Saeko understood painfully well how Mizuho Takayama’s parents must feel. After all, she hadn’t given up on finding her father after all this time. They would probably still be looking for her ten, even twenty years later.
“So, we’re a team. Same target.”
“Yeah. What do you know?” Kitazawa chuckled.
“This changes our approach, of course, since there are multiple disappearances.”
“Exactly. The first thing we need to find is where their paths crossed. I’m going to Itoigawa tomorrow to see what I can find.”
Even if they didn’t find the connection between the three cases, the development was bound to draw a lot more interest to the articles and the TV series.
In the end, they had never solved the Fujimura family’s disappearance. Sadly, Shigeko Torii’s insights hadn’t led to any final resolution. Instead, it seemed the number of unsolved disappearances was only increasing.
If the string of cases were united by some sort of cause, it might help Saeko find her father. After all, she had discovered his day planner at the Fujimuras’ home. It had to be more than a coincidence.
Saeko had a flash of awareness of some sort of superhuman force. The instincts she’d developed investigating missing persons cases told her that something eerie was afoot. Some unknowable presence was sending a message, but was it a missive of malevolence or of goodwill? There was no way of knowing yet.
In any case, people were disappearing. Here and there, without any warning …
2Kitazawa had taken the Toyama Chitestu Main Line to Kurobe, transferring to the Japan Railway Hokuriku Main Line about thirty minutes earlier.
After passing through Ichiburi, they’d entered what seemed like an endless tunnel, but Kitazawa knew they would emerge from it soon. He pressed his face against the window, hoping to catch a glimpse of the sheer Oyashirazu-Koshirazu cliffs by the water’s edge. The Japan Sea was known for its turbulence during the winter, but the view of it he’d caught before they’d entered the tunnel had been placid. Just beyond Oyashirazu was Itoigawa. The train would arrive at 11:50 a.m.
There were only a few other passengers. When they finally emerged from the tunnel, sunlight flooded the car. It was overwhelmingly bright after the long passage through the darkness. Kitazawa turned his face away from the window, reached into his shoulder bag on the seat next to him, and pulled out a file.
He scanned his to-do list for when he arrived in Itoigawa. His first priority was to investigate the case from his client, which meant visiting the business hotel where Mizuho Takayama had stayed to see if he could find any clues. Another detective had already gone over her trail, but Kitazawa’s client felt that a specialist might find something the first investigator had overlooked. Even though the trail was more than a year old, the fact that Kitazawa was also looking into two related disappearances gave him an advantage.
The train entered another tunnel and emerged once more in an entirely different landscape. Oumi Station. The next station would be Itoigawa. Kitazawa stood up and pulled his travel bag and coat down from the overhead rack.
It was perfect weather for a walk. Even though it was a winter day in the Hokuriku region, it was sunny and there was no wind, and the cold was hardly biting. Kitazawa ate lunch near the station before meeting the public relations officer for the jade handicrafts exhibit that Mizuho Takayama had interviewed. When he got back to the area near the train station, it was after four in the afternoon.
The business hotel was near the mouth of the Hime River on Prefectural Highway 222. The last time anyone had seen Mizuho Takayama was when she had checked into her room here.
Kitazawa sat down on a sofa in the lobby, warming his hands with a hot can of oolong tea from a vending machine and losing himself in contemplation, once more mentally retracing Mizuho Takayama’s steps.
On September 13, 2011, Mizuho Takayama had left her home in Musashino at seven in the morning. She’d boarded the 7:30 a.m. Azusa 3 at Shinjuku Station. She’d gotten off at Minami Otori and transferred to the Oito Line, arriving at Itoigawa Station at 12:44 p.m. After stopping in the tourism section at city hall, she’d met with Fujio Kamitani, the public relations officer for the jade handicrafts exhibition. After photographing the exhibition, she had checked into her hotel at 6:20 that evening. Kitazawa had already verified her exact check-in time.
