by Kōji Suzuki
“And why’s that?”
“From the bottom of that shaft, there was no way she could’ve thrown anything past the fence on the roof.”
Assuming it had something to do with the angle, Ando didn’t press the point further.
“So, it’s most natural to assume that she wasn’t wearing any panties when she left.”
“At the moment, that’s the only explanation we can think of.”
They stopped in front of the autopsy room.
“Would you like to join me, Dr Ando?” asked Nakayama.
“Maybe just for a little while.” It was an honest enough answer. If it wasn’t Mai, he’d sigh with relief and leave. And if it was her … he’d probably leave anyway, entrusting the autopsy to Nakayama. In any event, the thing to do now was check to see if it was her.
Beyond the door, he could hear water gushing from the faucet, as usual. As he listened for other sounds, Ando was suddenly overcome with the urge to flee. His stomach churned, and his extremities quivered. He prayed it wasn’t her. It was all he could do.
Before Ando was really prepared, Nakayama opened the door and led the way into the autopsy room. The officer was next to enter. Ando didn’t go in, but only peered through the open doorway at the naked, pale corpse on the operating table.
2
He’d had a sneaking suspicion that the day would come, but seeing the young woman’s body up close sent a deathly chill through his body nonetheless. Ando finally approached the table in Nakayama and the officer’s wake. He looked at the face from every angle, still unwilling to recognize it. There was mud, dried and hardened, in the hair on the back of her head. Her ankle was twisted unnaturally; the skin over it showed the only discoloration on her body. He figured the ankle was broken, or at least badly sprained. No signs that she’d been strangled. In fact, there were no external wounds at all. The body was well past the rigor mortis stage. Over ninety hours had elapsed since death.
Ando knew the healthy glow her flesh had displayed in life. How many times had he fantasized about holding her and feeling that skin against his? Now he’d never have the opportunity. Now she was a wasted, waxen corpse. The woman he’d been about to fall in love with now lay cruelly exposed on the table, changed into this. Ando couldn’t bear the reality, and anger welled up in him.
“Goddamnit,” he sighed. Nakayama and the officer turned simultaneously to look at him.
The policeman couldn’t hide his astonishment. “Do you know her?” Ando gave a barely perceptible nod.
“I’m sorry,” Nakayama mumbled, not being able to tell exactly how close Ando had been to the woman.
The policeman spoke next, slowly and deliberately. “Would you know who we should contact?” Behind the polite tone, Ando could hear a hint of expectation. If he knew who she was, it would save the officer from the drudgery of having to identify her.
Wordlessly, Ando took out his planner and paged through it. He was sure he’d written her parents’ phone number in it. He found the number, wrote it on another piece of paper, and handed it over. The officer read it back to Ando.
“You’re sure about this, then?” The man’s tone was almost obsequious.
“I’m sure. It’s Mai Takano, alright.”
The policeman rushed out of the room to call Mai’s parents and notify them of her death. Ando imagined the scene at their house: the phone ringing, her mother picking up the receiver, an ostentatious voice on the other end identifying itself as Officer So-and-so from the police department, then, Your daughter is dead … Ando shuddered. He felt sorry for her mother, about to experience that moment. She wouldn’t collapse, she wouldn’t break down crying. The world around her would simply recede.
He couldn’t stand to be in the autopsy room a moment longer. When the scalpel entered Mai’s body, the air would be filled with an odor much worse than what greeted them now. And when the organ wall was cut so that the contents of her stomach and intestines could be examined, the stench would be positively horrific. Ando knew how surprisingly long olfactory memories could last, and he didn’t want this one. He knew very well that it was the fate of all living beings, no matter how pure and beautiful, to finally leave an unbearable stench. But just this once, he felt like giving in to sentimentality. He wanted to keep his memories of Mai from being sullied by that smell.
He whispered in Nakayama’s ear, “I’m going to leave now.”
