Katsumata agreed. The basic technique had a lot in common with loan sharking: pile on the psychological pressure until people lost the ability to think rationally. The approach was effective—on amateurs, at least.
“Go on,” said Katsumata encouragingly.
“The invitation proper arrived two or three days later. The date of the show was November the tenth, the second Sunday of the month; the place was Kabukicho in Shinjuku; the time was six fifteen p.m., and the entrance fee was one hundred thousand yen.
“By that stage, I was convinced that I’d end up being murdered like the person in the video if I failed to show up. I made up my mind to go. My idea was to just go the one time and ask the people behind it to let me walk away if I promised not to contact the police and never breathe a word to anyone.
“I felt a whole lot better after making that decision. ‘It’s not like you’re going to kill anyone,’ I kept telling myself. ‘You’re only going to be a spectator.’ Gradually, I started feeling more positive. Perhaps there was nothing to it after all. Perhaps the elaborate video and the nasty threats were just a tasteless prank.
“When I went to the venue on the day specified, the thing that really spooked me was the meticulous organization. There was this derelict building, with no sign or anything outside, and all these people milling around. They would check their watches, then one would go in, then another.… I realized that there was a reason why my invitation said six fifteen. They were managing the inflow, getting people to come in one by one.”
Was there anyone stationed outside for crowd control? Katsumata asked. Tashiro said no. You just went on in when your time came.
“So when it was my turn, I went in. There was this passageway with a black curtain at the far end. It was the only way in, so I pushed through the curtain. Behind, it was like a tunnel with black curtains on either side. I was going along it until suddenly this voice commanded me to stop. A man in a black mask with a flashlight was inspecting me from between two curtains. It’s the same drill every time. You give your name, and they check that the name and face match. That’s also when you pay the entrance fee. When that’s all taken care of, you keep on going until you emerge into this auditoriumlike space.
“It was bigger and a bit brighter. There was a stage. Nothing else. By the time I went in, there must have been about ten people there already. With the others who came after me, there must have been about twenty of us in total.
“Then I heard this loud bang behind me. ‘They’ve shut the door,’ I thought. It didn’t occur to me to leave. Might as well stick it out and see what was going to happen. There were twenty of us. They couldn’t very well murder all of us!”
Katsumata noticed a moist glint in Tashiro’s bloodshot eyes. Crybabies were another of his pet hates.
“The show eventually started. The first time I went, there was this guy nailed to a cross. Two men in black masks carried him out onto the stage. He had trousers on, but was bare above the waist. There were these strips of cloth over his eyes and his mouth. Next, the two men carried out this brazier full of charcoal.… We soon discovered why.
“Just one of the masked men came back out. There were these long metal chopsticks sticking out of the burning charcoal. He pulled one of them out, then held it up against the man’s stomach in an almost playful way. There was smoke and a sizzling sound, and the man on the cross moaned into his gag. The chopstick left this long thin purple welt on his stomach. Then the man in the mask began skipping around the stage, pressing the hot chopsticks into the man’s flesh over and over and over again.
“There were plenty of chopsticks in the brazier. When one of them cooled down, he would just help himself to another. He stuck one up the guy’s nose—all the way up. People screamed. He gave his ears and mouth the same treatment, straight through the gag. Next he went for the eyes … he was relentless. He poked and jabbed until the eyeballs popped out. There was a lot of blood and smoke. The smell wafted over to where I was standing.… It was like roasted meat.
“Eventually, the guy on the cross stopped moving. He’d passed out. The masked fellow slapped him. No reaction. Doused him with water. Again, nothing. That was when he whipped out this knife, an ordinary cheap box cutter thing. He drew it across the guy’s throat like this.”
Tashiro mimed a slashing motion. “He was so offhand about it, but, oh my God, the blood—it just exploded out like water spurting from a fountain. Some of the audience got spattered. It was thrilling, beautiful.…
“It was like art. It blew me away. Your take on life changes when you see death close up. This person is beaten to a pulp and murdered right in front of you, there’s no space between you and them. And all that separates life and death is the flimsy little blade of a box cutter.”
A confusing jumble of expressions scudded across Tashiro’s face. He smiled, then cringed; his eyes shone with elation, then brimmed with tears.
It’s like watching a speeded-up film of someone losing their marbles.
“It took me a while to figure out that the person who got murdered was always one of the people who’d come to see the show. This one time I noticed that the woman up on stage was wearing the same skirt as a woman I’d seen waiting outside in the street before. I guess that the passageway that led to the auditorium, that dark tunnel, was where our fates were decided. The person they grabbed ended up on stage, while the rest of us were the audience.
“The realization terrified me—but I still wanted to go. Maybe more than ever. Even though I knew I could end up on the stage myself, I felt this compulsion. God, the relief I felt when I made it safely through the tunnel to the theater! You saw the victim torn to pieces, each month a completely different method, each time brutal and horrible. They were reduced to a bloody mess, killed. And you knew it could have been you. You got this incredible sense of superiority, of being special. ‘I survived today, and I’ve got another whole month of life ahead of me.’ It was pure, unadulterated joy. Knowing—really feeling in your bones—that your life exists as the flip side of death, of death of the nastiest and most degrading kind. It’s wonderful. The whole world seems to open up before you.”
