The cry of some irritated-sounding cicada in the distance seemed to rise in volume. The shadows cast on the building uncomfortably adjusted their positions. Now Rentaro was sweating for another reason. He felt ill.
Hotaru suspiciously eyed him. “Rentaro, are you sure Kihachi didn’t give you anything? Like, anything at all? He didn’t slip you something while you weren’t paying attention?”
Rentaro briskly shook his head. “No. Nothing.”
“Oh…”
“What about you? Did Suibara ask you to keep anything for him?”
“Nothing I can think of.”
They were right back where they started.
But Suibara’s memory card had to exist somewhere. It was the one thing they could link to everything else in the case. Rentaro decided to file that thought away for now as he mentally switched gears.
“Hotaru, there’s something else coming here reminded me of. Do you have Suibara’s cell phone or anything?”
“I was kind of hoping you did,” Hotaru replied, leaning against a concrete column. “You don’t know where it is?”
“No…”
Rentaro had been asked multiple times by police interrogators about Suibara’s mobile phone. It was clear, if indirect, evidence that the cops didn’t have it. Smartphones had been everyday parts of people’s lives for over twenty years now, their functionality and privacy measures both far advanced over the initial generation.
If they could track down the phone, that would earn them valuable evidence, such as his site-access history and call records. The police would doubtlessly do anything to find it.
“The killer must’ve taken it with him,” Rentaro said. “Bastards thought of everything.”
“We shouldn’t jump to conclusions yet,” replied Hotaru as she took out her cell phone, tapping at it a bit before bringing it to her ear. Must be calling Suibara’s line, Rentaro thought.
Suddenly, he could hear the faint sound of a phone ringing somewhere.
“Where is it?!”
“Ssh!” Hotaru brought a finger to her lips. Somewhere between the quiet, the cicada calls, and the roar of the trucks occasionally passing by the building, they could hear a sound as soft as the cry of a mosquito. Tiptoeing to the edge of the building, they felt the wind blow against their faces as they peered downward from the dizzying height. The sound was coming from beneath them.
Rentaro and Hotaru looked at each other, nodded, and quickly went downstairs. It came from the far end of the building’s outer perimeter, and now they could clearly hear it. A pop tune, one whose main melody was familiar even to the chronically nontrendy Rentaro. Wading through the tall grass to the side, they finally found it—a black smartphone, lying facedown, vibrating a little on the ground.
He picked it up just as the vibration stopped. The phone fell silent, and no matter how much he jabbed at the start button, it wouldn’t respond.
“The battery must be drained. That sure was close.”
“Oh…”
The phone must have fallen out of Suibara’s hand as he was shot. If he consciously threw it out of the building as he fell, it’d be a pretty remarkable feat on his part.
Suibara…
Rentaro felt an odd sense of nostalgia as he turned the phone over. The screen was heavily cracked, like someone had taken a knuckle-duster to it. It was amazing that the internals survived intact. Looking at the home screen, there was only the barest sliver of a charge left. Uncharacteristically, Rentaro found himself thinking this was the hand of fate at work.
“Let’s go find a charger.”
Flying into a nearby Internet café, the two of them grabbed a PC booth, settling down on the hard, contoured chairs and plugging the phone into the universal charger on the side of the computer. They waited a few moments, hands clasped in prayer, and then the phone whirred in Rentaro’s hand. One percent charged.
Rentaro and Hotaru gave each other a joyous glance. The screen was just as damaged as before, although the touchscreen somehow still worked. But before he could start flicking around the screen, Rentaro’s finger stopped. Suibara might be dead, but how permissible would this be—poking around someone’s private property just to clear your own name? He might be about to go face-to-face with a Kihachi Suibara he never knew before. Browsing through it might be something he’d eternally regret. Paranoia set in.
Well, he thought as he brought finger to screen, so be it.
From there, Rentaro and Hotaru took their time, searching through the phone for whatever clues they could find. But there was nothing particularly noteworthy in his inbox, and his photo gallery mostly consisted of people—all shapes and sizes. Over half of them were of Hotaru. Rentaro could’ve predicted it, given that Suibara adored her to the point where he had her as his wallpaper.
