The Gate of Sorrows (18 page)

For two hours he worked, or at least tried to. When he glanced up, Seigo was frowning and beckoning.

“You’re thinking about things you shouldn’t.”

There was no use denying it.

“You’re thinking about contacting that FM station, or searching their site?”

“Of course not!”

“Well, you didn’t. That’s admirable.” Seigo had been watching him.

“The first person to go looking after that old guy with the cart was a coffee shop owner, right? Kenji must’ve talked to him. And you’re planning the same thing. I thought of talking to him too. So did Narita. We were going to go there yesterday, but in the end we decided not to. It wouldn’t have led to anything.”

Kotaro had to speak up. “What makes you so sure? We should be trying to find Kenji right now.”

“No, we should be quietly watching and waiting. If he doesn’t show up, any investigation should be left to the police.” Seigo’s expression softened. “Look, Ko-Prime. As far as we know, we could all be laughing about this someday.”

“But Kenji’s gone. That’s reality.”

“Maybe he just can’t contact us. Maybe he can’t get back to his apartment right now, for some reason that has nothing to do with his investigation.”

Sure. Just a coincidence.

“Kenji’s an adult. He’s been out of contact for less than two days.”

“More than twenty-four hours.”

Kotaro wouldn’t budge. Seigo sighed.

“That’s enough. Go home. Right now, you’re less use to me than an old man in a PC course who just learned how to turn the computer on.”

“What? Why? I’m doing my job.”

“Don’t BS me. Your reputation will suffer.” Kotaro had never heard Seigo talk this way.

“Go home and cool off. Got it? Go straight home and sit tight till you hear from me or Narita. There must be a thing or two you can do for fun besides work. Do something different for a change.”

He finally smiled and clapped Kotaro on the shoulder. “The Lady is up in Gunma or Niigata skiing, you know. You ought to call her and go on up there.”

“She’s in Nagano,” Kotaro said in a small voice. “And she’s snowboarding, not skiing.”

And like a kid defying his father, Kotaro turned his back on Seigo and stalked off.

Kotaro was glad he’d brought his laptop to work. With the case over his shoulder, he headed to the coffee shop where Kenji had briefed him about darknet school sites.

It was close to lunchtime and seats were filling up. Kotaro managed to grab an empty spot in the corner. As soon as he sat down, he became an unwilling audience to the conversation of four young women at the next table.

“It’s so awful. I didn’t worry because until now it’s been happening in the sticks, but I mean, Yokohama …”

“Yeah, but it’s Totsuka. Not a very fashionable part of Yokohama.”

“It’s still close to Tokyo. I live in Musashi Kosugi. That’s practically next door.”

The women’s winter outfits were trendy, with makeup to match. Kotaro guessed they were students from a nearby polytechnic. What were they afraid of?

He opened the image file that Kenji had sent to Narita. He quickly realized that he’d missed some important details on the phone’s small screen.

The sketch was innocent and crude. Anyone could see that the artist was a very young child, but children usually preferred bright colors. Whoever drew this picture had used three colors only: gray, black, and dark green.

“This is the sickest one yet.”

“They’re all sick.”

“I know, but this time he took off a leg at the knee. A leg, not a toe.”

Kotaro froze with one elbow on the table. The women looked disgusted. They leaned in with their shoulders scrunched up, talking animatedly about something dreadful. Yet they seemed excited.

Kotaro clicked on his news feed. There it was at the top. The conversation next door continued in whispers.

“They can’t call him Toe-Cutter Bill anymore.” The Toe-Fetish Killer had claimed his fourth victim.

“Who cares what they call him? He’s a murderer.” The woman sounded angry. Her three companions exchanged uncomfortable glances.

“Of course, you’re right.”

“But everyone’s going nuts about it.”

“I don’t want to be like other people. This is serious. People are dying.”

“I know, but won’t they find the killer faster the more it’s on the news and stuff? Like that time when they captured a killer by searching through surveillance camera pictures.”

“I remember! You could see his face close-up. It was gross.”

Kotaro kept one ear on the conversation as he paged through the news sites. The fourth victim was a woman in her thirties or forties. Cause of death was undetermined, as was the victim’s identity. The body had been discovered in the restroom of a gas station in Yokohama’s Totsuka Ward. The right leg had been severed at the knee. The information was only ten minutes old. None of the news feeds had further details.

Things must be hot back at Kumar
, thought Kotaro. Seigo would be putting together another special team. Dredging textboards was hard work, but it had made Kotaro feel like a true cyber patroller.

He immediately shook his head. Something had occurred to him for the first time since he started following the Toe-Fetish Killer. The discovery of each new victim must be traumatic for people with missing relatives or loved ones. It was something that had never occurred to him.

But now Kenji was missing. It was a minor incident compared to the murders, but for Kotaro, it was more than enough to bring home how unforgiving reality could be.

A person vanishes. Her life is taken and the corpse is discovered. It was a terrible, terrible thing. Kotaro’s mind was so preoccupied with concern for Kenji that he could hardly concentrate.

The group at the next table got up and left, still talking animatedly. Two businessmen quickly took their place. They started talking about money as soon as they sat down.