Nakayama gave him a suspicious look. “You don’t want to participate, after all?”
“I still have some work I need to finish up in the lab. But I want to hear the details later.”
“Understood.”
Ando put his hand on Nakayama’s shoulder and whispered to him again. “Pay attention to the coronary artery. Make sure you get a tissue sample from it.”
Nakayama was puzzled that Ando had a hypothesis regarding the cause of death. “Did she have angina?”
Ando didn’t answer. Instead, he squeezed Nakayama’s shoulder and, with a look that warned against asking why, said, “Just do it, alright?”
Nakayama nodded twice.
3
Back at the office, Ando pulled out the chair from the desk next to Nakayama’s and sat down in it backwards, hugging the backrest. He waited like that for Nakayama to finish his paperwork.
“You seem rather concerned,” Nakayama said, looking up from the report he was writing.
“Sort of.”
“Want to see the autopsy report?” Nakayama indicated a sheaf of documents in front of Ando.
“No. All I need is a summary.”
Nakayama turned to face Ando.
“Let me get right to the point, then. The cause of death was not a heart attack due to blockage of the coronary artery.”
So the hypothesis Ando had shared with Nakayama before the autopsy had been wrong. Ando fell silent for a time, wondering how to interpret this. So Mai didn’t watch the video after all? Perhaps the tumor didn’t get big enough to block the flow of blood.
He decided he needed to check further. “So there was no sarcoma in the coronary artery?”
“None that I could see.”
“Are you absolutely sure?”
“Well. I’ll have to wait for the tissue sample to come back before I can say for sure.”
For the moment, the telltale tumor seemed to be missing from Mai’s artery.
“In that case, what killed her?”
“Probably the cold. She was in an extremely weakened state.”
“How about injuries?”
“Her left ankle was broken, and she had lacerations on both elbows. Most likely from when she fell. There were particles of concrete ground into the wounds.”
So she’d fallen in feet first, broken her ankle, and was unable to get out of there. The shaft was a yard wide and over three deep, too deep for her to escape on her own. She would have been stuck there, with only rainwater to quench her thirst. Even so, she would have survived for several days.
“I wonder how long she was alive in there.” It wasn’t really a question. He was merely thinking aloud as he imagined her fear and despair at being left all alone at the bottom of a hole on a rooftop.
“I’d estimate about ten days.” Her stomach and intestines were empty, and her subcutaneous fat was largely depleted.
“Ten days.” Ando took out his planner. Assuming she survived for ten days in the exhaust shaft, and assuming five more for her body to be discovered, she would have vanished on or about the 10th of November. Ando’s date with her had been scheduled for the ninth; the fact that she hadn’t answered the phone all day that day pushed the date of her disappearance back at least that far. Indeed, her mailbox had contained newspapers going back to the eighth. Which meant that something had happened to her on the eighth or ninth to make her leave her apartment.
Ando marked those two dates on his calendar.
Something had happened to her between the eighth and tenth of November.
He tried to imagine himself
in her place. When she was found, she had on a skirt and a sweatshirt. Her attire suggested she’d just stepped out for a moment, maybe for a breath of fresh air. But, strangely, she hadn’t been wearing any panties.
He thought again about the things he’d felt when he visited her apartment. They were still vivid in his mind. That had been the 15th of November. If the results of the autopsy were to be believed, at that point she was already trapped on the roof, waiting to be rescued. In other words, she’d been gone from her apartment for several days. Yet, Ando was sure he’d sensed something in the apartment. It should have been empty, but he had definitely felt something that breathed.
“Oh, and …” said Nakayama, holding up an index finger as if he’d just remembered something important.
“What?”
“You were pretty close to her, weren’t you, Dr Ando?”
“I wouldn’t say close. I’d only met her twice.”
“Oh. When had you last seen her?”
“The end of last month, I guess.”
“That would be about three weeks before her death.” Nakayama looked as if he were holding back something important. Ando fixed his older colleague with a stare that said, Come on, say it.
