The Hunter

by Asa Nonami

  When she thought of her life since then, it seemed like police work had controlled her destiny. From the time she followed the recommendation of her boss and put in an innocent request to join the women's motorcycle corps, her life started to change. Right away, while commuting to the training center in Asaka for motorcycle lessons, she met her future husband, who was also working in the Traffic Division. Her prospects were rosy; of this she had no doubt. Those were days when she'd been her most audacious, exultant, confident, positive. She'd been utterly carefree; scoldings from her superiors rolled off her back.

  The women's motorcycle corps had been part of a campaign to soften the image of the MPD. Rather than law enforcement, their work consisted of ornamental tasks like providing a motorcycle escort for marathons and public events; they were sent strictly to safe environments where, as women, they would stand out. Even so, in the beginning it seemed festive and exciting. Takako got calls from friends who'd seen her in a telecast of the marathon; once she was written up in a magazine. Even if former colleagues from her days as a patrol officer looked on her with jealousy, and male officers treated her like a fifth wheel, still she felt on top of the world. Love had made her strong and bold.

  After a while, as her relationship with her then-boyfriend settled into permanency and she could turn her mind to other things, a pleasant sort of boredom had crept over her. The idea of staying on as a figurehead member of the motorcycle corps held no magic. The work lacked excitement. She needed more challenge.

  "Everybody says you're doing great," her boyfriend tried comforting her. "Your motorcycle skills are getting up there, too. Why don't you enter a tournament? You're good enough to join the top ranks."

  But while she stayed in her rut, he was gaining valuable experience as a member of a mobile riot squad. She might be wearing a uniform like him, but she could not share his experiences; one might think they were walking side by side, but in the end she would be left behind.

  Takako felt a growing impatience. Wanting to test her abilities, she requested a transfer to the Criminal Affairs Division. She'd made the request lightly, not expecting it would go through quickly, if at all—but surprise surprise, she was assigned to the larceny investigation section and ended up undergoing training to become a detective.

  Takako could still remember the look of astonishment on her ex's face. "You mean you're gonna be a dick?" he said. Then, with a resigned laugh, he added, "Imagine, a wife who's a dick." That, in effect, had been his proposal of marriage. And so, when she was twenty-six and he was twenty-eight, they had wed.

  After her marriage, Takako had begun assisting at crime-scene investigations, and she learned to make the rounds of pawnshops looking for stolen goods. In the beginning it seemed like a game; there was fresh stimulation in her work, but more than anything else she felt free and alive. When she came back to their newlywed home after work, those times when they could eat dinner together, she would chatter incessantly about the events of her day. But after a while, from around the time she began to work in the detention rooms of police headquarters, the situation changed. When she was put in charge of guarding the women's cells, for the first time she came into direct contact with actual criminals, encountering women of all ages and backgrounds.

  Why would someone like this do a thing like this? Day after day, she asked herself this same question. Some of the women were openly hostile to her, others spoke to her with a trace of something like a fond memory. Thing was, they struck Takako as rather like herself. They were separated only by a trick of fate—and yet there was a great, unyielding difference: the difference between the captive and the captor. Takako did not speak about these women to her husband. Not because of her professional duty to preserve confidentiality, but rather because as a fellow woman, to do that seemed thoroughly inappropriate.

  In time she was assigned to the homicide section, where her thinking was forced to undergo yet another dizzying change. Now she found herself in an all-male society which no longer treated her with distant politeness but stood rudely in her way. There were six female police officers in the entire Criminal Affairs Division, but they did not band together for mutual support; differences in the work they were assigned, as well as in their ages and personalities, contributed to an atmosphere which, as had been the case at the police academy, kept them from becoming best friends. Besides, among the roughly 1,200 investigators in police headquarters, a mere handful of women would have been virtually powerless.

  Day after day, surrounded by men, Takako ran around performing unfamiliar tasks, studying how to write reports, and learning the ropes of actual investigation, all the while being told things like, "Get out my way, will you?" At home, before she knew it, she and her husband were spending less and less time together. Without realizing that the hours he was keeping were odd, she put up with bald-faced lies. Finally the day came when it hit her:

  I'm being played for a fool.

  If she had listened to her mother and become a nursery school teacher, or something feminine like that, what would her life have been like? Would that have been any guarantee of happiness? By now, she'd probably be the mother of at least one child, but would she be satisfied passing the time schmoozing with the other mothers? She would never have learned to ride a motorcycle or to fire a gun; she would never have gotten so tired she was ready to pass out; she would never have had to worry about bladder infections or spend so much time staring at the ugly butt of human nature. Without somebody like the emperor penguin snapping at her, she might have gone on secure in her belief that men were protectors of women. It might have been a fine life. Better than this one, definitely. Peaceful, laid-back, carefree. But there was no turning back now. Besides, when had she ever wanted a life like that?

  Takako craved stimulation. And in her current position in the homicide section, it had become a thing with her to expose the truth about people.

