Prefecture D: Four Novellas Page 13

  Tomoko kept her foot on the accelerator and arrived at the station just as the Mobile Forensics Team were packing up.

  “Watch duty, Sniffer?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Tough break.”

  She sat on a concrete bench a little away from the drop-off point. It was now past 5:30. Crowds emerged from the station every fifteen to twenty minutes, indicating the start of the evening rush. The majority were in dark suits, so a cream dress would stand out.

  Where on earth are you?

  It was dark by 7:00. With most of the cars gone, Mizuho’s was left by itself. Once she was confident she’d grasped the timing of the trains, Tomoko got to her feet. She walked to the phone booth outside the store and dialed the number for home.

  “Hello?” The uninterested tone of her son’s voice, recently broken, was just like his father’s.

  “Yacho. Have you had dinner yet?”

  “Stop calling me that,” he protested.

  “Sorry. Ya-chi-o. Look, I’m going to be late after all.”

  “…”

  “Are you still there?”

  “Yes.”

  “Try to get some studying done, won’t you?”

  The line clicked off.

  Her watch showed 8:00, then 9:00, and still there was no sign of Mizuho. Time seemed to slow to a crawl as she waited there alone. She realized it would be the same for her son. Waiting was the only constant he’d had growing up.

  Tomoko checked her watch again, noting the time as 9:30 when an officer in uniform jogged up to her from the substation. They’d had a call from one of her female officers, a Mitsuko Adachi from Juvenile Crime in headquarters. She’d called after hearing of Mizuho’s disappearance via the network.

  “This is Tomoko. Do you have something for me, Officer Adachi?”

  “Yes. I saw Mizuho’s car, early this morning.”

  “Her car? Where?”

  The news came as a shock. Mitsuko went on to tell Tomoko that she’d seen Mizuho’s car a little before 8:00 that morning, parked outside the Prefectural HQ. I’m pretty sure it was her. She always parks in the same spot and the grille kind of stands out. Her tone had left little room for doubt. Tomoko found it hard to regain her calm, even after she ended the call.

  Mizuho had come to work. She’d made it as far as the parking area but driven off instead of coming in.

  It didn’t make sense.

  Tomoko slumped back into her metal chair inside the substation. She could at least be certain now that Mizuho had not made her decision to disappear until early that morning. She’d been out of sorts the previous evening, perhaps, but she’d come all the way to the Prefectural HQ. She’d intended to come to work as usual. Something had happened in the parking area to change her mind. But what? Had Mild Seven called her while she was in the car? That didn’t seem likely. As far as Tomoko knew, Mizuho didn’t own a mobile phone. Which left … what? Tomoko felt suddenly afraid, as though she’d peered into an old, dark well.

  “Excuse me. Sir?”

  “…”

  “Sir…?”

  Coming back to herself, Tomoko looked around to see the officer in uniform once again holding up his phone.

  “We’ve just been informed that Officer Hirano is back with her family.”

  8

  Her hurt and concern were mixed with relief, leaving Tomoko confused as to what it was she was supposed to be feeling. She pressed on the accelerator and made sure it stayed down. There was no point in hurrying, but there was nothing she could do to stop herself.

  What the hell had it all been about?

  Mizuho’s home was located deep in the mountains. Tomoko had been there before, when she’d first met Mizuho’s parents, and for certain administrative tasks, but this was the first time she’d had to make the trip at night. The area was mostly farming villages, all alike, and there were no streetlights or signposts worthy of the name. The date was on the verge of changing when, after a good deal of backtracking, Tomoko finally reached her destination.

  The main building had a thatched roof with a chimney and had probably been used for sericulture in the past. Lights were on in the building next to it, a two-story home with stone walls. Mizuho’s mother appeared, head dipped in apology, when Tomoko called from the entrance. She kept repeating that she was sorry, then turned to call for her daughter, barely managing to conceal her anger.

  “Mizuho, could you come to the door?”

