The Silent Dead (32 page)

“These are grabs from the infrared camera in my apartment,” Tatsumi explained. “I retrieved the cameras and went to an Internet café to extract the data. You can have them. The images are a bit blurry, but they could help with Otsuka's murder.”

The green-tinged photographs showed two people: a large, sturdy man in a dark polo shirt and jeans, and a smaller man in a black leather bodysuit. These had to be the people who killed Otsuka.

“You've got an infrared camera in your place? You don't take any chances.”

“I'm no amateur. They won't kill me so easily.”

“You went back to your place. You're lucky to be alive.”

“B&E's one of my specialties.”

Katsumata found the two sheets of paper even more interesting.
This must have bowled Otsuka over
. The list included the name of someone Otsuka had interviewed.

Tomohiko Tashiro was the one who had posted under the handle “Wicked Wizard.” He was the thirty-nine-year-old salesman for an electronics firm who'd belonged to the Haseda University hiking club with Yukio Namekawa. Tashiro had alerted Otsuka to Strawberry Night. His claim that Namekawa had told him about it was clearly an out-and-out lie. Tashiro's postings gave the unmistakable impression that Tashiro had attended the shows himself. His comments included descriptions—almost eyewitness accounts—that matched exactly how Kanebara had been killed. Tashiro was trying to play a double game: dropping hints to nudge the investigation in the right direction while trying his best to conceal his own participation.

Scumbag! You went to the show, your own friend was butchered, and now to top it off, you're a snitch as well
.

Katsumata felt an uncharacteristic surge of moral indignation.

“This is valuable stuff, Tatsumi. Now I need you to identify the guy behind the show, pronto.”

The two men separated. Katsumata immediately put in a call to Suyama at the task force coordination desk, got Tashiro's number from him, and called it.

“Good afternoon. Matsumoto Electronic Industries' sales division.” A young woman answered the phone. That was enough to get Katsumata's back up.

“Is Tomohiko Tashiro there? This is Lieutenant Katsumata of the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department.”

He thought he did a good job of sounding polite. Much good it did him.

“I'm sorry, sir. Mr. Tashiro is out of the office right now.”

“I need to get in touch with him urgently. Have you got the number of his cell phone?”

“Yes, but I would need to know what this is about.”

Something inside Katsumata snapped.

“Oh no, you don't. Your job, little lady, is to answer the phone, make the tea—and fuck all else. Tell me the number. If you don't want to do that, then call Tashiro and get his permission to tell me. Somehow I don't think he's going to refuse to cooperate with the police. Okay, which is it—tell me or ask him? If the latter, I'll call you back in five. Make sure you pick up. Okay?”

Silence.

“I asked you a question. Can't you do
anything
right?”

That final shouted insult seemed to do the trick. Between sniffles, the woman gave him Tashiro's cell number.

“So the last four digits are seven-oh-nine-two? Got it. And next time a policeman asks you to do something, jump to it. Don't try using that thick head of yours for thinking. That's not what it was designed for.”

He felt pleasantly refreshed after ending the call.

*   *   *

Tashiro was in Shinjuku when he took Katsumata's call. “I'll be there as soon as I can,” said the detective. “Make the time to see me.” Four thirty was the earliest Tashiro said he could manage. “That's fine for me,” answered Katsumata. “But I need you to show up without fail.” Not wanting to make Tashiro nervous, Katsumata did his best to sound friendly.

They'd agreed to meet at a diner. Katsumata got there at four twenty-five. Not knowing what Tashiro looked like, Katsumata called his cell. A man sitting on the bench for patrons waiting to be seated pulled out his phone.

Katsumata walked over to him. “Are you Mr. Tomohiko Tashiro?” he inquired mildly.

“I am. You must be Lieutenant Katsumata. I—”

Before the man could even finish his sentence, Katsumata had grabbed his tie and yanked him onto his feet.

“You sewer rat, you're coming with me. Hey, waitress, this gent won't be needing a table after all.”

Katsumata dragged Tashiro out of the diner and down to the parking lot. A couple getting out of their car looked at them with open-mouthed suspicion. Katsumata ignored them and hauled Tashiro right to the back.

