by Kōji Suzuki
He decided he needed to check further. "So there was no sarcoma in the coronary artery?"
"None that I could see."
"Are you absolutely sure?"
"Well. I'll have to wait for the tissue sample to come back before I can say for sure."
For the moment, the telltale tumor seemed to be missing from Mai's artery.
"In that case, what killed her?"
"Probably the cold. She was in an extremely weakened state."
"How about injuries?"
"Her left ankle was broken, and she had lacerations on both elbows. Most likely from when she fell. There were particles of concrete ground into the wounds."
So she'd fallen in feet first, broken her ankle, and was unable to get out of there. The shaft was a yard wide and over three deep, too deep for her to escape on her own. She would have been stuck there, with only rainwater to quench her thirst. Even so, she would have survived for several days.
"I wonder how long she was alive in there." It wasn't really a question. He was merely thinking aloud as he imagined her fear and despair at being left all alone at the bottom of a hole on a rooftop.
"I'd estimate about ten days." Her stomach and intestines were empty, and her subcutaneous fat was largely depleted.
"Ten days." Ando took out his planner. Assuming she survived for ten days in the exhaust shaft, and assuming five more for her body to be discovered, she would have vanished on or about the 10th of November. Ando's date with her had been scheduled for the ninth; the fact that she hadn't answered the phone all day that day pushed the date of her disappearance back at least that far. Indeed, her mailbox had contained newspapers going back to the eighth. Which meant that something had happened to her on the eighth or ninth to make her leave her apartment.
Ando marked those two dates on his calendar.
Something had happened to her between the eighth and tenth of November.
He tried to imagine himself in her place. When she was found, she had on a skirt and a sweatshirt. Her attire suggested she'd just stepped out for a moment, maybe for a breath of fresh air. But, strangely, she hadn't been wearing any panties.
He thought again about the things he'd felt when he visited her apartment. They were still vivid in his mind. That had been the 15th of November. If the results of the autopsy were to be believed, at that point she was already trapped on the roof, waiting to be rescued. In other words, she'd been gone from her apartment for several days. Yet, Ando was sure he'd sensed something in the apartment. It should have been empty, but he had definitely felt something that breathed.
"Oh, and…" said Nakayama, holding up an index finger as if he'd just remembered something important.
"What?"
"You were pretty close to her, weren't you, Dr Ando?"
"I wouldn't say close. I'd only met her twice."
"Oh. When had you last seen her?"
"The end of last month, I guess."
"That would be about three weeks before her death." Nakayama looked as if he were holding back something important. Ando fixed his older colleague with a stare that said, Come on, say it.
"She was pregnant, wasn't she?" Nakayama finally blurted out. For a moment, Ando wasn't sure who he was talking about.
"Who was?" he said.
"Mai, of course." Nakayama was keeping a close eye on Ando's confused reaction. "Didn't you know?"
Ando didn't answer.
"You don't mean to tell me you overlooked the obvious signs of a woman nearing term."
"Nearing term?"
Ando could only parrot Nakayama's words. He looked at the ceiling and tried to recall the exact lines of Mai's figure. He'd seen her once in mourning clothes and once in a bright dress. Both outfits had been tight around her waist and hips, showing off her slim contours. Her wasp waist had been one of her most attractive features. But it wasn't just that. Ando had sensed something virginal about her. And now Nakayama was trying to tell him she'd been pregnant? Nearing term, in fact?
Not that he'd ever observed her that closely. In fact, the more he thought about her the blur-rier his image of her became. His memory was hazy. But no, it couldn't be. There was no way she'd been nine months pregnant. For one thing, he'd seen her corpse with his own eyes. Her belly had been so flat it almost touched her spine.
"She couldn't have been nearing term."
"Some women are like that, though. They don't get very big even in the last trimester."
"It's not a question of degrees, though. I saw her dead body myself."
"You misunderstand," Nakayama said, waving his hands. Then he carefully arrayed the evidence before Ando.
