EDGE (7 page)

“Ah-ha! Did the husband know?” Oki asked quickly. He seemed to be already imagining the set-up: husband learns of wife’s affair and in a blind rage kills his family before taking his own life. Naturally, Saeko had entertained the same possibility.

“I looked into it, but it seems the rumors about Haruko hadn’t reached Kota. They were baseless to begin with and never went any further than Haruko’s workplace. For that reason, the jealous husband scenario doesn’t seem like a possibility, either.”

In a sweeping motion, Oki the producer reclined in his seat and leaned back all the way. “Mm-hmm. So I guess that only leaves one possibility.”

“Abduction, you mean?”

“Yes. What’s your take?”

“I think the possibility of a foreign government being involved is slim, but the most likely remaining explanation is that they were abducted.”

“Ah-ha!” Oki’s reaction seemed vaguely excited as he sat back up in his chair, leaning forwards across the table.

“Nothing else fits. The chances that a group of criminals broke into the Fujimuras’ home and kidnapped them is basically nil. There was no evidence whatsoever of a struggle. The family’s car is still parked in their garage, so we know they didn’t go for a drive and get into an accident. The only possible explanation is that someone very close to the Fujimuras lured the whole family out of the house and that they were taken away in a van or similar vehicle.”

“I see. Does anyone else have any ideas?” Oki turned to the other members of the group.

“Well, perhaps we should consider the possibility of a UFO abduction,” suggested writer Satoyama with a wide-eyed expression. Immediately the tension in the room slackened, and a few members of the group let out guffaws. Saeko wasn’t sure whether Satoyama was kidding or not. He looked like a typical occult-obsessed reclusive type, and it seemed possible that he genuinely believed aliens might be involved.

Saeko smiled and refrained from commenting. Then she revealed the hypothesis she’d left out of her report.

“Between you and me, when I began my investigation, I suspected Koji’s older brother Seiji.” Without clear evidence, Saeko could have been sued for slander if she’d publicly implicated a specific individual in her report. It wasn’t the sort of thing a writer could publish without any proof.

“Why?” Both Oki and Hashiba simultaneously voiced their interest.

“Because Seiji does have debt,” Saeko replied.

Immediately, the expressions of the entire group turned grave. Only Satoyama looked vaguely disappointed.

“How much does he owe?” Oki inquired.

“Approximately two million yen. And not because his business went bankrupt. He just spent himself deeper and deeper into debt.”

“Well, that’s not uncommon.”

“But Seiji has no prospects for paying his debts off.”

“If the entire Fujimura family were to disappear, would Seiji inherit everything they had?” Hashiba probed.

Saeko nodded. “Exactly. He’s Koji’s only sibling. If the Fujimuras never reappear, Seiji is the legal heir to their estate. As I mentioned earlier, the Fujimuras had almost 35 million yen just in savings. When you factor in their home, the lot, and their other property, they were easily worth more than 50 million.”

“And if Seiji wanted to inherit that money, he would have to get rid of the entire family, right?”

“Do you know what he asked me?”

“What?”

Saeko lowered her voice and imitated Seiji’s throaty growl. “Say, does it really take seven years to close a missing persons case?”

Hashiba gave her a startled look. Up until now, Saeko had responded to the men’s questions with a perfectly sober demeanor. Then, all of a sudden, she’d launched into an uncanny impression of a brazenly greedy middle-aged man. He was so taken off guard that he didn’t have time to laugh, but it made him take a fresh look at Saeko. Delight registered on his face as on a boy’s discovering an appealing toy.

“I get it. The case has to be closed for him to inherit their estate, huh?” Oki’s speech, too, dropped into an informal, more familiar register.

“What do you think, Ms. Kuriyama? You’ve met this Seiji, right?” Hashiba asked.

“Yes.”

“Well? Is he behind this?”

The six men gazed at Saeko in tense anticipation.

“No.” Saeko delivered her verdict with an off-hand shrug.

“What? He’s not?” All at once, the six men clamored to know why Saeko could be so sure of Seiji’s innocence.

“On paper, he looks pretty suspicious. But the moment I met him, I knew he couldn’t have done it. He’s clean, all right. He doesn’t have the balls to pull off something this big.”

