When Misaki pulled into the prison parking lot, she spotted a black Honda that hadn't been there earlier that afternoon. A short man about ten years older than her with trendy black-framed glasses was just getting out of the driver's seat; he smiled when he saw her. Misaki fought down a surge of annoyance. How the hell had the press heard about this already - or was Yomiuri Shimbun's top crime reporter's presence here just a coincidence?
"Director!" he called, waving as if she could have possibly missed him. "Sorry, I mean Acting Director."
"I don't recall signing off on any of your requests for visitation, Toda," she said coolly as she locked her car and walked past him to the front entrance.
He shrugged, and fell into step beside her. "Well, it never hurts to try. I heard a rumor that you paid our favorite prisoner a visit earlier this afternoon; thought I'd stop by and see if I could learn anything interesting. But you're here now, so…either my source was a little confused about the time, or something especially interesting is going on."
"Careful," Misaki warned. "Contractors are still designated state secrets; anything you publish that doesn't come directly from my office can earn you five years in prison."
"Sure, but we aren't talking about contractors, are we? Unless you're saying that Director Hourai…" Toda trailed off, as if expecting her to fill in the blanks for him. Misaki frequently used that same tactic in her own interrogations; no way was she going to fall for it herself. In any case, it seemed that he hadn't heard the news about Hourai yet. Good. She couldn't risk that getting out until she knew what had actually happened.
Misaki pushed open the door to the single-story, plain brick building. Saitou, Kouno, and one of the Interpol detectives, a youngish man named Navid, were waiting for her in the lobby, looking grim and not speaking to one another. "Thanks for getting here so fast," she told them quietly in English for Navid's sake, ignoring Toda's presence as he followed her in. "Let's get going."
She fished around for her badge in her inside suit jacket pocket, then remembered that she had stuffed it into the outside pocket during her earlier visit. Pulling it out, she addressed the officer sitting behind the bulletproof window. "Acting Director -"
"Kirihara," the officer finished. "Superintendent Memoto said to let you and your team right through." He motioned them over to the metal detector and x-ray machine, where another officer led them through a little gate that bypassed the scanners. Toda watched; his curiosity was certainly piqued, but he had no authorization to pass this first security point. Misaki hoped that he wouldn't wait around for them to return. Regardless of whether he could or could not publish, the less he saw, the better.
"Chief, do you know what happened?" Saitou whispered in Japanese as they waited for their escort, out of sight and earshot of the front lobby.
She shook her head. "Just what I told you on the phone. About an hour after he agreed to sign a deal, his guard opened the cell to give him his dinner and found him dead, apparently by his own hand."
"Shit," Kouno muttered.
"English, please," Navid said, pursing his lips in obvious annoyance.
"Chief," Saitou said again, dropping his voice even lower, "does he have to be here?"
Misaki shot him a sharp look. "Yes," she replied in English. "This case is too close to us; I want an external party involved."
For the past month, Interpol had been conducting an investigation into Pandora while Section Four focused on the branch of the Syndicate that had infiltrated the National Police Agency. They were using Section Four's offices as their headquarters; a handful of times the two teams had worked together as was necessary for their cases. None of her team was particularly happy about the foreign interlopers. Misaki herself didn't mind, but occasionally she did get the distinct impression that she was being babysat. That, she did not appreciate.
After a long moment in which no one said anything further, Superintendent Memoto came hurrying up the corridor. "Director, thank you for coming so soon. I apologize -"
"Has anyone been inside the cell since you called?" Misaki interrupted; she'd heard enough apologies on the phone. Behind her, Saitou was clumsily translating in English for Navid. They used that language in their joint meetings with Interpol, but none of the prison staff spoke it well enough to make conversing feasible.
The balding man shook his head, sweat beading on his brow despite the coolness of the corridors through which he was leading them. "No. As I said, the guard who found him entered to administer first aid; when he saw that it was too late, he exited and left the cell locked behind him. No one has been in or out since."
"What about the time between my visit and when he returned to his cell? Did anything unusual happen?"
"We took him straight back to his cell after your interrogation," Memoto said. "Moriyama is a senior officer, a great stickler for protocol; everything was completely by the book. It's a very clear-cut case of suicide."
"Did you oversee the transfer?"
"Not personally, no -"
"Then you can't know for sure that protocol was followed to the letter."
"We've already reviewed the tapes," Memoto insisted. "Nothing abnormal appeared at all."
"Nothing aside from a prisoner somehow managing to take his own life in an isolated, high-security cell."
They passed through the final checkpoint. Memoto led them past the room where Misaki had met with Hourai and down another corridor, at the end of which were clustered a few guards, talking amongst themselves. They quieted and moved out of the way when one of them, an older man that Misaki recognized from her earlier visit, noticed Memoto and the Section Four team.
