The Hunter (7 page)

On the thin sheet of paper, the image was of a man standing, leaning slightly to one side, a smile playing on his lips. A stray lock of hair on his forehead, a gaze of invincible cool. He was staring straight into the camera, in perfect control. His slanting eyes and too-thin eyebrows were rather effeminate; had he been ten years younger, he might have passed for a second-or third-rate teen idol. His smile conveyed the sense that he was fully aware of his attractiveness, took pleasure in his looks. But this man would never smile again. His body was now a shriveled, black crisp, split open from cranium to belly, and stored in the city morgue. As yet no relatives had come forward to claim his remains.

"He went by the name Takuma Sugawara, which is an alias. Real name is Teruo Hara. Age 34, not 30. When he was 20, he committed assault with intent to commit bodily harm, but punishment was deferred and he was released on probation."

It was 8:00 p.m., the setting was special investigation headquarters, and the voice of the chief investigator, Captain Watanuki, filled the room.

Two days had passed since the noon hour when Takako sat across from Takizawa eating ramen. This night meeting had been called to bring everyone up to speed. Exhausted and half-frozen, Takako had dragged herself to the station at 7:00 to spend the hour sitting next to Takizawa as he wrote up the day's report without a thought or a peep from her. While struggling with the drowsiness that threatened to engulf her as she warmed up, Takako retraced the last couple day's activities in her mind, trying to connect any dots she might have missed. But the only picture that popped up in her mind was the hateful sight of her partner's backside.

Takizawa still had made no effort to adjust to her presence. Again today, while continuing to interview the witnesses in the hospital, he had ignored her, as if she were thin air. Perhaps, like an artisan in the old days, he meant that she had to learn by watching and copying his techniques—although by now she found it impossible to believe that anything he did was out of solicitude. He never once asked her opinion, and no matter whom he was interviewing, he would thrust himself forward and shove her to the side. If she said anything to him, he scowled in annoyance. Now, back at headquarters, by rights she, as the junior member of the team, should be writing the report while he went off and had a cup of coffee; yet here he was grumpily twisting his head left and right as he appropriated the task for himself.

I'd think whoever reads it would be happier reading
my
writing
—
that's unless the reader is a numskull who thinks you can't trust anything a woman wrote.

As long as her partner maintained this attitude, Takako found herself putting a negative spin on everything. Although there was precious little fruit of their labor to report, Takizawa pressed down heavily with his ballpoint pen, writing in an oddly square ideographic style developed no doubt from years of presenting written evidence—a cover for lack of results, she thought sarcastically. She gazed at Takizawa, bent over his desk with the posture of a bad student cramming for an exam. Deep down, men like him, who made such an issue of their masculinity, were just a bunch of chicken-livered
fools,
with all the heart of a flea. That was Takako's humble opinion, arrived at after staring day and night at the rear end of this emperor penguin.

And that wasn't all: she couldn't imagine he was any good in bed.

I bet he goes through the motions, managed to knock his wife up a time or three. God, I wonder what
she
looks like.

Unless she focused on inane thoughts like these, Takako was liable to let out a huge yawn at any moment. But just then the meeting that would end their long day began, and all thought of sleep was instantly swept aside. A photograph of the victim was passed out.

"The photograph you have in your hands was shown to Sadako Kitayama, a person of interest in the case, yesterday, and she confirmed that it was Takuma Sugawara beyond a doubt."

Two days before, when someone had contacted investigation headquarters saying she had an idea who the victim might be, and the name Takuma Sugawara first surfaced, everyone expected the hunt for the killer to take on new life. By the end of the day, the photograph of Sugawara had been obtained, and yesterday morning an in-depth probe of his background and situation was ready to be launched. What held things up was the discovery that Sugawara was not his actual name.

"Kitayama had no knowledge of the name Teruo Hara. She claims she had no idea he was using an alias, but didn't seem surprised to hear about it. All she said when confronted with that information was, T see.'"

Sadako Kitayama was a forty-four-year-old housewife who had arranged to meet Sugawara at the restaurant on the night of the fire. She had managed to avoid the conflagration by arriving a half hour late, but when the next day came and went without word from him, she grew worried and on a hunch went to the police. She insisted that the victim was a "mere acquaintance," and that all she really knew about him was his cellphone number. Why didn't she check on him right away? Why wait till two days after the fire to report him missing? What was there to hesitate about? Her answer was, "We didn't have a close relationship."

"She's meeting a younger guy at that time of night. What for, if not to fuck him?" whispered a detective.

The comment was met with muffled laughter. Takako thought the detective was probably right, but she pretended not to hear. Suppose she turned around to express her agreement, what then? They would only stiffen with awkwardness and clam up. After all she'd been through, words like "fuck" were hardly enough to throw her off balance, but male detectives had a tendency to worry about her tender sensibility.

"Our person of interest also said she never knew that the one means of contact she had with Sugawara, his cellphone, was actually registered in the name of another woman."

Because of the extensive damage to the corpse, Kitayama was not asked to identify the body. Instead, she was asked to describe the man she was supposed to meet, noting any distinctive physical characteristics. Kitayama testified that she believed Sugawara had two gold lower left molars, and she added that about ten days earlier, he had been bitten on the leg by a stray dog. These descriptions matched the body in the morgue. Nothing about either the bite marks on the victim's thigh and ankle or about the false teeth had been released to the media. And so it was concluded that the man whom Kitayama was to meet that night was in fact the victim. Thanks to her testimony, the previously nameless corpse was identified as Takuma Sugawara, age around thirty, employed as manager of a model agency.

Yes, it all fits.

