It would have been then that Mikami had turned up.
Amamiya would have recognized his voice. He’d heard so many on the phone, but Mikami’s response would have left an impression. And the name on his card started with Mi. With the call still fresh in his mind, Amamiya would have drawn only one conclusion. His daughter’s run away. He’s anxious for her safety. Perhaps he’d seen an opportunity to forge a real, emotional connection, become convinced that the man before him was one of only a handful of officers capable of understanding his plight – the pain of a parent who’d lost a daughter. If Mikami had been there to talk of anything else, Amamiya might have confided in him that he’d tracked down the voice of the Six Four kidnapper.
But . . .
What had Mikami said instead? It hurt to think about it. He’d asked Amamiya to accept a visit from the commissioner. Made a blatant attempt to involve him in a PR exercise. He’d pressed him for an answer, suggesting it might help, that the coverage might even unearth new leads. Amamiya’s suspicions would have been confirmed. They haven’t changed. Fourteen years, and the force continued to display no regard for the victim; far from it – they were hoping to take advantage of his suffering and shore up their own defences.
I appreciate the offer, but it won’t be necessary. There’s no need for someone as important as that to come all this way.
That was how it had started. Amamiya’s attitude had undergone a sudden transformation. Mikami was sure of it now.
He had decided he wanted to corner Mesaki himself. He reached out to Koda. Together, the two men, who had both suffered at the hands of the police, put their heads together and came up with a plan. They wanted revenge on Mesaki, but they also wanted to get back at the force. They decided to enact their plan on the day of the commissioner’s visit, knowing that would deal the heaviest blow. In the end, the one variable they had no control over – Kasumi’s absence from home – had forced them to move it forward a day. The timing had never been down to chance. In what looked like a twist of fate, a copycat kidnapping took place just a day before the commissioner’s inspection into Six Four. It wasn’t the fury of Criminal Investigations that had finally forced the cancellation, nor was it fate – it was Koda and Amamiya’s unmerciful revenge. Mikami had pushed Amamiya when he’d been undecided. By notifying him of the commissioner’s visit, he’d ended up giving him a date they could use. The haircut had been a token of that resolve.
The words on their call the previous night . . . they probably hadn’t been for Mikami alone. Not everything is bad. There’s good out there, too.
And yet . . .
Amamiya and Koda had crossed a line.
They had to shoulder the responsibility. Amamiya’s share of the burden was particularly weighty. Heresy is heresy; there are no graduations. Whatever his reasons, he’d staged the kidnapping of a young girl. He’d subjected her mother, Mutsuko Mesaki, to the terrors of losing her daughter. All this despite having witnessed first hand the suffering of his wife, Toshiko, when they’d learned of their daughter’s abduction; even though her feelings were indistinguishable from his own. Amamiya had abandoned morality. He had, in order to satisfy his personal desire for retribution, crushed underfoot a mother’s innocent heart.
He was fully aware that that was what he’d done, more than anyone. That was why he hadn’t come back. Was it possible he’d decided to . . .?
Mikami recognized the sound of a car horn.
It was coming from the top of the hill.
The taxi was independently owned, one the Prefectural HQ used constantly; it was unlikely that the driver suspected Mikami of lying or trying to dodge the fare. Then again, Mikami had had the look of a man who hadn’t slept for thirty-six hours . . . he must have looked inescapably bleak – perhaps the driver was worried he might drown himself. Mikami could see him now, in the distance, already out of the car. He leaned out of the phone box and waved a hand in the air.
I won’t be much longer.
He closed the door and opened his mobile. He was about to dial Matsuoka’s number when the urge took him to lift the phone before him off the cradle. The crackling of the line sounded like it came from the past. Matsuoka’s phone went straight to voicemail. Deciding it wouldn’t be funny to leave a silent call from a phone box, Mikami left his name and a message, saying he’d try again. He hung up. Something told him Matsuoka would call back. There were things he wanted to say; questions he wanted to ask.
What had happened to Kazuki Koda?
He doubted Matsuoka would just let him go. Theft. Open threats. Blackmail. His actions were unmistakably criminal. And yet the whole time Mikami had been in the command vehicle, he hadn’t heard Matsuoka mention his name once; nor had it been mentioned on the radio. Had the Intercept Units not been able to bring him in? Had they deliberately let him go? Koda had to have been in contact with Matsuoka. At the very least, Matsuoka would have received an anonymous tip-off before everything started. It was the only way some things could be explained.
Matsuoka hadn’t seen Amamiya’s blackened finger. Without anything to make the connection, how else could he have joined the dots between the ‘M’ calls and the kidnapping?
Still . . . there were more pressing issues. Was Mesaki the mastermind behind Six Four? That was the most important question.
Matsuoka had seemed convinced. But with no evidence beyond Amamiya’s testimony, there was no case for prosecution, nothing that would stand up in court. Without a confession or some kind of real evidence, Mesaki’s status would stay unchanged and he would just remain a man under ‘police protection’.
