Whenever there was a news story about an earthquake, the events of the night Saeko had passed in the hospital in Ina came flooding back.
Her body still retained a vivid memory of being paralyzed while a man standing next to her bed fingered her breast.
The terror had lasted for only one night thanks to a visit from Hashiba the following afternoon.
Hashiba’s visit instantly inspired an assortment of conflicting emotions in Saeko. The nurse she’d called for solace that night hadn’t taken her seriously and left her alone to tremble at shadows. Too terrified of the same thing happening again to sleep, she’d lain awake for the rest of the night, counting the minutes until dawn.
The only person who could possibly understand, and might even be able to help, was Hashiba. Just as she had hoped, he came to see her the next day during a break in filming. He listened to everything she had to say and then inquired with the registration desk as to whether a Seiji Fujimura had been admitted to the hospital. There was nobody in the hospital by that name, deepening the mystery, but the mere fact that Hashiba had taken her seriously meant a great deal to Saeko. He could have just dismissed her story as a dream or hallucination, but the way he sincerely tried to understand what she had been through was a tremendous comfort to Saeko.
When he left that day, he told her, “I have to return to Tokyo this evening, but please let me know when you’re ready to go home and I’ll come and get you.” He’d jotted down his cell number on a piece of paper, and sure enough, the day Saeko was released, he’d driven all the way from Tokyo to pick her up.
On the highway heading back towards Tokyo from Ina, Hashiba had spoken excitedly about his plans for the project. If the program got good ratings, Hashiba was confident that the station would grant him another similar project. If they did, would Saeko consider collaborating again?
She was thrilled that Hashiba had kept his promise, driving all the way out to the hospital in Ina to give her a ride home, even though she knew he had his hands full editing the footage from the project. It was pretty common for men to make all sorts of sweet promises and never follow through on them, but Hashiba was different. He appeared to be the type who kept his word. Saeko knew right away that if he were given a follow-up project, she’d agree to work with him again, unconditionally.
Since getting out of the hospital in Ina and returning to Tokyo, she had been swamped with work. The tests they ran at the hospital had shown no abnormalities in her brain, and they had let her go after four days of observation. Still, she found herself scrambling day and night to make up for lost time.
She’d had someone else cover the interview in Gifu, but she wrote the article, sending it in by e-mail from her assignment in Hokkaido. It was touch and go, but she’d pulled it off in the end. That was a week ago.
The day before yesterday, Hashiba had called. When they met, he informed her jubilantly that the program had garnered stellar ratings and that the station was likely to give him another assignment dealing with a missing persons case. “Thanks to you!” he’d added. Hashiba’s words of appreciation made Saeko all the more glad to have been involved.
When he was appointed chief director of the next project, Hashiba extended an official request that Saeko collaborate once again.
Bolstered by a series in a monthly magazine put out by a major publisher and a highly successful pilot, the project would have a generous budget at its disposal.
When she heard the news, Saeko informed Hashiba and Maezono that there was a limit to what she could unearth alone and proposed that they bring on board a highly skilled professional to make the investigations that much more efficient and accurate.
Both clients consented, agreeing that they would split the cost and jointly reap the benefits of the additional information.
Saeko had a file open in her lap and was just using the remote control to turn off the TV when the phone rang in the living room. She picked up the receiver. The voice on the other end belonged to the exact person she had been thinking of calling: Kitazawa.
“Oh, god. I was just going to call you,” she told him.
“Synchronicity. Which is what I’m calling about, actually. The other day you brought in a file about some missing persons in Itoigawa, right? Well, our office got a request to investigate a disappearance from Itoigawa right around the same time.”
“The same case?” Saeko had copied the documents in the file from editor-in-chief Maezono and left them with Kitazawa.
“No. A different one.”
“You mean, three separate people vanished from Itoigawa right around the same time? By pure coincidence?”
“We should assume they’re connected. The young lady who disappeared was a Mizuho Takayama, age 27, single. She lived with her parents in Musashino, Tokyo. She was the editor of a trade journal. She disappeared in the middle of September of last year. Her parents are the ones who came to us. Mizuho Takayama was visiting Itoigawa to do a report on jade handicrafts when she went missing. Her family’s pretty well off. Her parents had a criminal investigation done, but it didn’t turn up a single clue. They came to us as a last resort. ’Course, there’s only so much we can do, a year after the disappearance.”
Saeko understood painfully well how Mizuho Takayama’s parents must feel. After all, she hadn’t given up on finding her father after all this time. They would probably still be looking for her ten, even twenty years later.
“So, we’re a team. Same target.”
“Yeah. What do you know?” Kitazawa chuckled.
“This changes our approach, of course, since there are multiple disappearances.”
“Exactly. The first thing we need to find is where their paths crossed. I’m going to Itoigawa tomorrow to see what I can find.”
Even if they didn’t find the connection between the three cases, the development was bound to draw a lot more interest to the articles and the TV series.
In the end, they had never solved the Fujimura family’s disappearance. Sadly, Shigeko Torii’s insights hadn’t led to any final resolution. Instead, it seemed the number of unsolved disappearances was only increasing.
If the string of cases were united by some sort of cause, it might help Saeko find her father. After all, she had discovered his day planner at the Fujimuras’ home. It had to be more than a coincidence.
Saeko had a flash of awareness of some sort of superhuman force. The instincts she’d developed investigating missing persons cases told her that something eerie was afoot. Some unknowable presence was sending a message, but was it a missive of malevolence or of goodwill? There was no way of knowing yet.
In any case, people were disappearing. Here and there, without any warning …
Kitazawa had taken the Toyama Chitestu Main Line to Kurobe, transferring to the Japan Railway Hokuriku Main Line about thirty minutes earlier.
After passing through Ichiburi, they’d entered what seemed like an endless tunnel, but Kitazawa knew they would emerge from it soon. He pressed his face against the window, hoping to catch a glimpse of the sheer Oyashirazu-Koshirazu cliffs by the water’s edge. The Japan Sea was known for its turbulence during the winter, but the view of it he’d caught before they’d entered the tunnel had been placid. Just beyond Oyashirazu was Itoigawa. The train would arrive at 11:50 a.m.
There were only a few other passengers. When they finally emerged from the tunnel, sunlight flooded the car. It was overwhelmingly bright after the long passage through the darkness. Kitazawa turned his face away from the window, reached into his shoulder bag on the seat next to him, and pulled out a file.
He scanned his to-do list for when he arrived in Itoigawa. His first priority was to investigate the case from his client, which meant visiting the business hotel where Mizuho Takayama had stayed to see if he could find any clues. Another detective had already gone over her trail, but Kitazawa’s client felt that a specialist might find something the first investigator had overlooked. Even though the trail was more than a year old, the fact that Kitazawa was also looking into two related disappearances gave him an advantage.