“What do you mean?”
Tadashima opened his notebook, licked his thumb, and flipped through a few pages.
“Before I came here, I asked a few basic questions to the people in the Tendo Agency.”
Rentaro thought his heart was going to stop. So Kisara, Tina, and Enju all knew he’d been arrested.
“Your boss testified that the victim, Kihachi Suibara, visited you to discuss a job. Thing is, though, she didn’t hear what the job was about.”
“He only wanted to discuss it with me. It was a trust issue.”
“All right, so who would know about that?”
“We were the only two people in the office. Suibara told me to get everyone else out of there—”
“—So nobody besides you knows what the job was about?”
“…What are you getting at?”
Tadashima’s eyes settled on his notebook. He began flipping through pages again.
“Well, I have some testimony here from your Initiator. She said you were clearly acting strange when she got back from her shopping. She offered to eat dinner together with you, but you declined and disappeared somewhere, apparently.”
“That…!” Rentaro raised his voice at first, but fell silent for a moment, unable to figure out what to say.
“What is it? Go ahead.”
“That’s a different thing…”
“You’re using your right to remain silent about it?”
“No! My boss got an offer for an arranged marriage, so…you know, it was hurting me, sharing the same space as her.”
Tadashima’s face indicated this wasn’t the reply he expected.
“So you’re in love with your boss?”
Rentaro blushed and stared at the floor. He could hear snickering from behind.
“Stop trying to dodge the question.”
“What do you mean by that?” Rentaro turned around and glared at the detective behind him. “Keep your eyes on me,” a low voice rumbled from in front. He followed the order, as Tadashima placed his elbows on the desk and clasped his fingers together.
“All right, so this is what we’re saying here. Basically, we don’t think Kihachi Suibara had any job for you at all.”
“What?”
“The victim was demanding money from you. Blackmail. I don’t know what he had on you, but you knew each other since childhood, so I’m sure he could dig up something. You saved Tokyo Area’s hide in the Third Kanto Battle and the Kagetane Hiruko terror attacks, so Suibara figured he’d try extorting whatever money he could from you. He threatened you, and that freaked you out so much that you didn’t feel like eating dinner together with your coworkers. Am I right?
“Then, once you decided to kill him, you lured Suibara to the site of your choice, you pulled the trigger, the police got a report of gunshots, and there you were. Kind of a silly thing to commit murder for, isn’t it?”
“That’s bullshit, man!”
Where did all that come from? There wasn’t a shred of truth to it… But there was, too. He was the only person to hear the nature of Suibara’s request. And he really did leave afterward, because he couldn’t bear to face Kisara. He never dreamed the events of that evening would lead to this kind of misunderstanding. The sweat continued to run down his cheeks.
“…Look, Inspector. I fought in the Third Kanto Battle. I fended off Kagetane Hiruko. Do you really think I’d kill someone over something like that?”
Rentaro was ready to turn to prayer at this point. If he lost Tadashima, the only person he could turn to now, his fate was all but sealed.
But the inspector just gave him an indifferent head shake. “I don’t know that. That’s why I’m here questioning you right now. Evil people do evil things. They get arrested for it. I’ve seen dozens of so-called ‘nice guys’ in here after something possessed them to go bad.”
Rentaro weakly shook his head.
“I didn’t do it.”
“So you’re denying the charge?”
“Of course I am! I’m not gonna own up to something I didn’t do. Get me a lawyer. You gotta have a lawyer on duty, right?”
Tadashima gave Rentaro a tiny sigh, staring straight through his suspect with cold eyes.
“Rentaro Satomi, I’m officially placing you in police custody. I’m gonna request an extension from the judge tomorrow, too, so I hope you’re ready to spend a little while in jail.”
7
“Well, I guess luck’s not been on your side lately, huh, Rentaro?”
Sumire Muroto sat on one side of the reinforced-glass barrier, picking at her hair distractedly as she griped at the prisoner on the other side.
