I. Goth

i

It had been about three weeks since I last saw Morino. It was summer vacation, but we had to attend school that day.

She arrived well before homeroom began and immediately threaded her way through the classroom bustle over to my desk.

We had never bothered with greetings. Morino stopped in front of me, pulled out a notebook from her pocket, and placed it on my desk. I had never seen it before.

It was small enough to rest on my palm, with a cover of brown synthetic leather—the kind of thing you see all the time in stationery stores.

“I found it,” she said.

“It isn’t mine.”

“I know.”

She seemed to be enjoying this.

I picked up the notebook, feeling the smooth fake leather against my skin. I flipped through it, skimming the contents; the first half of it was filled with tiny writing, the latter half was blank.

“Read from the beginning.”

I did as she said, moving my eyes along letters written by an unknown hand. There were a lot of paragraphs; it was almost like an itemized list.

†

May 10

Met a girl named Kusuda Mitsue in front of the station.

She was sixteen.

I spoke to her and she got in my car shortly after.

I took her to T***** Mountain.

As she gazed out the window, she told me her mother was obsessed with the letters to the editor column in the newspaper.

I stopped the car at the top of T***** Mountain.

I took the bag containing knives, nails, etc. out of the trunk, and she laughed, asking what was inside.

†

It went on like that.

I had seen the name Kusuda Mitsue before … Three months before, a family had been hiking on T***** Mountain, a married couple and their son. The father had not had a day off in a long time, and he had lain down to rest when they reached the mountain. The boy had tried to get his father to play, but the man had not budged. So after lunch, the boy went to explore the woods alone.

The mother realized her son was missing. Then she heard a scream from the forest.

The couple went into the woods and found their son: he was standing still, looking at something just above his eyeline.

When the parents followed his gaze, they saw some reddish-black dirt on the trunk of the tree—something small and sinister was nailed to it at eye level. They gazed around them and found that all the trees nearby had something nailed to them …

Bits of Kusuda Mitsue. Someone had taken apart her body in the forest. Her eyes, tongue, ears, thumbs, organs—each was nailed to a tree.

One tree had, from top to bottom, the left big toe, the upper lip, the nose, and the stomach. Another had other bits of her arranged like Christmas tree decorations.

The murder was soon the talk of the nation.

The notebook Morino had found contained a detailed description of how Kusuda Mitsue had been killed, which bits of her were nailed to which tree, and what kind of nails had been used—but it contained no mention of the writer’s emotions.

I had been following the case on TV, in the papers and magazines, and on the Internet, and so I knew a lot about it. But this notebook contained minute details that none of those reports had revealed.

“I believe this notebook belonged to the man who killed her.”

Kusuda Mitsue was a high school girl from the next prefecture over. She had last been seen saying goodbye to friends in front of the station. And she was only the first victim in the gruesome murders that had caused a stir all across Japan. There had been another case, with strong similarities, and it was believed to be the work of a serial killer.

“He wrote about the second victim too.”

†

June 21

I spoke to a woman waiting for the bus with some shopping bags on her arm. She said her name was Nakanishi Kasumi.

I suggested I give her a lift home.

On the way to H*** Mountain, she noticed that we were headed away from her home, and she began to make noise.

I stopped the car and hit her with a hammer until she was quiet.

I placed her in a small hut on H*** Mountain.

†

The nation had learned the name of vocational school student Nakanishi Kasumi a month earlier. The news and the papers had snatched it up instantly, and I had known there was a second victim before I even got home from school that day.

She had been found in a small hut on H*** Mountain. The building had been left abandoned for some time, its owner a mystery. It had been badly damaged by rain and was filled with mold and stains. It was about ten feet wide, and the walls and floor were planks.

An old man who had come up the mountain to collect food noticed that the door to the hut, which had always been closed, was now open. Surprised, he came closer—and noticed the stench.

He looked inside. It seems certain he could not tell what he saw at first. Nakanishi Kasumi was laid out in rows on the floor of the hut. Like the first victim, her body had been cut into pieces, and these had been placed carefully within a ten by ten grid on the floor, each bit about ten centimeters away from the next. She had been turned into a hundred small lumps.

