The Gate of Sorrows (41 page)

Her arm tensed as she aimed.

A dart flew along the line of her index finger, straight and silent, piercing the night air, slicing through the incense and the voices chanting sutras, through the sobbing and murmuring.

Kotaro followed its flight with his left eye. The dart was forged from darkness, honed and polished like obsidian, flying toward—

The mourners on the gangway. A single individual. A face in profile, clearly visible with his left eye. A woman. She was crying, holding a handkerchief to her face, arm linked with another mourner for support. Her lips trembled as she spoke to her companion.

The dart plunged into her back and disappeared.

Kotaro gasped. A syrupy blob began spreading out around the woman’s feet, growing rapidly larger, rising and morphing into her exact likeness. It was no shadow; she was much too far from the lights of the hall now.

Her doppelgänger.

A silver arrow cut from left to right across the darkness in Kotaro’s left eye and disappeared.

It is the keeper of her words.

Kotaro could
see
Galla’s voice. He stood rooted to the spot and blinked slowly.

The mourners moved solemnly, heads bowed, but Galla’s target was different from the others. Only she had a doppelgänger. No matter where the light fell, and even in shadow, her doppelgänger never faded, never changed.

Now Kotaro would know her even if she tried to disappear among the other mourners. A woman with a white face, dressed in black, followed by a black doppelgänger.

That is your quarry
.

He saw the voice again, a silver arrow.

“I understand,” he said. Galla turned away and disappeared. At the same time, he felt something soft touch his back.

“What is it, Kotaro?”

It was Kaname. Her eyes were swollen. She held a crumpled handkerchief to her nose. Makoto stood beside her, one arm around her shoulders.

“Nothing,” said Kotaro. He smiled. “Come on, let’s make the offering.”

The killer was a woman.

A woman about the same age as Ayuko had murdered her, and brutally.

If the news had come from God himself, Kotaro still would not have believed it—if not for Galla.

Still, how could he be certain Galla was speaking the truth? He had every reason to doubt it. Hesitation, confusion, denial—all would’ve been sensible reactions.

Yet he was certain this woman was the killer, and his confidence didn’t surprise him.

He followed her to the mourner’s lounge, observing her as he went through the motions of tidying up glassware and beer bottles. She sat with several men and women, all about the same age. There were many tears; the women in the group clung to each other for support. Now and then there was a wan smile.

They must be Ayuko’s friends from school.

He approached them casually. For the first time he saw the doppelgänger up close, the Shadow that Galla had summoned. He almost cried out in surprise.

It was moving. No—it was wriggling.

The Shadow looked like a black body bag—stuffed not with a corpse, but with writhing, wriggling animals. Disgusting creatures, rotting food, and sour-smelling old clothes combined to form this image of a woman, faithful to the last detail, a thing she dragged behind her wherever she went.

What was writhing inside the black form? It seemed ready to rip itself apart. Kotaro sensed suddenly that he might be able to see through the surface and catch a glimpse of what was inside if he focused his left eye.

He was right. He saw what moved inside the body bag: thousands of wriggling threads.

Her words
.

Millions of tiny threads, undulating and colliding and intertwining, in all the colors of the spectrum, from red hot to frozen indigo. The accumulated words of a lifetime.

“Do you want something?”

Everyone at the table was eying him with suspicion. The face of the woman with the doppelgänger was startlingly near. She was twisting in her chair, trying to get away from him.

“Is he a friend of yours, Kei?” a woman at the table asked.

“I’ve never seen him before.” The woman named Kei kept pushing her chair back, trying to get away from Kotaro. She was clearly upset.

He straightened quickly and bowed. “I’m sorry, I’m afraid I’ve been rude.”

He looked at the woman again. She was very attractive, but her makeup was over the top. Her face was a mask.

“I believe I’ve made a mistake. You wouldn’t be seminar classmates of our late president … ?”

“No, not at all,” everyone at the table said at once.

“We were in the same club with Ayuko.”

“The bicycle touring club.”

“Ah, I see,” Kotaro said with an exaggerated nod. “Then I
have
made a mistake. I was looking for Keiko Sato. She was in a seminar with Ayuko.”

“Kei’s last name is Tashiro, not Sato.” The woman sitting next to Kei pointed to her. “Keiko and Ayuko were the stars of the club. Who knows how many men with no interest in cycling were desperate to join because of those two?”

The rest of the table chuckled quietly. Keiko Tashiro lowered her eyes and tried to look suitably modest.

“Thank you. Every memory of Ayuko is precious.” Kotaro bowed again and hurried away, bottles and glasses clinking. His heart was pounding.

Keiko Tashiro. A member of Ayuko’s college cycling club. That was more than enough information. Finding out the rest would be simple.

But he’d made a bigger discovery.

I can read people’s words.

The first threads he’d seen belonged to Kazumi. He’d heard her words and seen the threads. With Galla, he had seen her words, like silver arrows, and heard them directly.

Now he’d reached another level. He’d been able to read the meaning of the wriggling threads inside Keiko Tashiro’s doppelgänger.

Of course, he hadn’t read everything perfectly. The Shadow contained all the words that a woman in her early thirties had said and accumulated during her life. Kotaro was still clumsy at using the borrowed abilities of his left eye, and naturally he couldn’t read all the words at a glance. It was like listening to a radio broadcast through a thick layer of static, and he had been able to catch only scattered fragments. But what he’d heard was more than enough.

