Chapter 018
SHE SET HER monitor on voice-recognition mode. Initiate call, she inputted in a soft voice, and called Shima.
The face that appeared on her monitor screen was haunted.
Shima was located just four rooms away and in the same stand-by mode as her cohort Shizue. As soon as she appeared Shima said, “Not again.”
“This is being recorded. You should watch what you say.”
“I’m not in any state to be careful about what I say. You should know that as a counselor,” Shima threw at Shizue.
Shima’s voice, transformed into a signal and then reconstructed by Shizue’s monitor, lost most of its bite.
“What are you saying I did? They died anyway.”
“I’m in the same situation. Don’t lash out at me. But let’s talk about Nakamura.”
“How can you be so calm at a time like this, Fuwa?” Shima sneered at Shizue.
Shima wasn’t really sneering at her, she knew, but at the lens.
“I’m not calm. But—”
“You’re pissing me off. They’re going to call me in soon, so I’m turning this off now.”
The image on Shizue’s screen disappeared, and the disconnect signal came up.
“She’s really been through the ringer,” Kunugi said from behind the screen. “She’s closer in age to me, your cohort.”
“Is she?”
“What she feels about what’s happened is more important to her than what’s taking place right now. She basically understands that the world she controls is subjective, but that means she can’t see the other side. We were all like that when we were young.”
“That’s a sort of truth, isn’t it?” Shizue answered. “I don’t fault it.”
“Well, it isn’t bad. Just, it makes it impossible to lie. Your judgments are all subjective. To be honest with yourself involves a devotion to what others don’t know. Then the more others don’t know, the more you become indistinguishable from criminals. It’s a given that you can’t know exactly what someone else is thinking, so if you stop pretending to know, there’s no reason to ever lie. Then the foundation of society begins to crumble. You were raised in a world separated from that fundamental behavior.”
“You make it sound like we’re bad people,” Shizue opined coolly.
“Are you objecting? Objecting would be about as useful as that dust box on the monitor. It’s just about knowing whether there’s something of use in there. Well, it doesn’t matter,” Kunugi said and added after a thought, “No, I guess it does matter.”
“It might be a serious problem. I say that, but then again most of the guys at the center of the police department are about my age,” he said. “The guys at the top of the prefectural police are probably about ten years older than me. I’m not saying they’re done for like I am, but it’s a troubled generation. We’re all being moved around to accounting or administration or office direction.
“They probably decided about ten years ago that that was the way to go. You keep ascending the career ladder and there’s some old man squatting on the top seat, so the organizational flow has been bad. If you look at the numbers, there are a lot more people joining the senior population, so it’s inevitable. When you reach a certain age it only makes sense that you’ll get sent back to the bottom of the ladder, but to change every assignment…The elderly are smarter than that. It’s something to think about, a generation of people with the right to speak. It’s not like these young guys can just go in and take their places.”
“Ishida’s still young.”
“No way,” Kunugi said, sincerely doubtful. “Ishida’s about the same age I am. Maybe just a couple years off.”
Interesting. Shizue thought Kunugi must have been about the age of her father. She didn’t think Ishida could possibly be the same age as Kunugi, but to be even within a handful of years of him was still unbelievable.
“I thought Ishida was much younger.”
“It’s because I look old.”
“You look your age.”
“Thanks,” he said. “Though I don’t remember ever telling you my actual age, ha!” Kunugi stood up. It was just an observation—couldn’t have been false flattery.
Kunugi disinfected his hands with a cleaning solution and stood up by the drink dispenser, put down the rental cup he’d been fondling, and hunched over the touch-screen display.
“I’ll help myself to another cup. That Ishida is one wise fellow. I mean it’s a career that dates back. He doesn’t talk about it that way now, so you wouldn’t know, right?”
“I do get that sense. I’m not that young either.”
Kunugi raised one eyebrow toward Shizue. He filled his cup with the flavonoid drink and walked over to the window. “Me and Lieutenant Ishida see, we’re from the same region. The east side, three sections away from here. So we’d never worked face to face, but I knew him by name. We’re both from a bygone generation. Still had schools. I was barely getting by, but he was top of his class. He was a real straight-A student. And it wasn’t just his grades. He was raised in a really cushy environment. From the starting line, there was no comparison.”
“Cushy?”
