Where exactly he had picked up the nickname 'The Great Detective' from Kyoichiro didn't know but he knew it was meant as ironic. It made him sound like something from a pulp TV series. Kyoichiro Tachibana, the Great Detective! Only on TV Tokyo! Schedules, Saturday, 2 October: 21:00 - 22:00 Kyoichiro Tachibana the Great Detective solves another thrilling case…
'Solves'. If only.
Well, whatever. It wasn't all that important. All that mattered at the moment was that he was stuck with this case, and it was proving to be - in the vernacular - a pain in the ass. He didn't even know why it had fallen to him and as for his ability to solve it…
The press coverage wasn't helping. After all, it was unusual, to say the least, for two bodies to show up in a shallow grave on a construction site. But what it meant in real terms for him was the hacks sat in their offices and tapped at their keyboards and demanded results, answers, arrests - and he couldn't find any. The coverage had been highly emotive. Some of the reports had said the bodies had been 'grossly mutilated'. Kyoichiro knew exactly what that meant and rather wished he didn't; they were dealing with some seriously fucked-up individual here, either some loser who'd recreated a movie killing or a sicko who was doing it all for 'fun'.
It was a tenuous connection, but even so Kyoichiro couldn't help but think of the nut who'd been going round carving up students - however the victims had lived and when questioned they'd claimed they couldn't recall what the guy who'd attacked them had looked like, let alone what his name was. There was no doubt in Kyoichiro's mind that it was the same man in both cases, though: there were too many similarities for it to be otherwise. Both boys had been in the same bar the night they went missing; both had been gone for no more than a few hours; their injuries had been very similar, inflicted with the same type of knife. There'd been a sex angle too, come to think of it - both those kids had been raped. The papers hadn't made enough of either case (coverage had been scant, perhaps because the victims had lived and as such were guaranteed the anonymity of survivors), coyly hinting at what had occurred rather than being direct, for it to be likely the second boy was the victim of a copycat.
Rape had not been part of what had happened to Ijima or Hisaya, strangely. Ijima was - had been - a pretty girl, he almost would have expected it in such a case (he would have been more surprised to hear Hisaya had been raped though if it was the same guy who'd attacked the students he probably would have been, Kyoichiro supposed). But seemingly it'd just been killing for kicks… there really wasn't much of a connection between this pair's murder and the assaults on those two boys, when you thought about it, the only thing there was the same bar had been implicated in all three cases, but it wasn't enough of a link. Besides, whoever it was who'd assaulted them seemed to have gone underground, at least for the duration. It was still way too early to tell if anything of the sort had happened with the murder, though Kyoichiro dearly hoped it had. He didn't even want to think of what would happen if this guy reoffended.
Guys like that tend to get more, not less, brutal.
***
"I'm still alive." Katsumi said: a statement of fact but delivered in a tone of mild incredulity. He looked down at his hands, palms up, fingers slightly curled. It was mildly discomfiting. There was no way of hiding what it was he'd tried to do. The bandages stopped about three-quarters of the way down his lower arms and for some reason ran across his palms. Just looking at his wrists would be enough to tell you he'd tried to kill himself.
Third chance. He'd nearly died twice now, once by someone else's hand, once by his own.
Jesus, Takafumi Yoshiya had seen him naked. Talk about embarrassing. Then again, Takafumi Yoshiya had saved his life. If his friend hadn't been so paranoid - justifiably paranoid, Katsumi corrected himself, after all Takafumi had found him half-conscious in the bath - he knew he'd have been dead by now. It was an embarrassment to him. He had tried to kill himself, though it wouldn't have solved anything… Hisaya would still have been dead.
It hadn't been until the following night, unable to sleep, lying in bed in hospital and staring at the ceiling, that he'd started to wonder if maybe he was better off living. He felt dazed and quietly ashamed by the whole thing, by taking the easy way out; suicide wasn't honourable to his mind. Far better would have been to stay and fight - he hadn't after all, irredeemably disgraced himself no matter what his father had to say on the matter. It had only been later when he'd seen it in those terms. If he killed himself then Koji would have won. He'd have got away with it. Besides, his father would probably have been quietly glad to hear about it. Katsumi hated his father almost as much as he hated Koji right now. He'd keep on living and to hell with the man.
You may as well live. At least alive he had a chance to make up for all the things he'd done wrong. He'd said as much to the psychiatrist who'd spoken to him (not, oddly enough, the one who'd tried to get him to talk after the whole thing with Koji - this had been an older man, pushing fifty if Katsumi had to hazard a guess, whilst the first man had been young, late twenties or early thirties and definitely nervy and probably more in need of analysis than half his patients were) and he had seemed honestly relieved.
"I'm sorry," Katsumi said.
Takafumi had been about to protest but closed his mouth when he caught sight of Katsumi's face. He wasn't just saying it, he genuinely didn't know. Looking away, he placed one hand in his pocket, touching the small square of folded paper he carried there. Katsumi's suicide note. He'd wanted to scream at the boy, throw the note at him, ask him what the hell he thought he'd been trying to do… He knew Katsumi hadn't set out to hurt him, but… reading it had made Takafumi feel terrible. And he'd called himself Katsumi's friend. Why hadn't he noticed how down he'd been feeling? Not just over Hisaya but over everything?
Takafumi, I'm sorry, but it's better this way. It's not your fault. I don't want you and Keisuke to get into trouble because of me. Take care of Madoka. Thanks for everything. You're a good friend. Katsumi.
Katsumi probably couldn't even remember writing it. Takafumi had been wondering why he had done it for days. But if he didn't know himself…
At least it had been possible to save him. Takafumi knew that in a lot of cases when people slit their wrists, they don't cut deep enough. That hadn't been the way with Katsumi. He'd known what he was doing. Takafumi remembered one of the doctors - or was it one of the paramedics? - telling him thank the Gods you found him when you did. At least they'd been able to save him. There were other ways to play it. Takafumi, I'm going for a walk. He wouldn't have thought that at all odd. It would have been so easy to do it some other way.
