The Gate of Sorrows (23 page)

The sky looked like all the stars in the Milky Way had been scooped up and thrown down again. Humanity had no way of reaching the stars yet, he thought, but they had long ago re-created the heavens on earth, in colors far more gaudy and vulgar.

Shigenori peered around the roof and froze.

The gargoyle was gone.

Kotaro watched as the seven o’clock news came on. The announcer started speaking excitedly. It was the same on every channel. Dinnertime in the Mishima household started at seven sharp, and if the news was grim, Asako usually switched the channel to something more pleasant. But today her eyes were glued to the set. Hearing that the fourth victim was a young mother seemed to hit her especially hard.

“Why haven’t they caught him yet? Doesn’t Kumar work with the police on this kind of thing? Hurry up, do something!”

“Kumar isn’t working
for
the police. We can’t do anything right away about something like this.”

“Was there anything on the Internet? Like an announcement by the killer or something?”

“Nothing so far.”

“Well, you should do something anyway. Someone needs to catch this guy now.”

As Kotaro watched his mother out of the corner of his eye and listened to her complaints, his pulse was racing.

That empty building in Ida with a gargoyle on the roof—he knew now that the locals called it the tea caddy building. A building constructed at the height of the tech bubble by a rich CEO. A building with a history.

He was going to sneak in there tonight. He was almost ready.

He’d already cased the premises. In the afternoon, after he left the dilapidated apartment that had been home to Mana and her mother, he had gone straight for the tea caddy building. Masao had been reluctant to let him go by himself.

“Both entrances are locked and the windows are barred. Without a key, there’s no way you could get in here.” When he saw the building up close, Masao had looked a bit relieved.

Even if Kenji had come here
, Kotaro thought,
he couldn’t have gotten in
. He could only have looked at the outside of the building. There had to be a connection between Mana’s picture and Kenji dropping out of sight.

“Yeah, you’d need a key,” Kotaro said. But in his mind, he was calculating furiously.

Kenji’s disappearance, this building, Mana’s picture, the homeless people Kenji was investigating—no way these were unconnected. On January 4—two days ago—Kenji had sent a mail to Narita at 9:34 p.m.

Something’s been bugging me. I’m going to investigate it tonight.

After he’d sent that mail, Kenji had gone somewhere. It had to have been here.

Maybe the building is used at night? Maybe if I come back at night, someone will be here, or I can get in somehow
, Kotaro thought. That would explain why Kenji decided it would be better to investigate after dark.

He had to get ready. He’d decided to go home first. Sitting in his gently swaying seat on the train, he had used his laptop to search for anything on the tea caddy building. What he found was astonishing.

Kotaro put the photos he took of the building and the gargoyle on his desktop. The shots of the statue were taken from a distance, but they were sharp and clear. He entered a raft of search terms, hit
ENTER
, and got a gusher of information.

The statue moved at night. Its pose and location were different from day to day. It was holding something that looked like a weapon, something that had not been there when it was first placed on the roof.

The tea caddy building was definitely on people’s radar screens, though not in a huge way. Urban legend websites were awash with these kinds of rumors. A moving statue was not going to surprise anyone. In fact, comments about the gargoyle were outnumbered by posts about the building’s history and how it ended up empty and abandoned.

Still, information about the “moving gargoyle” would’ve been gold for Kenji. It must have been enough to drive him to seek further answers from the building under cover of darkness.

The monster came from the sky, and it moved by night. It beat its wings.

Mana saw it.

Kotaro gaped suddenly with surprise. The background Mana drew, the dozens of slanting lines. Kenji had thought they looked like rain. He was right.

Mana’s mother had died of pneumonia early on December 5, so she must have been bedridden before that. The night before, Tokyo had been struck by a violent winter storm. The lines Mana had drawn behind the monster must be the slanting downpour.

Kotaro could see it in his mind’s eye—Mana looking out the window of the tumbledown apartment, her bedridden mother behind her on the floor. The monster descending from the sky as she watched. That was the night of the fourth. Kozaburo Ino had vanished the next day.

