A Cop's Eyes (22 page)

Ohta smiled, unperturbed. “And who would believe that?”

“What the hell do you want?” Was it money? He didn't have any to spare, but …

“Let's see … I bet you don't have much in the way of cash. How about you loan me Kyoko for a night.”

Seiji's reaction was to glare at Ohta.

“Stop with the scary face … I've had a thing for her since we were in elementary school. I've wanted to sleep with her, just once. If I could slobber over that woman, I'd forgive and forget everything. I promise I'll even hand the proof to you.”

“Don't screw with me.”

“Just one night will do. If I told the police, your family would
fall apart, wouldn't it? Kyoko wouldn't want that, either, I bet. So ask her for me? My feeling superior for being with your woman is all it's gonna take to end your problems.”

Ohta smiled and stood up.

“I'll come again, so open a tab for me.”

With those closing words, he left the bar.

Clenching his teeth, Seiji looked down at his hand. It was gripping the icepick hard.

He raised his head in surprise at the sound of the door opening. A regular had come into his bar.

“Sorry, but … I don't feel well and was closing for tonight.”

After putting an ice scoop into his bag, Seiji left the bar and headed towards the main street.

“Up to Hikarigaoka park please,” he told the taxi driver when he got in.

What should he do—

He felt like he was going mad from his mounting sense of panic.

There was no way he could offer up Kyoko to that man for a night. First of all, what did Ohta think Seiji could even say to ask her?

But if he didn't let Ohta sleep with Kyoko, he might give the police evidence of the crime he'd committed.

If it came to that, Seiji would be arrested as the assailant. It wasn't just that. He might be accused of killing Kyoko's sister, though he hadn't committed that crime.

Would the police believe that he wasn't Yasuko's killer? If they ended up not believing him and pinning her murder on him, just how much of a shock would that be to Kyoko and her parents?

When the taxi stopped, he impatiently received his change and ran into the park ahead. He relied on his memories as he fervently searched around the dark park.

After looking for some time, he finally found a place that matched them. He'd dug a hole under the thickly growing trees before his eyes and buried the hammer there. Heading to a particularly large tree within the thicket, Seiji pulled out the ice scoop and started digging. No matter how much he dug, however, the hammer failed to materialize. There was no mistaking he'd buried it there. He didn't remember digging a hole deeper than now, either. Afraid of keeping the hammer on him, he'd come to the park, a short distance from where he'd attacked the girl, to bury his weapon.

Perhaps Ohta, who had witnessed his crime, had gone as far as to follow him here.

Then, he'd dug up the hammer Seiji had buried.

But Seiji didn't think the hammer would be decisive proof. The girl's bloodstains might have been on it, but before burying it here, he'd wiped the handle many times. His fingerprints shouldn't be on it.

Unless there was evidence other than the hammer—

How
 … he thought, then something came to mind.

Ohta had been into photography back then and was always carrying a camera. He might have documented the critical moment on film.

Amidst the pitch-black darkness, Seiji looked up to the heavens.

“Welcome home. You must be tired.”

Kyoko, who had opened the door, turned to him with a smiling face.

“Yup …”

Seiji's bar was open until four in the morning. After that, he cleaned up and came home around six in the morning. In order not to incur Kyoko's suspicion, he'd killed some time at a family restaurant next to the park and come home at the usual hour.

When he came in, the tabletop was set with breakfast. Because they couldn't have dinner together, they at least tried to make sure that they had breakfast as a couple.

“Sorry … but I don't have an appetite today.”

“Are you not feeling well? Now that you say so, you look sort of pale …” Kyoko asked him, worried.

“It's nothing, really. But … I'm dead tired, I need to crash.”

Looking at Kyoko's face was so difficult that he immediately went into the bedroom. Nozomi was still asleep in her small bedspread. Crouching next to her, he stared at her peaceful, sleeping face.

Ohta wanted to rob him of what was irreplaceable and dear to him. Out of revenge for being bullied, the man intended to make not only Seiji but his entire family miserable.

