Soul Cage--A Mystery

by Tetsuya Honda

  More rustling. As far as she could tell, he wasn’t getting up; perhaps he had lain back down again.

  “No, I’d no idea. Lately, I’ve not been feeling too good. I’ve been in bed … the whole day.”

  “In bed all day?”

  “Yeah, except for when I went for a piss. About where you’re standing now.”

  Eager though she was to jump aside, Reiko didn’t want to give the homeless guy the satisfaction.

  “Very interesting. There was a small white van parked on the embankment up there from late last night until early this morning. Would you know anything about that?”

  “What’s that about the embankment?”

  “I asked if you were aware that a small white van was parked there from late last night till early this morning.”

  The man exploded into a spasm of coughing. It sounded nasty. Reiko hoped it wasn’t TB. She waited for the noise to subside.

  “Nah, didn’t see nothing. Last night, today, just taken a piss over there. Never looked at the embankment.”

  It was plausible enough. You couldn’t see the embankment from down here. To do that, you’d have to get out of the tall weed patch or go down to the river’s edge.

  “Did you hear anything? Any noises?”

  A pause.

  “When?”

  “Last night or early this morning.”

  “Naah,” the man grunted and sank into silence. “What kind of noises, anyway?”

  “Could be anything. Branches breaking, someone prowling around, the sound of car brakes.”

  Reiko nearly added “the sound of someone dumping something in the river,” but thought better of it.

  “I get you. It’s always pretty noisy around here. There’s the dogs, the birds, the crows who come to steal the trash.…”

  As Reiko’s eyes got used to the darkness, she was gradually able to make things out. The man wasn’t completely lying down; he had his head propped up on his arm and was looking at her.

  “So did you hear anything?”

  The man was overcome with another violent coughing fit.

  “Are you all right, sir?”

  There was no reply. The coughing went on and on, accompanied by a slithery rustling of newspapers and cardboard.

  What am I supposed to do in a situation like this?

  As a human being and a government employee, Reiko felt that she should go over, rub his back, ask him how he felt, maybe even arrange for him to go to a hospital.

  But as a policeman, that wasn’t her job, and she loathed dirty people. She actually preferred a decomposed dead body to a dirty living one. All corpses smelled bad; that was just the way they were. She put up with them because it was part of her job. Now, here she was, confronted with someone who was alive and smelled bad, and she wanted nothing to do with him. It didn’t seem quite right.

  The guy was sick, so, yes, she felt sorry for him. At the same time, she wanted to ask him how he could seriously expect to stay healthy when he lived like this. Some people ended up homeless despite doing everything they could to fight against it. But if the guy’s only problem was a lack of grit, then he needed to pull his socks up and make an effort to return to normal life. Living this way was dangerous: he was putting both his health and his safety at risk.

  The man eventually stopped coughing.

  “Why you still here?” he grunted. “I can’t tell you anything … that you want to know.… Shit, I don’t even know what fucking time it is.… Why’d you imagine I’d know anything in the first place anyway? Go on, get out of here. Leave me alone.”

  That was the first proper answer Reiko had got out of him and it had made her ears prick up.

  Why’d you imagine I’d know anything in the first place anyway?

  She didn’t know why that particular phrase bugged her. Was it something in the tone of his voice? Was it because of the long pause before he said it? Was it the words themselves?

  Sounded a little bit legalistic and roundabout to me …

  Reiko asked the man if he had a cell phone, even though she suspected the question was a waste of time.

  “No, I don’t,” came the answer in a tone that as good as said, “Duh! You stupid bitch.”

  Reiko asked for his name. Takeshi Iizuka, he said, and even spelled it for her. She asked him to call 110 and ask for Kamata Police Station if he happened to remember anything.

  No answer.

  All she could hear was his stertorous breathing. Or was the man snoring?

  4

  It was just after 7:30 p.m. when Reiko and the other investigators in her group got back to Kamata Police Station. Somebody had taped a sign reading “Tama River Dumped Body Task Force” to the door of the room.