“I swear, every time I get involved with you, I wind up being forced out of the basement over and over again. I hate it. I had to expose myself to the sun at full blast on the way here. I thought I was gonna turn into a pile of ashes, ha-ha-ha.”
Even by Sumire standards, the laugh sounded terribly contrived.
“They wearing you out in there?”
Rentaro gave her a shrug. “I’m doing pretty good, actually. Three hots and a cot, and all that. Plus, I can nap all I want.”
Sumire looked surprised for a moment, then curled her lips upward. “That’s the spirit, my boy,” she said. “If you could keep your spirits up long enough to escape, that’d save me a lot of trouble.”
A cough emanated from behind Rentaro as the prison guard chose that moment to make his presence known. Sumire replied with a calm shrug.
The two of them were in the visitation room. A week had passed since Rentaro was placed under custody.
“Y’know, I figured if you ever got yourself arrested, it’d be once you finally succumbed to your raging hormones and started licking little girls’ rear ends in the park. But murder, though, huh? For better or for worse, you’ve really surpassed my expectations.”
“I didn’t kill anybody.”
“They must’ve let you talk to an attorney by now. How’s that going?”
“It’s going nowhere. I’m a shoo-in to get prosecuted, and he said I don’t stand much chance of winning.”
“Must’ve been a shock, huh?”
“Not really,” Rentaro lied. Somewhere in his heart, he still believed in himself. He didn’t kill anyone, so someone would understand soon enough. Justice would be served. But it turned out that he didn’t need much time for that hope to transform itself into hopelessness. There were the intense interrogation sessions, the extension of his custody period, the cuffs and belly chain they made him move around in like a hardened criminal, the being forced by detectives and assistant prosecutors to recite what he did on that evening dozens of times. His miserable pleas of “I didn’t do it” were cut off by apathetic inquisitors telling him to “just answer the questions you’re asked,” shouting down the voice of innocence.
The idea that some assassin group rubbed Suibara out was greeted with open derision. On more than one occasion, the desperation made him want to confess to everything and put the matter to rest finally.
“I bet we could improve your chances if I represented you in court, but I guess I’d need to go through all this stupid paperwork and licensing and so on first.”
“Uh, you’re a doctor.”
“Nothing in the law books saying a doctor can’t be a lawyer, is there?”
“Well, no, but…”
“Besides, I’ve read all the statutes already. All of them. Pretty heady reading. It took me thirty whole minutes to memorize them all.”
“What did you think of it?”
“It’s a remarkable guide to all the greedy desires of mankind. There’s a lot of them. And by the way,” Sumire said as she looked at Rentaro’s chest, “I heard that Enju’s been paying you regular visits.”
She was staring at a poorly made patchwork rabbit sewn into the loose hoodie he was wearing. He touched it, noting the quilted fabric. A gift from Enju.
The school uniform he had on during his arrest was confiscated from him—he
could’ve hung himself with the belt, or swallowed the buttons on it to die of suffocation or blockage or something. He really should’ve had his cybernetic limbs taken from him, too, but the artificial skin covering them meant he didn’t have to worry about that unless he blabbed about it.
Enju had been his only other visitor. Neither Tina nor Kisara showed their face once.
“How’s Tina doing, Doctor?”
Sumire shook her head. “She hasn’t gotten back from the police yet.”
Tina was detained not long after Rentaro’s arrest. Just as Sumire feared, Tina was the only person they could find capable of shooting a target traveling on a 200-kilometer-per-hour train. According to Enju, she wasn’t charged with anything, but the police hauled her in as a material witness and she hadn’t been sighted at the office since. Her inability to provide an alibi for the day of the murder was another black mark on her credibility.
“If this keeps up, they’ll probably make you out to be the mastermind behind Giichi Ebihara’s murder, with Tina serving as your hit man.”
“That’s insane!”
As Rentaro spat out the words, Sumire, distracted, leaned over and calmly placed her elbows on the table in front of her, putting her chin on her crossed arms.
