The Silent Dead Read online

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  About the Author and Translator

  Copyright Page

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  Cast of characters

  TMPD, Unit 10:

  Reiko Himekawa—Lieutenant and squad leader, Homicide Division, Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department

  Tamotsu Ishikura—Sergeant, Himekawa’s squad

  Kazuo Kikuta—Sergeant, Himekawa’s squad

  Junji Otsuka—Officer, Himekawa’s squad

  Kohei Yuda—Officer, Himekawa’s squad

  Mamoru Kusaka—Lieutenant and squad leader

  Haruo Imaizumi—Captain, head of Unit 10

  Hiromitsu Ioka—Senior Officer, Kameari precinct

  Kensaku Katsumata—Lieutenant and squad leader, Unit 5, Homicide Division, Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department

  Noboru Kitami—Lieutenant, fast-track trainee, assigned to the Kameari precinct

  Hashizume—Director, Homicide Division, Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department

  Wada—Chief of Homicide Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department

  Komine—Lieutenant, Criminal Identification Bureau, Forensics

  Sadanosuke Kunioku—coroner, Tokyo Medical Examiner’s Office

  Note

  100,000 yen is approximately equal to 850 US dollars or 750 Euros

  PART I

  A putrid rain was falling, turning the whole world gray.

  I knew what was really out there in front of my eyes. The passing taxi that was sending up a curtain of muddy water from the potholed street was green. The umbrella that the little school kid was holding was red. I looked down at my shoulder. I could see that my navy blue school blazer had turned black in the rain. My mind recognized the colors—but my heart couldn’t feel them.

  My perception is monochrome. Not like a black-and-white photo, though. It’s got none of those soft edges, or depth, or sense of reality. It’s more like a crappy watercolor, a meaningless shadowy blur. Spilt ink on a sheet of white paper—that’s the gray universe where I live.

  The flimsy prefab house was old and its walls rain-blackened. The front door was unlocked. I pushed it open in silence. Straightaway a sour stink invaded my body. I’m not imagining things. The house itself was sick, rotten.

  Leaking sewage. A rank, animal odor. A thick, musty atmosphere. Mold on every surface—the floor, the walls, the ceiling. Living in that vile place was enough to destroy anyone’s sense of smell. Sadly, mine still worked. And the stink was rotting me from the inside out.

  “That you?”

  The voice gurgled like sludge oozing from a drainpipe. It came from the dimly lit living room at the end of the passage. It was about as welcome as a cockroach burrowing into my brain. I covered my ears. I did not reply.

  “I’m talking to you, shit-for-brains.”

  A shadow reared up and blocked the living room doorway.

  He’d gotten dressed in my honor. He wore a sleeveless running shirt. It looked gray to me; in reality it was probably brown. Otherwise he was naked. Everything in this place was foul. Dirt and ugliness was my world.

  “Didn’t you fucking hear me?”

  Enjoying yourself, are you? Is bullying me really so much fun? Just because you’re my dad, you think you’ve got the right to make my life hell. You’ve been kicked out of your gang and hightailed it back here with a load of drugs you probably stole. You may think it’s fun to see which will hold out longer—your decaying body or the supply of drugs you’re stuffing it with. But it’s got nothing to do with me. Nothing.

  “Get over here,” he growled.

  He grabbed me by the hair, same as always, and dragged me into the room. My mom, covered in sores, was sprawled on the ripped-up couch with the sticking-out springs.

  Her eyes swiveled toward me. She recognized me but didn’t lift a finger. I didn’t want or expect her help. Still, it’d be nice if she could at least manage to look a teeny bit upset. Her scrawny arms were black and pitted with track marks. Come on, Mom, I’m being abused here. Can’t you manage a teeny-weeny frown?

  “This one’s for you.”

  His thick palm smacked the bridge of my nose. It knocked me off my feet and onto the floor.

  “Yee-haw.”

  He straddled me, panting and laughing like a maniac.

  That again?

  I wondered where he got the strength. A washed-up two-bit gangster, he’d never even tried to support his family. He was so busy being perverted, most of the time he forgot to eat. The guy was sinking in a swamp of drugs and filth, but he was still as strong as a horse.

  My uniform tore. Probably where I’d sewn it up the day before yesterday. Tomorrow I’d have to go to school in my tracksuit.

  None of my classmates would speak to me. Same with the teachers. They all kept their distance. Because I stank; I stank bad enough to make them gag. Still, I was grateful that the school let me in at all. It was somewhere to escape to in the daytime at least.