Kotaro called up a map. The Ida and Hyakunin districts were practically next to each other.

Then homeless people started going missing.
One after another, along the Seibu-Shinjuku commuter line.

Kotaro had to get into the building and find out what was inside. Maybe he would find Kenji—hopefully unharmed, but who knew what sort of shape he might be in? Maybe he got in and found himself trapped. Without his phone he’d have no way of calling for help. No one would hear his cries, or maybe he’d be in no shape to use his voice. He didn’t have his phone, that was definite—it had been found in a narrow space between two buildings, smashed and nonfunctional.

How had it gotten there? Why was it so badly damaged? Maybe Kenji had been running for his life. From a monster out of the sky?

Or maybe the monster grabbed him and carried him skyward? Kenji dropped his phone and the impact pulverized it.

It was time to stop thinking and start doing.

Kotaro’s first task on returning home was to give Asako his cover story. He’d told her in the morning that he’d be home late, but with this new murder by the Toe-Fetish Killer, his schedule had changed suddenly. He’d have to be back at the office by ten, and he’d be there all night.

Then, in the privacy of his room, he had stuffed his backpack with everything he thought he might need, including his flashlight and digital camera. He’d be watching the statue until morning. It would be freezing. A sleeping bag would’ve been perfect, but he didn’t have one. He’d just have to dress as warmly as he could.

The real problem was—what if he couldn’t get inside? He needed a tool to open the back door.

A crowbar. He’d once seen a news special about a ring of burglars that used them to lever open locked doors. He could borrow the crowbar that was sitting in the garage on his way out. At this time of year, his father was out every evening at New Year’s parties. He wouldn’t miss it for one night.

Kotaro’s mind kept flitting from one thought to another. There was no way a monster like the one Mana had drawn could be real. If so, someone was pretending to be a monster. Why such an elaborate deception? Abducting homeless people—if that was the goal—wouldn’t be much more difficult than what the kids Kenji had been monitoring were doing.

It was a strangely elaborate piece of performance art. If it weren’t for the missing people, it could easily be a reality TV prank.

Kotaro’s research suggested that the tea caddy building had been abandoned because it couldn’t be sold. There was a conflict of ownership. Maybe someone was staging this whole thing to drive the building’s value down and force another party to relinquish their claim. But in that case, it would make sense to do something more conspicuous, more outrageous. Maybe the abductions were a warning of some kind? If so, it was a very roundabout way of sending a warning.

Or perhaps it was some kind of copycat thing, re-creating or restaging some story. Kotaro had searched for something similar on a website devoted to summaries of serialized comics and movies dealing with winged monsters that terrorized cities by night, attacking people. His search returned—sure enough—Mothman and even pterodactyls, but no gargoyles. A humanoid creature with wings? That would be vampires.

Vampires?

Kotaro felt a flicker of fear. What if he got inside the building and found the corpses of the homeless people piled up and sucked dry of blood?

C’mon, man, get a grip.

He went downstairs at seven. Kazumi was just getting home. The tournament was approaching, and she was practicing every day before the new term began.

On New Year’s Day, Kotaro had visited the Sonois to offer his greetings. Mika had seemed cheerful and happy. The feeling in the household had been warm, and Aunt Hanako had been in a good mood. Kotaro half-thought he might be able to pick up some fresh information about Mika’s problem, but what he saw put him at ease. Just as her mother had predicted, the worst seemed to be past and the problem was dying down. Which basically meant it was solved.

“Hey, you’re home,” Kotaro said. Kazumi ignored him. For a girl of her age, an older brother ranked lower than an insect.

“How’s Mika?”

Kazumi padded off toward the bathroom, radiating an aura that declared,
Can’t you see I’m tired and in a bad mood?
As she went down the hall she half-turned and spat out, “You saw her at New Year’s.”

“That was then.”

“It was last week. What day is it, anyway?”

“Fine, forget it.”

