Meanwhile, Mizuho Takayama had fallen to the ground so that just her delicate arm was now within view of the camera. It writhed awkwardly on the floor, attesting to her presence. Even though the rest of her body wasn’t visible, as her thin arm wriggled on the floor like an inchworm, it served as a powerful reminder of her existence.
As a second jolt shook the store, the security camera tilted even further upwards. The ceiling now occupied most of the screen, with only a shelf lined with pornographic magazines visible at the bottom.
The counter read 6:44:30 p.m. The tremor subsided, and the screen showed nothing more than an unchanging view of the ceiling. A small dark speck on the ceiling flew off into the air — it was an insect, not a stain. Other than that, there was no movement on the screen whatsoever.
Absorbed, Saeko had drawn close, perching on the edge of a table in an unladylike pose. Now she stood up and moved in even closer.
The stillness after the earthquake was like a palpable presence. The counter on the screen indicated that the footage was still playing, but to both Saeko and Kitazawa, it felt as if time had stopped. With nothing but the ceiling visible on the screen, the three young people were about to vanish at any moment.
“This is when it happens, right?”
“Right.”
“But the camera didn’t catch it?”
“Unfortunately.”
Saeko stopped the video and turned towards Kitazawa. “What do you make of this?”
“I don’t know. I really can’t say.”
For a full minute, the three of them sat in silence, thinking. Not only did they fail to achieve any flashes of inspiration, it seemed as if they had lost the power to think and were simply staring blankly into space.
The video clearly told them one thing.
The three seemingly unrelated disappearances in Itoigawa had taken place together.
Saeko recalled the footage from the earthquake that had struck while they were filming at the Fujimuras’ home in Takato. Immediately afterwards, the voices of the staff had filled the air, in sharp contrast to the stillness they had just observed. Saeko alone had been plunged into a silent abyss of unconsciousness. Here, at the convenience store in Itoigawa, three people had simultaneously disappeared in the wake of an earthquake.
There was clearly a link that related to the setting.
Kitazawa issued a research assignment to his son. “This is where you come in,” he told Toshiya. “I want you to find as many similar disappearances as you can, not just in Japan but worldwide, and figure out what they have in common.”
Toshiya muttered something about being busy enough already writing his dissertation, but the pleased expression on his face told a different story. He agreed to the task — given his self-proclaimed ability to locate and analyze any kind of information, how could he refuse? But more importantly, Toshiya was starting to become intrigued by the case. When he wasn’t interested in something, heaven and earth couldn’t budge him. But when he did take an interest, he would work all night if he had to, even without pay.
If Saeko knew Toshiya, he would probably pull an all-nighter tonight. She was sure of it.
The next evening at seven o’clock, Saeko visited Kitazawa’s office again, this time with Hashiba. They arrived just as Toshiya was leaving; he had been called into office at the university suddenly and had to go, even though he had been up all night working on the case. Chagrined that he couldn’t discuss his findings with the rest of the group, Toshiya hurried off after a few words of greeting.
The lines of fatigue in Kitazawa’s face were etched even more deeply than the day before. He paced the small room feverishly, turning the computer on and off and pulling books from the shelf only to replace them, as if he himself weren’t sure what he was doing. Saeko had never seen him so distracted.
She cut right to the chase. “What did you find out?”
“Well, how should I put this? I guess the best thing is to show you. All I can say is, Toshiya did his job well.”
Kitazawa reached for a file on his desk but hesitated before picking it up. The file was fat with printed pages.
Hashiba observed Kitazawa’s cryptic, noncommittal movements without comment.
“I suppose you might say we’ve discovered something unexpected. Then again, I might be reading too much into something that’s actually pure coincidence. In any case, I’d be glad to get your opinions on the matter.”
In a roundabout way, Kitazawa seemed to be hinting that they had come across an important lead.
“This computer contains data on missing persons cases all over Japan. Not the 100,000 cases said to occur in Japan each year — just the ones that are potentially relevant. Most missing persons wind up surfacing eventually. Ninety percent of the ones who don’t were usually struggling with serious debts, and such. The other ten percent are the ones Toshiya focused on. In other words, disappearances without any obvious cause. Still, that leaves about 5,000 cases. That’s still too many to really review. So he narrowed the field again, rejecting any cases where there was any kind of likely explanation, keeping just the ones that were total mysterious. Those cases always generate a fair bit of buzz. The police investigate some of those cases if they suspect foul play, but not all of them. Beyond that, he picked up a number of cases from the last few years that seemed similar to the Ina and Itoigawa cases, relying solely on intuition. That brought the number down to 150 cases. Anyway, have a look.”
Kitazawa divided the pile of printed documents into stacks of roughly 50 pages each and handed them to Saeko and Hashiba.
Each page contained the name of a missing person, their age, date of disappearance, and other pertinent information summed up in as few words as possible.
The three of them went through their stacks page by page, skimming the information. When they’d each finished with their piles, they swapped stacks. It took around fifteen minutes for all three of them to peruse all 150 pages.
Kitazawa waited for the other two to look up from the piles of papers in their laps.
“What do you think? Did you notice anything?”
Hashiba answered immediately. “There seems to be a pattern in terms of the location of the disappearances.”
Each of the profiles included the prefecture and municipality where the disappearance had taken place. Saeko had noticed the same thing. Certain prefectures cropped up quite often — Mie, Yamanashi, Tokushima, Shizuoka, Oita, Nagano, Kagawa, Aichi, Niigata — while there seemed to be very few cases in northeast Japan and Hokkaido. Just as Hashiba had noted, there seemed to be a notable discrepancy in the geographic distribution of the reports.
“Why would that be?” Saeko wasn’t so much asking Kitazawa as wondering aloud.
The prefectures with many disappearances had two to three times as many cases as the ones with fewer cases. It would make sense if they reflected differences in average income from prefecture to prefecture, but even with that in mind the discrepancies were too large. Besides, there were almost no disappearances of the kind in Hokkaido and Okinawa, two prefectures with high levels of unemployment, calling into question whether economic factors were even relevant.
Kitazawa gave Saeko a quick glance of affirmation before continuing. “The same thing occurred to me. The locations of the disappearances are clearly skewed towards certain areas. Just as I suspected, location seems to be relevant to these cases. But what on earth could be causing the cases to be distributed so unevenly? I considered every factor I could think of — income, unemployment rate, homeownership rates — but none of them lined up. I thought that looking at the distribution at a prefectural level might be too broad, so I tried analyzing the data on a more local scale, but I still couldn’t figure out the determining factor. But I knew there had to be some sort of commonality among the locations that have experienced a lot of these disappearances. The results were too skewed for it to be pure coincidence.”