Katsumata gaped in mute astonishment.
Sense of superiority? Pure unadulterated joy?
Tashiro began giggling.
A forty-year-old man who still peed his pants was raving about a murder show with a look of pure ecstasy on his face. There was no way to put a positive spin on it, thought Katsumata. The man’s mind must have given way.
Katsumata flicked the stub of his umpteenth cigarette into the half-dried puddle of Tashiro’s urine.
“How did Namekawa end up going? Did you introduce him?”
“Yes, I did. Though introduced is the wrong word. I just chatted to him about the show and recommended it to him. The guy was in a slump and had lost all his inspiration. He was jaded. The show, I told him, would help him rediscover his sense of what it really meant to be alive. He found the homepage for himself and showed up on his own. That was the way it worked.”
“Okay. Listen, I’ve had about all I can take of your blow-by-blow reportage. I’m going to ask you a serious question, and I need a serious answer. Who organizes the event?”
“No idea.” Tashiro shook his head, the ecstatic glow on his face quite undimmed.
“Okay then. How many people are involved in running it?”
“I don’t know. Maybe five…”
“You sure?”
“No, that’s why I said ‘maybe.’ Could be fewer, could be more.” Tashiro gave a start and looked directly up at Katsumata. Apparently he was lucid again. “Oh, I just remembered something. There was this time when I was standing near the side of the stage and I heard people talking in the wings. Someone said, ‘Go and fetch F.’ Yeah, I remember that.”
“F? Like the letter f?”
“It’s just something I overheard.… Still, the show got under way very soon after. Perhaps the psycho killer’s name was F.”
“Let’s rewind a bit. There was the guy who said, ‘Fetch F’; the guy who did the fetching; and then F himself. That gives us at least three people.”
“Sounds about right.”
The most obvious way to interpret F was as the first letter in the anglicized version of a Japanese name. The only person Katsumata could think of whose name fit was Yasuyuki Fukazawa.
There was a problem, though. If Fukazawa was the perpetrator, he could have killed the ten victims up to and including Namekawa. But he couldn’t have killed the most recent victim, Kanebara. Could somebody else have stepped in to take his place as a one-off? Another member of the group could have copied Fukazawa’s method of killing.
“You were away on a business trip when Namekawa was murdered, right?”
Tashiro smiled creepily. “Not really. I finished my business in Osaka early and hurried back for the show. When I realized that Namekawa was the victim that night, I was horrified—but felt a whole new level of excitement too. My old friend was being killed right in front of me. There was the usual sense of superiority but with added complexity. The joy of having survived had an intensity, a potency—”
“Aw, shut it Tashiro.… There’s something else I need to ask you. At the most recent show, was it the same killer as before? Were Kanebara’s killer in August and Namekawa’s killer last month one and the same person?
Tashiro cocked his head. “Hmm. Difficult to say. They all wear these black masks, so it’s hard to tell them apart. I think it was the same person. He’s a scrawny guy, not very tall, always wears a black leather body suit.”
A black leather body suit? That’s it! That’s the link!
Katsumata tore Tatsumi’s envelope out of his pocket and showed the photographs to Tashiro.
“So this fellow is F?”
Tashiro’s head bobbed frantically up and down.
“Yes, that’s him. That’s F.”
“So who’s the other one? The guy who processes you on the way in?”
“I’m not sure.… No, he looks different. I don’t know.”
At the same time he was providing valuable testimony, Tashiro was also demolishing one of Katsumata’s pet theories.
Katsumata knew of one more person whose name began with f—Yasuyuki’s little sister, Yukari Fukazawa. However, the person in the black leather body suit in the photographs was quite clearly a man.
What the fuck’s going on here?
Katsumata felt jittery, uneasy. Like that feeling you got when you wore a shirt with the buttons done up wrong.
I’ve got to go see that Yukari girl.
“Okay,” Katsumata muttered to himself, as he stuffed the photos back into his inside jacket pocket. “I’m going to need a formal statement from you tomorrow, Tashiro. Wait for my call—and don’t forget to put on a fresh pair of underpants.”
Katsumata turned and walked away. Behind him, Tashiro continued jabbering to himself. Paying no attention, Katsuma raised a hand and hailed himself a cab.
PART IV
1
After going to take a look at a burlesque club that had recently changed hands, Reiko and Kitami dropped in on a couple of real estate agents. They learned nothing helpful.
This is a complete waste of time.
As they walked around Ikebukuro, they occasionally caught sight of investigators from the other task force based in the local precinct. They were busy doing the canvass in connection with Otsuka’s murder. Reiko recognized several of the guys from the Mobile Unit and from Homicide. Normally she would have said hi, but today, without being fully aware of it, she was doing her best not to be noticed.
She felt partly responsible for Otsuka’s death. She had no idea why he’d embarked on his solo investigation, and her ignorance was proof enough that she was doing a poor job managing her squad. In her emotionally fragile state, she was haunted by the sense of having failed one of her subordinates.
