The events of the next seven days or so were like a dam giving way.
It was as if the break in the Tomakomai case had created a tiny hole from which water had begun to spurt. The confessions in the Akita murder widened the breach, causing cracks to form around it. Water started leaking from these cracks as well. The hole got bigger and bigger, and the stream turned into a gusher—
The gusher began with a wave of new developments in the murder of Saeko Komiya. The first brief announcement of the discovery of the victim’s severed leg was soon followed by details at a press conference of the Kanagawa Police, timed to coincide with the evening news. Kosuke Nakasono, owner of a flower shop in Kawasaki, was wanted for murder. His whereabouts were unknown, and he was presumed to be a fugitive.
Two days later, the special investigation unit handling the Yamashina case announced that it was searching for a female acquaintance of the victim as a person of interest. Evidence also indicated that the same individual was responsible for the letters sent to television networks after the murder.
By coincidence, the press conference took place the same day that the national weather service announced the end of the unusually long rainy season. It was as though the clearing skies over Japan were a sign that the specter of the Serial Amputator had disappeared too, dissolved by torrents of truth.
Keiko Tashiro’s whereabouts were unknown, but she was not wanted as a suspect, and the police didn’t mention her by name. Instead, she was an important person of interest. Perhaps the police hadn’t quite been able to dig up enough evidence to put her on the wanted list, or perhaps they were already planning it but the timing wasn’t right.
“I wonder if they’ll really find who did it,” Kaname said, forlorn.
Kotaro was frustrated that he couldn’t cheer her up. Sorry, it’s all my fault. I should’ve gotten the details out of her, like I did with Nakasono. Then I could’ve given them to the police. Security camera footage and phone records are just circumstantial evidence. But when I hunted her down, I was still new at it, you know?
People at Kumar were lucky to be insanely busy. They had no time to think about anything unimportant, including Seigo’s chronic absences and the unwelcome attention he was getting in the media. At least there was some hope of resolving the mystery of who had killed their founder, and they responded with genuine joy and relief, throwing themselves into their work. They needed to fight their way through to the light.
Now only the murder of Mama Masami remained unsolved. Kotaro waited for news from Shigenori, but it seemed he was lying low. When Kotaro ran out of patience and called the older man’s cell, he discovered that he’d been to Mishima and returned days before.
Instead of information, Shigenori had a question. “What’s the leading theory about Mama Masami on the net these days?”
“I can’t tell you in a nutshell. There’s too many theories and they keep changing all the time. You know something, don’t you? Did you make friends with the detectives in Kanagawa this time?”
“I’m not that lucky, kid.”
“So you came back empty-handed?”
Shigenori went quiet. Kotaro could sense a heavy vibe on the other end of the line.
He waited. He was sitting in an armchair in a corner of the cafeteria. It was summer break. Outside, the midday sun flooded the pathways that crisscrossed the campus. The only students here now were dedicated club members, serious people who were immersed in their schoolwork, and those like Kotaro, who had blown it the previous term and had to attend supplemental lectures and resubmit their term papers.
Shigenori broke the silence in a low voice. “There was a suicide.”
It had happened soon after the murder, around the time when the public was going crazy over the Serial Amputator story.
“A guy she went to high school with. He dropped by Misty now and then. Unemployed, age thirty-five.”
“Was he a suspect?”
“Totally off the radar screen.”
“What about her customers? Did anyone notice something odd?”
“No one noticed him doing or saying anything out of the ordinary. But just past midnight, about ten days after she was killed, he ran right into a highway divider. His car was totaled. He must’ve been killed instantly.”
“Maybe it was an accident?”
“A truck driver in the opposite lane saw the whole thing. The guy accelerated right into the divider. The airbag didn’t deploy. It had been disabled, I assume deliberately.”
“I bet he didn’t leave a note.”
“Not as far as I know.”
“I’ll go there myself,” Kotaro said. “He must’ve left something behind I’ll be able to see.”
Shigenori didn’t answer. Kotaro had an idea why.
“You got some help too, didn’t you? You ‘saw’ something.”
“I took care of this one myself. Galla didn’t do anything to me.”
Not “help me,” but “do anything to me?” I guess there’s no way to bridge that gap.
“It was intuition,” Shigenori continued. “I’ve seen a few cases like this in my time. Right after a murder takes place, someone related to the deceased commits suicide. We didn’t have any idea they might’ve been involved until they did away with themselves. It’s rare, but it happens.
“You have someone who’s committed murder, but no one suspects them, no one’s checking up on them. Yet they end up caving to pressure from their conscience. They can’t run away from what they’ve done, and it corners them. It’s not so different from that ghost who wouldn’t give her mother any peace.”
“But what was the motive?”
Shigenori laughed briefly. “He owed Masami Tono money, it turns out. A little over twelve thousand yen. Unfortunately that’s nowhere near enough to furnish a motive. He didn’t have a bad relationship with her, either. He wasn’t a regular at Misty, but he dropped by every couple of months. The other customers say he got along well with her. They spent a lot of time talking about their high school days.”
