Soul Cage--A Mystery

by Tetsuya Honda

  “Takaoka was clutching an old photo in his good hand: it was him and the kid there, at an amusement park together.”

  He peeled off his latex glove and crammed it into his pocket.

  Reiko could still feel the vestigial warmth where Mishima’s hand had been gripping hers.

  * * *

  When Forensics went to process the scene the next day, they dug up a head and a left hand—Makio Tobe’s, they assumed—from the ground immediately below the tent.

  Kenichi Takaoka’s body was taken to Tomei University Hospital’s forensic pathology unit for an autopsy.

  Dr. Umehara estimated that Takaoka had been dead four, possibly five days. Amputating his own hand had driven him into a state of circulatory shock; shock had then led to minor thrombosis, low blood pressure, hypoxemia, vasoconstriction, and capillary blockage. Eventually, his internal organs ceased to function properly, culminating in heart failure.

  Takaoka’s face—exposed to the cold dry air outside his blanket—was in the early stages of mummification. In a normal, heated environment, the process of decay would have been advanced enough that he would have been unrecognizable by the time Mishima saw him.

  Further tests confirmed that the severed left hand from the van and the body in the tent both belonged to Kenichi Takaoka. A second search of Tobe’s apartment was conducted the day after the body was found in the tent. This yielded a hairbrush with follicles that the lab tested to prove that the torso belonged to Makio Tobe.

  However, nothing could alter the fact that their murder suspect, Kenichi Takaoka, was dead. They could forward the case to the Public Prosecutor’s Office, but obviously there would be no indictment and no legal resolution to the case. The police were nonetheless obliged to put together a watertight case to properly establish Kenichi Takaoka’s guilt. This would be forwarded to the Public Prosecutor’s Office, which would review all the documents, before officially abandoning the case on the grounds of the suspect being dead.

  Getting all the paperwork ready was a job that fell to the investigators who’d worked the case: Captain Imaizumi, as the head of Unit 10; Lieutenant Kusaka, the lead field investigator; and finally Reiko. While they were busy on that, all the other investigators on the case were placed on Level C, the lowest level of readiness. As their colleagues enjoyed the equivalent of a vacation, the three of them were stuck in Homicide’s office on the sixth floor of the Tokyo Metropolitan Police headquarters, frantically cobbling together the necessary documents.

  There were mountains of documentation to produce. They had to compile and index all the reports turned in by all the individual investigators. They had to do the same for all the witness statements and interview transcripts, as well as summarize all the expert forensic opinions and test results, including the recent report on the tent where Takaoka’s body had been found. There was also a forensics report on the cord of the electric saw, which Ioka, following Reiko’s instructions, had dropped off at the crime lab for testing. Kusaka personally put together all the documentation related to the various searches.

  The necessity of proving that the suspect Kenichi Takaoka was in fact Kazutoshi Naito added a layer of complexity to everything. They had to draw up a detailed timeline with a comprehensive list of references. Even a minor factual error could produce an inconsistency that might undermine the entire case. The case they sent to the prosecutors had to be watertight. Only then would the police be officially allowed to close the book on this one. The result was reams and reams of paper for what was, after all, only a single murder.

  I’m sick to death of this. It’s so darn boring.

  Reiko found herself scowling at Kusaka, who was working opposite her, three desks down.

  It annoyed her that Kusaka was so good at this kind of work. He sat there, tapping away at his computer keyboard as though data entry were his full-time job. How could a man his age be so proficient at touch-typing? Most detectives over forty struggled even with the basics of a PC.

  Bet the guy took evening classes. Creep.

  Reiko was compiling a document that listed all the new information uncovered subsequent to finding Takaoka’s corpse.

  On the night of the third, Takaoka had gone to the white tent after dumping Tobe’s remains in the river. He had presented the original occupant, a certain Daisuke Tanaka, with two bundles of banknotes of one million yen each, and asked him to get out and give him the tent.

