Spiral by Kôji Suzuki Page B

spoken to on the phone on Friday. His name card said he was Kazuyoshi Kurahashi, Lecturer in Forensic Medicine at Shuwa University. Judging by the man's position, Ando figured they had to be about the same age, but Kurahashi looked young enough to be in his early twenties. Probably it was to avoid being taken for a student that he spoke in an overdone tone of authority and stolidity.
    "Come right this way," Kurahashi said punctiliously, ushering Ando in.
    Ando had learned just about everything he could by fax. His purpose today was to see with his own eyes things that couldn't be faxed, and to speak directly to the doctor who'd been in charge of the autopsies. He and Kurahashi exchanged small talk, and then began to share their observations of the bodies they'd dissected. Apparently, Kurahashi had been quite surprised by the unidentified sarcomas he'd found blocking the coronary arteries. As soon as the conversation turned to them, his cool demeanor cracked.
    "Would you care to see?" So saying, he went to get one of the tissue samples from the blocked arteries.
    Ando had a good look at it with his naked eye, then placed it under a microscope and examined it on a cellular level. One glance told him that these cells had undergone the same transformations as Ryuji's. When cells are treated with a hematoxylin-eosin stain, the cytoplasm turns red while the nucleus turns blue, allowing them to be differentiated with ease. Here, the diseased cells' shapes were distorted; their nuclei were larger than normal. Whereas normal cells had an overall reddish tint, these cells looked bluish. Ando stared at the red, amoeba-like speckles floating on the blue. He had to find out what had caused this change-the culprit, as it were. Obviously, it wasn't going to be easy. He had to deduce the murder weapon and the criminal entirely on the basis of the damage done to the victims' bodies.
    Ando lifted his eyes from the microscope and took a deep breath. Somehow, the longer he looked, the harder it was to breathe. "Whose cells are these, by the way?"
    "The wife's." Kurahashi turned his head only slightly to answer. He was standing by the shelves which covered one wall, removing and replacing files. He kept shaking his head, evidently unable to locate what he was looking for.
    Ando bent over the instrument again, and again the microscopic world assailed him.
    So these are Kazuyuki Asakawa 's wife's. Knowing who they belonged to, he found himself trying to imagine, in detail, what had happened to their owner. Last month, a car her husband had been driving had collided with a truck near the Oi exit ramp on the Metropolitan Bayside Expressway. Sunday, October 21st, noon. Autopsies had confirmed that mother and child had expired an hour prior to the accident. In other words, they had died simultaneously, at around eleven in the morning. Of the same cause, no less. And that was what he just couldn't wrap his mind around.
    So small these lumps of flesh were compared to the rest of the body, yet big enough to block off an artery and stop a heart. He had a hard time imagining that these sarcomas had been growing gradually over a long period of time, since they'd claimed two lives at virtually the same instant. Even if the victims had contracted a virus of some sort, if the virus required an incubation period of months before producing its symptoms, there was no way the two victims should have died nearly simultaneously. The physical differences between the victims should have assured some sort of lag. There was a thirty year age difference between Shizu and Yoko Asakawa, and that should have had some effect. Maybe it was just a coincidence? But no, that couldn't be. The young couple autop-sied at Yokodai had died simultaneously, too. And if it wasn't just a coincidence, he had no choice but to conclude that the period between infection and death was extremely short.
    The viral hypothesis didn't seem to make for an adequate explanation. Ando momentarily laid