She had heard it too, the sound of footsteps on shingles. She’d known about Ryo’s habit of leaving through his window and walking across the roof to get outside. She’d never mentioned it to the boy, though. Having him out of the house made it easier for her to spend time with Matsuura.
He had left that day, too. She remembered hearing the sound again when he came back.
So he wasn’t there. But so what? What does that detective think Ryo did?
Santa Claus stood by the doorway, handing out cards. Speakers inside were playing classical arrangements of Christmas songs. The combination of Christmas, New Year, and the grand opening sale meant that the aisles were packed. Nearly all the customers were young women. Like insects drawn to a flower, Sasagaki thought.
It was opening day at Yukiho Shinozuka’s R&Y Osaka branch. Unlike the shops in Tokyo, this one took up an entire building. It was more than just clothes. There were accessories, bags, and a whole floor for shoes – all luxury brands, not that Sasagaki could tell the difference. Everything about the place seemed to contradict what he had heard about Japan’s economic bubble breaking.
There was a small café next to the escalator leading from the ground floor to the first. Sasagaki had been sitting there for about an hour, looking down on the floor below. Even when night fell outside, the customers kept coming. He’d had to line up for a while just to get into the café, and there was still a long line at the entrance. Sasagaki ordered a second cup of coffee to keep himself on the good side of the staff.
A young couple sat across the table from him. To a casual observer, they might have looked like a young man and wife out for a day with grandpa. ‘No show, huh?’ the younger man said quietly.
Sasagaki nodded. His eyes focused on the floor below them.
Both of the people sitting across from him were officers from Osaka Homicide.
Sasagaki looked at his watch. It was nearing closing time.
‘There’s still a chance,’ he said, half to himself.
If Ryo Kirihara showed up, the two officers were going to take him into custody. The retired Sasagaki was only there as a spotter. Koga had arranged everything.
Kirihara was wanted for murder.
The moment Sasagaki had seen the fragment of glass from the broken cactus pot, a light had gone off in his head. He remembered the descriptions he’d read in reports of Matsuura just before he disappeared, in particular the comments they’d had from several people that he often wore Ray-Bans with green-tinted lenses. Maybe he hadn’t been lying low after the pirated game bust after all. Maybe something worse had happened to him.
Sasagaki had Koga run a check on the glass. He was right. It was from a pair of Ray-Bans, and the slight fingerprint they found on it bore a strong resemblance to one they had taken in Matsuura’s apartment. Forensics said there was a greater than ninety per cent chance it was his.
So why was a fragment of Matsuura’s sunglasses in that pot? The most obvious explanation was that the glass had been in the dirt Reiko Karasawa used when she potted her cactus. So where did she get the dirt? Probably from her own garden.
They had needed a search warrant to start digging up the Karasawa garden. That was a difficult call to make, given the evidence they had, but Koga was willing to risk it. It helped that there were currently no residents at the Karasawa house. It also could have been grudging respect for an old detective’s persistence, Sasagaki thought.
They had performed the search the day before and found a patch of soil in the tightly planted yard with no trees in it. They began to dig there first.
Roughly two hours later, they found a single white bone. Then the others. There were no clothes. They estimated that seven or eight years had passed since the time of death.
Osaka police then sent the remains to a forensic laboratory in an attempt to determine their identity. There were several ways by which they could do this, but each would take time. The odds were good, though, that they would be able to tell whether the bones belonged to Matsuura or not.
For his part, Sasagaki was sure they were Matsuura’s once he heard that they’d found a small platinum ring on the right pinky finger of the skeleton. He could remember seeing it on the man’s hand like it was yesterday.
The right hand was holding a piece of evidence, too: several strands of human hair wrapped around the bleached finger bones. Like hair he might have pulled out during a struggle.
Now the question was whether they could identify those hairs as belonging to Ryo Kirihara. Typically hair was identified by its colour, lustre, hardness, thickness, medullary index, pigment distribution and blood type, allowing a near one-to-one match with an individual. But given that the hair in question had been buried for years, it was uncertain how much of that information remained intact. Koga had promised to send it to a DNA lab for testing if it came to that.
DNA testing was a relatively new method, but they’d had some success with it over the last couple of years. There were plans to share the technology with every police station in the country within the next four years, but right now there was only one lab running the tests.
Times had changed in the nineteen years since the pawnbroker died. Everything was different now, even the way the police ran investigations.
The problem, then, was finding Ryo. No matter how much evidence they had on him, if they couldn’t arrest him, none of it mattered.
It had been Sasagaki’s suggestion that they keep a close eye on Yukiho Shinozuka’s surroundings. Watch the shrimp and eventually you’ll find the goby, that was his belief.
‘He has to show up when she opens her new shop. Opening a place in Osaka has a special meaning for them. And Yukiho’s been too busy with her shops in Tokyo to come down to Osaka all the time, so they’re due for a reunion. Opening day is our day,’ Sasagaki had told Koga.
Koga agreed with the old detective. From the moment the shop opened, several officers had taken turns watching from various vantage points. Sasagaki, too, had been there since that morning in a coffee shop across the street. Eventually, after hours of fruitless watching, he’d come inside.
‘You think Kirihara is still going by Yuichi Akiyoshi?’ the male detective asked.
‘Hard to say. He might have switched to a different name by now.’
While he answered, Sasagaki’s mind was drifting off in another direction – wondering about Ryo’s choice of alias.
It had sounded familiar the first time he heard it, but it was only recently that he had put two and two together. He had heard the name ‘Akiyoshi’ from his informant Fumihiko Kikuchi. Yuichi Akiyoshi was the name of the kid who had tattled on him about the keychain, linking Fumihiko to the rape. Yuichi Akiyoshi, the traitor.
So why had Ryo chosen that particular name as an alias? He would have to ask Ryo himself to know for sure, but Sasagaki’s pet theory was that Ryo saw himself living a life of betrayal. His choice of Akiyoshi’s name was a self-deprecating inside joke.
Not that any of that mattered any more.
Sasagaki was almost certain he knew why Ryo had set up Fumihiko. The photograph Fumihiko had showing Yaeko and Matsuura’s affair was a thorn in his side. If Fumihiko had shown the photograph to the police, it might have spurred a reopening of the entire case, making Ryo fear for his alibi. If Yaeko and Matsuura had been in mid-tryst, that would have left Ryo alone. Even if the police back then were unlikely to suspect an elementary school boy of murdering his own father, it was a piece of evidence he’d rather not have out there.
It had been while he was drinking with Yaeko the night before that Sasagaki had finally reached clarity in his own conjectures. Ryo had been alone on the top floor that day, but he hadn’t stayed in the house. Just as it was easy for burglars to sneak in through the upper-storey windows in those crowded neighbourhoods, a boy could sneak out by the same route. Ryo had gone somewhere that day, stepping across the rooftops.