But it was just our misunderstanding that the place had been vacated; everyone had gathered in one corner. There was a TV set there, but the screen wasn’t even visible to me thanks to the layers of people.
“Did something happen?” Yamamoto called out to one of them.
“Yeah, it’s intense. That rumor was actually true.”
“That rumor?”
“About Mr. Katsuragi’s daughter. They say she’s gone missing. And it’s been over ten days.”
“What?!”
Yamamoto pushed his way through. I followed him. Finally, I could see the TV screen. But there was just an announcer’s face informing us about a different case. It seemed the segment on Juri Katsuragi had ended.
The congregation around the TV started returning to their seats, musing about the whole thing.
“Work must be the last thing on Mr. Katsuragi’s mind now.”
“I thought it was weird for that man not to come to meetings.”
“Won’t Nissei’s stock go down again?”
“I wonder, did she just run away?”
“Let’s hope so. She hasn’t been murdered or anything, has she?”
The last, alarming speculation came from Sugimoto. I grabbed his shoulder.
“Hey, tell me the details. What’s up with Mr. Katsuragi’s daughter?”
Sugimoto looked at me with some surprise. “It seems she’s been missing since several days ago, and the police have begun investigating.”
“Investigating? What kind of investigation is this?”
“I don’t know. It’s probably showing on other channels.” Sugimoto went back to his seat like he couldn’t be bothered.
Ah, Yamamoto let out behind me. It seemed he’d been changing the channel busily, and a different announcer from before was displayed. Nissei Auto EVP’s daughter missing, the title said.
The female announcer reported pretty much what Sugimoto had told me. We have learned that Mr. Katsutoshi Katsuragi’s elder daughter, Juri, has gone missing. The Metropolitan Police Department and the Ota Police Station believe that she has been involved in a case and have launched an investigation—
Involved in a case?
What did it mean? Why didn’t they just say that it was a kidnapping? No, more importantly, Juri was missing. What in the world had happened to her?
Yet it was what followed the next moment that truly stunned me. A woman’s face appeared on screen.
It seemed to be a candid photo. Juri Katsuragi, the caption said.
The female announcer’s report continued. However, her voice didn’t reach my ears. If no one were next to me, I might have screamed at the TV screen. Holding back that urge took a great deal of effort.
The face of Juri Katsuragi on the TV screen didn’t belong to the Juri I knew. It was the face of a completely different person whom I’d never met.
Chapter 18
I needed a drink, but I went straight home. If I got drunk carelessly, I might run my mouth about something I shouldn’t. I didn’t have the confidence tonight to keep my emotions under check.
Once I was home, I took out a bottle of bourbon and started drinking it straight. My heart was still thumping. Or maybe this was what they called a premonition. If that was what it was, it wouldn’t help no matter how much I drank.
The TV screen was burned into my mind and refused to go away. The face of Juri Katsuragi that had been displayed.
Who was that? Why was a different person’s face being presented to the public as hers?
But I kept seeing the same face on other news programs. If they had broadcast another person’s by mistake, they’d have corrected it by now.
In other words, that was Juri Katsuragi.
Then the person I spent several days with wasn’t Juri? Who was it, then? Why had she presented herself as Juri?
Was there any way I might ascertain if she had been the real Juri? Eventually I thought of one. Her voice.
In order to spy on the police’s behavior, we had used Hakozaki Junction. At that time, I had used Juri to manipulate Katsuragi. For grabbing the ransom money, too. Juri had spoken with Katsuragi. He hadn’t seemed to doubt that it was her. Even if the two women had similar voices, I didn’t think that a father would mistake his own daughter’s. Even if he had been at his wits’ end—and as far as I could tell, Katsutoshi Katsuragi hadn’t lost sight of himself. Down to just before his ransom money was taken, he’d responded to my instructions collectedly.
Then was the photo broadcast on TV wrong? Had Katsutoshi Katsuragi intentionally provided a different person’s pic? Why would he ever do such a thing?
No, that was definitely unthinkable. I wasn’t the only one tuning in. Juri’s acquaintances were, too. If the person in the photo were different, someone would call the station right away.
Juri. As in the first characters from “arbor” and “science.”
I recalled how she’d told me her name at the beginning. She’d definitely said so. Was that a lie, too? Had the lies started so early?
Who could that have been?
No matter how much bourbon I gulped down, I still felt sober. My pulse quickened, while I grew more and more unsettled.
I recollected the hours and days I had spent with her. It was a short time, but a lot had happened. We had played an audacious game, a staged kidnapping, to completion. What did it mean that I didn’t know my partner’s true identity?
That wasn’t the only thing I didn’t know. It seemed that somehow the real Juri Katsuragi had vanished the same night I had met the fake Juri. Where had the real Juri gone? Was the fake Juri running away from home coincidental or inevitable?
My brain was a disorganized mess. I couldn’t come up with a single logical answer.
I lost track of how much alcohol I’d imbibed. When I came to, I was lying on the sofa. I had left the light on, and the bottle of bourbon was on its side and empty. The sun was shining through from the other side of the curtain. I looked at the wall clock. It wasn’t even ten minutes off from the usual hour I woke up. It seemed ingrained habits didn’t break down even at a time like this.
I got up sluggishly. My head hurt horribly. My throat was completely parched. I went to the kitchen and pulled out Evian water and drank it straight out of the bottle. I felt dizzy and leaned on the refrigerator.
My eyes rested on the large pot that sat on top of the microwave. I recalled Juri had used it to make stew. The various things she’d talked about passed through my head. How much of it was true, which parts were lies? Or had it all been lies? As I was now, I couldn’t judge.
I went back to the sofa and turned on the TV. In the early morning, every station repeatedly broadcast the same news. As I watched absentmindedly, the case in question came up, too. Nissei Auto EVP’s daughter missing—now there was a question mark appended to the words. And beneath them: Running away from home?
And again, the photo of a girl I had never met before popped up. The missing Juri Katsuragi, it was captioned. There wasn’t anything new in the story. It seemed they hadn’t spoken to the Katsuragis. They must have been wary of approaching the family behind a leading corporate sponsor. There were signs the media were frustrated about not being able to obtain detailed information.
Perhaps the press hadn’t been told that it was a kidnapping. I vaguely saw why. The police wanted their blunder of losing the ransom to be kept under wraps. They probably thought that bit could wait until the culprits’ arrest. But to conduct an open investigation, they needed the mass media. Thus they had simply made it public that she was missing.