  A cream dress appeared at the end of the hallway. At first the impression was that of something inanimate. Mizuho shuffled forward, her eyes and nose red. It seemed she’d been crying for a while.

  Mizuho …

  Tomoko breathed a deep sigh of relief. She set her chin and filled her lungs before looking up again. “I’m so glad you’re safe.” The anger was gone. All that remained was a boundless sense of relief.

  “Officer Nanao…” In the hallway, Mizuho’s voice sounded brittle. Nasal and congested, it was the voice of someone trying not to burst into tears.

  Tomoko fought her own urge to cry. She found herself pulling Mizuho into a tight hug. “Silly. You had us all worried.”

  “I’m really sorry.”

  “Where on earth have you been?”

  In place of an answer, Mizuho buried her face in Tomoko’s chest. She smelled of sweat. Tomoko understood. It was hard work to cry.

  Entering the front room, Tomoko saw Morishima next to Mizuho’s father, the two men looking deadly serious. She’d seen the former’s car, so she’d known he would be there.

  Mizuho huddled up next to her mother.

  “She refuses to tell us what this is all about.” The woman gave her daughter a look of total exasperation. Yet she did not let go of Mizuho’s hand, continuing every now and then to massage her fingers.

  Mizuho’s head stayed down. Her expression was like stone, devoid of emotion.

  “Mizuho!” Her father, cigarette smoldering and tipped in the direction of the floor, yelled her name.

  “Perhaps we can reconvene another time,” Morishima suggested before Tomoko had a chance to interject. “It’s late and Mizuho should get some rest. We should probably call it a night, too, Officer Nanao?”

  Tomoko nodded. She desperately wanted to know what was going on inside Mizuho’s head but realized it was probably futile, at this stage, to keep trying for information. She was happy enough to celebrate the fact that Mizuho was home and safe.

  “Give me a call when you feel better.”

  “…”

  “I’ll take you for that anmitsu I promised.”

  “Good, good,” Morishima grumbled. He gave Tomoko a look that told her it was time to leave.

  They got to their feet, and Mizuho stood, too, angling herself into a deep bow. Tomoko caught sight of a framed photo behind her. A beaming smile, standing in salute before one of the prefecture’s substations.

  Mizuho came with them to the door, keeping in the shadow of her parents. For a moment, Tomoko thought she saw a pleading look on the girl’s face.

  An incredible number of stars greeted them as they left. As they walked back to their cars, Tomoko dropped her voice to a whisper. “Did she come back alone?”

  “Yes.”

  “On the train?”

  “That’s right. She got on at Train Station M. Called home when she got to the station closest to here.”

  “It’s strange, though. Why not just drive here?”

  “Who knows?” Morishima said, sounding uninterested as he clambered into his car.

  It was all still a mystery.

  Perhaps Mizuho had suffered a broken heart. Tomoko had never seen the girl looking so dejected. Halfway into her seat, Tomoko turned back toward the house. On the first floor, the lights had come on. She thought she could sense Mizuho looking out from the bedroom window.

  Get some sleep.

  Tomoko managed the return trip without getting lost, making it home in just forty minutes. It was already 2:00 in the
morning. The lights were on in the hallway, the front room, and the bathroom. The TV was on, too.

  No different than usual.

  She crept forward and poked her head into the back room. Yachio was asleep on the bed, still fully clothed. He looked as innocent as he had as a toddler, when, unable to properly pronounce his name, he’d proudly told her that “Yacho” was doing this and “Yacho” was doing that. His textbooks were strewn across the floor. His desk held his TV, stereo, and computer, along with enough games and CDs to start a business. They were what he used to pass the time. To fill the gaps. To alleviate the worry.

  I’ll make it up to him one day.

  She’d been saying it for fifteen years.

  She rearranged his sheets and went back to the front room. She warmed some curry and ate it with some bread.

  She started to cry.

