The Silent Dead Page 8

  “—Which means what?” Hashizume said, crossing his arms on his chest and throwing himself back in his chair.

  “Which means that … there are probably more victims who were killed prior to Kanebara sitting at the bottom of that pond.”

  The top brass stared at her flabbergasted.

  It was exactly what she had been looking forward to.

  Reiko savored the moment.

  PART II

  My life was gray. The same as it always was.

  I never settled into the orphanage they put me in after I lost my parents. And I never felt comfortable in the hospital they sent me to from time to time. I never felt like I was properly alive.

  It was like I was still trapped in that house. That house that was supposed to have burned down and disappeared off the face of the earth. For years that feeling of being trapped had made my life hell: the stink, the yelling, the cursing, the beatings, the insanity, the self-destructiveness.

  “I wish you’d never been born.” That was always his favorite warm-up line. “Just fuckin’ die, will ya? Life. It just goes around and around and around. You eat, you take a dump, and then you eat some more. Your mom, she squatted down and shat you out. You’re a lump of shit. No, ’scuse my manners. You are one fine little piece of excrement.”

  Excrement?

  Maybe he’d been right.

  My life meant nothing. I had no control. There was someone to take me to the orphanage. When I made trouble, there was someone else to take me to the mental hospital. When they decided I was “better,” they took me back to the orphanage. Then the next time I lost it, it was back to the hospital again. Like an endless loop: orphanage, hospital, orphanage, hospital, orphanage, hospital—eating me up and shitting me out, over and over and over again. My parents weren’t the only ones to think I was shit; I was shit in the eyes of the whole goddamn world. That was the one thing I knew for sure.

  Funnily enough, I didn’t want to die. I guess I was looking for something. What, I don’t know. My place in the world? That something that would make me feel alive? The ability to feel, to desire? Your guess is as good as mine. Whatever I was after, I started to wander the streets looking for it.

  Shibuya was too flashy for me; Roppongi and Harajuku even worse. Ikebukuro was getting there, but it was Shinjuku that hit the spot. Shinjuku was perfect.

  Incredibly filthy, incredibly noisy, incredibly crowded. As chaotic as the inside of my own head. At night, Kabukicho, the red light district in Shinjuku, was a blaze of neon, while its back alleys were sunk in darkness. There was light and there was dark. Plenty of both. Kabukicho was stark black and bright white, never gray. Nice and clear cut, how I liked it.

  The district was crawling with yakuza. That gave me a buzz. My favorite place was this big park, because of the sense of hidden danger. It was crawling with homeless people. Occasionally I came across one like me there—standing at the roadside, yelling their heart out at the world. Shinjuku was the place where I could connect with my pain.

  Even in that shithole—maybe because it was a shithole—I found people prepared to be nice to me. Like the old homeless guy.

  “Look at you, kid, you’re filthy. Why not try this on for size? I picked it up, but it’s way too small for me. No point in chucking it. If you want it, go on, have it.”

  The old fellow handed me a black leather bodysuit, the kind that motorcyclists wear. I was grateful because the weather was just turning cold. I’ve worn it ever since.

  Experiences like that were few and far between. One cold morning the old man was cold and dead, and the cops came to the underpass and cleared away the whole cardboard village. I had to leave. That’s when I decided to try my luck in Kabukicho. I was so filthy, everyone steered clear of me. It was straight back to feeling like a piece of shit again. The feeling got stronger, and before I knew it I must have done something, because I came to in some hospital. I quickly snuck out and headed back to Shinjuku. I changed out of my hospital clothes and back into the biker suit in a train station bathroom.

  It was around then that I met Mako.

  I was squatting on the curb, minding my own business, when she came up to me and hugged my head to her chest. “The world’s a harsh place,” she cooed. “It just ain’t fair. But I understand you, I know how you feel.” Mako had beautiful long platinum blonde hair and beautiful bright eyes. I put my head on her lap and cried my eyes out.

