Why don’t they just remove math from the list of required subjects, then? Ishigami wondered. Only a handful of people really understood mathematics anyway. There was no point in even teaching math at this low level. Wasn’t it enough to let them know there was this incomprehensible thing out there called mathematics, and leave it at that?
When he had finished grading, he looked at the clock. It was already eight P.M.
After checking that the dojo was locked up, Ishigami left the school for the night. He was standing at the crosswalk under the traffic light when a man approached.
“On your way home?” the man asked, smiling. “When you weren’t at your apartment I thought I might find you here.”
Ishigami recognized the man’s face. It was the homicide detective.
“I’m sorry, you are…?”
“Ah, you’ve probably forgotten.”
The man reached for his coat pocket, but Ishigami held up his hand and nodded. “No, I remember you now. You’re Detective Kusanagi.”
The light turned green and Ishigami began to walk. Kusanagi followed.
What’s he doing here? Ishigami thought as he crossed the street. Was it about Yukawa’s visit two days ago? Yukawa had told him that they wanted him to help with their investigation, but he had refused, hadn’t he?
“Do you know a Manabu Yukawa?” Kusanagi asked.
“I do. He came to see me. He said you’d told him about me.”
“Actually, that’s true. I told him that you’d gone to Imperial University—the same department he was in. I’m sorry if it was an imposition.”
“Not at all. I was glad to see him again.”
“What did you two talk about, if you don’t mind me asking?”
“Old times, mostly. That was about all we talked about the first time he visited.”
“The first time?” Kusanagi lifted an eyebrow. “Has he been back?”
“He’s come to see me twice. The second time, he told me that you’d sent him.”
“I sent him?” Kusanagi blinked. “Um, what exactly did he say I sent him to do?”
“He said you wanted me to help with your investigation, and that you thought it might be better if the request came from him.”
“Oh, right, help with the investigation.” Kusanagi scratched his head as he walked.
Ishigami noticed his uncertainty at once. The detective seemed confused. Perhaps he didn’t ask Yukawa to come talk to me after all?
Kusanagi grinned sheepishly. “I talk to him about a lot of things, so I get a little confused about exactly which cases he knows about and which he doesn’t. What kind of help did he mention?”
Ishigami considered the detective’s question. He hesitated to say Yasuko’s name, but of course, he couldn’t exactly play dumb. Kusanagi would surely cross-check whatever he said with Yukawa.
Ishigami told him about Yukawa’s request that he spy on Yasuko Hanaoka.
Kusanagi’s eyes went wide. “He asked you to do that, did he?” he asked, sounding flustered. “Right, right—ah, I guess I did talk to him about that, yes. About whether you might be able to help us. He must have thought he could help out by asking you, since you two have a connection. Right, that makes sense.”
To Ishigami, the detective’s explanation sounded like a last-minute improvisation. Which meant that Yukawa had come on his own to prod Ishigami about the case. So what had he been after?
Ishigami stopped and turned to face Kusanagi. “And you came out here today to ask me that? Or was there something else?”
“No, sorry, I was just getting to it.” Kusanagi pulled a photograph from his jacket pocket. “Have you seen this man? I’m sorry the picture isn’t very good, I had to take it with a telephoto.”
Ishigami looked at the photograph and swallowed.
The man in the photograph was the person who had been foremost in his thoughts these past few days. He didn’t know his name. He didn’t know who he was. All he knew was that this man was close to Yasuko.
“Mr. Ishigami?”
Ishigami wondered how to respond. He could just say he didn’t know him and leave it at that. But then how would he ever find out who the man really was?
“You know, he looks somewhat familiar,” Ishigami said slowly. “Who is he?”
“Can you think where you might have seen him?”
“Well, I’m not sure. I see a lot of people every day. If you told me his name or where he works, I might be able to come up with something.”
“His name is Kudo. He runs a printing company.”
“Kudo?”
“Yes. Like this—” Kusanagi described the Chinese characters used to write Kudo’s name.
Kudo … Ishigami stared at the photograph. So why were the police checking him out? He must be involved with Yasuko somehow. In other words, the police suspected a connection—a special, maybe even intimate connection—between this Mr. Kudo and Yasuko Hanaoka.
“Well? Do you remember anything?”
“Hmm. Not really. He does look familiar though.” Ishigami shook his head. “I’m sorry I don’t remember more than that. Maybe I’m mistaking him for someone else.”
“Right, no problem,” Kusanagi said, frowning slightly and putting the photo back into his pocket. He pulled out a business card. “If you think of anything, do you mind dropping me a line?”
“Certainly. Um, does he have something to do with the case?”
“I really can’t say at this time. We’re still looking into it.”
“Is he involved with Ms. Hanaoka somehow?”
“They had some contact, yes,” Kusanagi said, being intentionally vague. He didn’t want to divulge any more information than he already had. “By the way, you were at Benten-tei with Yukawa the other day, yes?”
Ishigami looked up at the detective. The question was so unexpected, for a moment he didn’t know how to respond.
“I happened to see the two of you there,” the detective went on. “I was on the job. Sorry I didn’t say hello.”