  Her son, the female officers for whom she was responsible—they were all so far away. When she tried to help, they resisted. Knocked her back. Left her by herself. She felt betrayed by the ring on her finger. It could do nothing to help. It had no answers.

  The morning paper was still there on the table. “Female Officer’s Triumph.” Mizuho was looking out at her, dressed in uniform.

  Mizuho. Talk to me.

  The perfume. The cigarettes. The reporter.

  The images swirled randomly through her tired head. First the perfume. She’d picked up the scent in Mizuho’s room, yet it hadn’t been there in the car. Nor had she noticed it earlier when she’d hugged Mizuho close. There’d been the smell of sweat but nothing to suggest the girl had been wearing perfume. Perhaps she hadn’t used it on herself. Perhaps she’d sprayed it, but only around her room.

  Why?

  Maybe it had been someone else. Someone other than Mizuho. But who? And why? The urge to sleep was becoming too strong. Tomoko decided to stop fighting it.

  Time for bed.

  Whatever happened, she would pay Mizuho another visit later that day. She got to her feet, cleared away the empty plates, and was about to fold the paper in two when her hands came to an abrupt stop. A sentence from the page caught her attention. Something wasn’t right. She kept reading, unable to pin the feeling down. Her vision began to blur. She started again, this time scanning the article from the top. She read the whole thing, word by word.

  Her eyes opened wide.

  No …

  As the understanding dawned on her, she remembered Mizuho’s pleading look. A hypothesis formed in her mind. The various fragments of information in her head began to slot together, as though they’d always been part of the same puzzle. The perfume, too, fitted in neatly among them. The hypothesis became fact.

  But that’s …

  Tomoko looked again at Mizuho’s drawing. The lines seemed darker, blacker than before. Her knees started to tremble. She tried to steady them, but her hand began to tremble with them. A shudder ran through her.

  The conclusion she’d come to, the cruel act she’d seen in her mind’s eye, was, in fact, the answer she’d been looking for.

  9

  It was, she discovered, surprisingly hard to justify a private meeting with a man who wasn’t your husband or partner, especially when the man in question was a member of the police. Having exhausted her options, Tomoko had finally opted to hold the secret talk in the station itself, and during the day. Her meeting was with Pomade, the bulldog.

  She lowered her voice. “The likeness was far from accurate. At first.”

  “…”

  “That’s why you ordered her to redo it.”

  “What if I did?” Morishima retorted, settling back to let the couch take his weight.

  He was clearly not planning to take this gracefully; the man seemed more annoyed than anything else. Tomoko had expected him to become defensive. If he’d been the kind of man who could apologize, he would never have issued such a callous order in the first place. He genuinely believed that it was no big deal.

  Tomoko had spent a week looking into what had happened.

  The starting point had come when she’d reread the article and realized the shocking contradiction it contained.

  It hadn’t been possible.

  Mizuho could never have drawn something so accurate. The victim had had her bag snatched. At seventy, she was elderly, and it would all have been over in an instant. She could never have been expected to recall the man’s features to any degree of accuracy. It wouldn’t matter how talented Mizuho was at asking the right questions, or at drawing, when there was no foundation on which to work.

  No one had noticed, of course, amid the excitement of the arrest and the shop owner’s claim that the drawing was a perfect, spitting image.

  Why had he said such a thing to begin with?

  He’d feared the gang leader for some time. All day, the man rode around in a pimped-out car. He’s trouble. The owner would have already suspected that something was likely to happen. Then the police had turned up bearing a likeness, saying the man in the drawing was the instigator of a theft. Maybe it was the shape of the hair, perhaps the contours of the face—something in the picture would have been close enough. The shop owner had become convinced it was the man from the gang.

  But there had been another factor in the shop owner’s choice of words. The man in question had only ever bought pornography at the store. It was standard practice, in such cases, for staff to avoid eye contact to reduce the shame of the customer.

  The owner had never properly seen the man’s face, not up close.

