“We first noticed at eleven o’clock at night,” the young housewife explained as she clutched her sound-asleep child to her bosom. We’d exchanged a few pleasantries at the beginning of the conversation, and she’d mentioned that the child had been born only three months earlier.
“Before bed, my husband went to check on Pavlov, and he wasn’t in his house …” Pavlov was the name of their dog, which had gone missing on a Tuesday night two weeks ago. It was a purebred dog, but of a breed I’d never heard of before.
The housewife and I were facing each other in the front door of a small home of Western construction, which was not much more than a mile from my house.
On the way home from school, I’d decided to make inquiries at the homes where dogs had been kidnapped.
I’d explained to the woman that I worked for the school newspaper and was investigating the series of pet kidnappings that had been occurring in the neighborhood. When I suggested that my work might lead to the capture of the individual responsible, the housewife had become extremely cooperative.
“Thinking back on it, I remember Pavlov barking a lot around ten. But he often barked when people walked past, so we ignored it.”
“And that was the last time you heard him?” I asked.
She nodded.
From here, I could see a tiny yard to one side with an empty doghouse—a fairly large one, with a metal hook out front for attaching the dog’s leash.
“The kidnapper unhooked the leash and pulled the dog away?” I asked.
She shook her head. “They left the leash—and there was a half-eaten chicken nugget.”
The kidnapper must have dropped the chicken, the woman explained.
When I asked if the nugget had been store-bought, the woman was unsure but thought it had looked homemade.
The kidnapper had brought something a dog might like from home to tame the dog and then taken it away. Using a bit of chicken made the whole crime seem rather prosaic—a very common sort of crime, not at all related to professional dog thieves or evil spirits.
I bowed my head and pretended to be grateful for the woman’s help.
She looked sadly at the doghouse, remembering her beloved pet. “I hope you find out who did this.” Her voice was quiet, but there was murderous fury hidden within it.
When the child in her arms began to sniffle, I said goodbye and turned away. As I did, I realized the house across the street had a dog as well. Through the gate, I could see a black dog—a big dog, about half my height.
“Its name is Chocolate,” the housewife said from behind me.
I mentioned that I hadn’t noticed it was there.
“Yes, it almost never barks.”
Chocolate’s house was in a much more visible position than Pavlov’s—but the dog was so quiet that the kidnapper might have simply overlooked it.
I went home, where my sister, Sakura, and my mother were making dinner. My mother was hovering over the pot, stirring, while my sister chopped vegetables.
My sister was two years younger than me and getting ready for her high school entrance exams. She was normally in cram school at this time of day, but she said the school was closed today. Until the spring, she’d worn her hair long, but she’d cut it boyishly short over the summer.
Her personality was the exact opposite of mine, and she helped out around the house a lot. She could never turn down a request for help. For example, if my mother was sitting in front of the TV snacking and she turned toward my sister, clasping both hands together and saying, “Sakura, do the dishes for me?” Sakura would refuse at first.
“Aw, no! Do them yourself!”
But my mother would hang her head and look forlorn—as if it was the end of the world. The moment Sakura saw that, she was done for. She would look totally shocked and hurriedly splutter, “Okay, okay! Don’t cry!” as if she herself were about to.
Then Sakura would jump up and race into the kitchen. As soon as this transaction had been completed, my mother would return her attention to the TV and her senbei. I frequently wondered if Sakura knew how much of what my mother did was a performance. Was Sakura really that naïve? It seemed she was doomed to look after my parents in their old age.
Sakura had a very special talent—at least, that was how I viewed it, although she seemed to think it was more a curse. Most of the time, however, she appeared to be a very ordinary person.
“Did you go by the game center again?” my mother sighed when she saw me come in. I wasn’t a big fan of video games, but that was my usual excuse when I returned home late.
I sat down on a chair in the kitchen and watched them as they cooked. They operated in silent harmony. As my mother stir-fried vegetables, she could hold out one hand silently, and my sister would know exactly what she wanted, silently handing over the saltshaker. My mother would taste the stir-fry, and before she could even ask for mirin, my sister would be bringing it over.
