Chapter 2.3

April 30 Siesta

"I see. So the kid was acquitted."

In the antique shop where I'd been living since I arrived in Japan, I was swaying back and forth in a rocking chair and talking to Fuubi on the phone.

It was a little past two in the afternoon. Not one person had come in since I'd opened the shop, and the soft afternoon sunlight that streamed in was making me deliciously drowsy.

"Yeah, it's a cryin' shame." Fuubi sighed heavily. "I didn't get to arrest the damn brat this time, either," she said. It was an uncharacteristically blatant complaint.

"I think you dislike him a bit too much, don't you? It's not like he killed your parents."

"If that was his only offense, he wouldn't get under my skin like this."

While I'd love to think that had been an assassin joke, if he caused incidents as nasty as that one on a frequent basis, her reaction might actually be warranted. Take that murder at the consumer loan office the day before yesterday, for example. At first, Boy K. had been a suspect, but we'd found out that he was only covering for the real murderer, due to some convoluted circumstances. That would have counted as helping a criminal avoid arrest, and he would have been

charged with that instead.

However, that night, the criminal had confessed. When the details of the incident came to light, we'd learned that the man responsible had broken the office's security camera and erased the data on the computer. Meaning all Boy

had done was accidentally pick up a knife from the floor. We'd had no way to charge him for a crime, and no evidence to use against him. In that sense, that lone kid had beaten both the police and the detective hollow.

"He got you, too, huh," Fuubi said, sympathizing with me. "You thought the

criminal he was covering for might be Danny Bryant, right?"

She was right. At first, I'd thought that was the most likely possibility. Boy K. had no friends or family, so if he was going to voluntarily take the fall for someone, I'd thought it might be the man claiming to be his relative.

However, I'd been wrong. Boy K. had been covering for a man he'd just met. He seemed to be at a crossroads, wrestling with a major question, and he'd done what he did in an attempt to find the answer to it.

"It's true that I couldn't find Danny this time, but I think I'll make progress before too long," I said. That wasn't my intuition talking. I felt quite certain about it.

"Oh-ho. Do you have any grounds for that statement?" Yes, I sure did. However, the surest thing was—

"Sorry, it looks like I've got a customer. See you," I told Fuubi, then hung up.

Right after that…

"You look a lot different than the last time I saw you, Gekka Shirogane."

The boy, Kimihiko Kimizuka, was the first customer of the day. He gazed at me dubiously. My class change from police officer to antique store owner seemed to have perplexed him to no end.

"I thought you'd come."

I invited him to come inside and take a load off in front of the counter.

Boy K. sat down in an antique chair and was staring at me so hard it seemed like he might burn a hole in my face. He'd been carrying a bundle under his arm and set it down gently on the floor. "Let me ask you one more time: Are you really Gekka?"

Two nights ago, after the incident had technically been resolved, I'd told Boy

this address and my actual identity. Except…

"I notice you've casually dropped the 'Ms.' when you address me."

I still looked like a woman in my twenties, but he'd dispensed with the formalities.

"I spent a while mulling things over, and not being so formal with you just felt like right thing to do."

The kid was shockingly self-centered. Well, considering our actual ages, it was fine if he wanted to skip the honorifics. Even so, it was a pretty unique way of shrinking interpersonal distance.

Since he didn't have any friends, I'd assumed he'd struggle with conversation,

but he was the opposite: He stuck to his guns no matter who he was talking to. It might be a little similar to the way I lived.

"That aside, that's one heck of a transformation. How did you do that?" The boy stared at my toes, then his eyes gradually traveled up.

"You focused on my chest for quite a while." "…I bet you were imagining that."

"Kid, do you know what the world calls relationships between a woman and a younger boy?"

"Anyway, let's get down to business!"

His childlike flushed cheeks seemed like the real deal. If I picked on him anymore, though, I'd end up stalling the conversation, so I controlled myself.

"I'm a hero who lives in the criminal underworld: The Fiend with Twenty Faces."

Once again, I told him my true identity that I'd revealed to him two nights ago.

"…But everything about you is different from before. Even your height." "I'm wearing a special mask and using shoe lifts to add to my height." "What's your real age?"

"Never ask women that question."

I gave a thin smile, and the boy stared dully back in an open display of boredom. Yes, that's a good face.

"Come to think of it, there was something I wanted to ask you, kid." There was one thing I hadn't checked on after the incident the other day. "You said you got dragged into that mess because you went to the consumer loan office to borrow money. That was a lie, wasn't it?"

The boy blinked. "You figured that out, too, huh?" He smiled thinly. I couldn't visualize someone as clever as him to be visiting a place like that without knowing what it was.

"Were you just passing by? Or did they call you into the office because you had some previous history with them?" With his knack for getting dragged into trouble, that was plausible.

"…The latter. Back then, I thought being honest about that might have implicated me."

I see. Yes, that really might have tipped the scales. Even if the truth had been bound to come out sooner or later.

"There was no record of any contact with you in the call history on the victim's cell phone, though."

Naturally, I'd assumed some of it might have been erased, so I had restored that data as well.

"Right, because he called this phone instead." The boy took out a cell phone and showed it to me. "It's one Danny was using. He had several that he used for different purposes; this is one of the phones he left behind."

He'd left it behind—meaning Danny Bryant really wasn't anywhere near Boy

at the moment.

"And is that why you came here today?"

Now we were getting to the point. My eyes traveled to the square, cloth- wrapped bundle that Boy K. had brought in.

"I came to pay back that favor today." The boy undid the cloth, revealing several works of art. They were all pastoral landscapes. "These are all the paintings Danny had."

True, I had heard that Danny Bryant had collected antiques and art before his disappearance. That was why I was pretending to run an antique shop.

"You're saying that these paintings show where he is?" "That's my suspicion, anyway."

My deal with Boy K. had been that, in exchange for proving his innocence, he'd tell me where Danny was.

"I actually don't know where he is right now, either, so I brought these instead."

"So you're looking for him, too?"

"Yeah. In other words, our interests are aligned." But as he said it, the boy averted his eyes.

My intuition told me he was hiding something. There was no sense in pointing that out right now, though. Besides… "Why would these landscape paintings show us where Danny is?"

There had to still be information I could get out of the boy. It should be all right to let him do as he pleased for a little while.

"Danny said that if he disappeared, I should sell them. He might just have meant for me to use the money to cover my living expenses, but I… I couldn't see it that way." He met my eyes as he spoke. For some reason, he really did seem to think these oil paintings were connected to Danny Bryant's whereabouts.

Once again, I studied the paintings the boy had brought in. The paintings I'd

just seen at his apartment two days ago.

"I see."

The boy had probably brought these without knowing I'd broken in and seen them already. However, now that they were here, the pictures took on a different significance. Boy K., who had spent several years building a relationship with Danny Bryant, was convinced that there was more to them.

"I thought you might know something about what they meant."

Boy K. must still have a secret he couldn't tell me. He was hiding something. But I could tell there was something he wanted to know, too. He was looking for answers. Was this about the familial love he'd mentioned that night at the crime scene? Or was it Danny Bryant's whereabouts? —Either way…

"Client requests must be granted," I said, reminding myself.

That was the beginning of our journey in search of Danny Bryant.