Useless parts.
Deficient parts.
Something struck her.
Fuwa! Hey, Fuwa!
She saw memory hair float in her field of vision.
“What's wrong? Are you okay? I wouldn't blame you for being disturbed by all this⦔
She was not disturbed. Just lost in thought.
“But we've got to keep a straight head on⦔ counselor Takazawa intoned with a grave face. She already knew what he'd want to say next.
You're so hard on the outside, but deep down inside you're still a woman
. There was no doubt in her mind. Shizue shot him a scornful look.
Shizue was well aware that it was unjust conjecture. Even if she were right on the money, it would still be conjecture. She just wanted to loathe this guy.
“This killer is a real weirdo, a real nut job,” the area chief declared. Shizue didn't even feel like explaining how problematic that word was today. Everyone in that room including Shizue, in fact, all of humanity, was weird.
There was no difference between normal and abnormal. All humans lived along a continuum. There might have been extreme cases, but be they vicious killers or church altar boys, there was very little difference in what went on in the minds of humans.
However, what scared her the most was that this was definitely some kind of aberration.
Arrogance was a weakness. It would be difficult to live your everyday life self-conscious of your peculiarities. You needed more than just a half-hearted emotional intelligence quotient. That was why humans were made forgetful. Shizue let herself believe it was typical to be pacing with anxiety about their abnormalities.
That was why humanity created concepts such as personality and character, which were indefinable and thus irreproachable. When people said that they were this kind of personality or had that kind of character, it was only because they didn't actually know themselves. Humans weren't that pure, and the brain was not so simple.
Shizue believed that people who spoke easily about their own personalities or whatever other kind of self-ascription were cowards who couldn't admit to the deception inherent in their beliefs. And those depressive people who couldn't be comforted by even this so-called understanding of their personality would slander failures as “weirdos.”
Yes, criminals are all failures.
And of course, their actions were recriminating.
In a society based on the principles of a legal system, the criminals were the failures. Yet even after acknowledging the existence of such flawed individuals, Shizue believed no one had the qualifications to place blame.
Shizue knew better than anyone that people had feelings. Still.
“The victim's parents are really confused right now,” the area chief said. “I mean, I understand their sadness and anger. Their daughter was savagely killed by a deranged criminal after all. I can even understand being perplexed, but they're asking what role the community center had in this ordeal.” The area chief looked in Shizue's direction.
“This Asumi girl had been missing since two nights ago.”
Th-that's right
, a voice said from the back of the room.
It was Shizue's colleague Yuko Shima.
Asumi and the last victim, Ryu Kawabata, had both been students under her charge.
“It hasn't been announced publicly.”
“The police intervened with the announcement.”
“What does that mean?”
“I mean, they were afraid of prank calls, so the information was never broadcast.”
“And?”
As if speaking as his proxy, the internal affairs officer spoke for the police chief.
“Why were the police informed before this discovery was announced to the center?”
“I did try to notify the center,” Shima said. “As soon as I got the message from Aikawa, I forwarded it to the main terminal at the center, the chief's personal monitor, and even to internal affairs. And then⦔
“Then what?”
“Message delivery failed.”
“Failed? Why?”
“The police.”
“The police stopped it? The police prevented your message from sending, is that it? That's a problem, isn't it?”
Of course it's a problem
.
Shizue did not want to think too deeply about what made this problematic.
“That is, Aikawa had twice spent the night away from her residence without permission.”
“She was a delinquent, was she?” the area chief said. Shima shook her head.
“Aikawa attended an evening course,” Shima said
“You mean the training,” the director acknowledged.
Shizue had no idea what kind of training he was referring to but thought it strange that any training would take place at night.
She examined Shima's composure.
She had no idea what Shima could be thinking.
“That's all we know for now,” Shima mumbled. “I also, um⦔
“You understand? No, wait a second. Why do the police have that information? Only counselors are supposed to be privy to that kind of information. Did you tell them?”
“Butâ¦they have the data files on all the kids, remember?”
The area chief rapped on his desk. “Aah!”
“But it was just yesterday evening that the data collection was completed.”
“At 4:23 pm exactly,” Takazawa responded almost inappropriately, to a question no one had asked.
“Though since the data is organized alphabeticallyâ”
“Asumi Aikawa's student data classification ID number was 00002,”
Shizue said, impatient with this conversation.
Her information had been processed three days ago. Two days ago when Shizue had started her second batch of data processing, Aikawa's information had long been processed.
“You shouldn't be so satisfied with that answer,” the area chief said, annoyed.
“I want to know how the transmission of a message can be stopped in the first place. Isn't that against the laws of privacy protection of personal information?” the director grumbled.
“Why is it that the transmission of a notice of an emergency situation to the counseling center gets tied into a vicious crime? It's information meant to prevent the crime, moreover. This might be the one instance when information works against us. This is bad. Really bad. Frankly, the fact that a message sent to a counselorâno, you can't look at the content of the data while it is being sent, and you can't choose and interrupt the messages, so there must have been a physical hack of the circuits. Why did you keep quiet about this, Shima? You should have seen the police's tyranny as problematic.”
“Uh⦔ Shima stood up. “I immediately restored my system. So I just thought it was a server malfunction. Then, the police contacted me as soon as I restored my circuits, and the police told me that it wasn't decided yet whether it was related to the killings, and the murders were still under investigation, so I shouldn't bring too much attention to this kind of delinquency, and they told me to keep quiet andâ”
“What's the meaning of this?” the area chief asked the administrative representative, who in turn looked at the director.
