Whatever Happened to Lucie Blackman?

I had to make a call to Tim Blackman, in Britain. I’d promised I would.

He wanted to know what had happened to his daughter Lucie as soon as I did. Mr. Blackman had so alienated the Tokyo Metropolitan Police in his quest to find her that he was the last person they would talk to about anything. They knew that anything they told him would be told to the press, and they didn’t like it. He realized they weren’t going to keep him up to date. He wanted to hear from someone he knew, rather than read about it in the paper. I’d promised that when there was definite news I would call and tell him, day or night, anytime. This was the time.

Lucie Blackman, his oldest daughter, had gone missing on July 1, 2000. I didn’t know it then, but the case would be a pivotal moment in my career. There was a whole world of sleaze and sexual exploitation beneath the veneer of Japan’s happy-go-lucky, in-your-face sex industry that I didn’t know anything about. The words “human trafficking” weren’t in my vocabulary or even in my realm of awareness. It would be years after this case that I finally made sense of what I would see while looking for Lucie.

Lucie, a British national, came to Japan on May 4, 2000. She had been working as a stewardess for British Airways part-time, but her best friend, Louise Phillips, had convinced her that there were good times to be had and good money to be made by coming to Japan and working as a hostess. Lucie had piled up some debts in Britain and the stewardess gig was leaving her feeling constantly tired because of her problems dealing with jet lag. A “paid vacation” or “working holiday” sounded good to her.

Louise’s sister had spent a few years in Japan working as a hostess; she knew the tricks of the trade and the profit potential. Lucie and Louise arrived in Japan together on tourist visas and promptly found lodging in a dodgy gaijin house—an apartment building where the majority of the residents were foreigners, the deposits were low, and the usual honorarium to the landlord, “key money,” wasn’t required. The checks on visas were almost nonexistent.

Legally, you cannot work in Japan on a tourist visa. In reality, at the time it was generally tolerated by the authorities. Most foreign girls working as hostesses in Japan then were made to understand, after a few weeks, that they were working illegally because that way the management could use it as leverage in salary negotiations and anything else that came up.

Tall and blond, Lucie was an amazingly attractive woman. She and Louise headed for Roppongi. Roppongi, which literally means “Six Trees,” has long been the gathering place where foreigners in Japan and Japanese who want to mingle with foreigners meet, merge, and mate. In the bubbly late eighties, it was a high-dollar area with elaborate discos that charged $30 just to get in the door and had rigid dress codes as well. However, when the bubble crashed, so did the doors keeping out the riffraff, and gradually the area was taken over by cheaper hostess pubs, small nightclubs, sexual massage parlors, prostitution bars, after-hour bars where drugs were readily available, and huge clubs catering to the pond scum of the foreign population with cheap booze and no entrance fees. The classy clubs had moved toward Nishi-Azabu, leaving the old Roppongi to stew in its juices.

Some nameless Japanese neophyte of English had nicknamed Roppongi “High-Touch Town.” The emblem is engraved into the wall of a concrete overpass that runs over Roppongi Crossing. It is in many ways similar to Kabukicho but seedier and full of gaijin: thus, the “Gaijin Kabukicho.” The Azabu police had long since lost interest in cleaning the area up because if there were any crimes going on there, the victims were mostly foreigners. When Lucie arrived, the area was really just beginning to turn from seedy to sleazy.

•    •    •

By the ninth, Lucie and Louise were both working at Casablanca, a hostess club, just catty-corner to Seventh Heaven, Roppongi’s first foreign female strip bar. There were nine other girls working at the club at the time, all of them blond except Louise. Their pay was 5,000 yen, roughly $50 an hour. The pay was supplemented by drinkbacks^1* as well as specific requests for an individual.

Three weeks later, on July 1, Lucie called Louise from Shibuya, telling her, “I’m meeting a customer from the club, and he’s going to buy me a cell phone. I’m so excited.” In the evening she called Louise again to tell her that she was on the way home, but she never made it,

On July 3, Louise got a very strange call on her cell phone. It was from a Japanese man calling himself “Akira Takagi.” He told Louise, “Lucie has entered a cult in Chiba Prefecture. She can’t come home. Don’t worry about her.”

