The only other possible reason was that there was already someone else seated next to him. She recalled the passage where her father had almost fallen asleep at the wheel on his way to Tiwanaku. Again there had been a phrase that didn’t sit right. He wrote about tiredness being catching. Saeko picked out the sentence:
They say that drowsiness is catching — I must have dozed off.
The sentence made perfect sense if there had already been someone sitting next to him in the jeep. That someone had probably dozed off, lulled to sleep by the rocking of the jeep, so her father tried to employ his mind to fight the temptation himself.
Saeko went through the rest of the text in her mind, applying this theory to each description in turn. Her father wrote that he had put his bag down and checked the time on the nightstand between the beds. There had been two beds … Her father had been staying in a twin room. As far as she knew, it was her father’s habit to always book a double room when he was staying by himself. Whether he was staying in a standard room or a suite, he always wanted a double bed. He would only ever book a twin room if there was someone staying with him.
He also wrote about phoning ahead to book a table at a cafe for dinner. Now that she thought about it, this was also completely unlike him. Her father usually liked to take a stroll around the hotel’s vicinity and just drop in wherever caught his eye. The only time he would ever take the trouble to book a table was when he was with someone special that he didn’t want to keep waiting while they walked around looking for a place to eat.
Having spent seventeen years traveling around the world with her father, Saeko felt confident that she knew his habits like the back of her own hand. While giving the initial appearance that he was traveling alone, her father had actually been traveling with someone. Someone had handed him a handkerchief for his tears in front of the statue of Viracocha. There was no doubt about it, then. Her father had been traveling with a woman.
The sentence that stood out the most was the one at the very end of the text:
I realize only when it is pointed out to me …
Again, a sign that someone else had been there with him. Moreover, this person had told her father that the bird-like figure looking out from behind Viracocha must have been modeled on someone rather than being an abstract representation. There were no photos included, so all Saeko could do was try to picture the scene in her mind. She thought of the description, the image of a horned reptilian face. The first picture to come into her head was that of a devil. Once in her head, she found it almost impossible to get rid of the image, which stuck like glue. Saeko shivered and a whimper escaped her lips.
She breathed deeply and tried to calm herself, using reason to dispel the image. There was no evidence to any of this; it was just the product of a series of associations. But try as she might, she couldn’t get rid of the idea, and Saeko knew herself too well. If she didn’t control the image now, it would propagate until she was unable to budge, trapped under its weight.
The last thing she wanted was to live through another experience like the night at the Ina hospital. Her mind continued to race, out of control. That night, after the earthquake, she’d been taken directly to the hospital from the Fujimura house. She remembered the feeling of helplessness that had taken hold as she found herself completely immobilized, the conviction that someone had been standing there, watching her from the darkness. The image had taken on the form of a particular person …
She looked down at her father’s document on the desk before her, feeling her back prickle as if to warn her that someone was in the room and standing directly behind her. She tried to tell herself that no one was there, but the terrifying sensation persisted. Her imagination was running off on its own, doing too good a job of recreating the feeling of a presence. It felt more real than if someone had actually been there. Her ears picked up the echo of keys jangling behind her.
There’s no one here, there’s no one here …
Saeko sat repeating the mantra in her head, pleading for the feeling to dissipate.
Kitazawa had known it before Saeko had even pointed it out. There was no chance that the discovery of her father’s notebook at the Fujimura house could be attributed to mere chance. He slumped deeper into the office chair behind his desk. The chair slid backwards and he almost fell off. Quickly, he straightened up.
It was clear that, at some point, something had happened that led to Saeko’s father’s notebook being picked up by the Fujimuras. Kitazawa wondered if it was possible that Shinichiro Kuriyama had known anyone in the Fujimura family. If he hadn’t, could he have come across any of them at some point? Was there anything they had in common?
He decided to start with places; perhaps there had been a time when someone from the Fujimura family had been in the same place as Shinichiro. Kitazawa started to examine the files he had put together so far. The amount of information he’d been able to gather differed greatly depending on the case. He looked at the three files before him. There was one for the Fujimura family, and one for the three disappearances in Itoikawa. Finally, there was the file for Saeko’s father.
When Saeko had enlisted him to research her father’s disappearance she had given him a huge advance payment that allowed him the luxury of spending a longer period of time researching the case than he usually did. As a result, that file was much thicker than the others. In contrast, the file for the Fujimuras had the least information. There were a mix of sheafs that he’d put together and some that Saeko had provided. The Itoikawa file was in the middle. Of the three people that had gone missing from the convenience store, Kitazawa had spent the most time investigating the disappearance of Mizuho Takayama since her parents had hired him specifically to work on the case.
Mizuho had been caught on film just before her disappearance by the cameras in a convenience store. Kitazawa could picture the scene now, having seen the footage — the image of her thin arm writhing on the floor during the earthquake, the silver bracelet on her wrist. She’d been the editor for a trade journal and had been visiting Itoikawa to research an article on local jade handicraft when she’d vanished without a trace.
In fact, Kitazawa had a very comprehensive file on Mizuho’s case. When he’d just started out as a private detective he’d taken on a case concerning a missing woman. During his investigations he’d researched her travel history and discovered that she’d visited Vietnam just two months before her disappearance. Working on a hunch that there could be a link, he’d visited the place in Vietnam and had actually found the woman living there with a lover. She’d explained to him that she’d returned to Japan unable to forget this man she’d had fallen for while travelling and had decided to run away. But she had found herself missing her old life soon enough; to the joy of his client, Kitazawa was able to persuade her to come back to Japan.
Since that time Kitazawa always made a point of researching where people had visited prior to a disappearance, paying special attention to any trips abroad. He noted that Saeko’s investigations into the Fujimura family’s disappearance were missing such information — she hadn’t checked their travel histories. His own investigations had shown no potential links between her father and Kota Fujimura in Japan. As a natural next step he had looked into their history of travel abroad.
Shinichiro Kuriyama had made a vast number of trips out of Japan. His travels spanned all parts of the world: Europe, the Americas, Asia, Oceania, Africa … Kitazawa limited the search to the few years prior to the disappearance, but even then the number of places visited was huge: England, France, America, India, Mexico, Russia, Mongolia … Kuriyama’s most recent trip had been to Peru and Bolivia in South America.