"The uterus was greatly enlarged and she had wounds where the placenta had been torn away. The vagina was full of a brownish secretion. And inside the vagina I found tiny pieces of flesh that I believe are from an umbilical cord."
You're out of your mind, thought Ando. But he couldn't imagine an experienced forensic surgeon like Nakayama making such an elementary mistake. Those three pieces of evidence presented by Mai's body could only lead to one conclusion: she'd given birth shortly before falling into the shaft.
Assuming the delivery was fact, could it explain her movements? Perhaps, on or about the seventh, she had gone into labor, and had accordingly headed for an obstetrician. She'd given birth, spent five or six days in the hospital, and then checked out on the twelfth or thirteenth. Maybe the baby had been stillborn. In her grief, the mother had wandered about until she found herself on the roof of the building, where she'd fallen into the exhaust shaft. She'd survived for ten days. And then this morning, her body had been discovered.
It worked out, time-wise. The birth offered a plausible explanation for her disappearance. And naturally she would have kept it all secret from her mother.
But Ando didn't buy it. Leaving aside the fact that, even allowing for individual variation, she just hadn't looked pregnant, he couldn't forget the impression their first encounter had made on him.
He'd first laid eyes on Mai right in the same office. Just before he was to dissect Ryuji, she'd been escorted in by a detective who wanted her to tell Ando all she knew about the circumstances of Ryuji's death. She had tried to sit down, then lost balance and steadied herself with a hand on a nearby desk. Ando had known at a glance that she was anemic. He had picked up the faint scent of blood on her and deduced that her anemia was due to her menstruating. His conclusion had been bolstered by her embarrassed expression as she apologized: "Sorry, it's just that…" Their eyes had met, and they'd had a moment of nonverbal communication.
Please don't worry. It's just the monthly thing.
Gotcha.
Mai had informed him only with her eyes, afraid to create a fuss given the location. The memory of how she'd made her meaning clear without words was still strangely vivid for Ando. He'd performed Ryuji's autopsy on the twentieth of the previous month. That meant Mai had been menstruating less than a month before supposedly giving birth. It was impossible, of course.
Maybe I misunderstood the whole thing. All along I thought there 'd been a silent exchange, but maybe I was fooling myself. Maybe I got it all wrong. But the more he thought about it, the less he was able to believe it. He was confident he'd taken her meaning.
However, the facts revealed by the autopsy flatly contradicted his view of the matter.
Ando stood up and said, pointing to the autopsy report, "Would you mind if I made a copy of this?" He wanted to take it home and read it carefully.
Nakayama held the stack of papers out to him. "Go right ahead."
"Oh, and one more thing," Ando added. "You took a blood sample, I assume?"
"Of course."
"Can I have a little of it?"
"A little, sure."
Ando realized that he had to confirm immediately whether or not Mai had been carrying the smallpox-like virus. If he found it in her blood, it would be proof that she'd watched the video. He needed to determine if the tragedy that had befallen her had i
ts source in the video or was the result of something entirely unrelated. At the moment, all he could do was amass data, little by little. If he could illuminate the video's role in this, perhaps he'd come one step closer to solving that "mutation" riddle.
4
Soon after he'd encountered Mai's corpse, Ando was notified of the death of Kazuyuki Asakawa. As Asakawa's condition had deteriorated, he'd been transferred from Shinagawa Saisei Hospital to Shuwa University Hospital, but he'd died almost immediately. Ando had been notified about the change in Asakawa's condition, but he hadn't imagined the patient would go so quickly. According to the attending physician, the death came about as the result of an infection, and the patient had passed away peacefully, as if from old age. Asakawa had never regained consciousness after losing it in the accident.
Ando went to the Shuwa hospital and told the doctors in charge of the case to look out for something during the autopsy: a sarcoma blocking the coronary artery, a smallpox-like virus in the tumor. Ando figured these points were crucial in terms of forecasting the future. He made sure the attending physician understood the importance of the situation and then left.
