The Last Train (Detective Hiroshi Series Book 1)

by Michael Pronko

  Chapter 46

  Sugamo was waiting at the corner with the new car, as Ueno and Osaki were still driving back from Kawasaki when no one emerged from Natsumi’s fruit and vegetable stand. Hiroshi and Sakaguchi hurried over to the car and hopped in.

  “Here’s the address,” Hiroshi said, popping the numbers from the printout into the car navigation device on the dashboard. “Not far.”

  “Congratulations on your son’s win!” Sakaguchi said as they pulled out.

  “The other kid was much bigger, but my son got his hand under the mawashi belt and dumped him with a perfect uwatenage over-arm throw,” Sugamo said, his voice filled with pride.

  “That was your specialty, wasn’t it?” Sakaguchi asked.

  “Yeah, but the funny thing is, I never mentioned it to my son,” Sugamo said.

  “Must be genetic,” Hiroshi said, rubbing his ribs.

  Sugamo parked in the circular drive of Michiko’s apartment building so that he could see both the front door and the parking garage. At the entrance, Sakaguchi watched from a short distance while Hiroshi buzzed the building manager’s call button. When there was no immediate answer, Hiroshi leaned on the button again. Sakaguchi looked over at the parking garage as Hiroshi dialed the manager’s security code on the keypad. When the manager answered, Hiroshi told him they were police detectives.

  The manager ran to the door, nearly knocking over the large ikebana flower arrangement just inside the security doors. Hiroshi and Sakaguchi showed him their badges and he nervously flipped through the master keys dangling from a coiled nylon string around his neck.

  At Michiko’s door, the manager fumbled the keys and twisting them in and out of the lock and trying several wrong keys, until Sakaguchi snatched the keys from him, slid the deadbolt back with the right key and opened the latch with a second key.

  “Wait here,” Hiroshi told him.

  “I’ll wait downstairs. Call the same number to get me,” the manager said before hurrying away.

  Sakaguchi whipped off his shoes in two quick motions and stepped inside, braced, picking the bedroom to the left. Hiroshi followed, but headed into the living room.

  They moved slowly, listening, and watching. Light from the street below came through the sliding glass doors along the living room. An L-shaped counter marked off the kitchen area. A row of countertop appliances and a large, stainless steel refrigerator twinkled in the dim light. A white sofa spread out past the dining table. The place was immaculate and huge.

  Sakaguchi walked into the living room and flipped on a light switch. Off the living room, a ten-mat tatami room held a yoga mat, CD player, and meditation CDs. A brushwork scroll of a single-stroke circle—open at the end—hung on the wall next to an empty cherry bark shelf.

  Sakaguchi opened the refrigerator and smelled the milk and yogurt containers. He poked a bag of greens and unscrewed a bottle of sake. “All fresh,” he growled.

  “She could have someone come in to do all this,” Hiroshi said.

  “Or someone else could be staying here,” Sakaguchi said.

  “Or we missed her.”

  Hiroshi checked the locks on the row of sliding glass doors. All six were closed tight. Outside, small bushes grew from planters embedded in the balcony floor. Spotlights pointed down on three rounded worn rocks nestled in gravel. Ten floors up, the apartment commanded a panoramic view of the night streets stretching south from Roppongi’s hills all the way to Tokyo Bay.

  “What’s a place like this go for a month?” Sakaguchi wondered out loud.

  “More than your salary and mine combined.”

  “The bedroom’s bigger than your office.”

  “The living room’s bigger than the homicide office.”

  “Better view, too.”

  Hiroshi walked over to the bookshelves that lined two walls. On the top shelf were tea ceremony bowls. Filling two shelves were photos of Michiko in stand-up frames: together with Reiko, Steve and Mark in Tokyo, alone at the Eiffel Tower, alone in front of European churches and art museums, and with a young man on the bayside walk in Hong Kong.

  The next shelf had photos of Natsumi and her daughter, of Michiko and a handsome young man at an onsen hot springs resort, in her aikido outfit next to what was probably her old teacher, in front of the entrance to the Ikenobo School of ikebana flower arrangement, and relaxing in a sash-tied yukata summer kimono.