  The instant she entered the room, Captain Imaizumi, who was sitting at the table up at the front, waved her over with an extravagant gesture. Reiko walked across the room, deposited her coat and bag on a seat in the middle of the front row, and turned to face him.

  “What is it, sir?”

  “Who’ve you left stationed at the crime scene?”

  “I left four investigators on the scene: Nori’s team and Sergeant Shimoda’s team—Shimoda is from the Major Crimes Division here at Kamata. There’s a temple on the embankment, and they let us use a room on the third floor overlooking the crime scene. The men are under orders to patrol the area on a rolling basis. Once the meeting here’s over, I’ll send another couple of teams across to relieve them. I’ll speak for Nori and Sergeant Shimoda at the meeting.”

  “Good work. Go and sit down.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  Ioka handed her a seaweed-covered rice ball when she got back to her place. It was pickled plum flavor. Reiko had picked it up in the convenience store on the way back to the station. Ioka must have taken it out of the package and wrapped the seaweed around the rice himself.

  “What the hell! I told you I’d do it myself.”

  “Don’t say that. It’s a labor of love.”

  God, this man just wears me out! My nerves are shot.

  “Thanks but no thanks. With seaweed, I prefer to roll my own.”

  “I’m not good enough for you?”

  There was a sudden sharp crack. Ioka yelped and grabbed his head with his hands. Kikuta, who was in the row behind, must have smacked him in the head.

  “What!” Ioka spluttered. “What are you doing, Brother Kaz?”

  “Sorry, bro. My hand must have slipped.”

  “Sure it did.”

  “You calling me a liar? All right, bucktooth, want to take this outside?”

  “Will you two just knock it off,” snapped Reiko, glaring at them. Kikuta pouted and looked away.

  Oh, please. You’re not a child.

  In the meantime, the remaining investigators had returned. Kusaka and his squad were back, and they sat in a row to the left of Reiko and her team.

  As Captain Imaizumi picked up the microphone, Reiko hurriedly crammed the last of the rice ball into her mouth.

  “Okay, let’s get this meeting under way. Everyone, stand at attention! Bow toward the front.”

  Including the forensics teams, there must have been over fifty investigators in the room. At the front of the room was Senior Superintendent Nakamura, the commander of Kamata Police Station; Superintendent Miyagawa, Commissioner of the Homicide Division; and Captain Kawada, Chief of Detectives of the local precinct, alongside Director Hashizume and Captain Imaizumi, the chief of Unit 10.

  The official head of the task force was the director of the TMPD’s Criminal Investigation Unit, but he was too lofty a being to put in a personal appearance. Even Director Hashizume wouldn’t be there all the time. That meant that in practical terms it was Captain Imaizumi who was leading this particular task force.

  “I’d like to kick things off by giving you an update on the hand that was found,” began Imaizumi. “We believe it was severed around four centimeters below the wrist joint from the palmar side, using an electric saw that cu
t through both the radius and the ulna.”

  Reiko flipped through the bundle of documents she’d been given until she came to the photographs of the hand. She found one that showed the hand as it was when found at the scene and before cleaning.

  The hand was slathered in its own blood and had turned a lurid pinky-red that looked nothing like normal human skin. It reminded Reiko of pickled red ginger garnish.

  “We examined an electric saw found in the garage. After comparing the shape of the blade with the marks on the cut bones, we concluded that the saw was used to sever the wrist. Traces around the on-off switch and the grip on the upper part of the saw show that someone used it while wearing cotton work gloves. We couldn’t lift any prints off of it.”

  Reiko flicked through a few more pages until she came to a photograph of the saw. It was old and heavily used. There was a piece of green electrical tape wrapped around the power cord about halfway down.

  “Any questions?”

  No one said anything.

  Reiko glanced off to one side and saw Kusaka wearing a pair of silver-rimmed spectacles, craning forward, busily taking notes.

  “Okay, we’ll move on, then. Let’s hear from TMPD Forensics on the garage.”

