Chapter 014
THE NEW CORPSE was found the day after Shizue had visited Hinako. The victim, Asumi Aikawa. A fourteen-year-old girl from her lab class.
If it were one of the serial killings, Aikawa would be the sixth victim, the seventh if you included Ryu Kawabata, second if you only counted those killed in Shizue’s residential district.
She was killed on a school day.
The communication session ended in the morning. That afternoon was a designated administrative break for faculty.
Even though there was no better foothold on the murder investigation, no clearer leads, and though the center still didn’t know the whereabouts of Yuko Yabe, the center didn’t seem any different. Not one person asked about the case. People weren’t more nervous than necessary, and everyone was doing their job as usual.
It was someone else’s problem.
The details of the other cases had long been returned to storage in monitors. Only the information newly delivered contained any controversy, and there was nothing unusual in the daily news. That was probably what everyone was thinking.
Shizue realized the police had probably finished processing the data on the community center’s children.
For that reason perhaps, news of discovery of this dead body felt horribly unreal by the time Shizue heard it.
The news came in right after the area chief’s regular communiqué had been deployed to everybody’s monitors at the center.
These communiqués were sent from central and were supposedly meant to highlight model areas of health-regulatory environments, or something like that. No one read them.
This week’s communiqué spotlighted the recent medical exams.
Shizue’s section happened to yield the highest percentage of children deemed of Triple-A health. Though 10 percent fewer Triple-A results would by no means be a bad statitistic.
Shizue should not have been thinking about her charges’ performance in a health exam. The discrepancy of 10 percent fewer or more children of optimal health was hardly negligible. Instead of thinking of the 10 percent laxity she could get away with, she should have realized that the 10 percent her clients had over the average child was a feat.
A list of the children who made Triple-A status was sent to each area counselor. At the top of that list, coincidentally, was Asumi Aikawa.
Shizue didn’t think that was a good sign.
The fact that Asumi Aikawa was at the top of the list was merely the coincidental result of an alphabetical order.
Still, she was the first recorded child of supreme health, only to have her second introduction to the world be as a corpse.
So.
It seemed like there were not enough people worried and too few people panicked.
Another communiqué was sent to each area counselor to make sure people went home, and after a little less than an hour on standby, the local and prefectural police were there again, another emergency meeting organized, and finally, almost everyone grasped the gravity of the situation.
Asumi Aikawa’s body had been disposed of in the residential area right in the middle of Section A.
Wounds on her body were severe, and the corpse itself was dumped unceremoniously.
The area police explained the discovery in a tone neither resentful nor outraged but officious, describing the way the body was treated with a figure of speech.
“Treated like trash.”
Shizue’s thoughts drifted to refuse.
She’d never seen “trash” in Section A.
For ostensible upkeep of living conditions, all unnecessary and damaged goods were categorically hidden, because then it was unquestionably “clean.”
In Section A, each household was held responsible for managing its own refuse. Any unusual trash that the household was not able to dispose of properly could be taken care of by the area municipality for a nominal fee. Anything the municipality could not handle went to the Prefectural Office of Living Standard Maintenance, and anything the prefecture couldn’t dispose of could be collected by the National Special Waste Disposal center.
Collections were swift, clean, and expensive.
It was costlier to throw things away than to buy them.
Which was why no one threw anything away. Trash never left the home. Never left the city. Never left the prefecture.
Moreover, the fines imposed on those who illegally dumped trash were exorbitantly high. No one wanted to take the risk of throwing anything out at all.
The same went for Section B and the commercial district.
The establishments had self-imposed management.
Whatever waste couldn’t be managed by individual firms was collected by the cooperative waste collection agency and dealt with periodically.
You couldn’t see it from the outside.
Shizue had heard that the waste management problem was dire even in the last century, but as she had never seen mountains of trash, she had absolutely no feelings about it. No one threw anything away, and that was that.
Therefore, Shizue wondered what it meant to be comparing a corpse to trash. In a world without trash, would such an analogy work? The city was beautiful.
Still.
No, it couldn’t be.
What made it dirty was simply not visible. The city was by no means clean. Shizue knew that. Since there was absolutely nothing dirty, it was impossible to know what was clean. There was no context.
The city just looked vaguely orderly. As a rule, everyone threw away their trash. That must mean that the city was overflowing with trash.
People thought the entire world was controlled, but there were things that couldn’t be. Anything that couldn’t be controlled, humans removed as unnecessary and then disposed of it.