The notebook described the process in detail.

There were no witnesses to either case, and the person who had killed them had not been arrested. The media were still talking about the two murders, calling them the gruesome work of a serial killer.

“I like watching news about this case.”

“Why?”

“It’s a strange case,” Morino said flatly.

I had been watching for the same reason, so I understood what she was trying to say.

People had been killed—torn to pieces. People who had had that done to them and people who had done that actually existed.

Morino and I had a unique interest in this kind of awful event. We were always looking for stories that were so tragic that they made you want to hang yourself. We had never spoken about this strange inclination directly, but we both sensed it in the other without saying anything.

I imagine normal people would have been appalled. Our sense of these things was abnormal, so whenever we discussed torture implements or methods of execution, we always kept our voices low.

When I looked up from the notebook, Morino was staring out the window. I could tell she was imagining all Nakanishi Kasumi’s parts laid out on the floor.

“Where’d you find this?” I asked, and she explained.

Yesterday evening, she had been sitting in a coffee shop she liked—a dark, quiet place with a shop master who never spoke.

As she drank the coffee he’d made, she flipped through the pages of Cruel Tales of the World. She heard the sound of rain, and when she glanced out the window, she saw it coming down really hard.

A few customers had been getting ready to leave, but Morino saw them sitting down again. They must have decided to wait out the evening showers. There were five customers there, not including her.

She stood up to go to the bathroom. As she walked, she felt something strange underfoot: she had stepped on a notebook lying there on the shop’s floor, which was made of black wooded planks. She picked up the notebook and put it in her pocket, apparently never once considering trying to figure out to whom it belonged.

When she got back from the bathroom, the other customers were watching it rain. None of them had left.

She could tell just how hard it was raining from looking at the shop master, who had ducked outside for a minute and come back in soaking wet.

Morino forgot about the notebook and went back to her book.

When it stopped raining, the sun came out again. Several customers stood up and left, and the rays of the summer sun soon dried the roads.

It wasn’t until Morino arrived home that she remembered the notebook and began to read it.

“I went to the bathroom twice. The first time, the notebook wasn’t there. It began raining immediately afterward, trapping the customers there. When I stood up again, the notebook was lying there. The killer was in that shop, and the killer lives near here.” She clasped her hands in front of her chest.

The two bodies had been found two or three hours away from where we lived, so it was not impossible for the killer to live there— but it didn’t feel real.

This case would be talked about for years. It was still unsolved, but the sheer gruesomeness of it was enough to make that clear. Everyone in the country was talking about it—even children knew about it. It was too famous—making it hard for us to believe the killer was that close.

“There’s a chance that this is only what the writer imagined, based on the news.”

“Read more,” Morino said, confident.

†

August 5

I gave a ride to a girl named Mizuguchi Nanami. I met her in a soba shop near S**** Mountain.

We went to the shrine in the woods on the south side of the mountain. She went into the woods with me.

†

In the woods, the notebook’s owner had stabbed Mizuguchi Nanami in the stomach with a knife.

In the notebook, the killer broke down her body. In cramped handwriting, he described how he had gouged out her eyes and what color the inside of her womb was.

He had left Mizuguchi Nanami in the woods.

“Have you heard the name Mizuguchi Nanami?” Morino asked.

I shook my head.

There had not yet been any reports of her corpse being discovered.

ii

I became aware of Morino when second year began and we found ourselves in the same class. At first, I thought she was like me, living her life without getting involved with anyone around her. Even during break periods or when she was walking through the halls, she always avoided other people, never joining the herd.

We were the only two people like that in our class. That is not to say that I gazed coldly at my classmates’ excitement the way she did, though. I would answer if someone spoke to me, and I joked around enough to keep things friendly. I did the bare minimum to lead a normal life. But these were surface relationships, and all the smiles I produced were lies.

The first time we spoke, Morino saw right through that part of me.

