Kojo Suzuki - Spiral

“Ah-ha.”

Yoshino faced Ando again, this time with a bitter expression. “I just don’t know where it is. I couldn’t find it in his apartment.” Having said this, he stared off into space.

Asakawa was hospitalized, and his wife and daughter were dead. The apartment was empty. Was Yoshino saying he’d broken in and searched it? “His apartment?”

“Yeah, well, the building manager’s an old softie. All I had to do was come up with a good excuse, and he let me right in with the master key.”

It was the same thing Ando himself had done just the other day, out of concern for Mai, so he knew he couldn’t criticize Yoshino’s behavior. The motives may have been different, but in the end, they had both done the same thing: they had ransacked apartments in their occupants’ absence.

Yoshino didn’t look ashamed in the least, only annoyed. “I searched every corner of that place. Didn’t find anything. Not his word processor, not the floppy disk.” Yoshino bounced his knee with nervous energy. Then he noticed and placed a hand on the knee, flashing Ando a rueful smile.

Ando was recalling the photos he’d been shown of the scene of Asakawa’s accident. He remembered the one that showed the interior of the car from the vantage point of the driver’s side window. The thing he understood to be a video deck sat on the passenger’s seat, wedged under the back of the seat where it had been pushed forward; on the floor on the passenger’s side lay what looked like a laptop. The pair of black objects had made a deep impression on Ando. And now they gave him an idea. He turned his head, desperately trying to think, pretending to watch the crowd flowing out of the station like a human tidal wave.

Ando realized he knew where to find the report that could explain everything. No doubt Yoshino had searched Asakawa’s apartment with great diligence, but the word processor and disk weren’t there at all. Yoshino didn’t know that Asakawa had brought them with him wherever he’d last been to, that they were in the car at the time of his accident.

Ando was now fairly confident he could get his hands on that disk, and he had no intention of sharing the information with Yoshino. He’d decide whether or not to tell the media only after he’d read Asakawa’s report. Right now, all he knew was that this smallpox-like virus had been found in all seven of the corpses in question. They weren’t ready yet to announce their findings in professional circles. In fact, they were only beginning to put together a research team consisting mainly of Shuwa and Yokodai people. If he went and let the media in on it at this stage, there was no telling what kind of panic they’d whip up. He had to proceed with utmost caution to make sure things didn’t get out of hand.

Yoshino spent the rest of their meeting lobbing predictable questions at Ando. What were the results of the autopsy? What did he determine was the cause of death? Was any part of Yoshino’s story suggestive in terms of the results of the autopsy? The reporter kept his face buried in his notebook as he went through his list.

Ando tried to answer each question as politely and as unobjectionably as he could. But all the while, his thoughts were lunging in another direction. He had to get his hands on that floppy disk right away. What did he need to do to make that happen?

The next day was Saturday. After finishing two autopsies, Ando took aside the young cop who was there as a witness and asked him what happened to cars that had been in accidents. If a car had been wrecked in an accident near the Oi exit of the Metropolitan Bayside Expressway, for instance, what was done with it?

“Well, first we’d inspect it.” He was a trusty-looking young man with glasses. Ando had seen him several times before, but this was the first time he’d spoken to him.

“Then what?”

“Then we’d return it to the owner.”

“What if it’s a rental?”

“We’d return it to the rentacar agency, of course.”

“Okay. There were three people aboard this car, a young couple and their daughter. They, ah, lived in a condo in Shinagawa, just the three of them. The wife and child died in the accident, and the husband is in critical condition. Now, what happens to the items that were in the car?”

“They’d be kept in temporary storage in the traffic division of the local precinct.”

“For an accident that happened at the Oi off-ramp of the Metropolitan Expressway, what’s the local precinct?”

“The exit?”

“Yeah, that’s right. Near the exit.”

“No, I mean, was it on the expressway or off it? They’re different jurisdictions.”

Ando thought back to the photos of the accident scene. He was certain it had happened on the expressway itself. He seemed to remember seeing the phrase “Tokyo Harbor Tunnel entrance” written in a file somewhere.

“It was definitely on the expressway.”

“Then it’d be the Metropolitan Expressway Traffic Patrol Unit.”

Ando had never heard the name before. “Where’s the headquarters?”

“Shintomi.”

“Alright. So the items would be stored there temporarily. What next?”

“They’d contact the family and have someone come and get the items.”

“Suppose, like I said, everybody in the family’s dead.”

“Even the siblings and parents of the man in the hospital?”

Ando knew nothing about Asakawa’s parents and siblings. Judging from the man’s age, there was a good chance that his parents were still alive. It raised the possibility that they were in possession of whatever was in the car. Asakawa and Ryuji had been classmates in high school. Since Ryuji’s parents lived in Sagami Ohno, Asakawa’s probably lived somewhere in that area, too. In any case, the first thing Ando should do was to look them up and contact them.

“I see. Thank you very much.”

Ando released the young cop and straightaway set about locating Asakawa’s parents.

He determined that they were both alive and living in the Kurihara section of the city of Zama, not far from Sagami Ohno. He placed a call and asked what had happened to the items from their son’s car. Asakawa’s father told him, in a strained voice, to call his eldest son, who lived in Kanda, in Tokyo. Kazuyuki, it turned out, was the youngest of three brothers: the oldest worked in the art book division of Shotoku, a major publisher, while the middle son was a junior high school Japanese teacher. Asakawa’s father said that he had in fact received a call from the police asking him to come down and pick up some items they were keeping at the station, but instead of going to get them himself, he’d told them to contact his son in Kanda. Kanda wasn’t too far from Shintomi, where the Metropolitan Expressway Traffic Patrol Unit had their headquarters, and Asakawa senior hadn’t felt like lugging a word processor and a VCR home at his age-he was over seventy. So he’d arranged with the police for his son to pick up the items.

Ando’s next move, then, was to contact Junichiro Asakawa, who lived with his wife in a Kanda condominium. When he finally managed to get in touch with him that evening, Ando came straight out and told him the situation, or most of it at least. He was afraid that if he aroused Junichiro’s suspicions by slapping together a lie or a clumsy cover-up, he might never get his hands on the disk. On the other hand, he couldn’t simply repeat the story Yoshino had told him. Ando didn’t believe most of it himself, and Junichiro would surely think he was crazy. So he abridged things as he saw fit, ending by emphasizing that there was a possibility that Asakawa had left behind a document that might shed some light on what was happening. Speaking on behalf of the Medical Examiner’s Office, he said he’d really like to get his hands on that document and wondered if he might be allowed to make a copy of it, please and thank you.