The train entered another tunnel and emerged once more in an entirely different landscape. Oumi Station. The next station would be Itoigawa. Kitazawa stood up and pulled his travel bag and coat down from the overhead rack.
It was perfect weather for a walk. Even though it was a winter day in the Hokuriku region, it was sunny and there was no wind, and the cold was hardly biting. Kitazawa ate lunch near the station before meeting the public relations officer for the jade handicrafts exhibit that Mizuho Takayama had interviewed. When he got back to the area near the train station, it was after four in the afternoon.
The business hotel was near the mouth of the Hime River on Prefectural Highway 222. The last time anyone had seen Mizuho Takayama was when she had checked into her room here.
Kitazawa sat down on a sofa in the lobby, warming his hands with a hot can of oolong tea from a vending machine and losing himself in contemplation, once more mentally retracing Mizuho Takayama’s steps.
On September 13, 2011, Mizuho Takayama had left her home in Musashino at seven in the morning. She’d boarded the 7:30 a.m. Azusa 3 at Shinjuku Station. She’d gotten off at Minami Otori and transferred to the Oito Line, arriving at Itoigawa Station at 12:44 p.m. After stopping in the tourism section at city hall, she’d met with Fujio Kamitani, the public relations officer for the jade handicrafts exhibition. After photographing the exhibition, she had checked into her hotel at 6:20 that evening. Kitazawa had already verified her exact check-in time.
The next morning, check-out time came and went without Mizuho Takayama appearing at the front desk. The receptionist had called her room, but nobody had answered. Concerned, the hotel staff had entered the room, only to find no one inside. Mizuho Takayama’s bag sat on her bedside table, and a light jacket hung in the wardrobe. When she’d left her house the previous day, she had been wearing the same jacket with a sleeveless top, so it wasn’t hard to deduce what she was wearing at the time of her disappearance. Denim pants with a beige sleeveless top. The bathtub was full of water, but it appeared not to have been used; there were no hairs, no residue of dirt or dead skin, and the bath towel remained folded and pristine. The bed, too, had not been slept in, and there were no signs of an intruder having entered the room.
What possibilities did that leave? With very little effort, one plausible scenario came to mind.
After checking into the hotel, Mizuho Takayama had taken off her jacket and hung it up. They’d had an intense Indian summer that fall, and she was probably bathed in sweat. Eager to bathe, she’d filled up the tub, but something had interrupted her.
Someone had knocked on the door, for example.
Kitazawa considered a myriad of possibilities. Perhaps an unexpected visitor had come to the door, prompting Mizuho Takayama to turn off the faucet and leave with just her wallet and room key.
And then she was abducted.
Given the fact that there had been no commotion at the hotel, perhaps the visitor had been someone she knew. It was possible that they had planned to meet even before she left Tokyo.
A secret lover, maybe.
It was entirely possible. Perhaps she was seeing a married man, and both had arranged business trips that allowed them an overnight rendezvous. But something had gone wrong when they were out together that evening. The young lady had announced that she was pregnant and insisted that he leave his wife … Driven into a corner, the man had panicked, lost control, and …
Kitazawa could picture the whole scenario. It sounded like the stuff of talk shows, but he knew better than to rule out the possibility. Crimes of passion were one of the leading causes of missing persons cases, second only to debt troubles.
He would definitely follow up on Mizuho Takayama’s social life, but he had his doubts about whether she’d planned a rendezvous at the business hotel. She’d checked into a single room, he reminded himself.
But even the singles have semi-double beds. It might have been just the thing for a pair of lovebirds on a budget.
Still uncertain, Kitazawa decided to check into his room. He got up from the sofa and made his way over to the counter to fill out the paperwork, requesting a single room like the one Mizuho Takayama had stayed in.
As he opened the door to his room, Kitazawa did his best to put himself in the mindset of a young woman.
Last year, on September 13th just after six in the evening, Mizuho Takayama had checked into a room just like this one.
Kitazawa took off his jacket and hung it up in the wardrobe. Then he went into the bathroom and began to draw a bath, gazing at the water as it filled up the tub. When the staff had entered the room the next morning, the water had been completely cold, and the tub had been only half full.
Something occurred to her, and she shut off the water before the bath was full.
Kitazawa looked around the bathroom. It was a small, utilitarian affair, done in cream. There was a shelf in front of the mirror, but it was empty. The shampoo and body soap dispensers were mounted directly to the wall. Only the most basic amenities were provided.
Maybe she was about to take her bath when she realized she was missing something. Something that she couldn’t get from the front desk. Like makeup remover, skin lotion, or sanitary products …
Without thinking about it, Kitazawa found himself shutting off the taps. He remembered that a convenience store featured in the file Saeko had given him. Drying his hands with a towel as he left the bathroom, he opened the file on the bed. Of the two men who had disappeared, Tomoaki Nishimura had worked at a convenience store.
Perhaps Mizuho Takayama realized she’d forgotten something and decided to run out to a convenience store.
The shop where Nishimura had worked was less than a five-minute walk from the hotel.
Kitazawa quickly checked his map for the convenience store’s location and left the room with the bathtub less than half full. He took only his wallet and map, leaving his travel bag in the room — much the way Mizuho Takayama had left the room. Their destination was probably the same, too.
Saeko made her way up to the fourth floor of the library and found a seat in a reading room, hanging her jacket over the back of the chair. She opened her notebook on the table, set her pen down next to it, and cradled her chin in her hand.
She was recalling something her father had once said. Whenever he was excited, her father had a tendency to talk with his hands, making sweeping gestures.
“Think of what the world was like in the seventeenth century. Society was just emerging from the dark ages, which lasted nearly a thousand years. The Renaissance was beginning, and Europe was just starting to reawaken to its ancient cultural heritage. At the time, everyone took it completely for granted that if you dropped an object, it would fall to the ground. But one day, it occurred to one man to question why. Why did an apple fall downwards? His name was Newton. The fact that he questioned something everyone simply accepted as the way things were is what led him to the theory of universal gravitation.”
Saeko had only been in junior high school at the time. It was a balmy morning at the beginning of summer vacation, and she was seated at the dining table wearing a white sleeveless blouse. She was just about to eat breakfast when her father challenged her to question even the most commonplace phenomena.