Kitazawa waited for the other two to look up from the piles of papers in their laps.
“What do you think? Did you notice anything?”
Hashiba answered immediately. “There seems to be a pattern in terms of the location of the disappearances.”
Each of the profiles included the prefecture and municipality where the disappearance had taken place. Saeko had noticed the same thing. Certain prefectures cropped up quite often—Mie, Yamanashi, Tokushima, Shizuoka, Oita, Nagano, Kagawa, Aichi, Niigata—while there seemed to be very few cases in northeast Japan and Hokkaido. Just as Hashiba had noted, there seemed to be a notable discrepancy in the geographic distribution of the reports.
“Why would that be?” Saeko wasn’t so much asking Kitazawa as wondering aloud.
The prefectures with many disappearances had two to three times as many cases as the ones with fewer cases. It would make sense if they reflected differences in average income from prefecture to prefecture, but even with that in mind the discrepancies were too large. Besides, there were almost no disappearances of the kind in Hokkaido and Okinawa, two prefectures with high levels of unemployment, calling into question whether economic factors were even relevant.
Kitazawa gave Saeko a quick glance of affirmation before continuing. “The same thing occurred to me. The locations of the disappearances are clearly skewed towards certain areas. Just as I suspected, location seems to be relevant to these cases. But what on earth could be causing the cases to be distributed so unevenly? I considered every factor I could think of—income, unemployment rate, homeownership rates—but none of them lined up. I thought that looking at the distribution at a prefectural level might be too broad, so I tried analyzing the data on a more local scale, but I still couldn’t figure out the determining factor. But I knew there had to be some sort of commonality among the locations that have experienced a lot of these disappearances. The results were too skewed for it to be pure coincidence.”
“So, did you figure it out?” Saeko pressed.
“Well, I don’t know how to say this …”
“Don’t keep us in suspense! Come on, out with it!”
“Patience, please. I’m still not sure whether or not I believe it myself.”
“Well, spit it out so we can all discuss it together!” Saeko urged irritably.
“All right, all right!” Kitazawa waved his hands to shush Saeko. Then he pulled out another document and handed a copy to Saeko and another to Hashiba. It was a map of Japan, peppered with clusters of black dots.
Saeko didn’t need to wait for Kitazawa to explain—she already had a pretty good idea what the map signified. With the disappearances represented as black dots on a map, it was much easier to understand exactly how they were distributed geographically. Immediately, she could see that the dots were concentrated mostly in the middle of Japan. There were very few in northeastern Japan, and just a few in the middle of Hokkaido. But that wasn’t all. As she examined the map more carefully, Saeko began to notice an even stranger geographic pattern. The clusters of black dots formed a recognizable symbol.
A cross!
The image came to Saeko in a flash. Actually, it was more like a letter “t” lying on its side than a cross. A dark cluster of black dots occurred right at the intersection of the two lines.
The disappearances were concentrated in two bands, and those bands intersected right in the middle of the Japanese archipelago like a “t.” The slightly bowed vertical band ran right through the center of the country. The horizontal band bisected the vertical one, arcing through Shizuoka and southern Aichi, across the Ise Bay and Kii Peninsula, and crossing through northern Shikoku and central Kyushu.
Saeko glanced at Kitazawa’s face, wondering what he was thinking. All three of them had surely noticed that the disappearances were concentrated along a curved, slightly messy t-shape. The question was why. Why on earth would such a geographic pattern emerge?
The first association that popped into Saeko’s mind were the geoglyphs in the Nazca desert in Peru, otherwise known as the Nazca Lines. These famous motifs were created by carving away the dry topsoil on the ground to a depth of just ten centimeters. Many of them formed pictures of animals such as a monkey, a whale, a hummingbird, a condor, or a spider, and some also incorporated geometric shapes such as triangles, squares, and spirals. They ranged in size from a few dozen meters to several hundred meters in length, with the largest spanning a distance of fifty kilometers.
