The Devotion Of Suspect X (29 page)

“Yasuko, she…” Ishigami dropped his eyes for a moment before continuing. “She’s seeing another man. Even though
I
was the one who dealt with her ex-husband. And if she hadn’t told me all those things, I never would’ve done it. She said it, plain and clear:
‘I want to kill him.’
So I killed him for her. You might say she was my accomplice. She made me do it, after all. In fact, I don’t know why you police aren’t over there arresting her this minute.”

In order to corroborate Ishigami’s story, the police had to search his apartment. While that was going on, Kusanagi and Kishitani went to talk to Yasuko Hanaoka. It was evening, and she and Misato were at home. The two detectives had a fellow officer take the girl outside—not to protect her from hearing anything alarming, but because they wanted to question her separately.

When she heard that Ishigami had turned himself in, Yasuko’s eyes went wide; for a moment she seemed to have stopped breathing. She opened her mouth but no words came out.

“I take it this comes as a surprise?” Kusanagi asked, paying close attention to her expression.

Yasuko shook her head slowly, and finally spoke. “I had no idea. I mean, why would he kill Togashi?”

“You can’t think of any possible motive?”

Yasuko hesitated at Kusanagi’s question, a look of bewilderment coming across her face. She looked as though she had something to say but was unwilling to say it.

“Ishigami says he did it for you. He says he killed your ex-husband on your behalf.”

Yasuko looked pained and let out a long sigh.

“So you
can
think of a reason.”

She nodded slightly. “I knew he had feelings for me. I just never imagined he would go so far—”

“He told us that the two of you have been in constant contact for some time now.”

“Contact?” Yasuko frowned. “We’ve barely ever spoken.”

“But there were phone calls from him? Every evening?” Kusanagi told the woman what Ishigami had said about their arrangement. Yasuko frowned again.

“So that was him calling.”

“You didn’t know?”

“I thought it might be him, maybe, but I wasn’t sure. He never gave his name.”

“I see. Can you tell us a little more about these calls?”

Yasuko explained that someone unknown started phoning her in the evening about three months ago. Without giving his name, the caller had suddenly started saying things about her personal life—things no one could possibly have known unless they had been spying on her. She was frightened, afraid that she had a stalker; but she’d been baffled by the question of who it might be. After that, the phone had rung every night at the same time, but she had never answered—except for once, when she’d picked up the receiver without thinking. Then the man on the other end said: “I understand you’ve been too busy to answer your phone. So I have a suggestion. I will call every evening, and you only need to answer if you need me for something. I will let the phone ring five times, you just need to pick up before the fifth ring.”

Yasuko had reluctantly agreed, and since that time, the phone rang every night. Apparently, the stranger was calling her from a public phone. She never answered.

“You couldn’t tell it was Ishigami from his voice?”

“Not really. We’d spoken so little. And I never picked up except for those two times, so I can’t even really remember what the voice sounded like now. In any case, I can hardly imagine someone like him doing such a thing. I mean, he’s a high school teacher!”

“That’s no guarantee of character these days, I’m afraid,” Kishitani offered. Then, as if embarrassed by his own interruption, he quickly lowered his head.

Kusanagi reflected on how the junior detective had taken the Hanaokas’ side since the very beginning.
Ishigami’s turning himself in must have come as a great relief to Kishitani.

“Was there ever anything else, besides the calls?” Kusanagi asked.

“Well…” Yasuko rose and retrieved three envelopes from a nearby drawer. There was no sender or return address marked on any of them; on the front of each was only the name “Yasuko Hanaoka.”

“And these are?”

“Letters I found in the mailbox on my door. There were some others, but I threw them out. I just thought I should keep these as evidence in case there was ever a more serious problem—people are always doing that on television, you know. I didn’t much like having them, but I kept these three, just in case.”

Kusanagi opened the envelopes.

Each contained a single sheet of paper with words that had clearly been typed on a computer. None of the letters was particularly long:

You should come home right after work is finished._]

Just me._]

I am the only one who can protect you._]

“Do you mind if I take these with me?”