They were both talking to me, so I responded appropriately. They laughed. Sakura laughed a little too hard and gasped for breath.
“Stop making us laugh and set the table. So what did the teacher do?” Sakura asked.
Apparently I had been talking about school. I would occasionally lose track of what I’d been talking about or why people around me were laughing. Everything I had to say to them could be conducted by reflex alone, and the stories were invariably improvised, made up on the spot. Strangely, this did not seem to create any discrepancies.
It must have looked like I was part of a warm and joyous family. My family seemed to think I was an outgoing boy—good at making people laugh but not much good at school.
But to me, there had been no conversation between me and my mother and sister. I forgot what we said as soon as it happened. It was as though I were sitting there in stony silence while everyone around me cracked up for no reason at all, as if I were living in some surreal dream.
“Kiri’s dog is still missing,” Sakura said, washing the cooking implements. My ears had been muffled, barely able to hear anything around me, but suddenly they were picking up every noise. “She was sure it would come home on its own, but …”
I asked for details.
Sakura explained that her classmate’s dog had vanished on Wednesday of last week. There were rumors the pet kidnapper had taken it.
“And when they found the dog missing, it seemed like they’d used a bit of sausage to nab it.”
“My,” my mother muttered, adding that she had forgotten to buy sausage at the store.
“What kind of dog? A big one?” I asked.
Sakura frowned at me, alarmed. Apparently, there was a look on my face I usually hid from my family.
“W-what?” I stammered, covering.
“The dog was a mutt, but a pretty small one.”
Abruptly, I realized I had forgotten to ask Pavlov’s owner the same question. I broke off the conversation as naturally as I could and ran back out the door, still in uniform, my mother calling out after me that it was almost time for dinner.
When I reached the house where Pavlov had once lived, it was getting dark out. I rang the bell, and the same young housewife I had spoken to a couple of hours before appeared. She looked surprised to see me again, and she was no longer holding her child.
“Sorry to bother you again, but there was something I forgot to ask. How big was Pavlov?”
“You came all this way for that?” she said, puzzled. Then she explained that Pavlov had not been full-grown and was still on the small side.
“Only a little bigger than a puppy?”
“Right. But his breed can get very big, which is why his house is so large.”
I thanked her and left.
When the kidnapper had taken the dogs, the leash had been left behind. So how were the dogs transported? Did the kidnapper bring a leash? It would’ve been easier—and faster—to simply unhook the leash from the doghouse, if that were the case. So the kidnapper had taken the leash off the dog’s collar and carried it away.
Now, why had the pet kidnapper chosen Pavlov and not the quiet dog across the street? I would have chosen the one that barked less simply because it would probably be easier to kidnap. But whoever was behind the pet kidnappings had not done that. My best guess was that Pavlov had been taken because he was smaller and thus easier to carry. The dog my sister’s friend had owned was also on the small side. It seemed likely that all the dogs the kidnapper had taken were small ones.
But why pick dogs that were easy to carry? One possibility was that the culprit didn’t have a car or any other vehicle large enough to carry a dog, which would explain avoiding large dogs and choosing small ones. From all the information I’d managed to gather, I knew that the area from which dogs had gone missing was not very large. Someone with a car would have avoided carrying out the crimes in such a confined area, instead collecting dogs from all over the city.
I remembered reading about a kind of analysis used when investigating killings done without motive, purely for the fun of it—it focused on the basis for the killer’s choice of victims. The killer in that case had unconsciously chosen targets that were weaker than himself. For example, all his victims had been less than five feet tall, not a single one of them even close to five foot three. In that case, they were able to speculate that the killer was between five feet and five feet three inches tall. Such a method of thinking might prove helpful in the missing-dog case.
When I got home, my father had returned from work, and my family had started eating already. I told them I’d gone to the convenience store and joined the conversation, smoothly working it around so that I could ask about houses that kept dogs in the neighborhood.
“The dog over there is really cute. I can’t imagine why they don’t keep it indoors, as small as it is,” Sakura said, somewhere in the middle of the list.
“It must bark a lot,” my father said.
I asked for the address. It was Tuesday night, so it was possible the kidnapper would target the house that evening.