“Rich.” Kunugi savored his tea. “Ri’ichiro Ishida has noble ancestors.”
He didn’t look like it.
“He’s a direct descendant of the founder of SVC. He’s the son of the current chief or something. You remember SVC. I was talking about it over dinner that night. The whole bioengineered food industry? SVC is at the center of that whole industry.”
“You mean that SVC?”
“Yeah. I don’t know any other companies with the same name, but I’m sure it’s that one. They pioneered the whole man-made alimentation industry. They used to be called Suzuki Food Sciences.”
She didn’t know about the original company name, but even Shizue had heard of SVC before.
According to what Kunugi had been saying before, they had a vested interest in the execution of the complete crossover from organic to manmade foodstuffs.
“Food ingredients were their main product, and they exchanged technology with foreign companies and were the first to come up with a good meat alternative to living animals. They were the first to push the export of food from Asia at the end of the twentieth century. It was established in 1975. It’s a long-established corporation.”
Shizue didn’t think biotechnology dated back so far. When she voiced her doubt Kunugi shook his empty teacup. No no, it doesn’t.
“It wasn’t called that,” he said. “But even the development of wheat grains is a sort of biotechnology, no? Humanity has always had a voracious appetite. As you can tell by the old name of the company, SVC has always been interested in producing food products. You know, when the company’s pioneers grew up after the war when food was scarce, food substitutes were really popular. Do you remember food substitutes?”
Shizue had heard a lifetime’s worth of history of the war growing up, but surprisingly, this was the first she’d heard of substitute food products. There was no mention of the phrase in any of the published information about that period. Shizue’s generation had learned all about the country’s way of life at the time. International ethical issues and conceptual problems were important, so when it came to learning about the two world wars, Shizue had only learned to recognize the numerous examples of man’s inhumanity toward man in the past. These were especially terrible ones that had directly involved her country.
“Well, there was such a thing,” Kunugi said. “At the time you could eat tuna without a thought. But then you couldn’t, and then we were eating shark the way we used to eat tuna, but if you think about it now it’s all screwy. Well, the idea was to make readily available foods seem like unavailable food. That was the source of this whole idea.”
“To make sharklike tuna? That’s definitely screwy.”
“Isn’t it, though?” Kunugi chuckled. “Well, SVC was concentrating on food products and never made a priority of medical products, so they escaped pretty much unscathed by the whole DNA information registry hoopla. And then other similar companies lost out their vested rights to that market. SVC stirred up their fighting spirit and vehemently opposed the regulation, you know. That was how SVC gained the trust of the industry and became the biggest player in the bioengineering game.
“They got ahead by holding out,” Kunugi said. “At the end of the day it was a fish in troubled waters. I guess we don’t say that anymore though. The nuance is a little off. Anyway, they avoided direct attack, so they saw great returns in the end. Whatever could fuse best with the existing system would win.”
“You seem to know a lot about this.”
“The SVC headquarters are right by where I was born. The company’s presence really brought up the standard of living out there. Seventy percent of the residents had been receiving some form of relief. My father worked there. So yeah, I know a lot about them. There was a monument to the founder, Yutaro Suzuki, built in front of the community center. So Ishida is a direct descendant of that guy. His mother was Suzuki’s granddaughter. Quite a little prince he was.”
“And he became a cop?”
“Strange, I know.” Kunugi looked out the window. “Well, inherited jobs are sort of rare nowadays, but who would have thought he’d go into the police force? He could just keep playing. Besides, there are so many other more relevant industries he could work in now. The area patrol out here are an enterprise of SVC.”
“Is that so?” The area patrol was a unit of citizen volunteers that had formed fifteen years ago.
At the time the area patrol unit was formed, the police force’s administration was undergoing changes, and the ubiquitization of security systems made single-handed police processing even more complicated. Eventually, the traffic, security, patrol, and crime prevention units were separated and turned into citizen initiatives, making them self-managed entities that developed into what they were today.
The mother organization was still the old police unit that oversaw the breakoff, but they were managed by designated security companies in each area.
“The company that manages the area patrol in this prefecture is D&S, right? The old company name was Ishida Security.”
“Ishida?”
“Exactly. It was founded by Lieutenant Ishida’s grandfather. The son of the founding Ishida got married to the daughter of the second-generation president of Suzuki Food Products. I don’t know which came first, but one of the companies got subsumed in the other and they merged to form D&S. There are other companies like this. Like that company I told you about before, Shikida Enterprises.”
