Loups-Garous (3 page)

Ayumi said, “Only someone like Tsuzuki would need that much disc space.”

“So it's Tsuzuki's.”

Could be. Mio had put down, no, dropped, her bag right around here.

“What do we do with it?”

“She'll probably come back to get it, right?”

“I doubt she knows it's here though.”

There was a lock on the drive, making it impossible for there not to be any content.

“If it's important, she's going to come looking for it. Just leave it where you found it.”

“But…”

Hazuki looked skyward.

The cold water droplets continued to pound her forehead. A giant frameless monitor screened two layers of dark gray sky mapping out a texture without cadence.

It was raining.

But it certainly didn't smell like water.

CHAPTER
002

SHE WAS STARING
at the edge of her desk because looking at the leathery old face of the supervisor made her sick.

She might not see him but could still hear him.

In other words.

Even from this vantage she could hear the
huh
s and
hah
s of his breath. When she thought of how they shared the air they breathed, how it filtered through his animal-like male body, through his filthy nasal cavity and viscous mouth hanging agape, it was enough to make her nauseated.

I hate conferences
.

It was just a way to communicate the news, but they had to make it a pointless meeting.

It was not constructive. Nothing that came of these meetings had anything to do with the deliberation items. Discussions in person didn't augment or add any information, nor did they refine what was already known. It was just a collection of advertised opinions, everyone's comportment, body odor, grating voice, extraneous data collected for intellectuals. Of no use. At this rate there would be no real discussion or deliberation.

It was maddening.

You know what you really need to effectively research communications is just your damned self
, thought Shizue Fuwa.

This was the only place she'd make eye contact.

There were faces to look at all around her. And…

Shizue hated the walls, the ceiling too. Actually, she hated the entire room.

It was wide and had a high ceiling. It was supposed to evoke a sense of space but instead made her feel trapped somehow. In other words it was
pretending
to be spacious.

Compared to this, the screen on her terminal was infinitely more spacious.

And suddenly all the inorganic designs felt like a total lie. It was an outright lie. Unabashed gussying up, at the end of the day.

The truth lay only in ideas.

Yet people created the facsimile of a truth and pretended it was the real thing all the time. They told themselves that bumps were straight lines. If they were so able to convince themselves of the lie, why bother saying it was straight?

Room 3, Section A, Area Community Center.

She didn't know how many centers there were across the country, but each region had a community center and each community center was built according to a uniform standard. The materials, the design, everything.

A public platform had no need for embellishments—or so the thinking went. Austere, hygienic—that was the ethos of the design. But putting up the facade of austerity was costlier than putting up a cheap design. They talked about hygiene but weren't really doing anything to disinfect the air—the spores were still there. What was more, you could see the dust. It was so bad you couldn't really go anywhere without moistened wipes or a cloth.

Shizue wasn't saying there should be embellishments and decorations everywhere. She just wondered why no one else saw how trying that hard to be austere just made it all the more obnoxious. It wasn't like you could walk into a space that really looked like a monitor.

It was because they made rooms like this that organic humans did dirty deeds together.

I hate it
. They'd just had their
monthly
meeting…last week.

Today's was a unique summons.

The Ministry of Culture, which brought together the National Welfare and Development System and the Committee on Adolescent Welfare and Development—comprised of center personnel from each locality— was meeting under the auspices of an emergency session of the 122nd Area Branch.

Shizue had been brought in from central.

They called her a counselor, but it wasn't like she was an accredited therapist. She had a license but mostly advised minors in their plans for the future and assured they were in good mental health.

She had no idea what it meant to deal with a serial killer, but they were saying at least one of the victims attended the 122nd.

The conference seats were filled with police associates and local cops, as well as local governance that didn't usually show up to these things. It wasn't any ordinary conference.

This was obviously a big deal.

Being in the same room as these people for any amount of time de-pressed Shizue. On top of which, the facilitator of the emergency meeting —the very man she was judging—was the dumbest one of them all.

Shizue's melancholy was pitched at an all-time high. His whole introduction was pointless and over-long.

“There's been a rash of bizarre crimes,” he waxed impassioned.

What's
bizarre
mean anyway?

It was an obsolete term.

Bizarre
. Derived from words signifying anger, wrath, and fascination with both.

Bizarre, eh?

Bizarre
was a word that was popular a hundred years ago in detective novels, its time long since passed into history.

Making such distinctions between normal and abnormal was in and of itself passé.

Shizue thought the real crime was this attempt to apply the distinction to an unquantifiable territory and to the psychology of its inhabitants, its society.

Unusual
simply meant outside of the norm.

It could also mean reality was less than ideal. Be it in excess or in its lack, significant idiosyncrasies were impossible.

In other words, before one could begin to use a word like
bizarre
one would have to define
normal
, and that required envisioning an ideal. This conference was not doing any such thing.

There was no such thing as a normal psychology or a normal society.

Things changed. Things were complex and had aberrations. Things couldn't be easily territorialized. Besides it being impossible to draw lines, how was one ever to measure deviations, if they'd deviated successfully?

Ideals required ignoring the defects and deficiencies of a reality and replacing them with theoretically and carefully composed goals of superiority. Ideals were just ideologies. In which case, something was wrong with you if you tried to fix an ideal in this day and age.

