Surprise mixed into Miho’s glare, and she stared at Kanako without blinking.
Kanako dropped her voice and whispered a second time, “You should kill him, Miho, with your own hands.”
“My own hands?”
Miho looked scared. Kanako readied more arrows against Miho, who lacked the guts after all.
“I understand your feelings as though they’re my own, Miho. You still love him, don’t you. Half of you wants to avenge your murdered child, but the other half still loves your man. You don’t want to let him go to another woman, not after all that. You said it yourself, that you’re an extremely jealous woman.”
Miho opened her mouth to try to say something, but Kanako didn’t let her and kept on loosing arrows.
“ ‘When I thought of him sleeping with another woman while I was in the hospital, I thought I’d go mad. I’d rather kill him than let him go to another woman.’ Am I wrong?” Maybe she was, but Kanako didn’t give Miho the time to object. “What a weird mindset, huh? It’s so scary. But people who kill other people are all weird in some way. It’s the scary ones who commit murder. Don’t you agree?”
Consider yourself in light of your father, Kanako commanded. Miho’s sickly face grew even more pallid. Her heart was clearly groaning, but also hardening.
“It’s sad, isn’t it, to think that you’ll fail at whatever you do because you’re the murderer’s girl. But you can’t blame stuff like that on blood.” Kanako meant the opposite; Miho had to nurture murderous intent towards Akira Nakagaki and to pick her reason, blood or otherwise. “I get how you feel so much it hurts. Aren’t you feeling strangely relieved that you can finally receive the same punishment as your father? You finally found a way. ‘This is the rail that was prepared for me. I, the daughter of a murderer, didn’t know how to properly inherit my father’s crime and punishment until now. But this is it, all I need to do is kill someone too’…Am I wrong?”
It felt like darkness was dripping down one drop at a time. The hate stored in Kanako’s hideaway was brimming over at last. There was no stopping it now.
Turn Miho Tsuzuki into a murderer, a villain just like her father. Make her climb the same thirteen steps as Norio Tsuzuki. With just a little push to her back, that version of Miho Tsuzuki would be complete.
Miho’s expression was in chaos. Her true feelings had been dragged out into the open, and she seemed at a loss.
“But you know, you can’t mess up and let the police catch you.”
Your punishment can’t come at the hands of the police or the courts. It’s to live knowing that you killed your loved one with your own hands. You can become an honest-to-god villain.
“I know what you’re saying,” Miho muttered, glancing at Kanako’s face.
You think you do? Try and say it, then.
“You’re saying I shouldn’t think like that…”
Idiot, Kanako spat in her mind. Her intentions weren’t getting across at all. The woman just needed to accept Kanako’s words whole.
“What do you think is the most important part of a murder plan?” she pried open Miho’s shutting mind. “As long as you have it, no one will suspect you…In other words, the thing your father didn’t think about at all. What do you suppose it is?”
The essence of the perfect crime that Norio Tsuzuki, who sat in a sea of deep red blood to be arrested on the spot by Officer Hashimoto, had decisively lacked.
Miho was starting to think. Think more. Let that impulse and drive possess you.
The droplets spilling from Kanako’s hideaway bounced at the bottom of the darkness. The sound they made turned into words, left her mouth, and slid into Miho’s ears.
“You should just kill him.”
5
Kanako gathered the spilled droplets of darkness into another container and swore to never let them escape again, her self-control finally switched back on.
Even if Miho acted on her murder plan, it was bound to fail. She would be arrested as the perpetrator, and the police would turn to Kanako as the one who had incited her. Kanako would be damned before she tossed her life away for Miho.
Why had she let herself say that to Miho? Kanako cursed her inability to restrain herself.
The morning lecture had just ended, and Kanako was rushing to the school gate because she was meeting up with Takumi to eat roast meat in the student district when her cell phone rang. Miho’s name was displayed on the screen.
It had been one week since Kanako had told her to “just kill him.” That night, the birthday cake had gone untouched in the end. “Sorry, I said something weird because I’m drunk,” Kanako smoothed things over, then left the bar ahead of Miho to make her weigh murder and love all on her own.
Recalling how vacant she’d looked as her guest departed, Kanako pushed the receive button.
“I thought about it after that.” Miho’s voice had an edge from the outset. “An alibi is where someone testifies that I was somewhere else when I killed him, right?”
Flustered that the conversation had begun without any preamble or pleasantries, Kanako couldn’t immediately find the words to reply. Miho had apparently reached the word “alibi” after a week. Had she become serious about this? “…That’s right, and the person who testifies has to be completely unrelated to you, a neutral third party.”
Kanako sat down on a campus bench. None of the students passing by in front of her would have imagined that the girl with a cell phone in one hand and a juice pack in the other, sitting there that tranquil autumn afternoon, was planning a murder.
“Would the police believe us if you told them, ‘Miho was with me that day at that time’?”
“My testimony won’t be credible once they find out we’re friends.”
Stop, don’t think of anything stupid, Kanako faltered faced with Miho’s enthusiasm. Their positions were reversed from what they had been a week ago.
“Then, for example, if I killed him at eight at night and met with someone at six in the afternoon, I could try to make that person think that we’d met at eight?”
