Shibata had looked into Maiko's eyes, holding up the cameo, and pleaded in her desperate, broken voice, Weren't they friends? What of the cameo Maiko had given her to raise her spirits? Why did she do it? as the tears rained down her face from under her black lashes. Maiko's own face carried no feeling at all as she pronounced that she didn't even know her own reasons. Her last words were an urgent whisper for help, before she launched herself from the rooftop, with the billowing spread of her overcoat like a butterfly's wings, down to her death against the asphalt several stories below. The scream of Maiko's name tore from Shibata's throat in the darkness as if in a vaccuum. There was a long moment of black, suffocating silence as Shibata clung helplessly to the guardrail, choking, tears dripping toward her friend's mangled body lying in the ghastly pool that slowly widened from her shattered skull. "Maiko isn't the one to blame," she told herself, when she arrived in the street. "There's someone else..."

Now Mayama sauntered through the blue darkness punctured by the pale streetlamps in another place, slowly and defiantly, to stare thickly across the walkway and up the concrete staircase into Asakura's glistening eyeglasses. "Give Maiko back," Asakura shouted. "Give Maiko back!" He charged down the stairs and violently seized Mayama's lapels, snarling, "You did it again, you fucking police let her die!" as he shook the detective, demanding a reply. "How many of mine do you have to kill before you're satisfied!"

Mayama barely resisted, letting the ghostly palour of his complacent face shine in the lamplight. At last, he glared back at Asakura with a maniacal smile the latter was not expecting, seized him in turn, wrestled him around and forced him against the tiled wall. "How 'bout we off your ass, too?" he sneered, grinning like a beast. The air shook as he took Asakura's glasses in his teeth and gnawed viciously on the wire rim.

There was a picture of Shibata and Maiko as teenagers, smiling together, their braids draped over the collars of their sailor suits. One of them together in their college years, Maiko playfully waving a tuft of Shibata's hair. The ones of Maiko and Asakura happily together. Shibata knelt before Maiko's bed in the clean, quiet room, gazing fondly, with hands clasped on the bedspread, at the bulletin board that held all those photographs, and her sentimental expression faded slowly into pain.

The furniture, the light, even the air itself held Maiko's memories. Shibata moved away from the bed, supporting herself with her hands on the wooden floor, and unzipped her tote bag to remove Maiko's old laptop computer. She tossed the cords onto the glass surface of the coffee table, opening the computer and cell phone, and and pressed the switch. An glimpse of the internet flashed only for a split second before the screen was dominated by the hard, bold, black characters that blinked into place, at which Shibata stared with trepidation:

Shibata's keystrokes were ineffectual at unfreezing whatever horror was in possession of the computer. The single character for death suddenly sprung into place, proliferating wildly until it at once filled the screen. Shibata could do nothing to dislodge or change the peculiar forest of clones of that single character, as it stared back at her until she slammed the computer closed.

Nonomura chuckled as he shoved another peanut into place with his fingertip, resting his chin on his other palm. He looked with contentment at the simple heart shape he had constructed out of party mix arranged on his chessboard. He raised his face, however, at the words of Taniguchi, who was occupied the telephone in the manner that was customary to him. "Eh--the culprit's arrested!? The embankment? Who?" Kondoh held a pencil under his nose with his upper lip, a heavy tome open below him, sharing his computer screen with Mayama.

"The Yugizuri murder?" Taniguchi continued, holding a sheet of printed matter in front of himself. "He confessed to all the other offenses during an arrest on molestation charges? Are you serious!?" A pause of silence, and then he crumpled his face into a grimace of malcontent as he congratulated the other party, and hung up.

The gruff-looking female officer called out her entry, sauntering in with a flimsy and disheveled paper in her hands. "Assistant Section Chief Nonomura, your lost article has arrived," she stated, and spread open the rumpled marriage registration form that Saotome had discarded in the wastebin several days before. A short muffled grunt escaped from Nonomura's throat as his hand fell away from his chin.

"Your marriage registration!?" Kondoh gulped with surprise as he rose involuntarily from his seat, with Mayama and Kondoh sharing an identical look of shock. Nonomura's spasmodic hands demolished his party-mix heart as he leapt from his desk in a panic; but Mayama beat him to the seizure of the paper, and prevented him from reclaiming it. "Chief! Did you get married a second time, hey?" Nonomura grabbed hastily for it, but Mayama continued to the name: "Daigo Miyabi--"

"Gimme that!" Nonomura demanded, groping in vain.

"Year 56 of the Showa!?" Mayama cried in the shock that loosened his grip for just a second, just long enough for Nonomura to recapture the document and begin immediately folding it.

"Seventeen years old," Kondoh computed.

"Seventeen!?" Taniguchi gasped.

The police woman returned, holding her bandaged and bloody wrist up as she called out her entry once more, getting only as far as the first syllables of Nonomura's name before Mayama, pointing at her arm, sputtered, "What happened to your wrist?" The woman shot her hand to her mouth with a sudden realisation of pain, and cried out her declaration in a frenzy: "Assistant Section Chief Nonomura, your honourable wife has arrived, please come in!"

"What the hell did you do?" Mayama asked, as the police woman cried into her palm, and the shadow of the girl stepping into the corridor lengthened on the wall.

"Miyabi!" Nonomura smiled, watching the girl's entering figure. The other men burst out laughing, which Nonomura's insulted frown did nothing to change.

Downtown, adjacent to the small public garden and its fountain, Shibata sat and stared blankly ahead of her, unmoved by the foot traffic over the cobblestone ground, each of the many figures meandering purposefully in his or her own path around the others. Aya nudged her from behind with with geniality. "Hey, hey! Whatta you makin' that face for? There was a mistake with that chick who ran away from home at the beginning of spring, she's in protective custody now."

Shibata's face did not change. Aya watched her watching the flurry of self-propelled bodies, the flashing of the signs at the crosswalks, and the cars that whizzed by, the light breeze waving a few strands of hair over her vacant, languid eyes.