Supposing he was the Six Four kidnapper, he’d done a good job of concealing it after leaving his house in the white coupé. He’d been genuinely concerned for his daughter’s safety, so perhaps that had helped. But he’d slipped up at the end. His front had collapsed, for a brief moment, as he’d blurted out a response to Koda’s instructions on the phone. It was after he’d been told to pull out from the Cherry Café, when he’d been driving north on the state road. It was what Ogata had been referring to when he’d said, There was that one time, in the car . . .
– Please, just tell me! Where do you want me to go . . .?
– Go straight . . . three . . . kilometres.
– Go straight?
– Ahead . . . there’s a hairdressers up ahead . . . the Ai’ai Hair Salon. Get there in ten minutes or . . . your daughter’s dead.
– B— . . . but . . .
Mikami had picked up on it, listening to the recording afterwards. Koda had caught Mesaki out. Even before he’d sent him on to the state road, Koda had asked if he was familiar with the area. He’d forced Mesaki to say, Here? No . . . not at all. As the Six Four kidnapper, Mesaki wouldn’t have been able to admit knowledge of the route. Having forced the declaration, Koda had then told Mesaki to drive straight for three kilometres. Before he realized what he was doing – genuinely so – Mesaki had responded with a question. Go straight? He would have known the correct way to reach the salon was to take a right at the next intersection, one kilometre ahead. At that point, Koda hadn’t even mentioned the name Ai’ai. He’d duped Mesaki into revealing his expectation that the next destination would be the Ai’ai Hair Salon.
For Mesaki, the kilometre leading to the intersection would have felt like half a lifetime. He’d been instructed to go straight, but also to go to the Ai’ai Hair Salon. Should he turn? Should he go straight? The choices had been equally terrifying. There was a detective on the floor behind his seat. The call was being recorded. He didn’t think the police suspected him of being the Six Four kidnapper, but they would realize he knew the salon’s location if he made the turn. Meaning he had to go straight. But he couldn’t do that. He had to think of what might happen if he didn’t get to the salon as instructed. The kidnapper had told him his daughter would be dead if he wasn’t there in ten minutes. Are you sure you want me to go straight? The words would have been on the tip of his tongue, but saying them would hav
e been tantamount to making a confession. After exhausting every possible avenue in his mind, he chose to take the right. He chose his daughter’s life.
But the real dilemma had been kept for the end. That was, it went without saying, the note on the paper.
Unexpectedly, there was still a pen-written message on the piece of paper Mesaki handed in to the police. Horizontal, on just one line.
Mikami shuddered.
A daughter. A child’s coffin.
Having found and read the note from the bottom of the container, Mesaki had crumpled to the ground in tears. He’d begun to howl. Kasumi is dead. Mesaki had read this as the meaning of the two sentences. Then Mutsuko had called, telling him his daughter was alive and well. He read the message again. Noticed a detail. That it said ‘child’s coffin’ and not just ‘coffin’. It had dawned on him then. The note hadn’t been referring to Kasumi: it had been referring to Shoko Amamiya.
Since the kidnapper’s calls, since learning that the kidnapping was a carbon-copy of his own crime, Mesaki would have feared the possibility that the kidnapper was somehow related to the Amamiyas. At the same time, he would have assured himself that no amateur – relative or not – could track him down, not when the professionals had failed after fourteen years of investigation. Coincidence, it’s just coincidence. He’d repeated the line like a mantra, attempting to drive his fears into submission.
But reading ‘child’s coffin’, he had realized the truth. It had left him no room for doubt. The message was from someone in Shoko’s immediate family. He’d realized this, yet he’d still handed the note to the police. What, then, had he chosen to eat?
Mikami had no idea. The paper had been torn above the message. The writing had been Western-style, horizontal, meaning Mesaki had chewed up the first half of the note. Specifically, he’d eaten two fifths of the sheet. The message they’d seen had filled the bottom half, the lower three fifths.
The first line would usually contain the addressee’s name. It seemed plausible. Masato Mesaki. But no. Amamiya would have known the police would take possession of the note. He would have wanted something to spell out the fact that Mesaki was Shoko’s murderer. Mesaki’s voice was close to identical to the kidnapper’s from fourteen years ago. That was all Amamiya knew for sure. Maybe that was exactly what he’d chosen to write. Masato Mesaki. Slightly hoarse, no trace of an accent.
It didn’t constitute evidence of any kind. Yet Mesaki had put it in his mouth regardless. Because he was the Six Four kidnapper.
What would be the clever thing to do, knowing the police would ask for the note? Mesaki’s mind had gone into overdrive. It would arouse suspicion to refuse. They would logically conclude that someone bore him a grudge, that he was trying to hide something from them. Yet he couldn’t allow himself to give them the note as it was. The first line would create a connection between him and Shoko’s murderer. And there was less than a year until the statute of limitations came into effect. Taking care not to be seen, he would put the top half in his mouth and leave the bottom as it was. That was his decision. To eat the part that would portray him as a suspect and leave the part that suggested he was a victim of a kidnapper who had murdered his child. He didn’t imagine the phrase becoming a problem. Child’s coffin. Offspring were always children in the eyes of their parents.
