She could feel the blood drain from her face. She knew she should say something, but the words wouldn’t come. Yukawa pulled a small notepad out of his pocket.
“‘Welcome to My Crystal Sea. The ocean is Hari Cove’s most valuable treasure. For now, I am one of its protectors. Please, come see our beautiful sea. I’m waiting for you’—these words are at the top of your Web site. Am I overthinking it if I said it sounded like you were talking to a specific person?”
Narumi sighed. “Yes, you are completely overthinking it.” Her voice was trembling.
“Well, I guess I was wrong then. Good night—oh, except there was one more thing I wanted to ask.”
“What now?”
“It’s nothing much,” Yukawa said, pulling a digital camera out of his pocket. “I’ll be leaving Hari Cove pretty soon myself. I wanted to take a picture of you to remember you by.”
“A picture of me? No thanks.”
“It’s okay, I won’t post it online or anything,” Yukawa said, clicking the shutter. The flash briefly illuminated the inside of the van. He looked at the display on the back of the camera and nodded. “Good shot.” He turned the camera so Narumi could see. She looked startled in the image. Her eyes were wide open.
“Good night,” Yukawa said, getting out. He walked off toward the hotel without turning to look back. Narumi watched him walk away before she slowly pulled away from the curb.
FIFTY-FOUR
It was already past midnight by the time Kusanagi came home to a depressingly muggy apartment. He tossed his jacket on the bed and turned on the air conditioner. Pulling off his necktie, he grabbed a beer out of the fridge and drank, feeling the cool refreshment spread from his throat down through his body all the way out to his fingertips. Breathing out a long sigh, he collapsed onto his low sofa.
He undid a few buttons on the shirt and reached over to pull his jacket off of the bed. Fishing his phone from his jacket pocket, he pulled up the address book until he found the entry for the Hari Cove Resort Hotel.
Yukawa had called Kusanagi to tell him that the Kawahatas were kicking him out because they were going to turn themselves in, and apparently, they had. Kusanagi didn’t hear about it until the evening, when he got a call from Tatara.
“They’re saying it was an accident. The boiler malfunctioned, and then they tried to hide the body, but there are still a lot of things in their story that aren’t adding up.” The alarm in Tatara’s voice was obvious. “They’re supposed to give me a call when they know something, but I’d like to share what we have if it’ll help. How are things going with you?”
Kusanagi told him about meeting with Senba, and Senba having no idea why Tsukahara might’ve been killed.
“Right,” Tatara said. “Well, might as well let Hari PD know.”
“Yes, sir,” Kusanagi replied, still wondering whether he should tell Tatara about the possibility that the Kawahatas had been involved in the Senba case decades before. He had decided not to. All he could do was pray that it didn’t come back to bite him.
Kusanagi called Hari and talked to Detective Motoyama about finding Senba in the hospital. The detective thanked him, but he didn’t sound entirely grateful. The reason why became immediately clear.
“It looks like we’ve finally nailed this one,” Motoyama told him. “We found the guy who helped the Kawahatas move the body—he’s a friend of the daughter. His story checked out, so we’re calling this one a wrap.”
He’d sounded genuinely relieved, a feeling that Kusanagi couldn’t share. Everything he’d seen up until that point indicated that this wasn’t a case they could write off as a simple accident.
He discussed it with Utsumi, and she agreed.
“Sounds like we have to go back to the very beginning,” she had said.
The two of them headed for Ginza to find the restaurant where, thirty years earlier, Shigehiro and Setsuko had first met. They found it, but not before Kusanagi walked enough that his feet were swollen and painful and his shirt was drenched in sweat, sticking to him in all the wrong ways. This might be the key that unlocked the truth about everything—but it felt like failure.
Kusanagi sighed again and called the number for the Hari Cove Resort Hotel. It was a long time before someone picked up, and another minute after he asked the receptionist to connect him to Yukawa before the physicist finally answered the phone.
“It’s me, Kusanagi. Were you asleep?”
“No, I was waiting for you to call. I figured you’d have something to tell me.”
“How are things on your end? It sounds like they’re getting ready to wrap this case up over there.”
“I’d say your assessment is correct. Unless there’s some dramatic change, I doubt the police will take one step further on this case. That is, they can’t. They’re effectively blind.”
“But you can see?”
“All I have is conjecture. You’re the one who has to tell me if I’m right or not. Isn’t that why you called?”
Kusanagi grinned and opened his notebook. “I found the restaurant where Setsuko Kawahata was working. It’s moved since then, but it’s still in business. Same owner, too.”
“And you had a chat with him?” Yukawa asked.
“That I did.”
“About what?”
“The good old days.”
* * *
The restaurant was on a small alley off of the Ginza. To the side of a white wooden lattice door hung a modest sign that read “Haruhi.” The place was practically designed to avoid attracting passersby.
“You must have a lot of regulars,” Kusanagi had asked the owner.
“About seventy to eighty percent, yep,” the owner, a Mr. Tsuguo Ukai, had replied. “And the people they bring with them wind up becoming regulars, and that keeps us gratefully in business.”
Ukai had perfectly white, neatly trimmed hair and looked sprightly for a man in his seventies. He said he still handled all of the buying for the restaurant himself.
When Kusanagi and Utsumi had arrived, it was a little after closing time, and there was still one customer at the bar, finishing his drink and chatting with Ukai while he cleaned up. They had to wait for the customer to leave before they could really start asking questions.
Other than the chairs at the counter, there were only three tables in the place. Kusanagi had guessed the max capacity was somewhere around thirty. Besides himself, the owner employed two cooks and a server.
Ukai had left Hari to become a chef while still in his teens. After working at a few famous places in the city, he had started Haruhi, a Hari cuisine specialty restaurant, at the age of thirty-four. In the beginning, he didn’t hire any help. It was just him and his wife.
“Our old shop was about a block down from here, along Sony Street. Small place—couldn’t fit much more than ten people. But we had some loyal customers, and that let us move up here once we’d saved enough.”
The move had been about twenty years ago.
“So when Setusko worked for you, that was at the old place?”
Ukai nodded. When they’d arrived, the detectives had told him they’d come to talk to him about Setsuko. They said that they were looking into someone else and trying to establish a better picture of their friends and associates.
“Yeah, I think she started working for us about two or three years after we opened. Eventually the work got too much for just the two of us. We started asking around, and one of our regulars said that he knew this nightclub hostess who liked to cook and had just quit her job, so he brought her by. I liked her well enough, but my wife, she loved the girl. Turns out she’d left the nightclub world and had no plans to go back, so she was only too happy to accept our offer. And it was a great deal for us. She was good with her hands and sharp as a tack. Learned recipes quick, too.”