The Silent Dead

by Tetsuya Honda

  “If we slit the gut, then the gas won’t build up—the body won’t inflate in the first place, right?”

  The guy young liked the suggestion. Everybody was happy.

  That, I guess, was the start of our strange partnership of crime.

  * * *

  “You’re fucking amazing. You blew my mind. What you did, it was like performance art. You’re a genius—an artist of murder. I can’t get the image out of my head.”

  The young guy was even more of a weirdo than I thought. I didn’t understand half of what he was saying. It felt quite nice, though. Fact is, I’d realized the same thing about myself. And I wanted to kill again.

  I killed my parents. After that, I got the nickname F and used violence as a way to feel alive. I was like a trader, and life was the wares I dealt in. Live or die? Kill or be killed? Those were the only times when I felt even slightly alive. Usually, the people I was hanging with stopped me before I actually murdered anyone. No one wanted to trigger a cycle of killing. Not even my friends in the Gang lusted for full-on slaughter.

  This young guy, however, was something else.

  “I want to provide you with a platform,” he said. “A theater of murder, a stage where you can kill all the people you want. You get me?”

  I got him. I liked the idea. But could he really do it? It sounded like a shortcut to the inside of a jail cell to me. The “all the people you want” part was hard to swallow.

  Amazingly, the young guy seemed to be in earnest.

  * * *

  One night, he came to pick me up. “We’ve got our first performance, so come with me now.” I thought he was bullshitting me, but I felt a little bit excited anyway. I went with him.

  He took me to a boarded-up building. It used to be a strip joint. There was a warren of passages, a dressing room, an auditorium, a stage. In the dressing room, I changed into my leather bodysuit, a new one, not the one I’d gotten from the old homeless fellow. Then I put on a mask, a black mask like the ones that professional wrestlers sometimes wore. It had holes only for the eyes and had mesh to cover the nose and mouth. I looked in the mirror. A real killer was looking back at me.

  Cool!

  I waited by myself in the dressing room for ages. The spectators came in, and the place gradually filled up. The atmosphere was electric. The spectators knew that something incredible was about to take place. They were going to see a murder show. I was going to kill somebody live on stage. But who?

  “F, you’re up soon.”

  The person who came to fetch me onstage was the young guy’s buddy—the one who had run off as fast as his legs could carry him the day I killed their friend. Today, though, we were all on the same side. Funny old world, huh?

  I left the green room, walked down a narrow passage, and went to the wings of the stage. We hadn’t discussed what I was meant to do out there. All I had with me was my pink box cutter, like a lucky charm. Everyone I’d killed, I’d killed with it.

  “Get out there and do your thing,” said Mr. Quick Exit.

  I went out onto the stage.

  A spotlight went on with a thunk and bathed the stage in a beam of blinding white light. The rest of the room was in complete darkness. It was like there was nothing left in the world except the stage and me. It was a nice, simple world split cleanly between black and white. In the middle of the stage there was a bed. A woman lay on the bed. Duct tape covered her eyes, her mouth, her wrists, and her ankles. Her arms were pulled apart and her upper body was naked. Of course, I could see her titties. It was embarrassing, uncomfortable.

  In a neat row at the foot the bed there was a saw, a carving knife, a sickle, a bat studded with nails, a broken beer bottle, and a whip. Had to be the tools the young guy wanted me to use on the woman. I’d never seen her before. I had no special reason to hate her. Killing her seemed a bit pointless.

  I took a good look. She was slim and her skin was pale. Erect nipples on firm breasts, which rose and fell. Her hair was stylishly cut and dyed an elegant gray. She must have been excited because her breathing was fast and ragged. She was a looker.

  You look like one of those normal people—one of those goddamned happy people.

  Suddenly I felt that killing her was okay.

  When I picked up the studded bat, she must have heard something. She turned toward me, trying to get a sense of what was happening. Her lips were writhing beneath the duct tape. She twisted and thrashed, trying to move. No chance. She was tied down good and proper.

  I hadn’t played much baseball, but I knew the basics. I imagined that one of her breasts was a ball and took my best swing.