This was too much for Hashiba. He grimaced, barely holding in his laughter. “He’s not the criminal type, you mean?”

“Oh, he’s rotten to the core. He’s the kind who would do anything
for money. But if he did, he’d be bound to screw something up. He’s that type. We’re talking about making an entire family disappear overnight without a trace, as if by magic. Seiji could never pull a stunt like that singlehandedly.”

“But we can’t be sure it was a solo job, right? Maybe he had accomplices,” Oki offered.

“Even more impossible.”

When Saeko shot down his suggestion, Oki looked slightly taken aback, slumping one shoulder dramatically. “How do you know?” he asked.

“No decent human being—or an indecent one for that matter—would ever consider partnering up with Seiji.”

The rest of the group eyed Saeko dubiously, as if wondering how she could be so sure just through her limited contact with Seiji. “Can you guarantee that?” one of the men ventured.

“He’s a little out of the ordinary. Very out of the ordinary, I should say. He hops from job to job and has virtually no social skills. He’s the black sheep of the family, and the Fujimuras didn’t have much to do with him. He lives in a shack in their neighborhood but he’s basically a hobo, frequently disappearing for a month or two, even a year at times. It would be perfectly obvious to anyone who met him. A group of kidnappers capable of abducting a family wouldn’t want to collaborate with a man like him.”

Saeko obviously held Seiji in the lowest possible regard. Hashiba gazed towards the ceiling with a vague look of satisfaction on his face, as if savoring Saeko’s vitriol. Perhaps he was imagining what unpleasantness had taken place between Saeko and Seiji when she was gathering information.

In contrast, Oki’s expression was faintly sour. “But this Seiji has the key to the Fujimuras’ home, right?” He was literally referring to the front door key to the Fujimuras’ now empty home.

“That’s right. Unfortunately, Seiji is now the caretaker of the Fujimura residence.”

“In other words, nobody can enter the house without Seiji’s permission?”

“That’s right.”

“But from what you wrote, it seems like you’ve been in the house.”

“I believe I’m one of very few journalists who have been inside.”

“Did money change hands?”

“No. Money played no part. Seiji rarely allows any journalists inside. Perhaps he only lends the key to those he perceives as allies.”

This had truly been the selling point of Saeko’s story. Her coverage was unique in providing vivid descriptions of the interior of the Fujimura home. The beer bottle on the table, the-old fashioned radio on the desk in the children’s room, the hardened banana peel in the trash can, the laundry hamper full of clothes in the bathroom … Her detached portrayal of the Fujimuras’ material belongings in the absence of their owners elicited a sort of ominous mood that made her article gripping.

“The other journalists?”

“He didn’t let them in.”

“Why did he let you in, if he turned the others away?”

“I don’t know. I think … I guess … he took a shine to me.” She said the words with such distaste that Hashiba couldn’t hold back a chuckle.

“Sorry. I can certainly understand why Seiji would like you, but I can also understand why you don’t feel the same way,” he commented.

In contrast to Hashiba’s amusement, Oki’s face was a mask of seriousness. “Actually, we’re going to need footage of the inside of the house to do this program.”

Naturally. They could hardly do a thirty-minute show about a family’s disappearance with no footage from inside their home. Saeko didn’t know much about television production, but she understood that much.

“Of course,” she agreed.

Oki laid his hands, half hidden by his sleeves, on the table top and interlaced his fingers. “Ms. Kuriyama, let me ask you something. Do you think you could persuade Seiji to let our team into the house?”

Saeko could almost hear the gears snap together in her mind. She finally understood why they had selected her from among the myriad reporters who had covered the Fujimura story to collaborate on the show. The chief director and the producer needed the key to the Fujimura home.

And they need me to get it. Lucky me, Seiji’s favorite reporter
.

And here she had thought it was because her coverage had been superior. Saeko felt her ego deflate like a punctured balloon.

5
“I’ll walk you to the door,” Hashiba offered as they exited the conference room after the meeting’s conclusion. They took the elevator down to the lobby and had just emerged when Hashiba stopped
and glanced at his watch.

