The Hunter

by Asa Nonami

  "It's morning, Gale," she whispered.

  The woods that had been a part of the night now came into outline as well. From the top of the pedestrian overpass she could make out the zigzag silhouettes of still-young pine trees reaching up to the gray sky. The hunters must have been waiting for morning light.

  Never again would the two run together. Never again would she look into those eyes.

  No human being has eyes that expressive.

  Slowly, steadily, the day broke. The lights of the industrial district now blurred. Her body felt clammy. Were the waves real at an artificial beach? At the very least, this stagnant sea water wasn't fake, probably. Involuntarily, in the bitter cold, she found herself stamping the ground when there came something like the sound of the wind. The wind? A flute? Takako held still and listened carefully. A high, resonating sound. It stretched out mournfully, riding on the wind.

  The howl of a dog.

  It could only be Gale. The howl stopped the officers roaming the area in their tracks; they stood still, listening, remarking on it to one another. Takako felt her heart grow cold. Why would Gale do such a thing—tell them where he was, give away his hiding place? Or was he deliberately trying to communicate? To say, here I am. But however he called to them, neither Kasahara nor Emiko could ever come. Gale surely knew that. Then whom was he calling to? Was there anyone else he knew? Suddenly the vision of Gale, gazing at her amid the surrounding darkness, came back to Takako. Gale had waited for her, spattered with mud as she was; without fear, without attacking, he had stood his ground quietly, looking straight at her.

  No way.

  Such a thing wasn't possible. But she agonized as she listened to the long, drawn-out, mournful cry. If she called to him, would he come obediently to her? Could he be captured without a shot fired, even if from a tranquilizer gun? She made up her mind: she would head in the direction of the officers and call Gale herself. That was when, over in a corner of the grove, she saw fire break out.

  Takako leaned over the railing and yelled: "Fire! Over there!"

  The officers, who had been listening to Gale's howls, immediately looked up at her. In the next moment, shouts rang out, along with the frantic baying of hunting dogs. Takako watched, frozen in the direction of the flames. People started running. Only Takako, without a radio, cut off from everyone, had no idea what happened. Clouds of black smoke billowed into the bright morning sky.

  The howling grew more intense. Immobilized, Takako stared in the direction of the fire. It was not a big fire. At first she had thought it had great momentum, but now the clouds of smoke were clearly bigger than the flames. Benzoyl peroxide maybe? Ogawa's doing? And then she heard it: the dry, small pop of a rifle. Her hands flew to her mouth. She knew what it was. Yet, instinctively, she knew that if she did not cover her mouth, something might slip out that was unprofessional and unbecoming to a police officer:

  Perhaps the scream of "No!" Or perhaps an unintelligible, strangled cry.

  9

  Otomichi's figure riding in front of Takizawa and Imazeki, under the low-hanging bank of gray clouds, looked exceedingly small and cold. Mixed in with the neat line of police cars no longer on the chase, her motorcycle sped through the chilly air, its license plate spattered with mud.

  Imazeki, his hands on the steering wheel, murmured again in admiration: "Even a man would get worn out, riding around that much in the middle of the night. And in this bitter cold, too." He may or may not have been aware of Takizawa's sidelong glance, but he went on, "Bravo. She's got real guts. I can see why you look out for her so much, Taki."

  "Look out for her? Me?" Takizawa shifted his position, letting his paunch expand. Watch it, buddy, he thought. That's not even funny. But this upright colleague of his seemed convinced that Takizawa and Otomichi had been on the best of terms from day one of their partnership, or even before.

  "I can tell just by watching. She does so much, and yet just because she's a woman, she gets a lot of grief. You see that going on, Taki, and that's why you protect her. That's why everybody says you're a sweet guy."

  There was nothing Takizawa could say in reply. The woman had really earned herself some Brownie points. She'd walked off with all the credit, and now people were congratulating him just for being her partner.

  Well, what of it. Let it go.

  A sweet guy? Him? Well, he'd been called worse things. Actually, it wasn't so bad, not as much as he would've thought. His eyes on the figure of Otomichi on the road ahead, Takizawa let out a small breath. The woman was in a state of near-total exhaustion. She was injured, her complexion, fair to begin with, drained of color, and yet she gritted her teeth and stood and watched as the tranquilized wolf-dog was carried out to a van. Seeing how close she was to tottering, even he had sympathy.

  "Still, there's not the feeling of accomplishment we were looking for, is there?" said Imazeki. "I mean, basically, it was the wolf-dog who took Ogawa down."

  "Better than having the case drag on and on. At least now it's wrapped up."

  "True enough. All that's left now is to write up the report." Imazeki let go of the steering wheel momentarily and cracked his knuckles.

  Takizawa felt put off: The guy was actually eager to get going on this most annoying part of the job.

  * * *

  That afternoon it snowed again. Takizawa trudged through the snow to visit Kasahara in the hospital. Kasahara was slowly, steadily gaining strength; although still unable to speak, on hearing that Gale had been safely apprehended, he let out a deep sigh of relief.

