The Gate of Sorrows

by Miyuki Miyabe

  “Island” was Kumar-speak. Each team was an “island” named after their patrol “beat” on the web. Kaname and Kotaro were members of Drug Island, the fourth-floor team patrolling for transactions involving illegal drugs and dangerous substances that weren’t yet illegal. The next row over was Suicide Island, which monitored sites where people looking to form suicide pacts with others could make contact. The team on the other side of the row was Adult Island, and patrolled for child pornography. Most islands had five or six members, but because of the amount of drug-related activity on the web, Drug Island had eight members, plus Kotaro and Kaname.

  “It’s some kind of meeting.” Kaname unbundled her long hair and shook it out over her shoulders. “Yamashina’s here.” Kumar’s president came up from Nagoya to visit the Tokyo office once or twice a month.

  “Did something happen?”

  “I don’t think so. Everyone from Adult Island got called in half an hour ago. They’re probably calling people island by island to talk about Sapporo.”

  Closing the Tokyo office was a done deal. All the regular and contract employees had to decide whether to move to Hokkaido or find another job. It would be a tough decision, especially for those with families. They also might earn less in Sapporo.

  “So it doesn’t have anything to do with us.”

  “I guess. Listen, take a look at this.” Kaname pointed to a Post-it stuck to the bottom edge of the monitor. “I finished processing this, but you might get a reaction. A high school student uploaded this video of himself jamming along the Tama River on his bike after scoring some herb last night.” The Post-it had a list of handles in Kaname’s rounded script.

  “Pretty stupid.”

  “I haven’t seen these handles before, but they look like friends of the biker who showed up here after he asked them to watch his video. They might get mixed up in something here. Seigo said we should keep an eye on it.”

  Every island had its chief, usually a veteran employee, but Drug Island was headed by Seigo, partly because it was often the destination for new employees and staff on short-term contracts.

  Kaname glanced at her watch. “Gotta catch my express. See you,” she said and hurried out. Kotaro gave her a big wave without taking his eyes from the monitor.

  As Kotaro scanned his inbox, the other residents of Drug Island filed back from the meeting. Seigo was with them.

  “Morning, Ko-Prime,” he tossed out a greeting as he sauntered back to his desk, which occupied a central position in the office. The rest of the team went back to work.

  A few days before, Kotaro had come across a site that was bothering him. The administrator’s handle was Alice’s Rabbit. At first glance it looked like a site for gardening tips. The admin’s blog talked about growing spices and herbs for tea, but there was something about his (her?) “lemongrass” and “mint” and “basil” that didn’t seem quite right. Kotaro suspected these names were euphemisms for potentially dangerous if not illegal plants. He dug around for information on cultivating lemongrass, mint, and basil, and what he found matched nothing that Alice’s Rabbit blogged about.

  If that weren’t enough, the blog sometimes contained cryptic, “those who know will know” remarks that seemed aimed at insiders. Alice’s Rabbit urged his readers to get into herb cultivation. He invited them to trade seeds and seedlings, and offered free seedlings he had crossbred himself. These were the kinds of clues Seigo called “omens”—ominous signs that would pop up and disappear on websites that otherwise seemed innocuous.

  Still, he didn’t have proof. Alice’s Rabbit had been busy; there were a lot of updates. Less than an hour earlier, he’d told his readers that he had just returned from a trip to the land of dreams, enveloped in the aroma of a new type of lemongrass.

  Another blog Kotaro had recently discovered was written by an art student. Each day seemed to bring a new post wailing about how behind schedule his projects were. Recently he’d written, “To liberate my high-level creative power, I need an external assist.” This entry drew a comment from someone recommending that the blogger use drugs. Kotaro hadn’t decided yet if the person was actually selling something, but he did have a pitch: he claimed he was a musician and had found something that saved him when he was in a creative slump. The anxious art student’s site had a lot of visitors, and the musician’s sales talk started a minor debate. Some comments warned the blogger not to get mixed up with the musician, but most urged him to give it a try: “I have the same problem. Why don’t we try it together?” Perhaps the people commenting were just as bogus as the “musician,” or maybe the “musician” was posing as different people.