  Tanaka willingly complied. He subsequently showed up in the homeless community beside the baseball ground a little further along the river. He won their acceptance by turning up with large quantities of food and alcohol. He was living alone because the other homeless guys didn’t want him around. Two million yen, however, can change minds. Suddenly, the returnee was everybody’s best friend; he even began to emerge as a leader in the group.

  When the investigators asked Tanaka what he’d felt about Takaoka missing a hand, his response had been quite matter of fact. Most people who are sleeping rough have some sort of hard-luck story, he explained, and you soon learn not to pry.

  They hadn’t managed to establish where the two million yen came from yet. They suspected Tobe might have had it on him. They’d asked the public prosecutor if they could quietly drop their inquiries into the matter.

  The matter of Takaoka’s driver’s license was an issue that puzzled Reiko, so she went and made some inquiries herself.

  Takaoka was on file at the Driver’s License Renewal Center. He was on record as having a standard vehicle driver’s license under the name of Kenichi Takaoka, though the photograph was of himself, Kazutoshi Naito. His actual license was real, not counterfeit. Reiko couldn’t understand how he had tricked the authorities into issuing and then renewing a license with an ID photo that didn’t match.

  The answer turned out to be surprisingly simple. The real Kenichi Takaoka, who had indeed committed suicide, never had a driver’s license. As a result, when Kazutoshi Naito moved to Middle Rokugo, he’d been able to apply for a license under his new identity because the authorities had no record of the real Takaoka’s appearance.

  That was a wild goose chase.

  Reiko looked at her watch. It was already three.

  Imaizumi was away from his desk at a meeting with Wada, the chief of Homicide. The investigators of Unit 2, who were at Level A readiness, were based at the far end of the room. Ironically, Kusaka was the only person anywhere near Reiko.

  Just my luck.

  Reiko went over to the coffee machine and poured a couple of cups. She gave one to Kusaka—he took his black—on the way back to her desk.

  “Here you go.”

  “Oh … cheers,” he murmured.

  His eyes never strayed from the documents on his desk in front of him, and his fingers continued speeding over the keyboard. The stuck-up, self-righteous little prig.

  Damn, there I go again!

  Reiko had never liked Kusaka’s face—the cold, emotionless eyes, the beaky nose, the tight, thin lips—but there was more to it than that. Kusaka looked like the man who raped her. He wasn’t a dead ringer by any means, but still, the resemblance was close enough to trigger nasty memories.

  She wondered if having to work with Kusaka was some sort of test.

  At a personal level, Reiko condoned what Takaoka had done: she had wanted to bump off both her rapist and Otsuka’s murderer, so she was a potential murderer herself. Forgiving Takaoka was, for her, a simple matter of “do as you would be done by.”

  As a cop, though, things were different. However deeply she empathized with Takaoka, the fact remained: the man had broken the law. The same would be true for her, if she went one step further and actually killed the man who raped or the one who’d killed Otsuka, her squad member. That was right and proper. That was the law.

  So where did that leave her?

  Reiko was looking for a more compelling reason than the cold, logical tenets of the law to reject the vengeful impulses inside her. She wanted to achieve self-restraint
based on something that came from her, as a person, and had nothing to do with the cold prohibitions of the law.

  She peered at the monitor of Kusaka’s computer. It looked like he was drawing up a list of all the articles they’d impounded during the two searches of Tobe’s apartment.

  Reiko found some comfort in the thought that, at least in this case, Kusaka, aka Mr. Guilty Verdict, wasn’t going to get his way this time.

  “Hey, Kusaka.”

  Can he hear me?

  In silence, Kusaka kept typing until he got to the end of his sentence, then pressed enter, clicked on the save icon, and pressed enter again, before he turned to look at her.

  “Yes, what?”

  He was blinking. Reiko wondered if his eyes were hurting.

  “I wanted to ask you what you thought of Takaoka.”

  “Think of him? How do you mean?”

  “Well, you’re about the same age as him, and you’ve got a son too.”

