‘That seems like a pretty blatant mistake for a respected physicist to make.’
‘I told you that story to illustrate the inherent danger of preconceptions. Which is why I sent you to that interview without any background information. As a result, you were able to give me extremely objective information.’ Yukawa returned his eyes to the report.
‘So, what’s the verdict? Are we still dealing with an imaginary solution?’
Yukawa just stared at the paper in his hand. A deep wrinkle formed between his eyebrows. ‘Several bottles in the fridge, huh?’ he said, half to himself.
‘I thought that was strange, too,’ Utsumi said. ‘Mrs Mashiba told us that she never let their stock of bottles run out. But on the day after she went to her parents’ house, they were down to one bottle. What do you think it means?’
Yukawa crossed his arms and closed his eyes.
‘Professor?’ she said, half afraid he’d fallen asleep.
‘Impossible,’ came the physicist’s reply.
‘What’s impossible?’
‘It just couldn’t be, and yet …’ Yukawa took off his glasses, pressed his fingertips to his eyelids, and said nothing more.
TWENTY-TWO
Kusanagi made his way up Kagurazaka-dori Avenue from Iidabashi station, taking a left immediately after the Bish -amonten temple. At the top of the steep slope was his destination, an office building on the right-hand side of the road.
Plates with the names of the resident businesses hung on the wall just inside the front entrance. Kunugi Publishing was on the second floor.
There was an elevator, but Kusanagi took the stairs. This turned out to be extremely awkward due to the large number of cardboard boxes stacked in the stairwell. It was a flagrant violation of fire codes, but he decided not to mention it – at least, not today.
He peeked in through the wide-open door at the top of the stairs and saw several employees sitting at their desks. The woman closest to the door noticed Kusanagi and came over.
‘Can I help you?’
‘Yes, is Mr Sasaoka here? I spoke with him on the phone.’
‘Oh, yes, hello.’ A slightly pudgy man’s face appeared from behind a cabinet.
‘Mr Sasaoka?’
‘Yes! Er …’ The man turned to the desk beside him, opened a drawer, and pulled out his card, which he offered to the detective. ‘Pleasure to meet you!’
They exchanged cards. Kusanagi glanced down at the one he had received, which read:
Kunio Sasaoka
CEO, Kunugi Publishing
Mr Sasaoka beamed. ‘This is my first time ever getting a card from a police officer. This’ll make an excellent keepsake.’ He reversed the card and huffed with surprise. ‘It says, “To Mr Sasaoka”! And you’ve written the date here – I see. This is to prevent inappropriate use, am I right?’
‘Don’t take it personally.’
‘No, no, I completely understand,’ the editor said. ‘So, would you like to talk here, or maybe we should go to a café?’
‘Here is fine.’
He led Kusanagi to a simple meeting area in a corner of the office.
‘Sorry to bother you during business hours.’ Kusanagi sat down on a black Naugahyde sofa.
‘No worries. Things are pretty laid-back here. Not like at the major publishers!’ Sasaoka guffawed loudly.
‘Like I said on the phone, I wanted to ask you a bit about a Ms Junko Tsukui.’
The smile faded from Sasaoka’s amiable face. ‘Yes … I was her editor, in fact. She had real talent. What a loss.’
‘Did you know her for long?’
‘I wouldn’t say long, maybe two years and a bit. She did two books for us …’ Sasaoka stood and retrieved two books from his own desk. ‘Here they are.’
The first was titled The Snowman Tumbles and the other The Adventures of Taro the Temple Dog.
‘She liked writing about characters that already have a certain place in the kid-lit tradition. She even did one about a teruterubozu,’ Sasaoka explained.
‘Actually, I know that one,’ Kusanagi told him, remembering the book that had launched the illustrator’s brief career as a character designer for Yoshitaka’s online anime.
Sasaoka nodded, his eyes crinkling at the corners. ‘Ms Tsukui could take the most familiar characters and make them sparkle. We all miss her.’