  There was a tremendous clattering of metal. The woman was squirming wildly, rocking the whole bed. Was it going to tip over? I heard sounds coming from the darkness of the auditorium. Screamlike sounds.

  I held the bat up. Red blood was dripping from the bat. I looked back at her. As I watched, the red of the blood spread out, covering her whole torso. It was beautiful.

  The spectators were making a lot of noise now. Must be enjoying themselves! They think I’m great, like the young guy who organized this murder show. “Make the bitch suffer! Kill her as cruelly as you can!” That was my interpretation of their whooping and yelling.

  The applause. The tang of blood. And red, the most beautiful color in the world. I was feeling good now. I was feeling truly alive.

  I took another swing. Then another. And another.

  I forgot all about the spectators. I was delirious. I was obsessed with making this woman bright red—like a moist ripe strawberry.

  Sweet! I grinned behind my mask.

  Perhaps it was time for something special to send her over the edge?

  Yes, it is time.

  I took the pink box cutter out of my pocket.

  1

  SATURDAY, AUGUST 23, 8:00 A.M.

  Reiko and Otsuka loitered in front of the counter on the ground floor of Kameari police station. They were hoping to catch Captain Imaizumi and Director Hashizume en route to the morning meeting, fill them in on what Otsuka had discovered, and get his findings incorporated into the investigation. Reiko and Otsuka were all but certain that Kanebara and Namekawa were regulars at the Strawberry Night murder show—and had been killed as a result.

  Other members of the task force, some from the local precinct, some from the TMPD, strolled by. Ishikura turned up with a morning newspaper stuffed under his arm.

  “Morning, Lieutenant. What’s up?”

  “Just the man I wanted to meet. Could you reserve one of the smaller meeting rooms for us?”

  “Sure, no problem. Planning on blindsiding the top brass again?”

  Ishikura was sharp.

  “Not me,” said Himekawa. “Otsuka.”

  Ishikura grinned at Otsuka. Reiko knew that Ishikura had a soft spot for the younger man. As detectives, the two of them had a great deal in common.

  “Nice work, kid.”

  Ishikura gave Otsuka a playful punch on the chest.

  “Just got lucky,” Otsuka said.

  “Sure you did. Nice work, son.”

  Instead of heading up the stairs, Ishikura headed down the passage to the admin offices. Reiko thought she detected a spring in his step.

  * * *

  Reiko and her squad gathered in one of the smaller meeting rooms along with Captain Imaizumi. Yuda was waiting out in the lobby with orders to bring Director Hashizume in the minute he showed up.

  Several minutes later the door swung open. It was neither Yuda nor Hashizume.

  “What’s going on here? First thing in the morning, and already doing things behind my back!”

  Stubby!

  It was Lieutenant Katsumata with his four goons in tow, come to crash the party. Reiko wasn’t surprised. He was hardly the type to sit passively in the main meeting room when Reiko and her whole team were somewhere else. She didn’t know how he’d tracked her down, but Katsumata would have looked behind every door in the police station including t
he supply closet to find them. Reiko had never meant to play hide-and-seek with him. That would be lowering herself to his level.

  “No one’s doing anything behind your back. There’s an issue I need to flag up before the main meeting got started. For the good of the overall investigation.”

  “Yeah? Well, you won’t mind if we join you then?”

  “Feel free.”

  Katsumata sauntered in and threw himself into the chair next to Captain Imaizumi. His squad members stood in a neat row behind him. Katsumata leaned over to Imaizumi.

  “Hi, Zoomzoom. Full of yourself as ever, you parakeet?”

  Reiko was mystified.

  “Hear you’ve been busy flashing the cash,” Captain Imaizumi said.

  “Says who?”

  “Spreading it around in Shinjuku yesterday, I heard.”

  “Don’t know what you’re talking about,” Katsumata said, then turned away.

  Reiko was at a loss, but her impression was that Imaizumi had got the better of the exchange.

  A couple of minutes later, Yuda ushered Hashizume into the room.