Then his eyes stopped on a certain photo. It must’ve been shot on Christmas. Suibara and Hotaru were there, both wearing Santa hats and standing on either side of a fancy cake in the background. Judging by the high angle, it must’ve been a selfie.
But the biggest surprise in the pic was that Hotaru was smiling. Not exactly beaming, per se, but both sides of her lips were curled gently upward as she gave the peace sign to the camera. It made Rentaro feel like a depraved peeper of sorts, and he swiped the photo away before Hotaru could notice his surprise.
With their check of the gallery complete, all that remained to search was the call history. There, they spotted something strange. Twice on the day of the murder, and once the day before, he had spoken with someone identified as “Dr. Surumi” in the directory. Looking further back in the history, they discovered Suibara exchanged a total of twenty-five calls with the doctor, extending back over the past month.
“Do you know who this is, Hotaru?”
“Yeah. Dr. Ayame Surumi. A forensic Gastrea pathologist. They spoke a few times about autopsy findings and stuff as part of our work.”
“Wow. Just like the one I know…”
“The one you know?”
“Ah, never mind. Do you know why they’d be talking to each other so often?”
Hotaru thought for a moment, then shook her head. “I can’t think of anything. I don’t think Kihachi and Dr. Surumi had any kind of private relationship.”
“All right. We better check this person out.”
“Her office is in a university hospital in District 6,” Hotaru said as she stood up.
“She’s a woman?”
“Yeah.”
“Uh, she wouldn’t happen to be pale to the point where you can see her veins, or wear a lab coat so long that it drags against the floor, or call her autopsy room ‘the kitchen,’ or have a body temperature of around 32 degrees Celsius, or build an expansion to her basement lab so she can have more room for her collection of corpses?”
“What?” replied Hotaru, clearly put off.
“Oh, uh, nothing. I’m sure it’s not the same woman. Probably.”
“She’s absent? Why?”
“Well, that’s what I’d like to know,” the tired-looking doctor replied, his ample belly fat wobbling as he walked up to them. He couldn’t have been an intern, but his youth was evidently clear. “She won’t answer the phone, and now I have to fill in for her shifts. I’m practically going out of my mind here.”
One eye exhibited a nervous tic as he spoke. It was clear that either stress or fatigue was taking its toll.
Rentaro and Hotaru were in an examination room at Shidao University Hospital. They managed to catch this doctor, who introduced himself as Kakujo, right as he was about to take a well-deserved break.
“Have there been that many Gastrea lately?” Rentaro asked point-blank.
Kakujo nodded broadly and opened his arms wide. “That many ain’t the half of it! It’s crazy! People are spreading all kinds of rumors about how there’s something up with the new Monolith 32 they built after the Third Kanto Battle.”
That couldn’t have been the case. The old Monolith 32’s collapse was entirely avo
idable, the result of adulteration that reduced the purity of the Varanium inside. The new one was 100 percent Varanium, something Rentaro and the Tendo Civil Security Agency personally confirmed for themselves.
Come to think of it, didn’t Enju mention an uptick in Gastrea numbers lately, too? Apparently the trend wasn’t exclusive to the Tendo Group’s jurisdiction. Where were they all getting in?
“Say,” Rentaro remarked, “you mind if I ask you a question? How many ways are there for Gastrea to get into Tokyo Area, anyway?”
“Mmm, good question. Where should I begin…?”
The doctor looked up at the ceiling, pointing his potbelly directly at Rentaro.
“Basically, there are three infiltration routes—air, land, and underground. You sometimes see sea-dwelling Gastrea make it in, too, but they can’t be much of a danger if they can’t breathe air, you know? Otherwise, the Varanium field weakens once you get about 200 meters underground or 5,000 meters into the sky, so if you can burrow below or fly above those numbers, you can get in that way. Remember back when a pack of really obstinate guys picked up an upward-flowing air current and caused a huge racket around the city? That sorta thing.”