  “Yes, sir,” said Lieutenant Ijizu from the CID Forensics Department, making his way to the whiteboard at the front of the room. He’d already drawn a floor plan of the garage on it.

  “I’m going to tell you what our inspection of the garage’s interior and environs turned up,” he began. “As you can see from this diagram, the garage is rectangular, with a width of 3.7 meters and a depth of 6.2 meters. It’s located at the far left of a row of three rental garages of identical size, which stand at a distance of 1.6 meters back from the road. Seen from the road, this garage has a window on the left-hand wall. Since there’s shelving running around all three of the garage’s internal walls, there’s stuff blocking the window from the inside. From the street you can just about tell if the light’s on or not, but you certainly can’t see inside.

  “There’s a lot of construction hardware—nails, metal fittings, lengths of timber and other building materials, leftover pieces of plywood—either sitting on the shelves proper, or leaning up against them. I’ll spare you the gory details, but suffice it to say that pieces of flesh and blood spatter were found in all directions, and the victim had lost enough blood to more or less cover the entire cement floor. From this, we conclude that the body was dismembered and cut into a minimum of six or seven pieces at the scene.

  “The next thing is fingerprints,” continued Ijizu. “We found six sets of prints in addition to those of Kenichi Takaoka, the victim, and Kosuke Mishima, his employee. We ran them through our database, but none of them came up as having any priors. Two of the six were found on boxes of building supplies on the shelves, so it’s quite possible that those particular prints originated outside the crime scene. Now I’d like to draw your attention to this metal pole-hook used to open and close the garage’s roller-shutter door.”

  Ijizu held up a clear plastic bag with the pole inside.

  “We found a complete set of prints—both the right and the left hand—on this pole-hook. They don’t belong either to Takaoka, the victim, or to Mishima, the employee who was first on the scene. It’s legitimate to speculate that the suspect left them in a moment of carelessness when he used the pole-hook to pull the door shut with ungloved hands.”

  Kusaka immediately raised his hand.

  “Lieutenant Ijizu, I’d prefer if you refrained from speculation of any kind.”

  Ijizu gave Kusaka an icy stare, nodded curtly, and went on.

  “I’ll proceed, if I may. The next thing is shoe prints. Because the floor was almost entirely covered with blood, we only managed to locate three shoe prints: these were Mishima’s sneakers, then a second set of sneakers, and finally some leather shoes. Since Mishima told us that Takaoka always wore sneakers for work, I think it’s reasonable to assume that the leather shoes—”

  Ijizu wanted to say that the leather shoes most likely belonged to the suspect; after his earlier run-in with Kusaka, however, he opted for tactical vagueness.

  “—belong to a third person of identity unknown. Traces of the same bloody shoe prints were also found on the stretch of concrete between the garage and the road. The fact that they are pointing toward the street suggests that the owner of the shoes trod in the blood inside the garage and then went outside. We also found the same shoe prints on the pedals of the abandoned van.

  “In the garage, we found a roll of translucent plastic sheeting of the kind contractors use to keep things clean when they’re working.”

  “How much of it was left?” boomed Kusaka from the back of the room. Reiko’s head swiveled around. This time he hadn’t bothered to raise his hand.

  Ijizu grimaced and jerked his shoulders angrily.

  “Two meters precisely. We also detected gloved fingerprints on this sheeting. We think it’s possible that this sheeting was used to wrap up the dismembered body parts prior to transportation.”

  There was an edge to Ijizu’s voice. He was clearly exasperated. He continued with his report, going into very precise detail. There was nothing in it that struck Reiko as truly game-changing.

  “If there are no questions about the garage, then we’ll move onto the next item,” said Imaizumi. “The results of the forensic testing of the vehicle.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  Sergeant Minuo of TMPD Forensics got to his feet. His findings didn’t add anything to what Ijizu had said.

  They had managed to pull some prints off the driver’s seat. They had also found impressions from cotton work gloves that had absorbed a large quantity of blood, but the prints were far dirtier than those on the electric saw in the garage because the gloves had slid around on the upholstery. There were some more partial glove prints on the driver’s door, on the sliding door on the passenger side of the van, and on the handle of the back hatch, but these only provided evidence of the suspect’s movements around the vehicle and were unlikely to be of much use until they had him in custody.