Proof of this impulse to throw out the useless was in those other places—there was this so-called trash in Section C. Section C was by no means the type of slum you used to hear of in the past. It wasn’t as though you couldn’t set foot in it, nor was it like the area was full of the desperately poor. Section C simply couldn’t pretend it was in control of anything. Because they couldn’t pretend they were in control, the trash was visible. Illegally dumped waste was immediately collected in other sections, but not in Section C.
That was what came to mind when Shizue heard the word trash.
And generally speaking, Section C’s rubbish was industrial trash no typical household would produce.
Tiles, ceramic bits, metal pipes, resin containers, wiring and tubes, magnetic film, needles…
In fact it wasn’t just in households you’d never see these things. You’d just never see these things, period.
It was like a time warp.
And when the chief said thrown out like a piece of trash, this was what it meant to Shizue.
And all Shizue could hear when the area chief spoke were hackneyed platitudes and bureaucratic condolences, and in the end all she could think of was a corpse lying in a pit of industrial refuse.
There was no dignity in the image.
Broken things, useless objects—those were what got disposed of illegally. That stark image figured prominently in the back of Shizue’s mind.
Arms, legs, the head, scattered on the sidewalk—even these graphic details did not seem real to her.
That notwithstanding, Shizue had never seen a dead body before. In fact, other than one specific group of people, no one in the nation would have ever seen a corpse in their lifetime. Like industrial refuse, no, even more so, dead bodies were painstakingly covered up and were always swiftly processed.
No.
Shizue had actually seen a dead body. Once.
Her mother’s. She had been made up to appear as she did when she was alive. Not because Shizue’s mother was in fact alive, but it was not really her mother’s dead body either.
It was a replica of a human.
A fabrication.
The corpse that was destroyed and left by the side of the road was, to Shizue, the replica of a person.
And Shizue was unable to find that atrocious.
It was just a body thrown out because it had no use anymore.
Useless parts.
Deficient parts.
Something struck her.
Fuwa! Hey, Fuwa!
She saw memory hair float in her field of vision.
“What’s wrong? Are you okay? I wouldn’t blame you for being disturbed by all this…”
She was not disturbed. Just lost in thought.
“But we’ve got to keep a straight head on…” counselor Takazawa intoned with a grave face. She already knew what he’d want to say next.
You’re so hard on the outside, but deep down inside you’re still a woman. There was no doubt in her mind. Shizue shot him a scornful look.
Shizue was well aware that it was unjust conjecture. Even if she were right on the money, it would still be conjecture. She just wanted to loathe this guy.
“This killer is a real weirdo, a real nut job,” the area chief declared. Shizue didn’t even feel like explaining how problematic that word was today. Everyone in that room including Shizue, in fact, all of humanity, was weird.
There was no difference between normal and abnormal. All humans lived along a continuum. There might have been extreme cases, but be they vicious killers or church altar boys, there was very little difference in what went on in the minds of humans.
However, what scared her the most was that this was definitely some kind of aberration.
Arrogance was a weakness. It would be difficult to live your everyday life self-conscious of your peculiarities. You needed more than just a half-hearted emotional intelligence quotient. That was why humans were made forgetful. Shizue let herself believe it was typical to be pacing with anxiety about their abnormalities.
That was why humanity created concepts such as personality and character, which were indefinable and thus irreproachable. When people said that they were this kind of personality or had that kind of character, it was only because they didn’t actually know themselves. Humans weren’t that pure, and the brain was not so simple.
Shizue believed that people who spoke easily about their own personalities or whatever other kind of self-ascription were cowards who couldn’t admit to the deception inherent in their beliefs. And those depressive people who couldn’t be comforted by even this so-called understanding of their personality would slander failures as “weirdos.”
Yes, criminals are all failures.
And of course, their actions were recriminating.
In a society based on the principles of a legal system, the criminals were the failures. Yet even after acknowledging the existence of such flawed individuals, Shizue believed no one had the qualifications to place blame.
Shizue knew better than anyone that people had feelings. Still.
“The victim’s parents are really confused right now,” the area chief said. “I mean, I understand their sadness and anger. Their daughter was savagely killed by a deranged criminal after all. I can even understand being perplexed, but they’re asking what role the community center had in this ordeal.” The area chief looked in Shizue’s direction.
“This Asumi girl had been missing since two nights ago.”
Th-that’s right, a voice said from the back of the room.
It was Shizue’s colleague Yuko Shima.
Asumi and the last victim, Ryu Kawabata, had both been students under her charge.
“It hasn’t been announced publicly.”
“The police intervened with the announcement.”
“What does that mean?”
“I mean, they were afraid of prank calls, so the information was never broadcast.”
“And?”