The Morphe Butterfly Incident, Rentaro thought, as he nodded vaguely at the doctor. But he didn’t voice it. If he demonstrated too much knowledge, Kakujo might start thinking he was a civsec. He wanted to avoid that if he could.
“So how would land-dwelling Gastrea get in?” Hotaru asked from the stool she was sitting on.
“Between the breaks in the Monoliths,” Kakujo instantly replied.
“The breaks?”
“Yeah. The Monoliths are built ten kilometers apart from one another, right? So they kind of aim for the places where the Varanium field’s at its weakest, usually in that five-kilometer interval right in the middle.”
“Do they really succeed all that often?”
“Nah. Probably nine out of ten of ’em die trying—plus, we got the self-defense force patrolling the border, so that one lucky survivor usually doesn’t last long, either. They say maybe one out of a hundred land-based Gastrea who attempt the crossing actually make it through. But we’re still talking a ton of them, and they have a tendency to try to attack people first, so no matter how much we beat ’em down, they keep on trying to get into Tokyo Area. So that’s why, in terms of sheer numbers, it’s still the land-based ones we see the most of in the statistics.”
“Wow. I see.”
“I mean,” Kakujo grumbled, “you know how much of a hit the SDF took in the Third Kanto Battle. Something like half the civsecs in Tokyo Area lost their lives. All we got left are people who didn’t join the battle or who fled to other Areas, and do you think we could really count on those guys? We’re still managing to keep this boat afloat so far, but all of us on the ground level are scared stiff that we’ll have another Pandemic before long. Plus, the news said that the ‘hero of Tokyo Area’ guy died in the Plaza Hotel a few days ago. Hey, actually, you look a little like—”
Rentaro scrambled to say something, but a cool, composed voice stopped him from the side.
“I apologize, Doctor, but could you tell us a little more about Dr. Surumi? How long has she been absent from work?”
On the way there, the pair decided that Hotaru would pose as Dr. Surumi’s sister. The ruse seemed to be working. Dr. Kakujo abandoned his suspicion and thought a little bit.
“Well, four days, I guess. On a job like this, if you’re absent for that long a period of time, you’re not gonna last too long. It’s tough, but that’s how it is.”
“Have you contacted the police yet?”
“The police? Nah, nah,” the doctor said, smiling as he dodged the question. “The retention rate in this place—ah, you probably don’t know what that word means, huh, little girl? Basically, people quit a whole lot around here. Surumi had a good head on her shoulders, so I figured she’d stick around for the long term, but…”
He was doubtlessly right. Performing pathological work on something as hideous as Gastrea corpses would require some pretty thick skin. Sumire, who enjoyed calling it her life’s work, was one in a million.
“Is there any chance she may have disappeared, or gotten caught up in something?”
“Hmm… I couldn’t really say,” Dr. Kakujo replied as he stroked his five-o’clock shadow. “I never thought about that…” Then he slapped a fist against his hand. “Hey, are you guys going to visit Surumi’s place after this?”
Hotaru drooped her shoulders in disappointment. She had a natural talent for acting. “I wanted to,” she said, “but my sister never gave her address out to anyone in the family, so…”
“Oh, that’s fine, I can give it to you. I think I asked her for it when I had to send off some stuff that came to the office for her.”
Rentaro wondered whether Dr. Kakujo was allowed to be so cavalier with people’s personal information, but he nevertheless appreciated his falling so completely for Hotaru’s cover story. Somehow, he doubted he could have convinced him to hand off the address by himself.
The doctor stood up and recomposed himself. “In exchange for that, there’s a favor I’d like to ask of you, if you don’t mind.”
“What’s that?”
“Well, Surumi conducted a Gastrea autopsy about a month ago, but the electronic version of her report’s disappeared from our database for some reason. I know Surumi printed out a paper version for our records right beforehand, so she might still have it kicking around somewhere. Sorry to bother you guys, but if you see her, would you be able to get that for us? I don’t really mind if she wants to quit or not, but we got a legal obligation to keep track of our records, so…”
Rentaro and Hotaru gave each other a glance. Dr. Surumi began making frequent contact with Suibara a month ago, too.