“Will you teach me how to smile like that?” she’d said, standing directly in front of me after school, no expression on her face at all. She must have scorned me for it privately.

That was at the end of May. Since then, we had begun to speak occasionally.

Morino only ever wore black clothes—dark colors, from her long, straight black hair to the tips of her shoes. In contrast to that, her skin was paler than anyone else’s I’d ever seen, her hands like ceramic. There was a small mole under her left eye, like the pattern on a clown’s face, and it gave her a slightly magical aura.

Her expression changed significantly less than that of most people, but it did change. For example, when she was reading a book about a killer who had murdered fifty-two women and children in Russia, Morino was clearly enjoying herself. It was not the same as the suicidally gloomy look she wore when she was in a crowd of our classmates; no, her eyes were glittering.

The only time I didn’t feign expressions was when talking to Morino. If I’d been speaking to anyone else, they would wonder why my face was so blank, why I never flashed a smile. But when I was speaking to her, none of that mattered. I imagine she chose to speak to me for much the same reason.

Neither of us liked to attract attention. We lived quiet lives in the shadow of our livelier classmates.

And then came summer vacation—and the notebook.

†

The day after she showed me the notebook, we met at the station and boarded the train for S**** Mountain.

We’d never met outside of school, so it was the first time I’d ever seen Morino out of uniform. She was still wearing dark colors, nevertheless. So was I—and from her expression, she noticed.

The train was quiet and deserted. We didn’t talk, keeping our noses in our books. She was reading a book about child abuse, and I was reading a book written by the family of a famous child criminal.

When we dismounted, we asked an old woman in a decrepit tobacco shop near the station how many soba shops there were near S**** Mountain. We learned that there was only one, and it was not far from where we were.

It was then that Morino said something very poignant. “Tobacco kills a lot of people, but cigarette vending machines are killing that woman by stealing her job.”

She didn’t particularly seem to be looking for a clever response, so I let it pass.

We walked along the side of the road toward the soba shop. The road led uphill, curving along the slope of the mountain.

The soba shop was at the base of S**** Mountain, in a row of bars and restaurants. It was not at all crowded, with few cars or people around. There were no cars at all in the soba shop’s parking lot, but apparently they weren’t closed; the sign said OPEN, so we went in.

“The killer met Mizuguchi Nanami here,” Morino said, looking around the shop as if we were in a popular tourist spot. “Pardon me—that’s still just a possibility. May have met her here. We are here to determine whether that’s true.”

I ignored her and read the notebook, which was written in with blue ballpoint pen. The story of the third woman’s death was not the only other thing in the book; there were a number of other mountain names as well. They were on the first page, before the accounts of the murders.

There were marks in front of the mountain names: ⌾,○, △, and X. The mountains where the three bodies had been left were all marked with ⌾, so this was probably a list of which mountains looked good for killing.

There was nothing that could identify who had written it. And neither of us ever considered giving it to the police. They would catch him eventually without our doing anything. If we gave them the notebook, they might arrest him faster, and there might be fewer victims—so it probably should have been our duty to turn it in. Sadly, though, neither of us had the kind of conscience that was bothered by keeping it to ourselves. We were cruel, reptilian high school kids.

“If a fourth victim were found, then it would be like we killed her.”

“How awful.”

That’s all we said while we slurped up our soba. Morino didn’t seem to think this was especially awful: her tone was disinterested, all her attention focused on the soba in front of her.

We asked the shop owner for directions to the shrine.

Morino kept her eyes on the notebook as we walked, stroking the cover with her fingers, touching it where the killer had touched it. Judging from that gesture, she had a fair amount of reverence for the killer.

I had a trace of that myself. I knew that was hardly appropriate. The killer was someone who deserved to be punished. He should not be looked at the way you would a revolutionary or an artist. At the same time, I knew that some unusual people worshipped famous murderers—and I knew that becoming like them was a bad thing.

We were captivated by the horror of what the notebook’s owner had done, though. The killer had stepped over the line of ordinary life to destroy people physically, trampling their identity and dignity. Like inside a nightmare, we could not look away.