As he walked back to the station, he felt renewed disappointment that Asakawa had never awoken. He'd possessed essential information, and he'd died having imparted it to no one. If only Ando knew what Asakawa knew, he'd have a much better idea what to expect. The future was maddeningly opaque now. Ando didn't know what to prepare for.
The biggest thing worrying Ando right now was whether Asakawa's death had been bad luck or a necessary outcome. The same question applied to Mai, for that matter. Both of them had wasted away and died after accidents-a traffic accident in Asakawa's case, a fall in Mai's. Their deaths seemed to have something in common. But Ando had no way of knowing if it had anything to do with their having watched the video.
As he walked, he suddenly realized that the building where Mai's body had been found was not far from the hospital he'd just left. He'd been wondering why she had chosen to climb to the roof of a shabby old office building; now was his chance to have a look and maybe find out. He needed to go soon, before any of the evidence disappeared.
He decided to go back to Nakahara Street and catch a cab. He'd be there in ten minutes.
After stopping once on the way to buy some flowers, Ando had the taxi let him off in front of a warehouse belonging to a shipping company. All he'd been told at the M.E.'s office was the name of the company and the instruction that the building was to be found to the south of the warehouse; he didn't know the name of the building itself.
Standing on the sidewalk, he stared south at a building. There was no mistaking it. It had fourteen stories, and an exposed staircase spiraled up the narrow space between its outer wall and the warehouse.
Ando moved toward the front door and then stopped. He walked around to the outside staircase. He thought he'd try to figure out how Mai had gone up. She could have taken the elevator to the fourteenth floor, gone out to the fire escape landing from there, and climbed the ladder to the roof, or she could have taken the fire escape stairs all the way up from the street to the ladder. At night, the front door was probably locked and protected by a metal shutter, so she'd have had to go in through the service entrance, which was surely guarded. And if it was too late, even the service entrance might have been locked, the guard gone. If she'd gone up at night, she must have used the fire escape.
But there was a gate at the edge of the second-floor landing, and it looked impassable. Ando climbed up to it to take a look. It was an iron gate, with a knob. He tried to turn it; it wouldn't budge. It had to be locked from the other side to prevent entry. The gate, however, was only six feet high or so, and a light and agile person could scale it without much problem. Mai had been on the track team in junior high; she'd have been able to get over it with little trouble.
Next to him on the landing was a door leading into the building. He tried turning the knob, but, unsurprisingly, this door too was locked. He wondered what time of day Mai had come here. If it had been day-time, she probably would have taken the elevator to the fourteenth floor. If it was night then she must have climbed over the gate and taken the stairs.
Ando returned to the front door of the building, entered, and went to the elevators. There were two of them, and both were waiting at the ground floor. Each floor of the building seemed to be occupied by a different business or businesses, whose names were all written, floor by floor, on a board by the elevators. But nearly half of them had been crossed out. They must have moved without the landlord being able to find new tenants to take their places. The building was quiet and felt rather abandoned.
On the fourteenth floor he stepped off the elevator into a dark hallway, where he started looking for stairs to the roof. After walking the length of the hall once, he hadn't found anything.
Mai would have had to go outside. Indeed, there was a door at the end of the hall, and Ando opened it and stepped outside. The wind off the ocean was so strong that he had to turn up the collar of his coat. It was only here, on the top floor, that he realized how close Tokyo Bay was. There was the Keihin Canal, beyond it Oi Pier, and then finally the Tokyo Harbor Tunnel, which was quickly swallowed up by the sea. From his vantage point, the two black holes of the tunnel entrance looked unnatural. He thought they looked like the nostrils of a drowned man floating face-up in the water.
From here, he also realized why the fourteenth floor had seemed so cramped despite the size of the building. The architects had made the square footage of this story about half that of the other floors, using the rest of the space for the outdoor balcony that encircled the building on all four sides. Stepping out, Ando saw that the landing for the fire escape was actually a corner of this balcony. But Mai's body had been found yet another level up.
