“Got it. Thanks a lot. I’m heading back to the station now.”
Matsumiya hung up and let out a sigh. He tapped the screen of his phone, calling up the information on the Shinkoiwa case so he could review it.
“Has something happened?” Kaga asked. “I heard you talking about ID-ing a body. Has there been another murder?”
“No. We were discussing a crime from a while ago.”
Matsumiya briefly talked Kaga through the Shinkoiwa case, supplementing his account with the new information he had just gotten from Sakagami.
“Right now, there’s no obvious link between the two crimes. The fact that the occupant of the Shinkoiwa shack has been found alive doesn’t mean he’s automatically linked to our Kosuge case. But I can’t get the idea out of my head. Mainly because the two incidents occurred in close proximity, in terms of time and place.”
“Time and place. Is that all that’s bothering you?”
“No...” Matsumiya was of two minds. Should he tell his cousin about the other thing? The feeling he got the minute he walked into Mutsuo Koshikawa’s little apartment. He didn’t want his cousin deriding him, accusing him of posing as a veteran guided by his intuition.
As he looked at his cousin sitting there, he rejected the idea. He would never say anything like that to me. Besides, if he didn’t talk to Kaga about it, who could he talk to?
So Matsumiya told his cousin about the Kosuge apartment. The atmosphere that filled the place: the absence of any sense of hope or dreams. The place was at once an apartment and not an apartment at all. It was a cramped space permeated with as much sadness as any blue-tarpaulin-covered homeless shack.
“What I’m trying to say is that I got the same vibe from both places.” Matsumiya could feel his irritation rising as he struggled to explain himself. He didn’t feel that he was getting his message across. “I’m probably not making myself clear.”
Kaga, who had been listening to Matsumiya with his arms crossed on his chest, uncrossed his arms and placed both hands on the edge of the table. He had a thoughtful look on his face.
“You said you had confirmation that the burned body was not the missing occupant of the Kosuge apartment. Did that come from a DNA test?”
“That’s right.”
“What did they use for the test?”
“Hang on a sec.” Matsumiya flipped open his notebook.
“A toothbrush, a razor, and an old towel. They found them in the apartment. They’re the sorts of items where there’s little chance of other people’s DNA getting mixed in.”
“True enough — but the perpetrator could always have switched those items out.”
Matsumiya started. The thought had not occurred to him.
“Why would he do that?”
“To knock the investigation off course, keep the body from being identified. We have one missing person. And we have one unidentified burned corpse. Given how the two crimes occurred in close spatial proximity and at around the same time, it’s only natural to do what you did and posit a connection between them — namely, to think that the same person might be responsible for both. Somebody who wanted to stop that from happening might go to the trouble of switching out the items he thought the police were most likely to use in a DNA test. What do you think? It’s not completely impossible, is it?”
Matsumiya thought the theory through carefully, then nodded his head. Now that it had been pointed out to him, it sounded credible enough.
“You could be right. But how am I supposed to prove it? To start with, it’s not even our case. We can’t go sticking our noses in...”
“Just do whatever you can do. My sense is that you’ll start making real headway if you can find out who the articles used in the DNA test really belong to.”
“Find the real owner of those items?” Matsumiya shrugged and held up his hands, palms outward, in a gesture of surrender. “How are we supposed to do that? If the perpetrator switched them, they’ll just be things he just picked up at random. There’s no way we can locate their actual owner.”
“I’m not sure about that. No, in fact, I disagree.”
“How so?”
“Because I don’t think they are items he just picked up at random.” Kaga held his right hand out with the fingers apart, then started to count, bending his fingers back into his palm one at a time. “Toothbrush. Safety razor. Old towel. The DNA collected from all three of them has got to match. That means he didn’t pick them up separately. In that case, he must have brought them from someone’s residence.”
“Someone’s home...?” Matsumiya’s jaw dropped. “You mean from the burned-down shack?”
Kaga broke into a grin. “It seems I finally got through to you.”
“The Shinkoiwa police have located the original occupant of the riverside shack. And you think the articles were his.”
“I think it’s extremely likely.”
Matsumiya sprang to his feet and hastily disposed of the tray and the cups. He was impatient to leave.
“Sorry. I’ve got to get going.”
“Okay. Have a good one.”
Matsumiya was already halfway down the stairs.
6
Hiromi had a quick word with the actors in the greenroom, then went to her meeting with the producer. She trusted him wholeheartedly. Love Suicides at Sonezaki: A Reimagining was a project that Hiromi had worked on for years. It was he who had given her the opportunity to present it at the Meijiza after attending its first production at a small theater in Osaka. Initially she’d been apprehensive when, based on the philosophy that “if a thing’s worth doing, it’s worth doing well,” he had proposed assembling a star-studded cast and doing an unusually long fifty-day run. Now she could see that he’d been right all along. The play was a tremendous commercial success.
“Did you see that piece in the paper the other day? The positive reviews just keep on rolling in.” The producer grinned happily. “The director of the theater is over the moon. He’s already talking about organizing a second run for the show. What do you think, Ms. Kadokura?”
“I’d jump at the chance, if he asked.”
“Good. Well, let me have a word with the management committee. We’re pretty much sold out until the end of this run, same-day tickets excepted, of course. This whole thing has gone fantastically well.” The producer ended the meeting on the same note of enthusiasm with which it had begun.
They shook hands and parted. Hiromi went to inspect the auditorium. She watched the performance from the control room almost every day, but she also liked to take a look at the audience before the curtain went up. If you want to make something that will really please the cheap seats, you’ve got to be prepared to look them in the eye. That was a lesson her ex-husband had drilled into her.
At the Meijiza Theater, the boxes are on the third floor of the building. Hiromi stood at Door 10 at the front right of the auditorium and surveyed the whole place from there. Although there was still about half an hour to go until the start of the show, the seats were already starting to fill up. Many of the patrons were women of a certain age. They were obviously inviting their friends and coming in big groups. If they did organize another run, figuring out how to boost the male attendance was one of the challenges they would face. If she was completely honest, she’d also like to pull in a younger demographic. But that would take a lot more than shoehorning some random celebrity into one of the main roles.
Something interrupted her train of thought and she gave a sudden start. She’d recognized one of the ticket holders. Tall and broad-shouldered; with those finely chiseled features—
Hiromi walked toward the man. He was too busy checking the number on his ticket against the seat numbers to notice her.