“It is. It’s really insane. But whenever something absurd and nonsensical happens, they always try to rationalize it as much as possible. You were at the scene of the crime, and you were standing there with the murder weapon in your hand. Meanwhile, a sniper killed their target under next-to-impossible conditions, and they can only find one person realistically capable of doing that. Only the scales of justice know what the verdict will be, and all that, but it’s pretty easy for me to imagine the jurors’ faces listening to that story.”
“……”
“But enough good news, huh? Lemme give you the bad news. Once you’re found guilty in a court of law, the regulations say that your civsec license’s gonna be revoked. I guess they don’t want convicted felons carrying those licenses around. Who knew, huh? But the worst part of that is, once you’re stripped of your right to perform civsec duties, Enju’s gonna be turned over to the IISO—the International Initiator Supervision Organization.”
“They’re…?”
“You’re allowed to live with a ten-year-old girl you’re not related to because your civsec license gives you that right. If you lose that, Enju’s gonna be put in a pretty rough situation.”
“She can just retire from the Initiator business, then.”
She should have the right, Rentaro reasoned. Initiators in Tokyo Area were fielded from a pool of volunteers and scouts. But Sumire shook her head. “I don’t think that’s gonna work. If Enju quits that gig, her supply of anti-corrosion drugs from the IISO will dry right up. In her current state, that’s gonna be fatal.”
“Shiiiiit.” Rentaro slammed his fist against the table. “We’re all screwed, aren’t we?”
The prison guard rolled his eyes at them as Sumire stood up.
“Well, just think about it, all right, Rentaro? It’s do-or-die time.”
Then she left the room.
What should I do? Rentaro internally asked himself. But no clear answer came to mind. As long as he was locked in here, it wouldn’t be easy for him to do much of anything. His last hope was that they’d decline to prosecute due to lack of evidence.
Calming his frayed nerves, Rentaro put his hands against each other, as if in prayer. I won’t get prosecuted. I mean, I didn’t kill anyone. Even after the guard motioned him to stand up, he stayed right in place, silent.
Two days later, Rentaro Satomi was officially indicted by the assistant prosecutor and went from being a suspect to the accused.
8
Days of dejection followed the filing of the prosecution papers.
When he was first told about it, Rentaro grew so angry at all its unfairness that the guard escorting him had to hold him down. What followed after that was a profound emptiness.
He hadn’t been able to see Tina since his arrest and detainment, but based on what he heard, the situation wasn’t too favorable for her either. Normally, the ten-year-old Tina Sprout would be offered at least some protections in the juvenile courts, but the prosecutor was apparently bound and determined to throw her to the gallows, using the excuse that she was not strictly a human being in order to try her as an adult and get her on the stand in court.
The despair in Rentaro’s mind weighed on him intensely. Wasn’t the law supposed to be the final line of defense the weak could turn to? Had human civilization decayed to the point where witch hunts like these were allowed to happen? Or was it that the hearts of the people themselves had decayed?
Enju, at least, came to visit him almost every day. She’d lean close to him, almost pressing her face against the partition, and give him all sorts of trite pleasantries—“It’s gonna be all right,” “You haven’t done anything bad at all, Rentaro,” “Once you get out, I’ll let you cop a feel free of charge,” that sort of thing.
Rentaro, for his part, gave what he thought were suitable replies—“Thanks,” “Of course not,” “I’ll pass on that.” Still, he was deeply in gratitude for her. Without her encouragement, the punishing despair he was facing would cause irreversible damage to his psyche. If it weren’t for the shatterproof glass in the way, he’d embrace her in a shower of kisses. Then, realizing he was getting this worked up over a ten-year-old girl, he felt an odd sense of embarrassment.
Today, once again, Rentaro was seated on his visitation-room chair. The person sitting across from him, however, was neither Sumire nor Enju.