"Moriyama." Memoto gestured the older man over. "Please give Director Kirihara and her team whatever assistance they need."
The veteran officer bowed gravely, but held up a hand when Misaki stepped forward. "It's not a pretty sight," he warned.
"I'm sure I've seen worse," Misaki told him. "But I need to see this for myself."
The entrance, a heavy steel door with a plate glass window, was propped open. Beyond it was a small vestibule about three feet deep, then a wall of bars. This way a guard could enter a cell and still be physically separated from a potentially dangerous inmate. As a further measure of security, both door and gate had electronic locks as well as manual. Currently, the inner barred gate was slid aside. She took a deep breath before stepping into the vestibule, and immediately regretted it as the distinctive smell of evacuated bowels flooded her senses.
Misaki didn't walk through into the cell. She could see the entire scene from there.
The room itself was tiny, only seven by twelve feet. The furniture - a single bunk with a thin mattress; a desk and a stool - were all made from poured concrete, with no part that could be broken off and used as a weapon. The toilet, sink, and water fountain were one unit, all stainless steel with no knobs or faucets that Misaki could see. A single security camera rested in the far corner. On the bed Misaki could see an orange prison jumpsuit, neatly folded, with a pair of laceless cotton slippers sitting tidily on the floor beneath it. The only other personal effects were two books standing on the desk next to a small television that was bolted to the concrete.
A boxy metal shower was built into the corner beside the bed, directly across from the door. In the shower was the body of Hourai Yoshimitsu. He hung from the faucet, his face purple and bloated, formerly-sunken eyes now red and bulging. The shower was so small and the faucet so low that she couldn't tell exactly how he had asphyxiated. His mouth gaped as if stunned by whatever his sightless eyes were staring at. Water still dripped from his shaggy hair and beard. He was completely naked, save for clear plastic gloves that were fitted tightly over his mechanical hands. It was a grotesque sight, one that Misaki at once wished that she had never seen; the bile rising in her throat had nothing to do with morning sickness.
"Thank you for not disturbing the scene," she said to Moriyama without averting her eyes from the corpse of her former superior. "Kouno, sweep the room."
Her subordinate stepped forward, holding a small tablet out in front of him as Navid watched over his shoulder. Misaki noticed that Kouno kept his gaze fixed on the readout as he slowly moved the screen from one side of the room to the other, his lips pursed tightly as if trying not breath in the foul stench. The tablet beeped once.
"What is that?" one of the guards asked, leaning in slightly.
"It's classified," Misaki said curtly.
Kouno tapped a button on the display. "Room's clear."
"Saitou, you have the camera?"
She remained in the vestibule with arms folded while her team began to document the scene. No one spoke; Kouno looked as if he might throw up at any moment, and Saitou's expression was stiff and pale. They both had plenty of experience dealing with horrific crime scenes far worse than this, but both had joined Section Four immediately after being accepted to the police. For Kouno that had been three years ago; eight for Saitou. Hourai was the only director either of them had known. They shouldn't have to be here now, doing this; except there was no one else Misaki could trust. She herself could be doing something useful like reviewing the security footage with Memoto, but she would stay here in this cell for as long as they did.
Navid didn't seem bothered any more than he would have been at any other crime scene. For him, it was just another crime scene. He worked alongside Saitou and Kouno as Misaki watched, documenting evidence and hunting for anything out of the ordinary. The cell was so small that the other two often bumped into him; Misaki suspected that at least one such collision was not entirely accidental on Kouno's part. She resisted the urge to sigh and rub her temple, and shifted from watching the three men to gazing around the cell.
Eventually her gaze settled on the folded orange jumpsuit. Something had been niggling at the back of her mind since her first look at the scene, and it finally made its way forward. "Did he usually shower at this time of day?" she asked Moriyama. "Right before dinner?"
"The shower is on an automatic timer," the guard answered. "It turns on at sixteen thirty-five and off at sixteen forty-two every day. So if he wanted to shower, which prisoner thirty-two generally did, he had no choice over the time."
"He has had twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, for an entire month to kill himself," she said, still looking at the folded clothes. "And he chose to do it during a five-minute shower, right after agreeing to sign a deal?"
"One giant eff you to his old department?" Kouno suggested as he leafed through one of the two books that had been sitting on the concrete desk.
"With respect, Miss," Moriyama said, "he has had nothing with which to strangle himself for the past month."
"Then what did he use, and where did he get it?" A sinking feeling was settling into her chest. This timing was too coincidental to be an actual coincidence. Or was she just being paranoid?