  Behind those, toward the back, were portraits of Michiko nude, leaning back on rounded river boulders in front of a waterfall. In another, she posed in the surf, the tide bubbling sand over the contours of her body. Hiroshi gazed at them, mesmerized.

  On the lower shelves were dictionaries and travel guides, for Paris, Hong Kong, and the rest of Asia, Sei Shonagon’s The Pillow Book and the classic treatise of bushido—Hagakure, In the Shadow of Leaves—well marked in pencil. The rest of the shelves held classics in Japanese and English, paperbacks and an e-reader flat on the shelf.

  Hiroshi went to the bedroom, when Sakaguchi came out, roaming, observing. A long silver reading lamp arced over the large, western bed. A book of English idioms rested on the antique, Chinese-style bedside table. Hiroshi could not fit this bedroom together with her cramped, claustrophobic childhood bedroom he had seen in Kawasaki. But this bedroom didn’t seem to be the bedroom of a killer, either.

  Large closets opened behind floor-to-ceiling doors. Hiroshi pulled them open and stepped inside. The clothes were even more lavish than those in Kawasaki, and these were neatly organized by type and length.

  Inside the closet stood three suitcases: one, maroon with dark blue straps, the other two, brushed leather with lots of pockets—all locked. Hiroshi picked them up. They were heavy and full. He left them in the exact same place.

  “Come here,” Sakaguchi shouted from the bathroom. He held out a bottle out to Hiroshi. “Same scent I caught in Kawasaki.”

  “Must be her brand.”

  Hiroshi put the perfume back among the other conditioners, gels and creams. He went back to a Chinese-style antique desk in the living room. He flipped open Michiko’s laptop. Sandwiched inside was an airplane ticket. He turned on the laptop, but got a password input icon and turned it off. The airplane ticket was for the next morning. He set it down and looked in the woven trash container below, retrieving a pair of torn-up airplane tickets from Fly A Way Travel Agency, dated two days before. He laid them out on the desk, trying to re-piece the torn parts.

  “What did you find?” Sakaguchi asked.

  Hiroshi held up the tickets. “In the trash. And look at this. Paris.”

  “From the same travel agency.”

  “She missed that flight and has another tomorrow. Paris again.”

  “Both in her name?”

  “The two for two days ago have the names ripped off. Tomorrow’s is a single ticket for Michiko Suzuki. I dug around in the trashcan, but nothing.”

  “See a passport anyplace?”

  “No such luck.”

  “Her bags are packed and waiting in the closet. Now, what?”

  Sakaguchi took a big breath and said. “Have Akiko call the airlines. If she’s coming back for her luggage and the ticket, we still have a chance. We’ll get her here or at Narita.”

  Hiroshi set the ticket and envelope back where he’d found it, in the laptop. “Let’s wait downstairs. Otherwise that manager will scare her off.” Hiroshi replaced everything in the desk and called the building manager.

  “Could you come lock up for us? We’re finished now.”

  “Finished? What do you mean? Didn’t you see her?” the manager sounded like he was strangling on his own words.

  “See who?” Hiroshi asked.

  “The tenant,” the manager whispered.

  “The woman who lives here?”

  “Yes, I, well, she, I ran into her in the hallway and she said she knew you and I shouldn’t worry and—”

  “When was that?”

  “Just a minute ago.”

  “Did sh
e ride the elevator up?”

  “I think so.”

  Hiroshi hung up. He moved quickly to the genkan and slipped on his shoes. Sakaguchi followed, surmising what the manager had said. As he stepped into the hallway after Hiroshi, Sakaguchi folded two pieces of paper and wedged them into the deadbolt and latch strikes in the doorjamb.

  Hiroshi nodded toward the stairs for Sakaguchi and at the elevator for himself. Hiroshi waited at the elevators, but did not press any buttons. One of the elevators went up to the top floor, and the other stopped two floors below. He waited for the one on the top floor to start down before he pressed the button. When the elevator doors opened, Hiroshi quickly apologized to a well-dressed couple—the woman’s perfume as strong as her glare—and stepped back into the hall.

  The other elevator came up to the floor and stopped. When its doors slowly slid open there was nothing more than empty space. His ribs were aching and he held his sides as he got on and pressed the buttons for every floor. When the doors slid open, he held them, looking up and down the hall. At the first floor, he pushed the button for Michiko’s floor. The folded paper Sakaguchi stuffed in Michiko’s front doorjamb to keep the apartment open was still there.