"We can see the whole damn flock of sheep," Aya remarked, observing the pedestrians in their self-contained ways. "The good old sheep. There's just one red sheep among them. There's one deep red one who bit your friend to death and took a bath in her blood. Look," she said, getting up and standing beside Shibata, "Why don't we just go on a hunt for that red sheep?"

At first Shibata's eyes were the only thing to follow Aya, then she wordlessly picked herself up from the bench and followed.

By the time they reached the tennis court, it was Aya who was following Shibata. Spectators peered through the wire fence, those in the court practiced their serves, and Shibata plowed forward deliberately and with some intensity while Aya clung to herself and tried to dodge the barrage of tennis balls, to which Shibata was apparently immune. "Hey, ch-ch-ch, damn, thisis dangerous," Aya carried on, holding her arm out to shield herself. "Goddamn it. C'mon, Shibata, wait up!" she cried, following past the nets, pelted with more balls. "Ow! Owow! Damn! Wait up, Shibata, ow! Man, why am I the only one gettin' hit?"

Shibata had scanned the courts in a desultory manner and set her path straight toward one young woman, a coworker of Maiko's, and wrapped her hands around the wrists that held the tennis racket. "Excuse me. May we have a word with you?" The young woman was puzzled, but agreeable.

Soon she was in the shower, with Shibata standing just on the other side of the curtain from under which the drenched steam rose around soft bare ankles from the tile floor. Aya was leaned in the doorway, watching Shibata call to the young woman over the curtain. "Er, Maiko informed me that at a time she was troubled, she wrote in an online forum that she wanted to die," she said as the flow of water came to an end with a squeak of the faucet. "Do you have any idea what it was that might have been troubling her?"

The woman pulled the towel in from where it was draped on the shower wall. "What I heard was that it was Miss Shibata's fault," she said.

"Eh?" Shibata yanked open the shower curtain, but quickly caught herself and closed it.

"You say Shibata's fault," Aya called, "What makes you say that?"

The young woman shoved the curtain aside and emerged soaked, a towel wrapped around her, rubbing a hand towel at her saturated hair. "What Maiko said," said she, "Was that Miss Shibata snuck around on a date with Mr Asakura."

The two detectives followed her to the sink and mirror. "Date?" Aya breathed incredulously.

The woman planted herself on the seat before the mirror, stroking her hair, letting the other two hover quizzically around her. "I guess your best friend stealing your boyfriend is something pretty serious to be worried about."

"That's terrible," Shibata whimpered.

"That's a bad, bad idea, dude, goin' out to eat with your best friend's boyfriend just pisses people off, dude," Aya commented when she and Shibata were outside, making their way away from the cedar and pine buildings of the tennis club which sat low beneath the cool shadows of the tall, sturdy trees.

"But," Shibata protested, "It was really only a meal. We didn't even have any side dishes..."

"But if you just saw him, that shit counts as a date," Aya told her as they passed over a short set of steps.

"But, we just happened to bump into each other on the street..."

"Well, why in the hell would he invite a chick like this?" Aya ruminated in her slow Kansai drawl, walking backwards to stare at Shibata. "Ulterior motive? No way..." she continued, turning around. "Well, I dunno, maybe if the man's horny enough he might go as far as using the konnyaku," she mused, naming a sea vegetable with a fairly jelly-like texture.

"How does one use konnyaku?" Shibata asked.

"You know, down there," Aya said.

"Down there?"

"Mr Asakura started gettin' all distant," Aya continued, holding a deliberate hand in front of her as they passed the shrubbery and trees. "So it ain't that hard to figure out like maybe he wanted it to look to Maiko like he was interested in you."

"That's terrible," Shibata complained.

Aya turned back toward her and let her pass, peeking into the back of Shibata's head to find and pluck out some particular remnant of something or other from her unclean mass of hair; Aya held the particle in fingertips graced by long, polished fingernails, and made a sour face. "But shit, if I lost to this kinda wench, I'd wanna kill myself, too."

"Huh?" Shibata asked, turning around.

Eventually the evening was closing around the Metropolitan Police Headquarters. The windows were large, solid white squares from which light would not penetrate into the conference room. Deep in the shadows, Saotome rose from his desk to face Madarame, and smacked the young man quick and hard across the face.

"It's not your place to make that decision," the administrator pronounced, his dour face set hard. "You and I are different. Don't ever misunderstand that."

Madarame, standing at attention, uttered a low but firm grunt of assent.

"We have evidence that your esteemed Mr Mayama is taking another aim at Asakura," Saotome continued earnestly. "Mayama is a dangerous man. Your offical operation order will be stated before long. The situation may be such that you will have no choice but to fire on him."

Madarame's lips seemed to tremble, but he gave no objection.

401. Asakura's apartment. Aya hit the buzzer, then leaned back while Shibata pressed her peculiar, mole-like face forward in an attempt to squint through the peephole. Aya herself leaned forward for a moment, as if straining to hear footsteps through the door, then she straightened up again and hit the buzzer once more. At length, the door opened in the shadows, and Asakura leaned out and met Aya's eyes; they exchanged a quick nod, and he turned his eyes to Shibata, exchanged a bow with her.

From across the way, Mayama watched them in the circular field of vision of his telescope. He did not move his eye from the lens, but reached behind his chair to clasp the bow gun in an outstretched arm beside the glow of the aquarium. He knitted his brow as he watched his two colleagues slip off their shoes in the genkan and follow the enemy into his abode.

They went to the rooftop, where the lights bathed Shibata's pale face in a phantasmal glow against the shadows as she spoke. "Er, we've just heard from Miss Minami from your office that, it seems that, Maiko was troubled by a suspicion about me and you," she told Asakura. "Where could she have gotten such an idea?"

Asakura's gaze was fixed demurely on the ground in front of him. "Well, I don't really have a clue."

"You and Maiko were a perfect couple, weren't you?" she asked with some exigency.

"Idiot," Aya breathed into Shibata's ear from behind, nudging her, "Just ask if everything was okay between them, or some shit like that."