  "Looks like Gale was on Ogawa's trail the whole time. Once you get your voice back, you've got to sit down and fill us in on how that dog was able to target Ogawa and find him. The animal sure isn't going to tell us anything."

  Two days earlier, Takizawa had broken the news of Emiko's death to Kasahara. After being told she was in critical condition and then hearing no updates, not even the name of the hospital she was in, this former policeman had prepared himself for the worst. Lying in bed scarcely able to move, he wept silent tears. Takizawa in turn gazed wordlessly at Kasahara's sunburned face, somehow so familiar that it seemed they must have known each other, and watched the crow's feet around his eyes grow moist with tears. Takizawa, himself a father of daughters, understood.

  "It was a near thing. An instant later and Gale would've been at Ogawa's throat. What a fine specimen! Man, when you see him up close like that, he's a huge son of a gun."

  Kasahara nodded slowly at Takizawa's words, and reached for the memo pad beside his pillow. In the days since they last talked, Kasahara had regained some use of his hands, and conversation flowed more smoothly with a pen than with the hiragana board.

  "What about the policewoman?" Kasahara wrote.

  Looking at the scribble, Takizawa exchanged glances with Imazeki. He didn't know what she was doing on this snowy afternoon, freed from her solo assignment. Had she gone to the doctor for her injuries, or gone to headquarters to file her own report, or gone home?

  "She . . . ah ... she was the one who chased after Gale on her motorcycle. Ran with him all the way from your house to Makuhari."

  Kasahara's face registered surprise.

  Takizawa nodded and said, "Quite a feat, all right. Along the way she took a spill; she actually says that Gale stopped and waited for her. She was all right, but she got herself covered in mud."

  After a bit, Kasahara picked up the pen and wrote: "Gale must have a sense about her. He knows when there is no fear. His instincts are sure, he knows trust. Not like with family. But he recognizes trust."

  Takizawa couldn't disagree, and he nodded slowly. With his own eyes, he had seen Otomichi and Gale race together through the night like they owned it. It was hard to understand, but the two of them had looked happy together. In his own way, Takizawa could sense the bond between them.

  "It's great you've recovered so much movement with your hands," Takizawa said. "As Gale's master, maybe you could help us out a little. For one thing,
how the hell did Gale know where Ogawa was?"

  On that note, he left the hospital. With the suspect under arrest, the only work left was the unexciting business of taking down his story and gathering corroborating evidence. But it was by no means as easy as it seemed, preparing the documents to build a case, one that lawyers for the defense could not overturn in court. There were a million matters to ask the two perps about: Gale, Emiko, the connections between the people Gale killed, Ogawa's background and motives, the method of acquiring benzoyl peroxide, construction of the timed ignition device, the relation between Kasahara and Ogawa, ... At the same time, they had to interrogate others in order to verify the facts of the crimes. Get more eyewitness testimony.

  "Think we'll get any more snow this year?"

  "Has there ever been a year when it snowed after the cherry blossoms came out? God help us."

  The heavy, moist snow dissolved as soon as it struck the windshield. Takizawa was remembering the last time it snowed—already it felt so long ago; he'd been out bouncing around in Otomichi's car, face freshly swollen. But this night, instead of getting started on Ogawa's interrogation, the investigators drank a toast at headquarters and went home early.

  "Thanks for everything." On her way out, Otomichi had said this to him in a small voice, her expression as stiff as ever. She had apparently had her injuries tended to in the afternoon: when she came up to him, she smelled faintly of medication.

  Takizawa raised a hand lightly in greeting, saying only, "Oh." He had wanted to say something more; but in the end he couldn't. He'd thought he would find a chance to say something the next day—but that ended up being the last time he saw her.

  The patrol unit, with its greater mobility, was generally involved only in the preliminary stages of investigation; even if its members were assigned to an investigation, once the subject was in custody, they generally took no part in the subsequent tasks of writing reports, interviewing material witnesses, and digging up corroboration. Otomichi and the other members of the Mobile Investigative Unit were taken off the case the following day and returned to their normal assignments.

  "How's it going? Lonely now?"

  When Takizawa got back to the familiar, all-male environment at Tachikawa Central Station, all sorts of people came up to him. Everyone had the same thing in mind.

  "Taki, did you know your partner was so accomplished?"

  Realizing the keen interest they'd had in his partnership with the policewoman, Takizawa felt for the first time a glow of satisfaction. But without that brusque-mannered girl around, the place seemed suddenly drab and cheerless.

  "Motorcycles—is that all she's good at riding?" one guy said.

  "I'd like to be her motorcycle any day," said another.

  Comments like this could now be bandied about openly, without restraint. Working with a woman was stifling, after all. Drab and cheerless or not, a workplace was easier to take when you could say whatever you felt like, without worrying about what some dame would think. Takizawa was sincerely happy, he decided, that life could return to its old rhythms at long last.

  10

  The next day, Ogawa's interrogation began in earnest.

