Spiral (7 page)

"Come right this way," Kurahashi said punctiliously, ushering Ando in.

Ando had learned just about everything he could by fax. His purpose today was to see with his own eyes things that couldn't be faxed, and to speak directly to the doctor who'd been in charge of the autopsies. He and Kurahashi exchanged small talk, and then began to share their observations of the bodies they'd dissected. Apparently, Kurahashi had been quite surprised by the unidentified sarcomas he'd found blocking the coronary arteries. As soon as the conversation turned to them, his cool demeanor cracked.

"Would you care to see?" So saying, he went to get one of the tissue samples from the blocked arteries.

Ando had a good look at it with his naked eye, then placed it under a microscope and examined it on a cellular level. One glance told him that these cells had undergone the same transformations as Ryuji's. When cells are treated with a hematoxylin-eosin stain, the cytoplasm turns red while the nucleus turns blue, allowing them to be differentiated with ease. Here, the diseased cells' shapes were distorted; their nuclei were larger than normal. Whereas normal cells had an overall reddish tint, these cells looked bluish. Ando stared at the red, amoeba-like speckles floating on the blue. He had to find out what had caused this change-the culprit, as it were. Obviously, it wasn't going to be easy. He had to deduce the murder weapon and the criminal entirely on the basis of the damage done to the victims' bodies.

Ando lifted his eyes from the microscope and took a deep breath. Somehow, the longer he looked, the harder it was to breathe. "Whose cells are these, by the way?"

"The wife's." Kurahashi turned his head only slightly to answer. He was standing by the shelves which covered one wall, removing and replacing files. He kept shaking his head, evidently unable to locate what he was looking for.

Ando bent over the instrument again, and again the microscopic world assailed him.

So these are Kazuyuki Asakawa 's wife's.
Knowing who they belonged to, he found himself trying to imagine, in detail, what had happened to their owner. Last month, a car her husband had been driving had collided with a truck near the Oi exit ramp on the Metropolitan Bayside Expressway. Sunday, October 21st, noon. Autopsies had confirmed that mother and child had expired an hour prior to the accident. In other words, they had died simultaneously, at around eleven in the morning. Of the same cause, no less. And that was what he just couldn't wrap his mind around.

So small these lumps of flesh were compared to the rest of the body, yet big enough to block off an artery and stop a heart. He had a hard time imagining that these sarcomas had been growing gradually over a long period of time, since they'd claimed two lives at virtually the same instant. Even if the victims had contracted a virus of some sort, if the virus required an incubation period of months before producing its symptoms, there was no way the two victims should have died nearly simultaneously. The physical differences between the victims should have assured some sort of lag. There was a thirty year age difference between Shizu and Yoko Asakawa, and that should have had some effect. Maybe it was just a coincidence? But no, that couldn't be. The young couple autop-sied at Yokodai had died simultaneously, too. And if it wasn't just a coincidence, he had no choice but to conclude that the period between infection and death was extremely short.

The viral hypothesis didn't seem to make for an adequate explanation. Ando momentarily laid aside that scenario, wondering if it could have been food poisoning or the like. With food poisoning, when two people eat the same spoiled item, it's not uncommon for both to fall prey to the same symptoms at the same time. Of course, "food poisoning" could involve a wide range of things; there are natural, chemical, and bacterial toxins. But he'd never heard of any toxin that caused sarcomas in the coronary artery. Perhaps some lab somewhere had been performing ultra-secret bacteriological research, and something had mutated and escaped…

Ando looked up again. He was merely speculating, and he knew all too well that guessing would get him nowhere.

Kurahashi approached the table where Ando was sitting and pulled out a chair. He held a file folder, from which he drew out ten or so photos.

"These are from the scene of the accident. I don't know if they'll be of any use to you."

Ando hardly expected that shots of the scene would give him anything to go on. He was convinced that the problem was rooted in irregularities at the cellular level, and not in a driver's carelessness. But since Kurahashi had gone to all the trouble of digging out the photos, Ando didn't feel right about returning them without at least taking a look at them. He glanced through them, one by one.

The first photo was of the wrecked automobile. The hood had been crumpled up until it was shaped like a mountain. Both headlights and the bumper were crushed. The windshield had been shattered, too, but the center pillars hadn't been bent. Although the car itself had been totaled, most of the shock evidently hadn't carried to the back seat.

