The Silent Dead (34 page)

Got to move.

Reiko jerked her head to one side.

A burst of flame. A bang. Hot smoke.

The shot was piercingly loud. A great balloon of numbness suddenly inflated around the right side of her head. She could hear nothing from that side.

“Careful with those sudden movements. Startle me and I shoot.”

A few seconds earlier, Reiko had perceived the truth, but incredulity was still uppermost in her mind.

You're the killer, Kitami!

She was too disoriented to speak. She crumpled to her knees with a hand clutching at her injured ear.

Kitami still held his firing posture. He had a .38 automatic in his hand.
The bullet that blew Otsuka's head off was a 9mm Parabellum. That was a match. Except that Kitami had been in a coffee shop at the time of the attack … or so he claimed.

An icy smile spread over his face. It suited him all too well.

“When you came up with that idea at the meeting about the perpetrator rummaging around inside Kanebara's stomach? It was so idiotic, I wanted to burst out laughing. But then you came up with the idea that the bodies were being dumped in the pond.… That one blindsided me. And then what do you do but go and find out about Fukazawa, who'd popped his socks three weeks before. Awesome detective work.”

Kitami kicked her in the stomach.

“Ugh!”

Her gorge rose. Her face flushed hot and cold. Her throat seemed to be clogged with stones. Her breathing …

“I know I made a few mistakes, but I've got to hand it to you, you and your boys pulled some unexpected moves on me. I never thought I'd have to go this far.”

As Kitami spoke, he slid a pair of handcuffs out of his pocket.

 

2

Katsumata got out of the elevator on the sixth floor of the hospital.

During his previous visit, he'd managed to win over one of the nurses, a woman called Akiko Kurihara. Having first asked her for directions to the medical office, he had bumped into her for a second time after his meeting with Dr. Omuro. Something about her face told him that she'd be open to earning a little on the side.

“Hey, you seen Nurse Kurihara?” he asked random people as he wandered around. Eventually he tracked her down.

“There you are!”

They stared at each other for a moment, then the nurse took Katsumata's hand and pulled him into a deserted stairwell. She took him to the next landing down, then stopped, checked that no one was coming up, and turned to Katsumata.

“Glad you're here. I was about to call you.”

“Something happened?”

She nodded. Her eyes were grave.

“Yukari Fukazawa ran away two nights ago.”

“What?!”

That means Yukari was on the loose at the time of Otsuka's murder!

Why hadn't the woman alerted him two days ago? What the hell did she think he was paying her for? He struggled to keep his anger under wraps. If he flew off the handle now, he'd only regret it later.

“You've got to try and tell me these things a little more promptly.”

“I can't believe you said that!” The nurse pouted in annoyance. “I don't do night shifts, and yesterday was my day off. Plus Yukari's not even one of my patients. I heard the news literally two minutes ago. What did you expect me to do?”

Uh-oh. She was one of those broads who lost her rag at the slightest hint of criticism. “Okay, I'm sorry. I didn't know.” After a cursory effort at soothing her ruffled feathers, Katsumata asked her for the details.

“Turns out that Yukari Fukazawa has run away several times before, but she always came back by morning. This time, it's been a day and a half, and she's still not back. The doctors and the administrators have had several meetings to discuss the problem. They haven't yet reported it to the police though. They want to give it a bit more time. As you can imagine, they're not wild about bringing in the police. This could be your chance, Lieutenant. Turn the screws on Dr. Omuro, and he'll probably tell you everything you need to know about the girl.”

The sense of unease Katsumata was feeling in his chest expanded through his entire body.

“Where is Omuro?”

“Consulting Room 3. I'll go with you. If he's got a patient with him, I'll need to deal with them.”

Nurse Kurihara was proving quite an ally after all.

*   *   *

Sure enough, the doctor had a patient in his consulting room.

