“You know what, Gami? I had a bad dream when I took a nap a while ago.”
“It's ages since I last had a dream.”
“It was really vivid. It still gives me goose bumps,” Akitsu said, gazing up at the ceiling. “Those two who died in the accident weren't our guys─they were set up by the real perp, who put the body in the trunk, and staged the accident. He's still out there laughing his head off. Then, just as I was on my way home after the investigation was officially closed, I saw a headline on the papers at the station─another woman had been murdered, and a call placed to a TV station.” He took a deep breath.
“It's not easy to fake a traffic accident,” Takegami said slowly.
“Yeah, I guess …”
“They haven't finished examining the scene yet, but they didn't find any kind of functional abnormality in the car.”
“But there'd been a fire.”
“They think Kurihashi started it when he lit his cigarette. And that bend in the Green Road is well known locally as an accident hotspot.”
Akitsu didn't say anything.
“Look, that ain't no dream, let alone a prophetic one. In my book, it's what you call crossing your bridges before you come to them.” Takegami was relieved to see Akitsu give a tight smile. “It's about time you got going, isn't it?”
Akitsu looked at the clock and stood up. After seeing him off, Takegami put away the report, and then went back to the file he'd been organizing when Akitsu had turned up. He knew exactly how he felt. In fact, precisely the same thing had occurred to him.
If those two guys in Akai were their men, it meant that the killers had gone ahead and died before they could catch them─and both of them had died together, to boot. They'd been so casual about taking their latest victim off for disposal somewhere that one had dropped his cigarette onto his lap and set fire to himself, then lost control of the car in his panic, crashed into the guardrail, and gone over the cliff, and both broken their necks, side by side. It was all just a bit too convenient, wasn't it?
He remembered a conversation he'd had with Captain Kanzaki when the arm was discovered in Okawa Park. In reality there are unbelievable coincidences; as police they experienced these often in the course of their investigations. Therefore even if, for example, a photo turned up of the very moment a criminal was throwing a body part into the trash, they couldn't automatically dismiss it as a hoax. And the killer had made use of that psychology … Wasn't it the same this time? Aren't we just falling into his trap again?
On the other hand, though, Takegami's intuition and experience were telling him that arranging for a momentary scene to be snapped in a photo was on an entirely different level to purposely causing a car crash. Let alone putting a dead body in the trunk to set up two innocent people as murderers. That would have taken an awful lot of forethought to cook up.
Something was bound to turn up in the house searches. That was reality. There would be suspicious evidence. Takai and Kurihashi were probably─probably─the culprits. Probably. But … There was that matter of divine punishment. In all of Takegami's almost twenty years as a cop, it would be the first time he'd ever seen it visited on a murderer.
The afternoon dragged on. Takegami enjoyed his role on the desk, and he considered it his duty to fulfill the mission, but now, just this once, he wished he could be in Akitsu's shoes. He wanted to get a glimpse into the lives of those two youths, Takai and Kurihashi. He wanted to be there on the scene. For a distraction he holed up in the meeting room and immersed himself in some trivial but necessary documentation work, doing his best not to look at the clock. Therefore, when Shinozaki knocked on the meeting room door, he had no clear idea of what time it was.
Shinozaki opened the door and came over to the desk, standing there looking like a bewildered child. He was blinking furiously.
“What's up?” asked Takegami. Anxiety and anticipation formed a lump in his chest and began beating where his heart normally was. “Hey, what's up?” he demanded again.
Shinozaki gave a start. He moved around the desk to where Takegami sat and said, his voice trembling, “It was an air purifier.”
Takegami didn't understand what he meant at first. Shinozaki's face crumpled as if he was about to cry. “Akitsu found an air purifier in Hiromi Kurihashi's apartment. That's probably what it was. That hum in the background on the tape.”
Takegami opened his mouth, then closed it again and stood up. “We're gonna be busy,” he said as he opened the door.
“I guess,” Shinozaki answered.
Takegami had no clear recollection of who he talked with about what for the rest of that day. The blockage in the case was suddenly dislodged and a torrent of information flooded into the incident room.
However, there was just one thing that kept nagging at him, however much he wanted to forget it. Then, in the maelstrom of jubilation and confusion, Captain Kanzaki came in to the incident room and pushed his way through the assembled detectives to where Takegami stood and shook him by the hand. This was a first, too.
“We got the bones.”
Takegami nodded silently.
“Just the right hand's missing. They were in a paper bag in Kurihashi's apartment.”
November 6, 1996, 6:20 PM
All the main TV stations interrupted their regular programming for a special news flash, announcing that two suspects had been identified in the serial killer case.
Yoshio was in his shop at the time, serving a customer. She was a young woman, about the same age as Mariko.
Shigeko was at home, seated at her desk and absorbed in writing up the story about how Shinichi had found the arm in the trash at Okawa Park.
Shinichi was seeing Kumi off at the station after she'd been to see him at work. She had just said something funny and Shinichi was laughing. It was only recently that Shinichi had started to laugh out loud again, even only briefly.
Meanwhile the news streamed overhead. There had been two perpetrators. And they were dead. In this godless land, just for one brief moment, everyone heard the sound of God's hammer come swinging down.
End of Part 1
Coming soon: Part 2
“I wonder if we ever saw its natural form.”
─Who Goes There? by John W. Campbell, Jr.
The first time Hiromi Kurihashi killed someone was on his tenth birthday. His friend Peace had been with him. Peace was the one who'd taught him how to kill.
Puppet Master vol. 1
Copyright © 2001 by Miyuki Miyabe
First published in Japanese by Shogakukan Inc. in 2001 under the title Mohōhan
English translation copyright © 2014 by Ginny Tapley Takemori
First e-book edition published December 2014 by Creek & River Co., Ltd.
Translation: Ginny Tapley Takemori
Editing: Susan Rogers Chikuba
Cover illustration: Koh Murao koh-murao.com
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Puppet Master vol.1 Page 33