“Yes, and wasn’t one of the victims of last year’s serial killings employed by them?”
“Yeah. That’s also a member of the SVC group. SVC has quite a reach here and going west. That’s why I figure it’d be even easier for Ishida to just take on a higher-up position in one of those companies. No need to go into the police force.”
“But he’s supposed to be the region’s expert on bizarre murder crimes.”
Shizue had heard that from a questionable source.
Kunugi made a strange face. “What did you say?”
“Is that incorrect?”
“Not that it’s wrong—just who exactly told you that? It couldn’t have been Ishida himself.”
“I think it was underground information,” Shizue said.
“Underground, eh? Well, Ishida was definitely working in the bizarre crimes squad when the killing spree occurred last year. Before that…No, I can’t know without looking at my server. It’s unsolved anyway, so for the lead detective on the case to be suddenly replaced…I guess it’s not unheard of. His moves have all been deliberate and upward. He’s advanced very steadily.”
“Without solving any of the crimes?”
“If he’s advancing it must be for a reason, sure. It could be just that he’s economically endowed, or that he has some leverage with central administration, or that…If you started conjecturing it would never end, but there’s no doubting he’s a stand-up man with real qualities, and if you skim the cream from the crop, there really is no need for him to stay in the police.”
This was true. There were plenty of better jobs for him.
“But still…”
Shizue understood what he was saying, but Kunugi himself shut his mouth and went quiet, like he’d suddenly run into a system error.
“What’s the matter?” Shizue asked. Kunugi, this beat-up old failure of a cop, practically the opposite of Ishida, was gnashing his teeth. This is no good.
“It’s nothing. Just…”
Kunugi’s face became still and gazed at the empty cup.
Shizue became aware of the fact that she was getting used to an existence divorced from normality. Perhaps she’d come across so many situations that ran counter to the law that she couldn’t help say things that she’d normally reject.
No.
This was all one big evasion of reality. She’d just completely stopped thinking about anything related to Yuji Nakamura or Yuko Yabe. That was why she was entertaining this useless conversation. She hated wasting her time, but every time she thought about doing anything related to the case, she’d make that horrible face she saw in the mirror that morning.
“I can’t stay here forever.”
Kunugi popped up and placed the used cup back in the holder.
“If I get caught here it’s your job on the line too. I’m sure you’re in no state of mind to be making idle chitchat.”
He wasn’t wrong, but…
“You’re right, but you’re in the best place possible for hiding. The rooms can’t be viewed from the halls for the sake of the children’s privacy, and the sound protection is complete. The courtyard beyond the window is, as you know, off-limits. As long as there are no children in the room nothing will be recorded, and unless myself or a child inside the room makes an emergency call no one can open the door from the outside. The only drawback is how we’re going to get you out of here when I leave the office.”
“The sensors turn on when the room is vacant. Then…”
Kunugi looked at the ceiling. There were five cameras.
“I should leave as soon as I can to avoid causing any more problems for you.”
Kunugi took deliberate steps toward the door. “But I can’t check the area. I can’t see or hear what’s going on out there.”
“That’s true. You could open the door into the hall and find people walking there…That would be bad.”
“Yes, it would.” Kunugi stood motionless at the door.
“You couldn’t just say I came in disguised as a cop and threatened you, could you?”
“I couldn’t lie like that. Besides if I said that you’d be…”
It wouldn’t just be that he’d be suspended. They’d send him to trial.
“It’s not a lie, though.” Kunugi furrowed his brow. “It’s half true.”
“I don’t remember being threatened.”
“Even if you didn’t feel it, this is plenty threatening. I snuck into a no-entry area and illegally came in through your window. Besides, you shouldn’t worry about what happens to me. If I get caught anywhere in this neighborhood they’ll take my badge for good.”
Kunugi extended his arm toward the door shield.
“Wait. Even if you get into the hall, how do you plan on getting out of the building?”
“I guess I can’t just go out.”
No, you can’t. You can’t go out if there’s no record of you having gone in.
“These past few days there have been several police officers and area patrols coming in and out, but even they have had to pass their IDs through.”
“Of course. Even zero-year-old infants have to have ID. The only way to go in and out without an ID is to break your way through the glass doors. However, the glass is reinforced, so it’d be difficult to break with your bare hands.”
