online Free PDF Page B

she planned to visit South Korea with Miriam for the weekend and renew the tourist visa upon their return flight. It was the trips out of Japan and back to renew her visa that made her budget so tight. She had been trying to set up a different, longer visa, when her mother forced her early flight. If she could get a three-year artist visa then her money would stretch further.
    Tanaka considered her as he took a long drag on his cigarette and blew out the smoke. “You write about murder?”
    Yes? No? If they looked at her blog, it was all she wrote lately. “Sometimes.”
    “Sometimes,” Tanaka echoed. He studied her another minute. “You do not know this man?”
    Nikki shook her head.
    “But you wrote of a man being killed with a blender?”
    Nikki winced and gave a tiny nod.
    “This man—this made-up man—he was American?”
    Nikki nodded again.
    “And he lived in Umeda where he could see the Ferris wheel?”
    She had babbled that out? Yes, she had. “Yes, he did.”
    Yoshida came back with a laptop, which he pushed toward her. He had a browser up in English. A Tachikoma robotic tank from Ghost in the Shell anime peeked around the window from a screensaver. The little forensic scientist was a anime fan.
    “Your blog. Show it to us, please.” Tanaka pointed at the laptop.
    Nikki typed in the address for her author website. She used a pen name in an effort to keep her writing secret from her mother. She had suspected she might want to be able to prove that she was really the author of the book, so she had included photographs of herself, abet hidden under a secret directory. “Look, see, this is my website.”
    “Ah!” Tanaka studied the secret pictures closely. “Very sexy.”
    Nikki blushed. Sheila’s brother Doug had been the photographer, so Sheila had taken the opportunity to play dress-up and matchmaker. Nikki ended up in a tight leather dress, three-inch stiletto boots, and more hairspray and makeup than she had ever used in her entire life. On the bright side, she doubted her mother would recognize her. On the downside, it had led to a short “thing” with Doug that ended like most of her dating attempts. She was just too creepy for most guys to take for more than a few days.
    She went up a level to the public front page that featured her first novel. Luckily her publisher hadn’t gone with the cover that was splattered with blood. “This is my book. I wrote it.”
    See I’m a writer, really I am!
    Nikki dropped down to her blog, and they read over her Saturday together. Yoshida translated for Tanaka, animating parts with his bird-delicate hands. First post of the day was about the panda-blood cookies. In the second she ranted on her love/hate relationship with the Japanese concept of laundry. Hanging everything on bamboo poles on the balcony of her apartment was alternately charming and annoying as hell. Third post was a snippet from her day’s work. It was a short chunk of the scene, really just a teasing of fiction. Blood splattering across white countertops. The whirl of a blender. The killer leaning over the dead body, dripping with cast-off blood.
    Tanaka gave a slight cry of dismay and pointed at the comment counter. “One hundred and five comments?”
    “I have a lot of fans,” Nikki temporized. There been only thirty comments that morning. What had made them triple in number? She scanned anxiously ahead as Tanaka scrolled through them.
    Comment thirty-one was from Miriam, using her handle of “SexyNinja.” She had posted from her phone “OMG, ThirdEye has been arrested for murder!” Nikki locked down on a groan. Miriam must have gone to Nikki’s blog to read the snippet and then posted to it by mistake instead of to the Team Banzai secret forum. There were a half-dozen posts of “Who did she kill?” that did nothing to establish her credibility with the police. Pixii then turned the thread’s focus with “George Wilson with a blender!” and that started people posting her