Kojo Suzuki - Spiral

Ando kept fiddling with this notion as he loitered just this side of incoherence. A certain delusion-it could be a joke or it could be for real-was producing a new storyline.

Utterly ridiculous.

Objective reason reared its head. In that instant, Ando felt as if he were gazing with the eyes of a disembodied spirit at his own body, spread-eagled on the bed. His body posture looked familiar to him. He’d seen that pose somewhere recently. In the midst of an overpowering sleepiness, he recalled the Polaroids of Ryuji’s dead body. It was the same pose: head back on the bed, arms and legs flung wide. He fought off sleep and got to his feet so that he could crawl into bed and pull up the covers. He couldn’t stop trembling until he dropped off to sleep.

He finished his second autopsy at the M.E.’s office, then headed back to the university, leaving the clean-up to his colleagues. Miyashita had contacted him, hinting at a development in the pursuit of Ryuji’s cause of death, and Ando had been on tenterhooks ever since. He darted up the steps out of the subway.

He entered the university hospital by the main entrance and then crossed over to the old wing. The new wing, which housed the main entrance, was only two years old. It was a totally modern seventeen-story building connected by a complex of halls and stairways to the old wings, which crowded around like high-rise apartments. The whole place was like a maze. First-time visitors invariably got lost. New and old intertwined, and the color, width, and smell of the hallways-even the squeak of his shoes on the floor-shifted as he pressed on. When he stopped at the iron door that marked the boundary and glanced back at the new wing’s wide corridor, he lost his sense of perspective momentarily. He was overcome by an illusion that he was gazing at the future.

The door to the Pathology Department was open a crack, and he could see Miyashita’s back where he sat on a stool. Rather than being ensconced in his lab equipment as Ando had expected, he was turned toward the central table, going through some literature. His face was down close to the book opened before him, and he was flipping its pages rapidly. Ando approached him from behind and tapped him on a burly shoulder.

Miyashita turned around and took off his glasses, then turned the book over and laid it on the table. The title on the spine read, A Beginner’s Guide to Astrology. Ando was taken aback.

Miyashita twirled on his stool until he was facing Ando and then asked, with a straight face, “So, what’s your date of birth?”

Ignoring him, Ando picked up the Beginner’s Guide and leafed through it.

“Horoscopes? What are you, a high-school girl?”

“You’d be surprised at how often this stuff hits the mark. Now tell me when you were born.”

“Never mind that. Listen.” Ando pulled another stool out from under the table and sat down. He moved carelessly, though, and knocked the Beginner’s Guide off the table. It fell to the floor with a thud.

“Calm down, will ya?” Miyashita bent over- it looked like it pained him-to retrieve the book. But Ando wasn’t interested in any book.

“So did you find a virus?” he demanded.

Miyashita shook his head. “My first step was to check with other universities’ forensic medicine departments to see if bodies had been brought in with the same symptoms as Ryuji. I’ve got the results of that inquiry.”

“So, were there any?”

“Yup. Six altogether, as far as I could determine.”

“Six deaths.” But Ando had no idea yet whether or not that was a lot.

“Everybody I asked was astonished. They’d all figured they were the only ones who’d stumbled across this.”

“What universities are we talking about?”

Letting the table edge wedge into his belly, Miyashita reached for the file folder that had been placed unceremoniously on top of it.

“Shuwa University had two, Taido University had one, and Yokodai University in Yokohama had three. Six total. And there’s every chance we’ll see more.”

“Let me have a look,” Ando said, taking the folder from Miyashita.

That morning, Miyashita and his counterparts at the other schools had faxed each other the relevant files. The folder contained faxes of copies of the original death certificates and autopsy reports. As such, they were somewhat blurry and not very easy to read. Ando took the printouts from the folder and skimmed them for relevant info.

First, the body dissected at Taido. Shuichi Iwata, age nineteen. He’d died on September 5th, at about eleven at night; he’d been on his 50cc motorbike in the intersection in front of Shinagawa Station when he’d fallen. The autopsy had determined that his coronary artery had been blocked by unexplained swelling and that a cardiac infarction had ensued.

Two of the three bodies autopsied at Yokodai belonged to a young couple, and they’d died together. Takehiko Nomi, age nineteen, and Haruko Tsuji, age seventeen. Sometime before dawn on September 6th, their bodies had been discovered in a rented car parked at the foot of Mt Okusu, in Yokosuka, Kanagawa Prefecture. When the bodies were discovered, Haruko Tsuji’s panties were down around her ankles, and Takehiko Nomi’s jeans and briefs were pulled down to his knees. They’d obviously pulled over into a wooded area intending to have car sex, when their hearts stopped simultaneously. The autopsies had discovered strange lumps in their coronary arteries, which were, again, blocked off.

Ando raised his eyes to the ceiling, muttering, “What the hell?”

“The couple in the car, right?”

“Yeah. They had heart attacks at the same time in the same place. And, counting this Shuichi Iwata autopsied at Taido, we have four people experiencing blockage of their coronary arteries at about the same time. What’s going on here?”

“Those aren’t the only symptoms, either. Have you looked at the mother and child?”

Ando looked down at the files again. “No, not yet.”

“Take a look. They had ulcerations on their pharynxes, just like Ryuji.”

Ando riffled through the pages until he found the notations for a mother and daughter autopsied at Shuwa. The mother was Shizu Asakawa, age thirty, and the daughter was Yoko, only eighteen months old.

When Ando saw the names, he felt something tug at his mind. He rested his hands for a moment, thinking. Something didn’t sit right.

“What’s wrong?” Miyashita peered at him.

“Nothing.”

Ando read on. On October 21st, at around noon, a car driven by Shizu’s husband and carrying Shizu and Yoko had gotten into an accident near the Oi off-ramp of the Metropolitan Bayside Expressway. Heading from Urayasu toward Oi, it was not uncommon to encounter traffic near the entrance to the Tokyo Harbor Tunnel. The Asakawas’ car had slammed into a light truck at the end of a column of vehicles waiting to exit at Oi. The car was badly wrecked, and mother and daughter, together in the back seat, had lost their lives, while Mr Asakawa had sustained serious injuries.

“Why did they get sent in for autopsies?” Ando wondered aloud. There wasn’t much call to autopsy people who had obviously died in a traffic accident. A full forensic autopsy such as they’d received, with a public prosecutor presiding, usually didn’t happen unless a crime was suspected.

“Don’t get ahead of yourself. Keep reading.”

“Why don’t you buy a new fax machine anyway? I can hardly read these. It’s making my head hurt,” Ando said, waving the curling page in Miyashita’s face. He just wanted to know what had happened, and he was having trouble grasping the situation from the blurry printouts cranked out by the antiquated fax.