  “Thanks for the coffee,” he said perfunctorily, picking up the cup with a peevish sigh. That attitude of his was precisely what got on Reiko’s nerves.

  “I suppose I can sympathize and understand some of what he did. I can’t endorse it, though.”

  “Which bits can you understand?”

  Kusaka sighed for a second time. Reiko assumed it meant something like, “Why must you ask me such idiotic questions?”

  “As a man and as a father myself, I completely understand Takaoka’s desire to support his quadriplegic son and to take care of Kosuke Mishima, despite their not being related by blood. Equally, I can’t help but sympathize with him when it was only his commitment to doing right by Mishima and his son that led him to murder Tobe.”

  “And what can’t you endorse?”

  He heaved yet another sigh. The guy was a piece of work. He didn’t even try to hide his sense of superiority. His head drooped a little, and he said nothing.

  “Come on, Kusaka, tell me.”

  “Why do you care what I think?”

  “Like I said, because you’re the same age and have a kid.”

  Reiko started feeling guilty. Perhaps she was pressing Kusaka harder than she should.

  “Because whenever we get talking, I always seem to end up saying something trite and corny.”

  “Oh, so it’s my fault?”

  “That’s not what I said. Let’s end this conversation. I’m pretty sure I don’t have any valuable insights to share.”

  “Don’t be bashful. Trite and corny is fine by me. You’re not a TV commentator.”

  “Trite and corny is the stock-in-trade of most commentators on TV. Exactly what I want to avoid here with you.”

  Kusaka took off his glasses and began massaging his closed eyes with his thumb and index finger. Was it some kind of signal? “Leave me alone”? “Give me a minute to collect my thoughts”? Reiko found the man discombobulating: the way he paced his remarks and gestures was so damn unpredictable. How did Kusaka behave when he was alone with his wife? What was the atmosphere like in the Kusaka family home? There was something morbidly fascinating about such questions.

  “You know that line about how children are formed through watching their parents?”

  With his flawlessly bad timing, it looked as though Kusaka had finally decided to open up, kicking things off with a nice stale cliché.

  “Yeah, I know the line.”

  “I don’t think it’s just saying that children copy what their parents do. It’s also saying parents can serve as a good example of what not to do. Takaoka ‘died’ twice, once as Kazutoshi Naito and once as Kenichi Takaoka, and then became a homeless nobody with no name.”

  That’s not strictly true, thought Reiko. On the first day of the investigation, he introduced himself to me as Takeshi Iizuka. But she decided now wasn’t the time for silly comments.

  “Children are always keeping an eagle eye on their parents, even when you think they’re not paying attention. My take on the matter is that parents should never do anything they wouldn’t want their children to see or that they couldn’t justify to them, whether the child is physically present or not. Anyone who wants to bring their kids up right has to live right themselves.”

  Hardly a revolutionary point of view, thought Reiko. She wondered how many parents would pass the Kusaka test. Probably not many. Adults committed the vast majority of crimes—and plenty of them had children to whom they were setting a bad example. And then—admittedly, this had nothing to do with criminality—you had those awful parents who expected much from their children when they had achieved little themselves. That wasn’t right either.

  “I told you I’d say something boring.”

  “I don’t think you did,” she protested halfheartedly.

  Why did she always end up treating Kusaka so dismissively? It was an unattractive trait. She needed to do as she would be done by—otherwise, they’d never escape the vicious circle they were in.

  Should I make the first move?

  In effort to be friendly, Reiko cast around for a new conversation topic.

  “Say, Kusaka, you’ve been married a long time. What’s it like?”

  She’d meant to lob him a conversational softball. Why was Kusaka scowling at her like that?

  “What’s wrong now?”

  “You’re so goddamn hopeless, you two.”

  You two?

  “What do you mean?”

  “‘What’s it like being married?’ How am I supposed to answer a question like that? Everyone’s different, so everyone’s relationships are different too.”

  “So?”

  “Go and ask Kikuta, if you’re so desperate to know. I’ve already had a word with the guy. I’m not so in love with the sound of my voice that I want to make the same speech twice. You want to know what I think, go talk to him.”

