‘OK. Where is that?’
‘Third floor,’ she said, returning to her writing. He looked and saw that she was writing New Year’s cards. From the personal address book on the desk next to her, it didn’t look like she was writing cards on behalf of the company, either.
‘Where on the third floor?’ Sasagaki asked.
The woman seemed aggravated by this, and jabbed towards the hall behind him with her felt-tip pen. ‘The elevator’s there. Just walk down the hall until you get to the door with a sign over it that says “Director’s Office”.’
‘Right, thanks,’ Sasagaki said, but the woman had already gone back to her cards.
Sasagaki went up to the third floor to find there was only one hallway on the floor, going in a square around the building, with doors along on either side. Sasagaki walked, checking the plates above the doors. He found it at the first corner and knocked.
‘Come in,’ he heard a voice say from inside. Sasagaki pushed open the door.
Kazunari was just standing from his chair, a large window to his back. He was wearing a brown double-breasted suit.
‘It’s good to see you. It’s been a while,’ Kazunari said with a warm smile.
‘Sorry I haven’t been in touch. Have you been well?’
‘I’m hanging in there.’
Kazunari guided him to a sofa in the middle of the room and sat across from him in an overstuffed armchair. ‘How long has it been since we actually met?’ he asked.
‘Since September of last year. At Shinozuka Pharmaceuticals, I recall?’
‘Yes, of course,’ Kazunari said. ‘I can’t believe it’s already been more than a year.’
‘I actually called the pharmaceutical company first, but they sent me here.’
‘Right, well, I left right after your visit,’ Kazunari said, a downward cast to his eyes. He looked as though he wanted to say something, but was refraining.
‘So you’re director now?’ Sasagaki said, as warmly as he could. ‘That’s quite the promotion. At your age, no less.’
Kazunari looked up at him, a dry smile on his face. ‘Is that what this looks like?’
‘Am I wrong?’
Kazunari stood without answering and went over to his desk. He picked up the phone and said, ‘Can I get two coffees? Yes, right away.’
He set the phone back down and turned to Sasagaki. ‘I believe I mentioned over the phone that my cousin got married.’
‘October, was it?’ Sasagaki said. ‘I’m sure that was quite the affair.’
‘It was rather subdued, actually. A small ceremony at a church, followed by a relatives-only reception at a restaurant in town. Considering it was the second time around for both of them, I think they wanted to keep it simple. That, and my cousin has children.’
‘You attended?’
‘I am a relative, so, yes. That said,’ he sat back down in the armchair and sighed before continuing, ‘I’ve no doubt they would rather not have invited me at all.’
‘You never withdrew your objections.’
Kazunari nodded.
Sasagaki had kept in close touch with Kazunari over the phone through the spring. Both sides had something to gain: Kazunari wanted to learn more about Yukiho, and Sasagaki wanted to learn more about Ryo Kirihara. So far, both sides remained disappointed.
‘You and I know more about her and what’s happened than anyone else I know and yet we still have nothing to go on,’ Kazunari said with a sigh. ‘I couldn’t open my cousin’s eyes.’
‘It was a tall order from the get-go. He’s not the first man she’s fooled,’ Sasagaki said, adding, ‘I was one of them.’
‘Nineteen years ago, was it?’
‘That’s right.’ Sasagaki took out a cigarette. ‘You mind?’
‘Go right ahead.’ Kazunari pushed a crystal glass ashtray in front of him. ‘Detective, I was hoping you could tell me everything today, the whole story. All two decades’ worth.’
‘That is why I’m here,’ Sasagaki said, lighting a cigarette. A knock came at the door – the coffee had arrived. Kazunari stood to get it.
Sasagaki took a sip out of his thick-rimmed mug and began to talk. He started with the body found in the abandoned building, then the ever-changing list of suspects, ending with Tadao Terasaki’s car accident that derailed the entire investigation. He filled in the details where necessary. Kazunari listened with his coffee cup in hand, but before long he put it down on the table and folded his arms across his chest. When Yukiho Nishimoto finally joined the story, he crossed his legs and took a deep breath.
‘That pretty much wraps up what happened with the murder of the pawnbroker,’ Sasagaki said, taking a drink of his coffee, which had by then gone lukewarm.
‘So the case was thrown out as unsolvable?’
‘Not right away, but without any new witnesses or information the general feeling was that it was only a matter of time before the case was put aside.’
‘But you didn’t give up, did you, detective?’
‘To tell the truth, I almost did.’
