The Silent Dead (2 page)

“Burning a dead body until it's completely carbonized isn't such an easy thing to do, is it?”

Reiko was having tempura with her chilled noodles. Kunioku had gone for the more basic option. She felt a bit guilty, knowing that today was Kunioku's turn to pay. Still, it wouldn't make sense to come here and not try the tempura. That was what this place was famous for.

Kunioku slurped appreciatively as he tipped broth from his bowl into his mouth.

“No, it's not. When an amateur tries to get rid of a body by burning it, the body usually ends up in the boxer stance.”

Reiko had heard of the boxer stance. Some people called it the pugilistic posture. It was a phenomenon caused by the flexor muscles and protractor muscles contracting at different rates due to heat. The back rounded out, and all four limbs pulled tight to the body.

Plenty of killers tried to dispose of their victims by burning the bodies. However, fully carbonizing a human body without a large furnace was all but impossible. If they tried burning a body on a patch of empty ground, the body rigidifying into the boxer stance was actually the best possible outcome. In the worst-case scenario, the body actually expanded in the heat. The heat of the fire also served to harden internal tissue structures, resulting in less overall postmortem change. Whichever way you sliced it, it wasn't a very smart way to dispose of a corpse.

Passing off a murder victim as the unfortunate result of an accidental fire wasn't easy either. Since dead people didn't breathe, they didn't ingest any smoke; the resulting absence of soot in the windpipe was something an autopsy could easily uncover. At that point, it became clear that the victim was dead before the fire started, whether murdered or from natural causes. Burning the body of someone who had died from natural causes was an infringement of Article 190 of the law. “Destruction of a corpse” was a criminal offense.

“I recently worked on a fully carbonized body,” continued Kunioku. “It was actually a tragic case—a child who'd fallen into an incinerator. It wasn't easy, but I managed to establish that the kid was still alive when he went into the flames. I wasn't able to determine whether it was an accident or not, though I heard that the local police decided to call it an accidental death in the end.”

Reiko and Kunioku lunched together once or twice a month. They went to all sorts of places—fancy French restaurants, backstreet grilled-chicken joints, ramen noodle bars—but the topic of conversation was the same whatever the venue: bizarre deaths.

Their last get-together had been at a smart Indian restaurant. Kuniko had talked about
Naegleria fowleri
, a parasitic amoeba that bred in bodies of fresh water during the summer months. The amoeba went directly into the brain via the nasal cavity, where it propagated, consuming the brain and reducing it to mush. Japan's second-ever death connected to
Naegleria fowleri
had recently been recorded in Tokyo.

That particular case had been an accidental death resulting from infection, but Reiko and Kunioku had discussed the feasibility of using the amoeba for murder. Kunioku had mentioned something about testing the water quality of the lakes and ponds in Tokyo. Reiko wondered how that turned out.

Kunioku poured a little more broth into his bowl.

“It was just too awful. The parents were young and half out of their minds from grief. To make things even worse, we discovered that the kid had fallen into the incinerator because of his old grandfather's carelessness.”

Reiko nodded. She glanced up at the mop of tousled gray hair that made Kunioku look so much older than he actually was. There was something inherently comical in his referring to anyone else as an “old grandfather.”

Still, Reiko always enjoyed her dates with the old man. He had vast experience as a coroner.

Coroners were experts in unnatural death. They dealt on a daily basis with whatever fell into the gray area between death while receiving medical treatment and straightforward homicide—accidental death, sudden death, death from sickness at home, suicide, murder tricked out as suicide, and murder tricked out as natural death. For a detective like Reiko, everything that Kunioku talked about was fascinating.

He turned on her with a mischievous glint in his eye.

“Got yourself a man yet, sweetheart?”

She almost choked on her noodles.

“Oh no. Not you too.”

“Me too? What do you mean?”