“Sure thing,” Rentaro replied, nodding deeply as Dr. Kakujo wrote down the missing doctor’s address on a piece of notepaper. The duo was just about to leave when the doctor called to them from behind.
“Hey, you guys don’t happen to know what Black Swan is, do you?”
Rentaro and Hotaru both whirled around at once.
“Where did you hear that name?”
Dr. Kakujo’s brows arched, a little taken aback by Rentaro’s sudden forcefulness. “Uh…well, no, I mean, I just remembered it. Surumi kinda mentioned it in passing not long before she left. Like she was kind of brooding over it, you know? It was almost like she was having a nervous breakdown or something at her lab station. And that’s not all…”
The corpulent doctor looked honestly bewildered as he spoke.
“She said she ‘had to burn the vineyard,’ whatever that means.”
The Shidao University Hospital grounds were orderly and well-kept, complete with artificial lawns and ponds. It would have been an inviting spot to rest and forget about your classes on most days, but to Rentaro, the sight was simply depressing. Hotaru’s gait next to his was similarly heavy, almost plodding.
It was clear now that Dr. Surumi and Suibara were working together. But that just led to new problems for them to tackle.
“What the hell is the ‘vineyard’…?”
Hotaru, preoccupied with the same question, had already taken out her cell phone, setting it to holodisplay mode so Rentaro could see the screen in the air. The first result was for an English instruction site. The pronunciation made it sound like some Romance-language word, but it turned out “vineyard” was simply a fancy way of saying “grape farm.”
“‘Burn the vineyard,’ though… What could that mean?”
“I don’t know.”
“That guy said Dr. Surumi started acting weird about a month ago, right?” said Hotaru, her voice free of any intonation. It was a far cry from the forlorn little girl she pretended to be for a moment in the doctor’s office. “And now that I think about it, I think I started noticing Kihachi hiding stuff from me a month or so ago, too.”
There it is again. A month.
“Wh
at happened during that time…?”
Rentaro decided to step back and take an impartial look at the situation. Dr. Surumi and Suibara, two people who allegedly had no personal connection to each other, had talked on the phone twenty-five times in the past month. They started puzzling the people around them with their behavior at about the same time. Suibara was a civsec. The only thing that could connect a civsec with a Gastrea pathologist was…well, a Gastrea.
“Did you and Suibara have any Gastrea encounters in the past month, Hotaru?”
“Yeah… Actually, Kihachi and I ran into one a month ago.”
“What kind was it?” an expectant Rentaro asked. Hotaru gave him a vague look of discomfort in response.
“I dunno…just your typical Stage Two. A flying one. It had a see-through thorax, so you could see all its guts and stuff floating around. It had a really long nose, too. Pretty gross.”
“Did you kill it?”
“Yeah. Kihachi and I were driving on the expressway and it was flying alongside us. I stuck myself out the passenger-side window and blew it away with a shotgun.”
“And then?”
“That’s all.”
“That can’t be all, Hotaru.”
“There’s really nothing else worth mentioning about it. I mean, the Gastrea looked pretty weird, yeah, but you could say that about all Gastrea that are Stage Two or higher. So then we left it to the police and went home, and… Oh, I remember that Kihachi got a phone call, then hurried right out of our place. Now that I think about it, I bet that was from Dr. Surumi.”
If the Gastrea looked normal enough but caused Suibara alarm later, the forensic pathologist must have discovered something highly unusual about it. But, just as before, this lead was getting them nowhere. Rentaro felt like they had a pretty decent selection of puzzle pieces, but there was no telling how they fit together to form a complete picture.
It was clear, however, that they now had information their foes absolutely did not want them to know. If the enemy picked up on their presence, they would undoubtedly face the full brunt of their vengeance. Hotaru was sadly not privy to Suibara and Dr. Surumi’s first exchange—but then again, if she were, chances were that she wouldn’t be breathing right now. A thorny dilemma.
Rentaro Satomi, Fugitive Page 17