  When they found the van, continued Sergeant Minuo, all the doors were locked and the key was not inside.

  So whoever had chopped up Takaoka’s corpse had wrapped the pieces in plastic sheeting or stuffed them into plastic bags, loaded them into the minivan, and then driven it to the Tama River embankment. There he locked the vehicle and abandoned it. But what had he done next?

  I don’t want to be Kusaka-like about it, but it’s probably best to not to speculate for now.

  “Thank you, Sergeant Minuo,” Imaizumi said. “Can we move on to the forensics report on the riverbank?”

  Sergeant Moroi, also from TMPD Forensics, got to his feet. Most of his report was devoted to the blood traces they’d found in the stretch of grass by the river.

  There had been a light rain the night of the crime, and Forensics had expected all the blood traces to be washed away. Amazingly, however, they’d located a series of bloodstains in a more or less straight line from where the van was parked down to the river’s edge.

  The bloodstains were all distributed within a lateral span of roughly four meters. This suggested that the suspect had made multiple trips from the van to the river, following a roughly similar path every time. Eventually the rain must have washed all the blood off the soles of his shoes, because they couldn’t determine in which direction he’d gone after disposing of the corpse.

  They’d retrieved a number of items from the scene: a small white button, some scraps of nylon, an unidentified fragment of red plastic, pieces of eggshell, a thick wooden cooking skewer, a dog collar, a broken cell phone, one ten-yen and two one-yen coins.…

  “We didn’t find any fingerprints or blood traces on any of the above items. That brings my reports on the riverside to an end.”

  “Any questions?” barked Imaizumi. “Right, then: next up is the canvass in the neighborhood of the garage. Who handled Secto
r One?”

  “That’s me, sir,” replied Kusaka, getting to his feet. The guy sitting next to him—was that Sergeant Satomura from Kamata Precinct? Reiko wasn’t quite sure.

  “We interviewed all the residents of Middle Rokugo block two, house numbers one to five. The first person we spoke to was Hideyuki Tanaka, age thirty-two. He works in the post office and rents the garage beside Takaoka’s. He lives in Middle Rokugo, block two, number three, in a detached house which he shares with his parents. The parents were also present when we conducted the interview. They are Masayuki Tanaka, a sixty-eight-year-old retiree, and his wife, Shizuko, a seventy-one-year-old homemaker. Hideyuki is an only child. Hideyuki has a car—a Mazda Demio. It is iris blue mica, which I can best describe as pale blue with a hint of purple.”

  God help us! Kusaka’s canvass reports always followed this pattern. He regurgitated every trivial factoid in the most excruciating detail.

  Reiko had taken him to task about it more than once. Leave out the irrelevant stuff and just give us the key points, she’d said. Kusaka had completely ignored her. Early on in the process, he argued, no one was qualified to judge what might or might not be relevant. For example, he might claim that if you didn’t know, say, that the little sister of the person renting the garage next door to Takaoka’s had moved up to Aichi Prefecture after her marriage four years ago, then you couldn’t safely eliminate her from the scope of the investigation.

  During one meeting, Reiko had gotten so exasperated that she’d blurted out something sarcastic about the need to take meteor strikes into account.

  Kusaka had counterpunched by explaining that, whenever he was assigned to an investigation, he would only set out for the crime scene after checking the local weather on an hour-by-hour basis. “Any fool could tell if there’d been a meteor strike,” he said, “but let me assure my female colleague that in the current case I have not encountered any evidence of freak events near the crime scene: no lightning strikes, no tornadoes—and no meteors either.”

  Reiko had been so furious she’d thought she was going to spontaneously combust.

  Kusaka’s approach reminded Reiko of a man grabbing everything he could get his hands on, sifting it through a sieve, and then plucking out any big lumps that stayed behind. She preferred to stick her hand right into the sieve and pull out what felt important.