“Yeah. Even if it weren’t reinforced, I couldn’t break it. Even if I broke it I doubt I’d get through it. I should just get caught.”
“Get caught…”
“On purpose,” Kunugi said. “I’m just going to cause you more trouble if I stay here.”
“It won’t matter where you are. Be it at the front of the building or in my office, wherever you get caught they’ll ask how you got in. If you refuse to answer they’ll figure it out when they find that the only place where security was compromised was my office. They’ll suspect me of helping you anyway.”
“In that case, I’ll just go out through the yard. That’s where I was to begin with.”
Kunugi went toward the window. “If I leave through here, it’ll be as if I was never here. I mean, unless you count the two cups of tea I had, but you could say you drank them.”
“What about the sensor?”
“Sensor? Well, there’s no limit to barriers on my way to freedom. I’m sure they’ll send someone to find me eventually, but out through the courtyard will be better than busting through a glass door. I don’t have any upper body strength, but I can run fast. Because I’m a coward.”
“If you run at full speed at your age, you’ll get hurt.”
“That’s age discrimination if I ever heard it,” Kunugi said. “Eh, I guess it’s okay because we’re talking privately.”
“It’s also the truth. I’m just telling you as a cautionary measure. Even if you run, where would you run to?”
“Where…”
“You aren’t possibly thinking of going home and playing your old role-playing games, are you?”
“Actually, that’s not a bad idea, but my server has been totally inactive for the past few days, so it’s highly likely someone’s there surveilling my house. With my monitor in the house but the house itself showing total vacancy, they’d know there’s trouble. Police officers are required to keep their monitors on them, even when on leave. Not that they’d be contacting me or anything. I’m not going to find a way out by being buttered up by your hospitality, and besides, I won’t get anything done just sitting around here.”
“Does that mean you had something you wanted to do in the first place?”
“I didn’t have a concrete mission or anything, but with Yuji Nakamura dead now too…I’m not satisfied just sitting around anymore,” Kunugi said in a low voice.
“As if you were ever just sitting around,” Shizue said, as if she had been either.
“This latest theory that the undocumented resident is the culprit doesn’t sit well with me.”
“It might have some validity though. It’s questionable where the police got their information, but if the lieutenant is spouting it, it’s possible it’s true. However, if this girl and this undocumented pharmacy her family runs are the supposed criminals, the police can’t say Rey Mao did everything herself. If there were an unknown partner…”
Someone under the radar, as it were.
“Well then,” Kunugi said and reached out to the door panel again, when just at the same moment, a beeping sound went off and her desk monitor turned on.
“Wait.”
Kunugi turned around.
Shizue put an index finger to her lips as if to say be quiet.
“Yes, this is Fuwa.”
On the display was a female employee at the center’s entry.
“There’s a child here requesting to see Counselor Fuwa.”
“A child?”
“Did you not have an appointment to see a child privately?”
“No, I didn’t.”
“I see. This is a real contact request. The child is presently here. Insists on seeing you—given the circumstances I felt I ought to call the director, who asked that the child be apprehended at your office.
“Apprehended…either way I’d like you to see the child. I can’t turn her away. Since children aren’t allowed to be out right now anyway.”
Shizue shifted her gaze from the monitor screen to Kunugi.
Kunugi received her look and moved away from the window toward the desk.
Shizue’s face was being watched by one of the cameras, so she couldn’t make any facial gestures to express what she wanted to say to Kunugi.
Kunugi came up to just behind the monitor and opened his mouth to speak. Shizue quickly uttered, “I understand, I’ll be with you in one second,” and closed the dialogue.
“What are you doing? I told you not to make a sound.”
“Yeah. I thought it would be easiest if someone on your monitor saw me attack you. Then Lieutenant Ishida would arrive immediately. Otherwise—”
“I’ll figure something out. Just sit still.”
“Figure something out? Isn’t there a kid about to show up here? Then what?”
“These aren’t normal office hours. Something’s wrong.”
Shizue called the reception desk.
“This is Fuwa. I apologize for abruptly signing off. I was slightly confused. Now who did you say was this child that requested to see me?”
“Uh, one Ayumi Kono. She’s in your session for age fourteens.”
“Kono?”
Ayumi Kono. What kind of child was she?