Now Louise was very worried. She went to the British Embassy and asked for advice and then went to the Azabu police station to file a missing persons report. The Azabu police did not want to take the case from the outset. However, the embassy had been notified and the mysterious phone call was impossible to ignore. If it hadn’t been for that phone call, there might never have been a real investigation. On the ninth, the TMPD Investigative Division (homicide, robberies and other violent crimes) officially decided to take over the case. It was out of the hands of the local cops and now a problem for headquarters.

Around that time, I got a call from a senior police reporter, Nishijima, aka Pablo, asking me to help cover the story, though it wasn’t really a story yet; the TMPD hadn’t made an official announcement, and the Yomiuri was just beginning its prep work. The details of Lucie’s disappearance were still very vague. Pablo warned me to keep my mouth shut about it for the time being.

I liked Pablo a lot; he was a good reporter and a gentleman to boot. Yamamoto and Pablo were both on the TMPD police beat, covering violent crimes and international crimes (Investigative Division 1 and International Crimes Division). Pablo was Yamamoto’s right-hand man.

Pablo didn’t look like a Japanese guy. He had an American ancestor somewhere in his family tree, giving him an almost Latin look. One of our coworkers used to joke that there were really three foreigners in the National News Department: a Mongolian (Yamamoto), a Jew (myself), and a Mexican (Pablo).

On the phone, Pablo was refreshingly point-blank: “Well, Jake, it looks like you might actually be useful for a change. The victim is a foreigner and all her friends are foreigners. We need someone who can blend in and also talk to people who know her and her family. That would be you. Are you interested?”

Absolutely, I assured him.

Honestly, at the time I thought the whole thing was being overblown. I assumed that Lucie was just another gaijin hostess who had taken off to Thailand or Bali with her boyfriend or her sugar daddy and just forgotten to notify anyone.

Nonetheless, I applied for permission to abandon my usual duties and help the TMPD team for a few weeks. On July 9, when the investigation officially began, I went to the TMPD headquarters, was waved in, and went up to the ninth floor. Pablo and Yamamoto were waiting for me. Misawa, the boss and captain of the TMPD press club, was passed out on the couch. The office looked the same as it had in 1993, although the copy of Madonna’s Sex had long since vanished from the bookshelf.

Yamamoto was in good spirits and greeted me warmly. “Jake, long time no see. Still doing heroin?”

“No, Yamamoto. I’m just selling it to schoolchildren now. I don’t use anymore.”

“Is that so? No wonder you’re getting so fat.”

It was true. Not that I had stopped doing heroin (or ever had done heroin), but I had gotten pretty fat.

Yamamoto, on the other hand, had lost a lot of weight—perhaps too much. Of all the assignments you can get on the police beat, the homicide/violent crimes beat is the toughest. It had taken its toll on him. Vice isn’t an easy beat, but you rarely get called out in the middle of the night for a bust. Vice is not a spontaneous crime. I learned this covering the Fourth District. The social impact of a police raid on a sex club or the seizure of pornographic DVDs was nominal at best and not the kind of news story that required immediate and deep coverage. Most of the time, what the vice squad did, if it was announced at all, never made it into the newspapers. Oh, you had to write up the articles but with the understanding that it was more than likely to be work in vain. Homicide and violent crimes are different. In a country where murders are rare, they are almost always big stories. They happen and are discovered at odd, inconvenient hours, and as news stories they have a real immediacy. You have to be on the scene quickly, and the competition is fierce to get a scoop on those kinds of sensational stories. I didn’t envy Yamamoto.

Pablo, on the other hand, probably because he was the guy on the ground floor rather than the middle manager, seemed to be entirely in his element. He quickly brought me up to speed on the case, referring to his notes. The cops had the following intel on Lucie at that point in time:

On the day Lucie vanished, she was last seen wearing a black dress with black sandals and a black bag. Her wallet was of brown alligator skin and folded in half, with a little change inside. She wore a heart-shaped diamond necklace and a square Armani wristwatch. She had worked for close to a year and a half for British Airways as a flight attendant. Her father had not forbidden her to go to Japan; Lucie had money, and he’d sent her money as well. She had told her parents it was possible to go sightseeing in Japan and earn a little money doing odd jobs. She did not intend to stay long.