The Nazca Lines were discovered in the 1930s, when the first airplanes flew over the area. The ones spanning fifty kilometers were better observed through the advent of manmade satellites.
While nobody was sure exactly when the figures were created, they were thought to date back to the Nazca civilization, more than 1,400 years ago. Although the motifs had survived over the centuries, they were so large that the local inhabitants had been unaware of them.
Why on earth had the ancient Nazca people created pictures that were impossible to view except from far above?
There were countless theories explaining the geoglyphs as nature worship, irrigation design, religious ruins, an astronomic calendar, aircraft runways, and UFO landing strips, but to this day no one had come up with a truly plausible explanation.
Saeko had seen a picture of one of the Nazca geoglyphs in the frontispiece of a book in her father’s study. There was one that looked like a gigantic arrow, ending in a long straight groove that stretched across the desert. The fifty-meter-long vector extending from the arrow’s tip pointed straight towards the south pole according to the caption.
The sideways t-shape running through the middle of the Japanese archipelago on Kitazawa’s map easily spanned a distance of more than 1,000 kilometers. But what did it signify? Was it an arrow designating a certain location? Or some sort of sign?
Without speaking, Kitazawa stared intently at Saeko and Hashiba’s faces. His gaze was impatient, as if waiting for them to notice something else. On the other hand, he didn’t seem eager to clue them in.
“Of course, it could just be a coincidence …” he paused, turning the monitor of his computer towards them. Immediately, Kitazawa and Saeko found themselves peering into the screen.
“This afternoon, I was dozing off in front of the computer when it came to me all of a sudden. A vertical line through the middle of Japan, and a horizontal line that runs through Shikoku and Kyushu … In high school, I took a geography class as a science elective, and I remembered seeing an illustration like this one in our textbooks.”
For Kitazawa, the image hadn’t brought to mind the Nazca Lines, but a high school textbook. He used the mouse to bring up a relief map of Japan. It depicted all of the geographic features of the Japanese archipelago in a three-dimensional format so that the characteristics of the terrain were easily distinguishable at a glance.
Hashiba’s response was immediate. “The Fossa Magna? It can’t be!”
Kitazawa turned towards Hashiba for a moment and nodded before turning back to the screen. “It can’t be … That was my response, too. But what do you make of this?”
Two curved lines appeared over the detailed, full-color relief map. The one that ran vertically from the western edge of Niigata Prefecture down through Shizuoka City was marked “Itoigawa-Shizuoka Tectonic Line.” The horizontal line that ran from Suwa Lake and extended through Shikoku and Kyushu was marked “Median Tectonic Line.” Both were major fault lines—the intersection of adjoining tectonic plates—along which the epicenters of frequent earthquakes lay.
Technically, the Itoigawa-Shizuoka Tectonic Line wasn’t the same as the Fossa Magna. The Fossa Magna was a u-shaped rift, over six thousand meters deep and fairly wide, that cut vertically across the Japanese archipelago. The Itoigawa-Shizuoka Tectonic Line was in fact its western border. As the name suggested, it ran north-south from Itoigawa City through Hakuba, Omachi, Ina, Okaya, Kobuchisawa, Kushigata, and Minobu all the way to Shizuoka City.
There was no need to
juxtapose the two maps. At a single glance, it was obvious that the Itoigawa-Shizuoka Tectonic Line and the Median Tectonic Line coincided perfectly with the distribution of black dots.
For the first time, Saeko realized that the Takato area was located right on top of an active fault. In fact, there were several more black dots clustered just ten kilometers south of the Fujimuras’ home in Takato. It was the only place on the map where so many disappearances were clustered together.
Only Hashiba realized the enormity of the situation.
“I don’t believe it …”
As he leaned in towards the screen, his pupils moved rapidly this way and that and he licked his lips as if lost in thought.