  “Thanks,” said the director. “I’ll take it from here.”

  He did a quick survey of the room. From where people were sitting, he deduced that Reiko had called the meeting.

  “You again, eh? What now? You want us to mobilize the army?”

  Hashizume sat down in the vacant chair on the other side of Imaizumi.

  “Keep it short and sweet. The morning meeting is due to—”

  Reiko interrupted him. “I already told the task force coordinator to push the start time back by half an hour.”

  Hashizume frowned in distaste. He was about to snap at her, but thought better of it.

  “You boys want a seat?” Reiko pointed to some vacant places on the other side of the table, and Katsumata’s four subordinates sat down.

  “Officer Otsuka, will you begin?”

  Otsuka passed a sheaf of paper across to Hashizume and Imaizumi. It was a document that he and Reiko had put together the day before. There were extracts from the printouts Otsuka had shown Reiko in Ikebukuro, with key sections highlighted in marker pen.

  Katsumata brazenly looked over Captain Imaizumi’s shoulder as he scanned the document.

  “What you have there is information I got from an interview with Tomohiko Tashiro on the nineteenth of August,” began Otsuka. “Tashiro and Namekawa have been close friends since college. Namekawa had mentioned a Web site called Strawberry Night to his friend. Tashiro didn’t think much of it at the time, but when he got the news that Namekawa had been killed, he remembered that Namekawa had said something about a ‘murder show.’ Suspecting a possible connection to Namekawa’s murder, Tashiro brought the matter to my attention.

  “If you look at the documentation, you can see that this ‘murder show’ has been the subject of discussion on several message boards for quite a while now. This is a printout of actual postings on a single specific day. If it’s hard to follow, refer to the summary I added at the bottom of the page. You can see that there are several points of overlap between Strawberry Night, which they are discussing, and the case we are currently working on.

  “For starters, note that the ‘murder show’ is held on the second Sunday of the month. The different online communities have different ideas on the date: on one message board, they think it’s the thirteenth of the month; somewhere else, they say the tenth. However, the contributor who appears to be by far the best informed states that the show is held on the second Sunday of the month.

  “The same contributor says something else very interesting. Turn to the next page, please, the one headed ‘Event Format.’ Apparently, somebody is murdered on a stage. So far, so straightforward. What’s really interesting is that the person who’s murdered is actually chosen from that day’s audience. The spectators, in other words, can themselves end up as victims at any time. What if Kanebara and Namekawa had both been spectators at the show for months, until one day the tables were turned and they found themselves being murdered onstage? That would fit the pattern of unexplained absences of both victims on the second Sunday of the month, and it matches the date of their murders.

  “That brings me to my third point. According to the various message boards, the Strawberry Night homepage is not normally accessible. It only shows up occasionally, apparently in response to a online search for it, and then it can only be accessed for a few hours. After that, the URL takes you nowhere. You get a ‘server not found’ notice, and searching for it turns up nothing. As a result, a very limited number of people have successfully accessed the actual homepage. Their reports circulate mostly as hearsay, which diminishes their credibility, of course. There are, however, multiple accounts that the video on the homepage shows someone having their throat slashed with a box cutter. The knife is put to the victim’s throat, then pulled to one side, killing them.… Since we’re talking about digital images, we can’t rule out the possibility that the whole thing is a hoax. Against that, there is the fact that everyone who claims to have seen the page stresses how real the video looks.

  “Putting all this together, I think that a valid case can be made that both Kanebara and Namekawa accessed the Strawberry Night homepage and attended the murder show, and that Namekawa was selected as the victim and murdered last month, with the same thing happening to Kanebara this month. The oldest thread I can find about Strawberry Night is from November of last year. That would suggest that the show has been running for at least ten months—which would give us a minimum of ten victims.

  “Hang on a minute,” Director Hashizume said. “The divers spent five days searching the Mizumoto Park pond, and Namekawa’s was the only body they found.”

  “Are you recommending we go on some more fishing trips?” sneered Katsumata.

  Hashizume treated Katsumata to a withering stare, then turned back to Otsuka.