Next was a shot of the surface of the road. It was dry, and there were no skidmarks, suggesting that Asakawa hadn't been watching where he was going. Where was he looking, then? Most likely at the back seat. Maybe he was even touching the cold bodies of his wife and daughter. Ando recalled the sequence of events he'd worked out in Miyashita's lab three days before.

He flipped through two or three more pictures, laying them on the table like playing cards. There was nothing in them to catch the eye, he thought, but then his hand stopped. He was holding a photo of the car's interior. The camera had been lodged against the passenger's side window and aimed so as to take in the front of the cabin. The seatbelt was draped over the driver's seat, and the passenger's seat was pushed forward. Ando stared, momentarily unsure of what in this picture had aroused his interest.

He'd had the same experience paging absently through books before. Sometimes a word would return to mind and keep him from turning the pages, but he'd be unable to remember where in the book he'd seen it, or, for that matter, what the word was. His palms started to perspire. He could feel his intuition at work. This photo was trying to tell him something. He brought the picture so close to his face that his nose was almost touching it. He examined every corner of it. Then he concentrated his vision on one point, and finally found the thing that had been hiding there.

On the passenger's seat sat the black thing, mostly hidden because the back of the seat had been pushed forward. A section of the front and one of the sides were the only visible portions. A similar flat, black thing rested on the floor of the car, also on the passenger's side, held down there by the headrest of the passenger's seat. Ando gave a little cry of excitement and called Kurahashi over.

"Hey, what do you think this is?" He held the photo out to Kurahashi and indicated where he should look. The short man took off his glasses and looked closely at the photo. Then he shook his head, not so much because he couldn't make out the thing, but because he couldn't figure out why Ando was interested in it.

"What is it?" Kurahashi muttered without taking his eyes from the photo.

"It looks to me like a video deck," said Ando, seeking confirmation.

"That
is
what it looks like." As soon as he recognized the object for what it was, Kurahashi thrust the photo back at Ando. The object on the passenger's seat could just as well have been a candy box, given its black, rectangular shape. But a close look at the front of the object revealed a round black button. It certainly looked like a video deck, but it could also have been a tuner or an amp. Regardless, Ando had decided that a video deck was what it was. The thing on the floor, under the headrest, looked like a portable word processor or a personal computer. Considering Asakawa's profession, it wasn't odd that he'd be carrying around a word processor. But a video deck?

"Why's it there?"

His conclusion that it was a video machine, of course, had to do with what Mai had told him. According to her, the day after Ryuji's death, Asakawa had visited Ryuji's apartment and asked her repeatedly about a videotape. The very next day, he'd put a video deck on the passenger seat of a car and gone somewhere, only to get in an accident on his way home to Shinagawa. Where had he been with that deck? If it was just to get it repaired, there was no need to get on the highway; surely there were electronics shops in his neighborhood. It bothered Ando. Asakawa couldn't have been driving around with a bare VCR for no reason.

Ando went through the photos again. When he found one that showed the wrecked car's license plate, he took out his planner and noted it. A Shinagawa plate, WA 5287. From the WA, Ando knew it was a rental. So not only was Asakawa driving a video deck around, he'd gone to the trouble of renting a car for the purpose. Why? Ando tried to put himself in Asakawa's position. If he were carrying around his own video deck, why would he be doing so?

Dubbing
…

He could think of no other reason. Suppose A calls B saying he has a fantastic videotape. B wants a copy, but A owns only one video deck, naturally. If B really wants a copy, he has no alternative but to take his own deck to A's house and ask him to let him make a copy of it.

Even so
… Ando lowered his head.
What could a video possibly have to do with these deaths?

Ando was possessed by an urge he couldn't reason with. He wanted to get his hands on the tape-if at all possible, he wanted to watch it. The accident had happened near Oi. What police precinct was that? The wrecked car had to be stored temporarily at the traffic division of the local precinct. If there had been a video deck in the car, the police would have taken possession of it, too. With Asakawa's wife and daughter dead and he barely conscious, perhaps no one had come to pick up the deck; perhaps it was still at the stationhouse. As an M.E., Ando had quite a few acquaintances on the police force. Getting his hands on that video deck wouldn't be too hard.

But first, Ando realized, he needed to meet Asakawa. It'd save Ando a lot of time if he could learn the facts of the case from Asakawa himself. According to the fax, Asakawa had been catatonic when he was taken to the hospital, but that was over ten days ago. Maybe there had been a change in his condition. If there was any chance of communicating with Asakawa, then the sooner the better.

"Do you know which hospital Kazuyuki Asakawa is in?"

