Goro barreled into my room before pausing to look around. It was the first time he’d ever been in my personal space. Before this, we’d always met out and about in town or at Yasahiro’s place.
“Uh, sorry. I should’ve asked before coming in.”
I smiled at him and gestured to the chair at the desk. “Please sit. You’re welcome here.”
“I’m too annoyed to sit,” he said, sighing and glancing at the photo of Yasahiro on my dresser. “Is this from when the two of you went to that onsen over the holidays?”
“Yeah,” I said, picking up my empty teacup from the floor and setting it on the desk behind him. Thankfully, my room was not in its usual shabby state.
“I remember when you came back from that vacation. Something had changed with Yasahiro. I couldn’t put my finger on it, but he was different. He talked about you more often and said things that made me feel like he would stick around here for the rest of his life. This whole situation is such a mess.”
My scalp crawled with tingles. Goro’s face was ashen, his eyes rimmed in red.
“What happened?”
I tensed my body, preparing for the worst.
“I’m off the case because I just don’t believe Yasahiro would kill Amanda. He was done with her. He was moving on.” Goro laughed and shook his head. “He had moved so far on that he might as well have been on Mars. Even Amanda coming back and threatening to take everything away from him wouldn’t have been enough for him to kill her.”
He pulled out the chair at the desk and sat down.
“The forensics team spent all day going through his email. They must’ve found something because they kicked me and Kayo off the case and sent an officer to his apartment to get him.”
“But…” I sank to my knees on my bed. “I just spoke to him thirty minutes ago.” I imagined him hanging up the phone and the officers arriving to arrest him not long after. My heart broke into a thousand pieces. I told him I’d stand by him and help him, and he was probably in jail. “You don’t know anything?”
“Well…” He glanced away, not making eye contact.
“What?” I growled at him.
“They found missing money.”
“Missing money? What kind of missing money?” What was really missing was my complete understanding of this situation. I’d never been so cut off from everyone and everything. Without Goro here, I’d be clueless.
“About two months ago, Yasahiro withdrew about $15,000US and the forensic accountants have no idea where it went. His lawyer knows nothing either.”
“What does Yasahiro say about it?” I swallowed, my stomach wanting to refuse all its contents. Missing money? How, what? My brain tripped over the information.
“I have no idea. They hadn’t questioned him again about it, but you know how it goes.” He waved his hand in a circle. “The wheels started turning and everyone was coming up with reasons for the missing money. Like he hired someone to kill Amanda, or he laundered the money or owed it to the mob, or…” He rubbed his face, his eyes tired and sad. “I couldn’t believe the things they said about him, and he’s my friend, too!”
If the earth had opened right then and swallowed me whole, I would not have been surprised. I was incapable of surprise anymore. My life had plummeted straight into a deep, bottomless canyon.
“And they let Robert go as well.”
“What?” My voice squeaked. “He’s a suspect! And a plausible suspect, too.”
Goro squeezed both of my shoulders. “Mei, don’t get hysterical on me.”
“I’m not hysterical!” My voice rose and cracked, and I stepped away from my own body to take a look at myself. I was sure my face was pale and wan. I hadn’t been feeling well, and eating was the last thing I always wanted to do. I’d lost sleep the past few days too, tossing and turning in my bed and waking up with sore hips and shoulders.
I shut my eyes and sucked in a shaky breath.
“I’m only a little hysterical.” My hand shook as I dragged my fingers through my hair. This couldn’t be happening.
Goro released my shoulders and glanced around my room again before returning to the chair.
“We believe Robert was in Tokyo when she was killed. Several witnesses saw him in the morning at that restaurant you went to, the one that just opened. We’re double-checking it because the times are off. Kayo spoke to the owner, Morinaga, and he said he wasn’t there for most of the day, so he couldn’t vouch for Robert. Anyway, the Tokyo Police confiscated his passport and have someone watching him back in Shinjuku. The chief doesn’t believe he killed Amanda, but maybe his wife, Giselle, did. They’re hoping that if he’s free, Giselle will try to contact him. It’s a plan, just not a very good one.”
“He had plenty of reasons to kill her.” I could barely breathe. “For interfering with his marriage, maybe to get her share of Yasahiro’s businesses, maybe just to hurt her. We have no idea what kind of man he is. Maybe he even proposed to Amanda, saying he was divorcing Giselle for her, and she turned him down!”