Asako didn’t take her eyes off the TV all through dinner. She kept talking about what a terrible crime it was and how the world was getting worse and worse, but for all that she seemed to have a terrific appetite.

The crime absorbed her attention. She worried about the victim’s family and hoped for a solution as soon as possible. Most people watching the news right now were probably feeling the same thing, and like most of them, Asako Mishima wasn’t unusually curious about homicides, nor was she impetuous or unusually tenderhearted.

Yet to Kotaro—preoccupied as he was with Kenji’s whereabouts—there was something ugly about his mother’s interest in the crime. She might feel sympathy for the victims, but there was something about the crime that was intoxicating. And she was enjoying it.

Kazumi had showered before dinner. Now she ate in sullen silence with a towel wrapped around her head.

“Your father will be home tomorrow. I’ll be making something special. When are you planning to come home, Ko-chan?”

Kotaro wasn’t sure what condition he’d be in at this time the next day, but it was no time to spoil his mother’s mood.

“I’ll probably be home by dinner.”

“You’re going to stay up all night and then go straight to class? Well, your studies are more important than that job of yours,” Asako said pointedly and stared at Kotaro. “Making a student work all night? I can’t say I appreciate what Kumar is doing.”

“Come on, Mom. Cyberspace doesn’t go to bed when the sun goes down.”

“I don’t have the faintest idea what you mean.”

“We’re like security guards. Sometimes we have night duty. What’s the problem? I’m getting some good experience.”

Kazumi pushed her empty plate away and left the table. After she went upstairs, Asako lowered her voice. “Do you think something happened at practice?”

“She’s got a competition coming up. She’s just on edge.”

“Are you going to take a bath before you stay up all night?”

“No. I’d probably just catch a cold.”

“Well at least change your underwear, for heaven’s sake.”

For a moment Kotaro felt a pang of guilt about lying to his mother. He also found himself thinking she was a pain in the neck.

With his bulging backpack slung over his shoulder, he crept into the garage and opened the toolbox. The straight crowbar was right on top. If he tried walking around Shinjuku at night with this thing in his hand—or sticking out of his backpack—he’d have company very quickly in the form of an officer of the law. He vacillated, wondering what to do, and finally decided to slip it into an umbrella case his mother had picked up for a hundred yen at a thrift store.

He rode his bicycle to the station with the case bungeed to the frame. The train into the city had few passengers and was cozily warm. The heat coming up from the vents below the seats made him sleepy. As he sat half-drowsing, Kotaro almost wondered if his plan to break into the building was just a dream.

A monster with wings …

Mana’s upraised finger …

He got off in Shinjuku and navigated his way to the ticket gate through the throngs of people who packed the station every day of the week, night and day, rain or shine.

Shinjuku. Bright lights, dark corners, trendy and vulgar, vibrant and decrepit, throbbing with life and on its last legs. This entertainment district of entertainment districts, with everything ever found in any entertainment district anywhere, was impossible to categorize.

Kotaro’s path from the station to the tea caddy building was in the opposite direction from the one he’d taken yesterday from Asashi House. Away from the bustle of the station, Shinjuku’s quiet neighborhoods were packed with residences along narrow streets. Kotaro could feel the life of the city pulsing around him.

The power was still off at the tea caddy building. The blackness around the building was complete. An island of darkness like this was hard to find in the city.

Kotaro’s heart beat faster. He was walking faster now, too, with the same rhythm.

When he’d checked out the building in daylight with Masao, they’d both been astonished by the strange barricade blocking street access to the service entrance. Masao had conjectured that it might have something to do with a suspicious fire some time before.

There was no barrier facing the main entrance. The double doors were easy enough to approach, though not to go through. They were locked and secured with a thick padlocked chain.

By walking between the building and a low cinder-block wall, Kotaro had been able to reach the back of the building and the service entrance, but the path was so narrow he’d had to traverse it by walking half-sideways. Masao didn’t even try. He was not only too large, his paunch was too big.