When Mariko had come home, the Arima Team detectives had sworn to him that they'd find whoever had done that to her. But how long would it take? A year? Two? The statute of limitations for murder was fifteen years. It might just end up taking all of them.
Until that day, Yoshio Arima couldn't die. Therefore he wouldn't drink. He had also stopped smoking, and was taking his medication to lower his blood pressure. Even on nights when he couldn't sleep, he still lay down and rested, and even though he didn't feel like eating, he treated food as medicine and forced himself to swallow it. Mariko had been killed far too young, and now he was begging for his own life to be extended. The life that you robbed from Mariko, give it to me. If you can't bring Mariko back, give the years of her life that you took from her to this old man. Give old Yoshio Arima the legs to outrun death.
“But why are you okay, Boss?” Kida's voice caught in his throat as he started carping again, almost in tears. “Why did you watch that program? It would send me over the edge. I don't get you. I'm really sorry for you, but I just don't understand you.”
Kida's wife must have been beside him, for there was a clatter as she wrested the phone from him, and then her voice came on the line. “Mr. Arima? I'm so sorry. This is Satoko. My husband is as drunk as a skunk. Please forgive him for saying such terrible things.”
“Don't worry. I know it's really not like Taka.”
“He started acting really weird while he was watching TV,” Satoko said, her voice breaking. “He was going on about how he'd known Mari-chan since she was a baby. He even started crying into his sake. Then he said he just had to call you.”
She apologized profusely, and before hanging up Yoshio assured her she needn't worry. He sat holding his head in his hands for a few minutes, then the phone rang again. He picked it up thinking it would be Kida.
“Stupid old fart.” It was the voice. “You still alive? Jeez, aren't you ashamed of living longer than your granddaughter?”
Yoshio's heart started racing alarmingly. This was the same voice as usual. The scathing voice he was used to hearing. The angry, emotional voice─the childishly defiant voice. Yes, that was it, he realized now. The difference between the voice that had been instructing Tagawa on TV, and the voice that Yoshio was hearing now, was the difference between an adult and a child. However unfathomably dangerous he was, this caller sounded childish.
“Why,” he managed to wring a voice out of his dry throat, “are you calling?
“Shut up!” the voice screeched. “Don't ask me questions. Apologize! Say sorry right now!”
He really was upset. Actually, he sounded like a child having a tantrum. Yoshio's heart was beating even harder, but he said boldly, “You're calling to vent your anger on me, aren't you? Well, aren't you?”
“It's up to me why I call!”
“I guess it is. I suppose you've had a fight with your accomplice.” The line suddenly went quiet. Yoshio sucked in his breath. “You're not alone, are you? I don't know whether there are two or three of you, but anyway, you haven't done everything on your own. And for all I know, someone could have been using you. Isn't that right?”
He could hear the caller breathing heavily. Had he hit the mark? It looked like he might have hit bull's-eye.
“When you got angry and hung up on that TV program, he told you off, didn't he? And then he took over the role of caller. You didn't like that, did you? That's why you decided to call this old man to vent your anger. I'm right, aren't I?” Yoshio waited, feeling the sweat build up in his balled fist.
“Stupid old fool!” the caller sounded like he was spitting the words out over his shoulder, just like a child who'd lost a fight and was running away. Then the line went dead.
Yoshio gripped the receiver as if it held all the answers to his questions. He closed his eyes and told himself: I was right. And I handled that just right. I was the one to land a punch this time. For the first time, I managed to shake him up.
He shouldn't rush things. It was a small victory, but a victory nonetheless. For the first time, he'd had a real sense that the guy was a flesh-and-blood person. And there was plenty of time. Time was on Yoshio's side. He would definitely catch him …
At Yoshio Arima's insistence, the investigating team had immediately started analyzing the voiceprints of the special program broadcast by HBS.
They had already done the same with the other recordings of calls made to the press and to the victim's family, and on the basis of these results they had assumed that the person who'd said he had dumped Mariko Furukawa's bag in Okawa Park was the same person who had sent Arima out to the Plaza Hotel, and who had called Chiaki Hidaka's mother.
This time, though, there were two specific points they had to establish:
-Was the person who had called in during the program the same person as in previous calls?
-And was the person who had called into the program before the commercial break the same as the person who had called in afterwards?
They had hoped to get a copy of the studio recording, especially since this was the only existing record of the person who had called in after the commercial break, but HBS had declined their request. The analysis needed to be undertaken with the utmost care. If Arima was right and a different person had called in after the commercial break, this would be the first evidence they had to support the theory of more than one perpetrator being involved in the serial homicide case.
A detective Yoshio had spoken to told him that such an important expert analysis would take at least three to four days, during which time he shouldn't breathe a word of this to anyone, not even if asked about it. Yoshio promised not to, after all he didn't want to obstruct the police in any way. However, he didn't quite understand what was meant by voiceprint: what it was or how it was analyzed, or how dependable it was. The detective seemed a bit vague on the details too, and brought in a young police officer from forensics to explain it to him. Yoshio couldn't help giving a wry smile.