"What was your relationship like?" Shibata pressed desperately.

"I did love her," Asakura said, meeting her eyes. "With all my heart."

"Um, you were aware that Maiko had gone on a group date with Shibata on the night of the incident?" Aya asked.

"The offline meeting," Asakura said affirmatively.

"Did you know what sort of party that offline meeting was going to be?" Shibata asked him.

"Yeah."

"If I'm not mistaken, it was the Worry Discussion Forum," Shibata continued. "I mean, did you know exactly what it was that was troubling her?"

"Yeah," he said with hesitation. "For me to say, from what I know, she suffered from a pretty severe neurosis."

"Neurosis?" Aya echoed.

"Maiko?" said Shibata, taking a step toward Asakura.

He turned his face away. "At first... she started to get the idea that there was someone watching her," he said, looking out past the fence and toward the street with its slow flow of headlights. "Pretty soon she thought she had to protect me to protect herself," he continued, his voice rising in urgency, "But she couldn't even remember who it was she was running from... So she went to counseling quite frequently." He turned toward Shibata, then looked past her into the night, making his face fully visible in Mayama's telescope. At length, Asakura turned away from the wire fence and back toward his questioner. "Did she," he asked with some difficulty, "Did she really kill those people?"

"I... don't think there's any doubt as to that," Shibata told him with hesitation, sucking her breath through her teeth as she quickly added, "But, I believe she was being made to do it by someone else."

"By someone else?" he repeated.

"Right," she said.

Asakura pressed his eyes closed and rubbed an eyelid beneath the lens of his glasses.

"Uh, are you alright?" Aya asked him.

"I'm sorry," he said, sniffing. "Could I ask you just to leave me by myself today?"

"Of course," said Aya, tugging Shibata along. "Uh, Shibata, let's go." In the darkness, Aya passed Asakura her business card, telling him that if he felt up to it at any time, to notify her by cellular phone. She said her goodbye.

Shibata's eyes grew pink with tears. "Er, may I ask you just one last thing?" she implored.

"Sure," Asakura said.

"The offline party was supposed to be something like a group date, right?"

"Yeah."

"If the woman you loved was ordinarily going to group dates, wouldn't you have wanted to persuade her against it?"

"If she did it all the time, I'd tell her to stop," he said. "But it seemed like if she only did it once in awhile, as a kind of recreation, it'd be alright."

"Didn't you want to tell her not to go?!" Shibata cried, incredulous.

Asakura's face seemed to begin to break.

Aya stepped forward and took Shibata by the hand. "That's enough," she apologized softly. "It's too much." She led her unwilling colleague away.

Mayama watched them leave through the wire fence until they climbed back into the stairwell, and then rotated the telescope slightly to bring Asakura into view, standing alone where the artificial lights made a hard fight against the darkness. Mayama closed his eyes, and uttered a deep sigh.

He opened his eyes again, and moved the telescope lens back into place. There, between the curtains of the apartment window, he saw Asakura enter his sitting room. Asakura took a few leisurely steps toward the window, and at last threw the curtain aside and cast a baleful grin in Mayama's direction.

Mayama backed away from the telescope in horror. He rose to his feet, assaulted by a cascade of visions, Asakura's hellish laughter pounding through the night, merging with the grainy image of the same as a youth on the videotape. Then the curtain was thrown closed. Mayama trembled violently, clutching the bow gun, his body hanging in an unsteady vertical position on the apartment floor.

He saw himself stalk Asakura into the pitch black subway tunnel. He marched straight after his prey with the bow gun in his hand, deeper and deeper into the black stone bowels of the subway with its sparse patches of cold, bleeding light. Asakura's steady gait carried him at last through a block corridor where Mayama stopped to face him. The two men stood opposite one another as if in a mutual challenge, but Asakura's face was like that of a doll. Then the mocking simper spread across his face until his mouth was open in a silent guffaw. Mayama raised the crossbow, but his enemy's body only wavered in the shadows, like a carnival clown daring to be sunk, until he pulled the trigger, and one arrow after the other was plunged into Asakura's soft gut. His grimace blurred in the flat silence, and he fell on his back. Dead. Just like Kee. Arrows pointing straight up from the corpse. The world faded and spun as Mayama convulsed in the stagnant darkness.

He shook on the floor of his apartment, sick with delusion, and awoke with a hard gasp. He slowly pushed himself into a sitting position as his surroundings came back into focus, and his eyes drifted to that aquarium, in which those five goldfish flitted about among the little wavering plants in the blue, bubbling water. He watched them open and close their tiny mouths, taking in the water, probing at the pebbles that lined the bottom of the tank.

He saw the goldfish as they were seven years ago, when his sister Saori first brought them home in that little glass bowl with the red rim. She had it placed on the middle of the table, kneeling and peering at the fish, when Mayama Tôru came through the room carrying his papers. What the hell's that?" he spat at her as he walked past, joking in the rough manner that was characteristic of him. "You gonna eat those? What a feast."

"I scooped these goldfish out at the night fair," Saori said. "I scooped out five, and the old man in the shop was pretty impressed!"

"Retarded," Tôru sung to himself as he went through his papers, kneeling in the corner.

"You're mean!" Saori said. "If you keep saying stuff like that, I'll just go and get married right away. Then you'll be left all alone."

Tôru scooted up to the table. "Ya can't keep 'em in that, or they'll be dead in two or three days," he said, making his sister look up at him with irresolute eyes, then look back down at the fish. "Okay, alright. You gotta get a real fish bowl," he frowned. He forked over a rumpled banknote, but Saori didn't look satisfied. "Fuckin' go get it," he said, shoveling out a few more bills. She beamed with joy. She was soon sitting in front of the new fish bowl she bought, happily captivated by the five fat little animals waving their butterfly tails about the sprig of foliage resting in the glass.

"They're moving around so much better," she said.

"Of course they are," he said, looking hard at her from behind where she knelt on the tatami. "That's because they're alive."