Kotaro left the news site and returned to Kenji’s drawing. Gray, black, and dark green. Somber colors. The figure of the creature was blurred at the edges, obviously crayon. Kotaro could picture the child working on the drawing with a box of crayons at his side.

The creature was winged but without a beak. The legs were humanoid. Narita had thought the creature was more human than bird, but it was missing something that was essentially human: a pair of arms.

There was something even more distinctive, something that made Kotaro even more unsure of what he was looking at: long hair.

He hadn’t noticed it before. The smartphone screen was small, and the background was filled with slanting lines, as if the figure were in flight. That was why the hair had been hard to see at first.

Still, it was definitely hair. It swept back at an angle, perhaps windblown. At rest, it would’ve hung all the way down the creature’s back.

This meant something else. The face wasn’t missing, because there was no need to draw it. The figure was facing away.

Kotaro blinked. The arms. It was the same thing. They weren’t missing, they just weren’t visible in this pose. But would a child be this skilled? Whether the subject was real or imaginary, depicting it from behind seemed odd. Kotaro had been taught that a child’s sketches could reflect their psychological state.

Or did the child see this in a book somewhere and simply copy it? Kotaro had seen images of centaurs with long hair, but centaurs had four legs and no wings. Pegasus? It had wings, but was clearly a horse. It was neither birdlike nor human.

Narita had said the sketch was of Mothman, but that was an American urban legend, an eerie cross between human and moth.

Chief, what do you think this is?

Kenji had been fascinated by the sketch. He’d not only sent it to Narita, he had called him up about it afterward.

I don’t think it has anything to do with his investigation. It must be something he just happened to stumble across.

No. It had to mean something.

Resting his chin in his hand, Kotaro tinkered with the image, zooming in, rotating the image, reversing it, trying to organize what it was about it that bothered him.

First of all, where did Kenji find this?

A child’s drawing, on public display. There weren’t too many possibilities. A classroom in a kindergarten or a nursery school? Those weren’t places a stranger could just stroll into. What about an exhibition of children’s drawings? Again, not too many possibilities.

Kotaro looked at the image again. He’d been scrutinizing it from close range. Now he pulled back. He had to examine what else the camera had caught besides the sketch itself.

The problem was, he didn’t know how to enhance the small amount of extra information the image contained at the edges. Go to the web. He entered a query.

The information he needed accumulated as he sipped his tepid coffee. He found a suitable free image-analysis package. The software was basic, but that was all he needed.

Top edge, right edge, bottom edge, left edge. He navigated clockwise around the image, looking for clues. In the center of the right edge was a beige object of some sort, blurred. It took him a split second to realize it was Kenji’s finger, holding the smartphone.

He could see parts of clothing. The tip of someone’s jaw a short distance away. Part of a finger, all in the part of the image on either side of the sketch. Kotaro was puzzled. How had the sketch been displayed? It was unframed. It wasn’t mounted on a panel or pinned to a wall. He could see people behind it. Maybe some sort of transparent sheet, or—

Glass. Window glass. The sketch was taped to a window, with people in the room beyond it.

That meant the picture hadn’t been taken at a school. The date stamp was December 30. School was out for vacation.

So it was some kind of public facility. City hall? Closed that day too. A community center? Possible. They sometimes exhibited children’s art.

Kotaro zoomed in on the left edge. The image outside the sketch was wider here than on the other side. Kenji had been holding the phone in his right hand, standing slightly to the right of the picture when he tripped the shutter.

The left edge of the image contained something important—part of a red box, with something like a poster affixed to it. Kotaro could make out the words
NEW YEAR’s CARDS
.

It was a postal delivery scooter. The full text probably said something like “Mail your New Year’s cards early” or “Mail New Year’s cards before December 25.”

A post office!

Kenji had walked all over the area, but he was searching for information about Kozaburo Ino. Kotaro called up a list of post offices in Hyakunin and surrounding neighborhoods. He was surprised how many there were.

The coffee shop was packed and getting louder. He decided to move. There was a bus stop out front for a bus that only came once an hour or so. He could sit there and keep working.

The day had started badly with the warning from Seigo, but Kotaro’s luck was with him. The soft-spoken woman who picked up at the third number he called told him what he needed to know.

“Yes, that’s correct. We had an exhibition of children’s art here last month.”

Gotcha!

“Excuse me, where are you located?”

“Sakae, in West Shinjuku.”

Sakae. Kotaro zoomed in on his map. It was right next to Hyakunin.

“The exhibition is over, I guess?”

“Yes, we’re doing a different one now.”

“I was really impressed with that artwork. I’d like to see it again. I don’t know which school the kids were from. Would you happen to know?”

Silence, then: “We can’t release the children’s names …”

“Of course. I just need the name of the school. I’ll ask them about the artwork.”

“But it wasn’t a school exhibit.”

“Sorry?”

“Didn’t you notice? The title of the exhibit was ‘Little Artists from the House of Light.’ ”

Now it was Kotaro’s turn to fall silent.

“You should probably ask the person in charge of their children’s association.”

“I see. Okay then, thanks for your help.”

Search: House of Light. Children’s association?

The results came back. “You gotta be kidding,” Kotaro said out loud. A passerby glanced at him warily and walked on quickly.

House of Light was a nonprofit religious organization.