“And I thought Ontario was bad.”
“It’s bad too. Personally, Vancouver was the most comfortable place I’ve lived. Never too hot, never too humid.”
“Ever think of going back?”
“Nah, all of my family is here. What about you, ever thought of relocating?”
“We’ve spent a bit of time in Warsaw where my wife’s family lives, but not a ton. INTERPOL is putting my family up in France while this investigation is ongoing. I’d consider moving though. I have no other family and all of my wife’s family is in Poland.”
Arata nodded. “It sounds like there isn’t much to hold you in one place then.”
“Not much… jobs and school for the kids. But they love Poland, so who knows… maybe one day.”
“I figure we’ll just try to travel as much as we can. It’s not cheap though, especially for us to go outside of Asia. But it’s always worth it.”
We talked as we worked. Eddie and Najat talked as they worked, Najat examining the bones and Eddie, sitting on a rock just a few feet from the grave, typing away on his computer. And the other detectives, they talked as they smoked a little ways away from us. It helped to pass the time and before we knew it, it was time to make the hot, sticky, and lengthy journey back downhill.
It seemed longer this time, much longer, as we dragged our already drained bodies down the slope. Going up was difficult, but going down while tired was worse in my opinion. It was a matter of constantly fighting against gravity, an evil force which seemed to want me to topple forward and roll to the bottom.
Although that would have made for a faster route.
It was getting dark by the time we made it back to the detachment. Najat had done her examinations of the bones at the sites and didn’t need to go to the hospital for anything further. The coroner had been asked to send us all of his information so that we could try to determine for certain if a shovel could have caused the injuries we observed. It had to be, as far as I was concerned. Nothing else made sense in terms of a readily accessible weapon that Crawford would have had with him.
I prepared to say my goodbyes to Arata and the detectives and to thank them for their time only to find that we were now heading out for food and drinks.
“It’s customary,” Arata said. “After a day of work, you often have to go drinking with your boss.”
“Have to?”
“If you want to keep working.” Arata followed it with a half-hearted laugh. So he was only partially joking.
“Well then, I guess I can’t refuse. Where are we heading to?”
“There’s a karaoke place right by the station, it’s the favourite amongst the detectives. Not much else we can do tonight anyway.”
The next thing I knew I was sitting in a small room eating sushi and drinking sake while Watanabe-san and Satō-san belted out Michael Jackson songs. The accents made the songs and I couldn’t believe that the quiet, reserved detectives were letting loose so quickly.
When it came to my turn I went for some Elvis, a little Blue Suede Shoes to start, followed by the absolute must sing at any karaoke party: Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody. The room was set up with four wireless microphones and before I really knew what was happening Eddie and Najat had paired up on one, Arata had his own, and the detectives had also paired up. Every note was hit off key or out of time but it didn’t matter. And with a little more sake and a couple of beers down, we didn’t care so much.
The pinnacle of the night came when Watanabe-san and Satō-san convinced Eddie, Najat and I to try out a Japanese pop song. The lyrics were in Japanese, of course, but written with English letters so it gave us a slight chance to pull the song off. Judging by their laughter, however, we failed miserably.
We carried on past midnight before calling it quits. Arata and the detectives went their way and we stumbled toward the Station Hotel. I unlocked the door to my room, locked it behind me and flopped onto the bed, ready to sleep.
My phone rang.
“Honestly, Crawford?”
“It couldn’t be all fun and games tonight, Lincoln. You have to do a little work.”
“I’ve been working all day cleaning up your mess, so don’t try to lecture me.” I tried hard to keep my words clear, my thoughts sober. It wasn’t easy.
“I see you found both Megumi and Hidenori. A shame about Hidenori, but he left me no choice. He was planning to die that night anyway, just not at someone else’s hand.”
“Wasn’t part of the plan, was he?”
“No, unfortunately, he wasn’t. That was the only time I’ve been worried that I might be caught. But, in the end, it changed nothing. His death was a necessity.”
“Cold way of looking at it, Crawford.”
He laughed. “You forgot that you are talking to a quote-unquote serial killer.”
“No quotes needed, that’s what you are.”
He paused for a moment. “I guess you’re right, Lincoln. By all definitions I am a serial killer. However, the reasons behind my actions are entirely noble.”
“That’s something you’ll have to explain. I can’t wrap my head around how killing random people is noble.”
“None of them were random. And are you sure you want to discuss this now? Will you even remember it in the morning?”
It was my turn to laugh. “I’m quite fine, thank you. So what noble cause are you killing for? World peace, an end to hunger, perfect happiness for everyone on Earth?”
“Precisely.”
I stopped for a moment. There was no way he was being serious. He sounded serious, but that had to be the alcohol talking.
“Well then, why would I want to stop you?”
“You don’t have a choice. To begin with, it’s your job. More importantly, it’s the role you have to play.”