She was so focused on avoiding the other detectives that she found it difficult to concentrate on the interviews. Despite hearing the words that came out of people’s mouths, she couldn’t process the information. Allowing meaningless jabber to wash over her hardly counted as investigating anything. It certainly wasn’t going to lead to any arrests. Pathetic. She was being pathetic, and she knew it; but sloughing off her powerful feeling of self-loathing was easier said than done. Still, she knew that by wallowing in her own emotions, she was only letting time go to waste.
She looked at her watch. After 6:30 already. She could legitimately pack in the investigation for the day. She felt too low to show her face at the evening meeting. Kitami mentioned something about finding a vacant building. It sounded as good a way as any other to kill time.
“Shall we go and take a look at that place you found?”
Kitami was enthusiastic, and they set off through the twilight streets of Ikebukuro.
The outdoor air-conditioning units spewed heat. The street noise was like a solid wall. The faces of the people they passed glistened with sweat. All around them flowed crowds of people, crowds that intermeshed, unraveled, and dispersed. To Reiko, the normal, everyday bustle of the city was no more than a pantomime, devoid of reality.
They went south down Meiji Boulevard, past the Seibu department store. The overwhelming mass of people was heading in the opposite direction—toward the train station rather than away from it.
Gradually their numbers thinned out.
“I think it was this way,” said Kitami doubtfully as he turned into a street on the right. “Pretty sure it was around here. The building’s nearly finished. The windows have been installed, but it doesn’t yet have a front door. Perhaps I should have double-checked with the real estate guys. They’d have known the place.”
They were only two or three minutes’ walk away from Meiji Boulevard and not that far from the train station. It was good location if you were looking to draw a crowd.
Kitami eventually found what he was looking for. “That’s the place,” he said, pointing to a building. Reiko felt a sense of letdown: it hardly looked like Strawberry Night material to her.
“Seems like an ordinary apartment building to me.”
“I guess. But the second and third floors have an open-plan layout for business tenants.”
“So? What about all those? You can see straight in.”
“Maybe it’s different around the other side.”
“Maybe…”
“The location isn’t bad at all.”
“Yeah, maybe you’re right.”
“There’s a gap here.”
Kitami gave a shove to the corrugated iron fence that ran around the site.
“See? You can easily slip through here.”
“Guess so,” said Reiko tepidly.
This is a total waste of time.
She couldn’t see any point in inspecting the building. On the other hand, she didn’t want to say as much to Kitami, who was unusually fired up. The boy thought he was to blame for Otsuka’s death and was doing his best to contribute to the investigation. No harm in indulging him.
Reiko smiled. “All right. Let’s take a quick look.”
Kitami nodded brightly.
He was right about the fence. Anyone could get in. The still doorless entrance of the building was a gaping concrete rectangle. They stepped inside. Sacks of cement and other building materials lay scattered around the floor.
You couldn’t host a murder show in a dump like this.
The daytime heat still radiated off the walls of the entranceway. No air seemed to penetrate the building, and it was even more humid than the outside. At the far end of the passageway was the elevator shaft, with a bare concrete staircase just to the right of it.
“Shall we take a look at the upper floors?”
Reiko followed Kitami upstairs, wondering what he was so excited about. After turning back on themselves once, they emerged onto the second floor. As Kitami had said, it consisted of two lar
ge open-plan rooms. The third floor was a single, even bigger room. Reiko wondered what sort of business would do well there. A hairdresser? A restaurant? A boutique? She walked inside and peered out of a window.
The building was set much further back from the street than she expected. Looking around, she realized that there were no other normal buildings nearby that overlooked that side of the building. Immediately opposite was the back of an automated parking tower, with an ordinary parking lot next to it. The bright lights of the train station and its environs looked very far away. The place was much more isolated than she’d thought.
Otsuka was checking an empty building just like this when he was killed.
He had been inspecting a live music venue that had closed down. His killers sneaked up on him in the dark, hit him with a blunt instrument, handcuffed him, and then blew his head off.
Perhaps Otsuka’s rogue investigation had unearthed something—something major. If the boys in the Ikebukuro task force figured out what it was, they would get all the credit for solving Otsuka’s murder—and the murder-show thing too.
Reiko simply didn’t care anymore. Normally, she would have been obsessed with catching the culprits herself. Now, as long as they did it fast, she didn’t care who took down Otsuka’s killer.
So this is how things feel when you’re on the victim end of things.
It came home to her again just how much she’d been treating homicide investigations as entertainment. It hurt her to acknowledge it, but she’d seen the homicides as so many trump cards in the promotion game. Kusaka had urged her to get out there and catch the perpetrator herself. She was no longer up to the job. Why didn’t someone else step up and solve Otsuka’s murder, find the Strawberry Night killers, and just bring the whole fucked-up case to an end?
I wonder how the Saitama prefectural police are getting on.
An image of the nine bundles neatly lined up on the bank of the Toda Rowing Course flashed into Reiko’s mind. Nine corpses, all wrapped in blue plastic sheeting. Nine victims, all of whom had been killed before Kanebara and Namekawa.
The Silent Dead Page 25