Puppet Master vol.1

by Miyuki Miyabe

  　“Oh, right, I never thought of that!” she said seriously, then shoved the rest of her sandwich into her mouth.

  　Just then there was an earsplitting squeal of brakes outside.

  　“Oh!” Kimi's eyes almost popped out of her head.

  　Katsuya instinctively squared his shoulders bracing himself for the crash. It came not as just a brief bang, but a long drawn-out crunch. He could almost see the car twisting and being wrenched apart.

  　He rushed out of the office to see in the distance to his right a thin plume of smoke rising up from the Green Road. The earlier rush had subsided and by now the traffic was moving smoothly, with no cars headed up the mountain and only a few coming down. Drivers began slowing down and leaning out of their car windows trying to see what had happened, and some pulled into the gas station. “Hey, someone call 110!” yelled the manager.

  　Kimi followed Katsuya out of the shop and brought her hands to her cheeks when she saw the smoke rising up into the sky. “Oh my God!”

  　“Did it catch fire?” Katsuya asked one of the other attendants.

  　“Where there's smoke …”

  　It wasn't thick smoke, though, and it looked as if it was beginning to clear.

  　“I'm going to have a look,” Katsuya said.

  　“Me too!” said Kimi, and ran after him along the side shoulder up the slope to the crash site.

  　The Green Road was known for it curves, but this was a particularly tight hairpin bend. Coming down the twisting mountain road from the summit, the road angled widely to the right then immediately doubled back on itself to the left. Katsuya was a confident driver and was used to this route so it had never really bothered him, but he knew there had been a lot of accidents here. Just a month ago a driver coming down the mountain had lost control and veered across the road into another car. That time a tow truck had brought the car, its front all smashed in, to the gas station and they'd helped to take care of the injured people.

  　This time Katsuya didn't think they would get away with just injuries. The car that crashed was nowhere in sight. All that was visible were the long skid marks that ran along the road and disappeared where the guardrail on the other side was twisted and ripped away. A middle-aged couple were standing there looking over the edge.

  　“Are you okay?” Katsuya called to them from the other side of the road.

  　The man turned around and pointed down the cliff. It looked like the car had been coming down the mountain, lost control at the curve, skidded across the road, and crashed into the guard rail, before tumbling over the edge.

  　“Is it your car?”

  　“You gotta be kidding. That's ours there,” the man said, pointing to a dark-blue sedan parked about five meters farther down the road. “We saw them go over─it was terrible!”

  　Katsuya took advantage of a gap in the slowly moving cars to cross over to the guardrail. “I work in the gas station just down there,” he told the couple. “We called 110, so the police should be here soon.”

  　“It's nothing to do with us,” the woman said sharply. “They'd just overtaken us at a ridiculous speed when they hit the curve. We were lucky they didn't take us out, too.”

  　“Hey, be careful─don't fall!” Kimi said, pulling on Katsuya's sleeve as he peered over the edge.

  　“Don't worry,” he told her. Making sure his feet were planted firmly, he leaned over the crumpled rail to see the tail end of a white sedan about ten meters below. It had gone over headfirst and crashed onto a ledge with its end up in the air.

  　“Oh man, that looks bad!”

  　There wasn't any smoke coming from the car anymore. It didn't look as though it had caught fire, so what had that smoke been? He couldn't see anyone trying to get out of the car. Perhaps they were stuck inside. It was impossible to see anything through the rear window at this distance. But the license plate was clearly visible. It was a Nerima number─from Tokyo.

  　“Something was on fire, wasn't it?”

  　“Did you see it?” the man asked with a frown. “It was already burning before the crash. Smoke was coming from the window.”

  　“Really?”

  　“Yes, you saw it, didn't you?” he said, turning to the woman for confirmation.

  　She nodded. “At any rate, the car was going so fast when it overtook us that it gave us quite a fright.”

  　“Maybe the driver was distracted by something on fire in the car?”

  　“It's just so awful.”

  　The trunk had been forced open about ten centimeters from the crash. Seen from above, it looked as if the car was sitting with its mouth open.

  　“They'll need a crane to pull it back up.”

  　Kimi clung onto Katsuya's arm as she peered over to look at it. “I wonder if they're dead?” she whispered.

  　Katsuya laughed. “Here's the scaredy-cat, sounding as though she's hoping for that!”

  　“That's not what I meant!” Kimi retorted, pouting.

  　They heard the sound of an approaching police siren.

  　“They were both men,” the man said. “There were two of them.”

  　“Two men?”

  　“Yes, I saw them.”

  　“Were they young?”

  　“I'm not sure. I only just caught sight of them as they overtook us.”

  　“I think they were young,” the woman put in. “They were wearing flashy shirts.”

  　Katsuya went out into the road and waved the approaching police car over. Then, since he and Kimi hadn't witnessed the accident, they went back to the gas station, passing a crane headed up the mountain on their way. The couple in the dark-blue sedan turned up a while later, looking exhausted after having given their witness statements to the police.

  　“Even though it was nothing to do with us!” the woman grumbled.

  　Katsuya laughed as he wiped their windscreen. “Bad luck, eh?”

