Chapter 159 (2/2)
「…I understand. If I do think of something, I’ll let you know.」
「Well, then.」
Miyakawa and Onishi stood from their chairs and after taking a long bow left the room.
☆
「…Miyakawa, you need to stop that. I know how you feel, but there’s also what happened last month. If we don’t handle this correctly, public opinion will turn against us.」
「Yeah, yeah, I know. I just wanted to make sure he had no memories.」
After we left the hospital, Miyakawa said and slowly shrugged his shoulders.
「It’s been a year of noise since this happened and we still haven’t found even one clue…there is one strange thing about the Ukei family that we have to investigate. The boy is in the center of the group disappearance, the same day his parents fall and die, his aunt and grandmother disappear, and the sister gets away from the phenomena that happened at the school. There has to be some connection.」
「Well, he’s the only one that had returned, so you can’t say that he has no relation to all of this. I mean, can we even categorize all that as coincidental? There’s no way to say the younger sister is related, so don’t make a big deal of it. Still, it does suck to be treated everyday as those『worthless and lazy cops』by the community.」
「Hah hah hah, they’re always going to see us as worthless, Onishi-kun. Since we’ve had no breakthroughs, we pretty much have been just wasting time.」
I sighed, and then simply laughed to myself.
However, I still wasn’t happy about anything. Even with all of this, I felt pretty sympathetic to Ukei.
He was the victim in this, after all, and if he could have helped us in any way, he would.
「Okay, if we can’t get this resolved immediately, we can at least start cleaning it up. The first thing is we can make this guy some good live bait.」
「…in order to do that without having to do some dangerous stuff, we can’t lop off the local thug’s heads to blame them and cover it up, it will get us in trouble with Public Safety.」
A scandal unheard of in today’s police force.
If dead bodies came from it, then the trust in the police wouldn’t have hit rock bottom.
Since the upper echelon of the police couldn’t conceal the whole affair because everyone knew about it, from that, everyone thought the police had messed up investigating the whole disappearance.
「Hah hah hah, of course it’s impossible. No matter how much criminals’ heads you cut, they always grow back!」
「…anyway, I don’t want to be the target of any more criticism. I’m the one put here to watch over you, so don’t piss me off.」
「Yeah, sorry. But still, don’t worry, because I’m ready to take the fall for it if something bad happens.」
「Miyakawa!」
「Hah hah hah」
What a jerk.
Because of this guy, even an able cop like me gets glared at from my superiors.
「So anyway, Onishi, you believe that rumor? If it’s right, then I wonder where the kid came home from.」
「The rumor, do you mean THAT rumor?」
One motive for the incident was a story that would make any normal person fall down laughing.
One person that saw the event stated that the people involved went to an alternate world.
「Well, it does make you think though. This time there was no video of the event, but he did arrive back wearing some kind of fantastic outfit.」
「Onishi, you’ve still got that hard head of yours. No matter how many times I’ve seen that picture, no matter how many times I’ve seen his clothes, I still can’t believe a weird occult story like that…but I almost believed it after seeing the boy today.」
Miyakawa said it with a calm and composed manner, but when he saw that picture of the boy, he looked quite weak.
「I wonder what life that boy lived when he was gone. He looked scared…like he was about to be killed by some opponent’s fists.」
「…」
After saying that Miyakawa, who said he’d quit smoking, lit up a cigarette.
The reason that I thought the boy wasn’t just some kid was the way he looked at us.
…he looked shaken…like a boy that had come upon a wounded bear while hunting with his father.