The next morning, check-out time came and went without Mizuho Takayama appearing at the front desk. The receptionist had called her room, but nobody had answered. Concerned, the hotel staff had entered the room, only to find no one inside. Mizuho Takayama’s bag sat on her bedside table, and a light jacket hung in the wardrobe. When she’d left her house the previous day, she had been wearing the same jacket with a sleeveless top, so it wasn’t hard to deduce what she was wearing at the time of her disappearance. Denim pants with a beige sleeveless top. The bathtub was full of water, but it appeared not to have been used; there were no hairs, no residue of dirt or dead skin, and the bath towel remained folded and pristine. The bed, too, had not been slept in, and there were no signs of an intruder having entered the room.
What possibilities did that leave? With very little effort, one plausible scenario came to mind.
After checking into the hotel, Mizuho Takayama had taken off her jacket and hung it up. They’d had an intense Indian summer that fall, and she was probably bathed in sweat. Eager to bathe, she’d filled up the tub, but something had interrupted her.
Someone had knocked on the door, for example.
Kitazawa considered a myriad of possibilities. Perhaps an unexpected visitor had come to the door, prompting Mizuho Takayama to turn off the faucet and leave with just her wallet and room key.
And then she was abducted.
Given the fact that there had been no commotion at the hotel, perhaps the visitor had been someone she knew. It was possible that they had planned to meet even before she left Tokyo.
A secret lover, maybe.
It was entirely possible. Perhaps she was seeing a married man, and both had arranged business trips that allowed them an overnight rendezvous. But something had gone wrong when they were out together that evening. The young lady had announced that she was pregnant and insisted that he leave his wife … Driven into a corner, the man had panicked, lost control, and …
Kitazawa could picture the whole scenario. It sounded like the stuff of talk shows, but he knew better than to rule out the possibility. Crimes of passion were one of the leading causes of missing persons cases, second only to debt troubles.
He would definitely follow up on Mizuho Takayama’s social life, but he had his doubts about whether she’d planned a rendezvous at the business hotel. She’d checked into a single room, he reminded himself.
But even the singles have semi-double beds. It might have been just the thing for a pair of lovebirds on a budget.
Still uncertain, Kitazawa decided to check into his room. He got up from the sofa and made his way over to the counter to fill out the paperwork, requesting a single room like the one Mizuho Takayama had stayed in.
As he opened the door to his room, Kitazawa did his best to put himself in the mindset of a young woman.
Last year, on September 13th just after six in the evening, Mizuho Takayama had checked into a room just like this one.
Kitazawa took off his jacket and hung it up in the wardrobe. Then he went into the bathroom and began to draw a bath, gazing at the water as it filled up the tub. When the staff had entered the room the next morning, the water had been completely cold, and the tub had been only half full.
Something occurred to her, and she shut off the water before the bath was full.
Kitazawa looked around the bathroom. It was a small, utilitarian affair, done in cream. There was a shelf in front of the mirror, but it was empty. The shampoo and body soap dispensers were mounted directly to the wall. Only the most basic amenities were provided.
Maybe she was about to take her bath when she realized she was miss
ing something. Something that she couldn’t get from the front desk. Like makeup remover, skin lotion, or sanitary products …
Without thinking about it, Kitazawa found himself shutting off the taps. He remembered that a convenience store featured in the file Saeko had given him. Drying his hands with a towel as he left the bathroom, he opened the file on the bed. Of the two men who had disappeared, Tomoaki Nishimura had worked at a convenience store.
Perhaps Mizuho Takayama realized she’d forgotten something and decided to run out to a convenience store.
The shop where Nishimura had worked was less than a five-minute walk from the hotel.
Kitazawa quickly checked his map for the convenience store’s location and left the room with the bathtub less than half full. He took only his wallet and map, leaving his travel bag in the room—much the way Mizuho Takayama had left the room. Their destination was probably the same, too.
3Saeko made her way up to the fourth floor of the library and found a seat in a reading room, hanging her jacket over the back of the chair. She opened her notebook on the table, set her pen down next to it, and cradled her chin in her hand.