"The Saisei Aid Society Hospital in Shinagawa, I think." Checking his file, Kurahashi said, "I was right. But it says here the patient's catatonic."

"I'm going to pay him a visit all the same," Ando remarked, nodding several times as if to persuade himself.

Ando had dozed off with his face pressed up against the window of the cab. Then his head slipped off the support of his right hand, and he collapsed forward so that his face banged into the back of the driver's seat; at the same time, he heard something that sounded like an alarm bell, off in the distance. Reflexively he looked at his watch. Ten past two. Immediately on leaving Shuwa he'd hopped in a cab, and he couldn't have been riding for more than about ten minutes. He'd probably only dropped off for a couple of those minutes, but somehow he had the feeling that a long time had elapsed. It felt like days had passed since Kurahashi had shown him the photos of the accident. Feeling as if he'd been spirited somewhere far away, Ando sat in the sealed cab and listened to the clanging alarm.

The cab wasn't moving. It was in the left-hand lane of a four-lane road, and it must have been a turn lane, since all the other lanes were flowing. Only they were stopped. He leaned forward and peered out through the windshield. Ahead and to the left he could see a railroad crossing: the bar was down and the signal light was flashing. It could have been his imagination, but the rhythms of the light and the bell seemed to be slightly out of synch. The crossing for the Keihin Express Line was about a hundred feet ahead on the No. 1 Tokyo-Yokohama Freeway, and Ando's taxi had been waiting for a train to go by. Shinagawa Saisei Hospital, his destination, was on the other side of the tracks. A train went by, bound for Tokyo, but the bar still didn't rise; the arrow indicating a Yokohama-bound train began to flash. It didn't look like they'd be able to get across any time soon. The cab driver had resigned himself to waiting and was flipping through a sheaf of papers bound by a paper clip, writing something down now and then.

No need to hurry. Visiting hours last until five, so there's still plenty of time.

Ando suddenly raised his head from the headrest: he thought he'd felt somebody's gaze on him. Somewhere close, outside the car, a pair of eyes was staring at him. Maybe this was what it felt like to be placed between slides as a tissue sample and examined under a microscope. There was something of the observer in the gaze that had been turned on him. Ando looked all around.

Maybe somebody in one of the other cars had recognized him and was trying to catch his attention. But he didn't see a familiar face in any of the cars, and there was nobody on the sidewalk. He tried to convince himself it was just his imagination, but the gaze showed no signs of relenting. Once again Ando turned his head right and left. To the left, just beyond the sidewalk, the ground rose in a grassy embankment that ran alongside the railroad tracks. Something in the shadow of the weeds was moving. It moved and froze, moved and froze. Without once taking its gaze off Ando, some creature was crawling along on the ground, alternating between stillness and motion. It was a snake. Ando was surprised to see one in such a place. Its tiny, intense eyes glowed in the autumn-afternoon sun. There was no doubt that this was the observer he'd sensed, and it dredged up memories of a scene from his grade school days.

He'd lived in the country, in a little town surrounded by farmers' fields. Once, on his way home from school-Ando remembered it as a peaceful spring afternoon-he'd seen a snake on a concrete wall that flanked a ditch filled with water. At first the threadlike gray snake had looked to him like just a crack in the wall, but as he got closer he could see the roundness of its body emerge from the surface. As soon as he saw it was a snake, he scooped up a rock the size of his fist. He tossed the rock in his palm a few times, gauging its size and weight, and then went into a pitcher's wind-up. It was several yards from where he stood to the wall on the other side of the ditch. He really didn't think he'd hit the bull's-eye. But the rock arced high in the air and came down from above directly onto the snake's head, crushing it. Ando recoiled with a cry. He was standing more than a dozen feet away, but it felt like he'd smashed the snake's head with his own clenched fist. He wiped his palm over and over on his trousers. The snake had fallen into the ditch like a suction cup peeling off a stainless steel surface. Ando took a couple of steps into the tangle of grass on the bank of the ditch and leaned forward, trying to catch the snake's last moments. He got there in time to see its corpse float away. At that moment, he'd felt the same gaze upon him that he did now. It hadn't been the dead snake's gaze, but rather that of a bigger snake that lay in the grass watching him. Its smooth face betrayed no expression as it entangled him in its insistent, unwavering stare. Ando had been shaken by the malevolence of that gaze. If the little snake he'd killed had been the big snake's child, some catastrophe would befall him for sure. The big snake was laying a curse on him: that was the purpose of the insistent stare. His grandmother had told him many times that if he killed snakes something terrible would happen to him.