[From the journals of Dr. John H. Watson]
The silence in our hotel suite was not merely an absence of sound; it was a physical weight, pressing down upon the chest and making the simple act of breathing a conscious, labored effort. It was the heavy, suffocating silence of a wake. Outside, the neon labyrinth of Tokyo pulsed with its electric, indifferent life, but in here, time seemed to have congealed into a thick, grey sludge.
Miss Marple had retired to her room an hour prior, the fatigue finally claiming her. She is a woman of formidable spirit, cast from the iron of a bygone age, but the events of the last few days—the betrayal of L, the gruesome death of Connor, the sheer, sprawling madness of this case—had etched deep, dark hollows beneath her gentle eyes. Her assistant, Isabelle Dubois, had excused herself as well, citing a sudden onset of dizziness and a weakness in her limbs. I suspected it was less a physical ailment and more the crushing emotional toll of our situation, a need to collapse in private away from the intense, vibrating energy of my friend.
For Sherlock Holmes was not sleeping. Indeed, I doubted he would ever sleep again.
He was pacing the length of the sitting room, a frantic, caged energy in his stride. The air was thick with the acrid, biting smoke of his cigarettes—he had abandoned the pipe for the moment, seeking the harsher, quicker hit of the paper-wrapped tobacco. He moved from the window to the desk, from the desk to the door, a pendulum swinging on a wire of nervous tension.
"It is a locked room, Watson," he muttered, not to me, but to the demons he was wrestling in the smoke. "Not a room of brick and mortar, but of silicon and code. A vault. And we have left the door behind."
I sat in the armchair, nursing a cup of tea that had gone cold an hour ago, watching him with a profound sense of helplessness. We were speaking, of course, of the laptop belonging to the late Akane Tanaka.
Earlier that evening, we had visited the Hino household in Arakawa. It was where the murdered girl had resided for the last five years, taken in by her aunt and uncle after the fire that claimed her parents. We had found the device hidden beneath a loose floorboard in her bedroom—a discovery that had initially sent a jolt of triumph through Holmes. But that triumph had been short-lived. The machine was encrypted, locked behind a password screen that stood as an impenetrable gatekeeper. And, with the police swarming the city and the shadow of Kira looming over every digital interaction, Holmes had made the agonizing decision to leave the device in situ, hidden once more in its dark recess.
"We could return for it, Holmes," I ventured, breaking the silence. "Perhaps in the morning? If we brought it here... surely there are specialists? The police have cyber-forensic divisions. Inspector Yagami struck me as an honorable man. Surely we could entrust it to him?"
Holmes spun on his heel, his dressing gown flaring around him like the wings of a great, dark bird. His eyes, usually sharp and clear, were rimmed with red, burning with a feverish intensity.
"The police, Watson?" he barked, a harsh, mirthless laugh escaping his lips. "The police are a sieve! A leaking bucket! We have seen what happens when information enters that system. It flows directly to Kira, or to this... this monster who calls himself B.B. No. To hand that laptop to the police would be to hand Akane Tanaka's soul over to her executioner a second time."
He resumed his pacing, his hands clasped behind his back, fingers twitching. "Furthermore, think of the optics, man! A British consulting detective and a retired army doctor, removing evidence from a crime scene? We are already operating on the thinnest of ice. If we are caught with that machine, we are not investigators; we are thieves. We are deportable. And then who is left to stop this madness? Miss Marple and her knitting needles?"
"But we cannot simply leave it there," I argued, though my conviction was waning. "If the secrets of Akane's death are on that hard drive..."
"They are," Holmes interrupted, stopping before the window to stare out at the Tokyo skyline. "I am certain of it. That girl... she was not merely a victim, Watson. She was a player. She was hunting something. Or someone."
He pressed his forehead against the cold glass. "There were two ways to open that oyster, Watson. Two ways. The first was brute force. A digital battering ram." His voice dropped, losing its angry edge and becoming infused with a sudden, profound melancholy. "Connor... he could have done it. He would have laid his hand upon the casing, his LED would have flashed that frantic yellow, and in ten seconds, the contents would have been spilled before us. He was the skeleton key to this entire age."