  His words had set everything in motion.

  Forensics had been notified in the morning that the likeness had led to an arrest. Knowing it would look good for the division, Morishima had called Media Relations to arrange a press conference. When the photo of the man eventually arrived from district, however, he’d realized that the resemblance was scant at best. He’d panicked. The press conference was already set for the evening. He’d handed the photo to Mizuho and requested that she redraw the likeness. She’d refused. She’d told him she couldn’t do it, over and over. He’d lost his temper and shouted the words.

  This is why we don’t need women in the force.

  That was what had broken her. She’d never complained when she’d rushed to crime scenes in the dead of night. She’d always been the first to help carry the team’s heavy equipment. She’d poured plaster on footprints, ignoring the urge to pee even as her teammates relieved themselves by the side of the road. She had never once protested.

  Despite this, she’d been pigeonholed as a “woman.” She’d been told she wasn’t needed.

  She’d agreed to do it. Her mind had been blank as her hands moved over the paper, mechanically following the method she’d been taught. Morishima had been overjoyed with the result. The reporters, too, had jumped on the chance to write up the story of her accomplishment.

  Mizuho alone had been crushed, hating herself for the deception. The next day she’d made it as far as the parking area, but that had been her limit. She’d tried her best, but she hadn’t been able to come into the office. She no longer deserved the uniform. She thought herself a disgrace.

  Morishima, the man responsible for all of this, now sat before Tomoko. He was smoking a cigarette but not enjoying it, tapping his foot just loudly enough to make it a challenge.

  “It was you who sprayed the perfume in her room.”

  Morishima had been spooked when Mizuho had failed to show the next day. He’d called the dorm, but that hadn’t been enough to allay his fears, so he’d headed there in person. He was afraid she might have left a note that detailed what he’d asked her to do. He would be in trouble if anyone saw such a thing.

  But there hadn’t been a note. He’d been relieved but had noticed a potential complication at the same time. He, more than anyone, knew about Tomoko’s keen sense of smell—he’d been the one, after all, to first call her Sniffer. He also knew that she was in charge of looking after the prefecture’s female officers. She would visit the do
rm if she heard Mizuho was missing. If she did, she would notice the smell of his pomade.

  He’d left for the dorm at nine, a time when Mizuho’s absence could have still been written off as tardiness. Not only that, but he’d gone there in person and gone into her room despite the ban on men entering the dorm. He’d realized this would make Tomoko suspicious, so he’d opened the window to flush out the smell. Worried this wasn’t enough, he’d seen the bottle of perfume and sprayed it around for good measure. Finally, he’d cajoled Toshie into keeping his secret on the pretext that Mizuho would hate to find out he’d been in her room.

  He’d returned to Forensics, waited a decent amount of time, then called Tomoko to give her the news.

  “Anything to say for yourself?”

  “This is a joke. You’re being naive.”

  “…”

  “We can’t have our officers wandering off each time there’s a minor setback. To be honest, this whole thing is really—”

  There was a sharp clap. Morishima’s eyes widened with shock.

  Tomoko’s hand was already back on her knee.

  “If you’ll excuse me, sir.”

  She got to her feet. She’d already weighed up the risks. Morishima wouldn’t dare tell a soul that a female officer had slapped him in the face. She walked out of Forensics. She turned once on her way out, but the man hadn’t moved from his place behind the partition.

  The meeting had done nothing to brighten her mood. It wasn’t just Morishima. There was Yuasa, too, and all the other members of Mizuho’s team. They would all have known that she’d redone the drawing. So, too, would the detectives who’d brought the man in. Not one of them had spoken up. From her disappearance to the moment she was found at home, no one had thought to say a damn thing.

  It was unnerving.

  The corridor seemed to shrink around her. Tomoko picked up speed, her shoes clicking loudly on the floor. She took off her ring and held it tightly in her fist. For the first time, she understood she had no choice but to make superintendent.