The TMPD did not believe the cult story, especially in the context of the previous events. The homicide cops were already convinced that she’d probably been kidnapped and killed by one of the customers from the club. They were highly doubtful that Akira Takagi even existed; he was more than likely a fake identity created by the person responsible for her disappearance.

They were putting some guys from the homicide squad on the case, including a few detectives who spoke English (or who couldn’t really but wanted to speak English) and had experience with sex crimes. Pablo gave me the names of the detectives in charge. I knew one of them already.

Yamamoto came over to join us while Pablo continued the briefing.

“Well, what do you want me to do?”

Yamamoto took the lead. “We want you to go talk to people at the gaijin house she was staying at and start looking around Roppongi for people who knew her, for anyone who might have been a customer. You must have some friends there, right?”

In actuality, I avoided Roppongi like the plague. Most of my friends were Japanese. I was more comfortable hanging out in Kabukicho, Shibuya, Ebisu, or even Korea Town. I had Sunao, so I didn’t need to or want to pick up an easy Roppongi girl for some no-strings-attached sex. I didn’t do drugs, nor did I have a fascination with big-breasted foreign strippers, discos, or expensive restaurants. I had no desire to fraternize with other gaijin. Roppongi was as foreign to me as it was to Pablo or Yamamoto.

So I told that to Yamamoto.

He just shook his head. “You’re an American, and you don’t go to Roppongi and you don’t know the rules of baseball. You must not be a real American. You’re really a North Korean spy, aren’t you. Confess.”

Pablo joined in. “Even I go to Roppongi now and then, and I’m Japanese.”

“Pablo-san, you look more like a foreigner than I do. This is why people call you Pablo. You belong in Roppongi. I’m sure the Filipino girls love you.”

“Is that so, Adelstein? Hey, at least I don’t look like an Iranian.”

While Pablo and I were trading crude insults about our ethnic appearances, Yamamoto pulled a wad of cash out of his pocket and handed it to me.

“What’s this for?”

“I don’t go to Roppongi much,” explained Yamamoto, “but I know one thing. It’s an expensive playground. Get receipts, if you can.”

I had no idea where to start looking, but I figured Lucie’s old club would be the best place. Unfortunately, when I arrived, there was a sign on the door stating CLOSED FOR RENOVATION. Not an auspicious start.

On July 12, the TMPD officially announced that it was conducting an investigation into the disappearance of Lucie Blackman. The Japanese newspaper coverage was subdued, but within days it became a major story in England.

I was spending every night in Roppongi scouring the streets for anyone who knew Lucie. I came across as so horribly geeky and uncomfortable that no one would talk to me. I had spent so much time immersed in an all-Japanese environment that I was having trouble speaking English. I stuttered. I probably sounded like a Japanese person trying to speak English. I must have given off a cop vibe.

And then around July 20, 2000, a very strange letter was delivered to the Azabu police, supposedly from Lucie Blackman herself.

The letter was postmarked from Chiba Prefecture, where Lucie was supposedly undergoing spiritual training. It told the police and her family to give up searching for her. The Azabu cops thought it was either a cheap prank or an attempt by the assailant to divert the investigation. One of the cops on the squad, whom I knew from the Fourth District, showed me the letter and asked me for my opinion. The cop had a strange name for a Japanese guy, so weird that he had to write the reading of it on his meishi so that people could make sense of it. I also think he had a thyroid condition, because his eyes literally bulged out of his head. His fellow cops, noticing this as cops are prone to do, nicknamed him Googly.

It was clear to me that the letter had been written by a Japanese person posing as a native speaker. The misuse of “a” and “the” and the stiffness of the prose, combined with a penchant for double negatives, clearly indicated that it had been written by a Japanese national. It was not a bad attempt but not a convincing one either. If I’d gotten anything out of teaching English conversation in Japan, it was a working knowledge of the quirks of Japanese English, aka Japlish. I explained as much to Googly, and he seemed convinced.

The next day Tim Blackman set up a special hotline to collect information regarding Lucie.

