Goth (4 page)

She shook her head. “I can’t be bothered to read such tiny handwriting.”

She seemed much more interested in me than in the notebook.

“When second year started, that girl suddenly started going to school all the time. Now I know why!”

The year before, Morino had said school was boring and rarely went. I had not known that. Her interests were unusual, but more than that, she was awkward, unable to blend in. It was only natural she had ended up the way she was.

I asked her mother when she had last seen Morino.

“Yesterday, just past noon, I think. I saw her leaving the house.”

“Did she say where she was going?”

Morino’s mother shook her head. “Will you look for her?” she asked, as I turned to leave.

I nodded. “If she’s still alive,” I added. Her mother thought I was joking and laughed.

†

As I walked back to the station, I folded back the fake leather cover, opening the notebook to the page filled with mountain names—the list of mountains the killer had been considering as places to dispose of the bodies. It was clear that mountains marked with ⌾ were mountains the killer considered ideal for that. There were only four of them, and so far all the bodies had been found on one of those four.

Of the four ⌾ mountains, three of them already had bodies—which meant he would probably take Morino to the fourth mountain, N** Mountain.

I asked the man at the station ticket window which train I should take to get there, and then I bought a ticket.

I got off the train at the station nearest the mountain, but I had to take a bus from there. There were vineyards around the base of N** Mountain, and from the bus window I saw a number of signs advertising grape picking.

The killer would have come here in a car. Where would he have left the body? He must have carried out his ritual deep in the mountain, where nobody would hear her screams. I couldn’t figure out where that might be.

The driver and I were the only people on the bus. I looked at the road map plastered on the side of the bus and talked to the driver, trying to figure out where the killer might have gone.

He said that people visiting N** Mountain from the direction Morino and I lived would almost always take the prefectural road, which crossed the east side of the mountain. There were few roads over it, and that was the only one that went in the direction we lived.

If the killer had driven Morino to N** Mountain, it seemed clear that he would have taken that road. According to the bus driver, it was the road the bus was on now.

I got off the bus at a stop near a fairly wide road that led all the way to the top of the mountain. If a car were headed down the mountain, then it would take this road.

I walked up the road. Although it was asphalt, there was no traffic.

There were several side roads branching off it into the woods on either side. I thought the killer and Morino might have taken any one of those.

The farther I walked, the steeper the road became. I could see the village through the trees, but in miniature.

I was close to the top soon enough. There was a small parking lot there and a building that appeared to be an observatory. Cars could go no farther. I hadn’t been walking long, so I wasn’t tired.

I was looking for Morino’s body.

I walked along the path between the trees, taking branching paths as I found them.

It was cloudy, and the woods were dark. Between the interlocking branches, I observed trees stretching as far as I could see. There was no wind, and cicadas provided the only sound.

N** Mountain was much too large to find a single dismembered corpse on. I eventually decided my search was futile. I returned to the bus stop, covered in sweat and exhausted.

There weren’t a lot of homes along the road the bus took, but there were a few. There had been one on the road toward the top, and I had asked the old man in the garden if any cars had gone up that road the day before. But he shook his head. He even called his family and repeated my question, but none of them had seen a car.

What had made Morino send that message? Had the killer forcibly taken her with him? She wasn’t stupid and wouldn’t be tricked easily.

Was I overthinking things? Had she not been captured at all?

I sat down next to the bus stop and read the notebook again. I was not skilled enough at profiling to glean anything about the killer from the descriptions of the murders.

My sweat dripped onto the pages, and the ink smeared, making bits of it unreadable. Apparently, the killer had been using a water-based ink.

Where had the killer written in this notebook? At home, after he returned from the killings? I doubted he’d written it during the crime. He had written it from his memory, colored by his imagination.

The bus arrived, and I stood up. Looking at my watch, I saw that it was after three. I was leaving the mountain.

iv

The coffee shop Morino always went to was in the middle of the arcade near the station. She had given me directions earlier, but I had never actually been there.

As she had said, the lighting was low, wrapping me in comfortable darkness. Quiet music was playing, melting into the air without drawing attention to itself.

I sat down at the counter.

There was a sign for the bathrooms in back. I glanced at the floor in front of them, where Morino had found the notebook.

There was only one other customer: a young woman in a suit. She was by the windows, reading a magazine as she sipped her coffee.

The shop master came to take my order, and I asked, “Does that woman come here a lot?”

He nodded, and then he frowned, wondering what of it.

“Not important. First, do you mind if I shake your hand?”

“Shake my … ? Why?”

“To mark the occasion.”

The shop master had a very sincere face. He wasn’t young, nor was he old enough to be called middle-aged. He had pale skin and wore a plain black T-shirt, the kind sold anywhere. His hair was neatly buzzed.

At first, he seemed to think I was just a strange customer—probably because I was staring too much.

He brought my coffee quickly.

“I’m friends with a girl named Morino. Do you know her?”

“She’s a regular.”

I asked if she was still alive.

He stopped moving.

He slowly put down the cup that had been in his hand, and then he turned to face me. His eyes were clouded, like two black holes bereft of light.

I thought the odds of this man being the killer were significantly higher than those of the other customers from that evening—and now I knew I had been right.

“What do you mean?” he asked, playing dumb.

I held out the notebook. When he saw it, he smiled, flashing dull white canines.

“Morino found this the other day.”

He took the notebook and flipped through it.

“I’m impressed that you knew it was mine.”

“At least half of it was nothing more than a gamble.” I explained how I had gone to N** Mountain to look for her body and what line of thought had brought me here.

†

What had the killer been thinking?

