She probably didn't hear that. No, she definitely didn't hear that. Ayumi didn't respond.
Butâ¦
She hated this. No doubt about it she hated this. Ayumi hated facing people like this, being seen. Talking like this was a total nuisance.
Hazuki regretted ever coming here. Palpitations vibrated in her throat.
“What can you see from here?” Mio asked in a loud voice. She grabbed the handrail and leaned over it, looking out in the direction Ayumi had been facing. She listlessly stretched her neck.
“The sky.”
“The
sky
?” Mio spun around and leaned her hip against the rail. “I don't see anything.”
“That's because there's nothing there.”
“Then you're not looking at anything.”
“I'm looking at nothing, then.”
“Philosophical, aren't we?”
Hmph
, Mio let out idiotically and brought out her binoculars, then turned back around.
“That'sâ¦the elevated freight road. What they used to call the highway.”
“It's the North-South Line,” Ayumi said nonchalantly.
“It's bright,” Mio said, and she lowered her binoculars. “It's the lamps on the side of the road. These make everything look a lot brighter.”
“You can't see without those things?”
“Human eyes aren't that good. If you can see it, that means
you're
the unusual one, Kono.”
Mio shrugged, bored, and approached Ayumi, holding the piercing between her fingertips and bringing it up near Ayumi's cheek.
She wasn't sure what it was reflectingâHazuki thought maybe the moonlightâbut for a moment, the pink stone glittered.
“This.”
Ayumi moved only the pupils of her large eyes over to where the object reflected light.
“What about this?” she said.
“This was left at my house.”
“And?”
“Isn't it yours?”
Mio leaned in toward Ayumi.
“It isn't?”
Ayumi suddenly dropped her shoulders as if they'd lost all strength and crossed her arms. She compared facial expressions on Hazuki and Mio.
“You came all the way here for that?”
“Was that wrong?”
“It's weird.”
“It's fun,” Mio said as she walked around Ayumi.
“Fun?”
“Yeah. Isn't it, Makino?”
Funâ¦
What does fun feel like?
Hazuki wondered.
But before she could answer her question, Ayumi plucked the piercing from Mio.
“This thing.” Ayumi stared into it.
“I wouldn't be caught dead wearing that,” Mio said.
“Then we'll just have to put it on you after you've died,” Ayumi said.
Mio narrowed her eyes.
“I'll let you because you're special. But if it's not yours or Makino's, whose is it?”
“This is Yabe's.”
“Yabe?”
Yuko Yabeâ¦soaked by the rain, pale skin. Pink pupils.
It matches her pink contacts
, Hazuki thought.
“You mean
that
Yabe?”
“You know any other Yuko Yabes?”
“Noâ¦but why would Yabe's piercing be in
my
house? I don't even know what she looks like. I've never connected with her online and her house is nowhere near mine.”
Her house was far from hers?
Nowhere near?
If Mio said soâ¦
But that dayâ¦Yuko Yabe had been in Section C, where Mio lived. Moreover, that girl with the drenched pink hair was the one who told Ayumi and Hazuki exactly which building Mio lived in. What was that all about? Was that some kind of mistake?
Could have been a mistake
, Hazuki thought.
Just because they'd seen and heard her didn't make it a reality.
“It's my fault,” Ayumi said unexpectedly.
“Your fault?”
“I had a physical exchange with Yuko Yabe a couple nights ago.”
“
Real contact?
You met?”
“Liar,” Hazuki blurted out.
“Liar?” Ayumi made a puzzled look.
Ayumi didn't meet with people.
Ayumi hated being looked at directly.
Ayumi would never directly exchange words with someone.
Ayumi had never even made eye contact with Hazuki.
But.
Yesterday.
Yuko Yabe and Ayumiâ¦
They did something together. Some kind of shared information Hazuki wasn't in on. That was what this was.
If that were the case.
Maybeâ¦
Hazuki looked back, and Ayumi, still facing the other direction, said,
“We had an encounter.”
“An encounter.”
“Yeah. I'm sure her piercing must have fallen in my bag or something. And I took that bag to our communication session, then on the way home I found myself breaking into your house. It must have fallen then. That's the most logical explanation. I was bumping into a lot of that crazy wiring in your room.”
Ayumi adjusted her seat awayâa wooden chairâand sat back down on the edge of it.
Mio rounded in front of her again and leaned in.
“When you say you met, you mean you deliberately interacted with her?”
“Yeah.”
“Why would her piercing get stuck on your bag from merely meeting? You saying her ear brushed against your bag when you met? Is she like some kind of pet?”
“Yes, already. God you're annoying.” Ayumi moved away again. “Yabe was clinging to me.”
“Clinging?”
“Yeah, she clung on to me, and like you said, she rubbed her head against my bag. That's probably when the piercing fell off.”
Ayumi looked up slightly.
“Actually, her piercing might have been taken off by then already.”
“Huh?”
Ayumi looked down at herself and turned her face to the right.
“Either way, it's because she'd used my body as her medium that it got to your room.”
“Where?”
“Where did you two meet?” Mio asked. Ayumi simply pointed forward. She was pointing at nothing in the dark.
It was the direction in which Mio had been staring before.
“Huh? At night? What was going on?”
“None of your business. Just walked.”
“I don't mean you. I don't care what weird shit you were up to. I mean Yabe.”
“I don't know,” Ayumi said indifferently. “She was being chased by someone. She was running away.”
“She was being chased?”
Mio's eyes widened. She looked over to Hazuki.
“This isn't some kind of movie. People don't get chased,” Mio said.
Hazuki couldn't answer.
She didn't understand what was going on.
“Yabe was attacked?” Mio asked. “By whom?”