The cause, the mechanism … Hashiba’s face was tense with concentration, his cheeks slightly flushed. Or perhaps he was simply quivering with innocuous excitement at the thought of breaking the story of the relationship between fault lines and mysterious disappearances on his television program.
7Saeko drew towards the window and pressed her cheek against the blinds. Chilled by the outside air, the glass drew the heat from her skin but did little to quell her agitation.
Peering through the slanting blinds, Saeko could see the workers in an office building across the street. There were no curtains on the windows, and the brightly lit interior of the office was clearly visible.
The women at their desks were all in uniform—a rare phenomenon in this day and age. The men wore suits, presumably from their own wardrobes as they were all different. The women outnumbered the men by a ratio of around six to four.
I wonder what sort of company it is? Saeko wondered, using her fingers to push the blinds apart for a better view. As she did, she lost her balance momentarily and reached out towards the window to keep herself from falling. The crunching sound the vinyl blinds made under her hand coincided with Hashiba’s voice.
“Perhaps the disappearances are signaling some sort of change in the earth’s crust.”
Saeko pulled her hand back from the blinds and straightened up. After her recent earthquake injury, the threat of changes to the earth’s crust held very real connotations for her. But where did he get the idea that the disappearances were a signal?
Kitazawa too seemed startled by the pronouncement. His coffee cup hovered in space on its way to his mouth.
“You know how animals vanish in flocks right before some unusual natural phenomenon occurs? Like lemmings leaping into the sea before an avalanche.”
Hashiba seemed to be drawing a connection between the predictive abilities of animals and the group disappearances of human beings.
Saeko remembered clearly how a flock of crows on the power lines outside had taken wing all at once just before the earthquake in Takato, and how all of the dogs in the neighborhood had begun howling in chorus.
Kitazawa showed no indication of laughing off Hashiba’s idea. Instead, he quietly moved his mouse again, bringing up a different map on his computer monitor. It was another relief map, complete with geological and tectonic markings, this time of the West Coast of the United States, with San Francisco and Los Angeles positioned towards the center.
“Everything I’ve told you so far pertained to just Japan. I don’t know how he did it, but Toshiya also gathered some information on disappearances overseas. After all, we need more examples to solve the question of whether our findings in Japan were pure coincidence. He entered data from a few dozen overseas missing persons cases into the computer. I’m sure you could read through all of it pretty quickly if you wanted to. Of those cases, there was one that I found particularly interesting.” Kitazawa looked down at the document in his hand and continued slowly. “The disappearance is thought to have taken place on September 25th of last year. Twelve days after the incident in Itoigawa, another group of people vanished in California. From their cars, not their homes. Two cars, right out in the middle of the desert. The vehicles were discovered near the bed of a small lake called Soda Lake, due west of Bakersfield, northwest of Los Angeles, California.
“The cars were discovered empty on September 26th, but it was evident that their inhabitants had disappeared the previous evening. The vehicles were pulled over on opposite sides of Seven Mile Road, an unpaved highway. The Ford was a rental car taken out by Hans and Claudia Ziemssen, a young couple from Frankfurt who had come to the U.S. on vacation. That day, they had landed at the Los Angeles International Airport, rented the Ford, and set out on a desert excursion. The other car was a Pontiac belonging to the Simpson family from Taft, California, comprising Mr. and Mrs. Simpson and their young child. The Simpsons had left home that day at around 1 p.m., supposedly to travel to San Luis Obispo. Now, at what time did the two cars cross paths? Based on the record of when Hans Ziemssen left the car rental lot, we can assume it was early evening. But the next day, when the two cars were found, they were both empty. The passengers had vanished, leaving behind only the vehicles and their belongings. This was in the middle of the desert, remember. Naturally, the authorities conducted an exhaustive search of the area within walking distance but found no sign of the missing people. Of course, they could have been abducted in a separate vehicle, but there were no indications of any kind of struggle.”