  　“It's no laughing matter, really!”

  　As they chatted, they heard the sound of another police siren. Katsuya looked up. “I wonder what that's all about?”

  　Another patrol car sped noisily past the gas station on its way up the mountain.

  　“Another accident?”

  　But the siren soon stopped. It must be at the same crash site.

  　“I wonder why they need more than one police car there?”

  　“I'd understand it if it had been an ambulance.”

  　“The crane came while we were there, but they were saying it was going to be difficult to pull the car up. The cliff was pretty steep, making it hard for the workers to get down and fix a hook to it.”

  　Then yet another car sped past with its siren blaring. This time it wasn't a patrol car, but a plain black sedan with a flashing light placed on top.

  　“Another one? That looked like police, too.”

  　That had been an undercover car, hadn't it? Why on earth would they need something like that for a traffic accident? And now another patrol car. What the hell was going on up there? Katsuya decided to go back up and have another look. “Hey, don't go rubbernecking!” his boss called after him, but he ignored him. Something weird was going on, and it was making him feel anxious. This was a new feeling for him, an ominous premonition, as if his own instincts were warning him about something.

  　He crossed over the road and jogged up the mountain just in time to see the crane stretching out its neck, pulling the car up and maneuvering it into position to put it back down on the road. Police cars barred the way, making it impossible to go any further. “Hey, where do you think you're going?” a stern-faced policeman demanded. “We're dealing with an accident here, so it's out of bounds. Keep your distance.”

  　Katsuya looked up at the car suspended in midair, hanging quietly as if it were being loaded onto a ship. The hood and front windscreen were completely smashed in, the doors twisted out of shape. And the trunk was open a bit further than it had been when he saw
it earlier, the lid trembling slightly as the crane pulled the car up.

  　“Hey, I said no closer!”

  　The officer pushed his shoulder, forcing him back half a step, and he looked down to steady himself. In that moment, there was a loud wrenching noise. He jerked his head up and saw the car had tilted sharply forward. One of the hooks had come loose. The circle of police started moving out of the way, and someone shouted “Watch out!”

  　Katsuya hurriedly moved back as the car listed even further and the driver's door swung open. “Watch out! The door's about to fall!” he yelled. But it wasn't the door that fell, it was something else. A black lump slithered out and dropped with a muffled thud onto the road where it lay with its head facing Katsuya. A person!

  　The car's balance shifted again and it tilted sharply. The crane operator desperately worked the levers to gradually reduce the height, but he couldn't stop the back from dropping. The trunk had been slightly open but now the gap widened and something else fell out─something that would give Katsuya nightmares for a long time to come.

  　It was another person, clad in a suit and folded in half like a penknife. It slid almost purposefully out of the trunk as if determined to escape, before dropping in a heap on the road. All of the police froze. Katsuya looked over the shoulder of the big officer in front of him and saw the face. The eyes were wide open, and locked with his.

  Chapter 18

  The first report of the fatal traffic accident on the Mount Akai Green Road came into Bokuto Police Station two hours after it had happened.

  　As the car had Tokyo plates and had been carrying the corpse of an unidentified man in the trunk, the Akai police had sent a report to the team investigating the serial killings, and they were now waiting for more detailed information to come in. The two young men who died in the accident had both been carrying driver's licenses and so had been quickly identified. Kazuaki Takai had been in the passenger seat, and had been thrown out of the car on impact. He was twenty-nine, and lived with his parents and younger sister in Tokyo's Nerima Ward. He was the eldest son, and together with his father ran a soba noodle restaurant called Chojuan. The driver, who had fallen out onto the road as the car was being hoisted up, had been Hiromi Kurihashi, also aged twenty-nine. His registered address was with his parents, also in Nerima Ward, but according to them he had been living alone in Shinjuku. He was an only son, with no siblings.

  　Several witnesses reported having seen smoke coming from the car just before it crashed. Upon further examination, the police did indeed find burns on the front of Kurihashi's body, between his legs, and on the driver's seat. It looked as though he had either dropped a lit cigarette while driving, or had been trying to light a cigarette and somehow set fire to his cotton shirt and synthetic jacket. Neither of them had been wearing seatbelts, although it wasn't clear whether this was because they'd hastily undone them when the fire broke out, or whether they hadn't been wearing them in the first place. Also, they wouldn't be able to judge whether the fire had distracted Kurihashi and caused the accident or not until they had conducted further tests.

  　The accident came as a huge shock to both families, as might be expected. However, any sympathy for them was tempered by the matter of the corpse in the trunk. There was nothing that might have given a hint as to this man's identity. He was properly dressed in a suit, but his nametags had been cut out of his jacket and pants, and he had no personal effects. From the look of it, he was being taken somewhere for disposal. There were no visible injuries on the body. However, the postmortem carried out early in the morning of the sixth determined that the cause of death was asphyxiation. There were marks left by adhesive tape on the wrists and ankles, as well as over the mouth and nose, which suggested that this tape had prevented him from breathing and had led to his death.

