Noguchi picked an interview room with easy chairs arranged around a coffee table rather than the bare desk and hard seats Yumi had seen before. They put her in the chair facing the door; Kenji and Noguchi would come in quietly behind Shimada’s back after he was seated across from her and take up positions behind him. Kenji explained they wouldn’t speak, but they’d be there to witness the interview and make sure Yumi was never in danger.
She sipped a glass of water as the guard arrived with the prisoner and removed his handcuffs. Shimada rubbed his wrists.
“I’ll be right outside if you need me,” the guard told Yumi.
“Thank you.”
Kenji and Mori slipped in, the door closing as Shimada perched on the edge of the chair opposite Yumi.
“Can I have some water?” he asked her, nodding toward the pitcher on the table.
“Dozo,” she said, pushing it toward him gingerly. With no bars between them, an edge of fear returned. She glanced past
She wasn’t sure how to begin. While Shimada filled his glass and drank, she nervously put her hands in her jacket pockets and discovered the Daruma cell phone ornament she’d taken from Rika’s phone. Yumi thought about the lifetime of wishes Rika would never make and her fingers tightened around the little figure. She took a deep breath and said, “Are you ready, Shimada-san?”
He choked, tears coming to his eyes as water went down the wrong way. “Don’t call me that.” He coughed again.
“Why?”
“That was . . . that was what people called my mother.”
“Oh. Did Rika and the others call you
“No. Daigoro. Dai for short.”
“Daigoro?”
“From Lone Wolf and Cub. Daigoro was the son of the Lone Wolf, his apprentice. He was the one who taught me what it meant to be a kaishaku-nin. After my mother died.”
“What happened to your mother?”
He studied the condensation on the pitcher. A bead of water rolled down the side.
“I didn’t know how sick she was until the very end. I hadn’t noticed how thin she’d become, how tired she was all the time. She hid it from me until one day she hurt so much she couldn’t get out of bed.”
He looked at Yumi. “By then it was in her bones, everywhere.” He put down his glass. “I skipped school and tried to take care of her, but the pain was so bad, I didn’t know what to do. I went to the drugstore every day and bought aspirin, but that didn’t help. The only time she wasn’t in pain was when she was asleep. Her doctor gave her some sleeping pills, but she stopped taking them. She didn’t tell me what she was saving them for, and because I was just a kid, I didn’t guess. At night she would hold her cries inside until I was asleep, but the pain kept getting worse. Then one morning she tried to get out of bed and fell. She couldn’t get up. Our neighbor heard her crying through the wall and knocked on our door.”
His fists clenched. “I shouldn’t have answered it. The neighbor lady didn’t listen to me. She scolded me, said I ought to have asked for help. She said I should have taken my mother to the hospital.”
His face pinched in pain. “But how could I? The doctors couldn’t help her anymore. She said so herself. And she was scared of hospitals. She told me the doctors would take away everything, even the right to decide about her own life.” He fell silent.
“What happened?”
“The neighbor called the police box. An ambulance came. They let me ride with my mother, but they didn’t let me stay with her. After that, I could only see her a little while every day, during visiting hours. They gave her morphine, and sometimes she slept the whole time I was there. But by the end of the second week, even the morphine wasn’t enough. One day she sent the nurse to get her a glass of water, then she begged me to get the sleeping pills from our apartment. She told me where they were, and asked me to bring the incense we burned in front of the butsudan, along with the matches on the shelf next to the altar. She was in so much pain, she told me to run. I went home and found what she’d asked for, but I was so hungry, I stopped at the convenience store on the way back. The new Shonen Jump was out, and I checked to see if the latest installment of my favorite comic was in it.” Shimada hung his head in shame. “I only meant to peek, but I ended up reading the whole thing, I couldn’t help myself. By the time I got back to the hospital, my mother’s room was full of people. I could tell it was an emergency, so I went back down the hall and stayed out of the way.
“I sat in the waiting area until the doctors and nurses began to come out. I could tell by the way they weren’t hurrying anymore that the emergency was over, so as soon as they were all gone, I went back into my mother’s room.
“She was lying there, looking more peaceful than I’d ever seen her. I thought they’d finally given her something that worked, something that killed the pain, that it didn’t matter I was late getting back with the sleeping pills because she was finally getting some rest. Then a nurse came in and told me . . . told me she was dead. I should have been ready, should have known she was never going to get better, but . . .” Tears rolled down his cheeks, the lashes fringing his beautiful eyes wet and spiky. “For years, I felt guilty that I didn’t get there in time. I’d dream she was standing by my bed, asking why I didn’t come back, why I left her to die alone, why I didn’t help her.”
