The Silent Dead (26 page)

That leaves me no choice …

Otsuka looked over at Tatsumi quickly, briefly meeting his eyes. He ducked his head and climbed off his bar stool. Otsuka squeezed himself into the narrow space by the wall and prostrated himself at Tatsumi's feet.

“Tatsumi, I'm begging you. Don't ask any questions. Just take the job. Please.”

“You're wasting your time,” Tatsumi sneered.

Otsuka stayed flat on the floor.

“That's enough of that,” said the mama-san, coming out from behind the bar.

Otsuka refused to get up. “I'm begging you,” he said, grinding his forehead into the worn crimson carpet. “Please take the job.”

Otsuka didn't feel that he was making a fool of himself. It was his only option, and if he persisted, he would eventually get what he was after. He was sure of it.

After a while, Tatsumi exhaled heavily.

“What do you want me to do?”

“Huh?” Otsuka gasped and looked up in disbelief.

“I said, what do you want me to do?”

“You mean you'll do it?”

“You need to tell me what it is first.”

“So when I tell you what it is, you will do it?”

“Yeah, yeah. Fuck, but you're one bullheaded bastard. You wore me down.”

Otsuka couldn't keep the smile off his face.

Tatsumi emitted a derisive snort. “It was the same damn thing when you arrested me. I'd have been fine if I'd just stayed put in my hiding place, but you waited me out, staying in the same damn place for three hours. I blinked first. You're free to think I fell off that wall, if you want, but that isn't what happened. You wore me out until I climbed down out of that building and I gave myself up.”

Otsuka got up off the floor and grasped Tatsumi's hands.

“Thank you. Thank you.”

Tatsumi tore his hands away.

“Hang on. I don't work for free, you know.”

“I know. What's your daily rate?”

“Like I said, I need to know what the job is first.”

Otsuka nodded, pulled an envelope out of his briefcase, tipped out several pages of printouts, and pushed them across. Tatsumi flicked through them.

“Looks like a message board?”

“That's right. I need to identify the individuals who are putting up posts. Take this Wicked Wizard guy here. I want you to get his real name and address. Think you can do it?”

“As long as the guy uses the same handle for all his posts.”

“Someone told me that people can only be tracked back as far as their proxy server. You think you can identify the individuals?”

Tatsumi gave an impatient jerk of his head. “Whining about proxies is for amateurs. I'm a pro, man. Identifying individual users—piece of fucking cake. There's only one snag: I need to be online at the same time as they are. When they're offline, there's fuck-all I can do. You need time and patience for a job like this.”

“That shouldn't be a problem, then. I want you to identify the regular users of the different message boards. They log on nightly.”

Tatsumi held up his hand to interrupt.

“Hang on a sec. Did you say regular
users
? You're talking about more than one of them?”

“I was going to ask you to do eight.”

“Eight? Okay, but like I said before, I don't come cheap.”

“How much will it cost me?”

“For this—fifty thousand yen per person.”

“Fifty thousand times eight—you mean four hundred thousand?”

That was impossible. Totally impossible. What he was asking for was illegal, so he wasn't going to get any funds from the department. He was going to have to pay for it himself, and four hundred thousand wasn't feasible. His salary was less than three hundred thousand a month. Four hundred was beyond him.

“Could you see your way to giving me a discount?”

They spent the next half hour haggling over price.

 

3

SUNDAY, AUGUST 24

Reiko was visiting empty properties in Shibuya. Yesterday had produced nothing, and they'd drawn a blank at the live music club they'd been to that morning.

“Maybe we'd be better off trying a new angle, Lieutenant,” suggested Ioka, leading her into an Internet café. “Here's my idea. If we access the online message boards from the police station, people would only have to check the server to see that we're cops. But here, it's a different story. If we use an Internet café, no one will know we're cops.”

As far Reiko could tell, Ioka was proposing that they started posting on the bulletin boards. That way, they might be able to establish contact with the regular contributors, some of whom seemed very well informed.

