“Nothing to report on my side. I think they’ve given up on me.” Kudo flicked some ashes into an ashtray. “Though there is something bothering me. I think it might be related.”
“What’s that?”
“Well…” Kudo mused for a moment before opening his mouth again. “It’s just, I’ve been getting these strange calls lately. The phone rings at my house, and I pick it up, but there’s no one on the other side.”
“Really? That sounds unpleasant.” Yasuko frowned.
“Yeah. And then there’s this—” After a moment’s hesitation, he pulled a piece of paper out of his coat pocket. “I found this in my mail the other day.”
Yasuko saw her name written on the paper and froze. The message read: “Keep away from Yasuko Hanaoka. She’ll never be happy with a man like you.”
The note had been written on a computer and printed out. There was nothing to indicate from whom it had come.
“Someone sent you this in the mail?”
“No, I think they put it in my mailbox by hand.”
“Do you have any idea who it might be?”
“Not a clue. I was hoping you might know.”
“I’m sorry. I can’t imagine…” Yasuko reached down to her handbag, taking out a handkerchief. Her palms were beginning to sweat. “That’s all there was? Just this note?”
“No. There was a picture, too.”
“A photograph?”
“From the time I met you in Shinagawa. Whoever it was took a picture of me in the hotel parking lot. I had no idea.” Kudo shook his head.
Unconsciously, Yasuko’s eyes swept the room. Certainly no one was watching them here?
By then, Misato had returned, so they didn’t discuss the note anymore. A few minutes later they left the restaurant, said good-bye to Kudo, and climbed into a taxi.
“I told you the food would be good,” Yasuko ventured, but Misato frowned and said nothing. “I wish you hadn’t made that face the whole time.”
“Then you shouldn’t have taken me along. I told you I didn’t want to go.”
“But he invited you specifically.”
“He would have been happy with just you, Mom. I don’t care if he invites me again. I’m not going.”
Yasuko sighed. Kudo seemed to believe that, if he gave it enough time, Misato would warm to him. Yasuko doubted that was true.
“Are you going to marry him, Mom?” Misato asked suddenly.
Yasuko sat up in her seat. “What are you talking about?”
“I’m serious. You want to marry him, right?”
“No.”
“Really?”
“Of course not. We just go to dinner every once in a while.”
“Okay. Fine then.” Misato turned and looked out the window.
“Why did you ask me that, Misato? Is there … something you want to say?”
“Nope.” But Misato slowly turned back toward her mother. “I just thought maybe it’s not a good idea to betray that other guy.”
“That guy? Who?”
Misato stared Yasuko in the eye and said nothing, though it was clear she meant Mr. Ishigami. She wasn’t saying anything because she didn’t want the taxi driver to hear.
“Well, I don’t think that’s anything you need to be worrying about,” Yasuko said, leaning back in her seat.
“Hmph,” Misato grunted. She clearly disagreed.
Yasuko thought about Ishigami. She was worried about him, even without Misato’s reminder. And the note and the photograph left in Kudo’s mailbox disturbed her deeply.
As far as Yasuko knew, there was only one person who could have sent that message. She remembered the dark look that had appeared on Ishigami’s face when he spotted Kudo dropping her off at her apartment. The image was burned vividly in her mind.
It was more than possible that Ishigami had discovered her relationship with Kudo and was jealous. She already knew his attraction to her was more serious than a passing fancy—after all, that was the only reasonable explanation for both his willingness to help them cover up Togashi’s murder and his continued protection of them from the police.
It was probably Ishigami who had left the note and the photograph in Kudo’s mailbox. If that was true, then what were his plans for her? Would he use what he knew as leverage to try and control her life? Would he never let her see—let alone marry—another man?
Thanks to Ishigami, Yasuko had, so far, avoided arrest in the hunt for Togashi’s murderer. She was grateful for that. Yet what was the point if she could never live a free life? It was no better than when Togashi was alive. She was just dealing with a different man now, and this time, there truly was no escape.