Setting down his mug, Sasagaki began the rest of his story.
Unable to find any clear evidence of Terasaki’s guilt, and unlikely to find any new suspects, the task force was drifting. There was talk of disbanding. Things on the streets had gone from bad to worse in the wake of the oil shock, and burglaries, arson and kidnappings were on the rise. Osaka police couldn’t afford to dedicate much manpower to tracking down one single murderer. Especially not when it was looking likely that the man who did it was already dead.
Sasagaki himself was starting to think he had reached the end of the road. It would be the third unsolved case of his career. Each one had a particular smell to it. There were cases so chaotic you didn’t know where to begin, which ended up being solved in a week. Then there were the cases that looked simple at first blush that ended up going nowhere. The Kirihara case was one of those.
So, a month after Terasaki’s death, when Sasagaki started rereading all of the notes they’d taken from the very beginning, it was more out of boredom than any real hope he’d find something. He mostly skimmed the vast pile of documents, pages upon pages without a clue in sight, but his fingers stopped when he found the report detailing the testimony given by the boy who found the body. His name was Michihiro Kikuchi, nine years old at the time of the discovery. The first person he told about it was his older brother, a fifth grader. The brother had gone to the building to make sure he was telling the truth, then told their mother, who had called the police. The report was mostly an outline of what she had told them.
Sasagaki was very familiar with the details surrounding the discovery. The kids had been playing a game they called ‘time tunnel’, crawling through the ducts in the abandoned building, when Michihiro had got separated from the rest. He’d circled around in the ducts for a while until he came to a darkly lit room where he found a man lying on a sofa. Suspicious, he looked closer and saw blood. The interesting part was what happened next.
‘He was scared,’ the report said, ‘and tried to leave, but there was a concrete block by the door that made it hard to open.’
Sasagaki found this strange. He thought back to the scene of the crime, remembering the door. It opened inwards, he recalled. It would have made sense for the murderer to place the block there to delay the discovery of the body, except that was impossible if you assumed he had then left the scene through the blocked door.
Sasagaki went to check it out. The name of the officer who’d taken the initial report was a captain named Kosaka from the local precinct.
Kosaka remembered the report in detail, but his explanation left something to be desired. ‘Actually, that part of the testimony was a little vague,’ he told Sasagaki with a frown. ‘The boy didn’t remember it very well. It was never clear whether the block was so close that the door didn’t open at all, or whether it was far enough away that someone could have opened the door enough to squeeze through. The kid was too flustered to remember. That
said, since the murderer clearly exited through the door, we just figured it was the latter.’
Sasagaki checked the forensics report on the matter, but they hadn’t bothered mentioning exactly where the block was in relation to the door, except to note that it was hard to tell because the boy who discovered the body had moved it.
Sasagaki was forced to give up that particular line of inquiry until a year later when he began to suspect Yukiho’s involvement following her mother’s death. This made the position of the block more important because its distance from the closed door would determine the size of the person that could have passed through and Yukiho would have been able to squeeze through a very small gap.
Sasagaki decided to meet with the boy, Michihiro, and what he learned came as a considerable surprise.
For one thing, the boy claimed to remember what had happened the year before perfectly – even better than he had at the time. That made some sense, Sasagaki thought. It would have been challenging for a nine-year-old, flustered at the discovery of a corpse, to put together an accurate statement. But he would have matured quite a bit in the intervening year.
Sasagaki asked him to describe how he had gone through the door in as much detail as possible.
‘Well, I couldn’t get it open at all at first,’ the boy told him. ‘When I looked down, there was a big concrete block there, right up against the bottom of the door.’
‘You’re sure about that?’
The boy nodded firmly.
‘Why didn’t you ever say that until now? Is this something you remembered recently?’
‘No, I said it at first back then when they were asking all the questions. But the police officer said it didn’t sound right and then I started to wonder and I guess I got kinda confused. But when I thought about it later, yeah, I’m sure I couldn’t open the door at all.’
Sasagaki gritted his teeth. This would have been critical testimony one year earlier, if the questioning officer hadn’t talked the kid out of it. Sasagaki told his superior officer immediately. But his boss’s reaction was cold. The kid’s memory couldn’t be trusted; not to mention that it was crazy to take a year-old testimony without a big pinch of salt.
Sasagaki’s boss at the time the investigation began had been recently transferred away and his replacement was ambitious to a fault, the type who would rather make his name solving a new, flashier case than waste his time on the half-abandoned search for the murderer of a pawnbroker.
