Mayama's footsteps carried him quickly through the evening crowd and into the quiet subway tunnel where Asakura stopped, waited, then turned to face him with ice in his eyes and his hands thrust into the pockets of his overcoat. Mayama slid toward him and met his eyes with the same expression. The two stood staring at one another for a long, frozen moment.

At length, Asakura spoke. "For what charge am I being arrested?" he asked.

"For murder," Mayama said without missing a beat.

Shibata's hair and skirts tossed about her as she ran with her tote bag through the wide stone corridors where cold white lamps set into stone walls led the way through the musty fog which hung in the the deep blue darkness. Deeper in the impenetrable shadows, Madarame peeked out from behind a corner, and gave the hand signal to his henchmen, who advanced with their pistols drawn. The flat circles of the ends of the silencers hovered into position.

"Who are you saying I've killed?" Asakura asked slowly.

Mayama rattled off the names as though reading a list in the young's eyes. "The murders masquerading as suicides of Takagi Daichi, Saitoh Takashi, Takeyuki Ichiroh, the recently dead Meguro Kazuki, the case reportage writer Kee who was following me, Shibata's friend Ôsawa Maiko, and my sister Saori."

"Get a grip, please," Asakura said. "I didn't kill anybody."

"Don't play dumb."

"I'm the victim here. We were invited by your sister. And all my friends killed themselves. My girlfriend's dead, too. Everybody, every last one, fucked up by you and your sister!"

Mayama stood staring for a moment, then reached into his overcoat to draw the pistol from his hip, and raised it slowly, cocking it with his thumb, then held it straight out to Asakura's face.

Asakura held the same unbroken gaze. "Shoot and I'm dead," he said in a puff of breath in the frigid air. "It won't change anything even if I'm alive, either. Kill me."

Staring over the sight of the gun into Asakura's face, the sickly green hue that bathed all that stood before Mayama's eyes made him twist his neck in perplexity. It was as if Asakura's face in the shadows had somehow morphed into Saori's. There was Saori standing in the path of the gun, dressed in her school uniform, spreading her arms as if to shield the man who had raped her. Her eyes were cold, still and phantasmal, but they met her brother's as though she were solid. A little boy peeked out from behind her. Mayama Tôru arched his trembling face on his neck and shut his eyes to block this vision. Behind his eyelids ran a fleecy red sheep; but he could not escape the ghost that stood at the end of his pistol. Shutting his eyes again, there was a scarlet wave, then a blood-red sunset. The gun lowered in his hand as he scrunched his eyes closed. The fleeting red impression of an old woman in a kimono flashed through his mind. The sheep again, Saori's eye, and everything, as it all raced in hiccuping flurries that turned the subway walls to rubber and liquid paint. The images hit him one after another until there was only light, and he was gone.

He was in the interrogation room, seated at the rusty red table. "My sister was murdered," he said, the shells of the fired pistol in the cellophane bag resting indisputably on the desktop. "It wasn't anything like a suicide."

"That's the evidence that you fired, there," Tsubosaka told him, standing in the wavering background against the little desk light.

"Yes sir."

"Why did you shoot a high school student?" Tsubosaka asked in a monotone, pacing past the single barred window through which the giant beckoning catatonic feline poked its white face.

"He murdered my sister."

"Your sister committed suicide."

"But she was destroyed."

"There ain't no evidence for murder," Tsubosaka echoed as he limped back and forth past the beckoning cat. "But there's evidence you fired that gun."

Mayama moved his eyes. "Did I... shoot a child?"

He saw another pair of eyes, and saw his own. His attention was drawn to the squeaking newt that crawled the wall. He got up and plucked it from the wall, and popped it in his mouth, sucking it's slithering, writhing hind legs and tail past his teeth. "Mayama!" echoed the distant sound of Tsubosaka's voice.

Mayama shook his head and returned to reality. Asakura was back in front of his eyes, glaring back at him in the subway. Mayama tried to maintain the gaze, but his mind was plunged into chaos again.

He stood before the young Asakura, who gaped with fear at the pistol aimed at him. Mayama held the gun steadily, but fired the blast past the boy's shoulder. The boy looked past the air where the bullet had flown, and turned defiantly at Mayama, who own eyes now filled with fear. Young Asakura lowered his head and stared with sinister sanpaku eyes. He raised a crooked finger and forced Mayama to turn the gun on himself and stare with terror down the barrel. He was forced to pull the trigger. His eyes went red, and Asakura grinned as Mayama's body fell, and fell again, and again, and again...

Mayama reared, rolling his eyes around in his skull. He continued to open and shut them in a hard fight against the hallucinations as he raised the pistol once more to align with Asakura's unblinking eyes, and steadied it with both trembling hands. The red dots of laser pointers were fixed on his head.

"Mr Mayama!" screamed Shibata's voice as she rushed into the corridor.

Mayama turned, and followed the points of light that speckled him from the sites of the Sweep team's guns. Madarame ordered them to fire, and the muffled pops of bullets sparked in the musty air, one of them catching Mayama hard in the left bicep. He screamed without a sound, twisting in agony.

Shibata raced to the front of him, and spread her arms as she faced Madarame's men. "Please stop!" she screeched.

"Shibata! Move!" Madarame shouted.

"I won't move!" she screamed back, dotted by the red points of light in their sites. "I won--" With expert marksmanship, Madarame's single bullet tore through Shibata's overcoat and grazed the flesh of her outstretched arm. She looked over at the light wound, began to swoon, and fell flat on her back.

Mayama staggered away and tore off into the darkness of the subway. "Get him!" Madarame yelled, and the men raced after the fugitive's invisible shadow, leaping over Shibata's fallen body where it lay spread on the dirty floor.

Asakura stepped out of the shadows and approached. "Miss Shibata?" he asked at length.

Her eyes sprung open. "I won't move!" she screamed.

As the sun slowly climbed the morning sky, chopping the icy fog with chisels of golden light, Mayama staggered over the old, hard wood of the pier, reeling and clutching his injured shoulder. He fell, and got up again, forcing himself onward through the tepid rays of sunshine.

