The Devotion of Suspect X - Keigo Higashino [82]
All the while Ishigami talked, Kusanagi was staring him straight in the eye. The detective’s gaze was piercing and fierce—the gaze of someone who truly believed that when a suspect wasn’t telling the truth, it would show in his eyes.
“I see. Well, all that judo must keep you in good shape. Probably only takes you half a day to recover from a fever, eh? Wish I had your constitution. The fellow at the office said he’d never even heard of you calling in sick.”
“That’s hardly true. I catch colds, too, you know.”
“And you just happened to catch one on the night of the tenth.”
“What do you mean by that? I know that’s the night your murder took place, but it wasn’t a particularly special night for me.”
“Of course.” Kusanagi closed his notepad and stood. “Sorry for taking your time.”
“Again, I’m sorry I couldn’t be of more assistance.”
“Not at all. We’re just covering the bases.”
The two of them walked out of the conference room together. Ishigami saw the detective to the main entrance.
“Seen much of Yukawa lately?” Kusanagi asked as they walked.
“No, not at all,” Ishigami answered. “How about you? You talk to him now and then, right?”
“Not recently. I’ve been too busy. You know, the three of us should get together sometime. I hear from Yukawa that you enjoy a drink now and then?” He motioned with his hand as if tilting a glass.
“I’d be happy to, but shouldn’t that wait until you’ve solved this case of yours?”
“Probably, yes, but a man has to get out sometimes. I’ll give you a ring.”
“All right. I’ll be looking forward to it, then.”
“You do that,” the detective said, turning to walk out the door.
Ishigami returned to the hallway and watched him through a window. Kusanagi was talking on his cell phone as he walked out to the road. His expression hadn’t changed.
Ishigami thought about what his visit meant. They must have had a reason to turn their suspicions toward him. What would that be? He hadn’t sensed anything of the sort the last time he’d met Kusanagi.
Based on the questions he asked, Kusanagi was a still long way from the truth. He was basically shooting in the dark. Perhaps Ishigami’s lack of an alibi had given him a new direction. But if so, so be it. Ishigami had planned for this, too.
The problem was—
The image of Manabu Yukawa’s face flitted across his mind. How much of the truth had the physicist been able to sniff out? And how much of that truth did he really want to expose?
Ishigami remembered something Yasuko had told him the other day on the phone. Apparently, Yukawa had asked her what she thought of him—of Ishigami. And it sounded like he had known about Ishigami’s fondness for Yasuko.
The mathematician recalled his various discussions with Yukawa but couldn’t remember a single careless word or gesture that might have tipped him off. So how had his old friend noticed?
Ishigami turned and began to walk toward the teachers’ room. He ran into the office assistant in the hallway on the way there.
“The detective leave already?”
“Just now, yeah.”
“So aren’t you going home, Mr. Ishigami?”
“No, I remembered something I have to do first.”
Leaving the assistant to wonder what the detective had wanted, Ishigami returned quickly to the teachers’ room. Sitting down at his desk there, he reached into a box he kept beneath it and pulled out several files. These weren’t class files. They were part of the results of his work over the last several years on a particularly difficult mathematics problem.
He placed them in his bag with the test sheets and left the room.
* * *
“How many times do I have to tell you that in order to examine something you have to do more than just look at it? You can’t simply say you were satisfied with an experiment because you got the results you were expecting. I don’t care how you feel about the experiment. And not everything was