“It was a scientist at the laboratories of Bell Telephone in America who thought analyzing the voiceprint─the sound spectrogram─might be an effective way to distinguish individual human speech patterns,” the young forensics officer explained confidently. “The idea originated in wartime research, when they wanted to identify enemy voices in intercepted communications from the German military. It was pretty rudimentary at that time, though. Then in around 1960, the FBI wanted to identify individual voices and asked Bell Labs to look into it─and that became the basis for voiceprint analysis today.”
“But what is that spectro whatchamacallit?” Yoshio asked dubiously.
“The spectrogram. We run a recording of speech through a special machine, which prints it visually on a kind of roller. This shows a number of lines in a wavelike pattern. I'm sure you must have seen one on a TV drama before now. These days it's all done digitally by computer, though.”
As with fingerprints, no two voiceprints were the same, but they were harder to use as evidence for identification.
“If the recording is of poor quality, there's more likelihood of error in the analysis. That's why we really want the HBS studio recordings.”
“So a short conversation wouldn't be enough?”
“That's not so much of a problem. Around ninety seconds is enough. Timewise we have plenty to be going on.”
Then there was the fact that a person's voiceprint tended to change as they aged, so that if the samples used in a comparative analysis came from different time periods, this could skew the results, too.
“That's not a problem in this case either. But because there are gray areas like these, the courts won't recognize voiceprints as hard evidence. They're only admissible as either circumstantial evidence, or as data to guide an investigation.”
But Yoshio's sense that the voice had changed after the commercial break had more to do with his own gut feeling rather than anythi
ng specific about the voice itself. He was beginning to worry that the machine wouldn't be able to make such a subtle distinction. Then there was the voice changer─wouldn't that affect the analysis, too?
The young officer smiled, as fresh-faced as the model in the recruitment poster on the wall. “No need to worry about that. The voice changer can't change the voiceprint─the analysis can see through all that.” The corners of his mouth curled up in a smile. “You know, your granddaughter's killer seems quite knowledgeable and fancies himself as a bit of a know-it-all, but I think he's completely unaware of this point. Not just the voiceprint, but he doesn't seem to know anything about cell phones, either.”
Yoshio looked at him in surprise. “What about cell phones?”
“He seems to think that unlike landlines, cell phones are untraceable. It's true that with a cell phone we can't pinpoint the telephone number like we can with a landline. But we can tell the area the call was made from─which transfer station the call came through. The telephone company needs that information in order to be able to bill the customer, after all.”
This was the first Yoshio had heard of such things. He looked at the officer, so youthful and eager. “Does that mean you've already looked into where the calls have been made from? You must have. Why didn't anyone tell me about that?”
The officer suddenly got cold feet. He'd obviously said too much. “Well, I'm just in forensics and don't know about that. It's definitely better for the investigation that it's not made public. And it's probably not something that you should know about at this stage either, Mr. Arima.”
“But─”
“I know it's hard,” he said kindly, “but please wait for the outcome of the voiceprint analysis. That could well change the direction of the investigation, and bring us closer to our culprit.”
It couldn't be helped─he'd just have to wait, Yoshio realized. He'd waited this long, so he could wait some more. At least things would be clearer in a few days when they had the result of the voiceprint analysis. That wasn't so long.
But three days later, events had taken an entirely new turn.
Chapter 17
Tuesday November 5, 1996.
The long fall holiday weekend was already over, but Route 12 through the mountainous northeast of the city of Akai in Gunma Prefecture was still packed with tourists enjoying the autumn colors.
Commonly known as the Mount Akai Green Road, Route 12 had been opened seven years earlier to improve access between JR Akai Station and the northeastern section of the city─an attempt to breathe life into this relatively undeveloped area. It followed the old forest road that had been used by loggers up until the middle of the Meiji period at the turn of the century, which was why it was generally precipitous with steep gradients and lots of bends.
While the road's construction was underway, a plan to develop the southern slopes of Mount Akai was hatched. The project included two hundred new homes, along with a new general hospital and assisted-living apartments for the elderly with on-site medical services provided by the hospital. However, the development ground to a halt due to lack of funding as shockwaves from the collapse of the bubble economy impacted on the provincial city's finances.
The project's mastermind was a city councilor who had run roughshod over the council's objections to secure the development permit, despite it being an area designated as protected forest. He just happened to be the father-in-law of the chief executive of a well-established private hospital in town who was in charge of the plans for the new hospital. This naturally had led to accusations of nepotism, but these had been outweighed by the fact that a Tokyo development firm, which had easy access to money from a finance company specializing in home loans backed by the major banks, was keen to start work on it.