Reiko snorted, her mouth a tight, straight line of scorn. “I mean you plus my father, my mother, and my aunt. My aunt's the worst of the lot.
You're already thirty, Reiko. You can't keep playing cops and robbers forever, you know
. I'll be thirty next year—that's a fact—but that ‘cops and robbers' stuff is going too far. She's even started setting me up on dates with prospective husbands on my days off.
Pushy
isn't the word for the damn woman.”

Kuniko chuckled gleefully. “So? How did the dates go?”

Reiko grinned back. “So far this year, I stood two of them up and left one in the lurch when I got called to a crime scene mid-date.”

They both laughed loudly. When the hot soba broth was served, Reiko poured a generous amount into her bowl. It was perfect timing. The air conditioning in the restaurant was a little strong. It felt good when she came in off the street, but now she was feeling chilly.

“Hey, doctor,” she began, putting her bowl back down. “Why do you invite me out to lunch like this?”

Kunioku put his bowl down too.

“I get to have lunch with my angel. I enjoy being with you.”

“Like being with a grandchild?”

“Ouch! No, like being with a girlfriend.”

“My turn to say ‘ouch.'”

Kunioku pulled a weepy face.

“You're going to break my heart.… Anyway, one-sided love is good enough for me at my age.”

“How about your job? You've been doing postmortems on unnatural deaths for decades. Do you still enjoy it?”

“Absolutely. Even now, I still learn something new every day. Forensic pathology isn't like clinical medicine. It doesn't advance by leaps and bounds. We don't have miraculous breakthrough drugs and amazing medical devices. All we have is the data we accumulate through performing countless autopsies, and the instincts and perceptiveness that come with experience. Experience isn't something that can be acquired overnight. That keeps all the ambitious youngsters below me at bay. The job's a perfect fit for an old lazybones like me.”

Kunioku picked up his bowl again. The back of his hand was mottled with liver spots of different sizes. “The pay's not great. That's the only fly in the ointment. After all, I'm an employee of the Tokyo municipal government. If I had my own practice, I'd probably be able to live a little better. Frankly, though, I'm more than content with this life of mine, plying my scalpel to communicate with the silent dead—and having lunch with you from time to time.”

Reiko secretly saw Kunioku as the grandfather—no, that wasn't fair—as the uncle she'd never had. She liked the way he was prepared to come out and say that he enjoyed a job that would have most people running for the hills.

As a cop, she wanted to be like that, too.

She'd made lieutenant at the unusually young age of twenty-seven, despite not being on the management fast track. Soon after that, she'd been tapped by the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department and was made a squad leader in the Homicide Division.

A young woman lieutenant—younger than many of her subordinates—working Homicide got tongues wagging. Inside the department, there were plenty of people ready to grumble about her being a “little miss” who “just knew how to ace tests.” Whenever she messed up, her colleagues judged her far more harshly than they did her male counterparts. Everyone talked pointedly about “the unbridgeable gap between exams and real-life experience.” Within earshot, naturally.

The working environment was hardly comfortable, but it never even crossed Reiko's mind to put in for a transfer. She was proud to be a detective and couldn't conceive of doing anything else. Like Dr. Kunioku, she wanted to be able to say, hand on heart, that she enjoyed her work. Luckily, she got on well with the men in her squad. That was largely thanks to her direct boss, Captain Haruo Imaizumi, head of Unit 10, who was responsible for bringing Reiko into Homicide in the first place. She had a superior officer and subordinates she could trust. That made her one of the lucky ones.

With all the grief her family gave her for not being married, these days she had more stress to deal with outside of her job. Next year she'd hit thirty. Still living at home, she would graduate from a “singleton” to an “over-the-hill.” The time was coming when she wouldn't be able to laugh off their criticisms any longer.

After working on a stalker homicide case in Itabashi, she'd spent the three days' leave she'd wangled at the family home in Minami-Urawa. Not a relaxing time. Now she was on standby at the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department HQ in central Tokyo, waiting to be called in on a case. If nothing came in today, it would be her sixth day just cooling her heels. No murders was good news for society at large but bad news for Reiko, who ended up spending more time stuck at home with her parents. If nothing came up, she'd have to traipse back to Minami-Urawa again tonight. Maybe it was because her neuralgia was acting up, but recently her mum seemed to be more hostile than ever.