The guard shook his head. "I couldn't tell for sure without moving the body, which would have been against protocol. It was some sort of blue cord."
"Ch - Director," Saitou said in English, for Navid's benefit. "I've finished photographing the body. Should we, uh, take him down now?"
Misaki nodded. "You two," she pointed to the guard who had asked about the tablet and one next to him. "Cut him down."
The two guards entered the cell. One took a knife from his belt and cut whatever was around the corpse's neck. Then they lowered it heavily onto the concrete floor. Kouno held out a plastic evidence bag, and the guard dropped a blue cord into it.
"Let me see that," Misaki said suddenly. Her subordinate looked questioningly at her, but brought it over. Misaki took the bag and stared, dumbfounded, at the blue Sailor-Moon-patterned lanyard inside. "How the hell," she breathed.
"What is that," Navid asked, as if he was torn between disgust and amusement.
Misaki ignored him. Shoving the bag back to Kouno, she dug around in her jacket pocket - both outer pockets, then the inner one. Then her trouser pockets. No lanyard. "Finish up here as quickly as you can; then I want to have a look at the security footage."
The cell being as small and bare as it was, it didn't take long for them to bag the rest of the evidence. When they'd finished, Navid performed a careful scan with the prototype portable synchrotron radiation detector that his team had brought to Tokyo with them.
"Anything?" Misaki asked, daring to hope.
He shook his head. "Hard to tell - it seems to be picking up a lot of background noise that I can't tune out."
She suppressed a sigh. Well, it was new technology, and they'd done just fine without it for the past several years. "Alright. Saitou, call the coroner's office; I want Kurosaki himself down here to supervise the pickup. Where is the CCTV footage stored?"
Moriyama led them back to the second checkpoint, where a portly officer sat behind a bank of screens. All of the checkpoints had television monitors showing the nearby corridors and gates, but this one had dozens of displays across multiple monitors; Misaki suspected that the entire facility could be viewed from this station.
"Officer Suda," the new officer said as he stood and bowed in greeting. "The superintendent has asked me to show you whatever you need, Director."
"Thank you," Misaki said. "First -" But movement in the top right corner of one of the screens caught her eye: a female prisoner with a broad face and dark, curling hair had leapt off her bed and turned to face the camera. One hand rested on the closed circuit television on her desk as she stared, unblinking, as if she could see through the camera and straight at Misaki.
"Who is that?" Misaki asked.
Suda glanced at the monitor. "Prisoner nineteen. She's been here a year or so."
"Is she watching us?" Kouno wondered aloud.
Moriyama snorted. "She's always doing shit like that; don't let her fool you. The cameras are recording twenty-four-seven; it seems to entertain her, trying to play us by making us think that she can actually tell when someone's watching."
Without taking her eyes off the camera, the prisoner reached for a magazine that was lying open on the desk and draped it over the top of her head.
"Contractors," Suda muttered.
Misaki shook her head. They needed to stay focused. "She's irrelevant to this case. First I need to see the footage from my visit earlier this afternoon," she told him, ignoring the confused looks from her subordinates. "I arrived at fourteen-thirty."
Suda nodded, and sat back down at his station where he clicked through a series of files. After a moment, a feed from the front entrance popped up. Misaki saw herself enter the building and approach the front desk. After another couple of clicks, two additional feeds of the same scene but from different angles popped up. Misaki and the others watched as multiple versions of herself passed through the various checkpoints, changing escorts each time.
Even though fewer than three hours had passed, Misaki felt wholly disconnected from what she was seeing on the screen. The high vantage points of the cameras, the odd angles, showed her a completely different perspective that she had trouble recognizing.
Finally, the screen-Misaki arrived at the last security point and passed her ID and badge - both attached to her lanyard - through the slot in the window. She watched the guard on the other side pull up her personnel file on his monitor and check it against the documents in his hand; then she received it back and replaced it around her neck.
But as she walked through the gate it caught and tore. Even with the new vantage point, Misaki couldn't quite tell how it had gotten snagged to begin with. She watched herself tuck her badge and the torn lanyard into her left jacket pocket; not so much as a frayed edge could be seen. Navid leaned forward at this point, watching with renewed interest.
Then Memoto met her and escorted her to the interrogation room. The concrete table was in full view of the two cameras, but to Misaki's frustration, her lap was hidden by the table top.
"Are those the only cameras in the room?" she asked.
"Yes ma'am."
Her jaw clenched. Nothing she could do about that now.
Hourai had entered the interrogation room; Misaki stared hard at the screen as she watched herself question him, but she saw nothing new, nothing that she hadn't noticed the first time she was there. Hourai's hands remained cuffed and secured to the table, and Misaki herself never came close to him. How had her broken lanyard passed from her pocket to around his neck? Without her ever noticing?