I felt a lump form in my throat at the mention of the android. I had not known the machine long, but his earnestness, his desperate desire to be more than his programming, had endeared him to me. To think of him now, scrapped and broken in that warehouse by the hand of the man we trusted... it was a bitterness I could not swallow.
"But Connor is gone," Holmes said, the steel returning to his voice as he pushed himself away from the window. "And we are left with the tools of the primitive. The mind. The logic. The second method, Watson. We must find the key."
"The password?"
"Precisely. People, even the paranoid, are creatures of sentiment. They do not choose random strings of alphanumeric gibberish. They choose anchors. Names. Dates. Truths they cannot bear to forget." Holmes began to arrange the scattered papers on the coffee table—notes we had made during our brief inspection of Akane's room. "We know she was investigating the fire. The arson that killed her parents five years ago."
"The police ruled it accidental," I reminded him. "Faulty wiring in the antique shop."
"The police are imbeciles," Holmes snapped, waving a hand dismissively. "The police saw a tragedy. Akane saw a murder. And she was right. I saw the clippings in her diary, Watson. She had tracked the burn patterns, the accelerant traces that the initial report missed. She was hunting the man who held the match. And shortly before she died... she found a name."
He picked up a photograph we had surreptitiously taken of the girl's desk. "She found the name. And that name, Watson, is the password. I would stake my reputation on it. To unlock the computer is to unlock the identity of the arsonist. The two mysteries are one and the same."
"But we have no leads on the arsonist," I said, feeling the hopelessness creep back in. "The trail is five years cold. And Akane was living with her own family. Her aunt. Surely if there were suspicions, her own flesh and blood would have acted?"
"Is it?" Holmes's eyes narrowed. He fell into the chair opposite me, pulling his knees up to his chest, adopting that peculiar, coiled posture he assumed when the pieces of a puzzle were beginning to align. "Let us re-examine the Hino household, Watson. Transport yourself back to that stifling little living room. What did you see?"
I closed my eyes, trying to summon the memory. "A modest house. Clean. Mrs. Hino was weeping, distraught over the bad news of her niece. Mr. Hino was... accommodating, though nervous. They seemed like a typical couple who had done a charitable thing, taking in an orphan."
"Charitable?" Holmes pounced on the word. "You say charitable. I say... predatory."
He began to tick points off on his long, nicotine-stained fingers. "Consider the location. The Hino residence is in Arakawa. Where was the antique shop that burned down?"
"I... I believe it was also in Arakawa," I recalled.
"Within four streets," Holmes corrected sharply. "Proximity. Coincidence number one. Now, consider the layout of the house. Akane was their niece, Watson. The daughter of Mrs. Hino's sister. Yet where was her room?"
"At the back," I said. "Near the kitchen."
"It was the scullery maid's quarters!" Holmes exclaimed. "Tiny. Poorly ventilated. While the guest room upstairs sat empty and dusted. They took her in, yes, but they did not treat her as a daughter. They treated her as a burden. Or perhaps... a prisoner."
"A prisoner?"
"Think of Mr. Hino. Takeshi Hino. How did he react when I asked to see her room?"
"He hesitated," I said slowly. "He looked at his wife. He was sweating. I attributed it to the heat and the stress of a police visit."
"The air conditioning was set to eighteen degrees Celsius, Watson. It was freezing in there. His sweat was the perspiration of guilt. And when we were in the room... did you notice the floorboards?"
"The loose one?"
"Not just that it was loose. That it was clean. The dust in that room was uniform—Akane had been dead for days, and the police had dusted for prints, leaving a mess. But around that floorboard? The dust was disturbed. Recently. After the police had left."
"Someone had looked there?"
"Or someone had tried to look there and failed to find the catch," Holmes mused. "But let us go deeper. The décor of the house. Did you notice the collection in the hallway cabinet?"
I shook my head. "I confess I did not pay it much mind. Ceramics?"