He'd heard of so many cases. The high-school misfit hanging herself in her bedroom whilst her parents were out shopping, the spurned lover jumping from the roof of a high-rise, the salaryman made redundant in the recession gassing himself in his car. One of his sister's closest friends had swallowed sleeping pills when she failed her entrance exams (she had lived). A man his father had worked alongside for years had thrown himself in front of a train one evening in the middle of the rush hour. And now Katsumi had tried to slit his wrists in the bath.
"I was nineteen yesterday." Katsumi said, as if it was a source of some amazement.
***
It was a cold day when Koji met Katsumi's fried Takafumi. Media attention over Eri and Hisaya was dying down and Koji felt a different approach was needed. He knew all about MO. If he and Izumi constantly picked people up in that dive of a bar they'd get caught in no time. Vary it. And although he'd thought Eri and Hisaya were fun, there'd been no sex appeal in the couple. He hadn't found Eri at all sexy (women were beginning to bore him - in terms of homicide men were more exciting) and Hisaya had not been his type.
Takafumi, however, was. Despite his looks, Koji had to guess that he was a bit older than the others had been. Maybe it was the glasses that had him thinking that; maybe it was his attitude. Again, part of him reminded Koji of Katsumi, but he seemed more like Katsumi as he would be in a few years' time. He was more cute than attractive and, despite appearing to be fairly spirited, certainly didn't look like the kind of person who went in mildly disreputable bars. In short, Koji should never have even seen him let alone have got talking to him.
He'd seen him in a coffee shop at about ten to two on a Saturday afternoon. He seemed pretty bored, sitting alone at a formica-topped table and listlessly stirring a cup of tea out of force of habit, staring into the cup as if he expected to see something amazing in there. It would have been bad form to go and sit next to him when the place was half-empty, so instead Koji, after ordering a coffee that he didn't intend to drink, sat at a table nearby and wondered how best to approach him. You couldn't use the 'can I buy you a drink' line in a coffee shop. You're not in a bar now, he reminded himself.
Takafumi looked at his watch again, a small frown creasing his forehead. He was early; he wondered how long he'd have to wait for the others. They'd said 'meet up at two' and Keisuke was normally very punctual. On the other hand, he was with Katsumi - who was, after all, habitually late for almost everything. Katsumi could, if he made an effort, turn up on time to his lectures and tutorials and manage to hand essays in on time, but when it came to any other kind of deadline or indeed meeting times, he was absolutely hopeless. Madoka, Katsumi's sister, had once told him that in her first few weeks at high school, Katsumi had walked back home with her. She'd once had to wait for over an hour for him to show up and when he had he hadn't even seemed to realise that she'd been waiting for him.
I believe the technical term for it is 'airhead', Takafumi had said to her at the time.
Of course, his failure to show up to anywhere on time had major disadvantages, not only for the poor person waiting for him. On the one occasion he'd desperately needed people to wonder about where he was, everyone had assumed he was just being himself and had 'forgotten' what time it was he had said he'd be coming home. He hadn't gotten any better at showing up on time, though.
"Waiting for someone?" Koji asked, gratified when his target looked up in mild surprise - surprise which did not abate when he saw who was addressing him.
Koji followed him there.
"Why are you following me?" Takafumi asked, turning to face him, perturbed to say the least.
'He'? Do I have it written on my forehead or something? Takafumi wondered, aware that he was blushing.
"Sorry, but no." Takafumi said. He hoped it was firmly. "I'm busy."
Takafumi looked at him and suddenly realised something he knew he'd never be able to prove. This man… he's the one who raped Katsumi. He knew it and at the same time he didn't know how he knew it. Keisuke would have been able to explain it all. Keisuke would have been able to help. But Keisuke wasn't here.
***
"Izumi?"
Izumi knew who it was on the other end of the phone the instant he picked it up. Before the man began to speak, even. Who else would call him here? Izumi sighed, aggrieved. It wasn't too much to ask, was it, to be allowed to spend an afternoon with his brother and sister (who, God knew, he saw rarely enough as it was) without Koji calling him up on the phone, was it? He didn't even know why he'd given Koji this number. Emergencies only, he'd said, but Koji regarded feeling horny as a life-threatening situation. More than once he had answered the phone only to hear Koji try to initiate phone sex with him. It wouldn't have been so embarrassing but for the fact that he'd told his little brother that he and Koji were just flatmates.
"What is it, Koji? I'm about to have lunch."
Whilst waiting for Koji to respond, he watched his sister Serika, who ironically enough attended the same school as Madoka Shibuya, fussing with the cutlery. She had heard about Hisaya and Eri through the papers and had asked him about them. She knew he went to that bar, had he seen them? Izumi didn't like having to lie to his little sister, but what else had there been to do?
"I've got a guest with me." Koji said cryptically.
Izumi hesitated. He didn't know if that was such a great idea. The first times they'd done this, when Koji had worked alone and he'd just watched, he hadn't been able to go through with it. Izumi had the feeling that if Koji worked alone again today, it'd be the same old story. He'd sleep with whoever the poor soul he'd dragged back with him turned out to be, then cut him a couple of times then get cold feet.
"No." he said. "Don't. Wait till I get back."
Koji said an abstracted "bye" as the line went dead. So… do what you like as long as you don't hurt him too badly. As long as this man (Takafumi something - he'd heard the name before, where? He was sure it would come back to him, so what the hell) was still conscious when Izumi got back, so long as he kept him alive, he could do what he would.
Amuse yourself till then, Izumi had said. He certainly would.
Part 10