  My seat was right at the back of the classroom. They’d made a space for me by shifting a locker full of cleaning stuff out of the corner a little way. I sat wedged in between the locker and the window. During lessons I could only see half the blackboard, and the teachers never asked me any questions. At school I was alone all day. I didn’t care. It was nothing compared to the hell I went through at home.

  Every day was the same. My clothes were ripped, and I was punched and kicked. I was throttled and my face shoved into the floorboards.

  And with every passing day, I was losing my ability to see color, my ability to taste food, even my ability to speak. The only thing I never lost was the ability to smell the foul stink of it all. My father wasn’t the only one sinking into the swamp. I was the same. I was going down with him. I knew he could kill me at any time. I don’t know why, but it never occurred to me to take my own life.

  Someday my life is going to change.

  I was sure of that. I didn’t know how. I just knew that someday something would change.

  Today was that day.

  On the floor, right in front of me, I noticed something that looked like a squashed pen. It was plastic, pretty, baby-pink. The tip was silver, and the other end was white. It loomed up toward me like something from a 3D movie. The cheap box cutter that had slipped out of my breast pocket.

  “What the fu—!”

  He looked down at me in bewilderment. He had no idea what had happened. He was clutching at his throat. From between his fingers, red blood was pumping out, spraying all around the room. Red—that brilliant, vibrant red—poured all over me and drenched me like glorious Technicolor rain.

  Perhaps the world is not gray after all!

  He grunted and groaned as he rolled on the floor. He looked like he was about to burst into tears.

  That’s funny. I always assumed he wanted to die.

  I looked at the box cutter in my hand.

  That was a whole lot easier than I thought it would be.

  “He-he … help me!”

  Fixing me with a look of terror, he dragged himself to the fa
r side of the room. Duh, you think the wall’s gonna save your life? He finally made his way to the couch where Mom was sprawling. He grabbed one of her feet and gave it a shake.

  “He-he … help me, please.”

  He looked back at me from time to time as he tugged at her. Mom just gawped dreamily down at her own feet. Didn’t move a muscle to help him. Minutes passed. His pleas for help became incoherent. The eyes, which looked at me with terror, gradually became as dim and bleary as my mom’s.

  “Beautiful,” I murmured.

  Everything was red now. The blood had transformed my dreary gray life into a place of brilliant, vivid color. My dark, stinking nothingness was a brave new world.

  Freedom.

  The word just popped into my head.

  My mom—my putrid, grungy mom—had been spray-painted a beautiful scarlet. I just stared at her. Then the color slowly started to fade. Blood blackens as it dries.

  Oh God, I don’t want everything to go back to gray again!

  In a momentary panic, I slashed the box cutter across my mother’s throat.

  * * *

  The pigsty of a house was burning. A red redder even than blood came billowing out the windows. Thick and surly black smoke hung heavily over the scene, as if a dark cloud had swallowed the whole neighborhood. Through the haze, I caught a glimpse of a streetlight like a full moon beneath a veil of cloud.

  The firefighters came and tried to put out the fire. Clouds of white smoke shot up every time they trained their hoses at the house. I was watching from behind a hedge in the park a little way away. I couldn’t be certain, but it looked like they weren’t putting much of a dent in the fire. It was burning as fiercely as ever, despite all their efforts. I liked that.

  A fire that fierce was sure to reduce both bodies to ashes. It wouldn’t be too hard for the police to find out that the man had been an addict. They’d probably conclude that he’d gone crazy and killed himself and his wife. It was perfect. I was free from that bastard. I had sidestepped my destruction at his hands.

  “I’ve got to go now … I want you to forget what happened today. No, strike that. I want you to forget everything that’s happened in your life so far. Let it go. Make a fresh start.”

  I nodded. That was what I planned to do. It didn’t make saying good-bye any easier.

  “Can’t we see each other?”

  “Better not.”

  “Never?”

  “Not never, but for a while…”

  Am I going to be alone again?

  Black smoke. White smoke. Bright streetlights. The pitch-black park. I could feel myself slipping back, down into my old gray world.

  1

  TUESDAY, AUGUST 12

  OTSUKA, BUNKYO WARD, TOKYO

  Reiko Himekawa was in a restaurant not far from the Tokyo Medical Examiner’s Office, having lunch with the coroner, Sadanosuke Kunioku.

  “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 amou
nt 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.