  Hate the sin but not the sinner. She had no intention of making any such noble declaration—and yet it was true that hatred for perfect strangers was far from easy to sustain. Hatred took energy. With case after case always cropping up, and a ceaseless flow of offenders passing through, it was impossible to go on feeling such callow emotion. There simply wasn't time.

  Gotta call home. Tell them I'm fine, nothing to worry about, all that stuff.

  A phone call she could manage, but for now there was no way she could get time off for a visit home. No need to tell her mother that. She wouldn't complain to her, wouldn't discuss her work. That, she was sure, set her mother's teeth on edge. And yet, judging from that message, something was going on with her little sister, in which case her mother's anxieties would not be focused just on Takako. That would actually be a relief. Anyway, must call home. Call home . . . call home . . . Repeating the words to herself, Takako drifted off. As if her body were being dragged into a marsh, her consciousness sank into blackness.

  2

  Takuma Sugawara. Born Teruo Hara, 28 March 1961. Father, Motoharu; mother, Hideyo; both living. A brother seven years older has succeeded to the family business, and a sister five years older is married and living in Koriyama. After graduating from the local middle school, Teruo went to the prefectural high school but dropped out after one year. Thereafter he repeatedly ran away from home but was brought back each time until, at the age of sixteen, he disappeared and never returned. Four years later, at the age of twenty, he was caught in the act of assault with intent to commit bodily harm; under questioning, he revealed that after running away from home he had gone to Tokyo, moving frequently from place to place, living in Ueno, Kinshicho, and other parts of town before getting work in a discotheque in Roppongi and settling into that area. To the authorities, he didn't seem like a thug, and as he had no prior convictions, he was let off with a warning. His activities since that time are not clear. His most recent occupation is yet to be established.

  Investigation headquarters put top priority on discovering Teruo Hara's last known occupation and his
social contacts. Examination of the timed ignition device would of course proceed simultaneously, focusing both on chemical agents and on parts used in its construction. Although the lab was working overtime to identify the chemical agents, full analysis was expected to take more than a week; moreover, as the mechanical parts were all widely available, there seemed little chance of tracking down a suspect based merely on the physical evidence. The MO was perplexing—no investigator could recall a similar method of killing, and the police computer databank drew a blank as well. In other words, the profile of the suspect was extremely hazy. The only recourse was to flush out the killer from the victim's surroundings. Only by hitting the pavement—walking and walking and walking around town—could they hope to find a clue that might break the case open.

  Takizawa and Takako revisited the witnesses they had interviewed and showed them Hara's photograph. The response was uniform: never seen him before. Masayo Kizaki, the severely burned young woman, was the only witness who remembered what the victim had looked like; unfortunately, she still had not recovered full vision.

  With no knowledge of Hara's employment or his sphere of activity, it was difficult to proceed. Other investigative teams concentrated on the women in Hara's life and his social contacts from the Roppongi disco. Still, days were going by without any light being shed on his recent activities.

  Takizawa and Takako next checked with other tenants of the building that had housed the restaurant. There was a superintendent's office, but as it happened, the fire had occurred not long after the previous superintendent quit, so the super on duty knew little.

  "You know, I do have a feeling I've seen this guy somewhere."

  "Where? Try to remember."

  The man Takizawa was talking to, the owner of a beauty salon just above the burned-out restaurant, stood with his arms folded, looking stumped. "I can tell you one thing, absolutely," he said, rubbing his cheek with one hand. "He wasn't one of our customers. If he was, I know I'd remember."

  "You mean, you have male customers, too?"

  "Well, of course we do, silly. No offense, Officer, but you must be a real old-timer to even ask such a thing."

  The beauty salon was not the only business forced to suspend operations because of the fire. There had been an English conversation school and a photography studio on the second floor. On the third floor, there was a dental clinic, a health appliance store, an astrologer, and an acupuncture and moxibustion clinic; on the fourth, the office of a sporting goods store, an accounting firm, an architectural firm, and one office the nature of whose business was unclear from the name alone. On the fifth and sixth floors was more of the same—another architectural office, a massage parlor, an event-planning firm, an interior designer, and a fortune-teller.

  Damage from the fire was concentrated on, besides the restaurant, the second, third, and fourth floors, and more narrowly on the fifth and sixth. But essentially, with the basement garage burned out as well, the entire building had been rendered useless and would have to be torn down. This was the verdict of the beauty salon owner Takizawa and Takako were now sounding out.

  The beauty salon owner had come to the shop by to see what he could salvage from the fire. The acrid smell of smoke was still strong. Looking at the photo in Takizawa's hand, he asked, "Is that the guy who did it? .. . Oh, he's the one who burned to death. What a terrible thing." And that was when, after a moment, he said the guy looked familiar.

  "I don't know where I've seen him," he went on. "I have to say, it's quite chilling to hear he's dead. All in all, I think it would be better if he was a stranger, don't you? I mean, if it turned out he was someone I knew even a little, I couldn't be this offhanded about the whole thing, could I?"