  “It’s awful. You need to be homeless, out on the street, to feel just a little bit alive. It’s the same for me. I understand. Go on, cry. Cry your little heart out. It’s not your fault. You haven’t done anything wrong. I know. I understand.” She paused, then said, “Come with me. I’ll introduce you to some friends of mine.”

  Her friends were a group of kids about her age. They called themselves the Gang. Shinjuku was their stomping ground. They fought turf wars with other gangs and even clashed with the yakuza and the cops. They were involved in a lot of heavy shit, but they weren’t going anywhere.

  Mako was the one I liked. The others I didn’t care for much. Like Mako’s elder brother. His nickname was Toki, and he was the leader, because he knew how to fight. I didn’t like the way he looked at me. It reminded me of the class monitor at school. What do I know? He let me stay, so maybe he was a good guy after all. He fed me the same as everyone else and must’ve patched up my cuts and bruises a hundred times. Maybe he only eyed me like that because I stuck so close to Mako. She was beautiful. No wonder Toki worried about her.

  The Gang was good to me, so I fought hard for them. Nothing frightened me. I was willing to kill anyone, including yakuza or cops. Those guys bleed the same as the rest of us, right? They act all high and mighty, but the blood in their veins is the same as mine—and the same as my burnt-to-a-cinder daddy.

  Look at the blood coming out of this cut in my leg. It looks black on my black bodysuit, but stick your finger in it, and look, it’s a lovely rich red. Your blood’s the same, see? Red. Hardly gonna be blue, I guess! Which is the nicer red, yours or mine? Hey, I’m just kidding. They’re the same color. That’s how it should be. It soothes me. My blood is this beautiful red color, just the same as everyone else’s. My blood, your blood—there’s no difference between them. I like that.

  But Mako cried all the time. Whenever she saw me drenched in beautiful red blood, she would go crazy. Her brother had to grab her and hold her until she calmed down. I know why she made such a scene. She told me she was worried about me getting hurt. I felt so guilty whenever I ended up all bandaged up after a rumble.

  I really got off on listening to the rest of the boys telling me what a kick-ass street fighter I was. I started thinking that maybe I’d found my place, that maybe this was what I’d been looking for, that maybe life was worth living after all. I could tell that the others guys respected me. It had been years, but I felt that a little color was seeping into my miserable gray life. I loved to look at Mako’s long blonde hair.

  Everyone in the Gang had a nickname, the shorter the better: Mako, Toki, Kusu, L, Mochi, Taji. Mako wanted to give me one too. I never spoke, so I had to scratch my name into the dirt with a stick for her. “Great,” said Mako. “We’ll call you F from now on.” It sounded nothing like my real name. I liked that. Felt like I’d changed into someone else.

  I was always in the thick of any fight. I wasn’t the strongest member of our gang, but I was relentless. No matter how bad I was hurting, I just fought on till the other guy begged me to stop. I got some nasty injuries, but I never, ever admitted I was beat. Perhaps I didn’t know how. In the end it was always the other guy who ended up pleading for his life.

  Just like my dear old dead dad, I suppose.

  Word about me spread among the other youth gangs. They’d give me a wide berth when they saw me coming. It was quite nice, though it meant less fighting. Less fighting meant my world fading back to gray again. That I didn’t like.

  Then Mako was murdered.

  Some guy from another gan
g found her body and brought us the news. She was stark naked and dead in a road tunnel near the Imperial Palace. It was harsh. It was ugly.

  “The fucking bastards,” said Mochi, his voice breaking. “They gang-raped her, and then they killed her.”

  Taji moaned and cursed as he pummeled the asphalt with his fists.

  We were all slumped on the road, bawling. The guy who’d led us to the tunnel wasn’t even part of our gang, and even he was crying his eyes out. The motorists were honking their horns at us, sounded like hundreds of them. We didn’t budge. We just sat and cried around Toki and his dead sister.

  “I’ll deal with this,” I stammered. “Just tell me who did it.”