Whether he acceded to Ohta's demands or rejected them, the joy of having this warm household would likely crumble away.

What should he do—

His mind raced as he looked at his daughter's sleeping face, but no answer came to him.

Yet … no matter what, he couldn't let go of this happiness.

Seeing a police vehicle a little ahead of them, Wataru Nagamine told the driver, “Around here will do.”

When the taxi parked, he scanned the surroundings of the house that was the crime scene. There was already a large crowd of onlookers.

Nagamine paid the driver, got out of the car, and headed to the scene. He showed the uniformed officers his badge and passed through the cordoning tape. When he looked at the front entrance, a man he recognized was standing outside.

Nobuhito Natsume—

“Thanks for joining us,” Natsume noticed Nagamine and called out to him.

“Can we go inside yet?”

“They're in the middle of forensics. It seems it'll take a while.”

“Then let's do some questioning until then.”

Natsume nodded and followed after him.

For about an hour, they went around asking neighbors about the victim. When they returned to the house, forensics had finished and they could go inside.

When they entered, there was a stairway right by the entrance. They could hear several voices coming from the upper level. It seemed the scene of the crime was on the second floor. Climbing up the stairs with Natsume, he made for a door that had been left open.

Nagamine hesitated a bit before stepping in. It was a very large room, but apart from the bed against the wall, there was almost no space to put a foot down thanks to all the objects scattered about. Plastic model boxes, DVDs, obscene comics, and magazines seemed to almost bury the man who had collapsed facedown.

Subsection Chief Yabusawa and one of the forensics staff were standing huddled together in a clear spot.

“Hard at work,” Nagamine called out.

Yabusawa turned to face them. “This was your jurisdiction, wasn't it.”

He'd said this to Natsume, who was behind Nagamine. Yabusawa didn't look pleased in the least. Natsume was notorious even at Investigation Section One for being an oddball.

“Can we come in?” Nagamine asked.

“Yeah. Forensics is done, and you can't do your job out there, can you.”

Nagamine did his best to walk on tiptoes and not step on anything inside as he went in.

Natsume followed, also doing the same.

“Wow, what a crazy room. The cause of death was …” Nagamine
crouched down and peered at the man's face.

“Strangulation,” answered Yabusawa. “It seems like the victim's neck was constricted with a phone cord or something. He must have put up a lot of resistance for the room to end up like this.

“It seems that the victim, Toru Ohta, had been a shut-in for the last decade. The first person to discover him was his mother. She noticed the living-room window was broken when she came home from work. She said she was worried and knocked on his door, but didn't get a response and came in to find him in this condition.”

Indeed, interviewing the neighbors earlier, they'd turned up very few memories of Toru Ohta.

The Ohta family had moved to Zoshigaya about five years ago, apparently from Nerima Ward.

“There's something that bothered me a little,” the forensics staffer said, lifting up a bag from the bed.

“Bothered?” Nagamine repeated, looking at the bag.

“There was a hammer in this plastic bag. It seems to have a lot of dirt on it, but the head looks like it has bloodstains on it.”

“There was also a towel and a container with a USB in the bag,” noted Yabusawa. “Could you go to the station from here and check what's on the USB?”

“Understood.”

Nagamine took the bag and turned to leave the room, but Natsume stood unmoving, his gaze fixed on one spot.

“What is it?”

“Excuse me.”

Natsume got on the bed and lay on his belly. He reached his hand toward a gap in the shelves behind the bed. However, the opening was so small, his hand wouldn't fit.

“Is there something like a stick?” Natsume raised his head and asked.

Nagamine looked around and found a thirty-centimeter ruler on top of a shelf. “How about this?”

Natsume jabbed the ruler between the shelves and tried to fish something out. An object that glittered in the light emerged from the gap. Natsume grabbed it with his white glove and showed it to everyone. It seemed to be a hair ornament made of beads. A heart and the name “Yasuko” were embroidered on it with multicolored spheres.