“Wha-what's this about?” Tashiro sputtered.

He looked ready to burst into tears. Dragged along by Katsumata, he stumbled, fell, and scrambled back to his feet repeatedly.

Katsumata only let go of his tie when they reached the back wall of the parking lot.

“Listen, buddy, I'm not here for Tomohiko Tashiro. I've got some questions for the Wicked Wizard of Oz—or whatever you fucking call yourself in computerland—and I need answers.”

Grabbing the lapels of Tashiro's jacket, he threw him against the wall. The man's face was contorted with terror, his whole body was rigid, and his eyes stared vacantly into the distance.

“Did you attend the Strawberry Night murder show?”

Tashiro's face crumpled as he began to cry.

“Did you?”

Tashiro gulped and sputtered.

“You're making a big mistake if you think that keeping quiet is going to make all this go away and that your life will go back to normal. You did some magnificent aiding and abetting, my friend. You're an accessory to murder. You're looking at serious jail time, I can promise you that. But for now at least, I have the power to keep your name out of this. So, what'll it be? Come clean with me here, or do the strong, silent act and go to the slammer? Your choice.”

Tashiro spasmed to his full height then collapsed in on himself and slid slowly down the wall. He curled up into a ball on the ground and promptly pissed himself.

“Goddammit. You filthy bastard.”

Katsumata took a brisk step backward to avoid the dark puddle that was spreading across the cement toward him. What the fuck was a pathetic jerk like him doing, going to see a murder show?

“Come on, talk to me. Then I'll buy you some new underpants. I'm a nice guy, you know.”

Katsumata lit a cigarette and waited for the whimpering to stop. He'd almost smoked it to the filter when Tashiro began to speak in short bursts.

“It just kind of happened.…”

He had stumbled on the Strawberry Night homepage by accident last September and first attended the event in October. Curiosity was his main motivation. Intrigued by the online video of what looked like a real murder, he had clicked the “Yes” button that popped up with the “Do you want to see this live?” text. He hadn't really been serious about it. When nothing happened, he'd written the whole thing off as a joke. Until …

“It was about two weeks later. This black envelope came to the house. There was no stamp or postmark. It said, ‘Confidential. Mr. Tomohiko Tashiro' on the front in white ink. On the back there was the red Strawberry Night logo I'd seen on the Internet.

“It gave me a big shock. All I'd done was view a homepage and click a button. That was enough for them to figure out where I lived. I was terrified. I was worried they might kill me too.

“Things only got worse when I opened the envelope. There was a headshot of me—God knows where it had been taken. Then there was this page listing my birthday, my current address—they obviously knew that—my job, even the names of my wife and children! At the bottom it said, ‘Please check that all the above information is full and correct. If it is, your identity as Tomohiko Tashiro has been confirmed and the registration process is complete.' It didn't say anything about how to contact them if the data was incorrect. It looked like a threat to me. ‘We know everything about you. You cannot escape us.' That was the real message.”

Katsumata agreed. The basic technique had a lot in common with loan sharking: pile on the psychological pressure until people lost the ability to think rationally. The approach was effective—on amateurs, at least.

“Go on,” said Katsumata encouragingly.

“The invitation proper arrived two or three days later. The date of the show was November the tenth, the second Sunday of the month; the place was Kabukicho in Shinjuku; the time was six fifteen p.m., and the entrance fee was one hundred thousand yen.

“By that stage, I was convinced that I'd end up being murdered like the person in the video if I failed to show up. I made up my mind to go. My idea was to just go the one time and ask the people behind it to let me walk away if I promised not to contact the police and never breathe a word to anyone.

“I felt a whole lot better after making that decision. ‘It's not like
you're
going to kill anyone,' I kept telling myself. ‘You're only going to be a spectator.' Gradually, I started feeling more positive. Perhaps there was nothing to it after all. Perhaps the elaborate video and the nasty threats were just a tasteless prank.

“When I went to the venue on the day specified, the thing that really spooked me was the meticulous organization. There was this derelict building, with no sign or anything outside, and all these people milling around. They would check their watches, then one would go in, then another.… I realized that there was a reason why my invitation said six fifteen. They were managing the inflow, getting people to come in one by one.”

