Loups-Garous (37 page)

“Yeah, but…the reason
I'm
saying Nakamura couldn't have done it isn't the same!” Mio wiped her nose and tapped at her keyboard again. “Look.”

This time Ayumi quickly jolted her head away after just a quick glimpse at the image.

“What the hell was that?”

“Look closer.” Mio pulled up the monitor. “Yuji Nakamura was killed too.”

Killed?

There was in fact an image of a male body torn apart on that screen.

“Even I was surprised. This was released just before Hazuki got here. He'd been tossed out of a deserted house here in Section C. A local cop found him, and there's been no autopsy performed yet. Now you ready? Look. Look at this. It says he's been dead
for at least three days
. It says so right there.”

“Three days since they found him? Wait, what?”

“
Three days since he died, you idiot!
” Mio screamed, hysterical for an instant. She took a deep breath.

“Until the final results of the official autopsy are released we don't know for sure, but they're saying that Yuko was probably killed on Monday night. But Nakamura was killed on Saturday or Sunday. Yabe was found first, but Nakamura
died first
.”

“Him too…”

Hazuki, like Ayumi, had to turn away from the monitor.

Mio huffed through her nose.

“Similar methods. Their throats were cut with a dull weapon. Deep wounds in their chest, stomach, and right arms. You can't really tell from this image, but it's the same as the others…especially Kawabata. What does all this mean?”

Something's not right
, Mio kept muttering to herself.

“This screws up everything. I thought this whole time Nakamura was the one who killed Kawabata. They had a falling out. They both attacked Yabe. That much is certain. They were going to kill her. Kono saw that too.”

Ayumi said
yeah
in a small voice.

“Then, Rey Mao appeared, saved Yuko from being killed, got pulled into the fight, and Nakamura ended up killing Kawabata, right? Now everything's uncertain!”

“What do you mean uncertain?” Hazuki asked.

“I can't sort any of this out. It's all just so nonsensical. Maybe Nakamura wasn't the culprit of the other murders either. So I looked into it.”

“What did you look into?”

“The reason they supposedly attacked Yuko. It was hard to tell from just what Yuko was saying. So I looked into it. I got a better idea. They had a motive.”

A motive to kill Yuko
.

To curb the spread of this extrasensory defect Yuko had.

“Kawabata and Nakamura were apparently big followers of that old-fashioned style of moving image.”

“Following what?”

“No, like they were maniacal fans. To the point where they started to believe in those images.”

“Believe—you mean those old pictures?”

“Something or other movies. It's a special kind of moving image.”

Belief in moving images?
It didn't quite come to her.

“You don't know what I'm talking about? They're like those antiques from forty or fifty years ago. What was it again, you know, you take a roll of film and draw directly on it and then transfer it to transparent film, and then roll the images. There's stuff that's not stick figures either. Kawabata collected old machines to tune up and watch this stuff from antique real shops. He would apparently try to convert it to soft files. Nakamura collected paper versions. Paper! Can you imagine how expensive that would have been?”

“So what?”

Well
, Mio placed her fingertips on the tablet this time. “Okay, so one of the directors of these something something films—he's obviously been long dead but let's see…Here it is. And this too. This is a movie by a different person. There are apparently a lot of people who still collect and talk about these two guys' work.”

On the screen were several images of a girl in fascinating clothes.

“This, and then this is a little different…These were made by various directors, but these two happen to have died within a day of each other. I mean they were born a year apart, but what do you call that? The day you die?”

“
A death anniversary
,” Ayumi replied. “It's called a death anniversary, the day they die.”

“Okay, death anniversary. Well, their death anniversary is a holiday for these guys. They call it their AM-versary, but it was started by a group of old people. It's at the end of March. They have events and stuff. Let's see. So people from all over the world, yes, from abroad and everything, were summoned by this group. I mean it's just a message from a crazy fanatic. I don't know what purpose they have in sending messages to dead people, but there's a pretty substantial amount of mail that gets sent.”

What appeared to be a monument appeared on the screen.

“There's apparently a data stocker at this commemorative statue, where every year the messages get transferred. It's a complete waste of time, but that's where these people write to.”

Mio entered some code into the search window and pressed return.

“‘Ryu Kawabata/Everything begins with you/The world you created is majestic/The imbeciles who pass off their replicas of your work as their own originals, they forsake you, but I will not forgive the jerks that refuse to acknowledge your work/These retarded idiots…' How do you say this word? I've only ever read it.”

E-rad-icate
, Ayumi said.

“‘…
shall be eradicated
,' it says. ‘These retarded idiots shall be eradicated.' Doesn't that sound like he's going to kill them? No one talks that way. He's totally nuts.”

“No one says
totally nuts
anymore either.”

“Shut up. Nuts is nuts. But look. This is the next message. ‘Yuji Nakamura/This world is a facade/That which transforms and decays is not the truth/The world you guys have created is absolute and unchanging/ You are the truth/The idiots who try to make their filthy reality appear true must die/I will not forgive such blasphemy…'”

“Blasphemy,” Hazuki repeated.

Yuko said she was accused of being blasphemous.

“You think this is why she was targeted?”

“
Yes
,” Mio answered. “She had an extrasensory defect. In other words she saw even her own face this way.” Mio returned the screen to the image of the deformée character illustrations.

A beautiful young woman from long ago in the monitor, and they didn't know her name or what she was doing in there.

It did strangely resemble Yuko.

“Kawabata and Nakamura thought this chick was their god or something. But to Yabe, this is actually what she thought she looked like.
This is what I look like
, she thought when she drew it. It does look like her drawing, right? The eyes and nose are the same.”