For a while, Rentaro stayed silent, not knowing how he should break the ice. To the girl in the black school uniform, it must have been the same way. The clock on the wall robotically ticked off three minutes of their valuable visitation time before the girl opened her mouth.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I had wanted to show up earlier than this…”
“It’s all right, Kisara. I don’t mind.”
Enju had given him enough advance warning that he had managed to keep himself calm at the sight of her.
He had no way of knowing this at the jail, but Rentaro’s arrest and Tina’s volunteering herself to police questioning had drawn the attention of the mainstream media—a frenzy that fell squarely on Kisara’s shoulders to handle. He respected how wild and audacious she could be, but he also knew that this was still just a sixteen-year-old girl.
Worse, Tina’s and Rentaro’s absence meant that the Tendo Civil Security Agency now boasted a roster of exactly zero pairs. Enju mentioned that they’d had to turn down the paltry number of jobs they’d been offered in the meantime due to that—and, to help prop her up mentally, Kisara had met up with Hitsuma several times, her potential marriage partner now serving as her closest confidant.
“So what’re you gonna do about the marriage, Kisara?” Rentaro gently asked.
Kisara put a bright face forward. “Well, Hitsuma’s a really good person. He’s with the police, so we’ve been able to talk about your case a lot, Satomi…” Then she stopped for a moment, head hung low. “But, Satomi, you want to ask me a lot more than that, don’t you?”
“Like?”
“Like, why I haven’t come to see you until now?”
“Not really,” Rentaro bluntly replied. “You were busy, weren’t you?” But the accusation startled him internally. He did want to know. It was driving him nuts. No matter how busy she was, she didn’t have a single moment to stop by? Did Hitsuma have something to do with that? …It sounded so pathetic to him, asking about trivial nonsense like that. What remained of Rentaro’s pride kept him from doing it.
“You know, Satomi, I’ve been thinking about a lot of stuff. I thought that I probably shouldn’t see you until I was ready to give a concrete answer…but I think I have that now.”
Kisara raised her head up, adjusting her posture as she looked at Rentaro.
“Satomi, I’m willing to do anything for
you. I’ll hire the best attorneys I can find. You don’t have to worry about the money. I’m going to make sure Tina wins her case, too, and then all four of us can go back to running the Tendo Civil Security Agency. I know it took a little too long, but that’s my answer.”
Rentaro looked at Kisara, speechless, emotions welling up in his chest.
Where would Kisara, who once tried to make her employees live off nothing but sweet potatoes, get that kind of money? She must have been talking about taking all her assets—her stocks, her savings, the deposit paid toward her tuition at Miwa Girls Academy—but, no, that still wouldn’t be enough. And if he wound up losing his case, that would be the final straw for their agency. She’d be so in the red, she would never be allowed to run a business again. And yet, that was the decision she made.
Rentaro felt ashamed of himself. He was obsessing so much over Hitsuma and Kisara’s relationship that he completely lost sight of what was important. The ugly jealousy that ruled over him melted away into nothing. Love replaced it. He wanted to smash through the partition and bring Kisara close to his heart right this minute.
But a voice in the back of his head stopped him.
“Do you know what that means, Rentaro? If you really just want Kisara to be happy, you’re gonna have to keep killing off your own feelings. There’s no way to half-ass that. Do you swear you’ll do that?”
The forensics department head asked him that in Magata University Hospital’s basement. How did he reply, again?
It was clear enough from what Kisara had told him that he was important to her.
Rentaro closed his eyes and slowly opened them again.
I won’t hope for anything more.
“Kisara, I’m glad you feel that way, but I don’t need that.”
“Wh-why not?”
Rentaro stared at his knees, gauging the shocked Kisara from the corner of his eye. “How about you calm down a bit?” he asked dryly. “I’ve sat here and let you talk, and what I see is that you’ve been running around with all your might, trying to be a hero. And that’s your right and all, but I don’t want your help.”
Rentaro Satomi, Fugitive Page 8