‘Detective,’ Matsuura said at one point, ‘I think you’ve squeezed just about everything you can out of us. There’s nothing else.’
Sasagaki nodded, when a book sitting on the edge of the counter caught his eye. He picked it up. ‘What’s this?’
‘That’s Ryo’s,’ Matsuura said. ‘He must have left it there.’
‘Ryo read a lot?’
‘Quite a bit, yeah. He used to go to the library all the time.’
‘The library?’
Matsuura nodded, clearly wondering what the library had to do with anything.
Sasagaki put the book back on the counter, his heart pounding.
The book was Gone with the Wind – the same book Yukiho had been reading when he went to pay a visit to Fumiyo Nishimoto. If he was being honest with himself, it wasn’t much more than a coincidence. Two kids of similar ages reading the same book probably happened all the time. Nor were they reading it at the same time. Yukiho had read it a full year earlier.
But the discovery stuck in his mind. Sasagaki paid a visit to the library, a small, grey building about two hundred metres north of the abandoned building where Yosuke Kirihara’s body was found.
He showed a photograph of Yukiho to the librarian, a young woman with glasses who looked like she was only a few years past being a book-loving student herself. She nodded when she saw the photo.
‘Oh, she used to come here all the time. I only remember her because she borrowed so many books.’
‘Did she come alone?’
‘Yes, always.’ Then she frowned. ‘Wait, well, no, sometimes she would come with a boy. A classmate, maybe? They looked about the same age.’
Sasagaki quickly pulled out another photograph, this one of the Kiriharas. He pointed his finger at Ryo. ‘Was that the boy?’
The librarian squinted through her glasses. ‘Well, that looks a bit like him, sure. It’s hard to say for certain, though.’
‘Were they always together?’
‘Not always. Just sometimes. They would often come looking for the same book. And I remember they would play by cutting paper.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘The boy would make these shapes out of paper with scissors and show them to her. I remember having to talk to them because I didn’t want little pieces of paper everywhere. But, I’m sorry, I really can’t say for sure whether it’s the boy in this picture.’
She’d given him proof enough. He remembered the paper cut-out he’d seen in Ryo’s room.
So Yukiho and Ryo were meeting at the library. They had known each other at the time of the murder. That was enough to turn everything on its head. Sasagaki made a complete about-face in his thinking on the investigation.
Ryo could have easily navigated the ducts, and he already had a witness in the same class who said Ryo often joined in their games. According to the witness, Ryo knew his way around the abandoned building better than any of them.
That left Ryo’s alibi. At the time of Yosuke Kirihara’s death, Ryo had purportedly been with his mother, Yaeko, and the shop manager, Matsuura. But there was good reason to suspect they might be protecting him – a possibility no one on the task force had yet explored.
The only problem was motive.
What could bring a son to murder his own father? It had happened before in the history of the world, of course, but it wasn’t commonplace. It would require a pretty compelling backstory and Sasagaki couldn’t think of any that applied to Yosuke Kirihara and his son. The investigation hadn’t uncovered any rift between the two. On the contrary, all the testimonies they had received made it seem like Yosuke Kirihara had genuinely cared for his son, and his son had loved him in return.
Sasagaki continued making the rounds and asking questions, but he had begun to seriously entertain the notion that it was all in his head. When you wander in the dark too long, you start to see things that aren’t really there.
‘I knew all too well that if I told anyone my Ryo theory, they’d think I was off my rocker and I would’ve got pulled off the case on the spot and probably given a nice long vacation,’ Sasagaki said with a chuckle. He sounded as if he was only half-joking.
‘So you couldn’t find a motive?’ Kazunari asked.
The detective shook his head. ‘Nothing at the time. It was too much of a reach to think that Ryo had killed his father just because he wanted the money.’
‘By “at the time” I take it you mean you found something later?’ Kazunari said, leaning forward, but Sasagaki waved him back with his hands.
‘Be patient, I’ll get there. Just let me tell it in order. Basically, my own little private investigation fell apart at that point, but I kept tabs on Ryo and Yukiho. Not that I was on stakeout, mind you, but I made a point of asking around every once in a while to see how they were coming along, what schools they were going to, trying to keep a general picture forming in my head. I was sure I’d find the two of them together at some point.’
‘Did you?’
Sasagaki gave a long sigh. ‘It took a long time. No matter which way you looked at it, they were complete strangers.’
‘But something happened?’
‘In their last year of middle school.’ Sasagaki stuck a finger into his box of cigarettes to find it empty. Kazunari opened the crystal case of cigarettes on the table. It was filled to the brim. Sasagaki nodded in thanks and took one.
‘Does this have anything to do with the attack on Yukiho’s classmate?’ Kazunari asked as he lit Sasagaki’s cigarette for him.
The detective looked at him. ‘You know about that?’
‘I heard about it from Mr Imaeda.’
Kazunari told the detective what Imaeda had told him, about the middle-school rape, and Yukiho being the one who discovered the victim. He added his own experience when he was in college and mentioned that Imaeda had suspected the connection might be Yukiho.
‘He was a good private eye, then. I’m surprised he went that deep. Yes, that was the incident in question. Of course, I was looking at it from a slightly different angle from Mr Imaeda. The perpetrator was never caught, you see, but there was a suspect – another kid in the same grade. Except, he had an alibi and was cleared of suspicion. The problem was who the suspect was and whose testimony gave him an alibi.’ Sasagaki breathed out a stream of silky smoke. The cigarettes were much more expensive-tasting than the ones he smoked. ‘The suspect’s name was Fumihiko Kikuchi, the older brother of the kid who found the pawnbroker’s body. And the person to give the testimony establishing his alibi was none other than Ryo Kirihara.’
Kazunari gaped.
‘Curious, right?’ Sasagaki said. ‘I found it hard to brush off as mere coincidence.’
‘But what does it mean?’
‘Well, I only heard about the rape a year after it happened, from Fumihiko Kikuchi himself. I had followed up with the family concerning the previous case a few times, so I knew both of the Kikuchi brothers pretty well. It was on one of those visits when we got to talking and he brought it up.
‘To sum it up, when the rape happened, Fumihiko had been watching a movie. He didn’t have any proof at first, but then Ryo Kirihara came to his rescue. There was a small bookshop across the street from the movie theatre and Ryo said he had been there with another friend and just happened to see Fumihiko going into the theatre. The officer taking the testimony checked it out with a friend, too, and decided it was true.’
‘So he was let go.’
‘He was. Fumihiko thought he just got lucky. But then, a little while later, he got a call from Ryo telling him he’d better be grateful and not to think about doing anything rash.’
‘What did he mean by that?’
‘Fumihiko had recently come into possession of a certain photograph that he thought showed Ryo’s mom and an employee at the pawnshop having an affair. He said he’d shown it to Ryo.’