The Gate of Sorrows (7 page)

“She would’ve done that only if Mika went to her for help.”

“Which means her mother knows about this site too.”

“Not necessarily. The girls posting here have got to be treating her pretty badly in class and at practice. Something’s sure to be going on. Mika would know how they feel, but we don’t know if she told her mother or your sister.”

Kenji set his empty glass on the table and shut down the laptop. The clock on the wall read 7:45.

“Don’t do anything for the time being,” Kenji said. “There’s nothing you can do anyway.” He closed the laptop and sighed as he packed it away. “At least the school is taking action. I’d tell her grandmother not to worry. Tell her parents too.”

“Her mother’s divorced. It’s just her and Mika.”

Kenji looked pained. “I see. Well, what’s the mother like? Would this kind of thing bother her?”

“Takako Sonoi? No, she’s not the type. She has bigger stones than the average guy. She’s good at what she does, I hear. Work keeps her busy.”

“So why don’t you tell her about your work? Tell her Kumar can help. We don’t have an official channel for this kind of thing, but we consult for people who’re having problems with unofficial school sites.”

“Maybe that’d just complicate things.”

“Schools protect themselves in cases like this. You can’t just assume they’ll be on Mika’s side. What her mother needs is someone who can give her useful advice, kind of like a lawyer.”

Kenji hoisted his bag onto his shoulder. “Listen, Kotaro. Don’t try to handle this yourself. Neither of us has enough experience. Okay?”

“Sure, okay.”

Walking back to work, Kotaro felt a great weight on his shoulders.

Fresh news on the murder in Mishima was waiting when he got back to his desk. Now he knew why the first reports hadn’t mentioned the victim’s gender. The corpse, which was missing the third toe of the right foot, was that of a transsexual woman. The victim had undergone breast augmentation surgery.

“Wouldn’t you like to take a short walk?”

Toshiko bent down to close the little dust window that faced the balcony. This floor-level fixture was a sign of how old the apartment was. The south-facing balcony was flooded with sunlight. Newly hung laundry swayed gently in the breeze.

“It’s too cold.”

Shigenori Tsuzuki sat on the sofa in front of the television, clipping his toenails. A sheet of newspaper spread over the faux wood floor caught the clippings. The breeze that blew in when Toshiko opened the dust window had caught the paper and scattered some of the fresh clippings.

“Well, it’s December. Of course it’s cold. But the weather’s so nice today.” Toshiko looked up into the cobalt-blue winter sky and squinted against the sunlight.

The five-story apartment building had stood for thirty years in this quiet corner of Shinjuku’s Wakaba district. The Tsuzukis’ apartment, on the southeast corner of the third floor, looked out over an elementary school and a small park. The couple had always loved the southern exposure and fresh breezes.

“The doctor said you ought to be walking as long as it doesn’t tire you. It’s good for the circulation in your legs.”

“Not today.” Shigenori pushed his reading glasses up the bridge of his nose.

“Is it bothering you much?”

“It hurts even to stand and brush my teeth.”

Toshiko sighed. “Then you’d better not lean forward like that to trim your toenails. I can do it for you.”

Yeah, that would be great,
Shigenori thought.
Just like a doddering old basket case. I’m only sixty-three.

“Well, I’m going shopping. Are you sure you wouldn’t like me to do that for you first?”

“I’ll do it myself.”

“What would you like for lunch?”

“Anything.”

“What about dinner?”

“No special requests.”

“Requests that aren’t special are the hardest to deal with,” muttered Toshiko. Shigenori heard her putting her arms into her coat sleeves, then the front door opening and closing behind her.

The two-hour news shows every morning at eight mostly covered celebrity scandals. It was almost ten now, but the program coming up would be similar, with a different name and a different panel of experts. Still, there might be some new developments in the case. Shigenori left the television on.

The first reports of a corpse dumped in the woods in Mishima had aired in the early afternoon the day before. By late evening, the victim was confirmed to be a transsexual female. She had had her breasts augmented. One toe from the right foot had been severed. Those were the only details. The morning paper had nothing to add, but the eight o’clock news had the victim’s identity, adding that she’d been strangled, likely with a belt. The third toe of the right foot had been severed after death with a sharp implement, probably shears.

The deceased was now officially a victim. Not only that, she was the “third” victim.

Every day was Sunday for Shigenori, and he devoured the morning and evening papers front to back. He’d been following the murders since the one on June 1 in Tomakomai, Hokkaido. He was thoroughly familiar with the second murder, in Akita on September 22; after the murder, he’d started a scrapbook. He knew instinctively that the two killings were related, and that there would be more.

His instincts had proven correct, though this hadn’t given him any satisfaction. The first two killings had been buried in the back pages of the newspapers. Now the same papers, and the news shows that specialized in celebrity love affairs and political scandals, had given themselves over totally to the story, hooting about serial psycho killers. Shigenori was appalled.

The latest victim was Masami Tono, thirty-five. She’d owned a small bar near Hamamatsu Station called Misty. Masami was popular with her customers, who called her Mama. Regulars knew about her transition—the cosmetic surgery and female hormone replacement therapy she was undergoing. Masami also belonged to a group that advised young people coping with gender dysphoria.

A local news team sought out a handful of regulars at Misty. All of them reacted to the news of Mama Masami’s death with shock and sadness. One young woman broke down as she spoke. “She was a wonderful person.” “Always so cheerful and full of energy.” “She could drink you under the table, and her cooking was amazing.” “Mama wasn’t the kind of person anyone would want to hurt …”

The interviews were off-camera, but after years of sizing people up for a living, Shigenori could tell that the emotions were genuine. Masami Tono had been surrounded by people who loved and needed her. She was part of their lives. She hadn’t been in a relationship when she died, but she’d often said she was “dreaming of finding the right person.”

