site 26: Shun Moritsuka

Wednesday, February 24th

I felt like complaining to someone. Today, at long last, my patience had run out.

The darkness inside the university was torn apart by dozens of red lights. They looked blurry in the rain that had started a few hours ago.

I’d taken a look at what there was to see, and then come outside of Seimei University Building 10. I shivered from the cold rain. The courtyard in front of me was filled with police cars. By tomorrow morning, the grass where the students relaxed would be torn apart by tire tracks. I was surrounded by police officers, forensics people, and medical personnel that were rushing in and out of the building.

So, anyway. About why I was pissed off. I was pissed off because someone had committed a crime in the middle of the damn night. I wanted to tell every criminal in the entire world to knock this crap off. I wanted to yell and scream at them. Thanks to whoever did this, it was almost midnight when we cops arrived here. How come criminals never thought about our needs? It just wasn’t fair.

But wait a second. This crime had happened hours before the body was found. Forensics had told me that the estimated time of death was six to eight hours ago. That meant that if anyone was to blame, it wasn’t the killer. It was whoever had discovered the body first.

“Christ! Whoever it was, I wish they would’ve thought about the time some more.”

The body was discovered by a middle-aged security guard employed by the university. Supposedly, the reason that it had taken so long to find the body was that finals were over and the school was on spring break. Personally, I wished he could’ve held off a little longer and found it in the morning. Then I could’ve spent today working on rebuilding my Vanguard deck. What if I end up losing to a middle school kid? What then?

This really was a pain in the butt.

“Moritsuka.”

I looked up and saw Kozaki and Shinoyama, two more detectives from the Musashino Police Department, jogging over to me. The looks on their faces told me that they’d been woken up from bed, and had hurriedly changed into their suits while their wives had complained to them. This work was tough on a married man.

“How was the scene?”

“Section 1 from the Tokyo Metro Police kicked me out halfway.” I shrugged as I answered, and both of them looked up at the sky in exasperation. They’d completely lost any desire to go visit the crime scene.

“What’s going on in there?” Asking that question was all they planned to do. I’d hoped that I could do the same thing, but I was unlucky enough to be the first detective from the Musashino Police Station to arrive on the scene.

“The victim’s name is Isayuki Hashigami, fifty-one years old. A professor at Seimei University’s School of Science and Engineering.” I smirked a little as I said the name, but neither Kozaki nor Shinoyama seemed impressed. “Huh? Did somebody already tell you the victim was Dr. Hashigami, the TV guy?”

“Yeah, I guess.” Shinoyama nodded, and Kozaki looked down at my notebook.

“Moritsuka, your handwriting is shit.”

“Hahaha... my mom tells me that a lot. I know it’s lame.”

“Can you even read that?”

“Of course. It’s like shorthand, you know.”

Both of them regarded me suspiciously. They didn’t seem interested in it any more, and motioned for me to continue talking.

“Um... The crime scene was his lab. It’s on the sixth floor of Building 10 here. The estimated time of death is between 3:00 and 5:00 PM this afternoon.” All the details would be shared when we put together a joint investigation task force later, so I decided just to give them the basic outline for now. “Um, the cause of death is... we’re not sure at the moment.”

“We don’t need the ‘um.’”

“Oh, sorry.” I laughed and nodded. Shinoyama was the old, burly type of detective, and he loved to impress his ways on others. He could be a hassle to deal with. He was a talented detective, but for people from my generation, he was difficult.

“What do you mean, you’re not sure?” Kozaki tilted his head. “Is that what forensics said?”

“There were wounds all over his body. He might’ve been tortured. His legs look like they were bound, for one thing. And his trademark long hair was literally ripped off his scalp, or something.”

Both of them wrinkled their brows in thought. Their detective’s intuition told them that this might not be an ordinary killing.

“Was the murder weapon found?” Kozaki was still glancing at my notebook as he spoke.

“Oh, yeah. There was a bloody knife left at the scene. And in a really obvious place.”

“An obvious place?”

“Yeah. Like the killer was trying to say, ‘This is the murder weapon!’”

“Any fingerprints?”

“There were, I guess. Really clear ones, too. You can ask forensics for the details.” They had to take the weapon back, get the fingerprints off it, and match them with the database. It would probably take them a while to figure out whose fingerprints they were. “Oh, and forensics was saying something else weird, too.”