To get to the shrine from the soba shop, we went up the hill some more and then up a long staircase.

Both of us felt an entirely irrational anger at the idea of any form of exercise. We enjoyed neither slope nor stairs. And by the time we reached the shrine, we were both exhausted.

We sat down on the statues in the shrine and rested for a while. There were trees all around, their branches stretched out above us—and when we looked up, we could see the summer sun peeking through the leaves.

We sat next to each other, listening to the cicadas all around us.

Beads of sweat accumulated on Morino’s forehead.

At last, she stood up, wiping the sweat away. She began looking for Mizuguchi Nanami’s body.

“The killer and Mizuguchi Nanami walked this way together,” she said, as we began walking side by side.

We entered the woods behind the shrine. We didn’t know how far or in which direction they had walked, so we could only search at random.

For the better part of an hour, we looked—with nothing to show for it.

“Maybe that way,” Morino said, moving away from me.

A few minutes later, I heard her call my name. I went in the direction of her voice and found her standing at the base of a cliff, her back to me, both hands dangling at her sides, her back stiff. I stood next to her and saw for myself what she had been gazing at: it was Mizuguchi Nanami.

Between the forest and the cliff, in the shadow of a very large tree, the girl sat naked in the dim summer light. Mizuguchi Nanami sat on the ground, her back leaning against the tree, her legs and arms flung out listlessly—nothing above her neck. Her head was inside her split-open belly.

Her eyes had been gouged out, and one was resting in each hand.

The empty eye sockets had been filled up again with mud, and rotting leaves had been stuffed into her mouth.

Something had been wound around the tree behind her … everything that had been inside Mizuguchi Nanami’s abdomen.

There were dark patches of dried blood on the ground, and her clothes lay nearby.

We stood facing her in silence. Neither of us able to say anything, we simply stared silently at the corpse.

†

The next day, Morino sent a message to my cell phone from hers: “Return the notebook.”

Her messages were always short and simple, nothing unnecessary. Likewise, Morino had no detestable clattery key holders or straps attached to her phone.

I had taken the notebook home with me. After we left Mizuguchi Nanami, I hadn’t given it back to Morino.

On the train home Morino had stared into the distance, not yet recovered from the shock.

Before we left, she had picked up Mizuguchi Nanami’s clothing off the ground, stuffing it into her pack. The clothes had been cut to pieces, but the girl’s hat and bag—and everything inside—remained untouched.

Inside Mizuguchi Nanami’s bag were her makeup, her wallet, and her handkerchief, all of which we looked over on the train coming home.

From the student ID in her wallet, we learned that Mizuguchi Nanami had been a high school student in the prefecture next to ours. In the bag, there was a small book designed to hold purikura; in those pictures and in the one on her ID, we could see what she had looked like while alive. Mizuguchi Nanami and an impressive number of friends smiled at us from the tiny purikura stickers.

I met Morino in the McDonald’s near the station in the afternoon, after having received her message.

Morino was not wearing her customary dark clothes. At first I didn’t even recognize her. The hat she was wearing was the same as the one we’d found lying next to Mizuguchi Nanami’s body, though, so I was able to work out that she was dressed like the dead girl.

Her hair and makeup were the same as Mizuguchi Nanami’s had been in the purikura. The girl’s clothes had been cut to pieces, so Morino must have gone shopping for look-alikes.

As she took the notebook, she appeared to be enjoying herself immensely.

“Should we tell Mizuguchi Nanami’s family that her body is in the woods?” I asked.

Morino thought about this for a moment, but then she shook her head. “The police will find her eventually.” Morino spoke about Mizuguchi Nanami’s death dressed exactly as the girl had been until a few minutes before she died.

What was Mizuguchi Nanami’s family doing now? Were they worried because she was missing? Did she have a boyfriend? What had her grades been like?

Morino seemed a little different. As we talked, the way she spoke and gestured moved gradually away from her usual behavior. She worried about where her bangs were, and she mentioned how the couple at the booth across from ours looked very much in love—neither was the kind of thing that Morino had ever done before.