However, with the government clamping down on real-estate loans, and the bubble economy now careening into recession, the finance company jumped ship and the developer also got cold feet. The powerful engine of the city councilor and hospital CEO was suddenly left without fuel, but even so they did their best to sputter along for another couple of years. When the large retailer that had planned to build an outlet there pulled out, however, they were forced to bow to the inevitable and in the fall of 1993 the project sank. Weeds covered the foundations of the condominium, and the metal frames of the hospital and affiliated senior housing were left exposed to the elements, leaving red rust-covered skeletons visible for all to see on the south-facing slopes of the mountain. Running through it all was the Green Road, headed into the uninhabited highlands.
Many residents thought this was for the best, however. The Green Road was a popular drive for tourists who came for the fall foliage and spring flowers, and also provided an alternate route to the Oyama Amusement Park on the other side of Mount Akai. It therefore enjoyed a fair amount of traffic despite the failed development project, and small rest houses, coffee shops, and restaurants sprang up along it. Eventually these were granted licenses by the city, albeit belatedly, and a panoramic observation deck and restaurant were constructed on the summit.
Meanwhile, the remains of the failed development plan stood out as a blot on the landscape, especially galling for the fact that it had all been written off as bad debt and couldn't be demolished. Inevitably, rumors of ghosts abounded, attracting youngsters not just from the local town but also from as far afield as Tokyo, who came in their hordes to explore the haunted ruins, as they came to be known. Eventually there were so many incidents of fights breaking out or of people slipping and hurting themselves on the precarious structures that the council made the area off-limits, although this didn't deter the most curious.
There were two gas stations on the Green Road, one near the panoramic observation deck on the summit, and the other, larger one, the Green Road National, at the foot of the mountain. Nineteen-year-old Katsuya Nagase stood by the second of its five pumps, waving his cap and bowing to a customer who was just leaving. A local of Akai, Katsuya had been to the haunted ruins just two evenings ago, on his night off. He and his girlfriend Satomi had arranged to go on a double date with her friend Kyoko and her boyfriend. Katsuya had just bought a new car and wanted to take it out for a spin, so asked them all where they wanted to go. When Satomi said she wanted to go to the haunted ruins, he'd been less than keen. He'd already had a period of messing about with friends there, and was tired of it. But Satomi and her friends were adamant. It transpired that Kyoko had some kind of psychic powers and had been wanting to go there for ages to see what, if anything, she could feel. Katsuya was completely uninterested in ghosts or psychic powers and frankly just wished they'd give him a break, but the two girls had had their hearts set on it and it didn't look as though he was going to get any support from Kyoko's boyfriend. Reluctantly, he'd set off up the Green Road.
Unsurprisingly, the evening had ended up being a disaster. As the decaying ruins loomed up ahead of them, Kyoko had started complaining that her chest hurt and she couldn't breathe. She could see thousands of white figures floating up and down the slopes of the mountain and felt like she was going to throw up, so Katsuya stopped the car and told her to get out. There was little traffic on the Green Road at night, but there were usually some youngsters out driving dangerously fast, so you had to take care. Katsuya felt totally fed up as he watched Satomi rubbing Kyoko's back at the side of the road. As for Kyoko's boyfriend, he'd just got out of the car and was nonchalantly smoking a cigarette without showing any sign of going to his girlfriend's aid. Weird couple they are, Katsuya thought in disgust. He probably wouldn't even bat an eyelid even if he'd taken Kyoko to a hotel and she'd complained of the room being haunted. What a jerk.
The girls were shaking with fear but still they insisted on going right up to the ruins. Katsuya did his best to control his mounting frustration, but his driving grew steadily rougher and eventually he ended up arguing with Satomi. Neither of them had been inclined to back down and the strained atmosphere grew i
ncreasingly hostile. Of course the place had been just pitch-black with nothing there, and he was damned if he'd ever go back there again. He'd ended up splitting up with Satomi, and was still pissed about it even now, two days later.
The gas station was surprisingly busy for a weekday. It must be the lingering holiday mood, especially since it was the peak season to enjoy fall colors. He couldn't even take his regular forty-five minutes for lunch from one o'clock, and it was almost four before the manager finally told him to take a short break. He was starving! Lightheaded with hunger, he headed for the staff room on the other side of the office.
Another part-timer was watching TV in the corner as she ate a sandwich. A gossip show was on, discussing that serial killer case in Tokyo that had been all over the news lately. Katsuya took one of the reserve stock of cup noodles and as he added hot water he teased her, “You'd better watch out, Kimi-chan, or you might find yourself dead and buried.”
“Yeah, it's scary,” she said without even a hint of a smile, her eyes glued to the TV.
“Hey, you'll be fine as long as you don't go getting into cars with strange men.”
“But what if someone grabs me off the street?” She waved the hand holding her half-eaten sandwich at the TV. “I'm not strong enough to fight off some man forcing me into his car. And then I'd be his prisoner!” She really did look frightened.
“Keep a hidden cell phone or pager so you can call for help.”