The Devotion Of Suspect X (34 page)

Misato wasn’t home yet. Yasuko sat and breathed a long ragged sigh. Then she got to her feet again and went into the back room. She took down a cookie box from a shelf there and removed the lid. The container held a collection of old letters. She lifted the entire bundle, removing one from the very bottom. Nothing was written on the envelope. It contained a single piece of ruled report paper, covered with writing.

Ishigami had put the envelope in her apartment mailbox before making his final call on that last evening. In it she had found the note it still held, as well as three letters—all of them supposed proof of how he had been a stalker. She had surrendered the three letters to the police as evidence.

The note told her how to use the letters, and what she should tell the detectives when they came to talk to her, all in Ishigami’s customary detail. There were instructions not only for Yasuko, but for Misato as well. It covered everything, every situation they might find themselves in, ensuring that no matter what befell the Hanaokas, they would know what to do. It was because of his instructions that Yasuko and Misato had been able to handle the police. Yasuko knew that if she made a misstep and the detectives saw through the deception, all of Ishigami’s hard work would go up in smoke. Misato must have known that, too.

At the very end of his instructions he had added a final message:

“I believe Kuniaki Kudo to be a loyal and trustworthy man. Marrying him will certainly increase the probability that you and Misato will be happy. Please forget about me. Feel no guilt. If you are not happy, all I have done will be for nothing.”

She read the letter again and fresh tears began to flow.

She had never encountered such deep devotion. She hadn’t even thought it existed. Yet Ishigami had it, hidden away beneath that expressionless mask of a face—the kind of passion unfathomable to the average person.

When she heard that he had turned himself in, she had assumed that he was simply taking their place. But now that she’d heard the truth from Yukawa, the words Ishigami had left for her stabbed even deeper into her heart.

She thought about going to the police and telling them everything. But that wouldn’t save Ishigami. He was a murderer, too, after all.

Her eyes fell on the jewelry box Kudo had given her. She opened the lid and watched the ring sparkle.

Maybe she should do what Ishigami wanted her to do—seize her chance at happiness. Maybe it was like he said: if she gave up now, all of his work would be for nothing.

Still, it was so hard to hide the truth. Would she ever really be able to be happy, with something so dark hidden inside? She would have to live the rest of her life with this guilt, never knowing true peace.
But maybe,
Yasuko thought,
enduring that guilt is a way of doing penance
.

She tried the ring on. The diamond was beautiful. How happy she would be if she could just run to Kudo, without a cloud in her heart! Yet that was a hopeless dream. Her conscience would never be clear.

She was putting the box away when her cell phone rang. She peered at the
LCD
screen. The number was unfamiliar. She opened the phone.

“Yes?”

“Hello? Is this the mother of Misato Hanaoka?” It was a man’s voice that she didn’t recognize.

“Yes. Is something wrong?” She felt her stomach flutter.

“My name’s Sakano. I’m a teacher at Morishita Minami Middle School. Sorry for the sudden nature of my call.”

“Is something wrong? Is Misato okay?”

“Actually, she was just found behind the gymnasium. It appears that her wrists were cut with a knife or some other sharp object.”

“What…?” Yasuko’s heart leapt into her throat and she gasped for breath.

“She was bleeding badly, so they took her to the hospital immediately. Don’t worry, she’ll be fine. However, there is a chance that this was an attempted suicide. I thought you should know so you could take the necessary steps—”

The man continued talking, but Yasuko didn’t hear a word he said.

A countless number of stains, scratches, and other small marks covered the wall in front of Ishigami. He chose several at random, and in his mind connected them all with straight lines. The resulting matrix was made up of triangles, squares, and hexagons. He began painting the shapes with four separate colors, not allowing any two adjacent shapes to share the same color. All of this he did in his head.