I had never met Mizuguchi Nanami—but now, watching Morino, I imagined that this was what Mizuguchi Nanami had been like.

Morino had her elbows on the table, and she looked happy. Next to her was the bag that had once belonged to Mizuguchi Nanami—on the clasp of the bag, a key holder with an anime character on it.

“You plan to dress like that for a while?”

“Yeah. Fun, isn’t it?”

It let Morino pretend. But the way she smiled or looked in a mirror, examining her eyebrows, was not a copy of an ordinary high school girl—it felt as if Mizuguchi Nanami had slipped inside Morino.

As we left McDonald’s, Morino very naturally took my hand, not even realizing she had done so until I pointed it out. Mizuguchi Nanami was dead, but I was sure it was her who had taken my hand.

We split up at the station.

When I got home, I turned on the TV. The news was talking about the serial killings, the first and second victims—the same information that had been covered countless times, nothing new at all. No mention of Mizuguchi Nanami.

There were images of the victims’ friends and family looking sad. Pictures of the victims enlarged to fill the screen …

I remembered Morino and worried—but that kind of thing almost never happened. I dismissed my own concerns.

The victims in the photographs had hair and clothes like Mizuguchi Nanami’s—which meant Morino was now the killer’s type.

iii

Three days after we had met at McDonald’s, my phone rang in the afternoon, indicating that I had received a message from someone … from Morino.

“Help.”

That was it, just that one word.

I quickly tapped out a reply: “Something happen?”

I waited awhile, but she didn’t respond, so I called her. I couldn’t reach her phone—it was either off or broken.

In the evening I called Morino’s house. She had given me the number once before—not because she thought I might ever need to call, but because the letters standing for the numbers coincidentally formed a deranged sentence, making the number easy to remember.

Her mother answered; she had a high voice and spoke very quickly.

I said I was a classmate and that I needed to talk with Morino about some class business.

She had not come home.

I had dismissed the idea that she would be attacked. Yet the contents of that notebook had been accurate, so it was probably also true that the killer had been in the same café as Morino. There was a chance that he had happened to see her in town dressed like Mizuguchi Nanami. The killer might have been surprised to see someone dressed just like the girl he had recently killed, and it might have tempted him … but the odds of his actually targeting her were very low. After all, any number of girls dressed that way.

The biggest reason to suspect that the killer might’ve captured Morino was the possibility that they lived near each other. They had been in the same coffee shop. Unless the killer had been far from home that day, his path might well cross Morino’s regularly. The chances of his seeing her were high.

I thought about it that night. It seemed likely that Morino had been killed by then. Her body was probably scattered on some mountain.

I fell asleep imagining it.

†

The next day, I called her house again.

Morino still wasn’t home. According to her mother, this was the first time she had ever stayed out all night without calling. Her mother was worried.

“So are you her boyfriend?” Morino’s mother asked.

“No, not at all.”

“You don’t need to deny it so firmly. I know all about it.”

Morino’s mother had absolutely no doubt that her daughter had a boyfriend. Her daughter had never had any friends, and this was the first time anyone had called for her since she was in elementary school.

“Recently, she’s been dressing in brighter colors, and I knew a boy was involved.”

I began to worry about the cost of the call.

“Is there a small brown notebook in her room?”

The mother went and checked, putting the phone down. There was a short silence. Then her voice came on the line again. “There was something like that on her desk … I hope it’s the one you meant.”

It seemed Morino hadn’t been carrying the notebook around. If she had, I’d been considering the possibility that the killer had seen her reading the notebook and had attacked her to keep her silent.

I told Morino’s mother that I would come get the notebook, asking for the address.

After I hung up, I headed for Morino’s house. I had known she lived not far from the station, but I had never been there before.

She lived on the third floor of an apartment complex behind the station.

I rang the bell and heard the voice from the phone call out as the door opened. Undoubtedly, it was Morino’s mother.

“Come in, come in, come in.”

Morino’s mother was wearing an apron; she was a very domestic-looking, ordinary housewife—completely different from Morino. I wondered how a mother like this had produced a girl like Morino.