So they are staking out Benten-tei.
“That’s right. Yukawa said he wanted to buy a lunch box, so I took him there.”
“Why go all that way? Don’t they sell lunches at the convenience store by the school?”
“Well, you’d have to ask Yukawa. Benten-tei was his idea.”
“Did you discuss anything about Ms. Hanaoka or the case?”
“Well, only what I told you before—that you wanted my help with the investigation.”
Kusanagi shook his head. “I mean other than that. As he probably told you, I ask Yukawa for advice on cases. Turns out he’s more than just a physics genius, he’s also a gifted sleuth. I was just hoping he might have said something about his thoughts on the case.”
Ishigami was confused. If they were meeting as often as it sounded like they were, then Yukawa and the detective should have been exchanging information. Why would the detective have to ask him what Yukawa thought?
“No, he didn’t say anything in particular,” Ishigami said.
“I see. Very well. Sorry to bother you on your way home.”
Kusanagi nodded farewell and headed back along the way that they had come. Ishigami watched him go. A feeling rose inside him, making him queasy, as though an elaborate formula he’d thought was perfect was now giving false results because of an unpredictable variable.
ELEVEN
Kusanagi pulled out his cell phone as he emerged from Shinozaki Station. He looked up Manabu Yukawa’s number and pressed the call button. Then, phone to his ear, he looked around. It was three in the afternoon—the lull time between the lunch rush and the commuter hour—but there were still plenty of people out on the street. A line of bicycles stood in front of the supermarket across the way.
Kusanagi’s cell found a signal quickly, and he waited for the dial tone—but then, before the phone began to ring, he closed it with a snap. He had just spotted the man he was looking for.
Yukawa was sitting on a g
uardrail in front of a bookshop, eating an ice cream cone. He was wearing white trousers and a simple black long-sleeved shirt. He was wearing sunglasses, too—a sleek, fashionable pair.
Kusanagi crossed the street and approached him from behind. Yukawa wasn’t moving. His eyes were fixed on the supermarket and its environs.
“Detective Galileo!” the detective exclaimed, hoping to get a rise out of his friend, but Yukawa’s reaction was unusually subdued. Still licking his ice cream, he looked around, his head turning in slow motion.
“I see your nose is as keen as ever. Who says the police need bloodhounds to do their sniffing for them?” he said, his expression unchanging.
“What are you doing here?” Kusanagi asked. “Oh, and before you say it, ‘I was eating ice cream’ isn’t an acceptable answer.”
Yukawa chuckled. “I might ask you the same question, but there’s no need. The answer’s quite evident. You came looking for me. Or rather, you came here hoping to find out what I was up to.”
“Well, now that the jig is up, you can just come out and tell me what you’re up to.”
“I was waiting for you.”
“Me? Yeah, right.”
“I’m quite serious. You see, I called the lab a little while ago, and one of the grad students said you’d been there asking after me. And I hear that you dropped by last evening, too, didn’t you? So, I reasoned that if I waited here long enough, you’d show up. After all, my grad student told you I was here at Shinozaki, didn’t he?”
This was all true enough, but it didn’t answer the real question, and Kusanagi wasn’t in the mood to let Yukawa off so easily.
“What I want to know is: why are you here in the first place?” he said, his voice rising a little. He was used to his physicist friend’s circumlocutions, but still they could be maddening sometimes.
“No need to get impatient. How about some coffee? All I can offer is what’s in those vending machines over there, but it’s bound to be better than the instant stuff back at the lab.” Yukawa stood, tossing the rest of his ice cream cone into a nearby trash can.
With Kusanagi following he ambled over to the supermarket, where he bought two coffees out of one of the vending machines. He passed one to the detective, and then, carelessly straddling a nearby parked bicycle, he began to sip his own drink.
Kusanagi remained standing. He looked around as he opened the top on his can. “You shouldn’t sit on other people’s bicycles like that. What if the owner comes back?”
“She won’t. Not for some time.”
“How do you know that?”
“Because the owner of this bicycle left it here, then went into the subway station. Even if she was only headed to the next station over, it would take her at least thirty minutes to get there, do whatever it was she was going to do, and then come back.”
Kusanagi took a sip of his coffee and frowned. “That’s what you were doing while you sat there, eating your ice cream?”
“Watching people is a bit of a hobby of mine. It’s quite fascinating, really.”
“It’s good to have a hobby, but I’d rather have answers. Why are you here? And don’t even try telling me this has nothing to do with my investigation.”
Yukawa twisted his body around the seat, examining the back fender.
“Not many people bother to write their names on their bicycles anymore. I suppose that these days they don’t want strangers knowing who they are. But it wasn’t that long ago that everyone would write their names on their bicycles. It’s interesting how customs change with the times.”
Now Kusanagi understood. “This isn’t the first time we’ve chatted about bicycles, is it.”
Yukawa nodded. “I believe you told me that it was very unlikely that the bicycle had been left near the scene of the crime on purpose.”
