The Devotion of Suspect X - Keigo Higashino [62]
“I’m quite serious. You see, I called the lab a little while ago, and one of the grad students said you’d been there asking after me. And I hear that you dropped by last evening, too, didn’t you? So, I reasoned that if I waited here long enough, you’d show up. After all, my grad student told you I was here at Shinozaki, didn’t he?”
This was all true enough, but it didn’t answer the real question, and Kusanagi wasn’t in the mood to let Yukawa off so easily.
“What I want to know is: why are you here in the first place?” he said, his voice rising a little. He was used to his physicist friend’s circumlocutions, but still they could be maddening sometimes.
“No need to get impatient. How about some coffee? All I can offer is what’s in those vending machines over there, but it’s bound to be better than the instant stuff back at the lab.” Yukawa stood, tossing the rest of his ice cream cone into a nearby trash can.
With Kusanagi following he ambled over to the supermarket, where he bought two coffees out of one of the vending machines. He passed one to the detective, and then, carelessly straddling a nearby parked bicycle, he began to sip his own drink.
Kusanagi remained standing. He looked around as he opened the top on his can. “You shouldn’t sit on other people’s bicycles like that. What if the owner comes back?”
“She won’t. Not for some time.”
“How do you know that?”
“Because the owner of this bicycle left it here, then went into the subway station. Even if she was only headed to the next station over, it would take her at least thirty minutes to get there, do whatever it was she was going to do, and then come back.”
Kusanagi took a sip of his coffee and frowned. “That’s what you were doing while you sat there, eating your ice cream?”
“Watching people is a bit of a hobby of mine. It’s quite fascinating, really.”
“It’s good to have a hobby, but I’d rather have answers. Why are you here? And don’t even try telling me this has nothing to do with my investigation.”
Yukawa twisted his body around the seat, examining the back fender.
“Not many people bother to write their names on their bicycles anymore. I suppose that these days they don’t want strangers knowing who they are. But it wasn’t that long ago that everyone would write their names on their bicycles. It’s interesting how customs change with the times.”
Now Kusanagi understood. “This isn’t the first time we’ve chatted about bicycles, is it.”
Yukawa nodded. “I believe you told me that it was very unlikely that the bicycle had been left near the scene of the crime on purpose.”
“Not exactly. What I said was, there wasn’t any point in deliberately leaving it there. If the killer was going to put the victim’s fingerprints on the bicycle, then why go to the trouble of burning fingerprints off the corpse itself? After all, those prints on the bicycle were what led us to the man’s identity.”
“Fascinating. But tell me, what if there hadn’t been any fingerprints on the bicycle? Would that have kept you from being able to identify the body?”
Kusanagi had to think for a full ten seconds before answering. It was a question he hadn’t considered before.
“No, it wouldn’t,” he replied at last. “We used the fingerprints to match the body to the man who disappeared from the rented room, but we didn’t need the fingerprints to do that. I think I told you we did a DNA analysis as well.”
“You did. In other words, burning the victim’s fingerprints off was ultimately meaningless. But, what if our murderer knew that from the start?”
“You mean, he burned off the fingerprints even though he knew doing so would be futile?”
“Oh, I’m sure he had a reason for doing what he did. Just, that reason wasn’t to hide the identity of the body. What if he did it to suggest that the bicycle he planted nearby wasn’t a plant at all?”
Kusanagi blinked, momentarily at a loss for words. “So what you’re trying to say is that it was a plant, placed there to confuse us somehow?”
“Yes. It’s the somehow I haven’t figured out yet,” Yukawa said, dismounting from the bicycle. “I’m sure he