The Fire Kimono Read Online Free PDF

they’d worked together for more than twenty years.
    On Dr. Ito’s orders, Mura lugged the barrel into the morgue, which was lit by lanterns and furnished with cabinets, waist-high tables, and stone troughs for washing the dead. Mura pried up the lid. Everyone peered inside at the jumble of dirty brown bones. The only one Sano could identify was the skull.
    “Can you tell anything from that?” Marume said doubtfully.
    “Perhaps,” Dr. Ito said. “First we must wash the bones.”
    Mura fetched buckets of water and filled a trough. He gently removed the bones from the barrel, immersed them, and scrubbed them with a brush. He did all the work associated with Dr. Ito’s examinations that required handling the dead. The dirt came off the bones, but the brown stain from the earth persisted. When Mura was finished, the skeleton lay on the table like pieces of a puzzle.
    “Now we put him together,” Dr. Ito said.
    He hung a scroll on the wall, an ink drawing of a human skeleton, the bones labeled. Referring to the chart, Dr. Ito picked up the bones with tongs and assembled Tadatoshi’s skeleton. Some small bones from the hands and feet were missing; perhaps they’d been lost at the graveside. But when Dr. Ito had finished, the skeleton appeared almost whole. A moment passed in silence as everyone contemplated the structure that had once supported a human body.
    “From the size I deduce that this was a child,” Dr. Ito said.
    “Tadatoshi was fourteen when he disappeared,” Sano said.
    “He must have died not long afterward. That is to say, he didn’t live to grow up before expiring at the shrine.” Dr. Ito’s gaze moved over the skeleton. “Cause of death can be difficult to determine when the flesh and organs are gone. Let us take a closer look.”
    Dr. Ito produced a large, round magnifying lens mounted on a wooden handle. He walked around the table, peering at the bones, pausing to study features through the lens. His eyebrows rose, and he pointed at a thighbone. “Observe this marking.”
    Sano, Marume, and Fukida crowded around the table. The marking was large enough for Sano to see without the lens. It appeared to be a crack in which black dirt remained stuck.
    “Here’s another,” Dr. Ito said, “and another.” He indicated similar markings on the ribs, the arm bones.
    “They look like the cracks in oracle bones,” Fukida said.
    The serious, scholarly detective was referring to the animal bones used in magic divination rituals. Fortune-tellers heated pokers in fire and applied them to the bones, causing cracks to form. By interpreting the shapes and patterns of these cracks in the “oracle bones,” they read the future.
    “Could they be breaks from a fall or other accident?” Marume asked.
    “Unfortunately not,” Dr. Ito said. “They are cuts. From a sword blade.”
    Sano hadn’t expected the death to have been an accident. If it had, then why bury Tadatoshi in an unmarked grave and let everyone think he’d perished in the Great Fire? The breath gusted from Sano as the idea of murder entered the picture.
    “Are you sure?” he asked, wanting to be absolutely certain before he opened a box of troubles.
    “Yes. I’ve seen cuts like these many times.”
    So had Sano seen many sword wounds, but in flesh, not on bared bones after the body had decomposed. Dr. Ito turned over hand and arm bones with his tongs, displaying more cuts. “He acquired these when he tried to protect himself.”
    Sano envisioned a boy flinging up his arms as a sword slashed at him, the blade opening bloody gashes. His screams echoed across the years. “Then he was hacked to death.”
    Dr. Ito nodded. “This is definitely a case of murder. I’m curious about the swords buried with Tadatoshi. Why would the killer leave them as a clue to his identity instead of letting him remain anonymous and forestalling an inquiry into his death?”
    “That’s a good question.” As Sano gazed down at the skeleton, the sword cuts