  Ogawa testified that he had slept in his car while moving from place to place in the city, and that for three days prior to his arrest he had hidden in a shed located in a grove of trees by the sea in Makuhari, facing an artificial dune. He did not know the wolf-dog was after him; but that morning, hearing the sudden screaming of sirens, he figured he'd been found and surrounded. He decided to use the two kilograms of benzoyl peroxide in his possession to start a fire, and then try to escape in the commotion.

  "What's with that dog?"

  Those were Ogawa's first words when the investigators grabbed him.

  He was able to start the fire as planned. He placed a lit cigarette upright, like a stick of incense, in a plastic bottle filled with benzoyl peroxide and threw it out the door of the shed. As the bottle flew through the air, the highly flammable chemical danced around, coming into contact with a spark from the cigarette. That was all it took. But then, just as the bottle exploded into flames, the wolf-dog appeared and had just started to leap.

  If a shooter from the Hunting Companion Society had not spotted Gale in time, Ogawa would have been dead on the spot.

  Ogawa confessed to the arson of the Kasahara house, adding: "After I set the place on fire, I thought the dog was dead. So I was caught completely off guard." He gnashed his teeth about having been "tracked down by a damned dog." He spoke as if it had completely slipped his mind that he was on the most-wanted list.

  Ogawa would have been all right if only he had kept the unglamorous lab job he got right out of college, working for a food manufacturer. Instead, he let himself be cajoled into developing health equipment, getting so wrapped up in it that he eventually quit his job and started his own company, only to go bankrupt.

  His statement read in part: "There I was, going through all that trouble to try to improve people's health; I couldn't understand why wealth always goes to people who do things half-heartedly, just for fun." And so, when his business venture went south, Ogawa came up with a plan. Rather than skip town in the middle of night to escape his creditors, he would put up a last, desperate fight. He didn't want an inordinate sum of money—a million yen, two million tops, enough to bring himself back from the brink of ruin.

  His big chance was insurance money. But people who took out life insurance policies on others and then murdered them were always caught. Better to go for money that was a sure thing, even if the amount was smaller. So he figured he'd start a fire in the building where his company was located. He knew better than to underestimate the power of a police investigation. If they found anything suspicious about the fire, they would go over the site with a fine-tooth comb. If they thought it was arson and started poking around, they might wise up to him. Setting fire to the building or the company would be a dead giveaway; better to set fire to something moving, something alive. That was Ogawa's reasoning.

  "I decided a guy like Hara didn't deserve to be alive. He was a filthy piece of shit. So I chose him."

  Ogawa knew Teruo Hara by sight; to his mind, Hara was a slimeball who made an easy living by preying on young girls. Every time Ogawa saw him, Hara was with a different woman, always dressed in flashy clothes, thumbing his nose at society. Ogawa was doing his damnedest to make a sober, decent living; it was sickening how a low-life like Hara could get everything his own way.

  He devised a way of setting fire to Hara using a health belt of his own design, one implanted with a pedometer as well as crystal beads to improve the flow of blood. He wired into the pedometer a timer function that could be manipulated by a command sequence so that, at the designated moment, a Nichrome wire inside the belt would heat up. Then all he had to do was pack the inside of the leather belt with the proper chemical—one that would ignite with the heat produced by a tiny, micro-cell battery and produce a spectacular blaze. The most likely candidate was benzoyl peroxide. In small increments, he acquired the chemical from various places around the city. There was little difficulty in purchasing benzoyl peroxide as a paste with twenty-five percent water. He could dry the paste at home, leave it to soak overnight in methanol, then let it dry outdoors to produce a dry, white crystalline powder.

  Ogawa's plan appeared to succeed. It was the acquaintance he formed with Kasahara, in the course of his numerous experiments on the deserted riverbed in the upper stream of the Tama River, that proved fatal in the end.

  For his part, Kasahara spent his days training Gale as an attack dog and alternately tracking down everyone who had corrupted Emiko and ruined her life. "There were many times I came close to stopping the insanity. It was my daughter who had been foolish. And it was my own fault she turned delinquent. I alone was responsible for turning my back on my family."

  Before he regained the use of his voice, Kasahara wrote this confession in a letter, according to Takizawa's instructions. When
he was able to speak again, he filled in the details. It started with a chance remark by Emiko. Back when she was first hospitalized for abuse of stimulant drugs, she was literally insane; but as her condition improved and she became capable of rational speech, she told Kasahara bits about her life when she ran away from home:

  "I really wanted to come back home, but I couldn't because I knew you hated me. Everyone I met was really nice to me. They said if I used the injections to lose weight and make myself pretty, you'd like me again. It was kind of true, wasn't it? See how nice you are to me now."

  Recalling this, Kasahara broke down and wept. These were the sobs of a man who had remained silent even on learning of his daughter's death.

  But when his daughter told him those things, Kasahara swore he would get revenge. That was all he could do for her. On her good days he would ask her, little by little, about the crowd that got her hooked on amphetamines. Taku, Kazu, Chieko, Mizukun. Emiko referred to them by their nicknames, and talked about them with eager pleasure. She described them as "nice people." To the end she believed they were kind to her, were fond of her.