  He listened for any sound coming from inside and before he pulled the door open, he felt the cool of a breeze wafting through the hallway—perhaps a window at the end of the corridor or the door to the stairwell had been propped open—and then he went inside.

  He could not remember if he’d turned off the lights, but the apartment was all shadows. He stood at the door and looked over the living room, ready for Michiko.

  He turned around and walked into the bedroom, but could not remember closing the closet. He turned to the closet doors, and with one solid yank, swung them open.

  The three suitcases were just where Sakaguchi left them.

  “The ticket,” he murmured and started back toward the laptop on the Chinese desk in the living room. As he passed the bathroom, though, he noted the perfume that he’d sniffed before. The closer he got to the laptop, the stronger the smell of lotus perfume.

  He flipped open the laptop, hoping to see what he’d put back in there only minutes before, but braced for what the lotus scent told him to expect. The scent was right—the ticket was gone.

  He fumbled through the papers on the desk, and then dug through the trash can below, but her ticket for tomorrow’s flight to Paris was not there. Hiroshi punched Sakaguchi’s number into his cell phone. “Did you take her ticket?” he asked, knowing the answer already.

  Sakaguchi, out of breath, said, “No. Where are you?” and then he remained silent on the other end.

  Hiroshi’s mind raced to figure out how it could have happened. The ticket was gone, and so was she.

  Chapter 47

  Hiroshi came out of the front door and stood in the circular drive in front of Michiko’s building and looked at the surrounding apartment buildings of Azabu. Most were larger than they appeared, and had multiple entrances on different levels of the steep hills and hard-to-walk slopes that enforced a certain privacy and quietude that attracted wealthy people and embassies.

  Hiroshi looked at Sugamo still waiting in the car under a streetlamp. It was already dark and Osaki and Ueno had still not arrived. If someone had come out, Sugamo would have seen. Sugamo frowned at Hiroshi—thinking he knew where Sakaguchi had gone—and then pointed to the parking garage to clue him in.

  Hiroshi hurried down the incline into the dimly lit parking garage. He looked for Sakaguchi up ahead and at both lines of cars as he passed. He thought he smelled a whiff of lotus scent perfume amid the car exhaust and oil drips, but was maybe imagining it. Hiroshi looked under and around the parked cars and kept moving.

  At the bottom of two winding floors of parking, Hiroshi vaulted over a low wall into a garden and hurried down to a line of trimmed trees at the edge of a drop-off. A set of switchback stairs led to the road below.

  Hiroshi could see Sakaguchi all the way at the bottom looking both ways. Hiroshi peered through the densely packed houses and apartment buildings all around. Through a break between the houses, a tall figure—Michiko, he was sure—flashed by.

  Hiroshi tried to point her direction out to Sakaguchi, but Sakaguchi had already taken off down concrete steps that led to a narrow street up a steep slope. Hiroshi clambered down after Sakaguchi—and hopefully Michiko—and once at the bottom, raced to the nearest intersection. From there, he caught another glimpse of Michiko heading toward Roppongi Hills—a skyscraper complex of offices, apartments, and entertainment spots.

  At the end of the next block, he could see her walking quickly up the slope leading to an escalator into the complex. At the top, she turned and looked back.

  Hiroshi was not sure whether she had seen him or not, but it no longer mattered. They had to catch her before she got lost in the crowd or ducked into one of the thousands of clubs, restaurants, and bars off the main streets on the other, busier side of Roppongi Hills.

  When he looked again, she was gone. He hurried up the stairs and ran under the scraggly ten-meter-tall bronze spider statue, Maman, under whose marble eggs people waited to meet. Michiko kept going through the milling crowd and hopped on a long escalator carrying a stream of people slowly down. Hiroshi got on the escalator just as she got off on the street below.

  Hiroshi called Sakaguchi and told him, “She’s on the street heading down Roppongi Dori.” He twisted back and forth to avoid passersby with their shopping bags and narrow focus on cell phone screens.

  “I see her,” Sakaguchi said. “I went around the other way. I’ve got her.”