As if speaking as his proxy, the internal affairs officer spoke for the police chief.
“Why were the police informed before this discovery was announced to the center?”
“I did try to notify the center,” Shima said. “As soon as I got the message from Aikawa, I forwarded it to the main terminal at the center, the chief’s personal monitor, and even to internal affairs. And then…”
“Then what?”
“Message delivery failed.”
“Failed? Why?”
“The police.”
“The police stopped it? The police prevented your message from sending, is that it? That’s a problem, isn’t it?”
Of course it’s a problem.
Shizue did not want to think too deeply about what made this problematic.
“That is, Aikawa had twice spent the night away from her residence without permission.”
“She was a delinquent, was she?” the area chief said. Shima shook her head.
“Aikawa attended an evening course,” Shima said
“You mean the training,” the director acknowledged.
Shizue had no idea what kind of training he was referring to but thought it strange that any training would take place at night.
She examined Shima’s composure.
She had no idea what Shima could be thinking.
“That’s all we know for now,” Shima mumbled. “I also, um…”
“You understand? No, wait a second. Why do the police have that information? Only counselors are supposed to be privy to that kind of information. Did you tell them?”
“But…they have the data files on all the kids, remember?”
The area chief rapped on his desk. “Aah!”
“But it was just yesterday evening that the data collection was completed.”
“At 4:23 pm exactly,” Takazawa responded almost inappropriately, to a question no one had asked.
“Though since the data is organized alphabetically—”
“Asumi Aikawa’s student data classification ID number was 00002,”
Shizue said, impatient with this conversation.
Her information had been processed three days ago. Two days ago when Shizue had started her second batch of data processing, Aikawa’s information had long been processed.
“You shouldn’t be so satisfied with that answer,” the area chief said, annoyed.
“I want to know how the transmission of a message can be stopped in the first place. Isn’t that against the laws of privacy protection of personal information?” the director grumbled.
“Why is it that the transmission of a notice of an emergency situation to the counseling center gets tied into a vicious crime? It’s information meant to prevent the crime, moreover. This might be the one instance when information works against us. This is bad. Really bad. Frankly, the fact that a message sent to a counselor—no, you can’t look at the content of the data while it is being sent, and you can’t choose and interrupt the messages, so there must have been a physical hack of the circuits. Why did you keep quiet about this, Shima? You should have seen the police’s tyranny as problematic.”
“Uh…” Shima stood up. “I immediately restored my system. So I just thought it was a server malfunction. Then, the police contacted me as soon as I restored my circuits, and the police told me that it wasn’t decided yet whether it was related to the killings, and the murders were still under investigation, so I shouldn’t bring too much attention to this kind of delinquency, and they told me to keep quiet and—”
“What’s the meaning of this?” the area chief asked the administrative representative, who in turn looked at the director.
“Aikawa’s parents reported their missing child to the police before you?”
“That’s what it sounds like. No wait, I’m wrong…” Shima was being painfully elusive. “I was the first one to hear this news. I told them to let me know if anything happened. Then I cut off all vocal communications and immediately drafted a notice addressed to the center and was going to send it. But then it didn’t send, and oh, this is what the police said. Once the communication was received, they’d assumed the center had been notified and forbade any further communication, but in the process they froze the network, so they had to take emergency measures and shut down everything. They were very apologetic, very polite…”
“I don’t care if they’re polite. You have a record of this interaction?”
“Yes.”
Shima brought out her monitor.
Not that she needed to.
Until an individual went in and deleted the information, all communications were recorded in a mainframe, and even if they were erased, the communications were temporarily stored in regional databanks.
It was also annoying that they had to belabor the questioning.
“However…”
“This has ended up being connected to a murder investigation,” the area chief said. More grumbling.
“There’s a possibility we might face examination of this center’s accountability in the matter. We’ll need the representative counselor and even non-counselors to keep that in mind.”
“You say accountability, but there’s nothing we could have done.”
“Well, except in that we had information before the murder, and local residents can’t be interrogated. They have unlimited rights.”
“Even that is limited to just data collection.”
“Even if there was information, we don’t know that it was obstructed.”
“No, it’s because we don’t know that there is the possibility it was obstructed.”
Something that didn’t seem random could by default be considered highly plausible, sure. But Shizue thought that to bring up plausibility in a situation like this was meaningless. Of course one could also approach this situation and say it was imperative to exercise complete diligence with every possibility. Yet, “possibility” meant that the result of consideration would be the exact opposite of an original hypothesis. In the event that a thorough and time-consuming investigation yielded a satisfactory explanation, the problem then became whether the subject taking responsibility for this explanation could then adequately perform inevitable crisis management.