The first week of August came and went. Lucie had come to Japan on a ninety-day tourist visa. If she was still in Japan, she was now an illegal alien.

Tim Blackman came back to Japan, and it was a media circus. At a press conference at the British Embassy, he announced a reward of 1.5 million yen (about $15,000) for information leading to the rescue or discovery of Lucie. Meanwhile, the police were slowly uncovering the true identity of the mysterious Akira Takagi but still had no information on the current whereabouts of Lucie.

Lucie’s birthday came on September 1. She would have been twenty-two.

I still had nothing solid on Lucie either. The only thing that sounded promising was information about a man who went by the name of Yuji. Yuji had long hair tinged with gray. He was a frequent customer at the foreign hostess clubs in Roppongi, Akasaka, and Ginza. He dressed well and spent copious amounts of money in every club he visited; he preferred blondes. No one had seen Yuji since late June. No one had his business card, and no one had a photo of him either.

•    •    •

Getting information about Lucie would require fitting into the Roppongi nightlife. It couldn’t be done by declaring myself a reporter. A lot of the foreigners there were working illegally. They didn’t trust cops or journos. So I created a fake identity.

I couldn’t pretend to be a counterculture, hip, cool gaijin guy/DJ/English teacher on the prowl in Roppongi. I’m not the type. The best I could hope for was to be perceived as another well-paid, sleazy foreign businessman. The phenotype was in ample supply, so it wasn’t hard to learn to imitate them. I got a better suit, took off my necktie, chatted up the girls in the bars, and stopped asking too many questions. I contemplated getting an earring, but that seemed as though it would be too much.

I made up a fake name for myself and an occupation that was close to what I was really doing: an insurance investigator. I made a fake business card, got a second cell phone, and spent every weekend in the dregs of Roppongi looking for someone who knew Lucie or the customer who’d taken her to the seaside.

I took the information about Yuji and passed it to my boss; I also passed it along to Googly. I thought about sharing my source with Pablo but couldn’t get myself to do it. Sources are things you can’t help but hoard for yourself.

The only other solid piece of information I had was that Yuji used to frequent a place called Club Codex. I went to check it out. It was run by a Japanese man called Slick.

As soon as I walked into Club Codex, I knew there was something a little different going on. Oh, it appeared to be a typical hostess club. It had the low lights, the fake potted plants, the velvety sofas and tables, the crystal decanters of whiskey and water perched on tables. However, the clientele seemed a little scruffier than most and the Eastern European women there did not seem to be enjoying themselves. Their smiles were forced; they seemed skittish. At that time, I had no idea what was really going on in the club; later I did. I casually mentioned Yuji to one of the girls and was asked to leave almost immediately. I took that as confirmation that Yuji had been there and that they were aware he was under investigation or going to be under investigation. I had one other piece of information from the trip. The Estonian girl who’d been chatting me up had said, “Yuji? It sounds like you’re talking about Georgie.”

Georgie? Yuji? The same guy with different aliases? I had no idea.

I’m not sure the police made contact with Slick after I passed on my information to them or whether Slick made contact with the police on his own. In any event, around this time, Slick began spilling his guts to the TMPD.

A few years before, one of Slick’s girls had been raped by “Yuji,” a frequent customer at the bar. Yuji had invited her on a leisurely drive to the coast, then taken her to the Izu Marina in Yokohama. Finally he took her to his apartment in Zushi, plied her with wine that was drugged, and then raped her. She’d been furious and wanted to go to the police. Slick had apparently talked her out of it. He had not forbidden Yuji to come to the club after the incident but had warned the girls to be wary of him. He passed along the name of the marina where his employee had been taken and all the information he had. It turned out to be a break for the investigation.

The other name that kept coming up in talks with the locals was Joji Obara. Obara was a rich real estate owner and property developer, age forty-eight, who frequented the foreign hostess clubs in Roppongi on a regular basis. He sounded a lot like Yuji. I passed on what I had heard to the cops. They had already heard about him.

By October 1, Obara was definitely a suspect. On October 12, the police arrested him for sexual assault in a different case.

The press release was very succinct:

After the press release was issued, a very short press conference was held. Here’s how it went:

I think Googly summed Obara up best: “He’s a sick fuck.”

