Soul Cage--A Mystery

by Tetsuya Honda

Was it something to do with all the police dramas on TV? These days, even ordinary civilians seemed to be well aware of the difference between the TMPD and the local police.

  “That’s correct.”

  “Up on your lofty perch there, it’s probably hard for you to imagine what a bunch of useless deadbeats most local cops are. Someone sticks a dead cat in Takaoka’s mailbox. What happens? Some plod from the nearest police station trundles by, gets him to fill out a couple of stupid forms—and that’s the end of the matter. Finished. Bye-bye. They didn’t investigate. They didn’t even modify their foot patrols at night to keep a closer eye on the Takaoka house. We couldn’t prove it, but all of us at the time thought that Nakabayashi had paid the cops off.”

  Sawai had the wrong idea about Reiko’s background. She certainly hadn’t started her career in the TMPD headquarters in central Tokyo. After graduating from the Police Academy, she’d served time in three local precincts—Shinagawa, Himonya, and Yotsuya—before being transferred to headquarters. She knew about life at the precinct level, and God knew, she’d seen with her own eyes how bone-idle and corrupt the local cops could be. She’d seen them reduce plenty of ordinary people to tears.

  “I wasn’t aware that Takaoka’s case was handled negligently,” she said quietly, tilting her head in a bow. “I’m very sorry. I know that my apology is too late to make any difference, but as a police officer, believe me, I’m ashamed.”

  She sympathized with Sawai. Even so, her apology was mainly a ruse so she could push on with her questions.

  In the seat next to her, Ioka also bowed his head.

  Sawai leaned in toward her.

  “I wasn’t angling for an apology. You’re from a completely different branch of the police force. I’m the one who’s out of line.”

  “The way you’ve described things, wouldn’t it have made more sense for Takaoka to get out of his house as fast as he could? In a way, he was lucky. I know luck’s not quite the right word, but with both his parents dead, he was free to move out, especially if he was in physical danger.”

  “I thought so too,” Sawai agreed. “But that night, he explained the situation. His parents had run up debts and mortgaged the house to repay them. Ken was steadily paying it off, but it seems the outfit that issued the mortgage was crooked, and there was something not quite right about the lien that they held against the house. My guess is that there was bad blood between the mortgage firm and the Nakabayashi people, and that the mortgage company was preventing Ken from fully settling his debts as a way of keeping him in the house. I suspect they were using him to block the construction of the Nakabayashi apartment building.”

  “I see what you’re saying.”

  Reiko found herself thinking of those well-worn phrases about “debt spirals” and “the inescapable cycle of poverty.”

  “Ken changed jobs quite a lot. I think he was in the sales department of an English-language textbook company at the time. Declaring personal bankruptcy would have been one way for him to clear his debts, but if his employer heard about it, they’d probably have fired him.… You know what employers are like. Paranoid. They think that people with debts are going to steal company funds. You’re damned if you do, damned if you don’t.”

  The evening sun was streaming into the restaurant at a low angle. The teaspoon in Sawai’s saucer gleamed like a fragment of a fallen star.

  “I wasn’t able to give Ken any practical advice. I just told him that I was there for him and that he could call me anytime he wanted.”

  “You said this meeting took place one or two weeks before Takaoka moved out?”

  “That’s just me guessing. A couple of weeks later I went back to the neighborhood, and the Takaoka house, the house beside it, and our place had all been knocked down. All that was left was an empty lot. I just assumed the problem with the mortgage had been sorted out. I called Ken’s cell, but it was offline. I thought he’d moved somewhere else to make a new start.”

  Reiko could see that Sawai was just itching to ask her what Takaoka was doing now, so she decided to put him out of his misery.

  “Takaoka moved to Ota Ward and began a new career as a construction worker and a carpenter.”

  “Ken? A laborer? Him?” Incredulity was pulling Sawai’s handsome face all out of shape. “That’s simply not possible.”

  “From what I heard about him, I felt the same way. Apparently, though, he did really well. He even took on an apprentice.”