"Zippo lighters," Holmes said, his voice dropping to a whisper. "Vintage. Rare. A collector's hoard. Hundreds of them. Kept in pristine condition. Polished. Loved. A strange hobby for a man who claims to have asthma and does not smoke, wouldn't you say? Mrs. Hino made a point of mentioning his 'delicate lungs' when I lit my pipe outside."
A chill ran down my spine that had nothing to do with the air conditioning. "Pyromania?"
"A fascination with fire often manifests in the hoarding of the instruments of ignition," Holmes said. "But that is circumstantial. Let us look at the timeline. Five years ago, the Tanaka antique shop burns down. Akane's parents—Hino's in-laws—perish. The land is cleared. Who bought that land, Watson? I saw the deed on the Hino's mantelpiece, tucked behind a family photo. It was a recent purchase, framed as a triumph."
I stared at him, stunned. "Mr. Hino bought the land where his sister-in-law died?"
"And built a rental property on it," Holmes confirmed. "Profit from tragedy. The oldest motive in the human heart. Now, weave the strands together. Akane suspects the fire was not an accident. She is a genius, but she is young. She has nowhere to go. So she accepts the charity of the very man she suspects. She lives in his house. She eats his food. She smiles at him across the breakfast table, all while hunting for the proof that he murdered her parents."
"Good God," I whispered. "To live with the killer... for five years?"
"She was playing a dangerous game," Holmes said, his eyes blazing. "She was infiltrating. She searches. She finds something. Perhaps a confession, perhaps a souvenir from the fire that he kept—pyromaniacs often keep trophies. She stores this proof on her laptop. She locks it with the name of the man she hunts."
"Hino," I breathed.
"Or 'Takeshi'. Or 'Uncle'. Something connecting him," Holmes said, his fingers drumming rhythmically on his knee. "But then... B.B. enters the picture. Akane is murdered. Not by Hino, but by the serial killer. A random tragedy? Or did B.B. know? Did B.B. target her because she held a secret?"
Holmes stood up abruptly, unable to contain his energy. "But here is the crux, Watson. Why leave the laptop in the house? Why not take it to the police immediately?"
"Because she hadn't cracked the encryption herself?" I suggested.
"No. Because she was waiting for the final piece. Or..." Holmes stopped, his face paling slightly. "Or perhaps she was about to go to the police. Perhaps that is why she was at that club, why she was out that night. But she left the laptop behind as insurance. A dead man's switch. Hidden under the floor of the murderer's own house."
He turned to me, his expression grim. "The Hino household is not a sanctuary of grief, Watson. It is a den of wolves. Mr. Hino knows she was looking. He suspects she found something. He has been trying to find where she hid her evidence. That is why the dust was disturbed. He is hunting for the very laptop we left sitting in the dark."
"Good God, Holmes," I gasped, standing up. "If he finds it... if he destroys it..."
"He cannot destroy it yet," Holmes said, a dark smile playing on his lips. "Curiosity is a powerful vice. If he finds it, he will try to open it. He will want to know what she knew. He will want to know if he is safe. He will peck at that password like a bird at a seed."
"But if he is the arsonist," I reasoned, "he will never guess the password is his own name. A man like that is arrogant, but he is not introspective."
"Precisely," Holmes said. "Which buys us time. But not much. We must get that laptop, Watson. And we must do it before Mr. Hino realizes that the girl he called 'niece' was the daughter of the people he burned alive."
He moved to the window again, looking out at the sprawling city, his silhouette sharp against the city glow. "We cannot use the police. We cannot use brute force. We must steal it. We must commit a burglary, Watson. You and I. Two old men against a murderer and a city of ghosts."
He turned back to me, and for the first time in days, the manic grief was gone, replaced by the cold, hard glint of the hunt.
"Get some rest, Watson. Tomorrow, we do not investigate. Tomorrow, we trespass."
I looked at my friend, saw the determination in his eyes, and knew that any protest was futile. The game, as he was so fond of saying, was afoot, and it was a game being played in the shadows of a world that had lost its mind.
"Very well, Holmes," I said, picking up my cold tea and setting it down again. "But if we are to be burglars... I insist we at least bring your lockpicks."
"I never leave home without them," Holmes replied, and in the darkness of the room, I fancied I saw the ghost of a smile.