"Yeah, they're alive," she said, turning around to smile widely at her brother. "I'm so happy..."

Mayama Tôru remembered tearing through the thicket of rushes and reeds in a scramble toward the river's edge. The detectives in their black coats meandered at the waterside by the body wrapped in the old blanket, and let him through; he crouched down in the grass beside it, hesitating, and lifted the cloth to see Saori's drowned face, eyes closed in eternal sleep. He stared, raised his hand and placed the backs of his fingers on her cold cheek. "It's suicide," was the detective's heavy, echoing pronounciation.

At home, near enough to the elegant glass bowl resting on the table, still holding the five goldfish swimming against the gentle bubbles of the tiny air filter, Mayama knelt under the chabudai, gazing for a long time at his sister's memorial altar.

The goldfish remained seven years later, in the aquarium at which he now sat gazing in his apartment, under the unkind white light hanging from his ceiling.

Daylight came, and the traffic moved by as usual under a clear blue sky around the Metropolitan Police Headquarters. Saotome walked quietly through the windowed hallway, and received an envelope from a faceless figure as they crossed paths. His cellular phone rang immediately in his breast pocket, and he came to a stop to flip it open and hold it to his cheek, with the envelope in the other hand.

The voice on the other end was that of Taniguchi Tsuyoshi, lowered to an urgent whisper. "This regards the case reportage writer known as Kee. New information came to hand on the matter of the pursuit of the name of Kamataki Ichiroh. The victim of the violent acts shown on the videotape in Kee's possession was Mayama Saori--she in fact was Inspector Mayama's younger sister."

"Got it," Saotome said as he opened the envelope and examined the photographs of the four teenage boys.

Taniguchi sat on the floor on the mezzanine above him, reduced to an anonymous hunchbacked silhouette. "Three of the four boys who assaulted Mayama Saori committed suicide; only one name remains. The photograph shows the boy named Meguro Kazuki who, having taken an overdose of sleeping pills, was unconscious and in critical condition..."

"What of it?"

"The truth is that he's been missing and unaccounted for for the past two years."

"So he obviously regained his senses," Saotome whispered, adding a forceful declaration that an investigation was needed. He closed the telephone and replaced it in his pocket, a sinister light springing up in eyes that travelled round and round and up and down ever so slightly; then he grabbed at whatever he could find in front of him, clawing at small desks and tables, overturning them violently in the hallway. Hayashida and Nagao rounded the corner in response to the clamour, and rushed up to their boss, calling out to him to please calm himself. Saotome knocked each of the other men to the floor as they tried in vain to restrain him.

Shibata lay in the chalk outline of Maiko's body at the foot of the building, face down, her tote bag resting on her back, her cheek pressed to the pavement, caressing the asphalt with her fingertips. Her eyes followed the subtle movements of her hands encircled by the fine white dust, and the rest of her face bore the soft wrinkles of her sadness. She closed her eyes and let her last memory of Maiko once again fill the darkness behind her eyelids. "Shibata, I'm sorry..." she had sobbed, and then with an expressionless face said she didn't know her own reasons, and whispered a final plea for help...

Shibata opened her eyes and let a fat tear float down over the bridge of her nose, from one eye into the other; then another trickled after it, down over the puffiness under her other eye. "Someone was manipulating her like a puppet," she swore, sucking in a breath. "How did they do it?"

Mayama leaned over the Chinese herbalist's counter, resting his elbows on it as he chewed his gum and looked about indifferently at the dim furnishings from antiquity and the pickled ginseng roots floating in glass jars, while the old woman of the shop rambled to him in Mandarin. She remembered, she was saying, the police detective, I won't sell you a damn thing; you're the one who uses my chaka to destroy a body. The best snake's head, and you would kill a high school student, and so on, she said as she shook her finger angrily at him. He pushed a few bills toward her over the counter under a black-gloved hand, and nodded to her as he chewed, giving her a subtly impatient and condescending gesture with his fingers. She grudgingly shoved the money in her jacket and got up to go to the cupboard shelves behind her. Only buy my medicine, she told him in Mandarin as she opened the cabinet. She brought back a small box made of light-coloured wood, assuring him that this was the genuine stuff, the real deal, as she laid it firmly on the counter.

Mayama continued to chew, or perhaps swallowed the gum, as he made his way with his purchase, through the ocean of people that filled the sidewalks. Madarame separated himself from the brick wall beside a shop window, hands thrust into the pockets of his black trenchcoat, and fell into Mayama's pace immediately behind him as he passed. Mayama only got a few paces more before Madarame's two henchmen oozed right out of the crowd in front of him. The three made a triangle around Mayama and led him forcibly into the nearest alley.

He coughed as they dragged him along and nearly flung him against the wall. "What's the package?" Madarame wondered. "Let us see what you've got in the box." One of the henchmen grabbed the bag from Mayama's hand and removed the wooden box, then handed it to Madarame. Popping the lid, he picked up the dubious plastic bag of beige powder.

"Residue of snapping turtle," Mayama explained sardonically. "I understand why you want it so bad."

"Please don't make jokes," Madarame said through his teeth.

"It's effective against insomnia," Mayama continued earnestly. "It's a real pain my insurance doesn't cover it, y'know."

"Confiscate it," Madarame told his henchman, passing the box to him.

"This is fascism," Mayama complained, reaching for it, but the other thug pulled his arms back.

"I'll give you a piece of advice as your subordinate," Madarame said. "You're under suspicion for murder charges. My official operation order is coming out soon."

Mayama laughed.

Madarame grabbed him by the lapels. "I don't wanna have to shoot you down!" he growled, barely fading Mayama's grin. "You should do as you're told," he said quietly at last.

Mayama gave a short shake of the head. "Can't do that," he said. With his collar still in the young man's grip, he said, "There's not having got protection from the law, and then there's disobeying the law."

"We're detectives!" Madarame cried in protest.

"We're only human," was Mayama's response.