Carefully, he’d torn the paper in half. Carefully, he’d transferred one part to his mouth. Carefully, he’d begun to chew. At that point, he was no longer a father concerned for the well-being of his daughter. He’d become a savage, a man who – despite having a three-year-old daughter of his own – had collected a ransom after kidnapping and murdering a seven-year-old girl.
Why did you eat the paper?
What was written there?
Mesaki had protested at first, claiming he hadn’t eaten anything. It’s on video. We can call a specialist to match the bite mark. He was quick to drop the pretence. Maybe I did eat a little bit, I wasn’t myself. I hadn’t eaten since yesterday. But this . . . this was all that was written down. Yes, I remember it clearly. Mikami had been shaking with fury as he’d listened in to the report being made to Matsuoka. He had already changed his mind from earlier, understanding now why Ogata and Minegishi had become so worked up. Why hadn’t Amamiya got Koda to push harder? They’d had plenty of time. All they’d needed to do was extract information on Six Four, drop by drop, back Mesaki slowly into a corner. They could have threatened to kill Kasumi if he didn’t confess. Koda had been a detective. If not a full confession, he should have been able to extract something close enough.
And yet he hadn’t. He hadn’t made Mesaki confess.
The end result was exactly as Matsuoka had said. Amamiya had delivered them a suspect. Nothing more, nothing less. It wouldn’t be hard for Mesaki to claim he didn’t know about the Ai’ai Hair Salon. The route came back to me, that’s why I made the turn . . . I remembered having seen a billboard for it, a long time ago . . . I was panicking, I don’t know what I was thinking . . . All he had to do was say something like that and the interrogators would have nowhere to go.
Why had the plan been so oblique? The more Mikami thought about it, the more difficult it became to grasp. And the more he thought about it, the more it seemed to have been engineered that way. Amamiya had drawn the line at ‘delivering a suspect’ and then thrown the ball into their court. It’s up to you to make the arrest.
Could what he’d done really be termed revenge?
The car horn sounded again. This time louder. Coming. The image came to him just as he was about to bring his hand up. The red baton. He saw Koda, in his guard’s uniform, guiding cars into the Tokumatsu car park.
Because of Koda.
Koda was the only one who hadn’t betrayed Amamiya’s trust. He’d worked without sleep as a member of the Home Unit. He had never got over the cover-up. He’d stood up to the force, and lost his job for his efforts. Even then he’d stayed true to Amamiya. Now, with all that had happened, he’d given Amamiya proof of his word. It’ll mean becoming a criminal. Koda had already been forced into the margins of society. It would have been only too easy to imagine the trials of having to serve time, then having to try to make a fresh start with his wife and child. Even then, Koda had agreed to help. He’d volunteered to become a kidnapper. That was when Amamiya had understood it, that there were still good men like Koda in the force.
Koda had endured the pain of putting the plan together. It had hurt – of that Mikami was sure. They were going to humiliate the force. Planning to expose the Six Four kidnapper, the very man the Prefectural HQ had failed to bring to justice for fourteen years. What would have happened if Koda had forced Mesaki to confess? Would Ogata and Minegishi have cheered in celebration? Koda would have ached to see the faces of his old colleagues. He knew he could deliver a physical blow to the Prefectural HQ, but the idea of humiliating them would have cut him up. No one had given him a second thought when he’d been forced to resign, yet he’d found a part of himself that couldn’t hate them for it. His home ground was still exactly that, no matter how corrupt it was. Some part of you remains a detective, even after you leave the force. It was why Koda had never forgotten about Six Four, about Amamiya. Even after his resignation, he’d stayed a detective the whole time. He’d kept the vocation with him, as a last measure of pride.
That was why the plan had stopped short. Amamiya had made the decision, unable to bear Koda’s anguish.
Mikami stepped out of the phone box.
The job’s an easy one. Easiest in the world. How would Koda respond to something like that?
Cases test a person, time and time again. Mikami’s feet were heavy as he stamped back through the dark.
78
The fare on the meter had shot up. The winter treads emitted a caustic sound on the road, but the taxi was like a dream compared to the command vehicle.
‘Must’ve been cold out there?’
The driver had just struck up a conversation when Mikami’s phone st
arted to vibrate in his jacket pocket. It was Matsuoka. Mikami asked the driver to turn on the radio before he answered.
‘Been making silent calls, Mikami?’
‘I just happened across a phone box, so . . .’
‘Is that a play or something?’
‘I’m in a taxi.’
‘What were you calling about?’
Mikami asked the driver to turn up the volume, then brought up a hand to cover his mouth. ‘What’s happening with Mesaki?’
‘He’s still in custody. We release him tomorrow.’
Mikami nodded. If Mesaki said he wanted to be out, they would have no choice but to comply.
‘Did he say anything?’
‘He told us to arrest the fucker that did this to him.’
Incredible.
‘Well, maybe that’s an option. You could use Amamiya’s testimony to—’
‘No, we’re not doing that. We’re going to get all we can on Mesaki. Cover all fourteen years. We’re going to get enough circumstantial evidence to bury the man alive.’
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