The Devotion of Suspect X - Keigo Higashino [108]
It had been hard to believe that the story Yukawa was telling him could be true. Kusanagi had shaken his head the whole time he was listening to it.
“I think the solution only occurred to Ishigami because he often walked along the river here. He’d had plenty of time to consider the homeless who lived there and their lives. Why were they living at all? Were they just killing time, waiting there for the day when they would eventually die? When they died, would anyone notice? Would anyone care? That’s what I imagine him thinking.”
“So because of that he thought it would be all right to kill one of them?” Kusanagi had asked.
“Certainly not ‘all right.’ But when he was putting his plan together, I’m certain he wouldn’t have forgotten them or their particular circumstances. Remember what I told you. He’s a man capable of doing anything as long as it makes logical sense.”
“And murder is logical?”
“A murdered body was the piece he needed to complete his puzzle.”
The story was, frankly, unbelievable. And hearing Yukawa deliver it, almost as if he was giving a lecture to his students, had made Kusanagi wonder about his friend.
“On the morning after Yasuko Hanaoka killed Shinji Togashi, Ishigami made contact with a homeless man. I’m not sure exactly what transpired between them, but it’s pretty safe to say he offered the man a job. His job description was to first go to the room Shinji Togashi had been renting and hang out there until evening. Ishigami had spent the night before removing all traces of Shinji Togashi’s presence from the room. The only fingerprints and hair that would be left in the room would belong to the homeless man. That night, the man was to go to a place indicated by Ishigami, wearing clothes he had given him.”
“Shinozaki Station?” Kusanagi had asked, but Yukawa had shaken his head.
“No. Probably the stop before that. Mizue.”
“Why Mizue?”
“Ishigami stole a bicycle from Shinozaki station and went to meet the man at Mizue Station. It’s highly likely that Ishigami had left another bicycle there for himself. The two of them rode together to the banks along the Old Edogawa River, where Ishigami killed the man. He smashed his face to hide the fact that he wasn’t Shinji Togashi. Technically, he didn’t have to burn off the man’s fingerprints, because he had already planted them in Togashi’s rented room, which would have led the police to believe that it was Togashi’s body anyway. Yet if he had crushed the man’s face and not removed his fingerprints, leaving the job half done as it were, it would have raised suspicion. His hand was forced by his fear that it might take too long for the police to discover the body’s identity. Which is why he left fingerprints on the bicycle. For the same reason he left the man’s clothes only half burned.”
“But I don’t see the reason why he had to steal a new bicycle for all that.”
“Ishigami stole a new bicycle to hedge his bets.”
“What bets?”
“Ishigami needed to make sure that the police correctly ascertained the time of the homeless man’s murder. He knew the autopsy would reveal a relatively accurate time of death, but he was afraid the body might not get discovered in time, which would make an accurate time of death much harder to determine. If the span of the possible time of death extended to the evening of the day before, in other words, the evening of March 9, that would be very bad for his plan because that was the evening when Togashi actually was killed. Neither Yasuko