Madarame's eyebrow made a slight movement, but he could say nothing else to the man looking back at him, and he took his leave. His henchmen followed. Alone in the alley, Mayama leaned against the brick wall and reached behind his neck. From the inside collar of his overcoat, he plucked out a key, tearing the fabric from it.

Shibata had meanwhile gone to call on the psychologist Maiko had been seeing. Behind the door of her office, the doctor, a scrubbed and studious woman not quite thirty, sifted through the papers in Maiko's file. "Miss Ôsawa Maiko, is it," she said. "She had a bit of a tendency toward a persecution complex."

"Persecution complex?" said Shibata.

"She frequently perceived that someone was destructively manipulating her," the doctor explained as she seated herself opposite the detective.

"That's exactly it," Shibata said, leaning forward emphatically.

"Eh?"

"That someone, who was it?"

"We couldn't know."

"But, Doctor, is it possible to carry out murder through things like hypnotism and suggestion?"

"I don't really think a person can be made to kill under hypnosis."

"I see."

"However, it may be possible to expand a feeling of hatred through an imprint on the sensory consciousness and memory..."

"What do you mean?"

"If it can actually be considered that hatred can be induced, I wonder if we can consider that that murder could have been produced as a result," the psychologist remarked. "A person's emotions and recollections are truly fragile things. If by the power of suggestion things like religion and sexuality, the affection between parent and child and so on and such values can be so drastically altered, it may indeed be possible to manufacture a murderer," she went on thoughtfully. "There may actually be a group of researchers involved in just such an experiment. Well, there would be an extraordinary degree of technical knowledge and skill required, though."

Underneath the rumble of the train on its tracks was the corridor that housed the public lockers. Mayama ambled past the others in his path, a cigarette dangling from his mouth and the key in his gloved fingers. He peered around at the other lockers as he went past them, honing in on his own just beside an anonymous man stuffing his baggage into one of ones above it. Mayama bent down and turned the key, squatting before his own locker, and removed from it a small, heavy object wrapped in a brown paper bag.

Aya had just returned from her bath, dressed in a flimsy nightgown and a wet towel wrapped around her head. She popped open her beer can as she strolled over to where Shibata had been lying on the floor beside the bed, engrossed in the little laptop computer. Aya took a refreshing gulp of her beer and set herself on the bed. "Whatcha doin'?" she teased, nudging Shibata with her foot. "What's up kid, you makin' your own homepage all by yourself?"

"I just hacked Mr Asakura's computer," Shibata replied, scrolling down the page to show her own photograph there.

"Asakura?" Aya exclaimed, nestling down beside Shibata to see the screen up close. "What the hell is Asakura doin' your homepage for?"

"Yeah..." Shibata murmured. She typed quickly and methodically, staring sharply past the fingers that supported her chin. The pictures she found were grainy monochrome stills through which she moved systematically and found at length, by going backwards through each real-time minute recorded of the hazy, chaotic figure in the white shirt, that these were quite unmistakibly the overhead view into the spacious single room that comprised Mayama's apartment.

Shibata arrived at his building and pounded relentlessly on the door, the loud rattling of her open hand against the loose door frame resounding in the hallway as she called out to him. "Mr Mayama! Mr Mayama!" she shouted. He had been tying up large plastic garbage bags in the semi-darkness of the wide room, and he got up without a word and opened the door, peeking out with a pair of puzzled, squint eyes at the intruder. She excused herself and shoved her way past him into the apartment.

"Whassup?" he asked, as she stopped for an instant in the inpenetrable shade of the room. She crept silently under the hanging ceiling lamp, scanning the ceiling, and located the only possible culprit. She grabbed the nearest chair from beside the aquarium, stamped up onto it, stretched her hand up above her, gave a hard twist, and with a breathy grunt tore the smoke alarm from its wires. As she climbed down from the chair, she told him, "This room has been under Mr Asakura's surveillance." She shoved the smoke alarm at him. "Entirely, for three years."

Mayama held the object for a moment, and silently pursed his lips at the irony.

"What's going on between you and Mr Asakura?" she demanded. "Maiko. This somehow involved Maiko and her death, didn't it?"

Mayama sat before his aquarium, gently tapping at the glass as the little fish darted about in the illumination.

Shibata crouched down to face him on eye level. "Please answer me," she said.

He popped open the lid of the cylinder of flakes, never taking his stare from the fish tank.

"Please answer me," Shibata repeated.

Mayama sprinkled some food onto the effervescent surface of the water, and replaced the lid on the can in a leisurely manner. He reached into his pocket, and held the key to his apartment out to Shibata. At length, she accepted the key, still waiting for him to speak. "If I die," he said, swallowing, "I wonder if somebody'll come feed these goldfish," he chuckled gloomily. His eyes remained fixed on the flowing bodies of the animals flitting back and forth in their glass prison. "A long time ago, my sister bought these here fish at a night fair. Goldfish, they got a long lifespan, all right. She died seven years ago, and they're still alive." He grunted thoughtfully, pausing at each sentence. "If she was still alive, she'd be the same age as you now. You really stuck your neck it, y'know," he conceded with a nod. "After so much docile obedience, can you put a hit on somebody? Huh? Being so patient in your residency..."

"No," she said.

"You wanna die, then?" he asked, looking her squarely in the eyes. "Asakura'll probably take an aim at you, too." Mayama's face seemed to have a spasm that betrayed some deep, incurable nausea. "If the Chief gives you the order to carry a gun, when you know you're in danger, don't even hesistate to fire."

"In other words," Shibata murmured falteringly, pleading into his eyes, "You're saying that I should kill a person?"

He grabbed her violently. "You better fuckin' do it! You'll be fuckin' dead!" he yelled. "When the time comes," he whispered, "It ain't a time to think about law and justice."

She stared back at him with those soft, dark eyes, and he relaxed his grip, smoothing the fabric at her neck. "If you're dead," he told her in his deep, gravelly whisper, "It's all over. It's all fuckin' over."