I’d begun by imagining the killer after he’d dropped the notebook.

Why had he written the notebook? To help him remember? To keep a record? I was sure he had read it over and over and that he attached great value to it, so he must’ve noticed that the notebook was missing.

Where had he kept the notebook? Either in his pocket or in his bag. Considering he had dropped it, probably in his pocket. Maybe he had washed his hands in the bathroom and dropped the notebook as he pulled out his handkerchief.

So when had he noticed it was missing? Ten minutes later? A few hours after? I was sure he had noticed it before the day was out.

He would have tried to figure out when he had last read it, the last time he was sure he had it. Then he would have retraced his steps, figuring out where he was most likely to have dropped it.

And I was willing to bet he had narrowed it down pretty well—mostly because I imagined he looked at it quite often. Every time he felt his thoughts growing dark, he would calm himself by reading the notebook. And if he read it that often, he would be able to pinpoint a narrow range of places and times he could have dropped it.

Then the killer must have looked for it, staring at the ground trying to find it.

But he would not have found it there. So the killer must have thought that someone picked it up. If someone were to read the book, he was finished—the police would search for the third victim and find the body. That wasn’t a problem in itself; the problem came if they managed to lift his prints from the notebook or match his handwriting.

If this had happened to me, what would I think? I certainly wouldn’t kill a fourth victim. The police might be investigating nearby. After all, the notebook had been dropped someplace the killer went on a daily basis. The police would assume he lived nearby. He couldn’t take that risk.

But a few days had passed, and Mizuguchi Nanami’s body still had not been found—because Morino and I had not turned over the notebook to the police.

The killer had been watching the news every night, waiting for them to find her body. He would not kill again until he was sure it was safe … but Morino had gone missing.

Discounting the possibility that Morino’s disappearance was just some sort of prank, I tried to figure out why the killer would act. If I were the killer, why would I choose a fourth victim?

* I couldn’t bear to wait any longer.

* I got overconfident, sure I wouldn’t be caught, and underestimated the police.

* I didn’t care if I got caught.

* I thought that nobody had picked up the notebook, that nobody had read it.

* I thought that whoever picked it up had not believed it.

Or perhaps he had actually not noticed that he’d lost the notebook. These were all possibilities … but I decided to bet on another theory. I believed the killer had thought as follows:

*
Someone picked up the notebook but was unable to read it. That’s why they haven’t given it to the police and Mizuguchi Nanami’s body has not been found.

The shop master listened to all this, nodding with interest. “So why did you think it was me?”

I took the notebook back and opened it. I showed him where my sweat had smudged the writing, leaving it illegible. “You knew what kind of ink you’d used, and you knew that if it got wet, nobody could read it. I theorized that the killer had assumed he’d dropped it outside, not in the shop. Morino told me it was raining hard when she found the notebook; it seemed likely the killer knew he had dropped it while it was raining.”

It was only natural that the killer would assume that if the notebook had been picked up in the shop, it would have been given to the police. But there were no reports of Mizuguchi Nanami’s body being found. “So the killer must have concluded that he’d dropped it outside in the rain, I thought. In that case, the notebook would be wet, and it would be unreadable.”

Morino had said the only person who had gone out in the rain was the shop master.

It was a tightrope walk based on pure speculation—but when I finished it, the shop master grinned.

“I did think I’d dropped it in the rain,” he admitted. “Morino’s upstairs.”

The second and third floors of the shop were the man’s home.

The shop master carefully placed the notebook back in his pocket. Then he turned his back to me, moved toward the entrance, and opened the door.

The clouds from earlier had cleared away, and the sun was beating down outside. It looked like pure white light to my eyes, which were now accustomed to the darkness inside the shop.

The man left the shop and crossed the road, vanishing into the light.

The regular customer stood up, coming to the register to pay her bill. She looked around the shop and asked me where the shop master had gone, but I merely shook my head.

†

The stairs were outside the building, and to get to the second floor, I had to leave the shop.

Morino was tied up on the third floor. She was still dressed like Mizuguchi Nanami, and she was lying on the floor with a rope tied around her arms and legs. She appeared otherwise unharmed.

When she saw me, Morino’s eyes narrowed. That was how she smiled. She was gagged with a towel and thus unable to speak.

When I undid the gag, she sighed.

“The shop master pretended he was hurt, and he asked me to help carry something. Before I knew it …”

Getting the ropes off of her looked difficult. I left her there and looked around the room. Judging from the state of the place, the master lived alone.

There was white paper on the desk, with a number of tiny crosses drawn on it.

I found a set of knives on the shelf. It was easy to guess that these had been used to kill his victims—he had mentioned them often in the notebook.

Morino called out, angry with me for not untying her.

I selected one of the knives, using it to cut the ropes.

“We’d better run—he’ll find us.”

“No, he won’t.”

He would never come back. I was sure of it. Yes, there was a slight possibility that he might come back to kill the two of us—but for some reason, I knew he wouldn’t.

When we had been talking at the shop counter, I’d felt as if the two of us had a lot in common.

He’d left the shop quietly precisely because he knew that I would never tell anyone.

Morino looked surprised that I seemed so sure the killer wasn’t coming back. She stood up, adjusting her clothes.

“I managed to send you a message, but he noticed.”

Her phone had been laid on the desk and switched off. Mizuguchi Nanami’s bag was there too; after all, Morino had been carrying it around. Had the killer not noticed that the girl about to become his fourth victim had the same bag as his third victim? Or had he targeted her because it was the same bag?

Morino had been tied up for a full day, so she staggered a little as she headed for the stairs.