The prosecutors would later conclude that “from as early as 1973, Obara would repeatedly lure women into his apartment in Zushi and give them drinks laced with drugs that caused sleepiness or impaired functioning, and when they would lose consciousness he would engage them in illicit sex (or sexually assault them) and then record the acts on videotape or other medium. He called this ‘subjugation play.’”

The case of one of the first victims to come forward was a template of Obara’s crimes. It’s dry and detached, but this is the pattern.

From the Prosecutor’s Opening Statements in one of the Obara trials:

That was what he’d done—allegedly more than a hundred times.^2*

After October 16, with each passing day, more and more evidence surfaced proving that Obara was a serial rapist and also connecting him to Lucie’s disappearance. After Lucie vanished, Obara showed up at an apartment in Miura that he had not used for years. He was spotted with his hands covered in concrete. He refused to let the caretaker of the apartment into his room. He was caught trying to change the lock of the caretaker’s apartment; he had mistaken it for his own. He was seen at a nearby beach with a shovel.

The caretaker was suspicious and reported him to the police. When they showed up, Obara would not let them in. Traces of concrete were found in his apartment.

Of course, a lot of people wondered why the police hadn’t searched his apartment then. There were no good answers.

In October, before his arrest, Obara purchased an expensive motorboat without even bothering to look at it. The TMPD believed that he was planning to use the boat to destroy evidence linking him to the crime.

The police analyzed the drugs taken from Obara’s homes and found several different kinds of sleeping pills, which were probably used in sexually assaulting not only foreign women but Japanese women too.

Once it leaked out that the victims had included Japanese women, the media frenzy increased.

The most damning evidence was the videotapes. The police were able to confirm more than a hundred videotapes of Obara sexually assaulting mostly Caucasian women. The tapes were recorded on 8 mm and VHS cartridges. The police had collected the tapes from his former home in Setagaya Ward as well as his second home, a condominium in the Zushi area of Kanagawa Prefecture. All of the women appeared to be unconscious and unable to resist Obara’s assaults.

Lucie was not on any of the tapes. The tapes were in semichronological order, but no tapes had been made around the period when Lucie had vanished. At the end of October, the Tokyo District Public Prosecutor’s Office officially indicted Obara on the first of many charges.

Unfortunately, Obara was still not talking. No one should have been surprised. The man had graduated from the law department of Keio University. He knew the law, and he knew how the police worked.

The cops tried the standard ploy: “If you don’t tell us where Lucie is buried, her spirit will never rest in peace.”

It didn’t work. Not only did Obara initially refuse to admit knowing Lucie at all, he claimed that all the victims had been paid prostitutes who had willingly consented to having sex with him.

The big question was still this: had anyone seen Obara and Lucie together?

I was supposed to find out. If we could find a witness to that, not only would we have a scoop but we’d have something to trade with the cops, information they wanted. It would be the equivalent of two scoops.

Yamamoto had high hopes that I would get something.

“Adelstein,” he said, patting me on the back while we sat at the counter of Propaganda in Roppongi, “do you know the saying ‘ja no michi wa hebi’?”

“Yes. I think in English that would be translated as ‘the snake knows the way of the serpent.’”

“Exactly. You’re a gaijin, the victim is a gaijin, the victim’s family are gaijin, the witnesses are probably gaijin. Obara himself is probably Korean-Japanese, making him also a gaijin, so you’re the perfect reporter to follow the story from the nonpolice side. Bring me back something good.”

“I’ll do my best.”

“Don’t do your best. Use your brain. Get results. Effort doesn’t count for shit. I appreciate it, but it’s the results that count.”

“All right, I’ll do a half-assed job, but I’ll bring back something interesting.”

“Exactly.”

He bought me another drink and then headed off to try to catch one of the detectives at his home.

I had now spent several weeks going to hostess bars and strip bars in Roppongi. At first it was kind of exciting and fun. Enough alcohol and pheromones could make you forget that ultimately what you were researching was something tragic and sinister. Nudity, sexy dances, flirtation, alcohol, the scent of sweat and perfume, being fondled by women clearly above my pay grade, having my shoulders rubbed and having the Yomiuri pay for it all—it was not unpleasant.