  “What you’ve got here is way too much hearsay for me. Most of your report isn’t even secondhand—it’s third-hand or worse. Apparently this and what if that. What are you going to come up with next, man—the hound of the bloody Baskervilles? The whole thing looks like an urban myth to me.”

  That’s pretty much the reaction I expected from you, Director.

  Reiko got to her feet. It was time for her to strut her stuff.

  “As things currently stand, Director, this is the only hypothesis that can establish a link between the victims’ mysterious behavior patterns and their deaths and that can provide a logical explanation for both. The numerous cuts on the victims’ torsos, we assume, come from torture. The sadistic infliction of injuries like these makes for a good spectacle. Then there’s the cut to the neck. That’s the show’s grand finale. It is also reputed to be the part that was streamed online. They need to kill the victims in an unambiguous, even spectacular fashion—in a way that draws a clear and explicit line between life and death. That’s why they slash the carotid artery. Because it releases the most spectacular fountain of blood. Last of all, there’s the cut to the abdomen. We’ve already solved that particular puzzle and how it enables them to conceal the bodies underwater. I believe that Strawberry Night is not a myth, that Kanebara and Namekawa were involved with it, and that they died as a result.

  “Nonetheless, I understand your skepticism, Director. Otsuka’s report does indeed lack credibility. The information in it is nothing more than hearsay pulled off the Internet. I can’t deny that on the same message boards some of the contributors dismiss Strawberry Night as a silly urban legend.

  “That is why I don’t think we should make Strawberry Night the main focus of the task force’s investigation. At best, it’s just one hypothesis for us to test and perhaps eliminate. There’s no need to put the entire task force on it. My squad has enough manpower. Why not let us handle it?”

  Katsumata glowered at Reiko with pure hatred in his eyes. She had set up this preliminary meeting knowing full well that Hashizume wouldn’t devote all of the task f
orce’s resources into investigating what might be a fantasy. She’d played her cards well, and now she got to take personal control of this whole aspect of the investigation. Katsumata, meanwhile, was left no way to muscle in on it. At least, not overtly.

  Katsumata scowled and clenched his jaw. Reiko savored his frustration.

  Suck it, Stubby! How’d you enjoy my master class on how to hijack an investigation?

  “I think Himekawa’s entire squad is too much manpower to throw at this,” said Director Hashizume to Captain Imaizumi.

  “You’re probably right,” concurred the captain.

  “I want two of your guys to stick with interviewing the victims’ friends and families.”

  Reiko shot a glance at Ishikura and Yuda. They nodded their assent.

  “All right, Director. Otsuka, Kikuta, and I will investigate this lead.”

  Hashizume jabbed a finger at her. “How, exactly?”

  “Based on the available information, I think it’s fair to assume that the murder show is probably held in one of the capital’s livelier shopping and entertainment districts. Anywhere quiet, and the locals would get suspicious about unexplained large groups. So we’ll start our inquiries in Shinjuku, Shibuya, and Ikebukuro. Specifically, we’ll be looking for places with a stage and room for an audience—strip clubs, small theaters, and live music clubs—that aren’t in daily use or have closed down. We’ll locate them by combing through the relevant local publications for the sex industry; we’ll also talk to local real estate agents.”

  Reiko felt a throb of pleasure as the investigation began to develop real momentum.

  We’re going to fight, and we’re going to win.

  Reiko no longer knew whether the voice in her head was Detective Sata speaking to her or if she was simply talking to herself.

  “Sounds dangerous to me,” growled Katsumata.

  2

  Otsuka and Kitami were assigned central Ikebukuro.

  Ikebukuro was one of Tokyo’s top entertainment and nightlife districts. There was a whole cluster of department stores—Tobu, Seibu, Mitsukoshi, Parco, Marui, Sunshine 60—around ten electronics emporiums, plus every kind of restaurant and bar imaginable, movie theaters, karaoke parlors, amusement arcades, pachinko parlors, sex clubs, love hotels. The whole district was so stuffed with people and businesses that it was a challenge to think of anything that was not there.