After thinking about it, Shizue gathered herself.
“She lives alone, if I’m correct.”
“That’s right. We have received a notice of long absence of her guardian. In case of emergency our center takes over as her guardian, which is why I thought the director’s judgment…”
“I see. But this girl…”
Her older sister was a member of the environmental cleanup development project and living abroad. That much Shizue recalled, but that didn’t help her remember anything else about the girl herself. She couldn’t remember any characteristics. She left her sentence unfinished and searched for her file, whereupon a picture of Ayumi Kono came up on the display.
Very short hair and a refined-looking face.
Ahh…
“W-where is Miss Kono now?”
“It was dangerous to be outside the building, so I let her through the entrance gate, but she’s not yet in the hall. If you give me the cue I can open the hall gate.”
“The child in question has a fear of strangers and will not like seeing people she is not acquainted with. Are there any police-related personnel in the East C road between the entrance hall and the counseling booth?”
“Please wait a second while I check.”
Kunugi waited with bated breath. Shizue looked at the still image of Ayumi Kono on her display. Something about it…
Something about it troubled her.
There is no one there, the display answered.
“Is that so? In that case please block the East C road from the entrance hall until the visiting minor has gone through. Obviously if there is an emergency you can lift the block, but this child is particularly frightened of police and authority figures. Please advise.”
“I need the director’s permission to block the road, but I can tell you what the odds are of this child running into anyone. As of now all the police personnel are in the south corridor, and all the center personnel short of the director are in separate meetings in the west corridor. You and Ms. Shima are the only counselors here as the rest of them have been asked to return home. Right now in the east corridor it is just you and Ms. Shima.”
“That’s fine. In that case please open the hall gate for Miss Kono and ask her to proceed to counseling booth C0045.”
Shizue was about to close the dialogue when the attendant said, “Wait, there’s something else. The police have instructed to have the minor escorted back to her house by a guard brought in by the area patrol after the interview. You will have to contact me again about the passersby in the East C road anyway, so please contact me as soon as your interview is over.”
“Understood.”
Shizue turned off her communication, turned her chair around, and faced Kunugi.
“What do you think?”
“What do you mean? What are you going to do?”
“The minor will be headed this way. Right now there is no one between here and the entrance. You just need to leave before the child arrives.”
“Into the hall?”
“The only sensor in the hall is one for body temperature. There is no visual surveillance. I will tell the child that you are the bodyguard assigned by the police—that’s not technically a lie. Stay outside the door and flat up against the wall until our meeting is over.”
“You mean like a bodyguard.”
“Yes. If you’re in the middle of the hall they’ll know you’re a human. When the interview is over I will escort the child out, so at that point please follow us to the entrance hall. I can open the gate from inside. Once it’s open we’ll appear on the management department’s scans, but there’s a brief interval before the scan begins. I realize I said you’re old for the exertion, but you will have to run as fast as you can to outside the center. The area patrol will send someone for the child immediately, so you need to clear out before they arrive.”
Go anywhere, Shizue would have normally said.
“You could go to your parents. You can say you lost your monitor in the house and went home to your parents. They’ll buy that, won’t they? Losing track of your monitor is a minor violation.”
As Shizue finished her sentence she stood in front of the door and brought her hand up to the sensor panel.
The door opened.
Kunugi moved uncharacteristically correctly from the window to where Shizue stood, and said, “I owe you one, big time.”
“I don’t expect anything,” Shizue said.
Kunugi stepped into the hall at almost the same time a small figure appeared on her floor.
She looked just like the girl in her monitor.
Her gaze looked somehow pained and forced Shizue to look down.
It was immoral.
Shizue still didn’t know what compelled this girl to come to her.
She’d come out to make a real contact conversation in the midst of a warning not to leave home, so it must have been a serious issue. And yet the whole time, Shizue was thinking of how to use this opportunity to help Kunugi escape the center. This was unforgivable as a counselor. Not only against the counselor’s code but her own personal code of conduct. She was behaving…recklessly.
“I’m Ayumi Kono,” the girl said.
“Miss Kono…” Shizue still couldn’t recall anything about her. “Please come in. This is the police…”
Shizue gulped. Ayumi was looking at Kunugi’s hands. Kunugi must have noticed as well. He put his hands behind him. In those hands were his mud-caked shoes.
“I am your bodyguard,” Kunugi said. “Please come in.”