After a week, though, the appeal faded. You notice the lines under the women’s eyes, you get to know their backgrounds, you see the bruises on their arms. You can hear the Japanese managers discussing the women like so many cattle. If you’re approachable, which I am, the girls will began to tell you how the system really works. They’re not enjoying themselves and many of the girls working there see you as an enemy to be crushed, a con to be milked. Not fun anymore.

My daughter, Beni, was born in September of that year, and I would have preferred to be home, hanging out with Sunao and interacting with the little rug rat, but instead I was spending every night in sleazy, poorly lit bars. Sunao knew where I was going and she understood the job, so it didn’t bother her much. She’d been a journalist herself, and she knew that when I’d become a shakaibu reporter, if we had children, she’d essentially be a single mother.

I remember sitting in Private Eyes one night, an Indian woman with gigantic breasts on my lap. As she stuffed her nipples into my face, I could think only one thing: I wonder if Beni is breast-feeding right now?

I made repeated trips to Outline.^3* Obara had been a frequent customer there, and the owner had a picture of him, one less than twenty years old. I made no bones about being a reporter from my first visit; I knew he could tell. But he let me talk to the women as long as I paid for their company. There were women who knew Obara and some who knew Lucie as well. Lucie, because she was tall and friendly, had made a name for herself in a small area of Roppongi. She was well liked. I found one girl who knew Obara and Lucie, but no one who had seen them together. I kept getting that hammered into my head by my boss: find someone who can connect the two, and we’ll have a scoop.

According to the manager of Outline, when Obara had come to the club he always had a bodyguard with him, a thuggish-looking guy who also doubled as his driver. He was a short, sturdy guy. The mama-san said that Obara and his bodyguard looked a lot alike, except Obara had longer hair tinged with gray.

She added that Obara had a Korean face as well.

“What’s a Korean face look like?” I asked the mama-san.

“Someone with a face like Obara’s bodyguard.”

Obara’s face was more square than round, she added; he didn’t talk much, and he seemed kind of gloomy. This information wasn’t very helpful.

I went to Seventh Heaven, thinking maybe Lucie had made friends with some of the girls there. The foreign worker community in Roppongi at the time was very small.

The basic setup of the club was typical of most strip clubs in the area; a small round wooden stage with a pole, slightly elevated, with a curtain behind it. The room was very dark; speakers were built into the ceiling. Groups of seats and sofas were situated around the stage. On the far left was the private dance area, blocked off by a thick curtain. There were three booths in the private dance area, with armless chairs in each booth.

During a private dance, the customer sits and the girl gyrates on top of him, in dry-hump fashion, for the duration of one song—for 7,000 yen. She might tongue your ear or feel up your crotch, but no more than that. Squeezing breasts is permitted but nippling (sucking on the breasts) is acceptable only for a regular customer or someone who has paid for at least three private dances. It was just understood.

There was one girl, Mindy, who would always talk to me. Greedy Mindy. She was the only redhead in the place, short with huge breasts (maybe natural) and quite attractive in an Irish sort of way. She could milk a customer like a dairymaid with a fecund cow. I bought her some drinks, and while she sat on my lap, she whispered in my ear what was happening. She said that that evening, right before the club had opened, two detectives from the TMPD had visited the club and shown the manager a black-and-white photo. There were two men in the photo, one with his arm around the other guy’s shoulder; the man in the center you could see clearly; the other guy’s face was cropped out of the picture.

The police asked the manager if he recognized the man, and the manager said he did. Mindy hadn’t heard the rest of the conversation. The man was Obara.

The Yomiuri wanted more information.

It wasn’t easy to get. The women didn’t like reporters. One very attractive potential source called me “an asshole” to my face. Ouch.

I spent the night of October 14 trying a new tactic. As a customer I wasn’t getting too far, and I decided that what I needed was a proxy, someone the girls would be less wary of. I called up Kristin, a tall, buxom, blond Montana girl, and asked her to help me out. She was married to my best friend from college. She was actually excited to play private eye and met me in Roppongi the same night after finishing her job teaching English.

