Less Than Human (27 page)

“It’s not available as a gas or anything?” said Ishihara.

“Certainly not.” He began to look exasperated. “I really must go now.”

“One last thing,” said Ishihara. “Have you sent a report to our Prefectural Office as well?”

“Of course. First thing this morning. Good day, Officers.”

“Thanks for your help,” said Beppu, but the screen was already blank.

They looked at each other.

“PO probably already know a Silver Angels suspect working in one of those labs,” said Beppu. “You’d think they could keep
us updated.”

Ishihara lit a cigarette, ignoring a number of pointed coughs from across the room. His hand shook slightly with annoyance.
“Bloody hell. If PO don’t tell us what they’re doing, this is going to end up a mess.” He thought of McGuire and her niece,
and the dead children, silver-painted and gone to join the angels. And of what crackpots could do with access to a poisons
lab. “We can’t risk that.”

“They haven’t called us to a meeting since Tuesday,” said Beppu. “When you weren’t here,” he added reproachfully.

“Yeah, sorry. I was catching a couple of hours’ sleep after spending the night in Okayama.” Ishihara pushed his chair back
until it crunched on the desk behind his. “When did this report come in?” He pointed with his cigarette at the screen.

“An hour or so ago. I went to dinner, came back, there it was.”

And Beppu had come and interrupted Ishihara’s musing on the Zecom and Kawanishi cases to tell him to check his mail.

“We need to talk to the super about Funo.” Beppu eased his backside off the corner of Ishihara’s desk.

“You bet we do.” Ishihara dropped his cigarette in a half-empty coffee cup and grabbed his phone.

They trudged up the hill from the subway station to Osaka Prefectural Police headquarters. There was no underground connection,
for security reasons.

West Station’s superintendent had been less than sympathetic. “Get over there if they won’t come to you,” he snapped. “You
can’t expect them to keep calling you with updates. Especially when they don’t want us getting any of the action, anyway,”
he added. But he did agree they should do their damnedest to stay part of the investigation. “If those kids were killed on
our beat, we’ll find out who did it.”

Ishihara and Beppu swallowed their indignation and went.

It was hotter than the day before. Looked like another summer of record temperatures. They passed the stump of an ancient
gingko tree that used to shade the footpath before it fell, just before the Great Quake, its white sacred ribbon still girdling
the stump. The tree falling had been a warning of the Quake, people said, a sign from the gods.

The only thing Ishihara liked about police headquarters was that you could see Osaka Castle from the east-facing windows,
its green copper roof glinting in afternoon sun, crouching sullen and forgotten by all but a few tourists in its refuge of
moat and trees. The seventeenth-century building had been restored in the 1990s. Police headquarters, also built in the 1990s,
reminded him of the castle, being a squat nine-story box with defensive, inset windows. The first- and second-floor walls
angled outward like castle walls, and a moatlike ditch in front ostensibly gave light to belowground offices.

The air inside the lobby almost cut his skin with the shock of coolness. Their sweaty shirts changed instantly to clammy shrouds.
They nodded to the constable on the information desk, then went to the security booth beside the elevators and let the system
scan their Betta chips, palms, and eyes before it would let them any farther into the building.

On the third floor they saw Funo coming out of the incident room. She was reading a printout on a clipboard and nearly ran
into Ishihara.

“I was about to call you,” she said without surprise at seeing them. “Follow this up.” She thrust the clipboard at Ishihara
and kept going past them down the corridor.

“Inspector …” Ishihara managed to get out, but by then she was talking to someone else. “Damn.”

“Doesn’t matter.” Beppu peered at the clipboard. “What’s the lead?”

One of the dead girls, Lissa Takada, and McGuire’s niece, Mari Kitami, had given the same person as guarantor when they paid
the contract money for their rooms. In Mari’s case, for her second room.

“Footwork,” said Beppu distastefully.

“You need the exercise.” Ishihara went into the incident room and asked one of the detectives he knew for an update.

The case was now officially a homicide. Detectives had been sent to the two companies in western Japan and the three in northeast
Japan that produced the poison found in the silver paint. They would cross-check the companies’ personnel records and check
their safety regulations compliance. Inspector Funo was liaising with Tokyo about the Silver Angels.