Arriving at the East Ikebukuro police station, Nagamine and Natsume headed to the assembly hall on the third floor where the investigation headquarters would be.

When they entered, the precinct detectives were in the process of moving chairs and long desks to set up the HQ.

“Computer?” Nagamine asked, to which Natsume replied, “There.” They made for a desk placed along a wall.

They started up the laptop and put in the USB. On it were eight photos, which they brought up on screen. What were these?

It seemed like a park. The focus was on someone's back. The person was wearing a dark sweatshirt with the hood up and seemed to be in the middle of running in the opposite direction. In the corner, a surprised woman faced them. The moment Nagamine glanced at the bottom of the picture, Natsume butted in ferociously, brushing him aside, and moved the cursor. The picture expanded. They could see a small child collapsed on the ground.

“Emi …”

Nagamine turned toward Natsume, who had uttered the name, his face pale as he stared at the screen.

“Are you okay?”

Nagamine examined his partner, who sat next to him. Although Natsume gave a firm nod, Nagamine got a lump in his
throat guessing at what the man was going through.

The photo in the possession of murder victim Toru Ohta indeed showed the moment Natsume's daughter, Emi, had been attacked ten years ago. The other seven likewise captured the moments before and after the attack. While none of the photos showed the face of the hooded person, the hammer held in his right hand indicated that he was, without a doubt, the culprit. They corresponded with eyewitness reports of the serial assailant cases from back then.

Of the eight pictures, just one showed a woman in one corner. Although Nagamine wasn't certain, she had to be one of the witnesses he'd spoken to.

He remembered the hair ornament found in Ohta's room.

That was likely the second victim Yasuko Toda's. In each of the cases, a girl had been struck in the head with a hammer and robbed of her hair ornament. The culprit must have taken something as a way to commemorate the deed, as criminals who did it for the pleasure were sometimes known to. The crimes' M.O., eyewitness accounts that a young man had been seen running away at the precise hour, and the victims' missing hair ornaments pointed to a common perpetrator for the two cases.

They made no mention of the missing hair ornaments to the press. They'd kept it confidential as a detail only the culprit would know.

Why had the ornament been where it was discovered? Had it been hidden in the bag with the hammer and somehow fallen out?

Regardless, they had retrieved from Ohta's room a hair ornament thought to have been on Yasuko Toda and a hammer with evident bloodstains.

Nagamine chewed over the fact, anxious for the investigation meeting to begin.

When a hush overtook the assembly hall, Nagamine looked
toward the door. Yabusawa and the other chiefs came in and sat in the front row. The initial investigation meeting was on.

First, they announced the results of the forensic autopsy of the victim, Toru Ohta.

The cause of Ohta's death was suffocation; he had been strangled with a cord-like object. The estimated time of death was between fourteen and sixteen hundred hours that same day.

Then came a report from an investigator who had conducted interviews. As of now, there were no witness reports from the Ohta residence's vicinity that might lead to an arrest.

“Next—”

At Subsection Chief Yabusawa's voice, Nagamine stood up.

“A bloodstained hammer, towels, and a container were found in a bag in Toru Ohta's room. Inspecting the photos on the USB found in the container, we found that they depict a serial assault case from ten years ago—” Nagamine reported.

The hall suddenly burst into a commotion. Most of the investigators were looking at Natsume, who was sitting next to Nagamine.

“In addition, we believe that the hair ornament found in Toru Ohta's room belonged to Yasuko Toda, one of the victims from ten years ago. Toru Ohta may be related in some way to the incidents back then, and for that reason we ask for a DNA test on the bloodstains on the hammer as well as Toru Ohta.”

Although there was no physical evidence from the first attack, the culprit had thrown away a glove with Yasuko's bloodstains near the crime scene after the second attack.

If the DNA from the bodily fluids inside the glove showed a match, Ohta would be the perp of the unsolved decade-old serial assailant case.

But—Nagamine thought as he sat down in his seat.