“She was pregnant, wasn’t she?” Nakayama finally blurted out. For a moment, Ando wasn’t sure who he was talking about.
“Who was?” he said.
“Mai, of course.” Nakayama was keeping a close eye on Ando’s confused reaction. “Didn’t you know?”
Ando didn’t answer.
“You don’t mean to tell me you overlooked the obvious signs of a woman nearing term.”
“Nearing term?”
Ando could only parrot Nakayama’s words. He looked at the ceiling and tried to recall the exact lines of Mai’s figure. He’d seen her once in mourning clothes and once in a bright dress. Both outfits had been tight around her waist and hips, showing off her slim contours. Her wasp waist had been one of her most attractive features. But it wasn’t just that. Ando had sensed something virginal about her. And now Nakayama was trying to tell him she’d been pregnant? Nearing term, in fact?
Not that he’d ever observed her that closely. In fact, the more he thought about her the blurrier his image of her became. His memory was hazy. But no, it couldn’t be. There was no way she’d been nine months pregnant. For one thing, he’d seen her corpse with his own eyes. Her belly had been so flat it almost touched her spine.
“She couldn’t have been nearing term.”
“Some women are like that, though. They don’t get very big even in the last trimester.”
“It’s not a question of degrees, though. I saw her dead body myself.”
“You misunderstand,” Nakayama said, waving his hands. Then he carefully arrayed the evidence before Ando.
“The uterus was greatly enlarged and she had wounds where the placenta had been torn away. The vagina was full of a brownish secretion. And inside the vagina I found tiny pieces of flesh that I believe are from an umbilical cord.”
You’re out of your mind, thought Ando. But he couldn’t imagine an experienced forensic surgeon like Nakayama making such an elementary mistake. Those three pieces of evidence presented by Mai’s body could only lead to one conclusion: she’d given birth shortly before falling into the shaft.
Assuming the delivery was fact, could it explain her movements? Perhaps, on or about the seventh, she had gone into labor, and had accordingly headed for an obstetrician. She’d given birth, spent five or six days in the hospital, and then checked out on the twelfth or thirteenth. Maybe the baby had been stillborn. In her grief, the mother had wandered about until she found herself on the roof of the building, where she’d fallen into the exhaust shaft. She’d survived for ten days. And then this morning, her body had been discovered.
It worked out, time-wise. The birth offered a plausible explanation for her disappearance. And naturally she would have kept it all secret from her mother.
But Ando didn’t buy it. Leaving aside the fact that, even allowing for individual variation, she just hadn’t looked pregnant, he couldn’t forget the impression their first encounter had made on him.
He’d first laid eyes on Mai right in the same office. Just before he was to dissect Ryuji, she’d been escorted in by a detective who wanted her to tell Ando all she knew about the circumstances of Ryuji’s death. She had tried to sit down, then lost balance and steadied herself with a hand on a nearby desk. Ando had known at a glance that she was anemic. He had picked up the faint scent of blood on her and deduced that her anemia was due to her menstruating. His conclusion had been bolstered by her embarrassed expression as she apologized: “Sorry, it’s just that …” Their eyes had met, and they’d had a moment of nonverbal communication.
Please don’t worry. It’s just the monthly thing.
Gotcha.
Mai had informed him only with her eyes, afraid to create a fuss given the location. The memory of how she’d made her meaning clear without words was still strangely vivid for Ando. He’d performed Ryuji’s autopsy on the twentieth of the previous month. That meant Mai had been menstruating less than a month before supposedly giving birth. It was impossible, of course.
Maybe I misunderstood the whole thing. All along I thought there’d been a silent exchange, but maybe I was fooling myself. Maybe I got it all wrong. But the more he thought about it, the less he was able to believe it. He was confident he’d taken her meaning.
However, the facts revealed by the autopsy flatly contradicted his view of the matter.
