He checked in and was surprised to hear there was a message for him. The receptionist passed him a white envelope together with his key.
Sasagaki opened the envelope and looked inside. Within was a piece of notepaper with a message that read: ‘Call 308.’
Sasagaki frowned, wondering who it could be.
His room was 321, on the same floor as whoever had left him the message. He stopped in front of room 308 on his way from the elevator. After a moment’s hesitation, he knocked and immediately heard the sound of someone shuffling to the door on the other side.
Sasagaki gaped when the door opened to reveal Hisashi Koga.
‘Well, you sure took your time,’ his former subordinate said.
‘What?’ Sasagaki said, stammering a little. ‘What are you doing here?’
‘This and that. Mostly waiting for you, old man. You eat yet?’
‘No.’
‘Great, let’s go get something. You can leave your stuff in my room.’ He took Sasagaki’s things and opened the narrow closet in his room to pull out his jacket and coat. ‘Got a preference for dinner?’
‘Anything but French,’ Sasagaki replied.
They ended up at a street corner place serving Japanese food with seating at four low tables on tatami mats in the back. They picked a table and sat across from each other. Koga mentioned he often came here when he was in Tokyo, and recommended the stew and the sashimi.
Koga ordered some beer and Sasagaki let him pour. He offered to pour for Koga, who refused and filled his own cup. After offering Koga a toast, Sasagaki asked, ‘So what’s this all about?’
‘There was a meeting at Tokyo Police Headquarters. Normally the section chief would go, but he wasn’t available so they sent me up here.’
‘You’re moving up in the world. Congratulations,’ Sasagaki said, his chopsticks aiming for a particularly tempting piece of fatty tuna. It was as good as it looked.
Koga had gone from being one of Sasagaki’s subordinates to head of Homicide in Osaka. Sasagaki knew there were some who viewed his rise through the ranks as nothing more than the achievement of a sycophant with a knack for aceing exams. But Koga had never shirked his duty. He worked as hard as anyone else at the station and studied harder for those advancement exams than the rest of them put together.
‘I’m still at a bit of a loss,’ Sasagaki said. ‘Surely you have better things to do than chew the fat here with me. Not to mention stay at that cheap-ass hotel.’
Koga chuckled. ‘It is pretty cheap-ass, isn’t it? Why do you stay there?’
‘Don’t ask questions you already know the answer to. I’m not here on vacation.’
‘That’s the problem,’ Koga said. ‘If you were here on vacation, I’d have nothing to say. But when I think about the most likely reason you’re up here, well, it’s hard for me to smile. Your wife’s pretty worried, too.’
‘So Katsuko put you up to this? What does she think you are, her errand boy?’
‘She didn’t ask me to come up. We were just talking about things, and she mentioned it.’
‘Same difference. She gave you your orders, admit it. Or was it Orie?’
‘I think it’s safe to say that everyone’s concerned.’
‘Great,’ Sasagaki snorted.
In addition to their relationship at work, Koga and Sasagaki were now actually related after Koga’s marriage to his wife’s niece, Orie. On the surface it was a coincidence. Apparently the two of them had just happened to meet and fall in love, but Sasagaki had always suspected Katsuko of pulling some strings.
Their beer bottles drained, Koga ordered some sake. Sasagaki started on his stew. The miso flavouring was a Tokyo thing, but he found it pretty good all the same.
The sake arrived and Koga poured some into Sasagaki’s cup, saying, ‘So, still on about that old case?’
‘It’s my cross to bear.’
‘Why this one? There are other unsolved cases out there. And this one stands a good chance of actually being unsolvable. What if that guy who died in the traffic accident was the killer? That seemed to be the prevailing opinion in the department.’
‘Terasaki didn’t do it,’ Sasagaki said firmly, tossing back his cup. Despite the nearly two decades that had passed since the pawnbroker had been found stabbed to death in that abandoned building, he still remembered the names of everyone involved.
‘We must have searched his place a hundred times, and there was never any sign of that million yen Kirihara was carrying. I don’t buy that he hid it either, like some people are saying. Terasaki was deep in debt. If he came into that kind of money, he would have turned it around as quick as he could. Which leads me to think that he never had the money, which leads me to think that he wasn’t the one who stabbed him.’