‘Do you remember anything about her death?’
‘All too well. She left a letter addressed to me, after all.’
‘Yes … according to her family, she sent a few notes to people she knew.’
Junko Tsukui’s family home had been in Hiroshima. Kusanagi had spoken with her mother over the phone. When the young woman died of a sleeping pill overdose, she had left three letters behind, each addressed to someone she knew professionally.
‘She apologized for abandoning her work,’ Sasaoka said, shaking his head. ‘I had just asked her to start her next book. I guess she was concerned that it was never going to get finished.’
‘Nothing about why she committed suicide?’
‘Nothing. Just an apology. As if I wouldn’t forgive her!’
Tsukui also mailed a letter to her mother just before killing herself. When her mother read it, she immediately phoned her daughter, and when she couldn’t reach her, she told the police. A local squad rushed to the apartment, where they found the body.
Junko hadn’t written about her reasons for committing suicide in her letter to her mother. Instead, she had thanked her mother for giving birth to and raising her, and she apologized for throwing away the life she had received.
‘We still don’t know why,’ the mother had told Kusanagi over the phone, breaking into tears, the pain in her voice still fresh even after two years.
‘Do you have any idea why she might’ve done it?’ Kusa -nagi asked Sasaoka.
The editor frowned. ‘The police asked me that back then, too, but I still don’t know. I saw her about two weeks before she died, and maybe I’m just dense, but I didn’t notice anything out of the ordinary at all.’
It wasn’t just you, Kusanagi thought. He had already met with the other two recipients of Junko’s letters, and both of them had said the same thing. No one understood why she had taken her own life.
‘Did you know she was seeing someone?’ he asked, changing the topic.
‘I heard something like that. But I never knew who it was. You have to watch what you say about those things these days, what with the sexual harassment suits and all,’ Sasaoka said with evident sincerity.
‘Boyfriends aside, then, do you know anyone else she might’ve been close to? A female associate or friend?’
Sasaoka crossed his thick arms and shrugged. ‘They asked me that, too, but I couldn’t think of anyone. I think she liked being alone, honestly. She was one of those people who are happy sitting in their room, drawing, not going out of their way to be around other people much. I was kind of surprised when I heard there was a man, to tell you the truth.’
Sounds a lot like Ayane, Kusanagi thought. With the exception of her assistant and one old friend back home, she was basically alone, sitting on the sofa in her big living room, working on her patchwork all day long.
Maybe the ‘lonely woman’ was Yoshitaka’s type? Kusanagi recalled his conversation with Tatsuhiko Ikai. Yoshitaka Mashiba chose women who led lonely lives because it was only their function as childbearers that interested him. If that was how he thought of them, then friends and the obligations of society would be needless accessories for a machine with only one purpose.
‘Detective?’ Sasaoka broke the silence. ‘Can I ask why you’re looking into her suicide now? I know there was no motive, but at the time they said it was a clear-cut case of suicide. There was no investigation back then.’
Kusanagi shook his head. ‘It actually has nothing to do with her suicide itself. Her name came up in the course of a different investigation.’
‘Oh. Right.’ Sasaoka was clearly curious but
lacked the temerity to press for more information.
Kusanagi took the opportunity to leave before Sasaoka asked more questions. ‘I should be going,’ he said. ‘Sorry for taking you away from your work.’
‘Are you sure that’s all you need? Gosh, I didn’t even remember to offer you some tea.’
‘It’s okay, I’m fine. Though I was wondering if I could borrow these books for a bit?’ He held up the two picture books in his hand.
‘Those? Please, you can have them.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Yeah. They’re just going to be shredded at some point anyway.’
‘Well, then, all right. Thanks.’ Kusanagi stood and headed for the door with the editor close behind him.
‘I have to say it was a real surprise when I heard she was gone. When I got the word that she’d died, suicide was the last thing I expected. Even when we heard what had actually happened, we debated it for a long time, me and my friends. Some even thought she was killed. I mean, who would have the guts to actually drink that stuff? It had to be painful.’