She invited me in, but I refused. What I was here for could be handled in the doorway.

I mentioned the notebook, and she had it ready. I took it, asking if she had read the contents.

She shook her head. “I can’t be bothered to read such tiny handwriting.”

She seemed much more interested in me than in the notebook.

“When second year started, that girl suddenly started going to school all the time. Now I know why!”

The year before, Morino had said school was boring and rarely went. I had not known that. Her interests were unusual, but more than that, she was awkward, unable to blend in. It was only natural she had ended up the way she was.

I asked her mother when she had last seen Morino.

“Yesterday, just past noon, I think. I saw her leaving the house.”

“Did she say where she was going?”

Morino’s mother shook her head. “Will you look for her?” she asked, as I turned to leave.

I nodded. “If she’s still alive,” I added. Her mother thought I was joking and laughed.

†

As I walked back to the station, I folded back the fake leather cover, opening the notebook to the page filled with mountain names—the list of mountains the killer had been considering as places to dispose of the bodies. It was clear that mountains marked with ⌾ were mountains the killer considered ideal for that. There were only four of them, and so far all the bodies had been found on one of those four.

Of the four ⌾ mountains, three of them already had bodies—which meant he would probably take Morino to the fourth mountain, N** Mountain.

I asked the man at the station ticket window which train I should take to get there, and then I bought a ticket.

I got off the train at the station nearest the mountain, but I had to take a bus from there. There were vineyards around the base of N** Mountain, and from the bus window I saw a number of signs advertising grape picking.

The killer would have come here in a car. Where would he have left the body? He must have carried out his ritual deep in the mountain, where nobody would hear her screams. I couldn’t figure out where that might be.

The driver and I were the only people on the bus. I looked at the road map plastered on the side of the bus and talked to the driver, trying to figure out where the killer might have gone.

He said that people visiting N** Mountain from the direction Morino and I lived would almost always take the prefectural road, which crossed the east side of the mountain. There were few roads over it, and that was the only one that went in the direction we lived.

If the killer had driven Morino to N** Mountain, it seemed clear that he would have taken that road. According to the bus driver, it was the road the bus was on now.

I got off the bus at a stop near a fairly wide road that led all the way to the top of the mountain. If a car were headed down the mountain, then it would take this road.

I walked up the road. Although it was asphalt, there was no traffic.

There were several side roads branching off it into the woods on either side. I thought the killer and Morino might have taken any one of those.

The farther I walked, the steeper the road became. I could see the village through the trees, but in miniature.

I was close to the top soon enough. There was a small parking lot there and a building that appeared to be an observatory. Cars could go no farther. I hadn’t been walking long, so I wasn’t tired.

I was looking for Morino’s body.

I walked along the path between the trees, taking branching paths as I found them.

It was cloudy, and the woods were dark. Between the interlocking branches, I observed trees stretching as far as I could see. There was no wind, and cicadas provided the only sound.

N** Mountain was much too large to find a single dismembered corpse on. I eventually decided my search was futile. I returned to the bus stop, covered in sweat and exhausted.

There weren’t a lot of homes along the road the bus took, but there were a few. There had been one on the road toward the top, and I had asked the old man in the garden if any cars had gone up that road the day before. But he shook his head. He even called his family and repeated my question, but none of them had seen a car.

What had made Morino send that message? Had the killer forcibly taken her with him? She wasn’t stupid and wouldn’t be tricked easily.

Was I overthinking things? Had she not been captured at all?

I sat down next to the bus stop and read the notebook again. I was not skilled enough at profiling to glean anything about the killer from the descriptions of the murders.

My sweat dripped onto the pages, and the ink smeared, making bits of it unreadable. Apparently, the killer had been using a water-based ink.

Where had the killer written in this notebook? At home, after he returned from the killings? I doubted he’d written it during the crime. He had written it from his memory, colored by his imagination.

