"Earth to Mina. Come in, Mina."

"Huh?"

"Are you all right? You spaced out or a second." The man sitting across the table from Mina Hongo, Eiji Suzuki, smiled. "I didn't spend a month's salary on dinner just so you could pick at your food and space out."

"Sorry. I have a lot on my mind." Mina and her boyfriend, Eiji, were sitting at a table on the mezzanine in one of Tokyo's finer restaurants. But Mina couldn't stop thinking about the people Kyohei worked for; her unease had only grown as she'd put on her makeup, jewelry, and her red dress.

Eiji ate a piece of meat. "Anything you want to talk about?"

"Well…I suppose. I've mentioned one of my students, Kyohei Tachibana."

"Name rings a bell."

"He's a very promising student who wants to go to France and become a pastry chef. A few months ago he got a job working for some woman. He missed several classes and always seemed tired and stressed out. I attributed it to juggling work and school. But his team was unable to take part of a test because he was absent. He scheduled a makeup for today, but then remembered he'd already agreed to work. He asked his employer if he could take test at her…I guess you could call it her residence. I didn't want to see three of my best students fail, so I agreed."

"So far so good."

"But then I met them! 'Sexualized' doesn't begin to describe it. And he arranged to have this one girl shoot anyone who came near the stove, and he didn't even blink. I've been sick with worry all day."

"Who are these people?"

"They live in some kind of trailer. I took a picture of them and e-mailed it to his parents."

"Can I see it?"

"Sure." She dug her phone out of her purse, flipped through the pictures to one of the group shots of Kyo with…with them, and handed it to Eiji.

"Ah, yes," Eiji said, "Sei Ping Ho and her troika of female furies."

"You know them?"

Eiji nodded. "They're a group of well-armed, well financed mercenaries with ties to the Bailan Triad."

"Mercenaries!? At that age?"

"All perfectly legal, I'm afraid." Eiji didn't hide his bitterness. He had followed in the footsteps of his father and grandfather when he'd joined Japan's National Police Agency, and grandfather had told him of the days when Japan had been so crime free that people could walk the streets of Tokyo in the middle of the night without fear. But the 21st century had not been kind to Japan in general and Tokyo in particular. When the crime rate had inexplicably risen, the government had decided to *cut* the NPA's budget and repeal almost all of Japan's gun control laws, the theory being the people could police the streets themselves, thereby saving Japan a ton of money. When that had only resulted in more chaos, RAPT, an organization with only the barest comprehension of proper police work, had been created, gobbling up many of the NPA's remaining street level functions in Tokyo as the NPA shrank still further. The Special Investigations Unit, the squad Eiji was a detective in, dealt with sex crimes, organized crimes, and anything else that couldn't be conveniently classified as property crime or murder. But between RAPT's ineptitude and the bottomless bank accounts of entities like the Bailan Triad and their legion of lawyers, the NPA was a shell of its former self, powerless to do anything against the forces running Tokyo into the ground.

And Sei Ping Ho was the most flagrant violator of all, in Eiji's mind the embodiment of everything that had sent Tokyo to hell in a hand basket. In his grandfather's day, she would have been arrested on a slue of charges; if she'd been lucky, she would have been sent on a one-way trip to China. He had a teenaged daughter Meg's age, and that someone Eiji considered little better than a mob princess playing soldier with real live children could operate in Japan with a nod and a wink from the authorities, regardless of the rumors he had heard of her conflicts with RAPT, galled him no end. Shutting her down and seeing her either imprisoned or deported had become his personal goal, but he couldn't see how to do it. Bailan's shysters had effectively closed off every legal line of attack.

Eiji went on, "Bailan's lawyers have covered everything, even the immigration statuses of these two, Meg and Jo."

"I thought Jo was Japanese," Mina said.

"Maybe she is, maybe she isn't, but nobody knows for sure. She arrived from New York City with Meg, claiming to not remember anything but her given name. There isn't a birth certificate for her or anyone matching her description anywhere in the world. We don't even know for certain how old she is. Neither of them should have been allowed into Japan in the first place, but a few Yen from Bailan and everything is nice and legal."

Mina was aghast. "And there's nothing you can do?"

"Unless we can prove they are operating outside their legal boundaries, or there are crimes being committed on the premises, or they are a front for a criminal enterprise - drugs, prostitution, child pornography or human trafficking - no, there's nothing we can do."

"Well, that is it! I'm putting a stop to this. I'm meeting with Kyohei on Monday, and I am not letting him go back to her. I don't know what she's doing to him, but I'll do everything I can to get him out of there."

Eiji chose his words carefully: "Do you think Sei could be sexually molesting him?"

"What-He's a sixteen year old boy! Most boys his age would be happy to be bedded by someone like…that."

"Sexual predation is about power, not gender," Eiji explained, "and the notion that it is strictly male on female is an antiquated myth debunked in my grandfather's day. Female on male abuse can be just as traumatic to the victim as male on female, and Kyohei is still too young to deal with it. She's beautiful, rich, powerful, and they spend a lot of time together…if he's enthralled to her…" He trailed off.

Mina had both hands over her mouth. "Oh, my…I mean, you think she…is that why…"

"Well, she may not have done anything yet. Predators have a period of what is called grooming. They insinuate themselves into their intended victim's lives, make themselves indispensable, while also lowering their victim's inhibitions - desensitizing them to violence, say - and when they're ready…I've seen the results. If he lives, he'll be scarred for life."

"Oh, my god!"

"Then again, he is working for a group of mercenaries. That is a high stress environment. And in her own way, Sei could just be trying to be a good friend."

"She told me she wants to help him get to France."

"See? Although she'd say that either way. There's no way to tell."

"Still, what can be done?"

"You say you're seeing him on Monday?"

"Yes."

"Keep your meeting, but don't try and stop him from going back to her, which won't do any good if she's got him under her thumb. Express your concerns, but make it clear you'll respect his decision. I'll have arrange for my partner to sit in under cover; she has an instinct for dealing with victims. If there's nothing to your concerns, then it's all innocent - she's still scum, but we'll at least know she's not doing anything to Kyohei. But if Sei Ping Ho is abusing Kyohei, her days of freedom in Japan are numbered."