Kusanagi stopped and fixed his gaze on Sasaoka’s round face. ‘Excuse me? Drink what stuff?’
‘The poison.’
‘Poison? Not sleeping pills?’
The editor’s mouth formed the shape of an O and he waved his hands. ‘No way, I thought you knew! It was arsenic.’
Kusanagi froze. ‘Arsenic?’
‘Yeah, the same stuff they found in that poisoned curry down in Wakayama.’
‘You mean arsenous acid?’
‘Right. Yeah. They did call it that.’
Kusanagi’s heart nearly leapt out of his chest. He quickly excused himself and left the offices. He dashed down the stairs to the street, ringing Kishitani on his mobile phone as soon as he was clear of the building. He instructed the junior detective to call the local Police Station who handled Junko Tsukui’s suicide and get everything they had on it.
‘Still chasing after that picture book illustrator?’ Kishitani asked. ‘What’s up this time?’
‘I’ve already got the chief’s okay on this, so stop whining and get on the phone,’ Kusanagi growled. He disconnected and hailed a cab. ‘Meguro Police Station!’ he told the driver.
As the taxi sped down the road, Kusanagi contemplated the situation. They had spent far too many days on the Mashiba case already. Their inability to determine the entry point of the poison was one reason, and the lack of suspects with a convincing motive was another. The only person with a real motive was Ayane, and she had the perfect alibi.
So, two days ago, Kusanagi had told the chief he was convinced that someone else must have come to the Mashiba residence the day he died. It was then Kusanagi had asked for permission to investigate further into the dead executive’s most recent ex-girlfriend.
‘But isn’t she already dead?’ Mamiya asked.
‘Yeah, that’s why I want to know more,’ Kusanagi told him. ‘If Yoshitaka Mashiba was the cause of her suicide, it would give anyone close to Junko Tsukui a motive.’
‘You’re talking about revenge? I dunno, it’s been two years since she killed herself. If this was revenge, what took them so long?’
‘I can’t say. Maybe they waited until everyone forgot about the suicide, so no one would make the connection?’
‘If that’s true, then our killer is awfully patient, Kusanagi. It’s not everyone that can, for two years, hold onto enough hatred to kill a man.’
Though Mamiya didn’t look very convinced, he gave his permission to look into the suicide case, and Kusanagi had wasted no time. The editor of It Can Rain Tomorrow had given him the home phone number of Junko’s family, which led to a string of phone calls to them and to every associate who had received one of her suicide letters.
Yet no one he talked to had said so much as a word connecting Yoshitaka Mashiba to her suicide. In fact, hardly anyone even knew she’d been dating anyone. According to her mother, there were no signs that a man had ever visited Junko’s apartment, and she didn’t think a romantic entanglement had anything to do with her daughter’s suicide. It had been three years since Mashiba and Junko were spotted at the tea room. If they had broken up soon after, then maybe Junko’s suicide a year later really didn’t have anything to do with him.
Even if it did, however, if no one knew that, then no one would have reason to seek revenge against the businessman. Despite getting the go-ahead from Mamiya, Kusanagi felt like his investigation had fallen flat just out of the gate.
Until he heard about the poison.
If he’d requested the case file from the officers who handled the Tsukiu death in the first place, he might have discovered the connection before now; but after calling and hearing her mother’s tearful story, Kusanagi had cut corners. After all, if the officers on the case had been comfortable calling it a suicide, what else was there to know?
But arsenous acid –
There was always the possibility it was sheer coincidence. After the news story about the curry poisoning incident, the effectiveness of the poison became public knowledge, which would, of course, lead people considering suicide or murder to try it.
But for a man to die by the same poison his ex-girlfriend used to commit suicide – that was a little too much coincidence for Kusanagi.
While the detective was pondering the possibilities, his phone rang. It was Yukawa.
‘You again? You must be going head to head with every high school girl in the country in terms of your phone bill this month.’
