Spiral

“Horoscopes? What are you, a high-school girl?”

“You’d be surprised at how often this stuff hits the mark. Now tell me when you were born.”

“Never mind that. Listen.” Ando pulled another stool out from under the table and sat down. He moved carelessly, though, and knocked the Beginner’s Guide off the table. It fell to the floor with a thud.

“Calm down, will ya?” Miyashita bent over—it looked like it pained him—to retrieve the book. But Ando wasn’t interested in any book.

“So did you find a virus?” he demanded.

Miyashita shook his head. “My first step was to check with other universities’ forensic medicine departments to see if bodies had been brought in with the same symptoms as Ryuji. I’ve got the results of that inquiry.”

“So, were there any?”

“Yup. Six altogether, as far as I could determine.”

“Six deaths.” But Ando had no idea yet whether or not that was a lot.

“Everybody I asked was astonished. They’d all figured they were the only ones who’d stumbled across this.”

“What universities are we talking about?”

Letting the table edge wedge into his belly, Miyashita reached for the file folder that had been placed unceremoniously on top of it.

“Shuwa University had two, Taido University had one, and Yokodai University in Yokohama had three. Six total. And there’s every chance we’ll see more.”

“Let me have a look,” Ando said, taking the folder from Miyashita.

That morning, Miyashita and his counterparts at the other schools had faxed each other the relevant files. The folder contained faxes of copies of the original death certificates and autopsy reports. As such, they were somewhat blurry and not very easy to read. Ando took the printouts from the folder and skimmed them for relevant info.

First, the body dissected at Taido. Shuichi Iwata, age nineteen. He’d died on September 5th, at about eleven at night; he’d been on his 50cc motorbike in the intersection in front of Shinagawa Station when he’d fallen. The autopsy had determined that his coronary artery had been blocked by unexplained swelling and that a cardiac infarction had ensued.

Two of the three bodies autopsied at Yokodai belonged to a young couple, and they’d died together. Takehiko Nomi, age nineteen, and Haruko Tsuji, age seventeen. Sometime before dawn on September 6th, their bodies had been discovered in a rented car parked at the foot of Mt Okusu, in Yokosuka, Kanagawa Prefecture. When the bodies were discovered, Haruko Tsuji’s panties were down around her ankles, and Takehiko Nomi’s jeans and briefs were pulled down to his knees. They’d obviously pulled over into a wooded area intending to have car sex, when their hearts stopped simultaneously. The autopsies had discovered strange lumps in their coronary arteries, which were, again, blocked off.

Ando raised his eyes to the ceiling, muttering, “What the hell?”

“The couple in the car, right?”

“Yeah. They had heart attacks at the same time in the same place. And, counting this Shuichi Iwata autopsied at Taido, we have four people experiencing blockage of their coronary arteries at about the same time. What’s going on here?”

“Those aren’t the only symptoms, either. Have you looked at the mother and child?”

Ando looked down at the files again. “No, not yet.”

“Take a look. They had ulcerations on their pharynxes, just like Ryuji.”

Ando riffled through the pages until he found the notations for a mother and daughter autopsied at Shuwa. The mother was Shizu Asakawa, age thirty, and the daughter was Yoko, only eighteen months old.

When Ando saw the names, he felt something tug at his mind. He rested his hands for a moment, thinking. Something didn’t sit right.

“What’s wrong?” Miyashita peered at him.

“Nothing.”

Ando read on. On October 21st, at around noon, a car driven by Shizu’s husband and carrying Shizu and Yoko had gotten into an accident near the Oi off-ramp of the Metropolitan Bayside Expressway. Heading from Urayasu toward Oi, it was not uncommon to encounter traffic near the entrance to the Tokyo Harbor Tunnel. The Asakawas’ car had slammed into a light truck at the end of a column of vehicles waiting to exit at Oi. The car was badly wrecked, and mother and daughter, together in the back seat, had lost their lives, while Mr Asakawa had sustained serious injuries.