Saotome and Hayashida stood with the aide on the stone verandah that overlooked the rocky grounds of the asylum. The buildings itself was a solid, heavy, three-story structure of cracked white stone and brown clay bricks, which formed a thick square around an uncultivated and nondescript-looking yard. "So on the day in question," Hayashida confirmed, "Meguro met with not a single person except for Mayama?"

The aide grunted thoughtfully. "I guess it looked that way from what I saw, but nobody else really knows, either."

Nonomura, Taniguchi and Kondoh crossed through one of the great gothic arches that formed the façade over the many doorways into the yard on the ground floor. Nagao did his best to push them back, arguing all the while, but Taniguchi's giant frame overpowered the short man's efforts as the three from Second Chapter lurched forward to stand beneath the verandah. "Administrator Saotome!" Nonomura yelled.

"What did you come here for?" Hayashida shot back.

"As Mayama's immediate supervisor, I believe I have a right to know the circumstances."

"You have no right to be here!"

"Assistant Section Chief Nonomura," said Saotome, "I believe we've already had this discussion."

"But as the Sweep is now involved, I can no longer remain silent and allow a colleague to die without intervening."

"Mayama has already strangled a man from the Sweep, and yesterday poisoned a patient under the care of this very hospital, one Meguro Kazuki. The evidence is here!"

Shibata crossed the yard behind the men who stood there, and stepped to the fore of them. "What's the evidence?" she demanded.

Nonomura uttered her name behind her as if to caution her.

"Meguro Kazuki was speaking with Mayama in that very room," Hayashida pronounced. "When it's only the two of them in the room, there's only one person who could've put that poison in Meguro's beverage, and that's Mayama!"

"Are you certain it was really Mr Mayama?"

"Mayama's fingerprints were detected on the remaining cup," Nagao told her, "I'm sorry to say."

"This is a trap!" Nonomura shouted up to Saotome.

"What is?" Saotome said, and stared for a brief instant before heading back inside the building.

Shibata led her colleagues into the hallway adjacent to the room in which Meguro Kazuki had died, where Saotome and the others were waiting. The quiet man in the hat was seated, blowing bubbles as usual. "So what could have been Mr Mayama's motive?" Shibata asked hesitantly as she tiptoed around the corner.

"Revenge on an offender in his sister's gang rape," said Hayashida.

"Aha, well, in that case, talking with him would have hardly been necessary, wouldn't you say?"

"What are you trying to say?" said Saotome.

"If Mr Mayama came here only for the purpose of murdering Mr Meguro, why do you suppose he would have turned to the unnecessary method of poisoning?"

"I wonder at your inference," Saotome replied.

"Basically, if Mr Mayama, who had attempted to shoot Mr Asakura with a pistol, had come to this hospital with the sole intention of committing a murder," Shibata continued, "He would have been more likely to simply shoot him."

"Shooting a person isn't a simple thing at all," Saotome objected. "In actuality, Mayama had failed twice. In other words, for Mayama, carrying out a homicide is something of a high hurdle. In light of that, I'd wonder if there's any possibility at all that anyone other than Mayama could have spread that poison."

Shibata considered, and faced Saotome again. "Mr Meguro did something like drink it himself."

Saotome sighed and took a few pensive steps forward. "I would also like very much to believe Mayama. However, all the evidence presented points in his direction. In addition, one of the members of the Sweep has been struck down by him."

"What is this Sleep?" Shibata asked.

"Shibata, it would be better if you didn't know any more than this," Nonomura told her. "At any rate, we will commence an independent investigation into this matter ourselves."

"This isn't a case that concerns Second Chapter," Saotome said.

"It's a case that concerns a colleague in Second Chapter," Nonomura replied.

"If you plunge any deeper into this," Saotome warned him, "Your daily activities and conduct will be held accountable."

"Fine," Nonomura said after a pause.

"Whoa, whoa, whoa, Mr Nonomura," Hayashida interjected, waving his arms. "Isn't it about time for retirement?"

"Wouldn't it be better to go along quietly?" Nagao added.

"I will be taking a paid vacation from here onward," Nonomura said. "For anything I may attempt over the course of my furlough, I apologize in advance." He turned on his heels and walked away.

"I will also take my vacation," Kondoh added, and headed off in the same direction.

"I'm right with him," Taniguchi pronounced, and turned away to leave Shibata the only one facing the others.

"I will also take a vacation," she declared, and attempted to walk away.

"Inspector Shibata!" Saotome shouted at her back.

She stopped and turned around. "Yes, sir?"

"You came forth from Tokyo University, and brought a valuable and talented asset to the National Police Agency," he said. "You're not like that mass of incompetents. Please be so kind as to terminate your residency."

"But, as a member of Second Chapter, the true situation concerning the suspicion of my associate--"

"I will make arrangements today to have you removed from Second Chapter hereafter."

Shibata uttered a little cry of surprise.

"You are due to be named the chief of your own jurisdiction this autumn as a result of excellence in your duties. It would be quite imprudent to injure your career for the sake of such a foolish matter as this."

"What do you mean, such a foolish matter as this?" Shibata demanded as she marched toward him.

He took a few calm steps forward to meet her halfway. "Do you fail to understand?"

"Mr Mayama is my closest senpai!" she cried.

"He is a murderer."

"That man was keeping goldfish," Shibata said. "For seven years after his sister's death, he raised and treasured them. A man who knows the value of life like that would not be able to kill another human being for the sport of it."

"However well aware of the value of life he may be, the situation of his murders remains."

Shibata gave a breathy moan of understanding as she looked hard into Saotome's eyes. "It seems that the condition of Mr Mayama's being alive has some great significance for you, I think? Namely, if Mr Mayama is allowed to live, it may create some problem for you. Therefore that Sleep is set in motion as an attempt to eliminate him."

Hayashida pressed his hatchet face forward past Saotome's shoulder. "SWEEP," he enunciated.

"Spoon," Shibata said back.

"Are you makin' that mistake intentionally?"

Shibata's eyes travelled from Hayashida's back to Saotome's, and in a few random movements of their own, as she slowly began to smile with demure irony. "It does seem that it was intentional, doesn't it..."