‘When you have something you want to say, it can’t be helped,’ Yukawa noted sagely. ‘Can you meet today?’
‘I can, but what’s this about? You finally figure out how the poison got into the coffee?’
‘Not exactly “figured out”. Let’s say I found a possible method, instead.’
Even while he rolled his eyes at the professor’s painstaking way of talking, Kusanagi’s grip tightened on his phone. When Yukawa started talking possibilities, it usually meant a solution was just around the corner.
‘Did you tell Utsumi?’
‘No, not yet. And, to be honest, I’m not ready to tell you either. So don’t get all excited about meeting me, because you’ll only be disappointed.’
‘What’s that supposed to mean? Why do you want to meet, then?’
‘I have a request concerning the investigation. I need to see if all of the conditions were in place for our killer to pull off the particular trick I have in mind.’
‘So you won’t tell me what this latest trick is, but you want me to share information with you? I shouldn’t have to tell you this, but you do know that talking about the details of an investigation with civilians is officially taboo.’
After several seconds of silence, Yukawa replied. ‘I’m surprised to hear you, of all people, saying that. But no matter. There’s a reason why I can’t tell you about the trick. I’ll explain in person.’
‘See, when you put it like that, I think you’re just leading me on. Anyway, I have to go to the Meguro station right now. I’ll stop by the university afterwards. Should be about eight o’clock.’
‘Then give me a ring when you get here. I might not be in the lab.’
‘Right.’ Kusanagi hung up, suddenly feeling tension mounting in the pit of his stomach.
He wanted to know what trick Yukawa had discovered, though he knew that guessing it was likely impossible. What worried him most was how the explanation might affect where Ayane stood on their roster of suspects.
If Yukawa’s trick breaks her ironclad alibi …
There will be no way out, the detective thought – meaning not Ayane, but rather, no way out for himself. Kusanagi would be forced to suspect her. Usually, the prospect of an elucidating lecture from Yukawa was reason for excitement. Today, however, it just brought Kusanagi more distress.
Kishitani was standing in the Meguro Police Station, a fax in his hand – details on Junko Tsukui’s suicide. Mamiya was standing next to him.
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‘Now I know why you wanted more info,’ Kishitani said, holding up the paper.
Kusanagi ran his eyes down the report. Tsukui had been found in her bed at her apartment. On the table next to her was a glass half full of water and a small plastic bag of white powder. The powder was oxidized arsenic, a.k.a. arsenous acid.
‘Nothing here about how she got the poison. They didn’t figure it out?’ Kusanagi muttered.
‘They probably didn’t look into it,’ Mamiya said. ‘There was no reason to suspect murder. And arsenous acid isn’t all that hard to come by. They probably thought it would be a waste of time.’
‘Still, it’s pretty significant that Mashiba’s ex killed herself with the same kind of poison that killed him. Not bad, Kusanagi,’ Kishitani said, his excitement palpable.
‘Did they keep the poison as evidence, by any chance?’ Kusanagi asked.
‘We checked into it, but no luck. It was two years ago, after all,’ Mamiya said with a frown. There was no chance to compare the poison used in each case to see if both samples came from the same source.
‘And they told the family about the poison?’ Kusanagi asked no one in particular.
‘What do you mean?’ Mamiya asked.
‘Tsukui’s mother told me she had died from a sleeping pill overdose. I was wondering why she thought that.’
‘Maybe she just got the wrong idea somehow?’
‘It’s possible …’ Kusanagi said. But he doubted that a mother would forget how her own daughter killed herself.
‘Well, with this and what Utsumi was talking about, it’s nice that we’re finally making a little progress,’ Kishitani said.
Kusanagi looked up. ‘What was Utsumi talking about?’
‘Some tidbit she got from Detective Galileo,’ Mamiya put in. ‘He’s having her reexamine the filter on the water line at the Mashiba house. They sent it to – what was that place?’
‘Spring-8,’ Kishitani said.