“Tricking a third party into believing it’s a different time happens in detective novels, but I think it’d be impossible to pull off in reality.”
“Then what should I do?”
“I don’t know.”
“Think!” Miho sounded desperate as she urged Kanako. “I absolutely don’t want to be caught by the police. But I’m a stupid and scatterbrained girl so any murder plan I’d come up with would be full of holes. That’s why I want you to think with me, Kako. All you need to do is come up with it. I’ll be the one to actually do it. I’m not planning on making you help me all the way. Even if the police catch me, I won’t tell them we planned it together, no matter what.”
“Are you serious about this?”
“Kako, you’re the one who said I should just kill a man like him.”
Kanako searched for an escape route. “Let’s be calm and think about this.”
“I did, all week. What’s there left to think about?!”
It was the first time Kanako had ever heard Miho screech. It was accompanied by a thud. The girl must have punched the wall by her phone.
Had Kanako’s feet caught in a bottomless bog? Hiding her identity, she’d crept up close and whispered, You should kill him, like a demon. But now, she was being ensnared by Miho’s murderous impulse.
“Sorry, I have lecture now. I’ll call you back,” Kanako cut short the conversation.
She hurried to the roast meat restaurant where Takumi was waiting for her.
After her last afternoon lecture, she headed down the path to the station for her part-time at a movie theater. Another call. Kanako had said that she’d be the one to call back, but apparently Miho couldn’t wait that long.
Kanako felt as though the cell phone waves were a net thrown to capture her.
“I thought for a bit, can you hear me out?” Miho started in, barely able to contain her excitement. “All I need is to have a dou
ble.”
“A double?”
“When I kill him, someone should pretend to be me to create my alibi.”
Who could this “someone” be? Kanako saw it coming.
“Kako, you and I are around the same height and have similar body shapes.”
“Wait a minute.”
“If we give you the same haircut, the same makeup, and stick on the same tattoo to your shoulder, we’d have another me.”
“But that’s—” Too shallow and easy, Kanako wanted to butt in.
“Kako, do you have anything against cutting your hair?”
“That’s not the point.”
“Then what is?”
“This isn’t what we discussed,” Kanako reminded Miho pointedly. “You said that all I had to do was help plan.”
“I’m not asking you to swing down a murder weapon with me. All I need is for you to pretend to be me at the same time at a different place and be seen by someone.”
“Be seen by someone? Who do you plan on tricking?”
“I’ll think about it.”
“It’s impossible. We’ll be found out. Oh, sorry, the connection’s getting bad. I’ll call you back.”
She needed to put a temporary end to their exchange. At this rate, she was going to get dragged along by Miho’s momentum. Kanako hung up and turned off her cell. Leaning on the rails of the station’s stairs, she took a deep breath.
The more thought Miho gave to her pipe dream of a murder plan, the more real it became. But for Kanako to pretend to be Miho seemed like something out of a comic book.
Pipe dream or comic book, if Kanako let this go on, her escape routes would be sealed, and she’d become an accomplice to Miho’s murder. Even so, Kanako found herself torn between slipping out of the cul-de-sac and giving Miho a huge shove forward, and couldn’t but feel a bit appalled at her own hopelessness.
That night, there was some time before the audience left the Shibuya Pantheon, so she turned her phone back on and called Miho.
It didn’t get through, perhaps because Miho was in the underground cellar that was Ice Storm. There were no messages from Miho in Kanako’s voice mail, either. Kanako prayed that the girl had thought over the plan she’d come up with during the day and given up on it.
The survey results in hand, Kanako took the Inokashira line to return to her apartment.
There was an envelope thrust through the mail slot on her door. On the front, it said “From Takumi” in ballpoint pen as though he’d scrawled it right there, and “I thought about waiting inside but thought you might want to see them alone, so I’m leaving these and going home.”
Kanako felt the contents of the envelope, guessed that they were the photos in question, and stuck her key into the knob.
Indeed, Takumi had brought them from home. Kanako’s house in Asagaya—the black-and-white photos had been taken from the street by the young photographer Takumi six years ago.
Thick clouds covered a dreary sky above a dingy two-story wood-and-mortar house. The metal storm windows were shut, the yard was overgrown with weeds, and a construction plan was taped to the entryway with duct tape.
It was a strange feeling, looking at what had once been her house through Takumi’s eyes.
She couldn’t hear her brothers’ voices. Watering the flowers in the yard, she used to hear her mother humming in the kitchen. But Kanako heard nothing from this photo. Her memory wasn’t triggered.
Her own impression that it was no more than an abandoned house whose ties to her had vanished long ago surprised Kanako.
She was no longer prone to autotoxemia. Seeing Takumi’s photo was worth it for that reason alone. It had been a while, but she felt the truth in her psychiatrist’s words that time was the best medicine.
It was just an empty house that the neighborhood couldn’t cope with. Picturing the young Takumi pointing his camera to capture the murderer’s passion and the victims’ resentment, she suddenly remembered the doubts that he’d brought up.
Why had Norio Tsuzuki fought on to the Supreme Court? Had it really been for his support group’s sake, or was he just afraid to die?