Was there anyone stationed outside for crowd control? Katsumata asked. Tashiro said no. You just went on in when your time came.

“So when it was my turn, I went in. There was this passageway with a black curtain at the far end. It was the only way in, so I pushed through the curtain. Behind, it was like a tunnel with black curtains on either side. I was going along it until suddenly this voice commanded me to stop. A man in a black mask with a flashlight was inspecting me from between two curtains. It's the same drill every time. You give your name, and they check that the name and face match. That's also when you pay the entrance fee. When that's all taken care of, you keep on going until you emerge into this auditoriumlike space.

“It was bigger and a bit brighter. There was a stage. Nothing else. By the time I went in, there must have been about ten people there already. With the others who came after me, there must have been about twenty of us in total.

“Then I heard this loud bang behind me. ‘They've shut the door,' I thought. It didn't occur to me to leave. Might as well stick it out and see what was going to happen. There were twenty of us. They couldn't very well murder all of us!”

Katsumata noticed a moist glint in Tashiro's bloodshot eyes. Crybabies were another of his pet hates.

“The show eventually started. The first time I went, there was this guy nailed to a cross. Two men in black masks carried him out onto the stage. He had trousers on, but was bare above the waist. There were these strips of cloth over his eyes and his mouth. Next, the two men carried out this brazier full of charcoal.… We soon discovered why.

“Just one of the masked men came back out. There were these long metal chopsticks sticking out of the burning charcoal. He pulled one of them out, then held it up against the man's stomach in an almost playful way. There was smoke and a sizzling sound, and the man on the cross moaned into his gag. The chopstick left this long thin purple welt on his stomach. Then the man in the mask began skipping around the stage, pressing the hot chopsticks into the man's flesh over and over and over again.

“There were plenty of chopsticks in the brazier. When one of them cooled down, he would just help himself to another. He stuck one up the guy's nose—all the way up. People screamed. He gave his ears and mouth the same treatment, straight through the gag. Next he went for the eyes … he was relentless. He poked and jabbed until the eyeballs popped out. There was a lot of blood and smoke. The smell wafted over to where I was standing.… It was like roasted meat.

“Eventually, the guy on the cross stopped moving. He'd passed out. The masked fellow slapped him. No reaction. Doused him with water. Again, nothing. That was when he whipped out this knife, an ordinary cheap box cutter thing. He drew it across the guy's throat like this.”

Tashiro mimed a slashing motion. “He was so offhand about it, but, oh my God, the blood—it just exploded out like water spurting from a fountain. Some of the audience got spattered. It was thrilling, beautiful.…

“It was like art. It blew me away. Your take on life changes when you see death close up. This person is beaten to a pulp and murdered right in front of you, there's no space between you and them. And all that separates life and death is the flimsy little blade of a box cutter.”

A confusing jumble of expressions scudded across Tashiro's face. He smiled, then cringed; his eyes shone with elation, then brimmed with tears.

It's like watching a speeded-up film of someone losing their marbles
.

“It took me a while to figure out that the person who got murdered was always one of the people who'd come to see the show. This one time I noticed that the woman up on stage was wearing the same skirt as a woman I'd seen waiting outside in the street before. I guess that the passageway that led to the auditorium, that dark tunnel, was where our fates were decided. The person they grabbed ended up on stage, while the rest of us were the audience.

“The realization terrified me—but I still wanted to go. Maybe more than ever. Even though I knew I could end up on the stage myself, I felt this compulsion. God, the relief I felt when I made it safely through the tunnel to the theater! You saw the victim torn to pieces, each month a completely different method, each time brutal and horrible. They were reduced to a bloody mess, killed.
And you knew it could have been you
. You got this incredible sense of superiority, of being special. ‘I survived today, and I've got another whole month of life ahead of me.' It was pure, unadulterated joy. Knowing—really feeling in your bones—that your life exists as the flip side of death, of death of the nastiest and most degrading kind. It's wonderful. The whole world seems to open up before you.”