  Once the man started talking, he rattled on, perhaps a habit ingrained from his line of work. If she were interviewing him alone, thought Takako, she would cut the pleasantries short, ask him point-blank what she wanted to know, and then move on. She had no use for men who were so blatantly shallow and glib, real chatterboxes. He seemed the type who had no real information to offer but was full of curiosity, eager just to keep the conversation going.

  "You suffered a lot of damage here, didn't you?"

  "Oh, did we ever. I'm scouting around for a new place now, but who knows how much it's going to end up costing me. I had a really, really nice setup here, but now I'll be right back in the hole."

  Too bad, but what about the face in the photograph? Takako had to bite her tongue to keep from butting in. If he remembered, he remembered; if he didn't, he didn't. She just couldn't bear the way he kept going on. Now he was starting on about the early days when he was a live-in employee.

  After spending the better part of a half hour in conversation, Takizawa finally lifted a hand. "Well, if anything comes up we may be back to ask your help, but in the meantime, you hang in there."

  The guy looked deflated, apparently not yet done talking, but he nodded and said, "Mm-hmm."

  Every little gesture of his struck Takako as effeminate.

  He and the penguin would make a great couple.

  No one was in the remaining stores and offices, all the way to the top floor. The elevator out of use, Takako and Takizawa trudged up and down the stairs, knocking on doors. Nearly half the places had notices posted giving contact information, an address and phone number. Undoubtedly, they were all out hustling for new quarters. Her hands numb with cold, Takako copied down every bit of the information. As she did so, Takizawa stood aside smoking a cigarette, not bothering to open his notebook; he must think this is women's work.

  Sure, sure, I'll do it all. God knows if you wrote it down we wouldn't be able to read it later anyway.

  The building was draped in white plastic sheeting on the outside, like a construction site; inside, the passageways were freezing cold, and sunlight filtering through the white sheeting created the effect of bright snow. On the upper floors the wind was stronger, and the sounds from the sheeting as it bellied out or pressed in toward them were eerie. Takizawa finished his cigarette and tossed the butt to the floor. Such insensitivity made Takako cringe. She loathed people who carelessly threw trash alongside a road—and this was worse: it was the scene of a fatal fire, for heaven's sake!

  As they came back down the frigid stairs to the second floor, suddenly a shrill voice sounded behind them: "Oh, there you are! Officer!" The beauty salon owner was waving a long, thin arm at them.

  Takako looked reflexively at Takizawa, who greeted the guy like an old friend. "What's up?"

  Takako sighed and tagged along.

  "You know, I just happened to remember where I saw the gentleman in your photograph. I'm so glad you're still here."

  Was this guy gay or what? He laid a hand on Takizawa's arm and smiled at him in a creepy way. His smile had the coyness of a young girl—it was not at all becoming. But of all the people she had seen Takizawa interview so far, no one else had shown this much eagerness to talk to him.

  What appalling taste.

  The beauty salon owner glanced toward Takako, tilting his head a trace and smiling. She steadily returned his gaze, unable to bring herself to smile back. Even if he came out and said, "Ooh, a scary policewoman!" she did not care.

  "A customer once was telling me about how, on one of the upper floors of this building, there's a ... what do you call it? You know, a date club."

  "A date club?"

  Takizawa's face was turned away from Takako. From his tone of voice, however, the term meant little to him.

  "The kind of place where they set up a date for you with high school girls. They say the girls make good money. Well, the elevator in this building was always chock-full of people. High school girls in middy-blouse uniforms, mostly. We always used to see them when we were going home at the end of the day, so at first I thought there must be a cram school on the upper floors."

  On the guy's large, sinewy middle finger there was a silver band. He waved his hand in the air as he went on excitedly. "Then, I hear
d it was a date club, of all things. Well, you could've knocked me over with a feather. I mean, from the outside, you can't tell at all. Anyway, in my shop, whenever a customer leaves, I always accompany her to the elevator to see her off. So there we are by the elevator talking, this customer and me, when the doors open and there he is! My customer does a double take. 'It's him,' she whispers. Then she turns to me and lifts her eyebrows—like this."

  His hollowed cheeks slightly flushed, spraying spittle from between too-large teeth, the hairdresser lifted his eyebrows in high arch. Then pausing, he cooed, "Could I possibly trouble you for a cigarette, Officer?"

  No doubt about it—the guy was queer as they came. Takizawa offered the guy a cigarette, lit it for him, and urged him on: "So then what happened?"

  "At first I didn't have the foggiest notion what she was trying to tell me. I just thought, hmm, such a good-looking man! So she walks into the elevator, greets him nonchalantly with something like, 'Oh, hello, you're the owner of the date club.' The gentleman ran the place!"

  The beauty salon owner pursed his thin lips and blew out a cloud of cigarette smoke. Then he gazed into the distance theatrically, as if trying to re-envision the event. "That man . . . Officer, could I take another peek at the photograph, please?"