The Devotion of Suspect X - Keigo Higashino [115]
Yet when trouble arrived and they needed help, it was only natural for Ishigami to go to their aid. After all, if they hadn’t been there for him, he would no longer be alive. He was returning the greatest of favors. They certainly had no idea what they had done, but that was okay. Sometimes, all you had to do was exist in order to be someone’s savior.
When he saw Togashi’s body, Ishigami already had a program in his head ready to load. It would be difficult to completely dispose of the body. No matter how carefully he did so, he could never reduce the chances of discovery to a perfect zero. And even if he got lucky and succeeded in concealing what had happened, it would do nothing to ease the pain in Yasuko’s heart. She and her daughter would live in constant fear of discovery. He could not bear to visit such hardship on them.
There was only one way to put Yasuko and her daughter truly at peace. He would have to detach them completely from the case. He would make it seem as though they were connected, and yet there could be no doubt that they had nothing to do with the murder.
That was when he decided to use the Engineer—the homeless man who had so recently begun living at the camp near Shin-Ohashi Bridge. It all worked quite smoothly.
In the early morning of March 10, Ishigami had approached the Engineer. He had found him sitting apart from the other homeless as usual.
“I have a job for you,” Ishigami had told the man. He explained that he wanted him to help as an observer on a riverworks project that would last several days. He had noticed that the Engineer had a background in construction.
The Engineer had been suspicious at first. “Why me?” he had asked.
“Well,” Ishigami had explained, “I’m in a bit of a tight situation.” And he’d told how the man he had previously asked to observe had been in an accident and was now unable to do the job—and, without an observer there, his firm wouldn’t get permission to proceed with the work. He needed someone to stand in for the absent man.
He’d offered an advance of fifty thousand yen, and the Engineer had agreed. Ishigami had then taken the man to the rental room where Togashi had been saying. There he’d given him Togashi’s clothes to put on and had told him to sit tight until that evening.
When evening came, he’d brought the Engineer out to Mizue Station. Ishigami had stolen a bicycle from Shinozaki Station in advance. He had chosen the newest bicycle he could find, to assure that the owner would promptly report the theft.
He had prepared another bicycle as well. This one he had stolen from Ichinoe, the station before Mizue. It was an old bicycle, with a broken lock.
He’d given the new bicycle to the Engineer, and the two of them had gone to the river, soon arriving at the spot along the Old Edogawa.
Remembering what happened next made Ishigami’s heart fill with darkness. The Engineer never knew why he had to die.
Ishigami couldn’t have anyone know about the second murder—especially not the Hanaokas. That was why he had used the very same murder weapon and had strangled the victim in the very same way.
Togashi’s body he had cut into six parts in his bathtub, tossing each one separately into the Sumida River in bags weighted down with heavy rocks. He did this all under cover of darkness, in three separate locations on three separate nights. He knew that at least some of them would be found at some point, but he didn’t care. The police would never be able to learn to whom the body parts belonged. According to their records, Togashi would have already been dead and his body found—and a man couldn’t die twice.
He was pretty sure that only Yukawa had figured it all out. Which was why Ishigami had chosen to turn himself in to the police. This, after all, was something he had been ready to do from the very beginning, and for which he had already made the necessary preparations.
Yukawa would talk to Kusanagi.