Shizue was fed up.
These people were not wondering whether they were responsible at all. They were neither defiant nor responsive. There was absolutely nothing commendable about them.
This was a meeting to ascertain who would take the blame. Had it been clearer who should take responsibility, there would have been no meeting. There was no victim or crime in a debate like this.
The core of the judgment.
That was probably a big issue for these people.
No one knew what lay ahead.
No matter how detailed the information upon which an opinion was based, no matter how astute the calculation behind a theory, there was absolutely no such thing as an absolute.
The assignation of an accurate interpretation only occurred when the results of the determination were considered good. When they weren’t, it wouldn’t matter how sophisticated the interpretation, it was considered a blanket failure. The core of the judgment always ran a risk.
“I see…”
Shizue ruminated on what the girl Hinako had said. That divinations were meant to assuage humans of their sense of risk. The core that took responsibility was God.
“So this is the fault of the police, am I right?” the director said.
“Well. I don’t know about ‘fault’ but—”
“But it is. They’re the ones who created this irresponsible gag order.
If I recall correctly, isn’t Aikawa known outside the prefecture?”
“She was an athlete. An aspiring pro,” the administrative representative answered. Okay, that’s what he meant by training then, Shizue thought.
It wasn’t just that she wasn’t responsible for the girl in question.
Shizue didn’t have an interest in sports news. In fact, no, she didn’t care at all whatsoever.
Asumi Aikawa was already dead to her.
How accomplished this girl was in her life, what kind of legacy she’d left, shouldn’t have mattered. At the very least, all that mattered in this situation was the meaning of her death. Weighing the facts of her death with the quality of her accomplishments in life would be a form of contamination in Shizue’s opinion.
Shizue was bothered.
Idiots would continue to pass blame around forever. What could have been just an informal notice had now become something worse than that god-awful conference. With a notice, one simply announced a piece of information and it was over. There was no place for a debate. It was no place for half-hearted complaints or for plaintiffs to show their ire.
Shizue was starting to feel lightheaded, so she brought out her wet cloths and wiped down her desk.
The horrible smell of antiseptics stung her nose. That stabilized her a little. The antiseptic smell she loathed was still better than the breath these people pumped into the air.
Fourteen-year-old girl, disemboweled.
There were over a dozen stab wounds. All of them deep. The body was cut in half, her insides quartered. Her neck and all four limbs were nearly completely severed. It was easy to visualize it all. There were far more horrific images on the monitor, and if she’d really wanted to see them, all Shizue’d have to do was file a request.
But Shizue could visualize it.
But it wasn’t accompanied by realism. The misery in Shizue’s mind had no blood or flesh. She tried to actualize the replica, to make it an original.
What hindered her original was not having a clear idea of Asumi Aikawa’s face. The image of the corpse in Shizue’s mind had the characteristics of Yuko Yabe. Yet the more she tried to add realism to the image, the farther the image got from her, making it vague at best.
Then she saw her mother’s face.
“Who was it that contacted you?” the area chief suddenly asked.
“Was it the police or an area cop? Or…”
“It was a prefectural policeman by the name of Ishida,” Shima answered.
Ishida!
A sickly face. Logical diction. Disagreeable expressions. The image of Ishida wiped out that of her mother.
“Ishida…Isn’t he the guy who was here the other day?”
“That was the officer in charge of the investigation, and Ishida’s one step above that man,” the administrative representative said.
“Meaning that’s the man personally responsible.”
“Vocal communications are obviously recorded. He knew it too. But if the director of this investigation himself contacted you, our not knowing about Asumi Aikawa’s disappearance and as a result no one here doing anything about it is totally the police’s fault, isn’t it?”
The area chief asked if this Ishida character was in fact in a position of being able to take any responsibility.
“He is the director, so…”
“Director, yes, but the director of the prefectural police. I think it always comes down to the local responsibilites.”
“That may be, but he’s really high up in the chain of command. You could even say he’s top brass at the prefectural department, and looking at his public profile, it seems that his record, his backers, and his connections are plentiful and very influential. Not to be overlooked, it seems. He’s at central right now, but again, very high up even there.”
“Hmm.”
It sounded like he was impressed. But also relieved.
Shizue held her breath. Something was rotting.
“But why is this guy sticking around the area of the crime, then? Doesn’t he have more to do up at central?”
“Actually, he’s apparently an expert in heinous crimes, and especially in special cases like this one involving savage or brutal murders, and so whenever something takes place he inserts himself with the area patrol. Well, this isn’t anything they’ve publicly broadcast at police headquarters. It’s underground information.”