I imagined Robert pulling up in a high-end black car to Yasahiro’s apartment, picking up Amanda, and taking her out of town, only to be jilted by her and kill her. In my head, he was either angry with her, desperate to make things right again with his family, Giselle, and perhaps his businesses too, or he was in love with her and she wasn’t with him. Either would’ve fit.
“I argued with my boss and everyone else,” Goro said, shaking his head again. “I shouldn’t have fought with them or I’d still be on the case. I tried to tell them that something that happened in the past would have little impact on what was happening now. Yasahiro has a good life. He didn’t blame Amanda for anything now, even if he did years ago.”
“What? What did he blame her for?”
I could feel a huge shift in the investigation, and my mind shifted with it. He hadn’t broken up with her because she cheated on him. This might’ve been one of the reasons, but it wasn’t the only reason. Something else was lurking below the surface, just out of reach. I needed to continue digging for clues, and I was sitting right on top of the evidence, literally. My computer was right underneath me.
“I don’t know, but I know how we can find out.” Goro pulled his phone from his pocket, quickly dashed off a text message, and set it on my desk. “Kumi says hi, and she’s also telling us to get to work. You have the data from Akai, right? I brought my computer. It’s in the other room.” He waved to the front of the house. “Hey, who are those people in your front room?”
I laughed, breaking the tension in my shoulders. “Remember how I saw a boy yesterday? They were living in the woods, and he was… borrowing our things. We caught them out there cooking.”
“Borrowing? I believe you mean stealing.” He cocked an eyebrow at me, and I waved him off.
“They’re from Kumamoto. They lost their apartment in the earthquake and were trying to drive to Hokkaido. Mom’s going to help them get to an aunt’s house north of here.”
Goro shook his head, but his lips jerked in a smile. “You know what they say about you and your mom in town, right? ‘Those Yamagawas have the purest of hearts.’ I hope no one ever takes too much advantage of that.”
It was now a race against the clock. Assuming the police had come for Yasahiro and took him into custody, I figured I had a day, maybe less, before they started talking about his involvement to the media. Once they did that, it would be impossible for Yasahiro to regain his good name. He would leave and that would be the end of us. Before then, though, he was just an “person of interest.” He was someone who could help. I had to believe Goro and I would uncover something to set him free.
I gave Goro a digital copy of Amanda’s book and he sat at my desk reading it on his computer. I camped on the bed once again, this time to go through Amanda’s email.
In the email folder was one file from Akai. “Here’s the URL, username and password for Amanda’s email. I do this for all of my clients. It’s a secure database with a webmail interface that’ll allow you to search all the email I found. It’s not able to send and receive, just an archive.”
Brilliant! This would make it so much easier. Thank you, Akai! I would have to find some way of thanking her for her hard work on this. Maybe some treats for her and Buttercup.
I copied the URL to my browser, typed in the username and password, and combed through Amanda’s email. Immediately, several emails jumped right out at me, sent last week, titled “While you’re in town.”
The first was from Hiroshi, Shōta’s “assistant.” I didn’t really know if he was Shōta’s assistant, but I was willing to give him the title until I knew more.
“Mr. Kimura requests you contact him so he can schedule time to see you while you’re in Tokyo next week. Please either respond to this email or text me back. Hiroshi Ota.”
Simple and to the point. I re-read the email and detected no hostility from Hiroshi, but maybe he had been hostile in the past. He must have done something to deserve that text from Amanda, right? She told him to stop contacting her.
I dug deeper, searching the email for more messages from him. When the results came up, my stomach flipped over, a new wave of nausea rolling over me. I saw words like “in love with you” and “we shouldn’t have done it” and “that night in the woods.” I cursed, letting the sound lurch from my lips.
“Goro, you have to see this.”
He clicked on a few things on his computer and came over to sit next to me. I gave him the computer, and he began reading, his eyes widening over several minutes as he went through the email chains.
He blew out a long breath and got up to pace.
“So, let me get this straight. Amanda, Shōta Kimura, and this friend of his, Hiroshi, were all involved in some sexual relationship together, and then it turned out Shōta and Hiroshi preferred each other and left her out?”
I pressed my cold fingers to my blushing cheeks. Hearing it out loud was almost worse than reading it. “It does look that way. And Hiroshi was trying to get Amanda to break things off with Shōta and leave them alone.”
“Well, if he had let her be, she might’ve moved on,” Goro said, pacing to my door and back.
“That’s not really Amanda’s style. Losing Yasahiro was a hit to her ego. Losing Shōta as well would make her insane with rage. She liked to work someone for everything they were worth. Shōta’s family is wealthy. She may have blackmailed him. He did say she mentioned something in her book about them.”
