A Cop's Eyes (27 page)

Then why had Ohta demanded that Kyoko sleep with him for just one night?

It made no sense, unless it was just to make Seiji suffer.

He recalled what Ohta had said then.

If you tell Kyoko that, I'll tell you something interesting
—

If Seiji had asked Kyoko, did Ohta mean to tell him next that they'd been having an affair all along?

That would have completely severed any bond between Seiji and Kyoko.

But why would Kyoko be with Ohta for half a year—

“He had some dirt on her, too. He threatened her to do as he said if she didn't want you and her parents to know. She'd been coerced into that relationship.”

“Dirt …”

“If you ever found out, Nozomi's happy family would crumble. Your relationship with her parents would crumble, too. No, not just that, her own relationship with her parents might crumble. She said that she wanted to take it back so much that she reluctantly slept with Ohta.”

“Wait a second. Dirt …” Seiji had no idea what Natsume
meant. “What kind of secret did he have against her?”

“She knew. That you were the assailant—”

Seiji's head went blank.

“When you attacked my daughter, it wasn't just Ohta. She witnessed it, too.”

That was impossible—

“Going home from cram school, they took a shortcut through the park and saw you in the middle of assaulting my daughter. It might have been because you were so upset, but you didn't notice running past her. She hadn't been able to report it because she liked you. After having failed to turn you in to the police, it was her younger sister Yasuko who was attacked and killed a week later, by the same culprit as far as the world knew. Then, you disappeared from sight. She wanted to believe you weren't the culprit in Yasuko's case, but the thought that you might be remained and tormented her. She couldn't share her suspicions with anyone. Doing so meant admitting that she hadn't reported your assault on my daughter. More than anything, the guilt was tearing her apart …”

“The guilt …”

“Over the fact that if she'd reported the first crime to the police, her sister wouldn't have been killed. A sense that she bore some of the blame for her sister's death … The thought haunted her. Then, when she was twenty, she met you again at a bar by chance. Just seeing your face set off her pent-up emotions, and she ran out crying.”

Her tears back then hadn't been due to the overwhelming joy of being reunited with him.

But—

“Why … did she date me then …” Seiji muttered.

“I think her genuine affection for you was half of it. You didn't have anything to do with Yasuko's case. She prayed that was true. But the other half of it was that she wanted you to feel
the pain all your life if you were indeed her sister's killer …”

Wanted him to feel the pain all his life—

“You'd probably never date her if you had attacked Yasuko knowing that she was Kyoko's sister. Since you did start seeing Kyoko, you must have attacked Yasuko unawares. Even so, it was unforgivable. The suffering the victims' families had been through … She wanted to make sure you were in close contact with her and her family for the pain it would inflict on you. She wanted you to dwell on the depth of your sin and to share their festering wound forever. She must have thought that becoming husband and wife and bearing constant pain, together, was how you two might do penance for her sister.”

But …

Seiji's vision grew blurry.

So Kyoko hadn't agreed to become his wife out of pure love as he'd believed …

“Getting married to your sister's killer isn't an easy thing to understand. She must have been deeply conflicted. But going to such lengths to be with you isn't something that simply leaves me baffled. A victim's family doesn't just wish for the culprit to go to prison or to be punished severely, but to reflect on the crime and to continue to feel the pain … That is our wish.”

“And that's why Kyoko was being threatened by Ohta? That's why she had to become his plaything?”

“That's right … Knowing you two were happily married, Ohta blackmailed her. He told her that if she didn't do as he said, he'd tell both you and her parents that she'd married you knowing that you were the attacker. Meanwhile, her life with you and Nozomi had turned into something irreplaceable for her. And of course there was her relationship with her parents. She could only do what he said. But that day, on the floor in Ohta's room … she found her sister's hair ornament. She killed Ohta, strangling his throat with a telephone cord, overcome by intense hatred.
She wanted to take home the accessory as evidence, but it was stuck in a gap between shelves and wouldn't come loose. While she was trying, she heard a noise downstairs. She said she gave up on taking home the ornament and slipped out of the house while you were searching the first floor.”

It was actually the man who'd been having his way with her body who had killed her sister—

He remembered how Kyoko had come on to him that day. Finally sure that Seiji hadn't been the attacker in Yasuko's case, she'd wanted him from the bottom of her heart for the first time ever since they'd started dating. No doubt she was also thinking that she'd be separated from her family soon.

“A guy like that … deserved to die …” Seiji spat, wiping his tears away.

“Is that what you think?” Natsume asked quietly.

“Of course … Why, are you saying that you don't hate me?! Don't you want to kill me?!”

“You affirm hatred, and killing people you hate is fine. Is that what you want to teach Nozomi?!”

Natsume's words rang in Seiji's ears. It was the first time he'd heard the man shout.