The taxi arrived at their apartment. They got out and walked up the stairs. The lights were on in Ishigami’s room.
Yasuko went into her apartment and began to change. Moments later, she heard the door to the next apartment open and close.
“See?” Misato said. “He was waiting for us to get back.”
“I know that,” Yasuko shot back, her testiness showing in her voice.
A few minutes later, her cell phone rang.
“Yes?”
“It’s me,” came the familiar voice. “Can you talk?”
“Yes.”
“Anything to report today?”
“No, nothing.”
“I see. Good.” She could hear Ishigami slowly breathe out on the other side of the line. “Actually, there are some things I need to talk to you about. The first is, I have placed three envelopes containing letters in the mail slot on your front door. Please go get them after I hang up.”
“Letters?” Yasuko glanced toward the door.
“Please keep them safe. You’ll need them shortly. All right?”
“Okay.”
“I included a memo with the letters explaining how you are to use them. I hardly need tell you to destroy the memo when you’re done reading it. Understood?”
“I understand. Should I get them now?”
“No, afterward is fine. Also, there is something else I need to say. It’s very important.” Ishigami paused. Yasuko sensed reluctance in his voice.
“Yes?”
“This is…” he began, “this is the last time I will call you like this. I won’t be contacting you any further. Nor should you try to contact me. No matter what happens, you and your daughter are to remain bystanders. Don’t get involved. That’s the only way you’ll be safe.”
Yasuko’s heart began to race as she listened to him talk. “What are you saying, Mr. Ishigami? What is this all about?”
“You’ll see soon enough. I think it’s better not to tell you right now. Just, don’t forget what I said. All right?”
“No, it’s not all right. I need you to explain.”
Misato came over, noticing her mother’s consternation.
“There is no need to explain. Good-bye.”
“Wait—” she said, but he had already hung up.
* * *
Kusanagi was in the car with Kishitani when his phone began to ring. He was on the passenger side, resting, with the seat back lowered as far as it would go. He grabbed his cell and answered it while still lying down. “Kusanagi here.”
“It’s me—Mamiya,” came the division chief’s voice. “I need you to come down to Edogawa police station immediately.”
“What, did you find something?”
“Someone found us. There’s a man here who wants to talk to you.”
“Who?” Kusanagi asked, wondering if it was Yukawa.
“It’s Ishigami, the math teacher who lives next to Yasuko Hanaoka.”
“Ishigami? He wants to talk to me? Why didn’t he just call?”
“Uh, I think it’s more important than that,” Mamiya replied, his tone severe.
“Did he tell you what this is all about, Chief?”
“He says he won’t talk about the details to anyone but you. That’s why we need you here now.”
“Right, fine, I’m
on my way.” Kusanagi put his hand over the receiver and tapped Kishitani on the shoulder. “Chief wants us down at Edogawa Station.”
Mamiya’s muffled voice came over the phone. “He says he did it.”
“Huh? What was that?”
“He says he killed Togashi. Ishigami’s turning himself in.”
“What the hell!?”
Kusanagi sat up so fast his seatbelt nearly left a bruise.
SIXTEEN
Ishigami, his face expressionless, was staring at Kusanagi. Or maybe his eyes just happen to be pointing in my direction, the detective thought. Maybe he’s not seeing me at all. The mathematician’s face was entirely devoid of emotion; it was as if his gaze was fixed on some faraway place and Kusanagi just happened to be sitting in that blank trajectory.
“The first time I saw him was on the tenth of March,” he was saying, his tone perfectly even. “He was loitering near her door when I returned home from school. I caught him putting his hand inside the mail slot in her doorway.”
“I’m sorry, this man—who was he, exactly?”
“Mr. Togashi. Though, of course, I didn’t know that at the time,” Ishigami answered.
Kusanagi and Kishitani were with him in the interrogation room. Kishitani sat off to one side, taking notes. Ishigami had asked that no one else be allowed in the room. He’d said he wouldn’t be able to tell them what he needed to say if a bunch of officers were there asking questions.
