The Gate of Sorrows (63 page)

“Where did you get that?” Seigo asked.

“From someone who says she lives in the neighborhood. She’s been tweeting a lot of details.”

“All right, that’s enough.” He held up a hand. “Concerning the murder of Ayuko Yamashina—”

Everyone fell silent. This was what they’d been waiting for.

“That had nothing to do with the Serial Amputator either. The statement sent by the killer was a hoax.”

Someone sitting near Kotaro murmured, “I knew it.”

“This is all I’m at liberty to say at the moment. I apologize.” He dipped his head. Kotaro fought the urge to close his right eye, and somehow won out.
This isn’t the time or place. I might scream.

“We’re forming another special team,” Seigo continued. “Let’s take a fresh look at all five cases, especially the two unsolved ones. We’ll gather the latest information and organize everything chronologically from the beginning. I’d like one volunteer from each island. Let’s dredge the textboards too. If you want to get in on that, let me know.”

The meeting broke up. Someone tugged on Kotaro’s sleeve. It was Makoto.

“They probably wanted to take the body all the way to Tomakomai.” He was talking about the Akita case. He had a pained expression, almost as though he had a toothache. “But it was too far, and they didn’t make it. They must’ve run out of emotional and physical energy. They would’ve taken the body up north in a car, which would’ve been horribly stressful.”

As it happened, their choice of Akita to discard the body ended up complicating the investigation even more than if they’d gone as far as Hokkaido. Investigations across jurisdictional boundaries were never a strong point for Japan’s police forces, and just taking the body out of Tokyo would’ve made it much harder for local law enforcement to get traction.

“It’s almost like you feel sorry for them,” Kotaro said.

“Not almost. I
do
feel sorry for them. Family strife is something I know firsthand. So will you be dredging?”

“Yeah, I’ll volunteer.”

“Good luck, then.”

Kotaro wondered what kind of strife Makoto meant. Of course, he was aware that when it came to murder, the killer and victim usually knew each other. They were almost always relatives, friends, or coworkers. Still, how could he feel sorry for them? No way should a mother who killed her daughter, a sister who killed her sister and mutilated the body, be allowed to plead for leniency because the victim was driving them crazy. Seigo was right. The dead can’t speak for themselves.

But that afternoon, more information came to light that gave Kotaro second thoughts.

The break in the Tomakomai case was one of the reasons mother and daughter had come forward. They’d begun to worry that it would be only a matter of time before their number came up. The unexpected resolution of the case hung heavy on their minds. But there was another reason, a more significant reason, for their confession.

The dead daughter’s ghost was appearing to the mother, night after night. The daughter had tried to convince her it was just a bad dream, but eventually the mother reached the limits of her sanity.

Kotaro understood. He knew the fear and terror of seeing something that was not of this world.

In tears, the mother told her daughter she’d have to confess or commit suicide. This was why the pair had turned themselves in at eight in the evening. The weeping mother had told her daughter she couldn’t spend another night in the house. If she didn’t kill herself, her dead daughter would do it for her.

The daughter, who was also at the end of her rope, brought her mother by the hand to the nearest police box. The killers were unmasked not by the authorities, not by the media or citizens of the web, but by the victim herself.

lonelylonelylonelylonelylonelylonelylonely

In his mind’s eye, Kotaro saw the apparition in white that he’d encountered in the tea caddy building. The ghost that stood by her mother’s bed must have whispered something similar.
Lonely lonely lonely lonely.

The two women had strangled the eldest daughter after she’d taken a sedative and was sound asleep. They had hidden the body in the house at first, wrapped in plastic sheeting, but after it began to decay, they knew they had to get rid it. As they were stripping the body of anything that would betray its identity, the daughter remembered the Tomakomai murder. If that case had been solved quickly, things would have played out differently. Perhaps the other murders would’ve drawn hardly any attention. Perhaps Ayuko would even be alive now.

During the evening break, Kotaro checked his phone. There was a mail from Shigenori.

I’m heading to the scene of the crime in Mishima.

It was past ten when he finally got home. Kazumi was just out of the evening bath. As soon as she saw him, she exploded. “Where’ve you been? Mika was here tonight. She wanted to apologize for putting you out. She even brought a cake.”

“Is she all right?”

“Yeah. Well, she still has a Band-Aid on her forehead.”

Kotaro went to his room and sent Mika a text. She answered instantly.

Welcome home. Put your head out the window.

He followed instructions. Across the street, the second-floor window of the Sonoi house opened. Mika put her head through the gap in the curtains and waved. She was still wearing her team jersey. Kotaro waved back. She didn’t seem to have the Band-Aid now.

This time he wasn’t tempted; he was worried. He closed his right eye.

Nothing much changed. Mika seemed slightly blurred, as if she were surrounded by a thin mist. Her word body hadn’t had time to coalesce.

She disappeared behind the curtains, catching them in the sliding glass window as she closed it. She opened it again and pulled the curtains inside.

A black object the size of a baby’s head silently scurried up the side of the house and disappeared inside before she shut the window.

Kotaro started with shock. For a moment he thought he was seeing something real—maybe a large rat.

No—it was words, and they were not Mika’s. They were pursuing her, or at least trailing after her. And they were clearly malevolent. In fact, the object had moved like a huge spider. It had had six legs—no, maybe eight. Or ten?

He hurried downstairs, dashed outside in his bare feet, and crossed the street to the Sonoi house. The creature had gone into Mika’s room, yet she wouldn’t even know it.

“Galla!” He shouted out of fear before clapping a hand over his mouth. A silver thread crossed his left field of vision.

When you seek me, I am here.

He held his breath. He kept the Eye trained on Mika’s window.

“I didn’t just imagine that, did I?”

There was no answer.

“Come on Galla, help me out. What should I do? I can’t let that thing hang out in Mika’s room. How do I get rid of it?” The soles of his feet were getting cold.

She does not know.

“So what should I do?”

Ask her.
That is what words are for.

The silver thread disappeared.

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.”