“Not exactly. What I said was, there wasn’t any point in deliberately leaving it there. If the killer was going to put the victim’s fingerprints on the bicycle, then why go to the trouble of burning fingerprints off the corpse itself? After all, those prints on the bicycle were what led us to the man’s identity.”
“Fascinating. But tell me, what if there hadn’t been any fingerprints on the bicycle? Would that have kept you from being able to identify the body?”
Kusanagi had to think for a full ten seconds before answering. It was a question he hadn’t considered before.
“No, it wouldn’t,” he replied at last. “We used the fingerprints to match the body to the man who disappeared from the rented room, but we didn’t need the fingerprints to do that. I think I told you we did a DNA analysis as well.”
“You did. In other words, burning the victim’s fingerprints off was ultimately meaningless. But, what if our murderer knew that from the start?”
“You mean, he burned off the fingerprints even though he knew doing so would be futile?”
“Oh, I’m sure he had a reason for doing what he did. Just, that reason wasn’t to hide the identity of the body. What if he did it to suggest that the bicycle he planted nearby wasn’t a plant at all?”
Kusanagi blinked, momentarily at a loss for words. “So what you’re trying to say is that it was a plant, placed there to confuse us somehow?”
“Yes. It’s the somehow I haven’t figured out yet,” Yukawa said, dismounting from the bicycle. “I’m sure he wanted us to think that the victim got there on that bicycle by himself. Why would he want us to think that?”
“To hide the fact that the victim couldn’t have gotten there by himself,” Kusanagi said. “Because he was already dead when the killer carried him there. That’s what the captain thinks.”
“And you disagree with that theory, yes? I assume because your lead suspect Yasuko Hanaoka doesn’t have a driver’s license.”
“Well, all bets on that are off if she had an accomplice.”
“Right, but let’s focus on the time that bicycle was stolen. I heard it was taken sometime between eleven in the morning and ten at night, and I wondered how you were able to pinpoint the time it was stolen so precisely.”
“Because that’s what the bicycle’s owner told us. It’s not rocket science.”
“Indeed,” Yukawa said, gesturing emphatically with his can of coffee. “And how were you able to find out that it was her bicycle so quickly?”
“That’s not rocket science either. She reported it stolen. All we had to do was compare the registration number on the bike to the one on the police report she filed.”
Yukawa groaned at his response. Kusanagi could see his hard stare, even behind his sunglasses. “What is it? What’s bothering you now?”
“Do you know where the bicycle was when it was stolen?”
“Of course I do. I was the one who questioned the owner.”
“Then, could you take me there? It’s around here, isn’t it?”
Kusanagi felt the intensity of Yukawa’s gaze. He was about to ask, “Why bother?” but decided against it. The physicist’s eyes had that gleam they got whenever he was close to formulating a hypothesis.
“It’s over this way,” Kusanagi said, and he headed for the site.
The place was only fifty meters or so from where they had been drinking their coffee. Kusanagi stood in front of a row of bicycles.
“She said that she had it chained to the railing along the sidewalk, here.”
“The thief cut the chain?”
“Seems likely.”
“So he had bolt cutters with him…” Yukawa muttered, glancing down the road. “There’s an awful lot of bicycles here without chains. Why would he steal one that was chained?”
“How should I know? Maybe he liked that bike.”
“Liked it?” Yukawa said to himself. “What did he like about it?”
“If you’re trying to say something, why not spit it out?” Kusanagi growled.
“As you know, I came here yesterday as well. And like today, I stood here, observing. Bicycles are left here all day long—lots of them. Some are
locked, and some left so blatantly unlocked I think the owners half want them to get stolen. Out of all these bicycles, why did our murderer choose that one?”
“We don’t know it was the murderer who took the bike.”
“Very well. Let’s stick with the original theory. Say it was the victim himself who stole it. Either way, why choose that one?”
Kusanagi shook his head. “I’m not sure what you’re getting at. It was an average bike, nothing remarkable about it at all. He probably just picked one at random.”
“Random? I think not.” Yukawa waved a finger at the detective. “Let me guess: the bicycle was brand-new, or practically brand-new. Well? Am I right?”
Taken aback, Kusanagi reflected on his discussion with the bicycle’s owner. “Yeah, it was,” he replied after a moment. “Now that you mention it, she did say she’d only bought it a month ago.”
Yukawa nodded, a satisfied look on his face. “As I expected. The owner of a brand-new bicycle with an expensive chain on it is a good deal more likely to file a report with the police if it’s stolen. Our thief expected this, and that’s why he brought the bolt cutters.”
“You mean he went for a new bike on purpose?”
“Indeed.”
“Why?”
“There can be only one reason. The criminal wanted the bicycle owner to file a report. Somehow, having a police report on file claiming the bicycle was stolen worked in our criminal’s favor. Probably because it would lead the investigation down the wrong path.”
“So you mean to say that even though we think the bicycle was stolen between eleven in the morning and ten at night, we’re wrong? But how would the thief know what the bicycle’s owner was going to say?”
“He might not know what they would say about the time of the theft, but he could be sure they would at least file a report that the bicycle had been stolen from Shinozaki Station.”
The Devotion of Suspect X Page 15