“Mrs. Yoshimura, could you step outside a moment?” Nurse Kurihara shot a meaningful glance at Katsumata and led a middle-aged woman, who could only shuffle at a snail's pace, out of the room. Katsumata telegraphed his thanks with his eyes and shut the door behind them.

Omuro sat facing him just as at their last meeting. He looked every bit as uncooperative too, though Katsumata did detect a shadow of anxiety.

“Heard you're in a bit of trouble, Dr. Omuro. Interested in my take?”

Katsumata flung himself into the chair for patients and lit himself a cigarette, fully aware that smoking was prohibited.

“When a severely troubled mental patient does a runner, is doing jack shit the normal response of this hospital? Looks to me like you've got a serious problem on your hands.” Katsumata took out his portable ashtray, placed it on the desk, and tapped the ash from his cigarette into it. The doctor's eyes tracked his every movement.

“What if Yukari's raising hell outside? What'll you do about that?”

The doctor inhaled sharply.

“Let's say—just for the sake of argument—that she kills somebody. How exactly would you deal with that little eventuality?”

Omuro shot a furtive glance at Katsumata, released his breath with a hiss, and gazed into the middle distance. It was not the body language of someone who saw Katsumata's suggestions as ridiculous.

“Listen, doc. That, or something like it, is what's already happened. There's a whole lot of things I can't make head or tail of. Things I need to sort out before I can make any headway. I'm not here to tell you how to do your job, and I'm not here to frame Yukari for crimes she didn't commit just because the poor girl's a head case. If Yukari is innocent, or if you're serious about wanting to help her, you're better off working with me. It will be good for her and probably for you too.”

Omuro slowly tilted back his head back and stared up at the ceiling. Then he closed his eyes and exhaled deeply as though he'd come to a decision about something. It was a pattern Katsumata was familiar with from suspects about to confess. He said nothing, deliberately leaving space for the doctor to fill.

“We think Yukari suffered terrible abuse at her father's hands,” began Omuro, his voice hoarse with fatigue. “He was an ex-yakuza and a drug addict. He wasn't just violent toward Yukari, he was sexually abusive too. That's what drove her over the edge.”

Katsumata had taken the precaution of doing a little advance study after his last visit.

“Are you implying that she suffered from multiple personality disorder?”

“No, I'm not implying that.”

The offhandness with which the doctor contradicted him was a humiliation Katsumata could have done without.

Guess acting like he knew something about this wasn't such a good idea after all
.

“Then what is wrong with her?” he asked, crushing out his cigarette with his fingers.

“Yukari's mother was remarried, so her abuser was her stepfather. Yukari hated the fact that she was female, and the thing she hated most fiercely of all was her own body—the body that her stepfather had polluted and contaminated. Can you imagine how she dealt with that?”

Katsumata decided not to even try and just shook his head. The doctor exhaled violently, as if in physical pain.

“Yukari's first visit to this hospital was not to the psychiatry department. She was brought to the ER from the orphanage where she was then. She was admitted after using a box cutter to slice off her right breast.”

Even Katsumata was shaken. His face was a mask of horror.

“At that point, she had already cut up her own left arm so badly that it was just a lump of hardened scar tissue. You see, with the condition she has, the sight of her own blood acted as an emotional tranquilizer or sedative. The media calls it wrist-cutting syndrome.

“On the one hand, she saw herself as worthless, as irredeemably vile, filthy—subhuman, basically. On the other hand, she was also resistant to that notion and was looking for a way to confirm her worth as a human being in her own mind. She needed to do something that proved to her that she was alive, that she had the same blood running through her veins as the rest of us. She needed demonstrable proof of things that anyone normal would just take for granted.

“The psychological pressure was so intense that all she could do was scream. Metaphorically, I mean. With nowhere left on her arm to cut, she resorted to slicing off her breast—which symbolized her femininity.