“How the hell should I know?”
“Andâ¦you tried to save her?”
“No, I didn't. I just ran into her. The girl in the Chinese clothes saved her.”
“The girl in the Chinese clothesâ¦You don't mean the girl with the cats!”
Mio stood up.
Ayumi didn't.
Hazukiâ¦looked up at the heavenly orb above her.
AS CHIEF LIEUTENANT
Ishida neurotically wiped his screen, a horizontal crease formed on his cheek.
Ishida was a man of delicate health.
Ishida's blatant repugnance gave a worse impression than the worst indifference to filth she'd encountered. Shizue thought that with a little perspective, anyone would see it that way. The Ishida she witnessed at the conference left her with a good impression, but you could contrast him with the rest to no end. You'd be comparing him to idiots, no less.
It turned outâ¦
He too was no good.
Shizue shot a venomous look at Ishida and then scattered her poisonfilled glare all around the sterile roomâa room almost identical to the center.
Everywhere, everything was constructed homogeneously in the deceptive guise of cleanliness, right angles in the guise of order, when really it was a crooked building. A man who'd put himself in this lie and coated the lie with a faux obsession with cleanliness was a truly despicable man.
Shizue dwelled on the mighty rage she felt and then swallowed it down.
She felt like the lining in her head was being rubbed raw.
In this situation she felt closer to being a masochist than just an aggrieved observer.
All her vilification came right back at her.
Give me a break
.
“Why do we need a survey conference?” Kunugi said from the side.
“We don't need one for now,” Ishida answered.
“Should I run this information to the investigators then?”
“That's not for you to worry about. The work has all been meted out. Whether the information is to be publicized or not is entirely the determination of the bureau chief, and that's me. You're just one investigator.”
“In that case, should I forward just the information on the missing child?”
“That is also not in your jurisdiction,” Ishida said. “I can only tell you the responsibility belongs to someone else. Right now in another room this missing child's guardians are being brought up to speed, and if they file a search request on their charge, then we will send the information to the person who will take necessary measures. You, you should consider your one concern to execute the one job we gave you.”
Yuko Yabe's guardians had returned home last night. It followed that the responsibility to guard her went back from the center to the guardians. In other words the guardians' disposition became the highest priority.
In that case, a counselor's opinions had no more use than secondary corroboration. In Shizue's estimation, neither the police nor the local authorities would move on this.
In the endâ¦
“Was there any point to this?” Shizue asked rhetorically, looking at the display behind Ishida's back. She said it in a way that made it explicit she was being sarcastic. But whether this bureaucrat actually sensed the sarcasm was hardly discernible.
Just in case, he coldly replied that it wasn't pointless and touched his display with a fingertip.
The data on the screen disappeared and was replaced by a huge police logo.
“As a consequence of your accident, we got a great deal of very interesting information for the investigative unit, so I want to thank you for that, but⦔
Ishida fiddled with the display again.
“But I stress that it was a consequence.”
Shizue commenced a pre-emptive strike.
“Are you suggesting that because I didn't turn up very interesting facts regarding a person of great interest in the murder investigation that my assessment as a counselor was flawed? That my actions were a deviation from the work responsibility of a community center counselor?”
“That is not what I am suggesting,” Ishida said without so much as a change in expression. “In fact your assessment and actions were entirely appropriate given the circumstance. As the head counselor for a student with an unexcused absence from the communication session and whose personal monitor was no longer transmitting a signal, of course it is your responsibility to survey the residence at once. There was nothing inappropriate about that. Noâ”
Ishida cut himself short and pointlessly tapped at the tablet screen and said, “If anything your response came too late.”
“Late? That's not possible. I responded as soon as I could.”
Ishida shook his head.
“You were late. You know that better than anyone. You know full well you took a police escort in order to pretend that you were hurrying to the scene.”
Ishida glared at Kunugi.
Kunugi pretended not to notice.
“If a child's guardian is exempt from supervision, the responsibility for care of the child in question becomes the community center's. If the child misses labs without a note, you are supposed to confirm the circumstances at the moment you learn of this absence,” Ishida said.
“You're right. However, this is customarily⦔
Shizue stopped herself short in the midst of her apology. Whether it was customary or not, even if the statute Ishida alluded to was unrealistic, the fact of the matter was that the center's response was exempt from the statutes.
“I'm sure you're busy with all kinds of business matters, but you must have known as soon as your mail didn't send that her terminal was offline. You should have, at the very least, known at that point something was wrong. You were almost an entire day late responding to the situation, so if anyone's going to notice it's you.”
He was right.
She should have noticed.
But the reason she didn't notice sooner was that damned conference.
The pointless conference and their insincere work was what threw off the timing of her correct actions and astute judgment.
“That's all I mean when I say this was a consequence,” Ishida continued. “If you had acted sooner, the connection between Yuji Nakamura and this uhâ¦what was her nameâ¦Yuko Yabe would have been known sooner. No?”
Sure, if they hadn't had that conference, Shizue would have known about Yuko Yabe's aberrance much sooner.
If they hadn't had the conference she could have left right after work for the Yabe residence that night, before 6 pm.
This Nakamura child had supposedly headed to the Yabe home after being released from interrogation after 8 pm. Shizue couldn't know, but she thought she might have been there before him.
Moreoverâ¦
“Also, as far as this case is concerned, the fact that a police officer just happened to be there is interesting. If you had gone on your own you wouldn't have known about the visitor log. That just seems to be too nice of a coincidence.”
Ishida glared at Kunugi again. Kunugi shot back a look of disagreement.
“Coincidence? I moved on my own accord.”
“Kunugi. Neither I as your superior nor the police organization has the authority to restrict your actions on your private time.”