“Wait a second.” Ayumi stood her ground.
“Wait…wait for what?”
“Please don’t close the door. When you do and I swipe my ID to come in, the room starts recording. I came to tell you something I don’t want recorded.”
Don’t want recorded…
Shizue’s heart started racing. This girl…
What was she doing here?
“But as I’m sure you’re aware then, what gets recorded here can’t leave the center without your permission. So…”
That wasn’t true.
Recordings might be abridged, but they all got handed over to the police.
Shizue was lying.
So…
She couldn’t tell her not to worry.
Shizue turned her eyes away again.
“In any case don’t worry. As long as what you say doesn’t have to do with a crime I don’t—”
“It does have to do with a crime,” Ayumi said.
“What did you say?”
“It does have to do with a crime.”
“What do you mean?”
“The police report clearly indicates a criminal.”
“What?”
Shizue stopped Kunugi from coming forward.
“Not just that, but the police distorted the information on the criminal,” Ayumi said.
“Th-that’s ridiculous.”
“Please, Mr. Kunugi.” Shizue had to speak harshly to Kunugi. This was probably not just childish fancy.
“Do you have proof?”
Ayumi didn’t respond but instead swallowed Shizue’s look.
She was not the kind of child to play a joke like this.
No child would play this kind of prank at a time like this.
Besides.
Her gaze was totally fixed. Uncomfortably so.
Shizue pressed a button on her monitor. “All right. The security is turned off now. If you come in now, the sensor won’t go off, so you won’t be recorded. Just say you forgot your ID card.”
“I had to use it to get into the center.”
“Oh, right. Then…”
“This is fine,” Ayumi said.
“I understand. So what did you want to tell me?”
Ayumi looked up and down the hall and, having confirmed no one was around, began to speak.
“It’s about Yuko Yabe’s murder.”
“Is there information about her murder already out in public?”
Ayumi didn’t respond to Shizue’s question.
“Yuko Yabe was being threatened by Nakamura and Kawabata. They lured her out and beat her up. Did the police know that?”
“That Nakamura and Kawabata were after Yabe? Well…”
“Lieutenant Ishida had said there was no record of communication from them in Yabe’s monitor,” Kunugi said.
“I heard from the victim herself,” Ayumi said.
“The victim…you were in contact with Yabe?”
“If there is no record of the messages, then they were erased from her monitor.”
“You’re saying the murderer was also erasing personal information?”
“Did you also know that Yabe trespassed into Representative Makino’s home on Saturday night and that the area patrol apprehended her?”
“Makino…”
Shizue looked to Kunugi for a sign. Kunugi was petrified.
“S-Saturday night?”
“An emergency call was placed, the area patrol came to secure her, and the patrol car took her away. That much is certain. But then the car was attacked by two men, and Yabe was abducted.”
“Hey! Stop talking nonsense. This is ridiculous. The police would have…”
Overcome with emotion Kunugi blurted all this out but then suddenly exhaled.
“Did you see something, kid?”
“Is that true, Miss Kono?” Shizue asked.
“Did you see someone?”
“I can’t say,” Ayumi said. “That undocumented resident saw it.”
“So that’s what this is,” Shizue said, emphatically.
Ayumi didn’t respond.
Shizue’s imagination ran with a new ferocity. “Did this undocumented resident happen to kill Kawabata while rescuing Yabe from him?”
“That’s false,” Ayumi said. “The undocumented resident has not killed anyone. Your suspicions are misdirected. There is another killer.”
“You know who? The killer?”
“I don’t know who killed Yabe,” Ayumi said. “But I do know that the information the police have is all useless. That much is certain.”
Shizue looked at Kunugi anew. Kunugi’s brow creased even more deeply and his face expressed discouragement. “You’re saying that there’s been tampering with evidence regarding the crime.”
“Ms. Fuwa,” Ayumi said. She was almost never called that by her children. “I have a favor to ask. You need to keep Mio Tsuzuki and Hazuki Makino in a safe place.”
“Tsuzuki and Makino?”
“Both of them know everything I know. Makino knows that the trespasser at her home was Yabe. So she knows that there is something wrong with the information about this case. Through her father she is making this statement to the area patrol shortly. But…
“We can no longer trust the area patrol,” Ayumi finished.