A baleful light sprung up in Saotome's eyes, which made the flesh around them twitch with wrath. He seized Shibata's face in his fingers. "Don't fuck with me!" he growled, and let go violently, then let his sight fix on nothing in particular. "It's a terrible mistake to let someone as screwed up as Mayama remain in the police force," he said softly.

Mayama had hidden in a run-down old house, where he lay on his back in the darkness, inclining his blood-smeared face toward the television monitor that glowed with the screaming defilement of his sister. As Meguro's face and words stuck in his mind, it was as if he could see Saori's placid, contented face smiling back at him on the screen as the boys assaulted her. Your sister invited us, the young man had sneered as he went mad in the sanitarium. Look at the video! Video! She's havin' a great fuckin' time, she loved it!

The video continued, and Mayama lay very still in the dusky, squalid room.

In the basement office, Nonomura penned in the last few lines and pressed his seal into the request form for his own furlough. Taniguchi and Kondoh approached his desk with their own forms, supplicating as they presented them to him. Shibata shoved in between them with a form of her own, excusing herself as she presented it with alacrity to the assistant section chief. "Please take care of my lot as well."

"Ahh--" Nonomura began, looking up from the form before him to Shibata above. "Er, because you're in training, you probably haven't accumulated any vacation time..."

"Eh?"

Kondoh pulled up the record of Shibata's term on his computer. "Unexcused absences were removed at the assistant section chief's arrangement, so as for vacation," he said, viewing the slots of zeros that dotted her record, "Nothing remains."

Shibata looked perturbed. "Those instances were..."

"Days off," said Nonomura.

"Without salary?"

"Right."

"And you're all..."

"Salaried," said Taniguchi.

"Paid vacation," said Kondoh, walking back to where the others gathered at Nonomura's desk.

"We've got our livelihood, and our families and households, you see," Nonomura said. Shibata let her eyes wander away in discomfiture as her boss merrily gathered the forms into a neat stack and collected his ink and stamp. "Well, I guess we'll go start this investigation in fifteen," he smiled, and closed his ballpoint pen. "I guess you all know it, too, but a long time ago I was a detective of some note. I could push my way to the truth like a gorilla. That's the nickame I got... Huh?" He looked up at last, and found that Shibata was the only one still standing before his desk.

"Chief, let's go," Kondoh called from where he and Taniguchi stood waiting at the door.

Nonomura grunted, straightened the papers with a light tap on the desktop, and held them for a pause, with his head lowered as though bowing to Shibata or to the office. He picked up his overcoat, and hurried toward the door.

"Oh, I'll go too," Shibata cried, grabbing her own overcoat and tote bag.

"No, you won't," Nonomura pronounced firmly, with his back to her.

The tiny cry of surprise rose from her throat.

"Now that the Sweep is out, as an amateur, you ought to just stay put."

"That's cruel," she protested softly.

Nonomura turned to face her, holding his overcoat draped over his arm. "Shibata, when circumstances like this arise, I regret that I can't look after your care to the last. However, even if we're not here, I hold the responsibility to see to it that your residency comes to a safe closure."

"But, Chief--"

"It would be better if you don't concern yourself with this matter any further. I'm sorry to say it," he smiled, "But you don't have any paid vacation. Now then." He ducked out with a short bob of the head, and cheerfully joined the other two men in slipping out the door and leaving the lone woman to sulk in silence.

Madarame knocked the clip into his gun and let it dangle in his hand. He leaned against the guardrails on the rooftop, where the roar of traffic below was a distant, muted hum, and the thin wind blew over Aya's tired skin where she stood nearby, resting against a guardrail herself, and looking very old. "Mr Mayama's your mentor," she said. "They gonna make you shoot him?"

Madarame separated himself from the guardrail and stood up straight, raising his pistol. Slowly he brought the barrel straight into alignment with his lover's face. "If my orders decree it, I'd even shoot you," he told her as she stared wearily and plaintively back at him. "That's our job."

Aya kept her eyes on his for a moment, then gave a short sigh of disgust. "So stupid," she breathed. "Shoot Mr Mayama, shoot me... One by one betray all your comrades... If that's what it means to be a detective, I'll fucking quit. You can talk about your orders, your job, and all that crap, but all it really means is doing whatever Saotome tells you."

"That's the system!" he retorted.

Aya smirked for a second. "So it is," she said, putting her hands in her pockets. "Goodbye," she sighed, and turned to head down the steps.

The light click of the cocking of Madarame's gun aimed at the back of her head made her stop on the staircase, but she did not turn around. In her thickest Kansai brill, she barked, "If you wanna shoot me, just fuckin' do it!"

But Madarame only stood in the same position with the gun in his straightened arm, and his mouth set tight with impotent anger. At length, Aya looked over her shoulder at him as the wind whipped her hair about. "Didn't get your orders, I guess. You can't do anything without that."

Madarame blinked against the cold air that rushed over his eyes, and silently watched Aya's languid descent down the iron staircase.

Shibata paced between the endless shelves of data in the basement office, haunted by images of Maiko's cracked skull bleeding on the pavement, and Mayama pointing his gun at the young Asakura. She saw Asakura's eyes as they were on the paint-smeared poster in the dim corner of Mayama's apartment when she had drawn that curtain aside. She stopped and stood between the stacks, and thought of the grisly murder of the reportage writer, Kee, and the rape of Mayama Saori. She saw the deaths of Meguro Kazuki and the other three boys who had assisted in perpetrating that incident, and remembered Mayama's words to her by the aquarium: He'll probably take an aim at you, too, he had said. If you die, it's all over...

Shibata's face contorted, and she uttered a piercing scream from the bottom of her torso, pressing all she had in her lungs into a whistling wail that tore through the basement office and stopped only at the smack of Aya's hand on her forehead.

"Shut up! What the hell are ya doing?"

Shibata cradled her cranium as she absorbed the awareness of Aya's presence. "I was ordered to stay put until further notice."

"So you have to just hang out here?"

"Yes."

"What the hell for?"

"Just because I was instructed to do so."

Aya clicked her tongue and yelled, "And not know whether Mr Mayama's gonna get killed during that time?"

"By the Sleep?" Shibata asked.

"Sweep," Aya corrected with deliberate enunciation.