The bus arrived, and I stood up. Looking at my watch, I saw that it was after three. I was leaving the mountain.

iv

The coffee shop Morino always went to was in the middle of the arcade near the station. She had given me directions earlier, but I had never actually been there.

As she had said, the lighting was low, wrapping me in comfortable darkness. Quiet music was playing, melting into the air without drawing attention to itself.

I sat down at the counter.

There was a sign for the bathrooms in back. I glanced at the floor in front of them, where Morino had found the notebook.

There was only one other customer: a young woman in a suit. She was by the windows, reading a magazine as she sipped her coffee.

The shop master came to take my order, and I asked, “Does that woman come here a lot?”

He nodded, and then he frowned, wondering what of it.

“Not important. First, do you mind if I shake your hand?”

“Shake my … ? Why?”

“To mark the occasion.”

The shop master had a very sincere face. He wasn’t young, nor was he old enough to be called middle-aged. He had pale skin and wore a plain black T-shirt, the kind sold anywhere. His hair was neatly buzzed.

At first, he seemed to think I was just a strange customer—probably because I was staring too much.

He brought my coffee quickly.

“I’m friends with a girl named Morino. Do you know her?”

“She’s a regular.”

I asked if she was still alive.

He stopped moving.

He slowly put down the cup that had been in his hand, and then he turned to face me. His eyes were clouded, like two black holes bereft of light.

I thought the odds of this man being the killer were significantly higher than those of the other customers from that evening—and now I knew I had been right.

“What do you mean?” he asked, playing dumb.

I held out the notebook. When he saw it, he smiled, flashing dull white canines.

“Morino found this the other day.”

He took the notebook and flipped through it.

“I’m impressed that you knew it was mine.”

“At least half of it was nothing more than a gamble.” I explained how I had gone to N** Mountain to look for her body and what line of thought had brought me here.

†

What had the killer been thinking?

I’d begun by imagining the killer after he’d dropped the notebook.

Why had he written the notebook? To help him remember? To keep a record? I was sure he had read it over and over and that he attached great value to it, so he must’ve noticed that the notebook was missing.

Where had he kept the notebook? Either in his pocket or in his bag. Considering he had dropped it, probably in his pocket. Maybe he had washed his hands in the bathroom and dropped the notebook as he pulled out his handkerchief.

So when had he noticed it was missing? Ten minutes later? A few hours after? I was sure he had noticed it before the day was out.

He would have tried to figure out when he had last read it, the last time he was sure he had it. Then he would have retraced his steps, figuring out where he was most likely to have dropped it.

And I was willing to bet he had narrowed it down pretty well—mostly because I imagined he looked at it quite often. Every time he felt his thoughts growing dark, he would calm himself by reading the notebook. And if he read it that often, he would be able to pinpoint a narrow range of places and times he could have dropped it.

Then the killer must have looked for it, staring at the ground trying to find it.

But he would not have found it there. So the killer must have thought that someone picked it up. If someone were to read the book, he was finished—the police would search for the third victim and find the body. That wasn’t a problem in itself; the problem came if they managed to lift his prints from the notebook or match his handwriting.

If this had happened to me, what would I think? I certainly wouldn’t kill a fourth victim. The police might be investigating nearby. After all, the notebook had been dropped someplace the killer went on a daily basis. The police would assume he lived nearby. He couldn’t take that risk.

But a few days had passed, and Mizuguchi Nanami’s body still had not been found—because Morino and I had not turned over the notebook to the police.

The killer had been watching the news every night, waiting for them to find her body. He would not kill again until he was sure it was safe … but Morino had gone missing.

Discounting the possibility that Morino’s disappearance was just some sort of prank, I tried to figure out why the killer would act. If I were the killer, why would I choose a fourth victim?

* I couldn’t bear to wait any longer.

* I got overconfident, sure I wouldn’t be caught, and underestimated the police.

* I didn’t care if I got caught.

* I thought that nobody had picked up the notebook, that nobody had read it.

* I thought that whoever picked it up had not believed it.