From the Shadow of the woman whose friends called her Kei, Kotaro had heard one word more clearly than any other:
Sei-chan
. Kotaro wasn’t sure whether she was calling out to him, or if he was hearing echoes of the name spoken to others.
Sei-chan
. Seigo Maki. That had been Ayuko’s nickname for him too.

marriage love me what about me liar what else can I do greedy serves her right never again

The words kept coming together among the writhing threads, forming a tangled mass, pulsating, intertwining, flying apart. Whispering, importuning, reaching out to Kotaro’s eye.

Sei-chan Sei-chan Sei-chan Sei-chan Sei-chan Sei-chan Sei-chan

Everything was falling into place. He would extract her story from her words and read it the way Yuriko Morisaki read his story, the way Galla read Shigenori’s story.

She was the killer.

His heart wouldn’t stop pounding. His left eye burned.

The day after the funeral, a small team of people got together at Kumar to compile a database of the mourners and thank them for their contributions.

Kotaro volunteered to help. Keiko Tashiro had written her address and contact number on her registry card. The bold handwriting slanted upward to the right. The address was in Adachi Ward. She’d included the name of her building and her apartment number. In the telephone field, she’d entered a mobile number.

The night of the wake, Kotaro had noticed she wasn’t wearing a wedding band. That and the fact that she’d left a mobile number not only suggested she was single, but that she was living alone.

As he hurried to compile the database, the coroner released details of the autopsy. Ayuko had been strangled with something like an electrical cord. Her blood contained traces of a sedative. She had been knocked out and strangled before her fingers were severed. The police were checking the record of calls to her mobile phone and searching for video footage of her after she left the taxi in Shibuya. The whole area was a commercial district with hundreds of security cameras. If any of them had captured images of Ayuko with someone else, it would be a major break in the case.

He had no time to lose.

Before he made his move, he had to talk to Seigo. He had to know more about his relationship with Keiko.

For three days Seigo was nowhere to be seen. Ayuko had been his business partner and fiancée. He would be extremely busy coping with the aftermath of her death.

The aftermath of her death.
The killer had murdered an angel and destroyed her world. Now that world had to be put back together, piece by piece, without her.

On the fourth day, Kotaro decided he’d have to go ahead with his plan even if Seigo didn’t show at the office. But as he input his ID at the terminal near the door, he felt a hand on his shoulder.

“Morning. Thanks for all your help.”

It was Seigo. He was wearing a suit. His cheeks were hollow. Half of him had died with Ayuko, and what was left was perishing slowly. With each passing moment a little piece of his soul expired, yet he still took the trouble to thank each of his employees personally. He might be dying, but he was still Seigo Maki.

“Good morning,” Kotaro answered, not knowing what to say.

“You must be worn out. Are you holding up okay?”

“I should be asking you that.”

As Kotaro groped for the right words, Seigo input his ID. “You’ve been sleeping here, haven’t you? You must’ve missed a lot of class. I hope your parents aren’t upset. If it helps, I’m happy to talk to them anytime. Just let me know. I’ll apologize for keeping you from your studies.”

Come on, Seigo. Give me a break.

“It’s okay. My parents know what’s going on.”

“Really? Okay, then.” Seigo frowned and loosened his tie. “Today’s bank day. This has got to be the first time ever that I’ve worn a suit every day for a week.” He forced a smile—a miserable smile, it seemed to Kotaro—and turned to go.

“Seigo?” Kotaro was surprised at how shrill his voice sounded. “Um—this woman approached me at the wake. She said she was a friend of you and Ayuko.”

Seigo stopped and looked at him curiously. He shifted his bulging briefcase from one hand to the other.

“She said you guys were in the same club. The bicycle touring club.”

Seigo’s thick eyebrows rose as if to say,
Oh, her …

“Were you good friends with the members?”

“They were Ayuko’s friends.”

“So you weren’t a member?”

“I went on a few rides with them. She dragged me along.”

Kotaro watched his face closely. “Do you remember someone named Keiko Tashiro?”

Seigo looked genuinely doubtful. “Tashiro?” He shifted the briefcase back to his other hand. “That must be Kei. She and Ayuko were friends all through college. Kei, that was her nickname.” He nodded. “We all went out for drinks a few times. Good-looking, kind of a narrow face?”

“Yes. Her eyes weren’t real friendly. She was wearing a lot of makeup.”

“That’s the one. She was into makeup big time.”

“She came up to me while I was clearing tables in the lounge and asked if I worked at Kumar. She wanted to know how you were doing.”

“Really?” Seigo glanced at the floor. “I’ve got a lot of people worrying about me.” He waved thanks and turned to go, but Kotaro wasn’t finished.

“What kind of person was she? Were she and Ayuko close?”

Seigo eyed him somewhat suspiciously. “I said they were.”

“Does she work in the same industry?”

“I don’t know that much about her.”

His phone started ringing. He took the phone out, nodded to Kotaro and walked over to his desk.

Keiko and Seigo were connected through their relationship with Ayuko, and only casually at that.

Sei-chan Sei-chan Sei-chan Sei-chan Sei-chan Sei-chan Sei-chan …