Кэйго Хигасино - The Name of the Game is a Kidnapping

“The reason was simple. I didn’t want to offer up my name. I didn’t want a stranger knowing that Chiharu Katsuragi was wandering around being weird. It was just a lie I came up with on the spot.”

I swayed my head from side to side. “It may have been a quick lie, but from then on, whenever you talked about yourself, you did so flawlessly as Juri. You know, you’re quite an actress.”

“It’s probably sarcasm, but thanks.”

“So then.” I put my glass on the table. “When did you plan all this? Naturally, it must have been after I proposed the game, but it couldn’t have been right then.”

“It wasn’t spontaneous or anything.” She took the wine bottle in hand and tried to fill my glass.

“Hey, pouring wine is the man’s job.” I took it over and did it myself.

“Your game was a hint. ‘He thinks I’m Juri. He wants to act like he kidnapped her.’ I wondered if I could use that somehow. I believed I could. So for the time being I went along with it.”

“And as you heard my plan, that conviction deepened?”

“I was convinced,” Chiharu replied with a grin, “when Papa praised me.”

“Praised you?”

“Right after hearing about the game from you, I decided to go ahead and call Papa. Also, Juri was on my mind.”

“So you were in touch with him from when the game started. Well, why wouldn’t you be. Mr. Katsuragi must have been rattled. I mean, his daughter had been murdered, and the killer was his daughter. He couldn’t go to the police.”

“For his part, Papa was trying to figure out if there was a way to cover it up. That’s when I called. He seems to have been worried that I’d committed suicide. He sounded relieved to hear my voice. He didn’t scold me about killing Juri. He told me to count on him to do something about it and to hurry up and come home. So I told him about you and your game.”

“And he praised you.”

“About intuiting that I could use your plan. According to Papa, it’s having the intuition and decisiveness at clutch moments that divides the winners from the losers.”

Thinking it was something Katsutoshi Katsuragi would say, I nodded. “And what instructions did Mr. Katsuragi give you?”

“First he told me to do as you say. Then he told me to report what that was in detail to him. Once the course of action was decided, he’d contact me.”

“Contact you? How?”

“He’d call me on my cellphone,” she said as though it were nothing.

“Cellphone? But didn’t you not have one?”

“I did. You think I’d ever forget something so important?” Chiharu laughed heartily, mockingly at me. “But I kept it turned off while I was with you.”

“I got played.” I shook my head. “He gave you a whole bunch of instructions through that cellphone then. Going to Yokosuka, too? You don’t have a friend called Yuki. Am I right?”

“I did. We were friends in middle school. Haven’t seen her at all lately.”

“You wanted me to go to Yokosuka because you planned on burying Juri’s remains on a hill there. But making me go wasn’t enough. Thinking ahead, you used all kinds of tricks to make sure I’d leave traces in Yokosuka.”

“Yes. All kinds.” Chiharu crossed her legs and looked at me with upturned eyes. “Can you guess?”

“While I was waiting for you, I was at the restaurant. Someone played a prank on my car while it was in the parking lot. The staff might remember my face. That it was an unusual car like the MR-S probably also left an impression. If the police went asking around with my photo, the staff would provide testimony. Was that prank the work of Mr. Katsuragi?”

“The one who did that was Mama.”

“Your mama? I see, so you had one more accomplice.”

“There are other traces of you, too.”

“I know. But I don’t get it.” I looked her in the eye and proceeded to gaze at her crossed legs. “To obtain traces of me, you slept with me? Because you wanted my semen and pubic hair... I can’t imagine that your parents pushed you to go that far.”

“What Papa told me was to get my hands on your body hair. Do you remember there was a small statue on that hill? He told me to hide it there. But I thought it wouldn’t be enough. Papa must have thought it’d be better with your semen. He couldn’t ask me to do that, so he said your hair. I saw that, so I exercised my own judgment to obtain the absolute physical evidence we needed.”

“Even though it meant having sex with a man you didn’t care for.”

“Are you sulking?”

“Not really.”

“I did care for you. You’re gutsy, and you’ve got brains. I didn’t mind sleeping with you. If you’d been dumber and a lame bastard, I don’t think I’d have been able to go that far.”

“Is that supposed to be a compliment?”

“Papa also has a high opinion of you. It was crucial for our plan that you weren’t stupid. If you were the type to come up with a sloppy kidnapping game, that would spoil everything. Papa suddenly went to your company, right?”

“Now that you mention it...” He had come asking to see games birthed by Cyberplan.

“His aim was to see a game you’d produced. The Mask of Youth , right? It seems after seeing it, Papa felt that you could be trusted.”

I sighed and shook my head. I couldn’t but let out a weak laugh. “So that’s when he buys me?”

“When you had me call from the love hotel, you beautifully worked in the sound of the whistle, remember? He said that was astute, too.”

“And it was another trace.” I had happily run along the rails that Katsutoshi Katsuragi had set for me.

“But the real match was from there. Papa really wanted to know how you were going to get your hands on the ransom. But you wouldn’t even tell me. I almost couldn’t resist telling you that no one had gone to the police.”

“Mr. Katsuragi must have been so irritated by my Hakozaki feint.”

“He was hoping you’d just take the money. But in the end he was impressed. He admitted that checking if there was a police tail was necessary.”

“Did he say anything about the real ransom exchange?”

“Of course he said it was splendid. That way, there’d be almost no evidence to specify the culprit, and he thinks it would’ve gone well even if there had been a police tail or stakeout.”

I nodded. I could hardly be pleased about it now, but at least it hadn’t been a plan that earned Katsutoshi Katsuragi’s derision. “We went to Yokosuka again with your two hundred seventy million yen. To hide the money in Yuki’s room, which doesn’t exist. What did you really do with the money?”

“I hid it in what looked like a storage room in that building. Then, I called Papa asap. After we left, he recovered it right away.”

“I see. With that, Juri Katsuragi had been safely kidnapped and the ransom was paid. But there’s one big problem. Well, I have a guess about the answer, though.”

“What is it?”

“What were you planning on doing with me?”

Chiharu shrugged her shoulders. “That’s a hard question for me to answer.”

“It would be.”

“You said you can guess? Well, let me hear it.”

“You won’t just tell me, even at this late date? Fine, fine. So, you’ve safely concealed Juri’s murder, the staged kidnapping’s been successful. But you have a small problem. Or should I call it a point of concern. It’s that you probably can’t keep me deceived. As the case gets reported, I sense the truth of the matter. In the worst case, I rush to the police, but you probably don’t need to worry about that. As the principle offender in the staged kidnapping, I don’t dare to. Yet you doubt that I’ll keep mum. Moreover, if I come to the police’s attention by some chance, I might confess. They might not believe me at first, but they’ll investigate to see if there’s any substance to it. The press will get in on the action. Nothing about that situation is welcome to the Katsuragis. There’s pretty much only one way to solve it.”