“They’re all yours.”

“Anything else like this happen recently?”

“To me? No, nothing really…” Yasuko’s voice trailed off.

“To your daughter then?”

“Well, no. But … there was something with Mr. Kudo.”

“Mr. Kuniaki Kudo? What happened to him?”

“When I met him for dinner the other day, he said he’d received an odd letter. There was no signature or return address, but the letter told him to stay away from me. There were some photographs in the envelope, too, photos of him, taken without his knowledge.”

“So your stalker was stalking him, too?”

The detectives exchanged looks. Given all they had seen thus far, the writer of the letters would have to have been Ishigami. Kusanagi thought about Manabu Yukawa. The physicist had respected Ishigami as a fellow scientist. Kusanagi wondered if his friend would be shocked to hear that the mathematician was moonlighting as a stalker.

There was a knock at the door. Yasuko answered it, and a young detective leaned into the room. He was a member of the team that had been searching Ishigami’s apartment.

“Can I have a moment with you, Detective Kusanagi?”

“Sure.” Kusanagi nodded and headed for the door.

In the next apartment, Mamiya was sitting in the chair by the desk. The PC monitor on the table next to him was glowing. Elsewhere in the room, young detectives were packing things in cardboard boxes to take back to the station as evidence.

Mamiya pointed at the wall next to the bookshelf. “Take a look.”

Kusanagi gasped despite himself.

The wallpaper had been removed from a corner of the wall, and a square had been cut out of the drywall behind it. A thin cord dangled from the hole; on the end of the cord was a small earphone.

“Have a listen.”

Kusanagi placed the earphone into his ear and immediately could hear voices.

“If we can confirm what Ishigami is telling us, things should proceed pretty quickly. I don’t think we’ll be bothering you too much more after that, Ms. Hanaoka.”

It was Kishitani. The sound was a little fuzzy, but perfectly audible. Kusanagi glanced back at Mamiya. He wouldn’t have believed the people he was listening to were on the other side of the wall if he hadn’t seen it himself. He listened again for a moment.

“… will Ishigami be charged with?”

“That will have to be determined by the court. But it’s a pretty clear case of murder, so I should think he’ll be put away for quite some time—that is, assuming he doesn’t get the death sentence. In any case, he won’t be bothering you anymore, Ms. Hanaoka.”

For a detective, he talks way too much,
Kusanagi thought, removing the earphone.

“We should show this to Ms. Hanaoka afterward. Ishigami says she knew about it, but I have my doubts about that,” Mamiya said.

“You mean Yasuko Hanaoka had no idea what Ishigami was up to?”

“I heard you talking to her over that earphone,” Mamiya said with a grin. “It’s pretty cut and dried. Ishigami was a classic stalker. Delusions of sharing some kind of bond with his target, trying to get rid of every other man who gets close to her. No wonder he hated her ex-husband.”

Kusanagi grunted.

“Why the frown? Something not sitting right with you?”

“No, it’s just I thought I had a good grasp on this Ishigami fellow, but everything he’s been telling us lately doesn’t seem to fit with my image of him. It’s confusing.”

“A man has many faces. Stalkers are never the people you think there are.”

“I know that, just … you find anything other than the listening device?”

Mamiya nodded grandly. “The kotatsu cord, for one. It was in a box along with his kotatsu in the closet. An insulated cord, too—the same kind as the one used to strangle the man. If we can find a trace of the victim’s skin on it, we’re golden.”

“Anything else?”

“Take a look.” Mamiya pushed the computer mouse back and forth on the desk. His motions were jerky; he was clearly unfamiliar with using a mouse. Kusanagi guessed that someone had just taught him. “Here.”

He had opened a wordprocessing program. A page full of writing showed on the screen. Kusanagi peered at the words.

As you can tell by the enclosed pictures, I have discovered the identity of the man you see frequently.

I must ask, what is this man to you?

If you’re having a relationship, that would be a serious betrayal.

Don’t you understand what I’ve done for you?

You must stop seeing this man immediately._

If you do not, my anger will be directed at him.