Goro took three long strides back to his computer and started typing and waiting, typing and waiting.
“Ah! Here it is. She buried it in chapter thirty-one.” He cleared his throat and recited, “But if I had learned one thing about being famous, it was that everyone wanted something from me. Even the ones I loved, the ones who found comfort in another man’s bed instead of mine, wanted my face and name attached to their life. It was a hard lesson to learn, that I was only worth something if I had fame. I ended a good relationship to save my career, losing a man who believed in me. From then on, I couldn’t gain back the respect from anyone. Instead, I had to gamble for it. I didn’t always win.”
We both sat in silence, listening to Amanda’s words from beyond the grave. She was cryptic on purpose, probably not wanting to name names and get dragged into lawsuits. But now that I had her emails, this paragraph made some sense. In Amanda’s eyes, Shōta had used her for her fame like all her other friends. Hiroshi had been a casualty of war. He’d been caught in the middle. Had he loved Shōta enough to kill Amanda? To keep her away from them?
And I had to guess that the part about ending a good relationship to save her career was about Yasahiro. As far as I knew, though, he encouraged her career, wanted her to do better, climb higher. She wouldn’t have had to leave him in order to “save her career.” Damn. Another mystery on top of every other mystery I was dealing with.
I grabbed my laptop while Goro stared into space. In later emails from Hiroshi, he called her a “stuck up bitch” after getting angry with her for seeing Shōta behind his back while she was in town. She then threatened to screen-cap the emails and show them to the whole world. She would trash his family and destroy his future. After that, he was silent except to do his job by arranging meetings. Even that was too much for Amanda though.
Using the cursor, I grabbed the scroll bar and went as far back in her email as I could. I finally saw Yasahiro’s name around 2013. I let the archive list load into the browser as my heart pounded in my chest. There was evidence here! Did the police have this too?
“That’s it,” Goro blurted out, and I jumped.
My eyes were glued to Yasahiro’s name and the email subject line consisting of at least a dozen messages, “See you next week?”
“The killer must be Hiroshi Ota. He had a motive, and he could have had an opportunity as well. We need to figure out if he picked up Amanda the day she was killed.”
Goro beckoned to my computer. “Come, Mei. Give me your computer. I want to look at Amanda’s texts and photos.”
I minimized the browser with Yasahiro’s emails in view and handed it over. If Goro suspected Hiroshi was the killer, then I wasn’t going to stand in his way.
The front doorbell rang, and I heard Mom call my name.
Goro glanced at me. “I’ll come. Just in case.”
I was nervous, my hair standing on end as I walked to the front room, but I sighed in relief as I saw Akiko.
“There you are!” She wrapped her arms around my shoulders, squeezing me, before pulling away. “My word, you look awful.”
Mom and our guests both looked at me, their heads cocked to the side.
“She’s right. You don’t look well, Mei.” Mom rested her hand on my forehead.
“Mom, I’m not sick.” I pushed her hand away, but Akiko had my wrist in her hand, taking my pulse. She leaned in and looked at my face before scanning me from head to toe.
I turned to shrug at Goro, and he shrugged back. “You look the same to me. I’ll go back to work.” He jerked his thumb at my bedroom and retreated down the hall.
“Akiko, I’m fine.” I waved her off. “I’ve just been a little sick with all the stress lately.”
She paused for a second, her face adjusting into the clinical facade she gets with patients. “Of course. I’ve been getting caught up on the news. This situation sounds stressful, and Yasahiro is right at the center of it all.” She hooked her arm into mine and pulled me to the door. “Why don’t you come across the street with me to my house and fill me in? A little fresh air will do you good.”
I opened my mouth to protest, but Mom jumped right in.
“That’s a great idea,” she exclaimed, pushing me along and standing over me while I put on my shoes. “Please get out of the house for a while. You and Goro have been in there for almost two hours, and the sun is going to set soon. Akiko, bring her back in an hour for dinner, and you should stay too. I’ll cook a big meal.” Mom handed me my coat as I relented.
“Fine. We’ll be back soon. Tell Goro to keep looking while I’m gone.”
“I will!” Mom pushed me out the door, closed the screen and stood waiting for me to leave. “Go on now. Get your mind off of this for just an hour. You won’t regret it. I promise.”
I stumbled down the steps after Akiko, she took my arm, and led me away from the ticking time bomb of my life, ready to explode and leave me in shatters.
Tick, tick, tick…