Ishihara and Beppu were to report to Assistant Inspector Ube, of Prefectural Office, as his team was following up the backgrounds
of the dead kids.

“So who do you think did it?” said Beppu, as they walked back up the corridor. “A rival group?”

“Dunno,” Ishihara grunted. He still felt Funo should have kept them more in the loop. “More likely they stepped out of line,
and the group got rid of them.”

“True.” Beppu considered this gloomily. “Plenty of precedents.”

“Assistant Inspector Ishihara.” Funo’s voice and tapping heels came from behind them. “About our international connection,”
she said as she caught up. “The other possible sources for the toxin used in the paint are all overseas. I think we should
follow up your foreign contact, especially as she has family connections with the Silver Angels.”

Ishihara realized she was talking about McGuire. “It’s a waste of time …” he began. But as the guarantor lead meant following
up McGuire’s niece, it was kind of the same thing. “I’ll get on to it,” he finished.

“I’ll get a level-two check on her, e-mail, phone, the lot,” said Funo. “Particularly any international contacts.”

“Is this poisoning what you meant when you said the Silver Angels had terrorist potential?” said Ishihara.

“We thought it more likely they’d disrupt network communications, but you never know.” She looked at them as though they were
cleaning robots away from the herd. “Get on with it, then.”

“Ishihara.” Funo waited until he got five paces away.

“Yes?”

“I’ll decide what’s a waste of time and what isn’t.”

Ishihara inclined his head.

“Ice queen,” muttered Beppu. But he waited until they were in the elevator before saying it.

The name of the mystery guarantor was Tomonaga Ikujiro. Address: 501-3-16, Muko-machi Betta, Amagasaki. There was no such
person at that address, of course, and the owners of the flats hadn’t bothered to check. There was no such person on record
anywhere and no record of the same alias being used before. The flat owners hadn’t seen the man, so the police couldn’t get
a description.

“No wonder people get ripped off,” Ishihara said disgustedly. “What do we have this national database for, anyway? All they
need to do is touch the screen to check an address.”

They had bought take-away eel for lunch on their way back to West Station.

“I reckon it’s the same bloke.” Beppu picked his teeth reflectively. “He must be connected with the Angels. The whole point
is to get these kids away from their families and former lives, right?”

“The girls gave his relationship as ‘tutor.’ Maybe he was, but his real name’s not Tomonaga.”

Beppu flipped open his notebook, and told it, “Check tutors and teachers in common, Lissa Takada and Mari Kitami.”

“Could be a boyfriend.”

Beppu paused. “Then it’s more likely to be two men using the same alias.”

Ishihara pushed his empty styro box over the side of the desk into the waste bin. “There might not have been a man at all.
The girls could have bought the seal and written the name themselves.”

Beppu shook his head. “They’d have someone ready in case the flat owners got fussy.”

Ishihara wasn’t so sure, but they had to follow the lead. “I’ll go to the university.” He pocketed a pen and his cigarettes.
“You check out the neighbors of the flats. Get a description of any man the girls were seen with and see if it matches up.”

“See you later.” Beppu went back to his own desk and started collecting his things.

University administration was icily cooperative. Ishihara got the message clearly—they’d talked all this over with the police
already, but they would make one last effort.

A polite young clerk sat with him in front of a computer screen and compared Mari’s academic record with that of Lissa Takada.

Mari and Lissa had taken three common subjects: English, western history, and communications theory.

“But their teachers are all different?” Ishihara asked the clerk.

“English is divided into several areas.” He flicked to another screen that showed a class schedule in table form. “Lissa took
English IIA, which is reading comprehension. Mari took IIC, which is travel conversation.”

He flicked to another screen that showed an example of a timetable. “As you can see, Mari would have taken western history
in first period Tuesday, because it clashed with her prac classes. Lissa took the same subject in first period Wednesday,
but with a different teacher because the professor has a senior seminar at that time.”

Ishihara left eventually with a printout of the girls’ subjects and his head spinning with curriculum details. No wonder university
students spent most of their time playing around—by the time they worked out their timetables, they’d be too tired to study.