“Out with it.”

“One of the victim’s teeth had been removed, supposedly.”

“One of his teeth?”

“It was one of those artificial teeth. Implants, they call ‘em. Usually they’re buried in pretty deep, so they’re not supposed to be easy to remove. You’d need a pair of pliers or something to do it. And if you tried to rip one out, it would be so painful that the person would pass out.”

“When was it taken out? Before or after his death?”

“We don’t know. But we know it happened today.”

“Hmm... sounds pretty brutal.”

“Makes it seem like the motive is a personal grudge, if you ask me.”

“Anyway, it seems like us local police are supposed to go around and talk to witnesses.” To be honest, I wasn’t happy with the idea of going around questioning people in the middle of winter like this. The two of them must’ve agreed, because I could see a small look of disgust on their faces. “Oh, right. There’s one more thing. This is a result of my personal investigations!”

“Your personal investigations?”

“Yes, you see, there’s this particular doujinshi...”

“What’s an, um... doujinshi?”

“Shinoyama, you don’t know what a doujin is? Man, you’re behind the times.” I giggled a little, and Shinoyama’s eyes narrowed. It felt like he was mad, so I decided not to drop it. “A doujin is to manga as an indie band is to music.”

“Manga doesn’t have anything to do with this.”

“You’d think so, right? But it does. Nobody else has noticed this yet, but when I heard about this case, I thought of it immediately. That’s something that only an otaku could do. Heheheh.”

“Did you find this doujin manga thing at the scene?”

“No, no. That’s not it. This murder scene is almost identical to a scene from a certain doujinshi. That particular manga is an adult publication for women. Its author is a woman named Ririka Nishizono. Oh, if you need it, I can bring it to the station later. So in this manga, after this man’s corpse gets raped, the rapist takes out his artificial tooth with a knife, as a memento, you see, and carries it home lovingly...”

“This is a waste of time.”

“Moritsuka, what you just said is seriously creeping me out.”

“Huh? Wha... Wait!” Shinoyama and Kozaki quickly ended the conversation and entered Building 10. I was left alone in the rain. “Sheesh. And I was nice enough to give them my big scoop, too. Didn’t they learn when they were kids that you should let people talk until they’re finished? A detective’s whole job is supposed to be listening to people.”

Well, maybe it made sense that they wouldn’t take me seriously. After all, I was a loser otaku who took his anime more seriously than his work. Ahaha. Anyway, I guess that meant my work was done for the day. I could let the elite detectives of the Tokyo Metropolitan Police, as well as my co-workers, handle this, and go home. Oh, but first I had to make a call.

I took out my phone and dialed the usual number. They picked up after the first ring. They must’ve been waiting for me to call.

“Agent Moritsuka,” I said, in my very best English.

“You can speak Japanese.”

“I’m Agent Moritsuka!”

“Are these EM waves secure?”

“Don’t underestimate an otaku. This line is perfectly scrambled. No one can break this perfect algorithm.”

They must’ve felt a little better after hearing that, because the voice on the phone chuckled a bit. “What’s the situation?”

“The rain’s pissing me off. I should’ve made a teru-teru bozu.”

“The weather report says it will stop by tomorrow.” I was joking, but they took me seriously. “Did you get the list?”

“No. I couldn’t find the thing itself. But...”

“But?”

“I did find something.”

“What do you mean?”

“The list we’ve been seeking for so long may not actually exist.”

“What do you mean—”

“Code.” I interrupted them mid-sentence. I could hear them gasp. “He had it written out in a damn dying message, of all things.”

“That’s bad.”

“Of course, it’s not a problem. I erased it before they saw it. I’m just glad I was the first one at the scene.”

“I see.”

“They haven’t realized that the list they want to get rid of so badly has been coded.”

“Does the list exist?”

“Yeah. But they went to the trouble of encoding and camouflaging it. I don’t think it exists in paper form at all anymore. The professor’s not that stupid.”

“There’s no time. Find the list.”

“Time, huh? You mean the time limit of life? Still... there’s too many of them to be just guinea pigs, right? I mean, 256 people?” I stopped and looked up through the rain at Seimei University Building 10. “But in the end...”

The voice on the phone fell silent. After a moment, the call ended.

“You probably can’t change the future.” My words melted into the cold rain.