  “But that’s crazy. Ken was a stick insect of a man. Way too frail and spindly for manual labor.”

  Frail? Spindly? Kosuke Mishima had dropped off a recent photo of Takaoka at the police station for them. He looked anything but spindly—muscle-bound was more like it. Sawai had known Takaoka a long time ago, so the man could have changed … somewhat. But still … does anyone change that much in twelve years?

  “Just hang on a second.” She turned to Ioka. “Give me the photograph.”

  Ioka flipped open his personal organizer and slid Takaoka’s photograph out of the flap on the inside back cover. “Here you go,” he said with a chuckle. Reiko grabbed it, turned it the right way up, and presented it to Sawai.

  “This is Kenichi Takaoka, right?”

  Sawai frowned in astonishment.

  “Who the hell is that?” he said gruffly.

  They all looked at one another.

  “It’s Kenichi Takaoka,” said Reiko.

  Sawai looked her directly in the eye and shook his head.

  “No way. There’s no way that is Ken Takaoka.”

  “How come?”

  “Look at this guy. He’s tough, he’s never been afraid of anything in his life. He’s got eyes like a wolf. Old Ken was more like an underfed sheep. He had droopy eyes and a saggy face. He was like an old man minus the wrinkles.”

  He grinned.

  “Sorry, Lieutenant, but this looks like a case of mistaken identity to me.”

  I refuse to believe it. It was there in black and white on the man’s resident’s card. He’d lived at that address in South Hanahata before moving to Middle Rokugo. That was beyond doubt.

  “What happened to this fellow?” Sawai asked.

  Half dazed, Reiko managed to tell him that “there had been an incident” and that the man was dead.

  Sawai displayed no surprise. “Poor fellow,” he murmured, shaking his head.

  * * *

  After parting from Sawai, Reiko and Ioka strolled down Shinjuku Boulevard. It was already dark.

  Kenichi Takaoka isn’t Kenichi Takaoka.

  The words ran around and around inside Reiko’s mind.

  “I’ve got no idea what’s going on with this case anymore,” burst out Ioka. “It’s crazy.”

  He pushed a little see-through bag toward her.

  “What’s that?”

  “Dried squid.”

  “What are you doing carrying that stuff around with you?”

  “It’s good to chew on when you’re feeling peckish—and when your brain is tangled up in knots. It helps you think. Fancy some?”

  “Don’t mind if I do.”

  They wandered on down the street, occasionally popping strips of dried squid into their mouths.

  Kenichi Takaoka is not Kenichi Takaoka. Where had they gone wrong? Where had their investigation taken a wrong turn?

  Okay, let’s think this thing through.

  Takaoka’s childhood friend Yuji Sawai was adamant that the man in their photograph was not the Kenichi Takaoka he knew from South Hanahata. And she believed him. The boy with the weak personality whom the other kids had all picked on, who was good at Japanese but hopeless with his hands—he could not be the same person as Takaoka, the builder who lived in Middle Rokugo.

  “You like my squid?” asked Ioka.

  Reiko mumbled something incoherent.

  Is it crazy to think that the Nakabayashi Group murdered the Kenichi Takaoka whose parents ran the local candy store? That they killed him and got someone else to tak
e his place? And that he took over the name Kenichi Takaoka and went to live in Middle Rokugo? An identity swap would certainly help explain how “Kenichi Takaoka” worked as a builder for Nakabayashi.

  No, that doesn’t hold water. Sawai said that there was another firm holding the mortgage for the Takaoka house and that that firm and Nakabayashi were at daggers drawn. Nakabayashi would only be shooting itself in the foot by killing Takaoka and making already prickly negotiations over the land rights even worse. No, for Nakabayashi, murdering the candy store kid would definitely have been a bad move.

  “Wow, Lieutenant, you’re really chugging that squid down.”

  How about suicide? Is that a realistic possibility?

  From what Sawai had told them, it sounded as though Takaoka had been driven to a state of paranoia. He might well have succumbed to a suicidal impulse and taken his own life.

  Let’s try on this chain of events for size.