That Ishida? If he is in fact an expert, he is one incompetent expert, Shizue thought.
These past few years there had been very few arrests made in connection with serial killings and especially not in the more heinous ones.
Besides, if you thought about the way the police were organized, the odds of such crimes taking place were low. There were certainly situations that required a specialist with focused talents be dispatched to a crime scene, but it was difficult to imagine a bureau superior assuming such a position. Even if that officer had prior experience with a similar case.
The problem here was the source of this information.
This “underground information” the director referred to was probably the nonpublic information supplied by crime fetishists. They collected information on crimes by various methods. Very little of that information could be trusted. It was just a kind of online rumor mill.
What they were saying about Ishida was conjecture based on his having been by coincidence at the scenes of these savage crimes. No doubt that was all it was.
If you looked at it realistically…
A case would be deemed unsolvable, and then after sending the case to the cold file another similar crime would occur. The police would fail once again to solve the crime and once again stop investigating.
If that were the case it wasn’t inconsistent with Shizue’s appraisal of the murders.
She didn’t know about his past record or his network, but Ishida was not remarkable. That much she was sure of. However, everyone above the area chief was convinced.
The area chief told Shima and the representative counselors to stay behind and work overtime. Everyone else should wait till the police made their statement about the crime and keep quiet until then. Finally, the meeting drew to a close.
“The police news conference is planned for six o’clock exactly. At the same time, Shima and her colleagues will be meeting with the victim’s relations. Sometime after tomorrow we’ll convene another conference. I will send details shortly.”
That was really all he had to say from the beginning. No need for a half hour of nonsense.
That took all of twenty seconds.
Shizue looked at the clock on her monitor and reexamined what the area chief had just said, then confirmed the time required, shut off the power, and scrambled out of her seat. She had to admit it was pretty rude.
As she stood up and turned on her heel however, she ran into Shima, who had a severe expression on her face.
She didn’t quite look sad or worried, but exasperated. Shizue couldn’t really blame her. Even she was exhausted by all this. And if something had happened to Yuko Yabe, Shizue would be in this same situation. And in that situation, she would certainly make the same face as Shima was making now. Or so she thought.
Similarities.
Shizue called out, and Shima responded with only a weak glance.
“This might be a strange question, but this girl Asumi Aikawa, she didn’t by any chance have an interest in deformée characters, did she?”
Shima narrowed her eyes without changing her composure in any other way. Now she looked annoyed.
“What’s that?”
“Anything, really. Just anything like animation or…”
“No,” Shima answered clearly and out of sync with how annoyed she seemed from her body language. “She expressed no other interest or hobby besides running. I think she hated people who were into animation. Her parents remembered hearing her say that too.”
She seemed awfully knowledgeable. This was unusual for Shima, so Shizue couldn’t help but ask again, at which point Shima said, “I like that stuff a lot.”
“You…you mean you personally like animation?”
“Yes. I had to see Asumi Aikawa a lot because she had such a special talent for running and competed in national races. Once, when I mentioned deformée characters she abruptly cut me off. I’ll never forget it.”
Shima spoke as if there was nothing in her heart and continued to speak with no intonation before finally turning her back to Shizue and leaving. Then as if only to herself Shima mumbled, Why’d you have to go and die, and trudged out of the room.
It wasn’t as though Asumi Aikawa had died because she wanted to.
In any case, Kunugi’s hypothesized key connection—the shared interest all the victims had in deformée characters—did not apply to this victim.
No.
She could simply be the anomaly.
The exception.
Those who fell outside…
… were all missing something. Their livers.
It would be strange for Shizue to ask about something like that. It would be strange even for a police officer to ask about it, much less a counselor.
The autopsy results wouldn’t be made public for some time. Plus, only people in the police department would have access to that information. Civilians would only have access to that information after the case was over—after the suspect had been prosecuted and sentenced.
Then there was the complicated process of obtaining consent from the bereaved necessary to get that all started.
The data would have a serious protection applied to it and couldn’t be seen except on the monitors they were downloaded onto. Furthermore it probably couldn’t be copied.
Unless Kunugi…
Nah, there was no way a dropout cop like Kunugi, who’d been relieved of any responsibility for this investigation, would have access.
What was I thinking?
That was when Shizue realized. The only thing she had to be concerned with was the disappearance of Yuko Yabe, not the investigation of this murder. That was someone else’s job. If she was preoccupied with this murder it was only because she was trying to escape reality. She was thoroughly disgusted with her work, but she knew she ought to give some more thought to figuring out her own situation.
Shizue shook her head several times.