“I wondered what he was up to, so I called out to him. He looked surprised, and told me he had business with Yasuko Hanaoka. Said he was her estranged husband. That’s when I realized who he was, and I knew he was lying, but I pretended to go along with his story so as not to alarm him.”
“Wait a second, how did you know he wasn’t telling you the truth?” Kusanagi asked.
Ishigami took a short breath. “Because I know everything there is to know about Yasuko Hanaoka. I know she’s divorced, and I know she had been moving around, trying to escape her ex-husband.”
“How could you know all these things? I had heard that you hardly spoke to her, despite the fact that she’s your neighbor. That you only saw her because you frequented the lunch shop where she works.”
“That’s what we tell people, yes.”
“Excuse me?”
Ishigami straightened himself in his chair, puffing out his chest ever so slightly. “I am Yasuko Hanaoka’s bodyguard. It has been my duty to protect her from men with less than good intentions. And for obvious reasons, neither of us wanted people to know about it. I am a schoolteacher, too, after all.”
“But you told us you hardly talked to her at all when we first met,” Kusanagi pressed.
Ishigami sighed quietly. “You came to my apartment to ask questions about Togashi’s murder, didn’t you? Of course I couldn’t tell you the truth. You would have suspected something immediately.”
“Okay…” Kusanagi hesitated. “So now you’re telling me that you know everything about Yasuko Hanaoka … because you’re her bodyguard?”
“That’s correct.”
“So you’ve been close to her for some time. Since before this incident?”
“Yes. As I said before, our arrangement was a secret. We were very careful to keep our communication hidden. Not even her daughter knew about it.”
“How exactly did you do that?”
“We employed several means. Would you like me to tell you about them now?” Ishigami looked questioningly at the detective.
None of this was feeling right to Kusanagi. He had been genuinely shocked at the suggestion that the math teacher had anything like a close relationship with his attractive neighbor, and the background the man was now giving them seemed vague at best. Still, if there was any truth to this story at all, he wanted to hear it.
“No,” Kusanagi said, “I’ll ask you about that later. I’d like to hear about your dealings with Mr. Togashi first. You said that you first met him outside Yasuko Hanaoka’s apartment, and that you pretended to believe he was still married to her. What happened then?”
“He asked me whether I knew where she was. So I told him she wasn’t living there anymore—that she’d had to move recently for work. That surprised him, as you might imagine. Then he asked me if I knew where she’d moved to. I told him I did.”
“Where did you tell him she’d gone?”
Ishigami grinned. “Shinozaki. I told him she’d moved to an apartment along the Old Edogawa River.”
I wondered when Shinozaki would come up, Kusanagi thought to himself. “Is that all?” he prodded. “That wouldn’t be enough for him to find her by. That’s quite a stretch of river, and there are lots of apartment buildings along there.”
“Of course, Togashi wanted to know her new address. I told him to wait while I went back into my room, looked at a map, and wrote down an address—the address of a water treatment facility. You should’ve seen his smile when I handed him the paper. He told me I’d saved him a lot of trouble.”
“Why did you give him that address?”
“To get him to go where there wouldn’t be many witnesses. I’m familiar with the lay of the land out there, you see.”
“Wait a second.” Kusanagi stared hard at Ishigami’s face. He couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “So you’re telling me that from the very moment you met Togashi, you planned to kill him?”
“Of course,” Ishigami replied, his voice matter-of-fact. “Like I just said, it’s my job to protect Ms. Hanaoka. If someone showed up who I knew intended her harm, it was my responsibility to eliminate the problem.”
“And you believe that Mister Togashi intended her harm?”
“It’s not a question of belief, I know he did. He had given her all kinds of trouble already by that point. She moved next door to me to get away from him, after all.”
“Ms. Hanaoka told you that herself?”
“Through our usual channels of communication, yes.”