I see, the whole thing is based on a pattern. It is reduced and adapted the same exact way.

Only the color of the pupils was different.

“If you look carefully, you'll see Yuko's father also wrote messages here. Nothing extreme like that other guy, but just how he was really into this stuff as a kid, and how he's still into it. Typical fan mail. Yuko had probably looked at stuff like this since she was really little. Maybe not shown it
per se
, but she had definitely seen it. Someone with her kind of perception disorder might be affected by early exposure.

“They wouldn't forgive her,” Mio said in a loud exhale and snapped off the power on the monitor farthest from her.

“But…aren't there tons of people who do these kinds of illustrations?”

“You saying it should be okay to copy?”

“Copies
are
okay. There are originals, and someone makes a copy. The copy could never be as good as the original. Except in Yuko's case. To her, the world really looked like this. She lived in a world made of deformée images. These fanatics couldn't forgive her. They had to confirm that she really had this defect, and when they did, they promptly eradicated her.”

Eradicated.

“That's their reason? Because she sees the world like it's illustrated?”

Should people be killing each other?

“The first girl who was killed…” Mio continued. “The first victim won the grand prize at the Deformée Character Biennale. The DC Biennale is where everyone exhibits their original DCs. The character that wins the prize is obviously praised as an original, but her work apparently looked a lot like something that appeared briefly in these guys' moving image work. None of the judges noticed. It created a big stir but eventually they dropped it. It was just similar looking, and no one really thought it was a direct copy. But these fans wouldn't forgive it.”

“Blasphemy again?”

“Yeah, you know, ‘the idiots who pass off your original work as their own have to be eradicated.' That's what they did.”

She had a point.

“But that's not all.”

Mio drew up another image on the monitor next to the one she'd just turned off.

“You know this? It's been popular lately. Deformation Idols. I prefer the old monsters and stuff, but…”

Even Hazuki had seen this character before.

It was the star of an explosively popular fiction series from last year.

The series was about a girl from no country in particular, from no era in particular, going on some kind of adventure.

Hazuki remembered downloading a few episodes because there were so many rave reviews.

But she'd never actually watched them all the way through.

The story was mediocre and it unfolded too suddenly; there were too many unexposed elements and subplots for Hazuki to follow. Eventually the show got to be boring for her.

Earlier this year, people had begun broadcasting their own daily lives twenty-four hours a day by connecting onto a special network.

It wasn't as though something were happening all the time—mostly it was just people asleep—but that meant you had a different episode every single day for a year. You'd wonder who on earth would want to watch something like that, but daily life shows were apparently really popular, especially among the middle-aged to older viewers.

“Doesn't this look like her?”

“What do you mean? This older DC character?”

“The one that looks like her and this other illustration. Look alike, right? The face and the hairdo?” Mio asked.

“Ahh”

Now that she mentioned it.

“The creator of course acknowledges being influenced by old DC artists. However there were some extreme fans who wouldn't let it slide. They said this was the original, and what do you call that moving illustration thing again? A…”

“Anime?” Hazuki suggested.

“Yes! Anime. What's
anime
a redaction of, I wonder. What language is it? Anyway, it was an original work having nothing to do with that ancient anime. People agreed it bore a resemblance, but you know, they were a little defensive. There are lots of fan sites for this show. So here's this hotshot on one of the biggest fan sites for the show defending it, and she became famous for actually speaking out about it a lot. Well, she was killed too.”

“Really?”

“That girl from the neighboring section. The second victim. Also, you know those people who dress up like their favorite characters? There was that one girl who was famous for wearing identical clothes to and doing her hair exactly like these DC characters. She was the fourth victim. She was on the daily life channel and garnered her own fans. The crazies probably didn't appreciate that.”

“Didn't appreciate…”

“
Kawabata and Nakamura
didn't appreciate it,” Mio said impatiently, then turned off that monitor. “That was probably blasphemous to them too.”

“You're saying Kawabata and Nakamura are responsible for all these other murders too?” Ayumi said. She looked at the palms of her hands, then brought her nails up to her nose. “Serial murderers, huh?”

“Vicious murders.” Mio stood up from her chair.

“No mistaking it. Right?”

“They were definitely the killers!” Mio yelled. “No doubt about it! But then if they were, then…”

“
Wait a second
.” Ayumi lifted her face. “There are others.”

“Others?”

“Aikawa was killed too. And there were others killed before her.”

“Yabe makes it seven. Those guys had motives to kill four of them.

The remaining three…suppose they all had this extrasensory defect. Aikawa from our district? Aikawa could have. It's hard to find out, right?”

“It's speculation.”

“Still.”

“Still nothing. Besides, at the very least, Nakamura and Kawabata couldn't have killed Yabe. Yabe was also killed by someone else,” Ayumi said.

“Like I said, I don't know what that means!” Mio pounded her desk with force.

“These crimes had to have been committed by them. The other murder victims don't have anything in common with them. Even though…”

“Everyone except Yabe.”

“So?”

“Wait.” Hazuki waved her hand through the air. “Yabe was definitely targeted by Nakamura and definitely attacked by him. That's a fact, but she was killed by someone else. Then isn't it possible that in the other cases too, a different person killed them than the one who taunted them?

Aren't there, like, a lot of these animation fanatics?”

“You saying they have more partners?”

Hmmm
, Mio said and withdrew, dropping her body back in the chair.

“Kawabata and Nakamura failed at their assignment, so they were— what's that word again? Era…”

“Eradicate.”

“They were eradicated.”

“I don't know about that,” Ayumi said with her hands cupping her mouth and nose. “You have a better explanation?” Mio said.