  My gang-mates were utterly astonished. They couldn’t figure out who had spoken. None of them had heard me speak before, not a word. The guy who’d taken us to the tunnel warned me it was better not to tangle with the guys who did it. Then we heard police sirens. They were getting closer. We split up and ran. We had no choice. We left Mako alone in that tunnel.

  * * *

  The next day, I started looking for the guys who’d killed Mako. I’d never heard of them, but it seemed like everyone else had. I walked the streets, listening to what people were saying, sometimes following them. As I followed them, I pushed the blade of my faithful box cutter in and out in my pocket. Clickety-click. Clickety-click.

  It took me three days to find the killers. There were three of them. They looked like university students. Maybe they were hipper new-look yakuza. Who cares? In this world, there are two types of people: winners and losers. And we all have the same color blood: red. Lovely, luscious red.

  “It was him. He made us do it. We went too far. You hear me? I know we crossed the line, but he’s the one who should pay.”

  “That’s not what happened.”

  “Don’t try and wriggle out of it. You got carried away and did all kinds of crazy shit to her. You were the one who strangled her.”

  “You were happy to watch.”

  “Yeah, I watched. I didn’t join in.”

  “That’s what you say. Now.”

  I’d had enough. I didn’t want to hear any more. I wanted to see some blood.

  A gurgling shriek.

  “What the fuck!”

  It was a fountain, a beautiful bright red fountain. Everything in my vision was monochrome—everything except where the red blood was spraying into the air. I was back to glorious Technicolor. The sliver of sky between the rooftops was violet. The wall on one side of me was dark green, the other beige. The handle of my box cutter was baby pink.

  “You’re out of your fucking mind!”

  One of the gang made a run for it. I let him go. I just gazed up at the night sky, drinking it in. God, it felt good. I remembered how it felt when I killed my dad. I remembered my mother. I remembered the cozy cardboard shelter of my old homeless friend. And I remembered Mako—her smile, her voice, her beautiful blonde hair, and most of all, her kindness.

  At my feet lay a still-twitching body, its face red like a gigantic ripe strawberry. One of the three was dead, one had fled, but for some reason one of them stayed behind with me.

  1

  SATURDAY, AUGUST 16

  First thing in the morning, a fleet of police vehicles swept into Mizumoto Park and parked around the fishing pond. The atmosphere was tense.

  Everyone was there. Chief of Homicide Wada, Director Hashizume, and Captain Imaizumi from the Task Force HQ; the commander, deputy commander, and chief of detectives from the Kameari precinct; all the investigators from Unit 10, including Reiko’s squad and their partners, plus a bunch of crime scene techs—making twenty in all. The Mobile Unit had dispatched a team of two commanders along with six divers from Water Rescue. Finally, around twenty uniformed officers from the Kameari precinct’s Community Affairs Division were there to direct traffic and keep the rubberneckers at bay.

  Rubberneckers were a royal pain in the ass. Unluckily, today was a Sunday. On a weekday, the local residents and random passersby would have been bad enough, but today there was a crowd that included a contingent of rod-toting geezers who’d come for a quiet day’s fishing.

  “You’ll be in big trouble if we don’t find anything.”

  Hashizume made the same observation every time he surveyed the scene.

  “Just because we’ve got a full house doesn’t mean that we’re putting on a show here,” countered Reiko, turning to inspect the pond.

  “Whatever.… But we were lucky that this park’s located in Tokyo’s Seventh District. The Water Rescue Team’s based here too. We’d probably wouldn’t have gotten anywhere with a mobilization request across jurisdictions.”

  “Yes, sir,” Reiko replied halfheartedly. She wasn’t interested in the ins and outs of district politics.

  “I’ve got no problem with you sticking your neck out, Himekawa, but you need to remember that there are twenty or thirty people out there who are after your job.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Yes, sir, no, sir, three bags full, sir. You seriously think I don’t know that?

  The police department did its personnel evaluations by deducting marks for errors. The system expected you to do your job right—that was the baseline. Make a single slip up, and there was hell to pay. The higher your rank, the worse it got. It was a crazy system. The upshot of it was that useless jerks who made no mistakes because they did nothing scored higher than officers who worked their butts off but made the odd mistake en route.