“I don’t buy into the idea of fate. My role is mine to choose.”
“Think whatever you wish, Lincoln. It doesn’t negate the truth. You will follow your path whether you believe in it or not. It isn’t for you to decide.”
“So you’re telling me I don’t make any decisions, all of this is just happening the way it is supposed to?”
“Exactly.”
“So how does it end? If you say anything other than with you dead or in custody, then you’re a liar.”
I heard him take a deep breath. “I will be dead when this is all over. It’s a shame really, I won’t get to see the changes I helped to usher in. Not from here anyway.”
“Crawford, you believe what you want to believe, but in every religion I’ve ever heard of, there’s a special place for people like you. Whether it’s Hell or Purgatory or Tartarus, it definitely doesn’t involve a set of wings and a wonderful view.”
“Such close-mindedness, Lincoln. I shouldn’t have expected any differently. If your own wife can’t open your eyes, how should I expect myself to be able to?”
“I may not know all the answers, Crawford, but my mind is far from closed. But if you’re going to try to tell me that this is all God’s will, that He wants you to murder a fuck-ton of people, I’m going to have to call you bat-shit-crazy. Then again, anyone who murders someone, wraps them in a shroud and carves an upside-down cross into their forehead should probably be fitted for a strait jacket.”
“Yet you aren’t closed-minded. There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy. Or is it just the sake and beer talking?”
“But come! Here, as before, never, so help you mercy.”
“Ah, yes. I forgot you were a fan of the bard.”
“You know so much about me, apparently, yet I feel I know so little about you.”
I was lying on the hotel bed, my shoes long ago kicked off, looking up at the ceiling. The awkwardness of the phone call, albeit a very
different awkwardness, paired with the way I was lying made me think of those late-night, teenaged calls to a person you were crushing on.
“What do you want to know?”
“You were a pilot, highly respected. What brought all of this on?”
“You must have noticed, Lincoln. Or was it perhaps too obvious?”
I shook my head, not that he could see it. “I don’t know what you mean. Clearly I missed something.”
“When did this all start? You must have seen my file, seen what had happened not long before.”
The moment he said it, I knew exactly what he was talking about. I was surprised I hadn’t noticed it before.
“The crash. Not long after the plane you were flying crashed on landing. You were lucky to have survived. Yet you walked away with barely a scratch.”
“My life flashed before my eyes. I saw the end but there was something telling me it wasn’t time yet. What I saw next changed me, it gave me new purpose. It gave me a reason not to die in that cockpit.”
“And what did you see?”
“That will have to be a conversation for another day, Lincoln.”
I was starting to get a little bored. “Where’s the fun in that?”
“All in good time.”
“Fine. Whatever. Maybe you’ll answer a different question,” I said.
“Depends on the question.”
“You’ve killed sixty-five people. Is this going to end at a certain number, or just go until you die? I mean, you already said this ends with your death.”
“I guess there’s no harm in telling you, Lincoln. I have two more people I need to kill. But that won’t be the end. After that, there will be one more thing I need to do.”
That worried me. All I could think was that he had something planned for the end, some sort of grand finale. “And what’s the one last thing?”
“I won’t be telling you that. If your fate really is to stop me, you’ll figure it out.”
“Because what you’re doing has to be done. Because your fate is the true fate.”
“It’s all one fate, we’re all intertwined. But there is a path I’m on, and I do believe that in the end we’ll see that it was the true path.”
“So if I stop you, you’ll admit that you were wrong? Somehow I don’t buy that.”
“There’s no right or wrong in this, Lincoln. If you stop me, it was the way it was meant to happen, but every action I have taken will still have been the necessary action.”
“How long have you spent telling yourself all of this bullshit? How long did it take to convince yourself of all this?”
He sighed a loud, almost forced sigh. “I should have known that you would never understand. Of course, I don’t need you to. Your role is to stop me, if you can. If you can’t, then there can be no doubts.”
Interesting. “You have your own doubts about this. Maybe it’s not God’s work that you’re doing, maybe you’re just another nut. So you lure me into this to see if you can be stopped. If you can’t be, you were right all along. But if I can…”
“It’s… it’s not so cut and dry, Lincoln. You can’t simply assume that I’m wrong because I got caught. That could be a part of the plan as well.”
“I don’t think you’re as sure about this as you want me to believe. If it was all going to happen as it was supposed to, it didn’t matter at all if I was involved. You would have gone on your merry way killing people and then plan your big ending. So why bring me into it? Because you’re insecure about this, you think you know what your role is, but you doubt it as well. Like Thomas, you won’t believe it until you’ve seen it. You aren’t testing your own abilities, you’re testing God.”
I could hear him breathing heavily. He was getting annoyed with me, which meant I was doing well. “We can’t all be as relaxed as you, visiting castles and drunkenly belting out Bohemian Rhapsody and, what was it, a J-Pop song?”