Or perhaps he had actually not noticed that he’d lost the notebook. These were all possibilities … but I decided to bet on another theory. I believed the killer had thought as follows:

* Someone picked up the notebook but was unable to read it. That’s why they haven’t given it to the police and Mizuguchi Nanami’s body has not been found.

The shop master listened to all this, nodding with interest. “So why did you think it was me?”

I took the notebook back and opened it. I showed him where my sweat had smudged the writing, leaving it illegible. “You knew what kind of ink you’d used, and you knew that if it got wet, nobody could read it. I theorized that the killer had assumed he’d dropped it outside, not in the shop. Morino told me it was raining hard when she found the notebook; it seemed likely the killer knew he had dropped it while it was raining.”

It was only natural that the killer would assume that if the notebook had been picked up in the shop, it would have been given to the police. But there were no reports of Mizuguchi Nanami’s body being found. “So the killer must have concluded that he’d dropped it outside in the rain, I thought. In that case, the notebook would be wet, and it would be unreadable.”

Morino had said the only person who had gone out in the rain was the shop master.

It was a tightrope walk based on pure speculation—but when I finished it, the shop master grinned.

“I did think I’d dropped it in the rain,” he admitted. “Morino’s upstairs.”

The second and third floors of the shop were the man’s home.

The shop master carefully placed the notebook back in his pocket. Then he turned his back to me, moved toward the entrance, and opened the door.

The clouds from earlier had cleared away, and the sun was beating down outside. It looked like pure white light to my eyes, which were now accustomed to the darkness inside the shop.

The man left the shop and crossed the road, vanishing into the light.

The regular customer stood up, coming to the register to pay her bill. She looked around the shop and asked me where the shop master had gone, but I merely shook my head.

†

The stairs were outside the building, and to get to the second floor, I had to leave the shop.

Morino was tied up on the third floor. She was still dressed like Mizuguchi Nanami, and she was lying on the floor with a rope tied around her arms and legs. She appeared otherwise unharmed.

When she saw me, Morino’s eyes narrowed. That was how she smiled. She was gagged with a towel and thus unable to speak.

When I undid the gag, she sighed.

“The shop master pretended he was hurt, and he asked me to help carry something. Before I knew it …”

Getting the ropes off of her looked difficult. I left her there and looked around the room. Judging from the state of the place, the master lived alone.

There was white paper on the desk, with a number of tiny crosses drawn on it.

I found a set of knives on the shelf. It was easy to guess that these had been used to kill his victims—he had mentioned them often in the notebook.

Morino called out, angry with me for not untying her.

I selected one of the knives, using it to cut the ropes.

“We’d better run—he’ll find us.”

“No, he won’t.”

He would never come back. I was sure of it. Yes, there was a slight possibility that he might come back to kill the two of us—but for some reason, I knew he wouldn’t.

When we had been talking at the shop counter, I’d felt as if the two of us had a lot in common.

He’d left the shop quietly precisely because he knew that I would never tell anyone.

Morino looked surprised that I seemed so sure the killer wasn’t coming back. She stood up, adjusting her clothes.

“I managed to send you a message, but he noticed.”

Her phone had been laid on the desk and switched off. Mizuguchi Nanami’s bag was there too; after all, Morino had been carrying it around. Had the killer not noticed that the girl about to become his fourth victim had the same bag as his third victim? Or had he targeted her because it was the same bag?

Morino had been tied up for a full day, so she staggered a little as she headed for the stairs.

When I left the room, I took the set of knives and the paper on the desk—as mementos. When the police figured everything out and searched this room, the lack of weapons might cause problems, but I didn’t care.

I went to the first floor and looked inside. Quiet music was playing in the empty shop.

I flipped the sign on the door, turning it to CLOSED.

Morino stood behind me, watching and rubbing her wrists—the rope marks were still there.

“It was horrible,” she said. “I’m never coming here again.”

“It wasn’t all bad. You got to meet him.”

Morino frowned. “Got to meet who? Why did the shop master do this to me, anyway?”

She had not realized that the shop master was a serial killer.

I looked down, staring at the tiny crosses on the piece of paper in my hand.