  Why do I get the feeling that seeing me demoted to local traffic duties wouldn’t break your heart?

  Reiko knew that at the end of the day Hashizume was a lot less worried about her being kicked a few rungs down the ladder than having his leadership put under the microscope.

  Still, Reiko had a strong track record. So far at least, her hunches had usually panned out. After dragging his feet a little, Hashizume had finally called in Water Rescue. It was only when confronted with the sight of the divers doing their stuff and the huge crowd of gawkers that he began to lose his nerve. The sheer scale of it had driven him out of his comfort zone. Chief of Homicide Wada turning up at the morning meeting—something he almost never did—hadn’t helped. Wada had questioned the need for an underwater search, and Hashizume had looked a fool when he could not explain his reasons properly.

  It’s risky, but someone’s got to grab the bull by the horns, or else the case will go nowhere. Hey, no one ever said police work was supposed to be easy.

  Reiko stared at the part of the pond where the divers had gone down. The glare of the reflected sunlight was too strong to look for long. She glanced at her watch. 10:30 a.m. The thought of the search possibly dragging on into the afternoon depressed her. Her thin blouse was already almost transparent with sweat. Half an hour before, Ioka had proudly announced that he could see her bra strap. Her answer was a deft knee in the groin. That had, briefly, shut him up.

  The man who rented out boats and sold fishing tackle informed Reiko that the pond was three meters deep at its deepest point, which was smack in the middle of its roughly triangular shape. She needn’t have asked, really. Of course it was deepest in the middle. Whoever disposed of the bodies had probably guessed as much, so the divers started their search there.

  Four buoys floating on the surface of the pond marked the boundaries of the current search area. Each five-by-five-meter square took the divers between five and ten minutes to check. Then they moved the buoys and searched the next area. Reiko uttered a silent prayer every time the six divers came up for air. As the cycle of hope and disappointment was repeated, even the onlookers were starting to lose heart.

  Are you searching properly, guys? Come on, I really need this. Reiko had no proof that there were bodies in the pond. It was just a hunch, so naturally she was on edge. All she could do was wait—and hope.

  Around the sixth or seventh block, the divers had only been down for a couple of minutes when one of them broke the surface.

  �
�I’ve found something. Hand me the camera.”

  Someone handed the diver a waterproof flash camera, and he dived back down.

  Something?

  What was it? Reiko was struggling—she’d been desperate to pee for a while already. Why couldn’t the man just tell them what the damn thing was?

  Three minutes. Five minutes. A diver, this one with no camera, came up and swam toward the bank.

  “There’s definitely something down there.”

  Chief of Homicide Wada squatted down and peered into the water.

  “It’s upright and the right height for a body.”

  The right height for a body!

  “We’ve cleaned the slime and gunk off it. Whatever it is, it’s wrapped in blue plastic sheeting.”

  Blue plastic sheeting!

  Reiko broke out in goose bumps.

  The diver with the camera surfaced. Pulling a bag of tools after him, he swam over to talk to his commander and Komine from Forensics.

  “Is it okay if we cut it?”

  Komine scratched his head dubiously.

  “It’d be better if you can bring it up exactly as it is.”

  “I don’t think that’s possible. Even with all of us pulling, the thing didn’t budge.”

  The Water Rescue commander tried to broker a compromise. “We can try and do what you want, but there’s a real risk of serious damage to the ‘package’ if we pull it up by force. I’d recommend cutting it.”

  “I understand.” Komine crossed his arms on his chest. “In that case, do what you think’s best.”

  The commander nodded and gestured at the diver. “Okay then, cut it.”

  “Yes, sir.” The diver went back down.

  Some time passed, then all the divers resurfaced. This time, though, there were seven, rather than six heads. Six of them were black, and one was blue. The blue one floated up, gradually revealing its full length, like a surfacing submarine.

  There was a commotion in the crowd, which now straggled around the entire pond. Here and there screams were heard.