“So why kill her?”
Shigenori snorted with derision. “When he wasn’t at Misty, and wasn’t around people who knew Masami, he spent a lot of time making fun of him—I mean, her—and generally criticizing her. He couldn’t forgive her for transitioning.”
Shigenori continued. “I poked around a bit and found out soon enough. He liked making her the butt of his jokes when he was out drinking with friends. Other guys thought it was hilarious. It’s a common thing, I’m afraid. The people who listened to his Masami jokes never got the impression that he hated her enough to actually kill her. Maybe he didn’t realize it himself.
“At the same time, he was watching her engage with her situation in a positive way, and he hated her for it. He never wasted an opportunity to heap scorn on her. He apparently felt compelled to visit Misty from time to time. His hatred made it impossible for him to stay away.”
The opposite of love is not hate, but indifference. Kotaro remembered coming across this insight in one of his required readings, though he couldn’t recall the author.
“Mama Masami was loved by her customers. Her bar was thriving. In that sense, there are parallels to the Tomakomai case. She had carved out a place for herself in the world and she was flourishing.
“The suicide worked for a well-known firm in Hamamatsu. Six months before the murder, he was laid off. Losing his job was the last straw for his wife. She took the kids to her parents’ and was consulting a lawyer about divorce.”
“Talk about adding insult to injury,” Kotaro said. “Couldn’t he find a new job?”
“He was a doing routine sales work. It’s hard for someone like that to get hired these days.”
“Maybe that’s what pushed him over the edge.”
“Stress factor. Yes, it’s an element in a lot of criminal behavior. Unemployme
nt, divorce, the death of someone close. Extreme experiences of loss.”
“You sound like a profiler, detective.”
“Tell me about it. Old cops like me never trained with the FBI. We learned it on the street. Oh, and by the way, my experience is telling me something else.” He seemed to be making an effort to sound casual. “If one were so inclined, one might propose that this guy didn’t commit suicide because his conscience was bothering him. Maybe he’d already decided to die, and the idea of his high school friend thriving and enjoying her life after he was dead was more than he could bear.
“His life is crashing down around him. He decides to end it. It’s a lonely decision. Maybe to ease the loneliness, or out of the pain and rage he felt at being pushed off a cliff by life, he decided to take someone with him.”
“That’s a rotten thing to do,” Kotaro said.
“Murder is always rotten. Naturally, severing one of the victim’s toes was meant to make the killing look like the latest in a series. Suicide would put him beyond the reach of the police, but people want to escape blame even in death. The Serial Amputator would be the ideal cover. And so you get yet another murder by a serial killer who doesn’t exist.
“As far as stuffing her body in a trunk and dumping it in the woods goes—not far from the home of parents who couldn’t accept the way she was living—that was a final symbol of spite and contempt for her and what she represented.”
It was a dark obsession. Kotaro couldn’t help but wonder how the killer would have looked through Galla’s Eye. What monstrous form must his word body have taken as it dogged his every step?
“Do the police suspect this guy?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t meet any nice detectives this time who were willing to take me down to the station and interrogate me until I found out what I needed to know.”
Kotaro had to laugh.
“But it’s already clear the whole Serial Amputator story is out the window, so they might be looking at this suicide in a different light after all. People are waking up from that dream and opening their eyes—not just the police, but people who knew him, and people who heard him insulting the victim over a mug of beer. Well, we’ll find out before long, I’m sure. There’s nothing to do but wait.”
As Kotaro left the campus, he decided to drop by Kumar. He wasn’t scheduled, but he felt the need to put in an appearance. He wasn’t the only one who’d acquired this habit. Everyone was thirsting for news about Ayuko’s murder, and they were drawn to Kumar if only as a place to scour the web and monitor the television for new developments. Somehow Kumar seemed the place to get news fast and accurately.
Kotaro climbed the stairs toward Drug Island. As long as he was here, he thought, he might as well see if there was anything the team needed help with. Seigo was talking to an older man in a suit who had pulled up a chair next to his desk. As Kotaro entered the office, Seigo waved him over. The man in the suit stood up.
He looked somehow familiar. Yes, the family resemblance was strong. Anyone would’ve recognized him.
“Ko-Prime?” Seigo gestured to the man. “This is Soji Morinaga. Kenji’s father.”
Kotaro decided that the coffee shop where Kenji had initiated him into the world of underground sites would be the best place to talk. Luckily it wasn’t crowded, just like the night he’d been there with Kenji, except it was the middle of the afternoon and the air conditioning was blasting.
Soji gave Kotaro a business card. He owned and managed a souvenir-cum-coffee shop named Tree Leaf in one of the tourist towns that faced the Sea of Japan.
Kenji’s childhood had been filled with hardship after his father’s company failed. Running a coffee shop for tourists was a big step down from managing a company, but for Soji it must’ve been an oasis of calm and a stable source of income, enough to send Kenji to university and on to graduate school in Tokyo. The Morinaga family had managed to pull their ship off the rocks.