Ishigami spoke smoothly and without hesitation. He certainly had plenty of time to get his story straight before coming in here, Kusanagi reflected. And yet there was a lot about the story that seemed suspicious at best. For one thing, nothing he was saying matched the mental image of the stodgy high school teacher that Kusanagi had of him until now. Still, there was nothing to do about it but hear the rest of what the man had to say, whether it was true or not.
“What did he do after you gave him the address?”
“He asked if I knew where she was working now. I told him I didn’t know where it was, but I’d heard she was working at a restaurant. I also told him I’d heard that she got off at eleven o’clock, and that her daughter would go to the restaurant after school and wait so they could go home together. Of course, I was making all that up.”
“And why did you fabricate this information?”
“To make it easier to predict how he would act. I couldn’t have him dropping by my selected location too early. It might be out of the way, but there are still people in the area during daylight hours. I knew that if he thought Yasuko wouldn’t be getting off work until that time, and that her daughter would be with her, he would have no reason to visit her apartment before then—”
“Hold on,” Kusanagi raised his hand, cutting him off. “Are you telling me you thought of all of that right there on the spot?”
“Yes. You don’t believe me?”
“No … it’s just that I’m impressed you could come up with such a plan so quickly.”
“It’s really not much,” Ishigami said, his smile fading. “I knew he wanted desperately to see her. All I had to do was use that desire against him. It wasn’t difficult.”
“Well, maybe not for you.” Kusanagi licked his lips. “So, what happened then?”
“Before he left, I gave him my cell phone number. I told him to call me if he couldn’t find the apartment. Typically, people suspect something when strangers show them that kind of kindness, but he didn’t suspect a thing. I don’t think he was v
ery smart, to tell the truth.”
“Very few people would imagine someone they’d only just met was planning to kill them.”
“If you ask me, he should have suspected something because it was the first time we’d met. In any case, he took the fake address, put it in his pocket, and practically skipped off down the hallway. When I saw that he had left, I went back inside my place and began making preparations.” Ishigami paused and slowly reached for the teacup on the table. He took a couple long gulps of the lukewarm tea.
“What sort of preparations?”
“Nothing too elaborate. I changed into some more comfortable clothes, and waited. I also spent some time thinking about the best way to kill him. After running through several options, I chose strangulation. I reasoned that would be the most reliable method. There’s no telling how much blood I might have got on me if I tried to stab or bludgeon him to death. Nor was I sure I could do it with just one blow. Also, strangulation made the choice of a murder weapon much simpler. I knew I needed something strong, so I went with the shielded electrical cord to a kotatsu.”
“Which you carried to the scene of the crime?”
Ishigami nodded. “I left the house around ten o’clock. I had the actual cord with me, as well as a box cutter and a disposable lighter. On my way to the station, I noticed a blue plastic sheet someone had thrown out in the garbage, so I folded that and brought it with me, too. I got off the train at Mizue and took a taxi to the Old Edogawa.”
“Mizue Station? Not Shinozaki?”
“Of course not,” Ishigami replied without hesitation. “I didn’t want to run into the man by mistake. I got out of the taxi some distance away from the place I’d told him about, too. I knew that, in order to retain the element of surprise, I needed to avoid being seen until the time was right.”
“So what did you do after you got out of the taxi?”
“Taking care not to be seen by anyone, I headed toward our meeting place. Not that I needed to be too careful. There was hardly anyone on the street.” Ishigami took a sip of tea. “Right after I arrived at the river bank, my cell phone began to ring. It was him. He told me he’d arrived at the address I’d given him, but couldn’t find the apartment building. So I asked him where he was, and he told me in some detail—all the while not realizing that I was approaching his location as we talked. I told him I would check the address again and call him back. By that time I knew exactly where he was. I could see him sitting—sprawled out, really—by a clump of grass on the riverbank. I walked up slowly, so as not to make a sound. He didn’t notice me at all until I was right behind him. But by then, I already had the cord around his neck. He resisted, of course, but I had the advantage, and he went limp quickly. It was a lot easier than I’d expected, to be honest.” Ishigami’s eyes fell back down to his cup. “Might I have another cup of tea?”