Kojo Suzuki - Spiral

But she hadn’t been wearing panties. November, and she was wearing a skirt and no panties. Was that normal for her?

“Excuse me, but I’m not sure exactly what you mean when you say she was found in an exhaust shaft on a roof,” Ando said. He was having trouble imagining the scene.

“We’re talking a shaft about ten feet deep and about three feet wide, next to the machine rooms on the roof. It’s usually covered with wire mesh, but it’d been partially removed.”

“Enough for her to fall through.”

“Probably.”

“Is it the kind of place you just trip and fall into?”

“No. It’s not easy even to get close to. First of all, the door from the elevator hall to the roof is locked.”

“So how did she get there?”

“There’s a ladder up to the roof from the top of the fire escape. It’s built into the outside wall. We think she went up that. It’s the only way she could have gotten up there.”

Ando didn’t see what she could have been doing up there.

“About the underwear. Do you think she could have taken it off herself, intentionally, inside the exhaust shaft?” The shaft was three yards deep. If she’d fallen, she would have hurt herself. Maybe she’d taken off her panties to use as a bandage. Or maybe she thought she could somehow use them to help her escape.

“We looked for them. In the shaft, and all over the roof. And then, just to be sure, we checked around the perimeter of the building, too.”

“Why the perimeter?” Nakayama interjected.

“We thought maybe she’d wrapped them around a piece of metal or something and tossed them. Inside the shaft, there was no chance anybody’d be able to hear her cries for help. The only way to let the outside world know where she was would have been to throw something down that might catch people’s attention. But that turned out to be impossible, too.”

“And why’s that?”

“From the bottom of that shaft, there was no way she could’ve thrown anything past the fence on the roof.”

Assuming it had something to do with the angle, Ando didn’t press the point further.

“So, it’s most natural to assume that she wasn’t wearing any panties when she left.”

“At the moment, that’s the only explanation we can think of.”

They stopped in front of the autopsy room.

“Would you like to join me, Dr Ando?” asked Nakayama.

“Maybe just for a little while.” It was an honest enough answer. If it wasn’t Mai, he’d sigh with relief and leave. And if it was her… he’d probably leave anyway, entrusting the autopsy to Nakayama. In any event, the thing to do now was check to see if it was her.

Beyond the door, he could hear water gushing from the faucet, as usual. As he listened for other sounds, Ando was suddenly overcome with the urge to flee. His stomach churned, and his extremities quivered. He prayed it wasn’t her. It was all he could do.

Before Ando was really prepared, Nakayama opened the door and led the way into the autopsy room. The officer was next to enter. Ando didn’t go in, but only peered through the open doorway at the naked, pale corpse on the operating table.

He’d had a sneaking suspicion that the day would come, but seeing the young woman’s body up close sent a deathly chill through his body nonetheless. Ando finally approached the table in Nakayama and the officer’s wake. He looked at the face from every angle, still unwilling to recognize it. There was mud, dried and hardened, in the hair on the back of her head. Her ankle was twisted unnaturally; the skin over it showed the only discoloration on her body. He figured the ankle was broken, or at least badly sprained. No signs that she’d been strangled. In fact, there were no external wounds at all. The body was well past the rigor mortis stage. Over ninety hours had elapsed since death.

Ando knew the healthy glow her flesh had displayed in life. How many times had he fantasized about holding her and feeling that skin against his? Now he’d never have the opportunity. Now she was a wasted, waxen corpse. The woman he’d been about to fall in love with now lay cruelly exposed on the table, changed into this. Ando couldn’t bear the reality, and anger welled up in him.

“Goddamnit,” he sighed. Nakayama and the officer turned simultaneously to look at him.

The policeman couldn’t hide his astonishment. “Do you know her?” Ando gave a barely perceptible nod.

“I’m sorry,” Nakayama mumbled, not being able to tell exactly how close Ando had been to the woman.

The policeman spoke next, slowly and deliberately. “Would you know who we should contact?” Behind the polite tone, Ando could hear a hint of expectation. If he knew who she was, it would save the officer from the drudgery of having to identify her.

Wordlessly, Ando took out his planner and paged through it. He was sure he’d written her parents’ phone number in it. He found the number, wrote it on another piece of paper, and handed it over. The officer read it back to Ando.

“You’re sure about this, then?” The man’s tone was almost obsequious.

“I’m sure. It’s Mai Takano, alright.”

The policeman rushed out of the room to call Mai’s parents and notify them of her death. Ando imagined the scene at their house: the phone ringing, her mother picking up the receiver, an ostentatious voice on the other end identifying itself as Officer So-and-so from the police department, then, Your daughter is dead… Ando shuddered. He felt sorry for her mother, about to experience that moment. She wouldn’t collapse, she wouldn’t break down crying. The world around her would simply recede.

He couldn’t stand to be in the autopsy room a moment longer. When the scalpel entered Mai’s body, the air would be filled with an odor much worse than what greeted them now. And when the organ wall was cut so that the contents of her stomach and intestines could be examined, the stench would be positively horrific. Ando knew how surprisingly long olfactory memories could last, and he didn’t want this one. He knew very well that it was the fate of all living beings, no matter how pure and beautiful, to finally leave an unbearable stench. But just this once, he felt like giving in to sentimentality. He wanted to keep his memories of Mai from being sullied by that smell.

He whispered in Nakayama’s ear, “I’m going to leave now.”

Nakayama gave him a suspicious look. “You don’t want to participate, after all?”

“I still have some work I need to finish up in the lab. But I want to hear the details later.”

“Understood.”

Ando put his hand on Nakayama’s shoulder and whispered to him again. “Pay attention to the coronary artery. Make sure you get a tissue sample from it.”

Nakayama was puzzled that Ando had a hypothesis regarding the cause of death. “Did she have angina?”

Ando didn’t answer. Instead, he squeezed Nakayama’s shoulder and, with a look that warned against asking why, said, “Just do it, alright?”

Nakayama nodded twice.

Back at the office, Ando pulled out the chair from the desk next to Nakayama’s and sat down in it backwards, hugging the backrest. He waited like that for Nakayama to finish his paperwork.

“You seem rather concerned,” Nakayama said, looking up from the report he was writing.

“Sort of.”

“Want to see the autopsy report?” Nakayama indicated a sheaf of documents in front of Ando.

“No. All I need is a summary.”

Nakayama turned to face Ando.

“Let me get right to the point, then. The cause of death was not a heart attack due to blockage of the coronary artery.”

So the hypothesis Ando had shared with Nakayama before the autopsy had been wrong. Ando fell silent for a time, wondering how to interpret this. So Mai didn’t watch the video after all? Perhaps the tumor didn’t get big enough to block the flow of blood.