The Silent Dead (11 page)

*   *   *

The next day, I started looking for the guys who'd killed Mako. I'd never heard of them, but it seemed like everyone else had. I walked the streets, listening to what people were saying, sometimes following them. As I followed them, I pushed the blade of my faithful box cutter in and out in my pocket.
Clickety-click. Clickety-click
.

It took me three days to find the killers. There were three of them. They looked like university students. Maybe they were hipper new-look yakuza. Who cares? In this world, there are two types of people: winners and losers. And we all have the same color blood: red. Lovely, luscious red.

“It was him. He made us do it. We went too far. You hear me? I know we crossed the line, but he's the one who should pay.”

“That's not what happened.”

“Don't try and wriggle out of it. You got carried away and did all kinds of crazy shit to her. You were the one who strangled her.”

“You were happy to watch.”

“Yeah, I watched. I didn't join in.”

“That's what you say.
Now
.”

I'd had enough. I didn't want to hear any more. I wanted to see some blood.

A gurgling shriek.

“
What the fuck!
”

It was a fountain, a beautiful bright red fountain. Everything in my vision was monochrome—everything except where the red blood was spraying into the air. I was back to glorious Technicolor. The sliver of sky between the rooftops was violet. The wall on one side of me was dark green, the other beige. The handle of my box cutter was baby pink.

“You're out of your fucking mind!”

One of the gang made a run for it. I let him go. I just gazed up at the night sky, drinking it in. God, it felt good. I remembered how it felt when I killed my dad. I remembered my mother. I remembered the cozy cardboard shelter of my old homeless friend. And I remembered Mako—her smile, her voice, her beautiful blonde hair, and most of all, her kindness.

At my feet lay a still-twitching body, its face red like a gigantic ripe strawberry. One of the three was dead, one had fled, but for some reason one of them stayed behind with me.

 

1

SATURDAY, AUGUST 16

First thing in the morning, a fleet of police vehicles swept into Mizumoto Park and parked around the fishing pond. The atmosphere was tense.

Everyone was there. Chief of Homicide Wada, Director Hashizume, and Captain Imaizumi from the Task Force HQ; the commander, deputy commander, and chief of detectives from the Kameari precinct; all the investigators from Unit 10, including Reiko's squad and their partners, plus a bunch of crime scene techs—making twenty in all. The Mobile Unit had dispatched a team of two commanders along with six divers from Water Rescue. Finally, around twenty uniformed officers from the Kameari precinct's Community Affairs Division were there to direct traffic and keep the rubberneckers at bay.

Rubberneckers were a royal pain in the ass. Unluckily, today was a Sunday. On a weekday, the local residents and random passersby would have been bad enough, but today there was a crowd that included a contingent of rod-toting geezers who'd come for a quiet day's fishing.

“You'll be in big trouble if we don't find anything.”

Hashizume made the same observation every time he surveyed the scene.

“Just because we've got a full house doesn't mean that we're putting on a show here,” countered Reiko, turning to inspect the pond.

“Whatever.… But we were lucky that this park's located in Tokyo's Seventh District. The Water Rescue Team's based here too. We'd probably wouldn't have gotten anywhere with a mobilization request across jurisdictions.”

“Yes, sir,” Reiko replied halfheartedly. She wasn't interested in the ins and outs of district politics.

“I've got no problem with you sticking your neck out, Himekawa, but you need to remember that there are twenty or thirty people out there who are after your job.”

“Yes, sir.”

Yes, sir, no, sir, three bags full, sir. You seriously think I don't know that?

The police department did its personnel evaluations by deducting marks for errors. The system expected you to do your job right—that was the baseline. Make a single slip up, and there was hell to pay. The higher your rank, the worse it got. It was a crazy system. The upshot of it was that useless jerks who made no mistakes because they did nothing scored higher than officers who worked their butts off but made the odd mistake en route.

Why do I get the feeling that seeing me demoted to local traffic duties wouldn't break your heart?

Reiko knew that at the end of the day Hashizume was a lot less worried about her being kicked a few rungs down the ladder than having his leadership put under the microscope.

Still, Reiko had a strong track record. So far at least, her hunches had usually panned out. After dragging his feet a little, Hashizume had finally called in Water Rescue. It was only when confronted with the sight of the divers doing their stuff and the huge crowd of gawkers that he began to lose his nerve. The sheer scale of it had driven him out of his comfort zone. Chief of Homicide Wada turning up at the morning meeting—something he almost never did—hadn't helped. Wada had questioned the need for an underwater search, and Hashizume had looked a fool when he could not explain his reasons properly.

It's risky, but someone's got to grab the bull by the horns, or else the case will go nowhere. Hey, no one ever said police work was supposed to be easy.

Reiko stared at the part of the pond where the divers had gone down. The glare of the reflected sunlight was too strong to look for long. She glanced at her watch. 10:30 a.m. The thought of the search possibly dragging on into the afternoon depressed her. Her thin blouse was already almost transparent with sweat. Half an hour before, Ioka had proudly announced that he could see her bra strap. Her answer was a deft knee in the groin. That had, briefly, shut him up.

The man who rented out boats and sold fishing tackle informed Reiko that the pond was three meters deep at its deepest point, which was smack in the middle of its roughly triangular shape. She needn't have asked, really. Of course it was deepest in the middle. Whoever disposed of the bodies had probably guessed as much, so the divers started their search there.

Four buoys floating on the surface of the pond marked the boundaries of the current search area. Each five-by-five-meter square took the divers between five and ten minutes to check. Then they moved the buoys and searched the next area. Reiko uttered a silent prayer every time the six divers came up for air. As the cycle of hope and disappointment was repeated, even the onlookers were starting to lose heart.