“Do you have a bit more time?” he asked, and proposed coffee. Saeko wasn’t in a hurry. She had planned to stop at the library on the way home, but only for personal reasons. She was under no obligation to be anywhere.

“Certainly,” she told him.

“Good. The cafeteria then?” Hashiba stood up and led the way, genuinely giving the impression that there was more he wanted to say to Saeko.

When they were seated opposite each other at a table, Hashiba bowed deeply.

“I’m so sorry,” he said contritely.

Saeko was baffled. “For what?” she asked.

“We didn’t ask you to collaborate on this project just to get the key to the Fujimuras’ home.”

Saeko’s cheeks flushed. Her face must have shown her annoyance in the meeting room. She was impressed that Hashiba had picked up on it.

Saeko’s ex-husband had driven her crazy the way he’d always misread her signals. When she was annoyed at some thoughtless comment he’d made, he’d attribute her bad mood to hunger and try to force her to eat. When her eyes suddenly filled with tears, he’d lecture her with hackneyed advice about how she had to “get over the past,” making her ever conscious of how they were somehow always misaligned.

The schism between them never closed. Instead, little incidents piled up until they were so great as to lead to divorce. In the beginning, it was just minor things that had made Saeko think,
Somehow he isn’t quite right for me
. In fact, Saeko’s ex-husband never once intuited her feelings correctly.

“Did you invite me to coffee just to tell me that?” Saeko smiled warmly so as not to give the impression that she resented the invitation.

“There’s one other thing too. I wanted to explain why the focus of the show turned out the way it did. Don’t think I missed the expression on your face when the producer mentioned bringing a psychic into the Fujimuras’ home. That was a look of scorn, wasn’t it?”

“Of course not!”

“What a typical, obvious, trite, overdone approach. That’s what you were thinking, isn’t it?”

“I wouldn’t put it in those terms, exactly …”

Actually, Hashiba had hit the nail on the head. The moment Producer
Oki had begun explaining their plans to bring a psychic into the Fujimuras’ home to intuit their whereabouts, Saeko’s shoulders had slumped at the predictability of it. Was this the kind of project she was going to wind up supporting?

“But that’s what you thought, right?”

“Honestly, it wasn’t what I was expecting.” Saeko held up both palms towards Hashiba and gave him a surprised look. It seemed almost childish of Hashiba to exhibit concern over such a thing, and Saeko found it somewhat endearing. He was playing the long-suffering director forced into creating a hackneyed show.

“Sometimes the most random things end up leading to the concept behind a show. That’s definitely true in this case. Satoyama, Shigeta, and I were having lunch together and someone brought up the topic of the family who’d disappeared in Takato. We were mulling over how confounding it was and what possibly could have caused them to go missing, wondering if there was an idea for a show in there somewhere. As dumb luck would have it, that was when Oki showed up and informed us that Shigeko Torii, the famous psychic, was interested in the case. It was all downhill from there, and the idea rammed right through the planning committee. In other words, the whole project was predicated on Shigeta Torii’s involvement from the start.”

The flow Hashiba described made perfect sense. Besides, what sort of show would Saeko have planned if it had been up to her? They could put together a hard-nosed informational broadcast that simply reviewed the known facts of the case, but it was questionable whether such a show would attract much of an audience. On commercial television, ratings were everything. For a show to work, broadcasters had to use whatever tricks and gimmicks they could to attract viewers. Besides, the Takato disappearance was being characterized as one of the world’s most bizarre mysteries. Perhaps it was inevitable that a psychic was being thrown into the mix for color.

“Please don’t worry. I have no objection to the idea whatsoever. I think it’s going to be an interesting show.”

At Saeko’s kind words, Hashiba’s face crinkled with relief. “You’re pretty interesting yourself,” he remarked, sipping his coffee.

From his tone of voice, it was clear he didn’t mean it as an insult. Still, Saeko wondered what he meant exactly. “How’s that?” she asked, cocking her head to one side.

“The way you talk and the things you say are weird.”

By any standard, it was a rude comment coming from someone Saeko had only met twice. Still, Saeko didn’t feel angry.

“Well, at least you’re honest. What’s so weird about me?” she asked serenely.

“You’re young, but the expressions you use are like an older person’s.”

“How old do you think I am?”