"I'll be right back," Shibata said, and toddled quickly out of the bookshelves.

"Where you goin'? Man, you're a pain in the ass. Shibata!"

Shibata turned around. "Yes?"

Aya drew a portable radio from her jacket pocket and held it out teasingly at Shibata. "I got the special Sweep radio right here," she said.

Shibata grabbed for it, but Aya moved it away, continuing to evade Shibata's wild grasps for it as she politely begged Aya to give it to her. "Maybe I just won't let you have it," Aya taunted.

"You're mean!"

"I have two conditions," Aya said, holding the radio high.

"What are they?" Shibata asked at length.

Aya wandered over to the desk cluster and planted herself on the desktop. "You gotta hook up ten group dates for me with some fine-ass dudes from Tokyo U," she insisted with glee.

"Ten of them..." Shibata hesitated.

"What's your answer?"

"Yes," Shibata said.

"The other thing," Aya intoned as she leaned forward and off the desktop. She stood very close to Shibata and spoke in complete earnest. "We absolutely have to arrest the real culprit in this case." She looked into Shibata's eyes, which looked intently back at her. "And I mean even if it is Mr Mayama."

Shibata blinked.

"What's your answer?"

"Yes," Shibata said finally.

The two of them sat in Aya's white car, with the Sweep radio mounted on the dashboard spewing garbled eyewitness information, times and locations. Shibata's eyes were transfixed on Aya as she lit the cigarette in her mouth while she slouched behind the steering wheel. Shibata continued to study her for a moment, then she reached down and procured the pack of cigarettes. She attempted to nonchalantly flip the pack open with one hand and pop one into her mouth, but she spilled several onto her overcoat. Undaunted, she kept one in her mouth, put another back and brushed the rest off, and tried very hard to look natural as she fumbled to flick the lighter. The flame wicked up in front of her face, startling her into dropping lighter and cigarette alike. When she regained her composure, she groped around on the floor for the fallen items.

Aya, who had been watching the whole spectacle with casual silence, took the cigarette from her own mouth, and passed it over to place it between Shibata's lips. Shibata let the smoking thing sit there, inhaled a bit, and leaned back with the same pretense of smug nonchalance. "The old detective spirit, eh?" she managed to say to Aya, just before she began to choke.

In a car parked at some distant curb sat the three men of Second Chapter. Taniguchi periodically jerked his eyes open as he fought ennui in the driver's seat. Nonomura was beside him, twisted around to watch Kondoh concentrating on his single earphone in the back seat. All that could be heard was a radio broadcast that seemed to be a hapless victim staving off a murderous monk, as Nonomura asked Kondoh if he had yet had any success in the attempt to intercept the Sweep radio. "It'll be just a while longer," Kondoh said. Taniguchi stretched his giant mouth open in a molar-filled hippopotamus yawn as the voice on the radio continued in its desperate fight with the deranged monk.

Two of Madarame's men drew their pistols and crossed the fence to charge on the old house in which Mayama had lingered. Mayama, clutching his blood-soaked shoulder, watched their entry from an opposing corner of the fence, and took off in a staggering run after a covered truck which rolled slowly over the quiet street. He chased it until he was able to fling himself under the open cloth canopy and into the bed.

Having thus nearly located him, the Sweep radio merely reported traces of Mayama's concealment in Koutouku. Aya looked around as she gripped the steering wheel. "He's gotta be around here," she said as Shibata flipped through the map book. Aya pulled the car to a stop at the curb and grabbed the book out of Shibata's hands. With a long, speckled false fingernail, she traced the roads and back streets which lined the page. "To trick the observation eye, he probably went this way."

"That's to say...?"

"He appears here," Aya said, peering out at the buildings on the other side of the windshield, "And slips into a truck somewhere."

"Where would he have headed?"

Aya cast a glance to her far right, and caught sight of those two trenchcoated Sweep men reaching into their coats in unison. She gasped and peeled away from the curb, leaving Shibata nonplussed as she threw her head back again to watch the men cross the sidewalk. "Shit, our position got found out!"

Shibata craned her neck to see one of the men raise his radio to his face far behind as they watched Aya's white car race away. "Oh, no, what should we do--eh?"

"Only thing we can, we gotta get the hell outta here!"

Somewhere else, the covered truck carried its wounded, hunted stowaway away from Koutouku.

Asakura had placed a Sweep radio of his own beside the keyboard on his desk. "We've lost sight of Mayama," it blurbed. When asked for a location, the first voice responded cluelessly; the second voice cursed the first, and ordered all bodies to reaggregate. Asakura sat over the keyboard in the low lamplight, staring at his computer screen. "Idiots," he murmured.

He tapped his fingers on the keys, bringing Mayama's photograph onto the screen beside other details by which he could be identified, including his injured shoulder, and phrased a request for any eyewitness information regarding this man that could lead to his present whereabouts. He held his hand to the window glass glowing with sunlight, then sat in the corner with a strong drink in his hand while the computer, with its back to him, automatically accepted one email after the other as they poured in on the winds of cyberspace.

"Mayama is in Shinjuku," came the unabashed declaration from the radio on Aya's dashboard. In his own car, Madarame demanded the identity of the anonymous voice.

"Mayama is in Shinjuku, wearing a black coat," Asakura continued into the radio, quoting directly from the mail that appeared on his screen. He set the radio back on his desk beside the keyboard and rested. Saotome's voice caught him from behind.

The young man turned in surprise, to have his fleshy face seized in anger. "You go too far in imitating me," Saotome said.

"I-I'm sorry--Mr Asakura--"

The ice pick came down, straight and steady, to poke the young man's forehead against his muffled grunts and grimace. The pointed thing jabbed him twice, and a third time came to rest in the dent of his broken skin. As it did so all the young man's deeds and memories in his life as Asakura passed beneath the lids of his squinted eyes, until at last, the ice pick's tip was drawn out of a bloody hole between his bulging, paralyzed eyes.

Aya brought her car to a stop near the yawning mouth of the subway station. "For now, you should catch the subway back to police headquarters," she instructed Shibata. "You gotta go on alone from here. Just make like some random auntie who belongs around here. Then be careful on the subway platform. It's dangerous. There's a chance somebody might push you off and kill you."