He wiped his eyes with the back of his sleeve and took a shaky breath. “Then when I was fourteen, I was reading Lone Wolf and Cub and I suddenly understood that she’d asked me to be her kaishaku-nin. She’d entrusted me with the task of bringing her the tools to make her transition to the next world easy and fast, rather than painful and slow. I failed her. Failed horribly. But I realized I could be like the Lone Wolf—I hadn’t been able to help my mother, but I could help others.”
He leaned toward Yumi, his eyes holding hers. “Once I started on the path the Lone Wolf had shown me, I stopped having those dreams. My mother’s spirit was finally at peace, once I understood what she was trying to tell me.”
“So you started visiting suicide websites, looking for people you could . . . help?”
Shimada nodded. “They all had good reasons to kill themselves. They decided. All I did was make sure they didn’t suffer.”
“Did they do it themselves or did you . . . ?”
“We did it together.
He grimaced. “There was a problem, though. The room was too big. It took too long. I had to leave for a while because the fumes were getting to me. When I came back, she was unconscious, but not gone yet. Then I heard her mother come in the front door and I panicked. I ran.
“Her mother found her and rushed her to the hospital. Two months later, we tried again, and that time she asked me to make sure, to use a plastic bag once she was unconscious. I went out of the room for a while at the beginning, then returned to hold her hand while she fell asleep. I burned incense—one stick for her, one for my mother. Then I put the bag over her head, just like she’d asked. I held it there until she was free.”
“And . . . the others?”
“With
s big pill identification book, and from then on we both saved every pill we found, and traded every time our shifts overlapped. I got the better end of the deal because a lot of them were sleeping pills. Doctors don’t like to be called in at night, so they always prescribe sleeping pills for their patients to keep them quiet. By the time
“Mixing them didn’t work very well, though. They knocked
“Then I figured out how to get enough pills of the same kind so I could work out the right dose. I got to know one of the nurses, and one night before she went off shift, I sneaked her dispensary cabinet key from her key ring and got a copy made.
“After that, I took one pill from each new bottle of Amoban when it was opened. The hospital went through them like candy, so I managed to collect two or three every week. I was careful, never greedy. Nobody noticed. By the time
“Did you do the same with Rika and the Hamadas?”
“My method worked perfectly for the Hamadas, but
The hangnail he’d been worrying started to bleed. He closed his fist over his thumb and dropped it to his lap. “I could tell she was confused, She threw up in the bushes. That had never happened before. So I went after her. I . . . I helped her the only way I knew how.”
“What do you mean?”
“I used the plastic bag. I held it until she stopped struggling. Then I didn’t know what to do. It didn’t seem right to leave her there on the ground, in the dark, so I put her back in the car. I was kind of worried, because she’d been so confused at the end. I gave her the rosary I always wear. It was the only thing I could think of, to help her spirit find its way.” He fell silent, then looked at Yumi with a troubled expression. “I did the right thing, didn’t I? I helped her do what she wanted. Even if it didn’t go perfectly, I made it all right in the end.” A note of pleading entered his voice. “It’s what you would have done, isn’t it? If you’d been there? If you were her kaishaku-nin?”
“I . . .” Yumi’s eyes filled with tears. For Rika. For the little boy whose mother died too young. And for the sad, twisted man sitting across from her, looking at her with his beautiful, devastated eyes, asking to be forgiven for a sin he couldn’t even admit to himself. He’d killed her best friend, but now that he’d admitted it, she just felt hollow inside. She wanted to tell him he was damaged, delusional, that nobody in his right mind would have done what he did. But in the end, all she could choke out was, “I understand.”
Yumi looked past him at Superintendent Noguchi, seated behind him. He shook his head and held up a piece of paper so Yumi could read it. He’d written three dates on it in large letters.
“The police want me to ask you where you were on a few other dates.”
“Why?”
“Some other women have been killed. They want to be sure you didn’t do it. If you tell me what you were doing on those nights and everything checks out, you’ll be cleared for those. Otherwise, they’ll keep you locked up, even if they believe you about Rika and Emiko and the others.”
“I’m not a killer,” he insisted, leaning forward, his leg jiggling nervously.
“The first one was the night of Tuesday, July third. The second was Tuesday, October ninth. And the third was Wednesday, January ninth.”