She had last been seen outside Misty on December 14, just past 1 a.m., as she waved goodbye to the last two customers of the evening. A college student helped out at the bar, but only until ten. Every night, Masami closed up the bar alone and drove home. The old rented house where she lived with a pair of cats was about ten minutes away.

From then until the next morning at just past ten, when her body was found in a storage trunk in the woods outside Mishima, her movements were unknown. The prefectural police had assembled a special investigation unit and were searching her house and bar. She was probably killed in one of these locations, or in her beloved yellow Volkswagen, her pride and joy. She’d always referred to it as her “yellow submarine,” and told everyone it was her good luck charm. Now it was missing.

Masami was a native of Mishima. Her parents still lived there. She’d moved to Tokyo after graduating from the local high school, but returned to Shizuoka just before her thirtieth birthday to open Misty. Her decision to live and work in her home prefecture, but not her hometown, seemed connected to a lingering conflict with her parents, who refused to have anything to do with the media. When a reporter leaned on the intercom call button at their front door, her father snapped in a gravelly voice, “We’ve had nothing to do with Masayoshi for a long time.” That was his first and last comment on the murder of his child.

Did the killer who stuffed Masami’s body into a trunk know about this family conflict? Shigenori suspected he did. That would be why the body was dumped in Mishima. Masami was born and raised there; she’d probably left because she had no choice. When her parents cut her off, she’d had no home to return to. Stuffing her corpse in a trunk and dumping it in the forest near her old home like a load of worn-out clothes seemed an act of spiteful mockery.

As he put the clipper away and balled up the newspaper, Shigenori shook his head. He was thinking too much again. Reading too much into things. It was a habit he’d had as a professional, and his bosses and colleagues had often warned him about it.

Shigenori had been a cop all his working life. Born in Tokyo’s old town, he’d joined the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department straight out of high school. After more than twenty years in uniform, patrolling neighborhoods out of one of Tokyo’s hundreds of police boxes, he’d became a detective at the Osaki Police Station in Shinagawa.

That was the start of a new period in his life, years of almost pure detective work, transferring every few years from one station to another. Just before his fiftieth birthday he was transferred to Section One of the Criminal Investigation Division at MPD headquarters. It was another step up, but not because of his performance as a detective. The section chief knew Shigenori as a man who never lost his cool, even in the tensest situations. He also had a genius for dealing with people and looking after young patrol officers, who sometimes struggled with the pressures and regimentation of police work.

With the new century, Tokyo’s violent crime rate started falling, yet this only made people more sensitive to perceived threats to their safety. The face of violent crime—shameless, cruel, and callous, often senseless and absurd—stoked the public’s worst fears. The general atmosphere of media-stoked hysteria made investigating such crimes even more trying for law enforcement and tended to put the detectives on edge about everything. To Shigenori, the younger men on the force seemed to need more psychological support than had the men of his own generation. This was why the section chief had reached out to him. His job was to be a mentor and role model.

Shigenori was assigned to Division One, Section Three, Squad Two. Everyone called it the Edano Squad, after its leader. He expected to be rotated to another squad in due course, but he never dreamed that, in the end, he would be the one to request the transfer.

In his sixth year on the Edano Squad, Shigenori started noticing occasional tingling and numbness in his legs. At first it only happened when the seasons changed or when there was a marked difference between the day’s high and low temperatures. But over time it became a constant problem. Eventually the tingling became a stabbing pain in the back of his left thigh that made it hard to walk.

Shigenori’s annual police physical didn’t cover orthopedic problems. He hated hospitals anyway, and didn’t have time to fool with doctors. He chalked his symptoms up to advancing age. Many of his fellow detectives were suffering from herniated disks. Lower back and knee pain were part of life for men who spent hours on their feet. There wasn’t a man on the force who wasn’t coping with, or more often ignoring, some kind of physical complaint. Shigenori visited a massage therapist whenever he could. Otherwise he made do by plastering his legs with medicated patches.

Gradually the pain increased to the point where massages and patches didn’t help. When winter’s cold deepened toward the end of each December, Shigenori could barely climb out of bed in the morning. Now the pain was constant, not only when he walked, but even while standing.

It was hard enough for Toshiko to watch her husband cover his legs with medicated patches every day. Eventually she’d had enough. She made an appointment with a nearby hospital. When the day came, she’d almost had to drag him to the examination.

The verdict: a minor disk herniation. Shigenori was treated with a nerve block and had to spend a night in the hospital. Afterward the numbness remained but the pain was gone, almost miraculously. He passed the holidays in an upbeat mood, but by early spring the pain was back. Another injection and the pain lessened—then a few months later it was back, worse than ever.

After the third nerve block had worn off and the pain and numbness again made it hard to use his leg, he saw the writing on the wall. He would just be a burden to the Edano Squad if he hung around longer. He wrote out a summary of his medical history and attached it to his transfer request. His new posting was back to Osaki Police Station, where he’d started his career as a plainclothes detective. He was assigned to the crime prevention section and served three years as an advisor. At fifty-nine, with retirement near, they sent him to the records section. By then he needed a cane to get around.

It was just bad luck. This was the body he was born with. His mother had had a bad back and ended her life bedridden. His father had also struggled with lower back pain. Shigenori accepted his fate stoically, but Toshiko refused to give up. She started pestering him to see a specialist. He pretended not to hear.