"What about you?"

"I'll be okay," Aya assured her. "Look, we'll meet up at Second Chapter later on."

"Right," Shibata nodded, undoing her seat belt. She disembarked, and flung the door closed with a quick and light bow of the head as Aya drove away. She pulled her tote bag over her shoulder as she headed down the staircase into the subterranean station among the civilians. But she got only a few steps downward before she stopped, turned around, and headed for an internet cafe on the other side of the crosswalk.

Upon her entrance to the internet cafe, she promptly tripped and crashed into a young man seated at one of the computers. "Ack--I'm sorry. I'm sorry," she said as she straightened herself and went to the counter. "Excuse me, I'd like only thirty minutes, please," she told the clerk.

She typed quickly, sending numerous anonymous email messages as a mock witness to Mayama's whereabouts, offering false information and misleading details to the sources she deemed appropriate, as she made the most of her time at the small table where she was seated across from the young man with whom she had collided, and came to an expedient completion of her session. She rose quickly, thanking the clerk with a light bow, and clobbered the young man with her tote bag as she made her exit.

Mayama bent over the sink in the public lavatory, near the train station, splashing the water over his blood-caked face and rinsing a red mess down the drain. When he rose his torso, flinching with the pain in the shoulder he continued to clutch, his demented reflection stared madly back at him in the spotted mirror. As he grew dizzy, the hallucinatory visions once again overtook him...

He chased Saori over a blurry field, and she ran playfully toward the railroad tracks. He caught and pushed her down, the weight of his adult body pinning the young girl to the ground. She looked up at him with coltish eyes and spoke frolicsome words he could not hear. He looked past her and down the tracks, where a haggard and ancient woman in a blood-red kimono frowned a blood-red frown redly into the distance, sitting on the gravel between the rails with a blood-red television screen that bore Saori's wily face. Her command morphed slowly from three staccatto vowels that slowly took shape as she repeated them out of time with the movements of her mouth, until the words at last materialized and bled into place in contrast to the fading landscape: "Kill me."

Mayama writhed on the floor of the lavatory as he came to, and flailed his legs in pain.

Shibata's mind turned over the words of the psychiatrist whom Maiko had consulted. She pondered that statement about the fragile nature of human emotions and memories, about how easily our values and manner of relating to reality could potentially be altered, about how it may indeed be possible to manufacture a killer through the power of suggestion. Shibata rotated in her chair as she spoke to herself in the dim light of the underground office. "Suggestion... A person can manipulate another... Someone could manipulate Maiko..." She twirled to a slow stop past the shadowy desks and bookshelves, and rested her sharp eyes on the solitary photo of Maiko and Asakura smiling on the desktop.

Her cell phone rang. She wheeled toward the desk to pick it up.

"Hello?"

Mayama was crouched in the phone booth, his face once again streaked with sweat and blood, as he held the light green receiver to a face that twitched uncontrollably as he shoved into a standing position against the glass. "It's bad of me, but I got a favour to ask."

"Mr Mayama, where are you now?" Shibata insisted.

"Without lettin' anybody know, send this message just to Asakura: The place where I shot at you seven years ago, that's where I'll be waiting."

"What are you planning to do?"

"Just go along with it."

"The Sleep is hunting you."

"I know."

"If I go along with what you're telling me, I'll just be letting them take their aim at you!"

"It's okay. The son of a bitch'll come."

"Why?"

"The son of a bitch is a murderer for pleasure. He's probably watching this whole chain of events from somewhere. And I doubt he's got any associates. If not, he'll come all by himself. He ain't afraid of me, and he ain't afraid of death, I don't think."

"Just to me," Shibata entreated, "Please just tell me your location."

"No way. You gotta stay alive," he flinched. "You gotta survive a long time, and there's somethin' else you gotta do for me."

"What is it?"

"Feed my goldfish," he said at length. "That's my request."

"I will," she said.

"Oh," he said, "And don't let anybody else in Second Chapter know. If you do... you'll be lettin' Aya know."

"Eh?"

"Aya is... the Sweep chief Madarame's woman. Don't let your guard down." At that point Mayama's keen wandering eyes caught sight of one of Madarame's own henchmen approaching the telephone box with hands concealed in his trenchcoat. Mayama slammed the telephone down and made haste to leave the booth.

Shibata held the beeping cell phone in her hand. "Aya, a spy...? That's impossible..."

She got up and went to Kondoh's computer, and pulled up Outlook to strike out the email message to Asakura, with a subject line entitled Waiting, verbatum as Mayama had told it to her. Having clicked the mouse and sent the message, she closed the program and sat contemplating the static screen.

Somewhere among the blackness of the bookshelves, a shadowy figure lurked.

Asakura was poised before his own monitor, bathed in its glow, and the message opened on his screen immediately. The place where I shot at you seven years ago, that's where I'll be waiting, read the stark words. The young man raised his black brows behind his round spectacles. "Die," he said.

While Shibata sat brooding at Kondoh's computer, a voice from behind her issued the same command. Perhaps it sounded like Mayama's voice? Her eyes shot up at once, as instantly a gloved hand plunged an iron blade deep into the soft muscle tissue of her back and withdrew it slowly through the torn and bloody opening in her sweater.

Shibata inclined her head in uncertainty, blinking as she felt around to the sticky wetness of her back. She brought her hand around again with apprehension, and found it covered in blood. "What's this--?" she breathed quickly, then brought it close to her face and sniffed at the mineral-laden redness. Her body leaned back in the chair and arched to the side as her senses faded, and at last she collapsed in a heap on the floor. She lay on her back and twisted stiffly with her breath escaping her. In her last fading perception, she witnessed the retreating figure of the assassin. Did it look like Mayama? She couldn't be sure. Then everything paled and disappeared.

Nonomura and Kondoh remained seated in the parked car, restless and bored by the day's long and fruitless attempts at intercepting the Sweep radio, and having found not the slightest trace of Mayama. Nonomura at last made a children's wordplay on the extent of his hunger, as he awaited the fast food Taniguchi had gone to purchase. Kondoh picked up the game and made a wordplay of his own on the distance toward making that purchase, inspiring Nonomura to respond in kind, attempting to outdo him in this juvenile amusement. As Kondoh then strained to stretch his wit, his grunt was taken up by Taniguchi, who leaned in through the car window with two plastic take-out bags. "Mai Iizumi," he said. "Um, I've had communication from Mr Mayama."