He’d arranged to meet one of Lissa’s friends in the Student Welfare Office. She said she was at the library studying, in spite
of the holidays. The woman in charge of the Student Welfare Office had sounded properly protective and insisted on being present.

He stopped to buy a can of orange juice from a vending machine near the main courtyard. Shade from chestnut and gingko trees
dappled the flagstones and benches. His imagination peopled the courtyard with girls, chattering and giggling, adjusting their
makeup or eating slivers of the latest fad food. He tried placing Junta with them, laughing at whatever they laughed at because
they were girls and pretty.

He swallowed the last of the juice. The courtyard was empty. Junta would be twenty-seven now, and beyond eighteen-year-old
girls.

Ishihara crumpled the juice can, all his strength going into the simple plea that wherever his son was, he’d be happy.

At the Student Welfare office he talked to Lissa’s friend. She seemed puzzled, more than anything, at Lissa’s death. A detective
from Prefectural Office had already interviewed her, so she seemed relieved that Ishihara only wanted to know about boyfriends,
and whether Mari and Lissa had been friends.

“When she was still talking to me, Lissa didn’t have any steady boyfriend.” The girl looked down at her hands, folded in her
lap around a pink handkerchief. She was thin and conservatively dressed in a knee-length skirt and cotton shirt. “But after
she stopped telling me things, I don’t know.”

“When did she stop telling you things?” Ishihara tried to keep his tone gentle, but the burly head of Student Welfare kept
glaring at him from her seat in the corner. A small air conditioner on the wall rattled ineffectively against the heat.

“About November last year. I was busy with exams, so I didn’t worry too much. Then when we came back after the New Year break,
she seemed like a different person.”

“Was that when she moved apartments?”

“Probably. I didn’t find out until I went around and found she’d moved.”

Lissa had moved in early March.

“I don’t suppose you know who she asked to be guarantor for the key money at her new place? She couldn’t ask her parents,
of course.”

“No.”

He hadn’t expected it. “If you do remember anything, especially about any teachers Lissa might have confided in, give me a
call. Thank you for talking to me.”

He passed the girl his card, a cheap plasper one. She took it with small, tapered fingers.

He called Beppu from the courtyard. Beppu had got nothing from Takada’s neighbors.

“I’m about to try Man Kitami’s lot,” he said. “Meet you there?”

“Right.” Ishihara could as easily take that line on his way back to the station.

The landlady’s strident voice reached him before he turned the corner from the street.

“… don’t think I don’t know what you’re up to. I seen it on TV. You suss out where everything valuable’s kept, then one of
your thieving mates breaks in. You only pretend to try and catch him, and split the lot.”

Beppu caught sight of Ishihara and waved, relief all over his face. The landlady peered at Ishihara from her seat halfway
down the metal fire escape stairs. She wore a dirty apron over a frayed nylon dress that dated from the sixties. She reminded
Ishihara of a character from an early
Sazaesan
comic.

“Here’s your accomplice, then?” She whined.

“Don’t shoo away the cats,” Beppu muttered to Ishihara. “That’s what set her off.”

The landlady hadn’t seen any men upstairs at Mari’s, but if she had, she would have kicked them out.

The kitchen window of the downstairs flat rattled open. An unshaven face growled at them to shut up, some people gotta sleep
during the day.

“Pardon me,” said Beppu swiftly. “Our apologies for disturbing you, but we’d like to ask a couple of questions. Did you know
the young lady in the upstairs flat?”

“Get fucked,” said the face. The windows rattled shut.

“You’re disgusting,” yelled the landlady. Then to Beppu, “He wouldn’t know her, he only just moved in.”

“Is anyone else home?” said Ishihara to Beppu.

“No,” said the landlady.

The two policemen bowed and retreated.

Beppu wiped his face with an already-damp handkerchief. “I’ve always felt it important to gauge when information is likely
to be forthcoming and when not.”

“It’s too bloody hot,” agreed Ishihara. He didn’t think the landlady would have forgotten to tell Prefectural Office detectives
such juicy details as men in Mari’s room.