Kanako knew someone who might be able to provide her with a clear answer.
The next day during lunch break, there was a call from Miho.
Kanako, who had been sipping tanuki soba with Eri in the school cafeteria, left her seat and spoke quickly. “I can’t talk now, but I’ll come by the bar at the usual time tonight.”
Miho seemed to want to hash things out right then but cheerfully replied, “Then I’ll be waiting,” and hung up.
If this went on, Miho could eventually come looking for her at the university. If they met, Kanako would be bound even further.
Did she in fact want to step into the muck where Miho was already submerged to the neck? If Kanako could attach a lifeline just to herself, then accompanying Miho for a while as she tried to become a murderer like her father, and proceeding through the bog together, was an option. At the very end, Kanako would shrewdly pull on her lifeline, leave Miho behind, and return to safety; watch her sink into the bog, turn around, and walk away.
Ice Storm at two in the morning had somehow become the site of Kanako and Miho’s secret talks.
Kanako killed some time at a family restaurant in Gotanda before walking along the Meguro River, inhaling its raw scent as she crossed the bridge. When she arrived in front of the bar, however, the neon lights that greeted her were different.
There were orange ones set up beside the blue. Wondering if the color arrangement meant anything, Kanako made her way down the stairs.
“There’s two colors now,” Kanako pointed out to Miho, who’d finished cleaning the counter and was drinking beer.
“Oh that,” she grimaced. “The owner came in the afternoon and said he wanted to make the entrance look more lively, and added another color of neon lights. He said he wanted to make a rainbow with seven colors in the near future. Isn’t it stupid?”
“I’m not sure that’d match the name Ice Storm.”
“I said that, too.”
“It used to feel like this place was somewhere cold and mysterious you could sneak into, but ‘over the rainbow’? I’d have to link arms with a scarecrow and a lion and enter the bar dancing.”
“I feel you. And anyway, why would there be a rainbow in the middle of the night?”
“Was orange next to blue? The sun’s light spectrum is supposed to be consistent. I’m pretty sure green or purple was next to blue…”
“I’ll tell that to the owner, too.”
Miho entered the counter and poured Kanako’s beer into a tumbler.
“About what I said yesterday, Kako. Come to think of it, it’d be pretty impossible for you to become me, huh?”
“Yeah, the police aren’t stupid.”
If it was impossible, was she giving up? Had Miho passed through her storm of murderous intent? Kanako was relieved, but also disappointed by Miho’s gutlessness.
“What do you think of this, then?” Miho leaned over the counter. So she hadn’t given up.
“When I killed Akira, I was with a customer here. That customer will testify that I was here at the time.”
“Who’s going to confirm your alibi?”
“You, Kako.”
“I told you, no matter what I testify—”
“Hear me out,” Miho interrupted as though with a machete. “To make sure they don’t know it’s you, we’ll make it so that a single female customer sat right there that night.”
“To make sure they don’t know it’s me?”
“The woman wobbles in just as the bar is closing and asks me for a drink as I’m closing up.”
“Wait a second, even if I pretended to be this customer, once the police look me up they’ll find out that I’m friends with you.”
“They won’t be able to look you up.”
“Why.”
“Because you’re an imaginary girl.”
“An imaginary
girl?”
“No matter how hard they search, they won’t be able to find her.”
Miho seemed awfully confident, but Kanako didn’t follow her at all. “But I’m going to be the one to testify for you?”
“Right. You’re going to say that I was pouring beer for you at the time of the crime.”
“I’m going to provide that testimony to the police?”
“Well, not exactly.” Miho’s eyes glittered. “You’re not going to testify to the police, but to Goro.”
Goro was the name of the blond employee.
Miho seemed to have concocted a complete plan beyond the bounds of Kanako’s imagination.
“And how exactly are you going to kill him?” Kanako cut to the heart of the plan, putting aside the matter of the alibi.
“With a hammer.” Miho took a breath of smoke from her cigarette before blithely continuing, “The same tool my father used.”
Kanako recalled how the heads of the four bodies lying in the morgue had been caved in. Her nerves screamed at the memory brushing at the back of her mind.
If this woman so badly wants to emulate that scene from eight years ago, why not encourage her? a cruel, quick-tongued voice dead-panned inside Kanako.
“It’s just as you said, Kako. I think I’ve got a murderer’s blood flowing through my veins.”
“I didn’t mean it that way.” She had definitely meant it that way.
“I’ll catch him unawares, and then strike him all I want afterwards. No matter how big he is, if I hit him right there on the back of his head…” Miho gestured toward Kanako’s nape. “It’ll only take one blow. It’s apparently a vital spot for humans. A regular who’s obsessed with martial arts told me.”
“But can you really do it?”
“I think so,” Miho replied casually, rotating her good hand as though warming up. Perhaps her murderous rage was growing daily and fueling her.
“Your father will probably be sad when he finds out.”
Although Kanako doubted those words would have any effect, she waited for Miho’s reaction, in order to gauge the strength of her murderous intent. Miho stopped rotating her hand and dropped her gaze. Maybe she was weak after all. Perhaps she’d turn back now.
Deep Red Page 25