"What's that?" Nonomura asked, startled.

"I think he's in this vicinity, but he hung up the phone in the middle of it."

"I'm sure he's badly injured," Nonomura speculated. "Let's split up and search for him."

"Yessir," said Kondoh as he followed to hurriedly exit the vehicle. "Mai Iizumi," Taniguchi reminded them as they began to head in different directions, and they accepted the sandwich boxes. Taniguchi saluted them as they jogged off with the edibles in their hands.

Mayama was slouched, nearly asleep, at the top of the staircase in an abandoned building. He raised himself, with the small black pistol in his hand, when he heard the approaching sounds in the hallway. The side of his face continued to twitch against his will, as he hid in the shadows and waited with a pointed gun for the arrival of the stranger.

It was Taniguchi who followed his own shadow and peered up the stairwell. "Mr Mayama..."

"Whattayou doin' here?"

Taniguchi held the plastic bag high in his hand to draw out the little sandwich boxes for display to his colleague. "Here," he said, extending a box in offering. "Thought you might be hungry."

"Open it," was Mayama's suspicious command.

Taniguchi obediently and eagerly opened the box and revealed its innocuous contents.

"Eat it," Mayama said.

Taniguchi put a bite of the sandwich in his mouth, chewed hastily, and opened his mouth to show Mayama what was inside. "There's no poison in here," he smiled. "Please believe your comrade."

Mayama knitted his brow, but he at last had to let his paranoia lose to his hunger.

At the top of the building, the nourishment finally loosened his tongue, and he began to fill Taniguchi in on the details of what had befallen him over the course of the past few days. As he leaned on the railing, gazing out in the field of lights of the skyscrapers, he scarfed the sandwich, washing it down with the canned beverage. "When I got away from the hospital, there was Asakura walkin' right in front of me," he said with a stuffed mouth. "It was like he was inviting me down into the tunnel so he could make an ambush."

Unbeknownst to Mayama, Taniguchi was donning white gloves behind his back.

"Then, the Sweep was there, too," he swallowed. "It seemed almost like the bastards were at the hospital from the get-go, and watched the whole thing when Meguro got knocked off. It's like..." he said, turning his head tensely, "Like a black curtain coming do--"

The iron knife glistened in Taniguchi's gloved hand. "Looks like you know too much already," the tall man uttered in a low monotone that vexed Mayama with horror.

"Why--" Mayama breathed, just as Taniguchi rushed at him and commanded him to die. They struggled toward and away from the guardrail as Mayama fought to keep the blade from impaling him. Taniguchi tripped him and wrestled him to the ground, pinning his weakened body with the weight of his giant frame, and grimaced as he stabbed hard and repeatedly. Mayama's scream of agony caught in his throat as a twisted gurgle as the blade came down again and again. Before it could come down for its final, fatal descent, he caught it in his bare hand, his limp face contorting as the steel tore through his flesh and the streams of blood poured down his wrist and spattered his chin. Finally, he mustered all his fading strength and kneed Taniguchi hard in the groin.

The knife fell from Taniguchi's hand as he rolled onto his back, and Mayama had him pinned, with the knife raised. "What the fuck's the idea!" he growled.

Taniguchi began to laugh, a strange, demented chuckle that loosened Mayama's hold on the other's body and caused him to back away in consternation. Taniguchi suddenly seized Mayama's hand, taking hold of the knife with it, and plunged it deep into his own gut, strangling in pain as Mayama looked on in muted amazement. "This," Taniguchi grimaced, "Is the idea..."

"Stop it!" Mayama gasped.

Taniguchi held fast to the knife, keeping it buried in his own flesh while the excruciating pain twisted every muscle in his face.

"Stop it!" Mayama screamed, struggling in vain to pull the knife out.

"Stop it, Mayama!" came Nonomura's shout as he appeared on the rooftop.

"Help me," Taniguchi pleaded in a desperate, dying whimper. His hands relaxed, and left Mayama's own wrapped around the knife blade. Mayama sat powerless on him, covered in a vile and incriminating mixture of their blood.

Nonomura whispered Mayama's name in utter disbelief. Mayama could do nothing but tear himself away and run at top speed from what had happened. The aghast Nonomura checked Taniguchi for signs of life, shaking him and calling his name in a voice that rose in volume and desperation. Taniguchi's eyes would not open.

Nonomura rose with shuddering horror, and at last he tilted his head back, and screamed.

Aya stepped into the darkness of Keizoku's basement office, and looked around the still and silent shadows for traces of Shibata. She walked around the desk, and looked down to find the blood that collected thickly in the low part of the floor underneath the furniture. Just beyond Kondoh's chair Shibata lay, unconscious, in a large red puddle leaking from underneath her sodden clothing.

In a panic, Aya quickly felt for a pulse in Shibata's neck, and hastened to grab the phone and hammer out the digits, the other party picking up after the first short ring. "We need an ambulance!" Aya cried. She then looked back down, and found, just beyond Shibata's open, limp hand, the three katakana spelling out the syllables of Mayama's name fingerpainted in blood on the linoleum.

"Hello? What's your location?" the voice on the telephone repeated.

"Uh... Police Headquarters..." Aya breathed.

Somewhere in the city, Mayama was spotted by two hapless women, as he darted through the night, defiled with the grime of murder, a horror to behold.

The paramedics rushed Shibata's body to the hospital, where the nurses joined them in wheeling her on the cot, a respirator on her face and an IV tailing under the sheet, speedily into the intensive care unit, while Aya waited helplessly in the lobby.

"What the hell are ya doing?" Hayashida cried madly at the bowed heads of Nonomura and Kondoh, as they all stood over those smeared katakana on their pallet of linoleum beside the lake of Shibata's blood. "You just had to take it upon yourselves to have a chat with your goddamn psychotic Mayama, and just look at what happened!" Hayashida screamed at them, gesticulating furiously, while Saotome stood laconic and steadfast to the side of the desk cluster.