  　The body in the trunk was clearly a homicide victim. The atmosphere in the Bokuto and Akai Police Stations grew a shade more expectant and tense.

  “Are you going undercover?”

  　Hearing Takegami address him, Akitsu looked up from the report he was reading and made a face. “I would if I thought it'd do any good, but there's probably no point. The media are already all over this.”

  　It was just after noon on November sixth. Akitsu was about to accompany a detective from the Gunma Prefectural Police on searches of the homes of Kazuaki Takai and Hiromi Kurihashi. The two men hadn't yet officially been linked with the serial killer case and at this stage Akitsu was simply acting as an observer. Nevertheless, some of the press knew his face, and would no doubt notice his involvement.

  　“Nerima police will also be there, so I really am just going along to watch.”

  　“So what's your opinion?”

  　“You mean, do I think these guys from Akai are the ones we're after?” Akitsu rubbed his eyes with big muscular hands. His eyelids were drooping from a chronic lack of sleep. “What do you think, Gami?”

  　Without answering right away, Takegami looked down at the report he'd been reading. It was the NRIPS analysis, just in with the morning mail, of the voiceprints from the calls made to the HBS special on November 1. Had it not been for this latest development, it would no doubt have been discussed at the investigation meeting that afternoon, with a press conference held later tonight or tomorrow morning.

  　Yoshio Arima's intuition had been right. NRIPS had concluded that the callers before and after the commercial break were different people. The video of the program was the only recording they had of the second caller, but even this didn't affect their conclusion. Clear differences in the waveforms of the two sound spectrograms showed that there were definitely two of them. Which meant that they were dealing with more than one perpetrator in the serial killer case.

  　The other recordings they had of the killer prior to the program perfectly matched the voiceprint for the caller before the commercial break as well as the call made to Arima right after the program ended. In other words, reasoned Takegami, the second caller had hastily called into the program after having a fight with the first caller, who had until then been tasked with publicizing their crimes. This hitherto unknown partner had broadcast his voice for the first time during the program. Meanwhile the first caller had again called Arima to vent his rage. They probably hadn't realized that the voice changer didn't affect their voiceprints. Or maybe they knew, but had been betting on the police not investigating that far. As long as they weren't caught, it was all the same whether there were one or two of them.

  　The sound analysis had also revealed something else that was of utmost interest to the investigation. Even infinitesimal sounds that could not be heard by the human ear could be detected as waveforms on the computer analysis. Sound analysis was a drudge job involving filtering out and analyzing background noise─a repetitive, tedious task but one that this time had reaped great rewards. The voice of someone talking into the phone rebounded off a barrier, such as the walls of the room from which they were calling, and reached the transmitter between one hundredth of a second to one thousandth of a second later than the original voice. This time lag was reflected in a slightly different waveform, which varied according to the material of the barrier. When you compared this waveform with the database of sample ones acquired in controlled experiments with different materials, you could deduce fairly accurately what kind of place the call had been made from, and whether the person who had made it was in motion or stationary.

  　The analysis therefore revealed the following facts:

  　-All of the calls had been made from enclosed, quiet, stationary spaces, including a room and a car with its engine turned off.

  　-The call informing a TV station that the arm found in Okawa Park was not Mariko Furukawa's had been made from a car. Nearby was a crossing for blind pedestrians.

  　-In the call to Yoshio Arima telling him to go to the Plaza Hotel, there had been quite a distinctive noise in the background. It was a continuous fixed tone, which they judged to be th
e hum of a machine, but the waveform sample comparisons ruled out the sounds of a computer fan, air conditioner, or refrigerator. Furthermore, this distinctive sound had not been detected in any of the other calls, including those made to HBS on November 1.

  　-The calls to HBS before and after the commercial break had been made from the same space in the same location, as had the call made to Arima after the program. The callers had remained motionless during these conversations. Furthermore, the space was enclosed by wood, with no concrete present in the walls or floor.

  　-The calls to HBS and the one to Arima straight afterwards clearly had the low hum of a machine in the background. A comparison with archived samples suggested that this was almost certainly the sound of a boiler for central heating.

  　A boiler for central heating, and a wood-frame house: could it be a mountain lodge, or a country villa? The area north of Akai over the mountains up to about Lake Nagakawa was a popular spot in northern Kanto for holiday homes. It fit perfectly.

  　Takegami filed the report, then balled his big hand into a fist and held it to his forehead. Akitsu looked up.

  　“If those guys are the ones we're after …”

  　“Then what?”

  　“How can I put it? Maybe I'm just getting old, but it's the first time I've ever felt there might be some truth in that proverb.”

  　“Proverb?”

  　“Yeah. Heaven's net is wide and coarse but nothing slips through.”

  　Takegami had expected Akitsu to laugh, but he said seriously, “Divine punishment, you mean? But what about the body in the trunk?”

  　“What about it?”

  　“You remember what he said on that HBS program?”

  　When the caller was criticized for picking on defenseless women, he'd countered by asking if he should kill men instead.

  　“Anyway, if those guys are the ones we're after, then that will have been their last crime.”

  　And they'd been on their way to dispose of the body when they had an accident.