His voice gave out and he knelt down on the soaked pavement.

“Yoshino!” he cried out one last time to the sky. But no matter how long he waited, she did not appear again on the foggy mountain road.

It kept on raining and his wet clothes were heavy.

Daddy, I’m so sorry.

Trembling now in the cold, Yoshio heard his daughter’s voice again in his ear. “Yoshino…” he murmured once more. The name fell to the wet pavement and formed a ripple in a puddle.

“I’ll never forgive him! Never!” Yoshio pounded the wet pavement a few times with his fist. Blood oozed out from his hand, into the freezing rain.

Finally, he stood up in the rain and with his bloody hand picked up one of the wilted bouquets of flowers someone had left by the roadside.

“I’m telling you there’s no way. Me a murderer? Kill that kind of woman? You gotta be kidding!”

Victoriously, Keigo Masuo went to the counter to get his second beer, then happily began to gulp it down. He’d been questioned by the police for just one night, but was acting as if he’d been released from jail after many years.

Seated on the sofa were a dozen or so of Keigo’s friends, including Koki Tsuruta. As Keigo stood there downing his beer, they looked up at him almost reverently.

Koki had barely touched his beer, but now he took a sip. As the group discussed what they had thought when they heard that Keigo had disappeared, they were so loud they drowned out the late afternoon music in the café, and even the clatter when a waitress dropped a plate.

It was after two that afternoon when they’d received an e-mail from Keigo. Koki had been in his apartment, asleep as usual, when the e-mail came in saying that anybody who wanted to hear what had happened should drop everything and come to the Monsoon Café in Tenjin. Koki was sure it was a practical joke, but a few minutes later Keigo phoned him. “Did ja see the message?” he said in a carefree voice. “You gotta come. I’ll tell you all about life on the run.” Koki had a million things he wanted to ask him, but Keigo just laughed. “Too much trouble to repeat the story to everyone individually, so I’d like to just tell it once to everyone.” And then he abruptly hung up.

The Monsoon was the kind of upscale café college students liked, where they served alcohol during the day, and the food and prices were reasonable enough. The kind of place where the management spent all its money on the interior design.

When Koki got there, ten or so people were already waiting for Keigo, but the guest of honor had yet to arrive. They all knew Keigo had been arrested in Nagoya, and were loudly speculating about how he had to be innocent, since the police had let him go.

When Keigo showed up outside the glass-enclosed café, a shout rose from among his friends. Some young girls, bent over their uninspired lunches, looked up to see what the commotion was about.

As Keigo came in, he winked at a waitress he apparently knew, and announced, “I, Keigo Masuo, have now been freed!” and spread wide his arms and bowed. Some of his friends clapped, others burst out laughing.

Keigo started off by telling his impatient fans why he was late. Earlier that morning, he’d been completely cleared of all charges by the police and released, and had gone back to his condo to take a shower. Which perhaps explained why he didn’t have the pathetic look of a runaway criminal that his friends had pictured.

As soon as Keigo sat down among them, they peppered him with questions: “Okay, so what really happened?” “You really didn’t kill her, right?” “If you didn’t, then why run away?” Keigo stopped them and turned to the vacant-looking waitress standing there and ordered a Belgian beer.

“One at a time, guys… I guess you could say it was simply a misunderstanding on my part.”

“A misunderstanding?” everyone around the table asked.

“Yeah, you could say that. I don’t know where to start. Hey, did they redecorate this place?”

Keigo was the one who’d called them all together, but he seemed to find the conversation kind of boring. Koki, sitting beside him, tried to get the story back on track. “Why don’t you start by telling us what happened that night,” he asked.

“Yeah, right, that night…” Keigo glanced up at the ceiling fan, then looked back at them. “Well, it’s true I was with that girl that night,” he began. “I was feeling kind of irritated. You guys get that way sometimes, right? There’s no real reason for it, but you feel kind of disgusted by things, and then you can’t sit still.”

The young men all nodded.

“It happens, am I right? Well, that night I was feeling like that, so I decided to get in my car and race around. I was driving around and had to piss, so I stopped at the Higashi Park, and that’s where I ran into her.”

“Did you know her?” the man seated farthest from Keigo asked, leaning out over the table.

“Uh, yeah, I did. Koki, you knew her, too, right? Remember those three girls who worked for an insurance company we met at a bar in Tenjin? The ones who were like fresh off the farm? Some of you must have been there that night?”

Several of his friends finally remembered. “Yeah, that’s right,” they said.

“It was one of them. After that, she wouldn’t let up with the e-mails. Oh, yeah-that’s right! The police checked out my phone and there were still a few of her messages on it. You want to see them?”

Want to see some e-mail from that girl who was murdered at Mitsuse Pass? Keigo was proudly asking them, and the group of men leaned forward expectantly. For a second, Koki had a creepy, bad feeling about it, but he was carried along by the enthusiasm of the others, so he felt he couldn’t object.

Keigo pulled out his cell phone and scrolled through his e-mails. “So anyway, I happened to run across that girl that night and gave her a ride. That was my first mistake…”

He paused, then continued. “She was looking at me with these dreamy, please-take-me-somewhere eyes. Like I said, I was in a bad mood, so I just thought, Why not take this slutty girl somewhere, get it on, and that might make me feel better. So I gave her a ride. But she’d apparently had gyoza and her breath stank, and that sort of made me lose interest. So anyway, after we drove up to Mitsuse Pass I couldn’t stand being with her anymore and left her there.”

Keigo was roughly scrolling through the messages on his phone, apparently having trouble locating the older ones. His friends grew impatient watching his fingers move.

“If you just left her there, then why run away?” somebody asked, and Keigo’s fingers stopped. He looked up and grinned.

“The girl didn’t want to get out, so finally I got physical. I wasn’t really thinking. And she hit her neck and it wound up like I was strangling her.”

As one, the men surrounding him gulped.

“No, that isn’t why she died. I was just pushing her out the door and accidentally pushed against her neck, that’s all. But when I heard that that girl had died there, at the pass, and there wasn’t anyone else around at the time, I jumped to the wrong conclusion and thought, Wow, what if that was why she died…”

Keigo laughed, trying to ease the tension, and gradually his laughter spread to the others. Koki, however, felt disgusted. He looked around, but he was the only one with a grimace on his face.

“So that’s why you went on the lam for a couple of weeks?” someone asked, and Keigo nodded sheepishly.

“As the girl was getting out of the car, I gave her a huge shove with my foot and she fell out and hit her head on the guardrail… But she didn’t really get hurt or anything.”

As Keigo nonchalantly continued, Koki felt as if he was going to vomit. Just as Koki was about to stand up, Keigo finally located the old e-mails.

“Oh, I got it! Here they are.”