"It was inexcusable," Nonomura apologized miserably.

"We've just had contact from the discerning investigation," announced Nagao as he entered the office, "And they've confirmed that the weapon used to stab Shibata and the one used to stab Taniguchi were in fact the same object."

Satome's ominous eyes widened. "Just as I thought, it is Mayama," he voiced.

"Yep, no doubt about it!" Hayashida clipped.

Saotome picked up Nonomura's jar of party mix from his desk and carried it sideways between his two palms as he sauntered with restrained venom toward the assistant section chief. "From now on, you in Second Chapter will be accompanied by armed escorts," he pronounced. "Matters regarding these incidents must never be revealed to the media, or even another soul within the police department."

"Yessir," Nonomura hiccuped.

"Yessir," echoed Kondoh.

Saotome spoke with carefully chosen words, and a look of infinite foreboding on his face. "From here, Mayama's punishment is decided," he declared breathlessly, his eyes darting unsteadily about. "I don't suppose you have any objections."

"No, sir!"

Saotome pressed the thick jar against Nonomura's chest. "Soon," he promised, his eyes closing as though consumed by nausea as he walked away, "Soon, your punishment will be decided as well."

"Doctor, blood pressure at 41," said the nurse who stood at the heart monitor. Under the bright, multi-faceted overhead light of the surgery, the masked surgeon and his assistant hovered with their instruments over Shibata's covered body, draped slack on the table with a plastic cap on her scalp and a fat tube taped into her mouth.

Standing just outside the door, Aya watched another nurse enter, closing the door before she could get a look inside. Nonomura advanced up the adjacent stairwell, followed by the policeman assigned to him, and grunted his grim greeting as he approached behind Aya. "Ah--what's Shibata's condition?"

Aya looked toward him for an instant. "Chief..." She looked away in trepidation.

At last, Shibata was left to lie at rest behind the curtained glass labeled ICU, amid the bleeping machines that kept her alive and piped fluid into her veins and oxygen into her lungs.

Somewhere, Mayama was stumbling, dazed and weak, over the sidewalk; and somewhere else, the false Asakura moved mechanically toward his appointed destination.

In the darkened morgue, Nonomura exchanged a grim bow with Taniguchi's widow and children. Kondoh, Aya, and the other detectives gathered morosely around the man resting peacefully in eternal slumber. Nonomura planted his hands on the table bedecked with flowers, and his tacit face set hard with anguish.

Eventually, the ICU door opened, and the squat silhouette of a grizzled old man hobbled in bearing a bundle. He crossed through the darkened corridors, and finally into the room where Shibata was sleeping soundly on her back. He carefully placed a heavy hand on her shoulder, then gave her a vigourous shake.

"Hey, woman," he grunted. "Wake the hell up, Shibata, hey!"

Slowly and languidly, Shibata opened her dry eyes to her white surroundings, and let them wander to the side until they focused on the intruder, and with a breathy sound of recognition, she greeted him. "Uhnn, Mr Tsubosaka," she sighed, a foggy smile spreading on her face. "Good morning."

Tsubosaka cradled a pineapple. "What the hell is this 'Good morning,'" he sneered, "It's the middle of the fuckin' night."

"Oh, then, good night," she breathed, and closed her eyes and drifted back to sleep.

Tsubosaka clicked his tongue. "Cut the shit, ya rascal, ya rascal," he repeated, slapping his thick palm repeatedly against her forehead until her own tiny squeaks of pain roused her. "It's a goddamn emergency, ya rascal, ain't ya gonna wake up?"

Shibata uttered an inaudible questioning sigh.

"Get up! This ain't a case ya can fuckin' sleep through, ya rascal!"

"Right, I'm sorry," Shibata apologized, and attempted to raise herself to a sitting position. The pain flooded back to her, and she sank slowly back into the bedding. "Hnh, I've forgotten I got stabbed," she said, and sucked her breath in, closing her eyes.

"Ya moron," Tsubosaka said.

He hacked his pineapple open on top of one of the meters. "Delicious," he declared. "Got myself a dog, thought I'd go to Hawaii, so I went, but," he paused to shove a chunk in his mouth, and carry another slice to Shibata's bed, "Jesus, this shit's boring." He drew the little stool up under him and seated himself at her bedside. "Want some? Ah, maybe it's not that great. Y'okay?" he asked softly. "Can ya eat? Eat it up, eat it up, eat it up," he told her, as he stuck a few chunks into her dehydrated mouth.

"Come on, kid, hurry up and scarf it down. Eat it up, eat it up," he rattled as he rested the remainder on the nearest apparatus and reached into his overcoat, "Damn, what a fuckin' shocker, eh, what the fuck did I come home to, hey, whatta fuckin' mess is goin' on here, eh what?"

"You can say that again," Shibata mumbled through a mouthful of pineapple.

The old man began to spread his collected newspaper clippings on the sheet that covered Shibata. "Jesus christ, looky here, first we got that Meguro Kazuki that did it to Mayama's sister, poisoned at the insane asylum," he said with a wrinkled brow as he opened the first article. "Then, one hour later, hey, an attempt to blow Asakura away, looks like," he continued with another page, slapping at it. And, you get stabbed..."

"That is..."

"After that, Mayama knifed Taniguchi to death, who went to protect him..."

"Eh?" Shibata breathed in surprise. "Th-that--Mr Taniguchi?"

"Hmm, yeah, I guess so."

"He passed away?"

Tsubosaka gave a surly grunt of affirmation as he continued to pore over the clippings.

Shibata rolled her head back on the pillow, her eyes sparkling with disillusionment. "Mr Mayama..."

"Your boss, right, Mr Nonomura, eye-witnessed Mayama on toppa Taniguchi, knifin' him in the stomach."

Shibata lay motionless, and did not even blink.

"Hey, hey, ya okay?"

At length, Shibata gave a weak but affirmative reply.