“If there is an information leak, there’s a possibility that we may have disadvantageous information going out to the murderer.”
“But, no, if information is in fact being falsified, the police will still only depend on the information on record. They won’t simply trust anything they’re told.”
“Not even if it’s from a prefectural assemblyman?”
No, that wouldn’t be ignored.
Still, there was no way to know for certain if recorded information was being falsified. In which case all they had to depend on was the informant’s memory. Obviously…
That’s why she would be threatened.
“Miss Kono…” Shizue stared straight at Ayumi’s face.
“We don’t know who killed Yabe. All we know is that she was attacked by Kawabata and Nakamura, that she was at one point secured by the area patrol on Saturday, and that she was then abducted. But neither Tsuzuki or Makino are suspicious of the cops.”
“And you are, missy?” Kunugi asked. Ayumi looked back at him.
“It is not that I suspect the police. I just don’t trust anyone right now.”
“But you trust this counselor?”
“I do.”
“Miss Kono…why would you say that?” Shizue asked.
“It’s not a good thing to murder people, right?”
“Huh?”
How cavalier. That was what Shizue thought before she could think of a response for Ayumi. Ayumi Kono struck Shizue as a cavalier girl for some reason. Her short haircut, her thin neck, the way she stood completely still in the same posture, all of it meant to be exactly that way. Totally different from the diminished face Shizue saw in the mirror.
Shizue was made up entirely of useless parts.
“It’s not good,” Shizue answered.
“Why isn’t it?”
“Because the law has determined it so.”
She would leave it at that. Kunugi looked perplexed, but Ayumi let out a little laugh.
“I think it would be bad for any more dead bodies to surface. But I can’t do anything about it. I don’t know Makino or Tsuzuki very well. But you know them better. Plus you’re an adult. Slightly better for this…than me.”
“But I’m with the police,” Kunugi said. “Remember, you don’t trust us?”
“I think the kind of bodyguard that doesn’t even have indoor shoes and has to hold his dirty outside shoes while waiting in a hallway is probably not trusted by the police. Whether I trust you isn’t an issue anymore.”
The young girl’s smart comment caught Kunugi a little off guard. He brought out his shoes from behind him. “All right, you have a point. You got me.”
“Please.” Ayumi lowered her head.
“All right. I’ll see what I can do.”
“What should I do?”
Kunugi said, “Don’t worry. We won’t let them kill any more people.
But adults are cunning. They may betray you. You’re not safe.”
“I’m fine.”
What a girl.
Shizue was a little scared of this purposeful girl with nothing out of place.
Was she always this way?
She was definitely one of her original kids. They’d had several meetings. Countless communications. But she’d never seen this face before. She’d never received this straight visual line.
It was as if she were a wild animal setting her sights on prey.
There was a sound behind them.
What was it?
A slight noise.
This sound…
She’d heard it before. What was it? It wasn’t out of place. She’d even gotten used to hearing it day to day. But it stood out. It was a sound she shouldn’t have been hearing here. Not now.
No, it was…
Shizue, thinking only of what the sound was, pushed Kunugi to the side.
Did they see her?
As soon as Shizue moved her body to push Kunugi, there appeared on the glass wall of the hallway a pinpoint red dot. There was no mistaking it. The tally lamp was reflected off that wall.
That sound was of the surveillance camera turning on. Security was in motion. No…
“Oh. Really, you don’t say. Okay. I understand,” Shizue said aloud and purposefully, and motioned to Ayumi to walk back toward the entrance. “I’ll send her out, so don’t worry,” Shizue said into her office in a loud voice again and closed the door.
She swiped her ID card.
The room signal indicated vacancy.
“What’s going on!” Kunugi said. “What are you trying to pull? Hey!”
“Some of those cunning adults…seems they’ve already betrayed us.”
“What?”
“The surveillance cameras.”
“What?!”
“The surveillance cameras on the ceiling…”
“Did they move? Are we being recorded?”
“The security was turned off, so the recording system wasn’t supposed to activate till the door closed and the room was in counseling mode. I can’t believe it was recording.”
“The conversation in your room was recorded then…”
No, it couldn’t have been.
“At the very least it wouldn’t activate till the door was opened. It’s not made to operate at all times. So…”
Even if it weren’t recording…
“Was the camera trying to observe you?” Kunugi asked.
“That must be what it was doing.”