  Today’s entry found the art student still struggling: his graduation project was never going to be finished in time, he went to a friend’s exhibition and was devastated because it was so good, now he couldn’t get any sleep. Nothing but doom and gloom. This last entry was posted at 3:40 a.m. Why doesn’t he just go to bed? thought Kotaro. Things always look different in the morning.

  Suddenly there was a commotion. Several people had left their desks and were crowded around Seigo, peering at his monitors and talking excitedly.

  “Here we go,” said a fellow islander named Maeda, who sat next to Kotaro. He was looking at his work monitor, not his patrol monitor. There was a browser window open to a news feed.

  “Seigo nailed it. This is the third one.”

  Kotaro went to the same feed. It was a news flash marked NEW.

  BODY FOUND IN FOREST NEAR MISHIMA, SHIZUOKA PREFECTURE, WITH MIDDLE TOE OF RIGHT FOOT SEVERED

  Kotaro glanced at Maeda, a rumpled man of about thirty. There were rumors that his hobby was Brazilian jiu-jitsu. His muscles bulged beneath his T-shirt.

  “The third one?”

  “Didn’t you hear him talking about it? Started in Hokkaido. Kushiro, was it? They find this dead guy in a refrigerator dumped by the road. Head bashed in, strangled with some kind of rope. His left big toe was missing.”

  “When did that happen?”

  “Maybe six months ago. Hold on.”

  Maeda grabbed his mouse and clicked on a file. Hardly anyone bothered with paper at Kumar. Kaname was one of the few people in the office who actually used Post-its.

  “Here it is. June first. Not Kushiro. Tomakomai. The victim ran an izakaya. Forty-one. Named Shiro Nakanome. Weird last name.”

  “June? That was before my time,” said Kotaro.

  “Really? You look like you’ve been here ten years.”

  “Ten years ago I was nine.”

  “Wow, you must’ve been a prodigy.” Maeda laughed. “This is going to be a tough one. That’s what Seigo said after the news broke. I mean, chopping off the guy’s toe? Come on.”

  “It does sound bizarre.”

  “I didn’t agree with him at the time. Maybe he’s watching too many murder mysteries, okay? They figured out who the guy was right away, and I figured when they caught the killer, it’d be the usual motive—money or some kind of sex thing. So he’s minus a toe. I didn’t think it meant much.”

  “Maybe the victim was mixed up with gangsters or something.”

  “Yeah, but the yakuza don’t collect toes.”

  Since the police identified the Tomakomai victim there had been no further progress on the case. This hadn’t seemed odd to Maeda, but—

  “Next one’s Akita. September 22. Found in a dumpster behind some public housing. Female, dead two days. Cause of death was strangulation. The fourth toe on the right foot was missing. Sliced off cleanly with some kind of sharp tool. When Seigo saw the news he jumped out of his chair. ‘Serial killer!’ he yells. It takes a lot to shake Seigo, okay? He actually smelled it coming. I was blown away.”

  Seigo had sensed what was coming, like a fisherman looking out across the vast ocean of the web spotting a flock of seabirds circling something beneath the surface.

 
“Did they identify the victim?”

  Maeda shook his head with a pained expression, almost as though he’d known the victim personally. “Her age was twenties to forties. The body was pretty badly decomposed. No clues at all. No personal effects. The tags on the clothes were snipped off. Even the linings of her shoes were ripped out.”

  Kotaro felt a real chill run down his spine. Severing a toe was ghastly. Going to such lengths to obliterate any trace of the victim’s identity was highly calculated. Taken together, they didn’t just add to the horror. They multiplied it.

  “I guess the cops must be checking the missing-persons lists.”

  “Prefectural police would, sure, but you can’t assume the victim’s from Akita. Fact is, there are a whole lot of people no one would bother filing a report on if they dropped out of sight tomorrow. You do this job, you know what I’m talking about, okay? You hear their voices out there in cyberspace.”