Ishigami finished the problem in less than a minute. Wiping the image, he chose different spots and repeated the process. It was the essence of simplicity, yet he could do it over and over without losing interest. If he grew weary of the four-color problem, he decided he would just use the spots on the wall to define an analytical geometry problem. Calculating the coordinates of every spot on the wall would take a considerable amount of time.

And that was just using the spots on the wall. Who cared if he wasn’t allowed to leave his room? As long as he had paper and something to write with, he could work on his math problems. Even if the authorities were to bind his hands and feet, he could explore new proofs in his head. They could take away his sight, or his hearing, but they could not touch his brain. Confinement was like a limitless garden of paradise for him.
How short is a lifetime,
he thought,
compared to the time it will take humankind to find all the rich veins of mathematical ore where they lie sleeping and tease them forth into the world
.

Nor, he reflected, did he need anyone to acknowledge his work. Certainly he would have liked to publish his theories, to be recognized and reviewed; but that was not the true essence of mathematics. In academia it was always a race to see who would reach the summit of which particular mountain first, but as long as
he
knew which peaks he had discovered, that would be enough.

It had taken Ishigami some time to reach this place. Not very long ago, he had been reduced to the terrible conclusion that his life had lost its meaning. If his only talent was for mathematics, he had reasoned, and yet he could make no progress along that path, what was the value of his existence? Every day, he’d contemplated death, feeling that if he died, no one would be sad, or really much inconvenienced. He doubted anyone would even notice.

He remembered a certain day, only a year ago …

He was standing in his apartment with a short length of thick rope in his hand. He was looking for a place on the ceiling to attach it. But he soon found that apartments lack any appropriate fixtures for hanging oneself. Finally, unable to find a better alternative, he resorted to pounding a large nail into a support post in the wall. He fixed his noose to it carefully and tested his weight on it. The post creaked alarmingly, but the nail did not bend and the rope did not break.

He had no regrets. There would be no particular meaning to his death. Just like there had been no particular meaning to his life.

He was standing on a stool, trying to fit his head through the noose, when the doorbell rang.

It had to be fate.

He only answered it because he didn’t want there to be any interruptions once he got started. Not knowing who was at the door, he had to consider that it might be an emergency. He couldn’t count on them just leaving him alone.

He opened his door to find two women standing there—a mother and daughter, by the looks of them.

The mother introduced herself, saying that they would be his neighbors. Her daughter bowed curtly beside her. When he laid his eyes upon them, a single realization pierced Ishigami’s entire being.

How beautiful their eyes are,
he thought. Until that moment, he had never been carried away by beauty of any kind. He didn’t even understand art. But in that moment, he understood everything. The very same beauty he found in unraveling a mathematics problem was standing right there before him.

Ishigami didn’t remember clearly what the women had said. But the way their eyes had shifted as they looked at him, every blink of their eyelids, was burned into his memory.

Ishigami’s life changed after he met the Hanaokas; in that moment he was renewed. All thought of suicide faded. Joy returned to his daily rituals. It made him happy just imagining where the two of them might be, what they might be doing. He had added the coordinates of Yasuko and Misato to the matrix of his life, and to him, it seemed like a miracle had occurred.

Sunday was his happiest day. If he opened his window, he could hear the two of them talking. He couldn’t make out what they said, but the faint voices that drifted to him along the wind were like the sweetest music to Ishigami’s ears.

He held no aspirations of ever being anything to them. He knew he should never even attempt to make contact. It was like his relationship with mathematics: it was enough merely to be associated with something so sublime. To seek any kind of acknowledgment would sully its dignity.

Yet when trouble arrived and they needed help, it was only natural for Ishigami to go to their aid. After all, if they hadn’t been there for him, he would no longer be alive. He was returning the greatest of favors. They certainly had no idea what they had done, but that was okay. Sometimes, all you had to do was exist in order to be someone’s savior.