“What her mother did was correct. Is that really what you want to teach Nozomi?!”

Seiji was speechless. He could only picture Nozomi's future in his mind's eye.

“When
my
daughter wakes up, that's not what I want to tell her. Even if she never wakes up … when we reunite in the next world, that's
not
what I want to tell her.”

Seiji couldn't shake his own daughter's image from his head.

“The day you'll reunite with Nozomi probably isn't far away. What you want to tell her … what you need to tell her, the next time you see her …”

That was something he and Kyoko had to think over at length
and with all they had, Natsume's eyes seemed to contend.

“I am … sorry …”

Squeezing the words out from the bottom of his heart, Seiji doubled over on the desk and melt into tears.

Natsume stayed silent as Tsukamoto covered his face with both his hands and cried in front of them.

What was Natsume thinking now? What kind of expression was he facing Tsukamoto with? Looking at the man's back, Nagamine wondered.

“Please handle the rest,” Natsume told him, then stood up slowly and exited the room.

Nagamine couldn't tell what the man was thinking even after glimpsing his profile.

Entrusting another detective with Tsukamoto, he went looking for Natsume. He tried the investigation section, with no luck. He walked down the hallway and asked a colleague who was nearby. Had he seen Natsume?

“Now that you mention it, he went up the stairs.”

Only the practice room was up that way. Nagamine took the stairs, but Natsume wasn't there in the
dojo
, either. Nagamine went further up, to the roof.

When he opened the door, he saw Natsume's back. He appeared to be watching the sun set on the streets of Ikebukuro.

“So you were here,” Nagamine said, approaching his partner.

Natsume turned around. “Good job.”

Had the man been able to unload at least part of the burden he'd been carrying around for years? Or was he still afflicted with an open wound even after arresting his daughter's assailant?

It was hard to tell from his expression.

“What were you thinking about?” asked Nagamine.

“Well, nothing in particular …” Natsume replied, returning his gaze to the district of Ikebukuro. “When I'm done for the day,
I look at the streets from here. The hospital my daughter is in is over there … This is how I cheer myself up so I don't quit.”

For me, investigations are always painful
—

Nagamine recalled how Natsume had uttered those words.

He admitted that he was beginning to dig and respect Natsume as a detective. He also understood the pain a guy like Natsume faced by continuing to be a detective.

“Are you going to stay a cop?” Nagamine asked, at which his partner faced him. “You avenged Emi, if only a little. So now …”

Natsume shook his head. “Anything less than a world free of crime falls short of vengeance.”

Transfixed by Natsume's gaze, Nagamine wondered if he'd ever felt so tense before.

The deep sorrow, and the powerful light that vied to counteract it, proved that Natsume's were unmistakably a cop's eyes.

Contrary to the adjectives that would later come to be applied to his writing, Gaku Yakumaru, born in 1969 in Hyogo Prefecture, could not get enough of Steve McQueen and dabbled in musicals, screenplay writing, and comics scripting before winning the Edogawa Rampo Award for new mystery writers in 2005 with
An Angel's Knife
. A professional novelist ever since, he has won multiple nominations, including from the Mystery Writers of Japan, for his nuanced explorations of violent crimes perpetrated by minors and underage offenders' subsequent ethical choices. A few of his works,
An Angel's Knife
and
A Cop's Eyes
among them, have been adapted into TV dramas.

Begun in 2006, the
Cop's
series featuring Detective Natsume appears at a deliberate pace of roughly one magazine installment per year; the sequel,
A Cop's Promise
, was only collected in 2014. This English edition marks the phenomenal author's North American debut.

Pro Bono

by Seicho Matsumoto

ISBN 978-1-934287-02-6, $14.95/16.95

From the father of postwar Japanese mystery who steered the genre away from locked rooms and toward a wider world of social forces, a classic about a young woman's revenge against a renowned lawyer.

City of Refuge

by Kenzo Kitakata

ISBN 978-1-934287-12-5, $14.95/18.95

It was only when the don of Japanese hardboiled came onto the scene in the '80s that the style truly became homegrown, weaning itself of anti-heroes with native names and foreign mannerisms.

Naoko

by Keigo Higashino

ISBN 978-1-932234-07-7, $14.95/19.95

Winner of the Japan Mystery Writers Award, this black comedy of hidden minds and lives turned the author, one of Japan's most ambitious and versatile mystery hands, into a perennial favorite.

KIZUMONOGATARI: Wound Tale

by NISIOISIN

ISBN 978-1-941220-97-9, $14.95/17.95

It doesn't get more cutting edge than this genre-traversing work by the palindromic mystery writer, the leading light of a younger generation who began their careers in the twenty-first century.

Learn more at
www.​vertical-inc.​com