She was recalling something her father had once said. Whenever he was excited, her father had a tendency to talk with his hands, making sweeping gestures.
“Think of what the world was like in the seventeenth century. Society was just emerging from the dark ages, which lasted nearly a thousand years. The Renaissance was beginning, and Europe was just starting to reawaken to its ancient cultural heritage. At the time, everyone took it completely for granted that if you dropped an object, it would fall to the ground. But one day, it occurred to one man to question why. Why did an apple fall downwards? His name was Newton. The fact that he questioned something everyone simply accepted as the way things were is what led him to the theory of universal gravitation.”
Saeko had only been in junior high school at the time. It was a balmy morning at the beginning of summer vacation, and she was seated at the dining table wearing a white sleeveless blouse. She was just about to eat breakfast when her father challenged her to question even the most commonplace phenomena.
As she listened to her father, Saeko sat with her chin propped in her hand. He prodded her elbow.
“Take how you’re leaning your elbow against the table. Why do you suppose your elbow doesn’t travel right through it?”
“What do you mean? That’s just how things are,” Saeko blurted, and then immediately regretted her response. She had walked right into her father’s trap. “Wait, no. Um, let me see …” Saeko wracked her brain, hemming and hawing. “Because it’s made up of matter,” she finally concluded, knocking on the tabletop with her fist for emphasis.
“Because it’s made up of matter? But Saeko, the fact that objects exist is actually much more difficult to explain. The real mystery is, why does the universe have any structure at all? And yet you take physical objects completely for granted.”
As he zeroed in on the point he wanted to make, Saeko’s father’s eyes sparkled. She had always enjoyed watching the changes in her father’s eyes.
“The fact that objects exist is a mystery?” she asked back.
Saeko still didn’t see what her father was getting at. He sensed her confusion and broke the idea down into simpler terms.
“The elements that make up this table and the elements that make up your body are different. Right now, there are 111 elements that we know of. How do we classify them? Basically, we distinguish them based on the number of protons and neutrons that make up their core, and the number of electrons that orbit that core. The element with the least mass is hydrogen, with one proton and one electron. The heaviest element is uranium, with 92 protons, 146 neutrons, and 92 electrons. I’ve already told you that the number of protons and electrons is always the same. Each proton is made up of two up quarks and one down quark, and each neutron has two down quarks and one up quark. You said that your elbow doesn’t go through the table because it’s made of matter, right? When you said that, what sort of configuration of electrons did you imagine?”
Until her father had posed the question, Saeko had never imagined how anything’s electrons were configured. After all, she’d never before thought to question why a part of her body didn’t pass through solid matter.
“You were probably envisioning something like this, weren’t you? The electrons orbiting the nucleus of the atom, forming a sort of sphere. A ball, if you will. And these balls are all packed together to make up a three-dimensional object. So let’s say the table is made up of black balls, and your elbow is made up of white balls. Both types of balls are packed together so tightly, there’s no way one could pass through the other.”
Saeko nodded decisively. It wasn’t exactly what she had imagined, but it wasn’t very far off. It was a pretty good description of how she conceived of matter.
“But the reality of the situation is totally different. If we had a microscope that could enlarge an atom to the size of a baseball, you’d be surprised by what it looks like. There wouldn’t be much to see. Basically, matter is made up of a whole lot of nothing.”
“Nothing?”
“Empty space.”
Saeko’s father opened the rice-seasoning container on the table and extracted a single sesame seed, holding it up on his index finger for Saeko to see.
“Say the nucleus of our atom was the size of this sesame seed—about a millimeter in diameter. The electrons would orbit it at a distance of fifty meters, and they would be so tiny as to be invisible to the naked eye.”
From where Saeko’s father was sitting, the living room wall was easily ten meters away. But the electrons’ orbit would be much further away.
“That’s all there is?” Saeko asked.
Her father nodded, grinning. “That’s it. Nothing more.”