He let out a long breath and sat back, relieved. “I was at work. For three years I’ve been on the graveyard shift at Asakusa Hospital. I work every night except Fridays and Saturdays—on at ten P.M., off at six A.M. Check my timecards. I never called in sick, except that one time with
Yumi nodded.
“Can I go now?” he asked, his face brightening.
Noguchi went to the door and called the guard; he appeared carrying handcuffs. Shimada leaped to his feet.
“No! Not back to that cell. Don’t let them take me back there!” he implored Yumi. “Make them understand! You promised! Help me!”
Shimada dodged around the guard, making a desperate break for the door. Kenji intercepted him and held him while the guard snapped the cuffs on his wrists. Shimada let out a howl of anguish as the guard pushed him through the door.
Yumi was on her feet, staring after him, her throat aching with unspent tears.
Chapter 72
Wednesday, April 17
7:00 P.M.
Kenji
“Do you believe him?” Superintendent Noguchi asked Kenji.
“If it’s a lie, it’s a pretty detailed one, sir.”
“Mm.” Noguchi frowned. “If it’s not, that means the Ozawa-Hamada case isn’t connected to the Shrine Murders like Inspector Mori thought. He’s not going to be happy to hear that. Before we tell him the bad news, let’s make sure. I’m releasing you from Mori’s detail for the time being so you can chase down Shimada’s alibis and find out
“Hai,” Kenji said, bowing.
“I’m going back to headquarters. We’ve got to catch that priest.”
Noguchi thanked Yumi, and with a curt bow to Kenji, let himself out of the interview room.
As soon as he was gone, Kenji turned to give Yumi a triumphant grin and said, “You did it!” Then he saw Yumi’s hunched shoulders, the way she was biting her lip. “What’s wrong?”
“I . . . he . . .” She took a shaky breath and looked up. “I wanted him to be evil. I wanted him to pay for what he did, to suffer the way he made me suffer. I thought I’d be happy when I got him to admit he killed Rika. But . . . What will happen to him?”
Kenji considered her question. “That’s for the prosecutor to decide. If Shimada’s alibis for the Shrine Murders check out, I’m pretty sure he’ll be diverted for treatment rather than prison. The prosecutor has a lot of discretion, and I’d be surprised if he didn’t decide that Shimada is one chopstick short of a pair.” He peered into Yumi’s face. “If he doesn’t serve jail time for Rika’s death, will you be okay with that?”
The tears began to spill. “It’s all so sad.” She sniffled. “Nothing is turning out the way I thought it would.” She took a ragged breath.
He touched her shoulder to steer her toward one of the chairs, but instead of sitting down, she turned and wrapped her arms around him, her tear-stained face smearing the front of his shirt.
It was all he could do not to hold her, not to put his arms around her and feel that bittersweet connection again. Why was she playing with him like this? He stood there without responding and let her cry for a while, then pulled away and sat her down. What did she want from him? He walked to the window and opened the blinds, deliberately breaking the connection.
“Nothing is simple anymore,” she whispered.
Did she mean
things are. If you want them to be.”
“What do you mean?”
“You know what I mean.” He turned to face her. “Why are you marrying a man you don’t love?.”
Yumi pushed her chair back and stood, hands clenched by her side.
“Is because he’s rich? Because his family is powerful. Because—”
Yumi crossed the room and delivered a stinging slap. He grabbed her wrist and pulled her to him, kissing her as punishment, taking what he’d been offered one too many times but couldn’t have. She pushed him away, both of them confused and thwarted. Rubbing the place where red shadows of his fingers marked her wrist, she closed her eyes, but not before he saw the regret she was trying to hide.
The silence between them grew. Finally she said, “Please try to understand. It’s not just about me. My father . . .”
A voice from the doorway interrupted. “Nakamura-san?”
It was Suzuki. Kenji reddened, hoping he hadn’t been standing there long.
“Superintendent Noguchi told me you might need some help tracking down Shimada’s alibis and the names of those women he met online, sir. Which would you like me to work on first?”
“Uh, I’ll be there in a minute. Get yourself some tea.”
“Yes sir.” Suzuki bowed and disappeared.
Kenji turned to Yumi and sighed. “I have work to do,” he said.
She bowed her head and nodded.
“I’ll see you out.”
Without a word, she followed him to the elevator and they rode down in silence. When the doors opened onto the lobby, Yumi stepped out. As they started to close, she spun around and thrust her hand between them. The doors bounced back and she returned, pulling something from her pocket. Grabbing his hand, she laid the object in his palm, closing his fingers around it. She looked up at him and started to say something, then dropped his hand and fled from the car.
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