“Aikawa's parents reported their missing child to the police before you?”
“That's what it sounds like. No wait, I'm wrong⦔ Shima was being painfully elusive. “I was the first one to hear this news. I told them to let me know if anything happened. Then I cut off all vocal communications and immediately drafted a notice addressed to the center and was going to send it. But then it didn't send, and oh, this is what the police said. Once the communication was received, they'd assumed the center had been notified and forbade any further communication, but in the process they froze the network, so they had to take emergency measures and shut down everything. They were very apologetic, very polite⦔
“I don't care if they're polite. You have a record of this interaction?”
“Yes.”
Shima brought out her monitor.
Not that she needed to.
Until an individual went in and deleted the information, all communications were recorded in a mainframe, and even if they were erased, the communications were temporarily stored in regional databanks.
It was also annoying that they had to belabor the questioning.
“However⦔
“This
has
ended up being connected to a murder investigation,” the area chief said. More grumbling.
“There's a possibility we might face examination of this center's accountability in the matter. We'll need the representative counselor and even non-counselors to keep that in mind.”
“You say accountability, but there's nothing we could have done.”
“Well, except in that we had information before the murder, and local residents can't be interrogated. They have unlimited rights.”
“Even that is limited to just data collection.”
“Even if there was information, we don't know that it was obstructed.”
“No, it's because we don't know that there is the possibility it was obstructed.”
Something that didn't
seem
random could by default be considered highly plausible, sure. But Shizue thought that to bring up plausibility in a situation like this was meaningless. Of course one could also approach this situation and say it was imperative to exercise complete diligence with every possibility. Yet, “possibility” meant that the result of consideration would be the exact opposite of an original hypothesis. In the event that a thorough and time-consuming investigation yielded a satisfactory explanation, the problem then became whether the subject taking responsibility for this explanation could then adequately perform inevitable crisis management.
Shizue was fed up.
These people were not wondering whether they were responsible at all. They were neither defiant nor responsive. There was absolutely nothing commendable about them.
This was a meeting to ascertain who would take the blame. Had it been clearer who should take responsibility, there would have been no meeting. There was no victim or crime in a debate like this.
The core of the judgment.
That was probably a big issue for these people.
No one knew what lay ahead.
No matter how detailed the information upon which an opinion was based, no matter how astute the calculation behind a theory, there was absolutely no such thing as an absolute.
The assignation of an accurate interpretation only occurred when the results of the determination were considered good. When they weren't, it wouldn't matter how sophisticated the interpretation, it was considered a blanket failure. The core of the judgment always ran a risk.
“I see⦔
Shizue ruminated on what the girl Hinako had said. That divinations were meant to assuage humans of their sense of risk. The core that took responsibility was God.
“So this is the fault of the police, am I right?” the director said.
“Well. I don't know about âfault' butâ”
“But it is. They're the ones who created this irresponsible gag order.
If I recall correctly, isn't Aikawa known outside the prefecture?”
“She was an athlete. An aspiring pro,” the administrative representative answered
. Okay, that's what he meant by
training
then
, Shizue thought.
It wasn't just that she wasn't responsible for the girl in question.
Shizue didn't have an interest in sports news. In fact, no, she didn't care at all whatsoever.
Asumi Aikawa was already dead to her.
How accomplished this girl was in her life, what kind of legacy she'd left, shouldn't have mattered. At the very least, all that mattered in this situation was the meaning of her death. Weighing the facts of her death with the quality of her accomplishments in life would be a form of contamination in Shizue's opinion.
Shizue was bothered.
Idiots would continue to pass blame around forever. What could have been just an informal notice had now become something worse than that god-awful conference. With a notice, one simply announced a piece of information and it was over. There was no place for a debate. It was no place for half-hearted complaints or for plaintiffs to show their ire.
Shizue was starting to feel lightheaded, so she brought out her wet cloths and wiped down her desk.
The horrible smell of antiseptics stung her nose. That stabilized her a little. The antiseptic smell she loathed was still better than the breath these people pumped into the air.
Fourteen-year-old girl, disemboweled.
There were over a dozen stab wounds. All of them deep. The body was cut in half, her insides quartered. Her neck and all four limbs were nearly completely severed. It was easy to visualize it all. There were far more horrific images on the monitor, and if she'd really wanted to see them, all Shizue'd have to do was file a request.
But Shizue could visualize it.
But it wasn't accompanied by realism. The misery in Shizue's mind had no blood or flesh. She tried to actualize the replica, to make it an original.
What hindered her original was not having a clear idea of Asumi Aikawa's face. The image of the corpse in Shizue's mind had the characteristics of Yuko Yabe. Yet the more she tried to add realism to the image, the farther the image got from her, making it vague at best.
Then she saw her mother's face.
“Who was it that contacted you?” the area chief suddenly asked.
“Was it the police or an area cop? Or⦔
“It was a prefectural policeman by the name of Ishida,” Shima answered.
Ishida!
A sickly face. Logical diction. Disagreeable expressions. The image of Ishida wiped out that of her mother.
“Ishidaâ¦Isn't he the guy who was here the other day?”
“That was the officer in charge of the investigation, and Ishida's one step above that man,” the administrative representative said.