He nodded down, then stood up, snatched the overstuffed plastic garbage bags from the floor, and headed out the door. Shibata sat for a moment before the aquarium. At last she heard to the door slam shut on its sqeaky hinge. She got to her feet, dragging her tote bag behind her, and was soon outside racing down the steps in the fore of the tenement. She dashed clumsily over the brick walkway and into the open chill of the night, coming to a halt in the middle of the yard, where the distant glow of headlights and windows punctuated the fanning blackness. She forced herself to swallow, parched, catching her breath in the unforgiving cold. Mayama was nowhere to be seen.

Deep in the night, Mayama was marching determinedly through the quiet streets. One of Madarame's henchmen was stalking him, making the effort to remain for the most part concealed, but Mayama knew he was being followed. He rounded a corner, his footsteps matched in time with the man in the shadows; he stepped stealithily down the lamplit alley, and the stranger followed. The Sweep man rounded another corner, and Mayama's figure disappeared at the next intersection. The man ran after him, but upon arriving at the corner he could find no trace. Suddenly he was seized from behind and was helpless in Mayama's vicelike grip around his bearded throat, constricting tighter and tighter, reducing his breath to a muffled gargle as his windpipe was crushed. Mayama dropped the body on the sidewalk, checked the area for anyone else, and dashed off into the darkness.

In the blackness of the conference room, the silhouette of Madarame stood gazing out the window, hands hidden behind a back that was turned to Aya, nearly invisible somewhere between the pinpoints of bulbs turned to their lowest setting. "The guy on the Sweep was taken out," Madarame stated softly.

"My God..."

"After that, Mayama made his escape. Destination and intentions uncertain. Do you know anything?"

"No, I don't," Aya said formally.

"I've kept Mayama in the clear for the past two years, and now look what's happening."

"I'm terribly sorry," she whispered.

"Did your perception get dull since you were removed from the first track? Or could it be that," he asked, turning to face her, "You betrayed me?"

Aya uttered a firm vow of allegiance to him, and the two of them shared a hard, black glance in their solitude.

Early in the morning, Nononura's whimper preceded him through the cold, musty doorway of the basement office. "Oh, this is terrible, this is terrible, terrible," he whined, hitting the switch; all the bare flourescent bulbs clinked on as he crossed the floor, flipping his scarf off over his head. "I never thought this day would come..." The telephone began to ring before he had reached his desk.

"Hello? Ohhh, Taniguchi," he whined, "Oh, Mayama's finally done it..."

"Sorry I'm late," Kondoh said as he hurried into the office with his necktie in his hands.

Nonomura waved him in and continued with his grave dialogue with Taniguchi. "You're on your way? Looks like there's no sign of Shibata, right? Unh. Bye." He lowered the receiver and spoke to himself in a low, raspy murmur. "Couldn't escape this until five months before my retirement..."

Kondoh, seated at his desk, had started his computer and was fastening his necktie; his eyes shot to Nonomura as the latter removed his overcoat. Then, with a start Kondoh noticed the looming figure of Shibata in the alcove.

She fixed her gaze on the assistant section chief. "What's happening with Mr Mayama?" she asked firmly. "Please tell me."

"It was a ghastly affair," Nonomura began when he and Shibata were seated opposite one another on the sofas. "It's already seven years gone by; Mayama's seventeen-year-old sister was brutally raped by five boys, and her body was discovered in the Tamagawa the next morning..."

Shibata paused with apprehension. "That was...?"

"Suicide," Nonomura pronounced grimly.

The scene was a horror to recall; the ruthless tearing of cloth as four laughing boys piled on top of the screaming girl, one boy standing back to videotape the affair.

"Were the culprits apprehended? You say seven years--there must have been a discernment made through analyzing the DNA? If there was any semen remaining inside the victim..."

"That," Nonomura said, "May be possible had it been only one perpetrator. In an incident perpetrated by four or five men, a specific semen analysis becomes exceedingly difficult. And when the victim committed suicide in addition to that, it becomes nearly impossible."

"In that case, what of the offenders?"

"Disputable, and unpunished."

"How horrible!"

"It's how the law works," Nonomura said. "However, to Mayama, it just wasn't something he could permit..."

"What do you mean?"

"Your deceased friend," Nonomura said, leaning forward. "I wonder how it was that she ever came to be involved with that man."

"You mean Mr Asakura?"

"He was among the group who raped Mayama's young sister."

"Mr Asakura was?"

"Indeed, Asakura claimed during his interrogation that he had merely watched and not participated in the criminal act..." Nonomura paused, recalling the youthful Asakura's interrogation and convincing claim of his own innocence. "However, Mayama seemed for some reason to be confident that Asakura was the principal offender..." He explained the supposed ambush Mayama had made of Asakura as the latter returned home from school in the twilight; the boy stopped, frozen with fear at the sight of the hooded detective in his path, who slowly raised his pistol, and fired.

"That's impossible, he couldn't have done a thing like fire on a high school student--" Shibata insisted, her palm pressed to her cheek.

"Of course, I don't believe such a thing happened, either," Nonomura contended. "However, the young Asakura pressed charges that he was fired on. Someone appeared to testify to hearing the gunshot..."

"The evidence?"

"None at all," he said. "But neither was there evidence that he was innocent. Mayama's immediate supervisor at that time was Mr Tsubosaka. Old Tsubo came to Mayama's defence and pleaded his case. And in the end, the authorities were made to turn their heads, and no punishment was dealt."

"So that's the history between those two?"

"Eventually, Mayama bore the admonition and was dealt half a year's disciplinary action. After that, he received his disposition to Second Chapter."

"Did Mr Mayama, at that time, make an attempt to kill Mr Asakura?"

"I don't know," Nonomura admitted grimly.

"So the offenders must all still be out there, then?"

"No, the only one still living is Asakura."

"Then what about the other four?" Shibata asked with surprise.

"Three suicides, and one comatose and in critcal condition."