“Not a bad idea. You think they'll bite?”

“No harm in trying.”

They went online and accessed one of the message boards. No one was talking about Strawberry Night right then, so the topic had been pushed down to the bottom of the list.

“We'll need a name to log in with. Hmmmm … everybody else here has a male handle, so maybe female would be better.”

“Does the name really matter much?”

“People talk about ‘the scent of a woman,'” said Ioka, snuggling his head into Reiko's shoulder.

“You're telling me I stink.”

“No, you smell good. You're fragrant.”

“And you're a pervert.”

“Oh, please. Abuse me some more.”

Reiko slapped Ioka hard. The sound echoed through the quiet room, and everyone turned to stare.

You never learn, do you? It's impressive in its own way.

Reiko responded violently to sexual harassment. On the train, with would-be gropers, she had notched up a tally of seventeen broken fingers and two broken arms. At work, her record was more modest: six broken fingers and zero arms—but she had kneed three guys in the balls and concussed a couple by kicking their legs out from under them. Ioka was lucky—he'd not yet suffered any broken bones.

Reiko wondered briefly if she was starting to like Ioka a little and was unconsciously cutting him slack.

That, I refuse to accept!

Ioka was unusually tough, she told herself, and could take any physical punishment she dished out.

“How about ‘Peaches'?” said Ioka, waggling a finger.

“What the hell kind of name is that?”

“It was the name of my pet hamster when I was a kid.”

“I don't want to share a name with your stupid hamster.”

“How about ‘Kasumi,' then?”

Reiko's cell phone buzzed on the edge of the table. She checked the caller ID. It was from task force HQ.

“Himekawa.”

“Imaizumi here. I need you to go to Toda Park. Fast.”

“Toda Park in Saitama? That Toda?”

“That's it. They've found a body at the Toda Rowing Course, wrapped in a blue plastic sheet. It's in an advanced state of decay, but it looks like it could be one of ours.”

“Yes, sir.”

Reiko felt a tingling in her spine.

*   *   *

Toda Park was just this side of the Arakawa River, which marked the border between Tokyo and Saitama. Reiko and Ioka got off the train at Toda Park Station and headed for the rowing course. A minivan with sliding doors—probably Forensics—was parked nearby, along with an unmarked car from the Mobile Unit and a black-and-white patrol car of the prefectural police. Twenty or so curious members of the public were milling around.

She showed her badge to the uniform on sentry duty. There was a pause, then a “Good afternoon.” He treated her to the usual slightly skeptical look but had the grace to lift up the yellow tape to let her through.

Advancing down the path, they came to a series of low-slung sheds. All the top universities, from Tokyo University on down, had boathouses here. Beyond the boathouses, they emerged beside a long straight stretch of water—the Toda Rowing Course.

The police had closed the park to the general public, so there were no civilians on this side of the river. The road on the far side, however, was a crowd of rubberneckers. It was a noisy, heaving scrum over there. Not even the blistering heat could keep people away.

The crime scene was indeed out of the ordinary. Bundles of blue plastic sheeting lay on the concrete bank—nine of them, all human-sized. As Reiko approached the cluster of middle-aged men gloomily inspecting the line of corpses, she slipped on a Homicide armband and introduced herself with a crisp bow.

“Reiko Himekawa, TMPD Homicide.”

“Good to see you. Fumihito Azuma, Homicide, Prefectural Police.”

The geniality of his smile as he presented her with his card took her aback.

“You got here fast. I specifically requested you. So, what do you think? Déjà vu all over again?”

The police forces outside Tokyo seemed to be staffed by people with a major chip on their shoulder with regard to the Metropolitan Police. But the Saitama Prefectural Police appeared to be the exception to the rule. Not only was Azuma friendly, none of the other detectives were eyeballing her either.

Azuma's the same rank as Sata was in the Saitama police.

It felt like good karma to Reiko.

“The plastic sheeting's certainly similar. Can I have a look inside?”

“Be my guest.”