If the sesame seed on her father’s finger was the nucleus, and the electrons were orbiting it at a distance of fifty meters, the atom really was mostly empty space.
If the outer shell of the atom were large enough to hold our whole apartment, there would be a nucleus in the middle the size of a sesame seed and nothing else!
As she came to terms with that concrete image, Saeko was seized by a wave of fear. Here she sat at the dining table, but if the atoms that made up the chair she was sitting on were mostly empty space, what was keeping her from falling through the chair and the floor, and straight through the earth’s crust?
Finally understanding her father’s question, a doubt resonated deep in Saeko’s mind. “Why, then? If matter is mostly nothing, why don’t we fall? Why don’t we pass through things?”
“Who knows? Maybe if everything shifted just a millimeter, we’d be in an entirely different universe,” her father teased. “But don’t worry. At the moment, the chances that you’re going to fall through the table and into an endless void are … null. But why? If matter is mostly empty space, why can’t objects pass through each other? Now, I want you to think about it and come up with the answer on your own. Why doesn’t one type of matter slip right through another?”
Until that day, whenever Saeko had watched scenes where people walked through walls on TV or in movies, she’d assumed they were ghosts. But now that she understood more about the structure of matter, she found herself wondering about things from a different angle. It seemed to make more sense for people to be able to pass through matter, and the real mystery was the fact that they didn’t.
Saeko had spent the entire rest of the day pondering the question her father had posed. None of the books she picked up offered an answer; they didn’t even go so far as to ask the question. She would have to come up with the answer for herself.
First, she reviewed what she knew about the structure of atoms in her mind. Compared to protons and neutrons, electrons were so tiny as to be almost irrelevant, and the mass of the atom was computed solely based on the protons and neutrons. The electrons whizzed wildly and unpredictably around the nucleus. If their orbi
ts were neatly contained the way an eggshell contained an egg, they would be easier to picture. But that wasn’t how it worked. And yet, no electron ever encroached on another electron’s territory.
The first idea that popped into Saeko’s mind was that of a force field. In science fiction movies set in outer space, sometimes the heroes had an invisible force field around their space ships that blocked the attack beams of enemy ships. Perhaps there was a sort of force field that prevented electrons from entering each other’s shells. An invisible force field just like in sci-fi movies.
When Saeko ran the idea by her father at dinner that night, his response was encouraging. “A force field, hmm? You’re on the right track. But what do you think creates that force field? I’ll give you a hint: think about the four interactive forces of the natural world.”
Now she was getting somewhere. Saeko looked up the forces that governed sub-atomic particles. With a more specific area of focus, it was easy to find what she was looking for. Almost any physics book contained information about the four interactive forces of the natural world: gravity, electromagnetism, the strong nuclear force, and the weak nuclear force. Saeko wasn’t entirely clear on the differences between the four, but she understood that electromagnetism, the strong nuclear force, and the weak nuclear force functioned on an atomic and quantum level, while gravity applied to large expanses of space, like the solar system and the universe. In other words, the former three forces were the ones that were relevant to the question at hand.
As she continued to read, she came across a passage that stated, “The strong nuclear force binds together protons and neutrons and causes a powerful electric force between the nucleus and the electrons.” That’s it! Saeko was jubilant. “While the atom itself carries no electric charge, it contains strong electric fields and charges within. These electric fields and charges are what give structure to matter.”
So that was what created the force fields! Even though atoms contained almost nothing but empty space, these electric charges caused a repulsive force between neighboring atoms, just the way the poles of two magnets repelled each other. At the same time, they created an electric force of attraction to bind atoms together and to pull multiple atoms together to form a molecule. The strength of the bond between atoms determined whether the matter was solid, liquid, or gas. Liquids and solids could move freely through gases, but solids couldn’t encroach on the space occupied by other solids. The electric fields produced structure from mostly empty space, and these structures combined to form larger structures. These fields were the glue that bonded solids tightly together. Saeko’s elbow didn’t pass through the table thanks to the powerful electromagnetic forces at work in the quantum world.