  Kotaro nodded. People who were so isolated they couldn’t even ask for help. People so lonely they’d given up on anyone ever listening to them. Yes, he knew what Maeda was talking about.

  “Do you think the police know they’re dealing with a serial killer?”

  “I wish I could tell you.” Maeda frowned. “Cops are bureaucrats too, and each department protects its turf—which means if something isn’t on it, they ignore it. Not their turf, not their responsibility. I like to think they’ll wake up, though.”

  The circle of people around Seigo’s desk had dispersed. Everyone had gone back to work. Seigo picked up the phone and started punching in a number.

  Kotaro went back to work too. The patrollers on the previous shift had added two new search terms, “parlor” and “malt.” Naturally the second term had nothing to do with whiskey.

  Someone clapped him on the shoulder. Kotaro looked up. It was Seigo.

  “Sorry,” he said to Maeda. “I need to borrow Ko-Prime.”

  Seigo pointed to the exit. Kotaro rushed to square away his desktop before running to catch up with Seigo, who was almost out the door. In the corridor he headed for the opposite door, which led to the third floor.

  “We’re dredging the textboards. I need your help on BB Island,” Seigo said.

  Dredging was different from crawling, which involved searching on multiple terms simultaneously and gathering hits for later analysis. Dredging meant reading through everything the search terms returned, page by page.

  BB stood for Black Box. The island specialized in monitoring sites for information about crimes already committed, or people looking for accomplices in murder, kidnapping, and robbery. BB Island also handled sites used by people looking for ways to take revenge for one reason or another.

  “You and Maeda were talking. Did he tell you about Mishima?”

  They walked down the stairs side by side. “Yeah, he told me. The victim was missing a toe.”

  “The police haven’t confirmed it.” Seigo sounded cautious, but he looked like a dog on a scent.

  “Maeda told me you thought this was a serial killer after the first victim was killed.”

  “I did. I hoped I was wrong, though. Anyway, there should be a lot of stuff going up about this today and tomorrow, so I’m putting more people on it. We’re going to dredge this sucker good.”

  “I’m game.”

  They went through the security door into the third floor. The room was buzzing. Kotaro noticed a few other faces he usually saw on the fourth floor. People were rearranging PCs and monitors and allocating positions. The whiteboard near the wall already showed a list of bullet points relating to the latest murder.

  “Hey Ino, say hi to Kotaro from DI.”

  Seigo jerked a thumb at Kotaro. Shinya Inose was the chief of BB Island. “Ino” was one of the brightest people in the company; he had taken a PhD in information engineering last year, just before joining Kumar. Small stature, round face, narrow eyes, gentle-looking, usually smiling. Kaname said he looked like her neighborhood tofu maker.

  “Here’s another body.”

  “Very good,” said Shinya and waved a hand toward the desks along the window. “That row’s open.”

  Kenji Morinaga, another part-timer, was already there. He was a junior majoring in civil engineering. They knew each other well. Shinya and Kotaro had joined Kumar together, and they’d trained together for the first few days.

  “Hey,” said Kenji.

  Kotaro took the seat next to him. “Looks like we’re buddies.”

  “Welcome.”

  This was a stroke of luck. Kenji was a member of School Island—in fact, his job was to monitor unofficial school sites on the deep web. Kotaro had been waiting for a chance to talk to Seigo about Mika’s problem, but if he was going to be working with Kenji today, he could talk to him directly.

  Kenji was into eyewear in a big way. He had a whole collection of gaming glasses just for working on his PC. Today’s pick had emerald-green frames.

  “How’s Kaname?”

  Kenji had a thing for Kaname. As soon as she joined Kumar he couldn’t stop raving about how cute she was. He was a naïve boy from a well-to-do family; a girl like Kaname was perfect for him. Unfortunately, he didn’t seem to be perfect for her. She’d never shown any interest in him at all.

  “I was late for the handoff today. I had to promise to buy her lunch.”

  “I can handle that for you if you want.”