Koga nodded. ‘I agree with your basic premise – I do. That’s why I kept making the rounds with you even after Terasaki died. But there’s making the rounds, and then there’s walking in the same wheel rut for twenty years.’
‘I know the statute of limitations is up on the case. But I’m not dying until I’ve cleaned it up, one way or the other.’
Koga tried to fill Sasagaki’s empty cup, but Sasagaki stopped him and snatched the decanter from his hand. He filled Koga’s cup to the brim before filling his own.
‘You’re right that it’s not the only unsolved case. There are bigger, more brutal cases out there where we haven’t caught so much as a hair off the perp’s head. And none of them sit well with me. But the pawnbroker’s different, because we had our chance and we blew it, and people have suffered for our mistake for years – people that had nothing to do with the pawnbroker at all.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean we should have nipped this thing in the bud when we had a chance. And because we didn’t, it grew and began to bloom into an evil, evil flower,’ Sasagaki said with a frown, pouring back some sake.
Koga loosened his tie and undid the top button of his shirt. ‘You’re talking about Yukiho Karasawa.’
Sasagaki reached into his jacket pocket. He pulled out a folded piece of paper and placed it on the table in front of Koga.
‘What’s that?’
‘Take a look.’
Koga unfolded the paper. A deep line formed between his thick eyebrows. ‘R&Y Osaka Now Opening?’
‘Yukiho Karasawa’s store. It’s a big deal. They finally made it down to Osaka, near Shinsaibashi. And take a look: the big opening’s on Christmas Eve this year.’
‘Is this that evil flower, then?’ Koga asked, carefully folding the pamphlet and pushing it in front of Sasagaki.
‘It’s more like the fruit.’
‘Remind me when you started to suspect Yukiho Karasawa? Or was she Yukiho Nishimoto at the time?’
‘Still Nishimoto. You may recall that Fumiyo Nishimoto died the year after Yosuke Kirihara. That’s what started it.’
‘And yet that was ruled an accidental death. Which you never believed.’
‘The victim drank sake, which she never drank, and took more than five times the normal dose of sleeping pills. I wouldn’t call that accidental. Unfortunately, I wasn’t on the task force, so I didn’t have much say in how it was handled.’
‘Wasn’t there talk of suicide?’ Koga crossed his arms, thinking back over the years.
‘Yukiho’s testimony put an end to the suicide theory. She said her mother always drank a little sake whenever she had a cold.’
‘Most people wouldn’t suspect an elementary-school-aged daughter of lying about her own mother’s death.’
‘No one else except for her said Fumiyo had a cold.’
‘But why would she do that? What difference would it make to Yukiho whether it was a suicide or an accident? There was no life insurance payout. And what kind of kid thinks about that sort of thing in the first place?’ Koga’s eyes widened. ‘Wait, you don’t think Yukiho killed her own mother?’ He was half-joking when he said it, but Sasagaki didn’t smile.
&nb
sp; ‘I wouldn’t go that far. But she could have been involved.’
‘How so?’
‘Ignoring obvious signs that her mother was contemplating suicide, for one.’
‘You think she wanted her mother to die?’
‘Yukiho didn’t waste much time moving in with Reiko Karasawa. They might’ve been talking about that move before the time came, even. Maybe Yukiho wanted to leave, but Fumiyo was holding her back.’
‘You think she’d just abandon her mother like that?’
‘She’s capable, yes. And she’d have a reason to want to hide the fact that her mother had committed suicide: an accidental death and everyone around her is sympathetic. But if word got out it was suicide, it would colour their opinion of her, too. Not hard to figure which one she’d pick.’
‘Look, Sasagaki, what you’re saying makes sense… but it all feels like a stretch, if you know what I mean.’ Koga ordered two more bottles of sake.
‘It took me a while following in Yukiho’s footsteps before I started putting things together – hey, this is pretty good. What’s this tempura?’ Sasagaki asked, staring at the small piece of fried food between his chopsticks.
‘What do you think it is?’ Koga asked with a grin.
‘I don’t know, that’s why I asked. Never tasted anything like it.’
‘It’s natto.’
‘What, that rotting bean stuff they eat up here?’
‘You got it,’ Koga said. ‘I knew you’d never eat it if you knew what it was.’
Sasagaki grunted. ‘They’re not so slimy when you do them up like this,’ he said, taking another mouthful. ‘Pretty good, actually.’