  Takaoka tops himself. Some Nakabayashi goon swings by to put the screws on him, only to find him dead in the house. Said goon knows that this is the worst possible outcome for his employer. With Takaoka dead, his land will fall into the hands of a rival developer, and Nakabayashi’s scheme to build a shiny new block of apartments will collapse. They need Takaoka alive.

  That’s it. That’s the key!

  So they brought in someone to take the dead man’s place and got him to sell the land to them. It wasn’t the time to haggle over money. They’d probably paid whatever price the mortgage company had asked for, dissolved the mortgage lien, changed the ownership of the land to their name, and then demolished the house. Demolishing the house was also a handy way to get rid of the physical evidence of the suicide and the identity swap.

  “Lieutenant, you’re not supposed to polish off a whole packet in one go. You’ve finished the lot.”

  “Go buy me some more.”

  “You’ll get sick.”

  But hang on a second! Why had they gone so all-in on the identity swap? If they needed a substitute, then why not find some serious, white-collar Nakabayashi employee who’d look the part and use him for just as long as was necessary? Why opt for a burly laborer and keep the deception running for years afterward?

  It was too weird. Reiko knew she was missing a vital piece of the puzzle.

  She needed more squid to get her brain working faster.

  4

  Officer Noriyuki Hayama had been keeping watch on Kimie Naito for three days now.

  Forty-nine years old and single, Kimie ran Naitos, a little restaurant-cum-bar in Kitasenju, which did a nice line in set lunches. Asking around, Hayama learned that she’d opened the place more than ten years earlier.

  He and his partner, Sergeant Nomura, had each gone to Naitos on separate days for lunch. The day Nomura went, there was fried mackerel on the menu, and it was a vegetable stir-fry when Hayama went. There was only one dish a day on offer, and even that was half prepared in advance.

  They needed to be careful about making too many repeat visits. They would get noticed. For now, with no link established between Kimie Naito and Kenichi Takaoka, they needed to stay under the radar. Hayama and Nomura were keeping a discreet eye on the restaurant from a parking lot diagonally across the street.

  At a 10:02 a.m., a high-sided truck drew up in front of the restaurant.

  “It’s the same truck that came yesterday and the day before,” commented Nomura.

  Today, though, it was a different driver. Hayama wondered if Nomura had picked up on that. It probably didn’t mean much, so Hayama contented himself with making a mental note of the fact.

  “That lieutenant of yours,” began Nomura. “She’s quite a woman.”

  Nomura had taken a major shine to Reiko Himekawa. He lost no opportunity to steer the conversation around to her, and when he did, his language lost some of its usual formality.

  “Is it true she doesn’t have a boyfriend?’

  “Search me. I’ve only been in Homicide three months.”

  “What’s your sixth sense say?”

  “I really don’t know. I’m pretty obtuse about that sort of thing. Sorry.”

  They’d now spent almost three full days watching from a car in the parking lot. Late last night, a relief team had been sent over, and they’d gone back to the police station for a bath and a short nap before participating in the morning meeting. They took turns making inquiries around the neighborhood, but that took up a maximum of two hours a day. Hayama thought of stakeouts as a crucial component of detective work; Nomura thought otherwise.

  “Talk about drawing the short straw. Here we are doing surveillance on some middle-aged broad, while Ioka, that monkey with his buckteeth, gets to pair up with Lieutenant Himekawa. Ioka, of all people.”

  Sergeant Kikuta had told Hayama that the Himekawa squad and Sergeant Ioka were linked together by some sort of unfortunate karmic bond. Nomura probably wouldn’t understand. Worse yet, any explanation he provided might give Nomura an excuse to go on about Himekawa even more. In the end, Hayama opted to say nothing.

  Hayama too had his own views on the lieutenant, but they were quite different from those of most of the other male detectives.

  His attitude stemmed from an experience back when he was a fourteen-year-old junior high school student. His parents had planned his whole life out for him: making sure that he aced his exams at the end of primary school and won a place in a big private school that “fed” students from its own junior high school into its own high school and then to a major university. Unfortunately, something happened that drove his life off the rails.