Right next to the door there was a ladder built right into the wall, leading up. It looked to be about ten feet to the top.
Trying to imagine what Mai could have been feeling, Ando put the flowers in his mouth, grasped a rung on the ladder, and started climbing.
What made her want to come up here anyway? wondered Ando, as he pulled himself up rung by rung. It wasn't because she wanted to jump. That was clear enough from the way the building had been designed. A jump from the roof would only have landed her a dozen feet below on the balcony. To fall to the ground, she'd have had to leap from the fire escape landing on the fourteenth floor instead.
It wasn't the kind of roof you went up to for the view, either. The water-resistant paint was peeling and cracking, and it gave way unpleasantly under his feet as he walked across it. There was no railing around the perimeter, and he wasn't going near the edge even if there was a balcony not far below.
There were concrete protrusions lined up at regular intervals, and they were shaped like the tetrapods used as breakwaters on beaches. Ando had no idea what they were for, but they were just the right height for him to sit on. Instead of going to the edge of the roof, he climbed up on top of one and had a look around. It was just before five o'clock, and it was the time of year when the sun set earliest. Lights had come on already in the surrounding buildings and the shops down below. Across the canal he could see a red Keihin Express train going by on the elevated tracks. It was actually an express train; it sped past the station platform that seemed to hover in the air. He knew that platform. He'd been on it a couple of times to visit Mai's apartment. Swathed in a diffuse white light, it was relatively empty for the time of day.
Using the station as a reference point, he tried to locate Mai's apartment. He found it only about four hundred yards away as the crow flies; it was right in front of his nose, so to speak. His gaze followed a path along the shopping street, turning right on the Shore Road. Another hundred yards brought him back to the building where he now stood.
Why this roof? There were any number of other tall buildings in the neighborhood. In fact, she could have gone up to the roof of the very building she lived in. He looked around until
he found it again. Perhaps because the rooms were all low-ceilinged studio apartments, the seven-storied building was less than half the height of the one atop which Ando now stood. Still, Mai's had a flat space on the roof where one could walk around. At the same time, it was right on the shopping street, so it was surrounded by tall buildings. In particular, there was a nine-story commercial building on its west side from which the roof was easily observed. That was what distinguished the building Ando was on now. Located on a stretch of the Shore Road full of warehouses, there weren't many tall buildings in its immediate environs. No fear that someone might be looking down on you from above.
Ando descended from the concrete protrusion and went to stand between two equipment houses that jutted upward. One was for elevator machinery, while the other seemed to house a ventilation system. There was a large water tank on top of the southern machine house.
Between them was a deep groove that functioned as an exhaust shaft. Walking carefully, testing each step, Ando progressed until he stood right by it. It was cordoned off with a steel mesh, but this had holes in it. The maintenance crew must have decided to ignore the holes on the assumption that nobody but them ever came up here. Ando couldn't bring himself to step any closer. Just one foot on the lip of that dark rectangular crevice and already he felt he'd be sucked in. But he leaned forward and, with trepidation, tossed the bouquet he was holding through one of the holes in the meshing. He pressed his palms together and prayed for her eternal repose. If a technician hadn't come up here to inspect the elevator the day before, Mai would have lain undiscovered for even longer.
Night came quickly. The rooftop was veiled in darkness now, and the ocean breeze swirled in the narrow space Ando occupied, surrounded by concrete on three sides. He shivered. He ought to have come earlier in the day, when the sun would have been directly overhead. Yet, he knew he wouldn't have the courage, even in broad daylight, to peer into the shaft, this hole which had had a dead body in it until just the day before. And it wasn't just the thought of the corpse that was covering him in goosebumps. The idea of awaiting death down in that hemmed-in place filled him with terror. How many days had Mai spent down there, having twisted her ankle in the fall and unable to stand, staring at the small slice of sky just three yards above her, gradually losing hope, until she died? It must have felt like being sealed alive in a coffin floating in the air. Ando felt short of breath. The situation was too unnatural to call it an accident.