Ando stood up and said, pointing to the autopsy report, “Would you mind if I made a copy of this?” He wanted to take it home and read it carefully.
Nakayama held the stack of papers out to him. “Go right ahead.”
“Oh, and one more thing,” Ando added. “You took a blood sample, I assume?”
“Of course.”
“Can I have a little of it?”
“A little, sure.”
Ando realized that he had to confirm immediately whether or not Mai had been carrying the smallpox-like virus. If he found it in her blood, it would be proof that she’d watched the video. He needed to determine if the tragedy that had befallen her had its source in the video or was the result of something entirely unrelated. At the moment, all he could do was amass data, little by little. If he could illuminate the video’s role in this, perhaps he’d come one step closer to solving that “mutation” riddle.
4
Soon after he’d encountered Mai’s corpse, Ando was notified of the death of Kazuyuki Asakawa. As Asakawa’s condition had deteriorated, he’d been transferred from Shinagawa Saisei Hospital to Shuwa University Hospital, but he’d died almost immediately. Ando had been notified about the change in Asakawa’s condition, but he hadn’t imagined the patient would go so quickly. According to the attending physician, the death came about as the result of an infection, and the patient had passed away peacefully, as if from old age. Asakawa had never regained consciousness after losing it in the accident.
Ando went to the Shuwa hospital and told the doctors in charge of the case to look out for something during the autopsy: a sarcoma blocking the coronary artery, a smallpox-like virus in the tumor. Ando figured these points were crucial in terms of forecasting the future. He made sure the attending physician understood the importance of the situation and then left.
As he walked back to the station, he felt renewed disappointment that Asakawa had never awoken. He’d possessed essential information, and he’d died having imparted it to no one. If only Ando knew what Asakawa knew, he’d have a much better idea what to expect. The future was maddeningly opaque now. Ando didn’t know what to prepare for.
The biggest thing worrying Ando right now was whether Asakawa’s death had been bad luck or a necessary outcome. The same question applied to Mai, for that matter. Both of them had wasted away and died after accidents—a traffic accident in Asakawa’s case, a fall in Mai’s. Their deaths seemed to have
something in common. But Ando had no way of knowing if it had anything to do with their having watched the video.
As he walked, he suddenly realized that the building where Mai’s body had been found was not far from the hospital he’d just left. He’d been wondering why she had chosen to climb to the roof of a shabby old office building; now was his chance to have a look and maybe find out. He needed to go soon, before any of the evidence disappeared.
He decided to go back to Nakahara Street and catch a cab. He’d be there in ten minutes.
After stopping once on the way to buy some flowers, Ando had the taxi let him off in front of a warehouse belonging to a shipping company. All he’d been told at the M.E.’s office was the name of the company and the instruction that the building was to be found to the south of the warehouse; he didn’t know the name of the building itself.
Standing on the sidewalk, he stared south at a building. There was no mistaking it. It had fourteen stories, and an exposed staircase spiraled up the narrow space between its outer wall and the warehouse.
Ando moved toward the front door and then stopped. He walked around to the outside staircase. He thought he’d try to figure out how Mai had gone up. She could have taken the elevator to the fourteenth floor, gone out to the fire escape landing from there, and climbed the ladder to the roof, or she could have taken the fire escape stairs all the way up from the street to the ladder. At night, the front door was probably locked and protected by a metal shutter, so she’d have had to go in through the service entrance, which was surely guarded. And if it was too late, even the service entrance might have been locked, the guard gone. If she’d gone up at night, she must have used the fire escape.
But there was a gate at the edge of the second-floor landing, and it looked impassable. Ando climbed up to it to take a look. It was an iron gate, with a knob. He tried to turn it; it wouldn’t budge. It had to be locked from the other side to prevent entry. The gate, however, was only six feet high or so, and a light and agile person could scale it without much problem. Mai had been on the track team in junior high; she’d have been able to get over it with little trouble.