  “All right, listen up!” Shinya clapped his hands. “We’ve got help now. Row Two and guests, I want you all over this thing. Check your search terms.”

  A list of terms popped up in a window on their work monitors. Tomakomai. Akita. Mishima. Shiro Nakanome. Profiling. Corpse mutilation. Dismemberment. Psycho killer. . . . Terms kept being added. There were titles from movies and novels.

  “Rows One and Three, business as usual. If you come across anything, pass it on immediately. We’ll be dredging this till the end of shift three tomorrow. Good luck.”

  Kumar operated around the clock on three shifts, starting at 8 a.m.: eight to three, three to eleven, and eleven to eight. Part-timers coordinated their shifts, but in emergencies like this, all bets were off.

  “When were you supposed to get off today?” asked Kenji.

  “I was on eleven to two, but I’m fine. I can blow off class.” Kotaro had two classes today, the first starting at three, but he could always copy someone’s notes later.

  “You still have class? I’m on winter vacation. I was going to stay late anyway.”

  As a third-year student, Kenji would normally have been busy setting up job interviews for after graduation, but he was planning to go on to graduate school, so his schedule was flexible.

  “I’m off the twentieth,” said Kotaro. “But I don’t have anything major till then. I could start winter break right now.”

  “I don’t know. Don’t make a habit of cutting class. Wait a minute—coming from me that’s not very convincing, is it?”

  “No. It’s not. Well, when it comes time to knuckle down, I’ll do what I have to.”

  Seigo and Shinya stood in front of the whiteboard talking. They turned to the room.

  “I think we’re going to be working on this case for a while. We’ll need a name, so here you go: The Toe-Fetish Killer.”

  A quiet laugh rippled around the room. Seigo smiled wryly. “It’s not a great case name, but maybe that’s better. We don’t want it to sound cool.”

  “I don’t need to remind you,” Shinya added, “that other people will be naming it too. As soon as you run across a name for the case, add it to the term list. If you run across someone with an unusual interest in naming the case, better look into it.”

  “Kumar is counting on you,” said Seigo as he left the floor. Shinya went back to his desk. Kenji pulled up his chair and prepared to get down to work.

  “Listen, Kenji,
” Kotaro whispered. “This has nothing to do with work, but in case I forget, I need your advice about something during the break.”

  “What’s going on?”

  “It’s about somebody close to the family. I think she’s having problems with an unofficial school site.”

  Kenji pushed his emerald-green glasses up the bridge of his nose and cocked his head. “You have a sister in middle school, right?”

  Kotaro couldn’t even remember if he’d mentioned Kazumi, but Kenji hadn’t forgotten. A good memory seemed to be a common trait among Kumar employees.

  “Yeah. Luckily it’s not her. It’s a friend of hers from the neighborhood. It looks like somebody’s bullying her.”

  “Got it. More later.”

  They settled down to work.

  Kotaro had no experience dredging textboards, but he had a vague notion that there would be a fair number of threads devoted to criminal activity. He found many more than he expected, and the threads were constantly being updated.

  Seigo had suspected from the beginning that there would be more murders, but Kotaro overrated his nose for criminal activity. The textboard threads were full of posts from people with noses even more sensitive. They were more passionate about the case than Seigo was, and had been following the Toe-Fetish Killer closely from the start, debating their own theories and hypotheses.

  Before the second killing, in Akita, people were arguing intensely about where the next murder would occur. They were even trying to profile the next victim. Profiling victims before they were killed was something Kotaro hadn’t heard of, but he soon discovered that it was a recurring theme in American crime dramas.

  The identity of the first victim was quickly established, but one victim was not much of a basis for profiling. Some of the posters seized on the man’s unusual name and insisted that the killer would go on to claim another victim with a rare last name.

  There were also aggregators who summarized the gist of these exchanges, the leading hypotheses, and other points that had to be considered. The killer had been christened Toe-Cutter Bill, after the psychopath in a popular crime novel that probably every one of these amateur detectives had read.