Free Goth by Otsuichi Page B

dinner.
    When I reached the house where Pavlov had once lived, it was getting dark out. I rang the bell, and the same young housewife I had spoken to a couple of hours before appeared. She looked surprised to see me again, and she was no longer holding her child.
    “Sorry to bother you again, but there was something I forgot to ask. How big was Pavlov?”
    “You came all this way for that?” she said, puzzled. Then she explained that Pavlov had not been full-grown and was still on the small side.
    “Only a little bigger than a puppy?”
    “Right. But his breed can get very big, which is why his house is so large.”
    I thanked her and left.
    When the kidnapper had taken the dogs, the leash had been left behind. So how were the dogs transported? Did the kidnapper bring a leash? It would’ve been easier—and faster—to simply unhook the leash from the doghouse, if that were the case. So the kidnapper had taken the leash off the dog’s collar and carried it away.
    Now, why had the pet kidnapper chosen Pavlov and not the quiet dog across the street? I would have chosen the one that barked less simply because it would probably be easier to kidnap. But whoever was behind the pet kidnappings had not done that. My best guess was that Pavlov had been taken because he was smaller and thus easier to carry. The dog my sister’s friend had owned was also on the small side. It seemed likely that all the dogs the kidnapper had taken were small ones.
    But why pick dogs that were easy to carry? One possibility was that the culprit didn’t have a car or any other vehicle large enough to carry a dog, which would explain avoiding large dogs and choosing small ones. From all the information I’d managed to gather, I knew that the area from which dogs had gone missing was not very large. Someone with a car would have avoided carrying out the crimes in such a confined area, instead collecting dogs from all over the city.
    I remembered reading about a kind of analysis used when investigating killings done without motive, purely for the fun of it—it focused on the basis for the killer’s choice of victims. The killer in that case had unconsciously chosen targets that were weaker than himself. For example, all his victims had been less than five feet tall, not a single one of them even close to five foot three. In that case, they were able to speculate that the killer was between five feet and five feet three inches tall. Such a method of thinking might prove helpful in the missing-dog case.
    When I got home, my father had returned from work, and my family had started eating already. I told them I’d gone to the convenience store and joined the conversation, smoothly working it around so that I could ask about houses that kept dogs in the neighborhood.
    “The dog over there is really cute. I can’t imagine why they don’t keep it indoors, as small as it is,” Sakura said, somewhere in the middle of the list.
    “It must bark a lot,” my father said.
    I asked for the address. It was Tuesday night, so it was possible the kidnapper would target the house that evening.
    †
    The house in question was on the corner, an old building of Japanese construction. I looked over the wall and spotted a large garden with a doghouse at the far end. The doghouse looked handmade, like a wooden box, and there was a stake driven into the ground next to it, around which the dog’s leash was tied.
    The dog had big eyes, and the moment it saw me, it began barking furiously, jumping around. It was small enough that even a child could carry it easily.
    I moved away from the house, hiding myself in a thicket a safe distance away. There were no lights near me, and I was surrounded by darkness.
    I checked my watch. It was dark out, but when I pressed the button on my watch, a light inside it turned on so I could read the display. It was ten, the same time they had last heard Pavlov bark two weeks ago. If the kidnapper was coming here tonight, it would be