The Devouring God by James Kendley Page A

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    CHAPTER 13
    Friday Morning
    T he detectives’ office was beige and gray with desks pushed flush together so that work groups sat face-­to-­face. At the center of the room, a short, balding detective wrote hurriedly in a small notebook. Takuda asked for Kimura. Without looking up, the detective pointed with his pen toward at the other corner of the office where Kimura sat alone at a table.
    Kimura had the hippest glasses Takuda had seen since the 1970s, and he grinned when Takuda told him so. “Yeah, my boss hates them.” He pointed at the man out at the table. “So I bought more.” He laughed a high-­pitched hiccuppy laugh and smoothed his hair with his free hand.
    Kimura put on one of his business faces. “You know, this incident with Mr. Thomas and Miss Nabeshima is very serious. When we look at his notebooks, there is a lot that we don’t know. I thought that you, as a special consultant, might have some input on this matter.”
    Takuda looked down pointedly at his coveralls. He almost reached for his staff before remembering that he had left it at home on purpose. “I’m not really a specialist.”
    Kimura tossed his chin at the busy detective out in the main room. “Chief of Detectives Ishikawa said you are. He said he got the call that you and your friends were sent from the heavens.”
    Takuda controlled his expression. The euphemism “sent from the heavens” to mean “from upper strata of the hierarchy” was already getting on his nerves. “I think Yoshida of the social ser­vices offices would be more helpful,” he said.
    Kimura smiled and handed Takuda a large binder. “She’s not a criminologist like you.”
    Takuda sighed and opened the binder. It was filled with copies white on black, like photostats. They were splotched with gray clouds of fingerprints and crossed by sheets of scudding stains from the ham of Thomas’s hand. He had lettered and sketched with a mechanical pencil, that or a nib too fine to blob or fill.
    Thomas drew with a vivisectionist’s precision: details of charred flesh peeling from the bones of inverted popes, intricate and sparingly cross-­hatched views of the damned abroil on pikes with their bellies ballooned and juices bubbling from burst navels, and one freer rendering of the Greek Titan Sisyphus crushed beneath his stone, blood spewing from his twisted mouth and coiled mass issuing from his anus. In the lower right-­hand corner of each page lay clustered fingerprints as if Thomas had paused after each drawing to examine and approve before moving on.
    Kimura took notes as Takuda spelled out the classical references in what he saw. He was surprised the detective was so ignorant of European mythology and religion. Even a cursory reading of popular manga would have taught him as much as Takuda knew.
    Three pages were drawings of the three-­headed dog, but they were rough enough to be just starting points for Thomas’s sculpture, if that. The last sketch in that group was a jointed framework. Either he had continued in another notebook or he had been good enough to pull off that sculpture with almost no preparation.
    The sketches were interleaved with bits of writing, none longer than two pages. Thomas’s longhand was a surprisingly childish scrawl, but his printing was sharp and angular with neither loops nor curves. He wrote in diamond O ’s and isosceles D ’s with high ascenders and deep descenders alike barbed as fishhooks, all characters discretely vertical and altogether more like primitive runes than any English writing Takuda had ever seen. He had reserved this sharp, unleaning style for poetry and essays, as if it were a script specially designed for recording madness, but what he wrote in that stilted hand was even stranger than the lettering itself.
    Takuda lit a cigarette after reading the first paragraph, a bizarre and disjointed admission