Also…

It was stupid to be calling this a
rash
of incidents.

Who knew why they deemed this a bizarre crime. It wasn't like “bizarre crimes” had never taken place before.

Even if in each era there were some vague trend of events noticed or unnoticed, the events were probably the result of several other events that occurred over the past several hundred years. Shizue was convinced that even if one tried to give numerical value to the events that led to the aberration and averaged a rate, there would be instances of too many or too few to come to a conclusion.

People had been the victims of mass murder from a long time ago, every single day. Of course you wanted to stop it, or if not stop, control… This savage country used to slit the throats of murderers. It was also a country that under the guise of war rendered tens of thousands of lives useless. The only difference now was that children were being uniquely targeted, the method of killing was atrocious, and they couldn't figure out how it happened. It was certainly disturbing but there was no right or wrong with a killer. In any murder case, a murderer was a murderer. Which stood to reason that there was no reason to get all up in arms now. You want normal?

This is normal.

This concept of the abnormal was no longer valid.

And if you took the things that were abnormal or bizarre, you would eventually see they had no meaning.

“The situation is imminent. We need a more concrete plan.”

Shizue was through staring at the corner of her desk, so she looked to the right and saw the face of a fellow member of the welfare department. He looked obsequiously at the terminal, nodding stupidly along to everything the supervisor said.

Did he feel anything? Or was it coded behavior, involuntary gesturing, meant for precisely this kind of situation.

How insensitive.

Really…

He must not have felt anything. What did you expect from such insensitivity toward language?

These people—a generation from the end of a millennium—were all obtuse when it came to language.

You had to define your terms before starting any argument. Words were ambiguous; limiting the breadth of your words assured no confusion in argument. Terrible things happened when you didn't respect this very basic premise, even when it came to something as simple as collecting data. It was impossible not to be prudent if you couldn't see the face of the person you were talking to.

It was hard dealing with people coming into a still-developing culture. They lacked skill and numbers, and because they had such low comprehension levels they were too eager to believe everything and too easily convinced to take sides. That was why they had to be personally confronted with information in order to get the information. Whatever it took…

Whatever…

Shizue's larger generation, born in the twenty-first century, was raised to be personally offended by words whose use lacked consideration.
Whatever
. That was a pretty thickheaded thing to say. It riled her up despite herself.

Still.

Shizue held her breath. Then slowly let it out to calm the ire in her belly.

The people who raised the insensitive generation that bruised Shizue now were probably even more insensitive. She tried to re-examine the bureaucrat's face with a more historical appreciation of his stupidity.

It made her feel better.

He kept blathering.

“—the body was discovered in this locality, and what's more it's a resident of the area, but besides the fact that the victim is a minor, and the possibility of this being one in a string of serial killings notwithstanding, we can't treat this case as anything less than alarming.”

That went without saying
.

Shizue looked at the clock on her monitor.

They'd wasted 1,050 seconds just confirming the obvious.

In other words
.

The murder discovered this morning wasn't deemed part of the greater killing spree because this latest victim was male. The others had all been female.

Based on this information it was decided the prefectural police would take over the investigation. The special investigations unit leader had the chief of Area 122 reporting to him, but otherwise the area chief reported to the prefectural police.

That was all. They could have gotten all this information in writing and saved themselves a lot of time.

Still.

The problem was what had happened before this.

It just so happened this murder had taken place outside of their jurisdiction. What did they think they'd accomplish now? It was beyond conference meetings to determine protocols for emergency notifications.

Plus, all these incidents had taken place in adjacent neighborhoods.

It wasn't as if there were some physical shield protecting the boundaries between those neighborhoods. Any distinction between inhabited areas was purely theoretical, nothing real. The ground kept going. The fire across the street could have started in your next-door neighbor's house. Of course it was going to spread. There was nothing you could do if people weren't worried about the fire in area 408 just because it wasn't
their
quarter.
They weren't worth saving
, thought Shizue.

“As people who work with adolescents…”

It had always been a dire circumstance.

“As far as we're concerned…”

The area chief of police, who sat next to the center's supervisor, spoke with a long face. Despite his severe face, the chief hardly moved his lips when speaking, making his speech come across as ambiguous at best and difficult to hear.

“So…we're in the throes of smoking out our suspect, but as you can see in the documents we have provided for you, the murder took place outside the residential quarter, and we believe that it took place late at night once again, on top of which we think getting any verbal statements from witnesses of this random killing will be difficult.”

What about it, then?

What did he think was going to happen by presenting this to a group of youth counselors?

“At the moment…”

Shizue had a horrible feeling about this.

“As of now, as area patrols, we are compiling a list of deviants who live in this residential quarter.”

“Wait a second.”

She'd gone and opened her mouth. She knew it was going to end badly but couldn't stop herself.

“How are you determining that this is a deviant? I'd like a clear definition of what makes this person deviant. Otherwise it's just discrimination.”

Perhaps because she'd just thrown the conversation off course, the area chief went silent, furrowed his brow, and said “discrimination” under his breath.

“Of course it's not discrimination. A deviant is a deviant. It's someone who can't be normal.”

“I am just asking as a matter of setting a standard. Are the police using a medical standard or else a sociological standard when using this term?”

It was useless.

“What for?”