  It was the autumn of his second year at junior high, and he was on his way home from basketball practice. He was walking along one of those Tokyo streets with just a painted line indicating the sidewalk, rather than raised paving or a metal guardrail. He recognized the girl who was walking down the street ahead of him. She had been his home tutor for the junior high entrance exams. At the time, she’d been in her final year at one of the local universities. Now, however, she was a fully fledged adult.

  A shadow suddenly burst out of a side street and appeared to engulf her.

  It was a man wearing sweats and a hoodie.

  The whole thing only took a second. There was no scream, just the sound of a body crumpling and crashing onto the black asphalt.

  The hooded figure ran off to the left. A man in a suit came running from further down the street.

  “What happened? Miss, are you okay?” Then he started yelling. “Oh my God! Somebody call an ambulance! Now!”

  That brought all the local residents out into the street. Hayama just stood there, rooted to the spot. A patrol car arrived along with the ambulance; the police asked if anyone in the crowd had seen anything. Hayama’s legs were like jelly. They refused to carry him over to them.

  The girl—her name was Reiko Arita—died from stab wounds. As there was no boyfriend or other male in her life for suspicion to fall on, the police classified the case as a random assault.

  Hayama never stopped reproaching himself. Why hadn’t he come forward to tell the police what he saw? He’d had a pretty good look at the attacker—knew his build, what he was wearing. Information that could have helped the investigation.

  The memory of the shadowy figure continued to terrify him, though. When he was lying alone in bed, he shuddered at the thought of that shadowy figure hunting him down and killing him to keep his mouth shut.

  The fear went on. And on. And on.

  Hayama decided to skip university and become a cop. He joined the police force four years later, right out of high school. He wanted to prove to himself that he wasn’t a coward. He also dreamed of making detective and personally reopening the unsolved Reiko Arita case. (Now that he’d actually made detective, he knew what a pipe dream that was. But he hadn’t quite given up; the commitment was still there, and he still had four years until the statute of limitations ran out.)

  He was doing his best to remake himself as someone
who would not fear the shadowy killer anymore. He had the confidence that came from being part of the police force; the physical strength he’d developed through his martial arts and other training; his investigative know-how; his knowledge of criminology and the law. Hayama devoted every waking moment of the day to making himself a better cop. He was a new creature: genus, policeman; species, detective.

  He was still a little short of his goal. But his hard work was definitely paying off: he’d been appointed to the Homicide Division at an extraordinarily young age. And Homicide was where he had encountered Reiko Himekawa, his squad leader.

  She was taller. She looked different. In fact, the only thing that Reiko Himekawa and Reiko Arita had in common was their first name. For Hayama, though, that banal fact was rich in meaning.

  And then there was the voice …

  When Himekawa addressed him as “Nori” and asked him if he’d completed his case report, it always brought back memories of his tutor asking him if he’d done his homework assignments.

  Each time Himekawa spoke to him, the sense of the obligation he was under to the murdered Reiko tightened its grip. “I must never forget her,” he thought. The stress must have been written on his face.

  Misinterpreting his expression, Himekawa never stopped asking him if he had a “problem” with her. He knew he came across as having an attitude, but the reasons behind it were just too heavy. In the end, he always deflected her questions with a curt “no.” In his heart, though, he wanted to open up to Himekawa and tell her the truth, sometime.

  * * *

  Things started getting interesting around two thirty in the afternoon.

  Kimie Naito came out of the restaurant, locked the door behind her, and headed down the street. Instead of her normal work getup of scarf and apron, she had on a black duffel coat over a brown skirt. It wasn’t high fashion, but, in her own way, she was dressed for going out. She had a large paper Uniqlo bag squeezed under her arm.

  “Let’s go,” said Hayama.

  “About time. Let’s goddamn go.”

  The two detectives set off after Kimie on foot. Hayama was planning to hail a taxi if she took the bus. Luckily for them, she opted to walk the fifteen minutes it took to reach Kitasenju Station. She took the train two stops to Kameari, dismounted, walked for five minutes, and went into a large building.