Azuma gestured to end of the line.

“We lined them up in order. Newest to oldest.”

“Uh-huh.”

So the nine bodies were all in different states of decay, were they? That would make sense if they'd been dumped in the water at the rate of one per month.

“We think this one's the freshest.”

Azuma peeled back the sheet. Reiko inspected the body, taking care not to breathe through her nose.

Although the face had disintegrated, it was clear from the body shape that they were looking at a woman. There were two X-shaped cuts where the breasts ought to have been. It looked as if the X had been the leitmotif of her particular torture session; there were around twenty similar-shaped cuts on her upper body. The flesh around them was blanched and puffy, giving her body the appearance of being covered in white flowers. Reiko checked the presence of the incisions to the carotid artery and the abdomen. Assuming this corpse was the one directly before Namekawa, it would be about two and half months old. The state of decomposition looked about right.

Reiko got as close to the body as she could stand. She stared at it, as if willing it to speak to her. But like the previous two bodies, it was silent. Strange. Unable to learn anything new from the corpse, Reiko stood up.

Reiko nodded at Azuma. “Definitely the same MO. Who discovered the bodies?”

Azuma, who had been squatting down beside her, stood back up. “The sheet around this particular body seems to have been tied especially tight. The decomposition gases, which accumulated around the head, couldn't get out. That made the string around the feet snap and the whole thing floated up to the surface like a big balloon.”

He jerked a thumb at the row of boat sheds behind him. “Some Tokyo University students found this one during morning rowing practice. They were merrily rowing away, when this thing bobbed up right next to their boat. Must have given them one hell of a shock. It sank straight back down again. That could have been the end of it, but luckily for us one of the boys had been paying attention to the news and knew something about you lot finding bodies wrapped in blue plastic in a pond in Tokyo. He called it in, and the local precinct got HQ to send in a team of divers. Their search turned up these nine. That's about it, really. The divers called it a day when they ran out of oxygen. They'll resume the search tomorrow. It's funny how after you found your bodies in Tokyo, this lot pops up over here. It's almost like they're trying to be found to get back at whoever killed them.”

Azuma paused, then flicked to the next page of the report in his hand. The second most recent body was already so far gone, he explained, they couldn't identify its sex. Assuming they'd got the order right, they presumed it dated from three and half months ago. The overall skeletonization process was advanced, and they'd been unable to confirm any wounds to the neck or abdomen.

Azuma showed Reiko the third and then the fourth body. Both were in a state of almost total skeletonization, and she could see little difference between them. Inspecting the others would be a waste of time. Just as the thought crossed her mind, a most unwelcome voice boomed out behind her.

“I'm impressed, Lieutenant Himekawa. Working so hard in this heat.”

She spun around. Lieutenant Katsumata was standing directly behind her, his florid face gleaming with sweat. Had the task force HQ sent him here, or had he sniffed out the crime scene on his own? Whichever it was, Reiko knew that his presence could only make things harder.

“Hi, all. The name's Katsumata, Metropolitan Police, Homicide,” he said. “Damn, this heat.”

“Hi, I'm Azuma, Prefectural Homicide.”

The sight of Azuma handing his business card to Katsumata, as he had just done to her, made Reiko irrationally angry. She cleared her throat loudly to get everyone's attention.

“Lieutenant Katsumata, why are you here?”

“Are you so up your own ass that you think you're the only one to hear about this crime scene? You think a fool like you knows anything I don't? You're too damn arrogant, you dumb hick.”

Azuma, who was standing next to Katsumata, looked utterly mystified.

“I'm not arrogant.”

“Yes, you fucking are. Anyway, everything's turned out roses for you. This parade of stiffs will give a nice credibility boost to that murder show theory that you and your sidekick floated.”

“Hey, wait a—” exclaimed Reiko.

“What are you talking about?” broke in Azuma. “What's this about a murder show?”

Katsumata turned to him, his face beaming. “We've got some unusual information I can't really tell you about, but the fact is—”