Are you searching properly, guys? Come on, I really need this.
Reiko had no proof that there were bodies in the pond. It was just a hunch, so naturally she was on edge. All she could do was wait—and hope.

Around the sixth or seventh block, the divers had only been down for a couple of minutes when one of them broke the surface.

“I've found something. Hand me the camera.”

Someone handed the diver a waterproof flash camera, and he dived back down.

Something?

What was it? Reiko was struggling—she'd been desperate to pee for a while already. Why couldn't the man just tell them what the damn thing was?

Three minutes. Five minutes. A diver, this one with no camera, came up and swam toward the bank.

“There's definitely something down there.”

Chief of Homicide Wada squatted down and peered into the water.

“It's upright and the right height for a body.”

The right height for a body!

“We've cleaned the slime and gunk off it. Whatever it is, it's wrapped in blue plastic sheeting.”

Blue plastic sheeting!

Reiko broke out in goose bumps.

The diver with the camera surfaced. Pulling a bag of tools after him, he swam over to talk to his commander and Komine from Forensics.

“Is it okay if we cut it?”

Komine scratched his head dubiously.

“It'd be better if you can bring it up exactly as it is.”

“I don't think that's possible. Even with all of us pulling, the thing didn't budge.”

The Water Rescue commander tried to broker a compromise. “We can try and do what you want, but there's a real risk of serious damage to the ‘package' if we pull it up by force. I'd recommend cutting it.”

“I understand.” Komine crossed his arms on his chest. “In that case, do what you think's best.”

The commander nodded and gestured at the diver. “Okay then, cut it.”

“Yes, sir.” The diver went back down.

Some time passed, then all the divers resurfaced. This time, though, there were seven, rather than six heads. Six of them were black, and one was blue. The blue one floated up, gradually revealing its full length, like a surfacing submarine.

There was a commotion in the crowd, which now straggled around the entire pond. Here and there screams were heard.

Captain Imaizumi patted Reiko on her sweaty shoulder.

“Nice work.”

“Thank you, sir. To be honest, it's a weight off my shoulders.”

Reiko exhaled a mass of air from her chest. She felt as if she'd been holding her breath for hours.

*   *   *

They lifted the bundle onto the shore and unwrapped it right away.

A murmur of disgust rose from all sides.

The corpse was naked. Male again. The face was in so-called Beelzebub bloat—angry and swollen to about one and a half times normal size. There was something creepy about the big purple head stuck on top of the pallid, bloodless body.

Just as with Kanebara, there was an incision at the throat slicing through the carotid artery, as well as numerous lacerations on the torso—though how they had been made was not immediately clear. The abdomen too was a gaping hole. The putrefied intestines had partially dissolved, and puffy white lumps of flesh dotted the tarpaulin. All the cuts had puffy and swollen edges. They would have had a hard time recognizing the wounds for what they were, had they had not seen Kanebara's corpse first.

It was probably only because the body had been wrapped so tightly in the plastic sheet that so much flesh remained. Normally, hungry fish and the motion of the water would have worked together to skeletonize the corpse. Although the hands and feet were swollen and resembled monstrous mittens and socks, the flesh had not become detached from the bone. If the forensics guys could still get prints, it would make identifying the victim that much easier.

The divers' debate about cutting referred to the rope that had been keeping the body in place. The bundle had been tied to a cement block. With no trapped gases to push the body upward, a single weight was enough to do the job.

A temporary halt to the search was called as the body was taken away to the forensics lab. The divers stayed behind to continue the search. There was no guarantee that the pond contained only that single body.

The investigators were ordered back to Kameari police station. The overall thrust of the investigation would need a rethink now that another body had been added to the equation.

*   *   *

Everyone was waiting in the big meeting room by 1:00 p.m. The Water Rescue team would need a little more time to develop their photographs of the underwater crime scene and to complete their report. Those investigators who had missed out on the discovery of the bodies were asking their colleagues how it had played out, while those who'd been in the park were skimming newspapers, drinking barley tea, and smoking cigarettes, all with a glazed look in their eyes. Other people were rereading files from the piles on the desk sergeant's desk.
There are a hundred ways to kill time
, thought Reiko as she looked around the room.

Suddenly there was a loud thump, and the door was thrown violently open. Reiko turned and saw a group of five men standing in the doorway in identical charcoal gray suits. They looked as if they were posing for a fashion shoot.

Stubby!
Reiko whispered silently to herself.

Stubby was the nickname of Kensaku Katsumata, a lieutenant in TMPD Homicide, Unit 5. Because his guys were all intel experts, everyone referred to his squad as Homicide's Public Security Bureau. It was more than a mere joke. Most of his team were intel experts who had experience dealing with national security issues firsthand.

Damn. I'd completely forgotten about him
.

Captain Imaizumi had warned Reiko that Katsumata was next in line to be assigned to the case if it showed any sign of dragging on. But the investigation had only just started and certainly wasn't on the rocks. Reiko guessed that the discovery of a second body had prompted the bosses to boost the number of investigators. Katsumata was just next on the roster.

The five men made a beeline for Reiko.

“You should think twice about swimming in ponds when you've got your period, princess.”

Katsumata's booming voice filled the room. Kikuta sprang to his feet, his fists clenched and his face flushed with anger. Reiko pushed him back into his seat as she got to her feet.

“That shouldn't be a problem. I wasn't doing the diving myself.”

“I know that, you hick. Anyway, your level 2 English certificate and your driver's license wouldn't do you much good underwater.”

Katsumata's jibes were right on target. Aside from her college degree, those were her only two official qualifications. She had never dived in her life, and although her period hadn't started, it was about to.

The follow-up comment about the driver's license and the English qualification were clearly designed to take his attack one level past plain sexual harassment. Katsumata was sending her a message:
I know everything about you that there is to know
. He was more like a stalker than an ex–Public Security Bureau agent.