When he saw Togashi’s body, Ishigami already had a program in his head ready to load. It would be difficult to completely dispose of the body. No matter how carefully he did so, he could never reduce the chances of discovery to a perfect zero. And even if he got lucky and succeeded in concealing what had happened, it would do nothing to ease the pain in Yasuko’s heart. She and her daughter would live in constant fear of discovery. He could not bear to visit such hardship on them.

There was only one way to put Yasuko and her daughter truly at peace. He would have to detach them completely from the case. He would make it seem as though they were connected, and yet there could be no doubt that they had nothing to do with the murder.

That was when he decided to use the Engineer—the homeless man who had so recently begun living at the camp near Shin-Ohashi Bridge. It all worked quite smoothly.

In the early morning of March 10, Ishigami had approached the Engineer. He had found him sitting apart from the other homeless as usual.

“I have a job for you,” Ishigami had told the man. He explained that he wanted him to help as an observer on a riverworks project that would last several days. He had noticed that the Engineer had a background in construction.

The Engineer had been suspicious at first. “Why me?” he had asked.

“Well,” Ishigami had explained, “I’m in a bit of a tight situation.” And he’d told how the man he had previously asked to observe had been in an accident and was now unable to do the job—and, without an observer there, his firm wouldn’t get permission to proceed with the work. He needed someone to stand in for the absent man.

He’d offered an advance of fifty thousand yen, and the Engineer had agreed. Ishigami had then taken the man to the rental room where Togashi had been saying. There he’d given him Togashi’s clothes to put on and had told him to sit tight until that evening.

When evening came, he’d brought the Engineer out to Mizue Station. Ishigami had stolen a bicycle from Shinozaki Station in advance. He had chosen the newest bicycle he could find, to assure that the owner would promptly report the theft.

He had prepared another bicycle as well. This one he had stolen from Ichinoe, the station before Mizue. It was an old bicycle, with a broken lock.

He’d given the new bicycle to the Engineer, and the two of them had gone to the river, soon arriving at the spot along the Old Edogawa.

Remembering what happened next made Ishigami’s heart fill with darkness. The Engineer never knew why he had to die.

Ishigami couldn’t have anyone know about the second murder—especially not the Hanaokas. That was why he had used the very same murder weapon and had strangled the victim in the very same way.

Togashi’s body he had cut into six parts in his bathtub, tossing each one separately into the Sumida River in bags weighted down with heavy rocks. He did this all under cover of darkness, in three separate locations on three separate nights. He knew that at least some of them would be found at some point, but he didn’t care. The police would never be able to learn to whom the body parts belonged. According to their records, Togashi would have already been dead and his body found—and a man couldn’t die twice.

He was pretty sure that only Yukawa had figured it all out. Which was why Ishigami had chosen to turn himself in to the police. This, after all, was something he had been ready to do from the very beginning, and for which he had already made the necessary preparations.

Yukawa would talk to Kusanagi. Kusanagi would then inform his superior. But the police wouldn’t act. At that point, there would be no way to prove they had misidentified the body. Meanwhile, Ishigami would be charged with Togashi’s murder.

There was no turning back now. Nor was there any reason to stop the plan he’d set in motion. No matter how brilliant the deductions of that genius physicist might be, they had no hope of prevailing against an actual criminal’s confession in court.

I’ve won,
he thought.

He heard a buzzer sound. It was the signal that indicated that there were visitors to the holding cell. The guard rose from his chair.

After a brief negotiation, someone entered the cell area. It was Kusanagi. He waited in front of the bars while the guard ordered Ishigami from his cell. The mathematician was searched, then handed over to Kusanagi. The detective didn’t say a word while all this was happening.

Outside the holding cell, Kusanagi turned to Ishigami and asked, “How are you feeling?”

Ishigami couldn’t tell whether it was the detective’s custom to be polite, or if this was part of some ploy.

“A little tired, to tell the truth. To be honest, I’d like to get through the legal proceedings as quickly as possible.”

“Don’t worry, this will be last time I’ll be taking you out for questioning. There’s someone here to see you.”