  Breathless, with his ribs still aching, Hiroshi said, “Don’t try to get her on your own. I’ll call Sugamo with the car and backup team and Osaki and Ueno will be here soon.” He wasn’t sure if Sakaguchi heard him or not.

  Michiko was far down the street by the time Hiroshi caught sight of Sakaguchi ahead, his large ambling gait easier to spot than Michiko’s graceful stride. He looked past Sakaguchi and saw her long, gleaming hair under the lights amid the bustling, nighttime crowd.

  At a crosswalk under the elevated highway, Michiko sprinted across just as the light changed to red. Sakaguchi sprinted across just before traffic pulled out. Hiroshi stayed on the opposite side, hurrying to pull even with them, watching Michiko emerge and disappear between people and pillars. Taxis, buses, and cars pulled by in waves, blocking his view across the eight lanes of traffic.

  He could see that she took the next crosswalk back to Hiroshi’s side as the light changed to red. Sakaguchi held up his hand to the cars to get back across, still ahead of Hiroshi but now on the same side of the street.

  Sakaguchi steered his bulk through the crowd more like a football running back than a sumo wrestler, weaving through the clumps of people along the crowded sidewalk, speeding up when Michiko sped up toward the large, five-way Roppongi crossing. Hiroshi started running. They could catch her at the corner. With the heavy traffic, she was trapped.

  Hiroshi watched closely as Sakaguchi sprinted toward her, closing the last few steps and springing toward her as if bursting across a sumo ring, his arms reaching forward. Michiko pivoted to the side. In one smooth motion, she slipped her hand under Sakaguchi’s huge armpit, blocked his leg, snagged his belt, and sent his momentum headfirst into the plate glass window of Almond Coffee Shop. His speed and weight propelled him straight through it.

  The huge window shattered like a bomb, flinging glass in all directions, causing people to cringe, scream and scatter. Sakaguchi landed hard and skidded to a stop against the front counter, his head cracking the metal as angrily as a car crash. Cakes and cookies spilled over him in soft thuds as the counter girls in pink and white lace uniforms shrieked, frozen in place with half-filled cups and just-cut slices of desserts in trembling hands.

  Hiroshi saw Michiko take off and took off after her, then stopped himself. He had to be sure Sakaguchi was all right. Hiroshi stepped through the broken window and knelt do
wn beside Sakaguchi. Blood and coffee pooled beside his huge round body, soaking into his bland, summer jacket, his back an arch of sweat. The back of his head was slashed and his legs splayed over glass shards and sponge cake.

  Sakaguchi moaned and lifted his blood-drenched face toward Hiroshi, whispering, “Don’t let her get away.” His legs tried to find purchase, but Hiroshi patted him and told him to stay down.

  Two uniformed policemen with long, wooden keijo sticks arrived from the nearby station. They looked as startled as the customers and clerks. Hiroshi flipped open his detective badge and ducked back through the window. He spun in all directions looking down the sidewalks and small lanes radiating from the large crossing like spokes.

  She was gone.

  A small man with round glasses frowned at Hiroshi and pointed with a finger.

  “She went over there?” Hiroshi asked. “You saw her?” The small man nodded. “She went down there?” The man pointed to the subway entrance. Hiroshi had to trust him.

  Hiroshi ran for the stairs, spinning 180 degrees on the landing and running down the next flight as fast as the crowd allowed. The gate attendant barely gave Hiroshi’s badge a glance as Hiroshi shot through the ticket gate and sped down the escalator to the platform.

  At the bottom, the platform split in two. To the left, the wall curved in, letting him see to the end of the platform. To the right, the wall curved out, so he could only see part way down. He walked along the curved-out side, pushing and twisting his shoulders to get through the waiting passengers chatting amiably or checking their cell phones.

  The rumble of an approaching train drummed loudly from inside the tunnel. He stepped back to the advertisements as a wall of air streamed through the tunnel into the station. He could see the front light of the train coming out of the dark tunnel. He did not see her anywhere. The train pounded closer.

  Hiroshi turned into a cut-through that led to the platform on the other side of the wall where she could have slipped through and doubled back. He surveyed the crowd in both directions along the platform as the train burst out of the tunnel into the bright platform area. The metal snarl and shriek of brakes echoed against the tiled concrete walls.