With a sigh, he set off, shoes clicking on the floor. He was fast.
What is this, competitive walking?! Seiji didn’t have time to even grouse about it; hastily running after Odoro, he slid into the elevator at the very last second. There was a ding, and it promptly deposited them on the first floor.
It was about half past four. They were pretty close to the hour of demons, but the sky was still gray and drizzling, and it made the boundary between daytime and sunset hard to pin down.
“Now then. We’re going to pay a visit to the client’s residence.”
“Huh? But we don’t know her address or anything.”
Odoro’s hand came up smoothly. It was holding a postcard; a direct mail ad from a dry cleaning place. The name of the addressee was—Suzu Torikai.
Did he steal that?!
It must have happened when Suzu was trying to board the elevator. When he’d moved her chair-walker, he’d probably snitched this from the side pocket.
Before Seiji could press the issue, Odoro hailed a taxi and they headed for the address on the postcard. It turned out to belong to a house in a blue-collar residential district crowded with similar houses.
It was a small place: a run-down, single-story wooden house. The garden was bordered by an old-fashioned cinder block wall and planted modestly with trees that were already winter bare.
The sign on the gatepost read TORIKAI. This was Suzu’s house.
Without hesitation, Odoro rang the doorbell. There was no response: She was still out. What now? Seiji thought, watching the situation develop as though it had nothing to do with him.
“…We’ll try the back entrance.” Odoro strode through the gate; Seiji followed him timidly. They went around the house, passing a rack with laundry poles, and discovered the back door next to the external air-conditioning unit.
Odoro tried the knob. Naturally, it was locked. What now? Seiji was wondering again, when—
Bam!
—Odoro kicked the door down. It might have been badly hung to begin with; the hinges flew right off.
“Wh-what are you doing?!” Seiji was starting to protest when a stink rolled out from inside that made him shut his mouth and cover his nose.
Yikes, what’s that stench?!
It smelled like something was rotting.
Odoro sniffed audibly. Then with a still, perfectly blank face, he said: “The other side of the house…most likely in the kitchen.”
What are you, a dog? Seiji retorted mentally. Ignoring him, Odoro walked in without taking his shoes off, as if that were the natural thing to do. This was flagrant breaking and entering. If someone called it in, the two of them would be arrested on the spot, no questions asked.
Dammit! If it happens, it happens. Kicking off his shoes rather desperately, Seiji sneaked in after Odoro. The door opened onto a narrow hallway. There was a tiny bathroom on the left, and what seemed to be a kitchen at the end.
Seiji groped his way carefully along the wall, feeling for a light switch.
“Oh, found it.”
When he flipped the switch, the lights came on, revealing a simple kitchen.
Pots and frying pans hung on the tiled walls. At first glance, everything seemed to be well used, carefully maintained, and pleasantly neat, except…
“…Something really does seem a little off here, doesn’t it?”
The window glass was all dusty, and a dead potted pothos sat in front of it. When Seiji looked closer, the sink was cloudy with limescale, and there were empty deli packs stacked in it. A small mountain of plastic garbage bags were piled against one wall; Suzu had probably forgotten to put them out on garbage day.
More than anything, there was that smell.
Maybe she’s let the contents of the fridge go rotten because of her dementia?
Just as that thought occurred to Seiji, his eyes found the refrigerator. No, I seriously can’t open that, he thought, deciding to pretend he hadn’t seen it. But as he was sidling away from it…
“Don’t run.” Odoro glared at him menacingly, his nose wrinkling like a mad dog’s.
Jesus.
However…
“Huh?”
He’d just assumed the fridge would be packed with rotten, oozing meat and fish, but it was empty. She must get most of her meals from the deli.
“What? But then where’s the smell coming from?”
Just then, a small black shape skittered past his feet, and Seiji jumped. Cockroach?! he thought, but it wasn’t. It was a rather flat beetle; that part was the same, but this one had shorter feelers, and its body was boxy.
“It appears to be a carrion beetle,” Odoro murmured. “Also known as a burying beetle. They’re notorious scavengers that feed on animal corpses.”
Wh-what’s with that extremely ominous description? Seiji shuddered.
The carrion beetle scuttled across the wooden floor until it reached the sink, and then…
“Oh? What’s this?”
There was a small square set of double doors in the floor. Apparently, the kitchen had an under-floor storage space.
The carrion beetle promptly squeezed through the crack between the doors. It was acting as if it had found its meal. That’s right, carrion beetles could trace the smell of death to its source.
“…I see,” said Odoro. “Here, hm?”
“No, um, just a second, I’m not ready for— Yaaaaaaugh!”
No sooner had Odoro pulled the doors open than a cloud of black specks exploded into the room.
Flies.
Instantly, the stench punched Seiji in the nose.
He’d opened his mouth to scream, and flies seemed to scramble over themselves to get into it. He flailed his arms frantically.
What surfaced from the fetid darkness were the rotting corpses of dogs.
The eyes seemed to have dissolved already; white maggots crawled in and out of the gaping sockets. Then there were the black swarming carrion beetles… The space had become a den of insects.
The stink seemed liable to twist Seiji’s nose off, and he groaned. He clapped a hand over his mouth, just barely managing to swallow what was threatening to come up. What the heck is going on here? Shaking his thoroughly confused head, he involuntarily backed away.
“Pug, papillon, toy poodle, dachshund… Hm. There’s one missing,” Odoro said. He was looking down into the hole in the floor, his profile unreadable. “In short, there were five dogs that Suzu called ‘Chi.’”
Seiji didn’t understand what he was hearing. Guessing as much from his expression, Odoro snorted, as if he found this tiresome. “The one with the wrinkled face was a pug. The butterfly ears belonged to the papillon, the one with the curly coat was a toy poodle, and the one with short legs was a dachshund. When Suzu described ‘Chi’ to us, she mixed traits from all of those breeds together.”
“Huh? But why would she…?”
“The first ‘Chi’ was probably the Chihuahua mix. When her pet disappeared, Suzu was upset and searched all over for her. Then she got it into her head that another small dog who looked nothing like her was ‘Chi’ and brought it home.”
“Then these dogs were…?”
“Either abandoned or lost,” Odoro said. His voice was casual, but his uncharacteristically melancholy profile seemed to be quietly mourning the dogs’ deaths.
“Who would do a thing like…?” Seiji started to say, and then an awful possibility occurred to him. “It can’t have been Suzu, can it?” A pleading note crept into his voice.
If Suzu had killed the dogs she brought home one after another, hidden their bodies under the floor, then forgotten about them, the situation would be far too bleak.
“There’s very little possibility of that. According to Suzu, the dogs always disappear during the night, after she’s taken her medication and is fast asleep.”
“B-but how could she miss this stench?”
“A dulled sense of smell is an early symptom of Alzheimer’s. In addition, the human nose grows accustomed to bad smells easily. It wouldn’t have been odd for her to go about her days without noticing it.”
But what if Suzu’s dementia had caused her to sleepwalk, and she was killing the dogs while she slept…?
“You’ve seen too many horror movies.”
“But I mean, she lives by herself, doesn’t she? Then who did this?”
“I believe that is what we are here to find out.” Shrugging, Odoro strode into the next room. Hastily shutting the storage compartment’s doors, Seiji followed him.