In stark contrast to this, the Fujimura family seemed to rarely travel abroad. When they had, it was through a standard tour package: once to Guam, once to Hong Kong. Both had been family trips taken when the two children were still in elementary school. Kitazawa sighed and looked up to the ceiling. He felt heavy, lethargic. It was difficult to concentrate. He probably needed a change of pace.
He went to the bathroom, splashed water over his face, and walked back to his chair. He flicked through the data cards he had put together for each member of the Fujimura family, trying to organize his thoughts. He stopped as soon as he reached Haruko Fujimura’s. The words jumped off the page — South America. She was the only member of the family to have visited the region. Moreover, she had been travelling by herself. It stood out like a sore thumb.
Haruko was the children’s mother, Kota’s wife. During summer vacation in August of 1994 she had travelled alone to South America. She had been twenty-eight at the time, married to Kota but still without kids. Their first child, Fumi, had been born in the following year. Could this be the link Kitazawa had been looking for? The feeling of lethargy seemed to lift as his thoughts began to race with the possibility.
The question was where the two of them could have met. He knew that Shinichiro had only visited Peru and Bolivia, so if they had met, it had to be one of the two countries. But those were large countries, and he had to narrow the focus somehow. He remembered that Shinichiro had penned a number of books on the ancient civilizations of South America. He would have visited one or more of the famous archeological sites during his visit.
Kitazawa didn’t know what sort of ancient ruins existed in Peru and Bolivia. At that moment, Toshiya opened the door and poked his head into the office.
“Dad, come and take a look at this.” Toshiya held up some papers for Kitazawa to look at.
Kitazawa ignored them and waved him over. “Good timing, kid — do you know anything about the ancient civilizations of Peru and Bolivia?”
“Huh? Bit out of the blue …” Toshiya walked across the room, taking care to weave around the clutter of papers and files stacked precariously on the desk.
“I think I’ve found a link between our girl’s dad and the Fujimuras.”
“And that’s got something to do with relics in Bolivia or Peru?”
“Exactly.”
“First place that comes to mind is that Incan site, Machu Picchu. Peru. I bet there are lots more though, hang on.” Toshiya sat in front of the computer and opened a search engine.
Kitazawa watched as his son pulled up a few websites detailing the ancient ruins of the two countries. He recognized a few of the names that came up on the display: Cusco, Nazca, Machu Picchu. They were all pretty well known, he guessed, although he didn’t know much about them. Toshiya clicked through the sites in turn and summarized the contents for his father. He explained that Cusco was well known for being the symbolic capital of the Incan empire, where the emperor had built his palace. Nowadays there were no ruins per se, just some stone foundations of old Incan buildings mostly hidden underneath the more recently built Catholic churches and other Spanish edifices. Nazca, he continued, was famous for the vast drawings visible only from the sky, the Nazca Lines. Again, he dismissed these as not technically being ruins.
Kitazawa remembered a program he’d seen on the wonders of the world that had shown footage of the drawings: giant depictions of spiders, monkeys, a hummingbird. He could see the geometric shapes in his mind’s eye. The program had presented a number of theories as to why the vast pictures had been made but concluded that no single compelling argument had been agreed on to date.
Machu Picchu, the city in the sky. Kitazawa knew that it was famous for its stunning location on the sheer cliffs of the Andes themselves. The site was first discovered at the beginning of the twentieth century when an archeologist stumbled across the vast stone structures of an abandoned city at the foot of the Andes. He had been hiking through the ancient Inca trails in search of the legendary city of Vilcabamba.
Kitazawa’s interest was immediately piqued by this image of Machu Picchu as it fitted perfectly with the image of ruins in his mind. He leant over Toshiya and scanned through the text on the monitor for more information. As he did so, one of the numbers on the screen caught his attention. He stopped and went back over the last few sentences, reading more slowly this time.
At the beginning of the 16th Century, the site was abandoned, seemingly overnight. The reasons for the sudden exodus are currently unknown. 400 years later, Bingham’s archeological dig uncovered a mass open grave containing the remains of 173 bodies. Of the bodies, it was determined that 150 were female. In all cases, the bodies had had their limbs severed before death. One theory for this is that the Incans thought to free themselves of anyone that would have slowed them down and thrown these bodies into an open grave. However, the theory does not explain why the limbs of the discarded bodies had been severed. We are still far from finding out the truth of what happened here.
They finished reading the passage and looked at each other. Toshiya took a deep breath; he looked sickened by the mention of mutilated bodies.
“Nasty way to go …”
Kitazawa sat trying to put the pieces of the puzzle together. Had Shinichiro and Haruko met at Machu Picchu?
Saeko was due to stop off at his office on her way to Atami the next morning, and she would definitely want to know about this development. Her father, Shinichiro, had been travelling in South America at exactly the same time as Haruko Fujimura. There had to be a point of connection. It was the only explanation for their finding his notebook at the Fujimura house. Kitazawa pulled together some papers and looked up at Toshiya.
“Didn’t you say you had something to show me?”
“Ah yes, I almost forgot.”
Toshiya showed his printouts from the Internet. The top page bore the title, “Disappearances at Zero Magnetic Field Points.”
“I was looking for links between the disappearances and magnetic disturbances. This article came up.”
Kitazawa ran through the content of the pages. The article was about people supposedly going missing at a point off Route 152, the Akiha Road, that once connected Tenryu and Imoya. Because it crossed directly over an active fault line — the median tectonic line — the road had been severed and never repaired. Due to this, going north of Hamamatsu required splitting off via Oshikamura towards Komagane, turning left on a T-intersection just by the Bungui mountain pass. The article cited a number of cases of people vanishing mysteriously from the woods there, a short walk from a parking area near the pass, right at the spot where there was a zero magnetic field.
The few reported cases were in the form of direct testimonies by young-sounding witnesses. The article didn’t seem particularly convincing; it was somewhat sensationalist in style, like a souped-up urban legend. But there was one point in particular that caught Kitazawa’s attention.
The location.
The supposed disturbance in the magnetic field was only ten or so kilometers south of the Fujimura house in Takato, too close to be mere coincidence. He decided that the article was worth holding on to and added it to the file that he was preparing to give to Saeko the next morning.
Perhaps she’ll be able to shed some light on this …
Chapter 5: Fissure