Shibata said nothing for a moment, her eyes linked firmly to Nonomura's; she gathered her overcoat and tote bag. "I'm going to the crime scenes," she said. She left the sofa and headed for the exit amid Nonomura's question, "Right now?"

He stood and watched her silent parting, and Kondoh approached him as he walked back to his desk.

"Is that a good idea?"

"Is what?"

Kondoh followed Nonomura at a close distance to his desk. "Miss Shibata going there."

"Why?"

Kondoh removed his spectacles and glanced tentatively away from his chief. "Maybe, it might be better if the truth of the matter isn't dug up..."

"The truth," Nonomura mused as he sat. "So you don't think it would be a splendid thing."

"But, this could be the start of a terrible scandal in the police..."

Nonomura looked up at Kondoh for an instant with grave eyes. Taniguchi's heavy footsteps beat rapidly against the floor as he staggered into the office, wincing for breath. "The offical operation order for the Sweep has been enstated!"

"What!" Nonomura cried, rising from his seat.

Shibata strolled over the pedestrian bridge made of stone that crossed the narrow Sumida River. She read from the casebook as she walked. "20 March 1991. The drowned corpse of the principal offender, Takagi Daichi, was discovered." She gazed with some alacrity at the gurgling waves, leaning on the sturdy guardrail, and imagined the sight of the young man's bloated, waterlogged carcass bobbing in the wash. "It was thought that he had thrown himself into the Sumida River, but there were no witnesses. It was concluded that his suicide was the result of the acute stress of his high school exams." She crouched at the wave-worn stone platform just outside a little fence at the bottom of the bridge, her knotted scarf anchoring her to the nearest pole, as she calculatingly waved her arm in possible directions of the boy's fatal fall into the swell and retreat of the water a few metres below her.

"Seven years ago," she said to herself when she had returned to the top of the bridge. She turned away from the water and into the radiant sunlight behind her. "There should've been pedestrian traffic..."

Soon she was sitting on the long staircase outside the apartment building that comprised the next infamous location, the casebook open in her lap as she gazed upward behind her. "1 April 1991, Saitoh Takashi leaped from the sixth story of his own apartment." She put herself in his place, emulating the position of each of his extremities, as she stretched over the stone steps in a like manner to the boy whose cracked head she visualised washing the steps in blood.

She went to the balcony six flights up, and tied her scarf to the guard pole, then squeaked with fear as she leaned too close to the edge and got a full view of her distance from the ground. Then she stepped back, composed herself, and dropped the casebook. She lifted her heavy tote bag, and aimed it downward as if to simulate the spiraling descent of Saitoh's body to its destruction on the narrow, steep staircase.

She went to the spacious, vacant school gymansium, slid open the door, and clearly envisioned the dangling body of the next suicide suspended in a noose from the basketball hoop. "7 May 1991, Takeyuki Ichiroh hung himself in the gymnasium." She made a lasso with the rope she had procured, twirled it, and cast it over the hoop; she pulled down lengths of the rope, watching her weighty bag drawn upward until she could see the bottom of it at the nearly exact distance from the floor that the boy's body had been, then she let it go and drop to the floor.

On the sleek floor she sat, lining up those three youths' photographs above the open casebook in front of her. She leaned back, holding the photograph of the one who remained. "There was a possibility that those three were murdered, too," she said to herself. She looked closely at the flat image in her hand. "There's also a motive for their murder..." She saw the dark figure of Mayama with the gun drawn. "The last person remaining is the one unconscious from his attempted suicide, Meguro Kazuki..."

Shibata went to the hospital. On the tree-lined grounds, she walked beside a nurse who had attended to young Meguro in his unconsciousness. "Actually, two years ago, he abruptly disappeared," was the nurse's admission.

"Eh?" Shibata breathed. "But--wasn't he comatose, a vegetable?"

"He wasn't a vegetable," said the nurse. "He didn't have any brain damage. But he didn't wake up, either. He was in a state of unconsciousness with the potential to regain his senses."

"If he regained his consciousness, would he have retained all his memories?"

"Sure, probably."

"You don't happen to know anything pertaining to the destination of Mr Meguro Kazuki's escape?"

"I believe he is hospitalised somewhere, still in quite a mentally unstable..." The nurse came to a halt on the sidewalk and raised her fingers to her cheek. "Ah..."

"Ha, did you remember something?" Shibata asked eagerly.

"Toward the end of last month, a police detective came to look in on Mr Meguro..."

Shibata gestured with excitement. "His name--it was Mr Mayama, right?"

The nurse was quite uncertain.

"Mr Mayama," Shibata insisted, flipping her head back and forth. She waved her arms to the nurse, saying, "Please wait a moment," and bounced over to one of the short benches, where she flopped a note pad down and pressed a felt-tip pen to the open page. The nurse stood quietly while Shibata scribbled away, fashioning a rude charicature demonstrating the loose necktie, the ubiquitous cigarette, and the queer lips. "A man who looked like this, right?" she insisted, holding up the page.

"No, I don't think anything at all like that," the nurse chuckled.

"Not very much like this, but, it was certainly this man, wasn't it?"

"I really--I'm really not sure--"

"Well, please draw him, here," she insisted, ripping out a page and shoving it and the pen at the confused nurse.

The mackeral man was weeping in the hallway when Shibata arrived at Mayama's residence; she carelessly sideswiped him with her tote bag as she scurried through the corridor toward the apartment that was Mayama's. The mackeral man spun around, bawling out a plea for local promotion coupons, as Shibata stuck the key into the doorknob and pushed her way into the dark apartment, slamming the door after her.

She marched to the other side of the great room, and shoved aside the curtains on the one huge window, bathing the spartan furnishings in the fresh daylight: there was the bed, the hanging ceiling light, the bathroom door, the aquarium and a couple of other boxes next to it, Shibata's own tote bag in the middle of the floor, and the few other things draped over in heavy cloth. Shibata yanked the covering off the tall thing near the window, and revealed the telescope and its obvious purpose. She hurried about the apartment in a desultory manner, yanked the quilt and sheet off the bed, filed through the rack of shirts and jackets hanging in the darkest corner, and stared cursorily into the tiny bathroom. At last her gaze settled on the giant drapery that hung against the wall just behind the shirt rack. She stepped slowly toward it. With a single deft spreading of her arms, she cast the curtains open and revealed a hidden alcove in which stood nothing but a single giant portrait of Asakura, with the word kill smacked on in red paint.