Sasagaki continued investigating on his own. He had a path to follow now. It would have been impossible for whoever killed Yosuke Kirihara to have left through the door, and all of the windows into the room had been locked from the inside. None of the windows were broken, nor were there any holes in the walls, which left only one possible explanation: the killer had left through the duct the boy had used to get in.
An adult probably wouldn’t be able to fit through the duct, nor would they risk getting stuck without an extremely good reason to not just use the door. A kid who had been playing in the ducts, on the other hand…
Sasagaki’s sights were increasingly focused on Yukiho. At first, he tried to get some proof that she had played in the ducts with the other kids, but none of the ones who played there, and none of her friends, remembered ever seeing her go near the place. ‘No girls would play in there,’ one of the boys said. ‘The place is super dirty and there’s like dead rats and bugs and stuff. And your clothes get all messed up.’
Sasagaki had to admit, from what he knew of Yukiho, that it didn’t seem likely she’d have spent much time in the abandoned building. Another of the kids who said he used to play in there all the time wondered if a girl could even handle the ducts. According to him, there were a lot of really steep slopes inside them and places where you had to crawl up just using your hands for several metres, which meant you had to be pretty strong and pretty confident in your own athleticism.
Sasagaki took the kid to the building and had him try to leave by the duct in the room where the body had been found. He went outside to wait and about fifteen minutes later the boy was standing by an exhaust duct on the rear side of the building.
‘Yeah, that was tough,’ the boy said. ‘There’s a place halfway through where you really gotta climb. I don’t know any girls with arms strong enough to handle that.’
Sasagaki was inclined to trust the kid’s judgment on this point. There were girls in elementary school as tough as some of the boys, no question. But Yukiho Nishimoto wasn’t one of them. He couldn’t picture her crawling around like a monkey through the building ducts.
In the end he had to admit that it was possible his fantasies about an eleven-year-old girl killer were just that, and the boy’s original testimony had just been incorrect.
‘I agree. There’s no way Yukiho Karasawa was playing games in air ducts,’ Kazunari said. Sasagaki wondered if he called Yukiho by her college-era maiden name out of habit, or because he was reluctant to call her by his own last name.
‘I hit a dead end.’
‘But you did find an answer, right?’
‘Of sorts,’ Sasagaki admitted. ‘I tried going back to square one, getting rid of all my preconceived notions about the case. That’s when I saw something I hadn’t seen up until that point.’
‘Which was?’
‘It’s pretty simple, really,’ Sasagaki said. ‘Once you know a girl couldn’t climb through those ducts, it means whoever did use them to escape the scene of the crime was a boy.’
‘A boy…’ Kazunari said, giving it a moment to sit before he asked, ‘You don’t mean Ryo Kirihara killed his own father?’
‘Yes,’ Sasagaki said. ‘That’s exactly what I mean.’
Sasagaki hadn’t arrived at his conclusion immediately. It was a chance discovery on a visit to the Kirihara Pawnshop that first turned his suspicions towards Ryo.
He’d come back to the pawnshop to talk to Matsuura about Yosuke Kirihara’s life. He kept the questions light – Matsuura had clearly had it with the investigation by that point and wasn’t going out of his way to make Sasagaki’s job any easier. It was already more than a year into the investigation, which would strain anyone’s good humour.
‘Detective,’ Matsuura said at one point, ‘I think you’ve squeezed just about everything you can out of us. There’s nothing else.’
Sasagaki nodded, when a book sitting on the edge of the counter caught his eye. He picked it up. ‘What’s this?’
‘That’s Ryo’s,’ Matsuura said. ‘He must have left it there.’
‘Ryo read a lot?’
‘Quite a bit, yeah. He used to go to the library all the time.’
‘The library?’
Matsuura nodded, clearly wondering what the library had to do with anything.
Sasagaki put the book back on the counter, his heart pounding.
The book was Gone with the Wind – the same book Yukiho had been reading when he went to pay a visit to Fumiyo Nishimoto. If he was being honest with himself, it wasn’t much more than a coincidence. Two kids of similar ages reading the same book probably happened all the time. Nor were they reading it at the same time. Yukiho had read it a full year earlier.
But the discovery stuck in his mind. Sasagaki paid a visit to the library, a small, grey building about two hundred metres north of the abandoned building where Yosuke Kirihara’s body was found.
He showed a photograph of Yukiho to the librarian, a young woman with glasses who looked like she was only a few years past being a book-loving student herself. She nodded when she saw the photo.