"There's a shitload of evidence, too. What a damn lineup. First the knife you got stabbed with and the one Taniguchi got stabbed with is the same thing, confiscation already taken care of." He sighed heavily and clicked his tongue. "The cup they gave Meguro to drink out of got Mayama's fingerprints on it. The reportage writer Kee, who got murdered a month before," he said, thumbing through more of the articles, "The arrow from the bow gun used for the murder weapon is an exact match to the kind of equipment Mayama had in his possession. That makes three homicides in a row." He scratched his bald pate as he reflected. "If you died, woulda been four."

He stood and walked to the dark window to the next room. "What's more, the three guys that raped his little sister back then, that looked like suicides," he said, leaning against the sill, "Shit, it starts to look an awful lot like homicide. Looks like he did it, all of it. I can just see it now, how he'll go down in history. Serial Murderer of the Police Force. Jesus!"

"Could it really be so," said Shibata.

"The story in all the evidence says the culprit's Mayama," Tsubosaka said. "There's witnesses, and there's a motive."

"But..."

"What?"

"I think the culprit is someone else."

"Got any evidence?"

"No, sir," she said. "But, I feel it."

"Jesus Christ. You got the fuckin' confidence to tell your half-assed theory to the judge, eh?" he said as he returned to her bedside.

"No."

"Well, whattaya gonna do," he wondered as he plopped back onto the stool.

"What is the best thing to do," she wondered back.

"What the hell, ya don't know that, either?"

"I'm sorry."

"I wonder what the fuckin' hell I came here for, anyway," the old man grumbled, gathered his clippings, and turned to leave the room.

"Please tell me!" Shibata called weakly to his departing back. "What should I do?"

Tsubosaka had stopped, and looked slowly over his shoulder. "More than a hundred, or even a thousand pieces of evidence, believe your own two eyes," he said. "Even if every public prosecutor and judge in Japan is your enemy, you should face 'em all down, and put out the truth if you found it with your own two eyes."

Shibata's eyes filled, and a swollen tear ran over the bridge of her nose.

Tsubosaka continued. "All this time till now, you remember Mayama damn well with that damn straight feeling, with those two eyes of yours. What kinda man he is, your own two eyes oughtta know better'n anything."

He lurched away with the large square knife in one hand and the wad of articles in the other. "Eat some pineapple," he said, and turned the doorknob.

Just as he opened the door, the sudden beeping of Shibata's disconnection from the meter made him turn around and utter a low grunt of surprise at the pale young woman standing in her hospital garb, her scarf draped around her neck, her overcoat in her arms, her tote bag around her shoulder, and an eager smile on her face. "I'll be right back," she said. "I'm going to look at the truth with these eyes."

Tsubosaka looked carefully at her, and gave a nod.

Aya's voice preceded her into the doorway: "Wait just a minute, there," she called out, and parked herself in the doorway with a sassy hand on her hip.

"Wait, nothin'," Tsubosaka drawled back, "This here's an emergency."

"That's pretty harsh, kid," Aya called to Shibata.

"I heard about you broke up with Madarame," Tsubosaka smirked, squinting at her past the point of his knife, "Miss Kido Aya of the Sweep, ain't it."

"Go with me instead," Aya said with her narrow eyes fixed on Shibata, "Not with this old pervert."

In the pitch black solitude of the hospital parking lot, Tsubosaka hurriedly covered the bundle that occupied the back of his van, concealing it entirely with the blanket, and tucking it in before slamming the hatch closed. With a roar of the engine, the van was off toward the back streets.

The flat lines of Shibata's empty heart meter trilled on in the deserted room. Soon the nurse arrived to call in to her, opening the door, but she froze at the sight of the unoccupied monitor and the covers peeled back from the white bed, and cried out at the pool of blood which led from the bed to the floor. Madarame, rushing in after her, widened his eyes and smacked his breath through his clenched teeth with frustrated fury, then stampeded back outside.

Tsubosaka approached the roadblock in due time. "What the hell's goin' on with these motherfuckers," he murmured to himself as he rolled his van to a stop before the two flashing patrol cars that blockaded the passage through the underpass, before which an officer in a neon vest blew hard on his whistle and waved his light stick in direction.

"What is it?" the old man asked through his window. As the first policeman approached, the other stood to the front of the van.

"Excuse me," the first man said, "Would you mind if we have a look under the blanket in the back there?"

"Ahhh, listen, I'm kinda embarassed about that, can I just ask your pardon?" Tsubosaka protested demurely.

"Let's see it."

But before the policeman could make another move, a series of snapping gunshots brought him to the ground. Tsubosaka had little time to react before another shower of bullets rained over and through the side of his van, shattering the windshield and splattering his blood on what remained of the jagged glass. The gunfire continued, a third wave riddling the van's hull with holes as the two policemen lay dead on the pavement.

The Sweep men on the hill then held their fire. At Madarame's signal, they descended, cocking their guns once more as they advanced on the ruined vehicle. They surrounded it with all the silenced barrels still raised, set directly on it as though expecting some hideous apparition to emerge. They flung the hatch open, aimed at the covered mass resembling a body, tore off the blanket, and found it to be nothing but a score of pineapples.

Madarame gazed into the front seats in dismay. Tsubosaka, punctured and bleeding as he sprawled out across the upholstery, raised his blood-striped face and forced his stare past his spattered chest, to chuckle back at his executioner. "You moron," he sneered.

The frustrated rage flew up in Madarame's face. He raised his pistol straight at the old man's face, and put a bullet through his head.

Aya's white car rolled steadily through the city streets. "You okay?" she asked Shibata.

"I'm fine," Shibata said, then paused for a long time. "Actually, I'm more concerned about Mr Tsubosaka. I wonder if he'll be okay?"

"'Course he will," Aya drawled. "What, you think he's gonna get murdered, he's gonna die, or some shit?"

"I... suppose you're right..." Shibata conceded, with deep uncertainty, as Tsubosaka lay still in his van near the underpass, his heavy, broken cranium resting on the passenger's seat.

Mayama tottered through the haze of the deep blue light that heralded the sun's return to the horizon, his skin caked and unctuous, and his eyes hollow and hot as they swept the blurs of light that comprised the city. He lifted a darkened and weightless hand to his face, smearing the blood it oozed across his feverish forehead and down over his nose as he staggered vacantly toward his destination.