The comely doctor strode through the falling twilight, his shadow reaching out behind him.
Among the pedestrians sharing the dusky Okubo Avenue with him were a cyborg, metabolic stabilizers jutting out from its back—an addict strung out on LSD, each belch condensing into the form of a woman or some other related private body part and disappearing just as quickly—a brain-eating roundworm wrapped around the moth-eaten flesh of a sleepwalking zombie—
But all that strangeness yielded as if by natural law to the physician’s beauty.
It was a rare occasion in this city when beauty trumped the weird. For this was Mephisto. An exquisiteness that surpassed even Setsura’s threw off ripples like small waves that rose up and sank down in the gloom, painting his portrait against a melancholy landscape.
Except that his was an unusual state of mind for the otherwise cool-headed physician, the result of what he had heard and seen just twenty minutes before.
After making rounds that afternoon, he’d paid Mayumi a house call as scheduled. He was running a bit behind schedule. In this case, “a bit” became an eternity.
Armored cars of the Shinjuku police were parked in front of her house. Two dead bodies were being carried out on stretchers. He identified himself and pulled back the sheet. The woman’s dead face revealed the extent of the tragedy to him.
The cops filled him in on the details. The man and the woman were brutally slain, the young woman presumed to be the perpetrator was nowhere to be found.
Mephisto looked around the room. The day before, the mother and daughter had come to the old Shinjuku government office building where his hospital now stood. Up to that point, the daughter had killed three men, including her father.
The mother had confessed to having confidentially “dealt with” the bodies of the other two. Mephisto didn’t know whether that meant she’d buried them in an unmarked grave, or arranged with the medical examiner to make them disappear, and he didn’t much care.
Everyone who’d had sex with her had died. This wasn’t a one-off freak of nature, but the kind of phenomenon that got Mephisto’s medical juices flowing.
His examinations had yielded no useful data so far. The coroner’s report the wife had brought in said only that her husband had died of a coronary infarction. This struck him as a commonsensical conclusion as he had detected no abnormalities in the daughter either.
Except that with the death count up to three, plus the one dying the night before, it was hard to dismiss the connection. The detectives speculated that the daughter must have fled after killing her mother, who in turn had been driven mad by the man’s death.
He was about to leave when a call came in from headquarters that the night before, an eyewitness had observed a girl riding a folding scooter down Okubo Avenue getting nabbed by a biker gang.
This “eyewitness” report came from an information broker representing the eyewitness. The crime database at the police station had matched it to the description sent in by the cops on the scene.
The information broker would forward the reward money to the informant, and would make sure identities weren’t leaked. Even taking their cut, brokers promised generous payouts, guaranteed the veracity of the intel they provided, and were fully prepared to punish providers of phony leads.
For that reason alone, the police preferred working with the “professionals,” as opposed to civic-minded bystanders.
The detective went to interview the witness. Mephisto accompanied them. He listened to what the man had to say, but did nothing more. The strung-out vagrant couldn’t even recall with certainty the gang emblems and colors always emblazoned on the sides of their bikes.
The broker wasn’t any more help. “So a bunch of bikers showed up and you thought you could cash in, eh?” spat out the disgusted detective. “These penny-ante outfits got no quality control. The big boys never pull crap like this.”
So Mephisto ended up walking the dusky streets alone. He had to wonder about what had happened to her. But he also knew it was beyond his control. In Shinjuku, the time he spent worrying about one patient could be better used to save ten more.
He knew this plain as day, but couldn’t shake the image in his mind’s eye of the young and pretty girl sitting there in the chair, eyes cast down. He spied a dilapidated telephone booth out of the corner of his eye. There were other ways of gathering information that would reveal the gang’s true colors.
Mephisto didn’t stop. Sometimes when the wheel of fate turned, all a doctor could do was stay out of the way until it came to a rest. Besides, he had enough on his plate this evening already.