At the same time, a young aide opened the door to a private room in the sanitarium and made a quick, chipper call into the room: "Mr Meguro, you have a visitor." The young man sat at the only piece of furniture other than the old bed, a writing desk at the caged window, and let the visitor's light footfalls carry him into the dingy room. At length, he turned his head, and saw silent Mayama standing there.

Nonomura stood before Saotome's desk and phrased his request as cordially and politely as he could. "I've been waiting since last evening..."

"What did you want?"

"Why was the operation order for the Sweep made?" Nonomura asked.

"So that's your question? Have you got some objection?"

"Don't change the subject," Nonomura pronounced with some asperity.

Saotome leaned back in his chair with reserved exasperation. "Assistant Section Chief Nonomura," he sighed. "You're above me in age, but below in rank. You would do well to heed my words."

"Do you remember what happened back when you first became a detective?" the older man asked, taking a few short paces toward the desk.

"No, I don't."

"Then I'll refresh your memory. When you were assigned to a career as a mere detective in the First Investigation Department, it was I who was put in charge of your training. A criminal was made to shoot, and you, the rookie, in your fear, fired on him instead of thinking about official protocol. I let it go by, and let you pursue your path up through the First Chapter."

Saotome replied with silence, his hard eyes fixed on Nonomura.

Nonomura bowed close to him. "You're not under any particular obligation, however..."

Saotome stood, promptly raising himself over Nonomura's bent head, and looked past him. "A man's already dead," he said. "If we in the First Chapter make any mistake in dealing with this situation, it will jeopardize the very confidence that citizens place in the police force. The most important thing in the treatment of this case is to ensure that the full particulars are not made public. It's called protecting the reliance of the police force." He grabbed the paper he had on his desk, and sauntered past the other desks in the otherwise empty room.

Nonomura was still leaned over the desk with his hands placed on its surface. Saotome stopped once before taking his leave. "Would you like to tell me I'm wrong?" he asked rhetorically, then walked away.

Behind the wire mesh of his sanitarium residence, Meguro made his polite explanation to Mayama. "All this time I've been putting on a show. 'Cause I know I'll get killed if I don't."

"By who?"

"Asakura," Meguro said. "That guy, he's a devil. He said it would be fun to rape your little sister." He was standing with his hands at his sides, and gave an apologetic bow to Mayama. "I'm sorry, I knew how horrible a thing it was. But, none of us went against Asakura. If I tried to disobey him, my body can't move! I'll testify. I'll atone for what I did. All the other guys were killed by that guy..."

To Mayama's surprise, the young man suddenly shook his fists rythmically as he began to pace, chanting, "What a time... what a time... what a time..." His animal eyes were glazed over in a most peculiar way. Mayama watched him with perplexity, and finally the young man turned around.

"What about it!" he sneered, cocking his head tauntingly with his hands behind his back. "Mr Asakura's got nothin' to do with it." He jabbed a finger at himself and went on, "Your sister invited us. She said she'd give us ten thousand yen to do whatever we want, and the bitch fuckin' loved it when we gave it to her! She was a fuckin' nympho, that's why! Look at the video! Video!" he squealed with dementia. "She's havin' a great fuckin' time! She loved it!"

Reality was drowned in hypnogogic colour forms in Mayama's eyes; the room faded, and soon he found himself standing with a bent head amid a wreck of overturned and scattered books and papers, a puddle of beverage knocked to the floor, and Meguro's contorted face oozing thick red from the frontal orifice. The aide set forth through the open doorway with a tray in her hand. "Mr Meguro, your meal..." But she cried out in horror, dropped the tray, and staggered against the door at the sight of the young man's lifeless body. Mayama fled out the corridor, past another of the residents blowing bubbles in the hallay.

"What? Mayama, to Meguro Kazuki..." Nononmura's shock as he spoke into the telephone receiver was echoed by the aghast faces of Taniguchi and Kondoh that turned on him. Shibata was seated at Mayama's space at the desk cluster, her ankles crossed on the desktop as she had been assuming his manner; and she slowly turned a quizzical and saturnine face toward the chief.

By time the sun was making its protracted descent toward the horizon in the city sky, Mayama was shifting through the thick downtown crowd to stake out Asakura among them on the sidewalk. Asakura stopped at the crosswalk, waiting for a change in the semaphore, and Mayama waited nonchalantly a few bodies behind him. When the signal came, they all moved together in a unified mass to mingle with the flow of bodies from the other side of the street. Mayama stalked him over each consequent crosswalk, as the light in the sky slowly died. The image on film of young Saori screaming desperately played on in his mind, struggling, her blouse torn open, her body to be found dead in the river. The night deepened. Glowing streetlamps poked out overhead. Asakura moved down the hill toward the station, and Mayama matched his pace, surreptitiously marching at a distance behind him into the tunnel. They made their way around the dark, fence-lined underpass, into the open space, and at last, Asakura faced Mayama with temerity in his shadowed face.

Mayama stared, blinked, and watched the small, mocking smile grow on Asakura's face as he stared back at him. Mayama felt the world shaking as he pushed his gaze to the ground. He forced his eyes upward in a hard sidelong glance, and Asakura's smile, relaxing into a dull sarcastic gape. Mayama smirked as he took his steps closer to that flat face.

Amid the nebulous faces of downtown buildings, the black figures of Madarame and three of his underlings raced over the crosswalks. Shibata headed for the same destination, from another direction, forcing herself in her waddling run over the paved and cobblestone sidewalks. She cried out when she tripped and fell, but picked herself up and continued running. She flung her tote bag over her shoulder and propelled herself onward as fast as she could.