“Why did they get sent in for autopsies?” Ando wondered aloud. There wasn’t much call to autopsy people who had obviously died in a traffic accident. A full forensic autopsy such as they’d received, with a public prosecutor presiding, usually didn’t happen unless a crime was suspected.

“Don’t get ahead of yourself. Keep reading.”

“Why don’t you buy a new fax machine anyway? I can hardly read these. It’s making my head hurt,” Ando said, waving the curling page in Miyashita’s face. He just wanted to know what had happened, and he was having trouble grasping the situation from the blurry printouts cranked out by the antiquated fax.

“You are one impatient bastard,” Miyashita said by way of preface. Then he began to explain. “At first, the feeling was that they had indeed died in the collision. But further examination showed no life-threatening injuries. The car was completely wrecked, but on the other hand, mother and daughter were in the back seat. This probably raised some doubts. They did a meticulous post-mortem on both of them. And sure enough, they found bruises and lacerations from the accident on their faces, their feet, et cetera, but the wounds showed no vital reaction. And I think that brings us to your territory.”

It was easy to tell if a corpse’s injuries had been sustained before or after death based on the presence or absence of a vital reaction. In this case, there was none. Which meant only one thing: at the time of the crash, mother and daughter were already dead.

“So, what, the husband was driving his dead wife and child around?”

Miyashita spread his hands. “So it would seem.”

That would immediately justify the forensic autopsy. Perhaps the husband had decided to kill himself and taken his family with him; he’d strangled his wife and child and driven off with them looking for the best place to end his own life, but had gotten into an accident on the way. The autopsies, however, had cleared the husband, for Shizu and Yoko had both had arterial blockages identical to the other cases. They couldn’t have been murdered. They’d both died of heart attacks on the expressway, shortly before the accident.

Once that was established, it was easy to guess how the husband lost control of the vehicle … He doesn’t realize for a while that his wife and daughter are dead—maybe they just quietly stopped breathing—so he drives on, thinking they’re asleep in the back seat. They’ve been curled up like that for an awfully long while. He tries to wake them up, keeping one hand on the steering wheel and reaching with the other into the rear of the car. He shakes his wife. She doesn’t wake up. He glances back to the front again before putting his hand on his wife’s knee. Then, suddenly, he realizes the change that’s come over her. He panics and just stares at his wife and child, not realizing that the traffic’s clogged ahead of him.

That had to be more or less what happened. Having lost his own son, Ando could well understand the panic the husband must have felt. It had been the same for him. If only he’d been able to overcome the panic, maybe he needn’t have lost Takanori … In the driver’s case, though, overcoming panic wouldn’t have accomplished anything. His wife and daughter were already dead.

“So what happened to the husband?” He felt sympathy for the man, who’d lost his family only two weeks before.

“He’s hospitalized, of course.”

“How bad are his injuries?”

“Physically, he doesn’t seem to be that bad off. Mostly it’s his mind that was affected.”

“Emotional damage?”

“Ever since they brought him in with the bodies of his wife and daughter, he’s been catatonic.”

“Poor guy.” He could think of nothing else to say. The facts spoke volumes about the violence of the psychological shock Asakawa had received in losing both wife and child in a single moment. He must have loved them deeply.

Ando grabbed the faxes out of Miyashita’s grip, licked his fingertips, and began paging through the flimsy sheets again. He wanted to know which hospital the man was in. He was curious about the symptoms, and he thought that if Asakawa was in a hospital where Ando knew somebody, specifics could be obtained.

The first thing that leapt into sight was the name.

Kazuyuki Asakawa.

“What’s this?” Ando let out a stupid-sounding yell, so surprised he was. “Kazuyuki Asakawa” was the same name he’d inscribed in his planner the other day. The man who’d gone to Ryuji’s apartment the night after his death and peppered Mai with questions about some videotape.

“You know him?” Miyashita yawned.