‘See? It pays to not have any preconceived notions about things. You never know until you try.’
‘You don’t say?’ Sasagaki said, drinking some sake. He could feel the warmth spreading down to his toes. ‘Speaking of preconceived notions, that’s exactly what tripped me up with this case. See, it was only when I started to realise that Yukiho wasn’t your average kid and looked back on the case of the murdered pawnbroker that I realised I’d overlooked something vital.’
‘What’s that?’ Koga said, a serious look in his eyes.
Sasagaki stared back at him. ‘Footprints, for one.’
‘Footprints?’
‘Yeah, the footprints at the scene where the body was found. The place was covered in dust, so there were a lot of footprints on the ground. But I never paid much attention to them. You remember why?’
‘Because we didn’t find any that looked like they belonged to the murderer,’ Koga replied.
Sasagaki nodded. ‘The only footprints at the scene, other than those made by the leather shoes of the victim, were made by kids’ sneakers. And we knew the kids played in there, and it was some kid from Ōe Elementary who discovered the body, so what’s so strange about some sneaker marks? That was where I was wrong.’
‘You mean the murderer was wearing kids’ sneakers?’
‘Don’t you think it was a little careless to not even consider the possibility?’
Koga frowned. ‘A kid couldn’t have pulled that murder off.’
‘Or maybe being a kid is how they pulled it off. Caught Kirihara off guard.’
‘But…’
‘There’s another thing I overlooked,’ Sasagaki said, putting down his chopsticks and sticking up a finger. ‘Alibis.’
‘Go on.’
‘When Fumiyo Nishimoto’s alibi checked out we immediately started checking for an accomplice. That’s when we hit on Terasaki, but there was someone else we should have looked at first.’
Koga rubbed his chin. ‘Wasn’t Yukiho at the library at the time?’
Sasagaki stared the younger detective in the face. ‘Good memory.’
Koga chuckled dryly. ‘Don’t tell me you’re one of the ones who thinks I care more about my rank than my work.’
‘Never crossed my mind. I didn’t think any of the other detectives remembered where Yukiho had been that day. But like you said, she was at the library. I looked into it and found out that that library is pretty darn close to the scene of the crime. She would’ve had to pass in front of that abandoned building on her way home.’
‘I see where you’re going with this, but come on – what age is that?’
‘Eleven years old. Old enough to know the deal.’ Sasagaki opened his box of Seven Stars and put one in his mouth. He began to look for a match.
Koga’s hand shot out with a lighter. ‘I’m not so sure,’ he said, lighting the old detective’s cigarette. The expensive lighter had a satisfying click.
Sasagaki nodded his thanks, then blowing a puff of white smoke he looked down at the lighter in Koga’s hands. ‘That a Dunhill?’
‘Cartier, actually.’
Sasagaki snorted. ‘Remember that Dunhill we found in Terasaki’s car after the accident?’
‘The one they thought might have belonged to the pawnbroker, right? Never did figure that one out, as I recall.’
‘That was my theory, that it belonged to Kirihara. But Terasaki wasn’t the murderer. I think it’s more likely that someone who wanted to make it look like he did it snuck it into his place, or sold him some story and gave it to him.’
‘And you think that was Yukiho?’
‘That would make the most sense. I’d say it’s even more likely than Terasaki just happening to own the same lighter as Kirihara.’
Koga sighed, a sigh that gradually turned into a groan. ‘Look, I admire your flexibility in even considering the possibility that Yukiho is behind all this. It’s true, we might have cut some corners because she was a kid. But without anything more conclusive, this is really just another theory. You have any evidence that she was the one who did it?’
‘Well…’ Sasagaki said, taking a deep drag on his cigarette and slowly exhaling. The smoke floated over Koga’s head before dispersing. ‘I’d have to say no. I don’t have evidence.’
‘Then maybe you better rethink this whole thing from the beginning. And, I’m sorry, but the statute of limitations is up on the case. Even if you did find the real killer, there’s nothing we can do.’
‘I know that.’
‘Well?’
‘Well, listen,’ Sasagaki said, snuffing his cigarette out. He glanced round, making sure no one was listening to them. ‘This is bigger than the question of whoever killed the pawnbroker. I’m not just after Yukiho Karasawa.’
‘Who else would you be after?’ Koga asked, a sharp light in his eyes.