"Show me the footage from when prisoner thirty-two was brought out," she said.
Suda called it up. The camera in the rear of Hourai's cell showed him lying down on his thin mattress, holding a book. He sat up when the steel door to corridor opened and Moriyama entered the vestibule. They appeared to exchange a few polite words; then Hourai set his book down carefully next to the other on his desk and approached the bars. He turned, arms behind his back, and Moriyama secured a pair of cuffs around his wrists, then his ankles. Once the former director was fully-trussed, Moriyama unlocked the gate and led the hobbled Hourai through the vestibule and out into the corridor. Both gate and door were locked behind them with the double-lock system.
"Keep it here," Misaki said when she saw that Suda was about to switch to the corridor cameras. "But speed it up."
The six of them watched as absolutely nothing happened in the empty cell in fast motion. Misaki sighed. It had been worth a shot. They could go through the footage more carefully later.
They then watched in silence as Moriyama led Hourai back into his cell. The former director positioned himself in front of the bars as before, facing away - and into the camera - so that Moriyama could remove his restraints. The quality of the black and white video was good, much better than the ultrasound, Misaki couldn't help but thinking. But even so, Hourai's expression was unreadable, and she couldn't tell if anything was now hidden somewhere in his jumpsuit. Once finished, the guard left the cell, clearly locking both the gate and the door behind him.
Hourai stood for a long moment in the center of the room, staring at seemingly nothing. Then he picked up his book and returned to his bed beneath the camera, where he sat cross-legged and began to read once again.
Misaki stared until her eyes watered, but there was nobody else in the room with him, no sign of anything unusual or abnormal at all. "Fast forward," she said at last, and Suda obediently sped up the tape. After a minute or two of accelerated reading, Hourai stood up and Suda returned to normal speed.
"Miss, you might want to look away now," Moriyama told her.
"Why?"
"These cells don't allow for any privacy."
"I'm fine," Misaki lied curtly. She absolutely did not want to see her former mentor at his most vulnerable, but what choice did she have? "The man is dead. What matters now is figuring out how."
Hourai turned his back to the camera as he stepped out of his loafers, placing them carefully below the bunk. Then he stripped out of his orange jumpsuit. Folding it neatly despite having the use of only one hand, he turned just enough to set it onto the mattress behind him. His pair of clear plastic gloves were sitting on the desk next to the book. Keeping his back to the watchers, he took the black bag from off his limp right hand and replaced it with one glove, fastening it tightly with a velcro strap at the elbow. He used his teeth to secure the other glove over his good hand; the silver robotics flashed beneath the cell's lamplight. His movements were efficient and precise, as if he was thoroughly used to following the exact same routine day after day.
Once his mechanical hands were protected, he stepped into the shower. The metal wall hid his face and upper body from view. The top of his head could be seen, but not the faucet, as low on the wall as it was placed and as tall as he was.
"Is this the only angle?" Misaki demanded in frustration.
Moriyama nodded. "The original plans called for a completely open shower, but the water ended up going everywhere. The cameras had already been installed by the time they added the wall, and couldn't be rewired."
Misaki swore silently to herself. On the screen, a steady trickle of water ran down Hourai's sagging stomach and pooled at his feet. His left hand came up to splash some of the stream onto his hair, then disappeared behind the shower wall again.
It happened a minute later. Hourai suddenly lurched into full view of the camera, then stumbled back again. Misaki squinted, but she couldn't tell exactly what was going on. Bent elbows appeared near the top of his head, as if he was trying to reach behind his neck; then one foot slipped on the wet floor and he sagged almost to his knees. Something was clearly holding his body weight up as his legs jerked violently beneath him. Misaki felt her hands clench and unclench compulsively as she watched; behind her, one of her subordinates drew in a sharp breath. It was a full minute before the kicks began to slow to feeble twitches. After another thirty seconds, the twitches stopped altogether as he hung, knees buckled. Misaki stood watching for another five minutes in which no one spoke. The camera showed nothing except Hourai's body turning slightly as if in a breeze.
"Alright," she said at last. "Turn it off. I want two copies of the footage from every camera in the facility for the last twenty-four hours in my office as soon as possible."
"Yes sir. Ma'am."
"By as soon as possible, I mean today. No delays, even if it means working an extra hour on your shift." To the other three she said, "Let's go - we can meet Kurosaki at the morgue for the autopsy."
As she turned to leave the security booth, she heard someone mutter behind her, "That is one cold hard bitch."
Her shoulders stiffened and she strode out without looking back. It took every ounce of willpower that she possessed to not throw up until she'd reached the restroom in the main lobby.