There was no way. Crawford had to still be back in France. But what if he wasn’t, what if there was a way for him to travel without being seen or caught?
“Can’t turn down drinking with your colleagues here. We all have to take one for the team eventually. I hope you got some nice pictures of the castle, although now that I think about it was your camera even pointing the right way?”
I got up off of the bed and went out into the hall. Eddie’s room was two doors down. When I got close I could hear two voices inside – one male, one female – talking and laughing. I hated to disturb them (and really hoped that they were only talking) but I had to. I put the phone against my chest to block the noise then knocked on Eddie’s door.
Crawford was still talking. If he was planning on making me feel guilty for not working every minute of the day it wasn’t going to happen.
“We all need to blow some steam off every once in a while, Crawford. And after spending the entire day hiking up mountain trails and through dense forests in ridiculously hot and humid weather to find the bodies of people you murdered to fulfill your sick little fantasies, I think a few drinks were in order. Maybe you should hit up a bar or a pachinko parlour instead of following me around all day.”
Eddie opened the door; I put a finger up to silence him.
“Call Arata, get him to put it out across the country. Crawford is in Japan.”
Eddie nodded and went back into his room. He hadn’t opened the door very far, maybe I had interrupted something.
“I’ve played pachinko before, Lincoln. Never won anything. I’d rather stick to stalking and sick little fantasies.”
“Hey, man, to each their own.”
“I’m getting tired of this, Lincoln. I need to go anyway, time to head back to France. I’m sure I’ll see you there.”
He didn’t give me the chance to respond, just hung up the second he was done talking. I put my phone away and waited for Eddie. It was a few minutes before the door opened again, but this time he opened it all the way and let me in.
Najat was sitting at a small table where a deck of cards was spread out. I couldn’t tell what they had been playing but I was sure they’d been having more fun than I had just had.
Eddie’s computer was open on the bed. I picked it up and brought it over to the table then sat down across from Najat. He already had a word processor open so I just opened a new page and started typing. Everything Crawford and I had said, to the best of my recollection, I typed into that page while Eddie used his best Japanese to get through to whomever he was speaking with.
“Okay, here,” Eddie said a few minutes later, handing me the phone. “Got him.”
“Arata? It’s Lincoln.”
“Figured you’d be asleep by now… I know I was.”
“Sorry. Crawford just called me. He knew we were at karaoke, even knew what songs we sang. He’s in Japan. We need to get every officer in the country aware of who he is and what he looks like. Can you do that?”
He took a second to answer. It wasn’t a small request and there were channels it had to go through.
“Yeah, I can do that. Any idea where he is now?”
“He knew we sang that J-Pop song, so he couldn’t have left Kitakyushu before that. Doesn’t give him much time to go anywhere, an hour or so at the most.”
“All right. I’ll get on it, leave it with me.”
“Thanks,” I said.
“Not a problem. Still flying out in the morning?”
“Yeah, we need to. Crawford said he’d see us back in France. If you guys can’t find him here, then we’ll have to find him there.”
“Okay. I’ll keep you posted if we find anything.”
“Thanks, and sorry for waking you. You probably won’t be getting any sleep tonight, will you?”
“I doubt it. But you know how good a case
like this is for the career. Should help me get into homicide down the road. And if it does, it’ll be worth a little lost sleep.”
“Well, then I guess I don’t have to feel too guilty.”
“Nah, it’s good, Lincoln. Thanks.”
“Happy to help.”
I hung up the phone and sat down at the table with Eddie and Najat. They had resumed their card game while I talked with Arata and I had interrupted it once more.
“Eddie, I need you to figure out how he’s following us. I’ve done counter-surveillance training, if he was actually stalking us, I’d like to think I’d know. So I don’t think he’s following us on foot or in vehicles. He’s tracking us somehow.”
Eddie only nodded. I could tell he was already lost in thought. Their card game was going to have to wait.
Chapter Twelve
The morning brought an early shinkansen ride to Fukuoka followed by a flight back to Tokyo. The shinkansen, or bullet train as we know it, was an awesome ride. Life flew by outside the windows as we tore down the tracks past small towns, along the coast and through the mountains. The transportation system in Japan was incredible, far better than anything North America had. The trains and buses ran like clockwork and covered the majority of the country allowing for ease of transit anywhere you wanted to go. There were still a lot of cars, but it seemed like it would be much easier to live life car-free here than it would have been back home.
I was quite impressed when my phone rang on the train, even at a blistering two-hundred-and-sixty kilometres an hour I still had a solid signal.
And my call display worked as well. It was Kat, someone I hadn’t talked to enough lately. I had been sending e-mails mainly because anytime I had the spare time to call her, it would’ve been the middle of the night for her.
“Hey, honey. How are things on your end?”
“Good. We got in late this afternoon and just finished some basic unpacking.”
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