Staring at the photograph of the victim when he was alive, Takako surmised that he was just the kind of person to set up a rendezvous in an all-night restaurant with a frustrated housewife dreaming of an amorous fling. He had the looks, for one thing. And if he was juggling two names like that, and carrying around the old charge of assault with intent, he probably was up to no good. But what had he done to get himself killed in such a bizarre and cruel way?

Watanuki continued his report: "Sugawara, or rather Hara, came from Shioya-gun, in Tochigi Prefecture, a little mountain village near the Fuku-shima border. His parents and a married older brother still reside there. They are farmers who do forestry work on the side. Police in Shioya-gun report that Teruo Hara ran away from home at age sixteen; he never returned or bothered to contact his parents. That might explain why no family member has come forward to claim the body."

That Takuma Sugawara was the alias for Teruo Hara was discovered in this way: Sugawara's cellphone number, obtained from Sadako Kitayama, was found to belong not to Sugawara but to a woman owner of a bar. Said bar owner confirmed that Takuma Sugawara was a friend who was borrowing her phone. Since she had gone so far as to lend him her cellphone (naturally, she was questioned about the terms of her friendship), she had apparently known Sugawara rather well, perhaps more intimately than did Sadako Kitayama. The bar owner provided Sugawara's home phone number. That number was registered in Sugawara's name, and it also yielded his home address.

The lease for the apartment at this address was made out in the name of Takuma Sugawara, but through the woman who had signed the lease as his guarantor—a manager of a beauty salon with several branches—the name Teruo Hara came to light. His certificate of ward residence also turned up the name Teruo Hara, at the same time revealing his place of birth.

"Hara lived about an eight-minute walk from the JR Kunitachi station. His apartment was expensive, with a monthly rent of ¥260,000. He lived alone, and judging from the furnishings and decor, he maintained a rather extravagant lifestyle. The apartment, however, gave no clues as to his life history or his private life; in that way, it was like a hotel room. There was no date book, no photos, or anything of the kind. No driver's license, no passport, no health insurance card."

Even getting this one photograph of him had not been easy. After questioning, a woman who had had dealings with him found a photo of the two of them together—her image was cropped to maintain her privacy. But there was nothing else to go on.

People, in the course of going about normal life, left traces of their lives behind wherever they went—a daily flow of rubbish that could be used as clues to the life they lived. But the search of the victim's apartment failed to produce any clues to his identity, leading one to think that either he had reason to be careful about leaving such information lying around, or he had a hideout somewhere else.

Hearing all this, Takako felt a pang of jealousy; while the team tracking down the victim's identity had been running around and discovering all these details, she and Takizawa had been mired in taking down statements from injured witnesses. But fruitless effort was part of every investigation. Even if you finally came across a loose end in the big ball of yarn that constituted a case, and tugged on it for all you were worth, it hardly ever led anywhere. In order to reel in the one thread they were after, the investigators had to unravel numberless threads to no avail.

". . . and when the photograph of Hara was shown to residents of his apartment building, barely one or two could make a positive identification. Further, the building has electronic security at its entrance, so there is no superintendent who could speak about his comings and goings."

After running away from home at sixteen, why had Teruo Hara changed his name, and what sort of life had he led thereafter? How could he afford to live in an apartment costing ¥260,000 in rent? What kind of man was he that he was surrounded by so many different women?

You really had something going for yourself, didn't you? I bet a whole bunch of people had it in for you.

That night, as soon as she got home, Takako flopped down on her bed and lay there, face down, without thinking. Her legs felt heavy, and her toes throbbed with pain. Her lower back ached. This morning before setting out, she had stuck a disposable pocket warmer under her clothes to fend off the cold, so she shouldn't have gotten chilled; still, it felt as if her pelvis were out of joint. They had walked around all day long, so it was only natural—and yet at such times Takako couldn't help thinking ruefully how she was growing older. She could tell she didn't have the resilience she'd had in her twenties. Back then, even if she came home tired, she would never have fallen into her bed right away like this. As the years wore on, it would only get harder to maintain her stamina. What a gloomy thought.

It's partly mental, too, that's for sure. Who wouldn't be a wreck after spending all day with that guy?

She felt so tired it was like her body was made of cotton; and yet as she relaxed a bit, thoughts of the victim, Hara, whom she had spent all day thinking about, to the point of exhaustion, began gnawing at her again.

Stupid man. Who would give you a belt booby-trapped like that?

Takako turned over, emitting a sound that was somewhere between a cough and a sigh, almost a groan; lying on her back, she looked up at the ceiling. Once again the muscles in her shoulders all the way down to her loins were taut, like a drum. She worried that one big yawn might send her back muscles into a cramp.

Was it a woman? I bet a woman gave it to you.

He seemed like a man used to receiving gifts. The owner of his cellphone, for starters, plus the guarantor for his apartment and the person he went to meet on the day of his death—older women, all of them. That isn't entirely normal.

What had until today been only a pathetic, charred victim now had a name and, thanks to the photograph, a face, and the secrets of that man's life were now starting to be laid bare. Whether he wanted them to be or not. The investigation would pool all the team efforts together, and he would be stripped naked, his hidden life revealed. How strange it was, she thought. The first time she learned his name, his life was already over. And from now on, however familiar she might become with the minutiae of his life, she could never come in actual contact with him.

Imagine spending all this time thinking so hard about a dead man!

It was a wretched business. It would be different if she were consumed with worry on his behalf, but the man was a charred crisp. Mentally she addressed him: "I've got to get serious and find out who did this to you— because until I do, I'm stuck with that awful old man."