I have both the resolve and the means to do this._

Let me repeat, if you’re engaged in a relationship with this man, that is a betrayal I cannot forgive, and I will have my revenge.

Yukawa stood at the laboratory window, staring intently at the outside. There was an unusual remoteness in his presence, a pained distance, as if an invisible regret weighed him down and drew him apart. It could have been shock at hearing of his old friend’s crime, but Kusanagi suspected it was something else.

“So,” Yukawa was saying in a low voice, “do you believe this testimony of Ishigami’s? Do you buy his story?”

“As a detective, I see no reason to doubt it,” Kusanagi said after a beat. “We’ve been able to corroborate his account from several different angles. I did some canvassing in a local park near Ishigami’s apartment where there is a public phone. That’s where he claims to have gone every night to call Yasuko Hanaoka. Turns out there’s a grocery store near where the phone is, and the proprietor there saw someone matching Ishigami’s description. He remembered him because not many people use public phones these days. He claims he saw him making calls there on several evenings.”

Yukawa slowly turned around to face Kusanagi. “That’s what you think as a detective. I asked whether you believe him. I don’t care about your investigation.”

Kusanagi nodded and sighed. “To be honest, it doesn’t feel right. There are no holes in his story. It all makes sense. But I guess I’m just having trouble imagining him doing all those things. Of course, when I tried to tell the chief that, he didn’t want to hear it.”

“I’m sure your superiors are happy now that they’ve got someone to charge with a crime. Why would they want anything else?”

“Things would be different if there were even one piece of the puzzle that didn’t fit, but there’s nothing. It’s perfect. Take the fingerprints left on the bicycle. He claims he didn’t even know the victim got there by bicycle. Nothing strange there. Ishigami’s testimony supports all the facts. With that kind of momentum, there’s nothing I could say to turn the train around at this point.”

“So, you don’t buy it, but you have no choice but to go with the flow and accept the conclusion that Ishigami is your murderer.”

“Look, I know you’re not happy about this either, but don’t take it out on me. Aren’t scientists supposed to shelve their doubts in the face of logical arguments? Wasn’t it you who told me that? I thought you were all about facts over feelings.”

Yukawa shook his head—a barely perceptible movement—then came to sit down across from Kusanagi. “The last time I met Ishigami, he presented me with a mathematical conundrum,” he said. “It’s a famous one, the P = NP problem. Basically, it asks whether it’s more difficult to think of the solution to a problem yourself or to ascertain if someone else’s answer to the same problem is correct.”

Kusanagi frowned. “That’s mathematics? Sounds more like philosophy.”

“Bear with me. By turning himself in, and giving you his testimony, Ishigami’s presented you with an answer that, no matter how you look at it, has to be correct. If you just nod your heads and say, ‘Okay, sounds good to us,’ you’ve lost. Really, what you should be doing is putting all your efforts into determining whether his answer is correct or not. It’s a challenge. You’re being tested.”

“And like I said, we looked into it. Everything backs up his story.”

“All you’re doing is tracing the steps of his proof. What you should be doing is looking to see if there aren’t any other answers that might fit what you know about this case as well. Only if you can prove that there are no legitimate answers other than the one he’s offered can you say that his is the only solution to the problem.”

Yukawa’s irritation was plain from his unusually hard tone. Kusanagi had rarely seen the levelheaded physicist this agitated.

“So you think Ishigami’s lying? He’s not the murderer?”

Yukawa frowned and lowered his eyes.

“What’s your basis for saying that?” the detective went on. “If you’ve got a theory of your own, I’d like to hear it. Or is it just that you can’t bear to think of your old friend as a killer?”

Yukawa stood and turned his back to Kusanagi.

“Yukawa?”

“It’s true. I don’t want to believe it,” Yukawa said. “Like I said before, that man is made of logic. Emotion comes a distant second. He’s capable of doing anything if he thinks it’s an effective solution to the problem at hand. Still, it’s very hard for me to imagine him going so far as to murder someone—especially someone with whom he had no personal connection.”