Why did Shizue need to be surveilled? Or did they suspect Ayumi?
Maybe they knew to expect she would have some information related to the murders.
“I’ve said this several times now, but the space inside the counseling room is very strictly protected. Barring only the extreme cases, there is no outside observation into the room allowed. It’s forbidden. As long as the central control system program itself isn’t altered, it’s unthinkable.”
“This is the work of the police.”
“Even if the request came from the police, if the director of the center doesn’t acquiesce…no, not even a police order would do it. It’s what your lieutenant likes to refer to as a situation that supersedes the law— center consent would be needed to conduct such surveillance.”
Why. Why did everything have to get so messy?
“Did I get caught in the surveillance?”
“Who knows?”
“I’m sure they couldn’t have known I would be here.”
“In any case we can’t stay here. Let’s go.”
“Go…go where?” Kunugi said.
“I’m the one being sought. You don’t have to…”
“I’m the one who was illegally surveilled.”
Right. Because superseding the law was the same as breaking it.
The line that separated good from bad was not ethics or morality or common good, but the law. Just as there were crimes that could be forgiven by human empathy, there were noble acts that could not be justified by ethics. The data collection performed last week was an example of those charged with upholding the law instead ignoring it. It was as Ayumi had said.
The police couldn’t be trusted.
Shizue pushed Ayumi down the hall.
Frustrating didn’t begin to describe it.
The walls zigzagged but were designed to look straight. What was with this clean, flat, functionless wall?
Shizue struck the wall with all her might.
Her hand hurt. It was neither soft nor warm.
“Hey, slow down,” Kunugi said. “You were given explicit orders, weren’t you? Not to leave this center?
“There’s no reason for the police to restrain someone who’s not even a suspect,” he said.
“If I can’t wait for my chance then I can’t not cooperate either. There’s no logical reason for my being held here. I have a monitor and a GPS if they need me.
“I can’t stay here!”
“That’s not what I mean. I meant your job here…”
“My job here was crushed this morning.”
“But…where are you going to go?” Kunugi asked.
“Like you, I’m not sure,” Shizue said. “We need to get out of here. As soon as the attendants realize there are three people in here they’ll send someone. Then you won’t have time to worry about me anymore.”
The sound of her feet running reverberated in her head.
Things like discretion and prudence all shattered one after the other.
She pulled Ayumi by the hand into the entrance hall.
“Miss Kono, at this point you’re in danger too,” Shizue said without looking at her. “I noticed when the surveillance camera went on, but I don’t know when the audio surveillance started. I don’t even know where they could have been listening from. If it’s as you said, that the police fabricated information on the murderer, you’re in danger too.”
Now.
What do we do?
Shizue passed her ID card through the reader that opened the entrance hall to the front gate. She took Ayumi and went into the entrance.
Shizue stopped Kunugi in the middle of passing the gate. As long as someone was standing in the doorway the gate wouldn’t close. There, nothing would be recorded.
Shizue went forward to the entrance camera with Ayumi.
“Surveillance team.” As she spoke the lamp on the camera went on, and the female attendant from earlier appeared on the screen directly under the camera.
“This is Fuwa.”
“Oh, uh…”
“I have Ayumi Kono here. I’m seeing her home.”
“But as I mentioned, she’s to be escorted by the area patrol,” said the attendant.
“I told you already. This child cannot be around unfamiliar people.”
“But—”
“I know what they said. There’s no need to get in touch with them.”
The attendant looked dismayed. There was nothing in her manual about this kind of situation.
“Just wait, please, Ms. Fuwa…Hello, calling Counselor 458321.”
The entrance gate opened. The monitor screen blinked off.
Kunugi started running.
Kunugi passed the building at exactly the same time the monitor screen reilluminated.
“You may not leave the building. Wait right there.”
“Go.”
She pushed Ayumi out.
“Miss Fuwa, you may not leave the building.”
“Run, fast.”
“I’m closing the gate, per instructions from the director.”
The reinforced glass gate started to close.
“Both of us have to go.” Ayumi yanked Shizue’s arm from the other side of the entrance.
“Ms. Fuwa!” Shizue tripped forward from the impact of Ayumi’s pull.
Ayumi embraced her.
The gate closed.
Shizue, collapsed, took in a deep breath of the scent of Ayumi’s arm that now held her up.
It was the smell of a beast.