  What the hell did Kikuta have to do with anything? And why was Kusaka suddenly so worked up?

  Kusaka abruptly returned his gaze to the documents on his desk.

  “There’s something I need to ask you. Your explanation of how you figured out that Takaoka was holed up in the tent by the river—I’ve gone through it I don’t know how many times, and it still makes no sense.”

  What’s with changing the subject?

  “I can follow up to the bit about Takaoka being too physically weak to drive his van, but I don’t see how you go from there to him being in the tent. He could equally well have chosen to leave the scene on foot or chuck himself headfirst into the river. I don’t want you progressing your cases through guesswork; I want you to refer to the fact of your having seen the guy and questioned him and develop a proper case that I can incorporate into a proper written report. This episode is typical of you: You make a random guess that just happens to be right, and you think that’s good enough. I know I’ve said this to you before, but successfully identifying the perpetrator doesn’t mean you can just forget about everything that led you to that point. If you can’t give an accurate, watertight account of your own thought process, your case is at risk of being overturned in court—”

  Kusaka’s cell phone began to ring inside his jacket. He pulled it out and looked at the exterior screen.

  “Excuse me a second.”

  Flipping open his phone, he stood up and wandered off toward the windows. Reiko guessed that the caller was from someone in his family.

  “Hi, it’s me.… Uh-huh, I see.… How’s the other kid?… What about Yoshihide? Is he doing all right…? Good … No, I’m back at TMPD headquarters now.… I’m not sure.…”

  Kusaka consulted his watch.

  “All right, I’ll do it. I’ll leave right now. I should be there by five.… Yes, yes, I understand. I’m going to hang up now.… I’m going to hang up.… Bye, then.”

  Kusaka walked back to his desk and sat down. He carefully saved all the files that were open on his desktop, then began to close them, one by one.

  “I’ve got to head home, Himekawa. Something urgent has come up. Sorry
, but I’ve got to go immediately. Tell Imaizumi not to worry. I’ll get everything finished up on time.”

  “Uh, sure.… Is there a problem at home?”

  An expression of pain flashed across Kusaka’s face. Reiko had never seen anything like it before.

  “It’s my son—one of the other kids was bullying him, he couldn’t take it anymore, and he snapped. There was a fight, and both of them got hurt.”

  Kusaka switched off his computer and locked away the case documents in his desk drawer.

  “Oh, that’s awful.… Don’t you worry, I’ll let Captain Imaizumi know.”

  Kusaka was on his feet and had his coat halfway onto his shoulders.

  “I was indiscreet just now. There’s no need to tell him anything about the bullying or my boy getting hurt.”

  Reiko nodded.

  Kusaka glared at her sternly.

  “What I was saying just now about your report—we’ll discuss that some more tomorrow.”

  Must we really?

  “Thanks, and good night.”

  Kusaka snatched up his briefcase and headed for the door, pulling his coat collar into place.

  You’re not playing fair, Kusaka.

  The alarm in his eyes when he heard about his boy being hurt was plain to see. Even when what he was saying to his wife sounded cold and unsympathetic, there had been warmth in his eyes. Maybe he isn’t all bad, she thought to herself, as she watched his retreating back.

  Have a heart, Reiko. The man’s a husband and a father.

  The thought that she was beginning to hate Kusaka less—if only by a microscopic degree—annoyed her.

  Why, if she was annoyed, did she feel so happy? That only made it even worse.

  ALSO BY TETSUYA HONDA

  THE SILENT DEAD

  About the Author

  TETSUYA HONDA is one of Japan’s bestselling authors whose ongoing crime series features Reiko Himekawa, a Homicide Detective with the Tokyo Metropolitan Police. The series has sold roughly 4 million copies in Japan, and is the basis for two TV miniseries, a TV special, and a major theatrical motion picture. The first book in this series, The Silent Dead, was recently published in English. Honda lives in Tokyo. You can sign up for email updates here.