Yet Kenji had disappeared from the world. It was enough to make Kotaro grind his teeth with frustration even now. Kenji, why?
“Thank you for meeting with me. I’m sorry to interrupt your holiday.” Soji dipped his head politely. It made Kotaro uncomfortable, given the gap in their ages.
“It’s all right, Mr. Morinaga. I’ve got work and summer classes. I’m not really on vacation anyway.”
He was beginning to seethe with frustration. Soji’s drooping shoulders and careworn, lonely appearance just seemed to raise the pressure inside him, pressure that had been building and building and now seemed ready to boil over.
He wanted to tell him everything—about Galla and where Kenji was. Tell him everything and ask him how to convince Kenji to come back to the world.
No, taking this sad-eyed father to Galla would be even better. If Kenji could look out of Galla’s scythe and see his father, surely his heart would be moved?
“I asked to meet because I’ve been wanting to ask you something, Kotaro.”
Kotaro sat up in his chair, beaten to the punch. “What was that?”
Soji blinked hesitantly. Kenji had his father’s eyes.
“Mr. Maki tells me Kenji confided in you. He told you homeless people were disappearing and he wanted to investigate, that he couldn’t bear to see needy people in trouble, and that he had a reason—not just a sense of justice, or the kind of curiosity a journalist might have, but something that made him feel their misfortune was his too.”
Is that what you came here to ask me? Kotaro was baffled.
“Ah … yes, he did say something like that.”
Soji’s spirits seemed to lift a bit. “How did he put it, exactly?”
“When he was in the fifth grade—he told me—he and his parents had to drop out of sight to get away from their creditors.”
Kotaro remembered what Kenji had said about how fragile people’s situations could be—how a few minor misjudgments mixed with a bit of bad luck could be enough to make everything fall apart.
“Yes, my business went bankrupt. The banks were after me. So Kenji told you all about it. I see.” He sighed. “You’re probably the first person he ever opened up to about it—about the bankruptcy and the hard times afterward. He never had a word of complaint to me or his mother. I’m sure he never told his friends either. Somehow he acted as if it had never happened.
“He wanted to forget, I think. It was something one ought to forget. I think it’s fortunate that he grew up to be the kind of person no one would guess had a difficult childhood.”
That certainly included Kotaro. Kenji, with his ever-changing, colorful glasses, had always seemed like someone from a comfortable background, with the naïveté to prove it.
“But he told you about it,” Soji added. “That shows how much he trusted you.”
Kotaro was doubtful. Kenji was two years older, but had never looked down on him. He’d been a good workmate and a nice guy, but that was all. Their relationship had never reached the point where a heavy word like “trust” even applied.
“I think he told me because finding out why those people were disappearing was so important to him. He thought it was a tragedy.”
Soji seemed to sag even more with disappointment. “Then if his investigation was so important to him, why would he disappear?”
“What do the police say?”
“They don’t seem to have a specific theory. Maybe he got mixed up in some sort of trouble while he was among the homeless. But you would expect someone to have some information about him, something to lead us to him. The detective in charge thinks he most likely got depressed with his situation, or maybe with life, and decided to drop out of sight,” Soji said. “It happens to people doing volunteer work with the disadvantaged, sometimes even to journalists writing stories about them. If they spend enough time with certain groups of people and get to know them well enough, sometimes they decide to cross ov
er and join them. At least that’s what the detective says.”
“I doubt it was that simple,” Kotaro said.
“I do too, but they do say someone with a psychological burden, or misgivings or doubts about their life, might suddenly decide to live on the streets. The detective told me he thought Kenji himself might have smashed his phone. It would be a symbol of his decision to be free.”
Kotaro didn’t know how to answer that. He would have to think about it.
I know what happened. Kenji found Galla near the tea caddy building and she took him to the roof. That’s when he dropped his phone. On the roof, she told him why the homeless were vanishing, and he decided to follow them—
If that was the truth, the detective’s theory still sounded plausible. In fact it was correct, in the sense that Kenji was trying to get away from reality.
One truth with two interpretations. An observer would give credence to both.
It’s like a story. It all depends on how you tell it.
But both stories contained the same riddle. What was Kenji’s motive? What was his real reason for dropping out of the world?
“Did Kenji give you any other … details?” Soji asked cautiously.
“What kind of details?”
“Well, that is … to borrow a phrase from the detective, did he seem as though something was tormenting him? Something to do with atonement?”
Kotaro stared uncomprehendingly.
“Did he seem to feel guilty about his life? Did he feel there was something he deserved to be punished for?”
Kotaro doubted his ears. Soji looked down in embarrassment.
“Are you saying Kenji did something that he should have been punished for?” Kotaro asked.
Soji Morinaga’s face drained of color. “He … he didn’t say anything to you?”
“All I heard was that the family had to run away in the middle of the night, that you moved from one place to another, that relatives and friends helped you out, and it took about two years to get back on your feet.”
“It was mainly a friend of mine who helped us. Kenji didn’t tell you about this?”
The Gate of Sorrows Page 50