“She has an abnormality—I'll spare you the medical terminology here—that causes her blood to coagulate fast, so she stopped bleeding relatively quickly. That's what kept her alive. From her perspective, that just meant more suffering. While she was in the hospital, she sliced off her other breast. Then she slipped out of the hospital and went back out onto the streets of Shinjuku. She was found stark naked in the middle of the day, gouging at the flesh on her buttocks and her belly.”

So the young girl had eliminated every trace of womanliness from her body. Katsumata could imagine how she must have looked after that. There was no doubt:
Yukari was F.

“Doctor, I need you to take a look at these photos.”

Katsumata laid the three photographs he had got from Tatsumi on the desk. The expression on the doctor's face was all the answer he needed.

“Can you see Yukari Fukazawa in these pictures?”

Omuro nodded despondently.

“It certainly looks like her.”

“How about the other man? Have you seen him before?”

Omuro shook his head, then craned forward for a closer look at the photograph in the middle, where the man's face was relatively clear.

“There was this young man who occasionally came to see her. He claimed to be her cousin. This could be him.”

“You sure about that?”

“No. It was a while ago, so I don't remember him clearly. I think there's a resemblance, though.”

“Know his name?”

“The hospital administration keeps a visitor log. They should know, provided they haven't thrown the old logs out.”

“Tell them to check ASAP.”

Omuro obediently reached for the telephone.

Katsumata put another cigarette in his mouth and lit up.

After relaying Katsumata's request, Dr. Omuro returned the receiver to its cradle. His attitude was one of complete resignation, as if he, not Yukari, were the suspect.

“I hear that Yukari ran away several times before?”

Omuro nodded feebly.

“Did that tend to coincide with the second Sunday of the month?”

Omuro tilted his head quizzically.

“I need you to check that for me too. I'm pretty sure that's what you'll find.”

Omuro gave a dazed nod.

The sky outside the window was dark with clouds threatening rain. Katsumata stared at them as they ground their way toward him. He knew it made no sense, but somehow the sight unnerved him.

He was wondering how long the administration people would take to review their visitor logs when Omuro began to speak.

“If anything, Yukari's symptoms seemed to have abated a bit over the last year. In mid-July, her brother died. He was the only surviving member of her immediate family, so we couldn't very well keep the news from her. We knew it would be a big shock, but she took it even harder than we feared.

“We already know about her tendency toward profound depression, depersonalization, and self-harm. After her brother's death, it became all too clear that she also wanted to harm other people. There was this incident where she grabbed one of the nurses and held a box cutter—God knows how she'd got hold of the thing—to her throat. I managed to talk her down and resolve the situation safely, but what she said then made my blood run cold. ‘If I kill her, my brother will help me sort it out.'”

Katsumata's smoldering suspicions burst into flame.

“When did that happen?”

“About the end of last July.”

That was after the visit of the officer from the Nishiarai precinct.

“Listen, you're a doctor. I know you've got a professional duty to protect your patients' rights, and I respect that, but if you'd told Officer Todoroki some of what you've told me, a man by the name of Taiichi Kanebara would probably still be alive. And if you'd given me the lowdown on Yukari's abnormalities when I came to see you, then a young cop called Otsuka wouldn't have been murdered.”

His cell phone buzzed in his breast pocket.

“Katsumata here.”

“This is Tatsumi,” said a gruff voice. “I know who's organizing Strawberry Night.”

Katsumata felt as though a hole had been punched in his chest.

“Damn! That was quick.”

“Because I'm a pro. I threw everything at the problem. Anyway, forget that. The answer blew me away. The guy behind it all is Noboru Kitami, the son of the TMPD director of Tokyo's Third District. He's just a kid. He's doing his training at Kameari police station, where your task force is based.”

“I'll be back,” yelled Katsumata to the doctor as he made a dash for the door.

 

3

Kitami was on the phone, yelling at someone.

“Don't go there. I shot the bitch and I can't undo it, so just haul ass over here. Yeah, that empty building in Ikebukuro. And tell F. Yeah, yeah. Quit riding me and get a move on.”