It was just like the domestic case, except for the fact that cars took the place of a home. A total of five people had vanished from the two vehicles. Perhaps they had suffered the same fate as the missing persons in Itoigawa and Takato.
Saeko, Hashiba, and Kitazawa slowly digested this new information.
“We know the exact location where the vehicles were found.” As Kitazawa spoke, he zoomed in on the map on his screen. The ocean disappeared from view as he zeroed in on an area roughly 130 miles northwest of Los Angeles, an empty wasteland between Route 58 and Route 166. The relief map afforded an excellent 3D view of the terrain. “Here,” Kitazawa pointed to a spot just a few miles north of Soda Lake, just after the turnoff onto Seven Mile Road from Route 58.
Saeko and Hashiba peered intently into the monitor. A black line intersected the exact spot where the five people had vanished from the two cars. It was a crooked, meandering line that snaked awkwardly this way and that. It wasn’t a road or a state border, so it had to represent some sort of subterranean geographic feature.
Saeko’s gaze traveled south down the black line until she suddenly encountered some English lettering. San Andreas Fault.
“It’s a fault line,” Kitazawa translated, indicating the jagged black line.
“Not again …” Hashiba murmured.
“The San Andreas Fault is a transform fault that marks the boundary between the Pacific Plate and North American Plate, and the cause of the earthquakes that frequently affect the San Francisco and Los Angeles areas. It’s an extremely active fault line. The empty cars were basically right on top of it when their inhabitants disappeared at roughly the same time. ‘Not again’ is right, Hashiba.”
Hashiba pointed at the display and seemed about to speak, but Kitazawa didn’t give him a chance.
“That’s not all. On October 22nd of that same year, just twenty-seven days after the disappearances on Seven Mile Road, another group of people vanished from a site 360 kilometers to the north.”
Kitazawa scrolled north on the map. Now the monitor showed an area just south of San Francisco, with a small lake in the center of the screen. Kitazawa’s account of the disappearances at Merced Lake on October 22, 2011 almost made it sound as if he’d been there himself.
Saturday, October 22, 2011
The first person to feel a stab of concern that evening was Mary, the mother of one of the missing teenagers.
On Saturday morning, Christine had gone out to do some landscape painting with the painting club at her school. As evening approached and Christine still hadn’t returned, Mary didn’t worry initially since the group had been accompanied by an art teacher from the school. But at seven o’clock she began to grow concerned and decided to check in with the chaperone. Christine had never been la
te coming home before.
The teacher’s husband answered the call. They were newlyweds, and he too had been anxiously awaiting his new bride’s return. The husband began to worry when he heard the concern in Mary’s voice and immediately called his wife’s cell phone number, but no matter how many times he tried, it went straight to voicemail.
Now Mary was really worried. She called the homes of the other two students and spoke with their families, only to learn that none of them had returned home yet.
The three girls had been members of the Richmond Junior High art club and had set out with their art teacher to work on landscape painting. They were all responsible students and had always been home by 6:30 for dinner. The teacher, for her part, had promised her husband that she would return by six that evening to make dinner.
When eight o’clock rolled around, Mary began to call around to other schoolmates of Christine’s to see if anyone knew where she was. Nobody had any answers. As nine o’clock approached, the families began to worry that the group might have been involved in some sort of accident or crime.
Still unable to reach the teacher on her cell phone, Mary decided to call the police and request an investigation. By then, it was ten minutes past nine o’clock.
When the group hadn’t turned up by midnight, the police intensified their search. Unfortunately, however, nobody knew where the group had headed for their painting project, and it wasn’t until close to dawn that they located four abandoned easels clustered at the southern shore of Merced Lake.
Alerted by the police, Mary rushed to the scene. The four easels stood on the shore as if waiting for the morning mist to clear. Catching the first rays of morning sun, they cast long shadows that stretched all the way to the water’s edge. The air was still, as it had been the previous day, and the lake surface was absolutely smooth. In their skewed-diamond formation, the four easels had the air of tombstones.