Please, God, give me something to do!

No, God wasn't in the business of doling out work to homicide detectives. Murderers were the people who sent jobs her way.

“Hey, darling, anyone home?” No sooner were the words out of Kunioku's mouth than the cell phone in Reiko's breast pocket started to vibrate. She pulled it out with glee. It was the TMPD.

“Himekawa speaking.”

“It's me. Where are you?”

It was Captain Imaizumi of Unit 10.

“I'm having lunch with a friend.”

“With Dr. Kunioku? You available?”

“Yes.”

“Good. Kusaka's been rushed to hospital with acute appendicitis.”

Mamoru Kusaka, like her, was a lieutenant in the Tenth with a squad under his command. He was also Reiko's second least–favorite person in the universe. There was no love lost between their squads. The news of his appendicitis actually brought a smile to her lips.

“You mean we get to step in?”

“That's right. I may need to bring in Katsumata too. We'll see how things go.”

Lieutenant Kensaku Katsumata was a squad leader from Fifth. In the department, though, his nickname was Stubby. Everyone referred to his team, which was made up of intel experts, as Homicide's Public Security Bureau. Joining forces with them would be bad news for Reiko. They'd suck up any leads that she and her boys dug up and give them nothing in return. That's how they operated. Even with a head start, Reiko's team would need to be careful not to have a march stolen on them.

“I understand. We'll try to work fast.”

“The crime scene's in Kanamachi. The local police station is Kameari. Here's the address.”

Reiko jotted down the details in her notebook and consulted her watch. She'd need just under an hour to get to the place.

“I'll be there before three.”

“Good. I'm heading over there now myself.”

She clapped her cell phone shut. Kunioku was smiling at her.

“You look like the cat who got the cream.”

Did she? Macabre though it was, nothing gave her as much pleasure as heading out to a crime scene.

“No, it's just—I'm just thinking that this case saves me from having to go home to my misery-guts parents' place.”

She wasn't ready to go all out and admit to being happy.

 

2

TUESDAY, AUGUST 12, 2:37 P.M.

Reiko got off the train at Kanamachi station and hopped on a bus heading north. She checked the address of the crime scene and saw that the body had been found very close to Mizumoto Park. The park was next to a flood control basin.

Smothering heat enveloped her the instant she got off the bus and momentarily stopped her in her tracks. Something cold and nauseous welled up inside her. She hated summer. It brought back memories of that awful night. That summer when she was seventeen.

It's okay. You're not in high school anymore
.

Reiko forced the demons down. That was her old self. Just memories. She was weaker then. It had gotten easier over the years. She was more able to keep those memories at bay, particularly since making lieutenant. That she was a police officer, and the pride she felt in her rank helped her stay in control.

These damn freckles I get in the summer are a much more serious problem now.

She gave a toss of her chin and held her handkerchief over her eyes like a sun visor. The gesture was of little practical use, but it made her feel better. Although this neighborhood was within the twenty-three wards that made up Tokyo, there were fewer tall buildings this far out. That meant less shade—and more sweltering heat.

She crossed the main thoroughfare and caught a glimpse of water—it looked like a river—through the railings. That had to be the inner reservoir. It was nothing more than a triangular fishing pond ringed with concrete. Twenty or so rowboats—probably for fishing—were moored along the bank, the paint peeling on all of them. No one was actually fishing.

Normal enough on a weekday afternoon
.

As she walked along the pond, she spotted the police on the far side. Why weren't there any police cars? Had they all parked somewhere else? She walked over to the scene.

METROPOLITAN POLICE. KEEP OUT.

The familiar yellow tape blocked her path. The uniformed officer on guard gave her a skeptical look as if to ask,
Who's this damn woman?