Here is the cover story and the plan we’d worked out: Kristin would be looking for a job as a hostess/stripper, and I would be her boyfriend. The City News Department was running out of money, and by visiting the clubs for “job interviews” we would get in free and maybe get some valuable intelligence.

Mindy was sitting at a table by herself when we got to Seventh Heaven. The manager had us wait inside while he called his boss to set up an impromptu interview. They were always looking for new, big-breasted blond women to display, and Kristin fit the bill.

As soon as Kristin and I sat down, Mindy sat herself between the two of us.

She turned to me.

“Well, who’s your lovely friend? I’m Mindy.”

“I’m Kristin,” my friend answered. “I’m thinking of working here. How’s the job?”

“Well,” said Mindy, now knee to knee with Kristin, “if you like men, it’s a good job. Good pay. Although, men, men, men all the time. It gets a little boring. Men are so hard, so cold.”

As Mindy was lamenting the coldness of men, her hands went to Kristin’s knees and then up to Kristin’s breasts. Gently kneading them, she leaned forward, her lips approaching Kristin’s neck—and then I snapped the back of Mindy’s bra, hard, and she pulled back. Kristin was looking uncomfortable. She sipped from the glass of orange juice the bartender had brought her.

“Why’d you have to do that?” Mindy glared at me and puffed out her lower lip, pouting. “I know,” she said, suddenly looking happy. “You’re jealous. You don’t want to share me with your girlfriend. I’ll give you a special, long private dance just so you know you still have a special place in my heart.”

“I’m not here for a private dance tonight.”

Mindy wasn’t fazed. She slipped her arm around Kristin’s shoulder, playing with her hair, adding, “I’d be delighted to give a private dance to a woman, as well.” Kristin looked at Mindy for a second and then burst out laughing, almost shooting orange juice out her nose. I told Mindy that if she could get me Obara’s photo, I’d pay for four private dances and she could just sit there and paint her nails. Her eyes lit up.

Kristin noticed that Mindy had a diamond-studded Rolex on her wrist. Mindy explained that a customer had given it to her.

“You would not believe this asshole who gave it to me. He thinks because he gave me a fancy little watch that he owns this sweet little ass. He could not be more wrong.”

Mindy had already been drinking for some time before we’d come, and I think the part of her brain playing gatekeeper to her mouth had long since shut down. Maybe it was because Kristin was there, but for whatever reason, she went into a monologue about hostess/strippers and how they viewed their customers. It wasn’t positive.

After Seventh Heaven, Kristin and I made our way to the Sports Café. Black Jack, a Nigerian bodyguard, was at the door. He and Lucie had been buddies, and every time I passed him he would ask if there was any news. He knew I was a reporter, but he kept his mouth shut. Black Jack gave me some discount tickets for the Private Eyes club. Kristin’s friend Dorcy joined us, and we all went in and had drinks.

Dorcy went and hung out in the girls’ restroom, which was like Grand Central Station in the club—everyone passed through it. A few girls were snorting coke in the stalls. Dorcy chatted up Jesse, an Australian girl covered in tattoos who had seen two different photos of Obara that were being carried around by the police. She knew Lucie’s ex-boyfriend, Nick, and told her where to find him.

He was on the corner near a bookstore (long since out of business) handing out flyers for a “nightclub” where they sold ecstasy behind the counter. I asked him when was the last time he’d seen Lucie.

In a thick Australian accent, he said to me, “You must be a reporter. If you want to know about Lucie, let’s see some cash.”

I gave him 5,000 yen. I showed him the sketch of Obara. It didn’t ring a bell. I told him I’d pay for a photo of Obara and walked away.

I headed back toward Seventh Heaven. Layla, a Swedish student who was studying Japanese at Sophia University, was handing out flyers for the club. I’d run into her at a Sophia alumni function, and thus she also knew I was a reporter. At about five feet eleven with long platinum blond hair, she stood out. She wasn’t working as a stripper but was waitressing and also sometimes pulling in customers. She handed me a list of the clubs the police had visited that day. She spoke Japanese and she paid attention to what the other girls were saying, so she had proven to be a useful source.

I thanked her for the list, and she motioned me to follow her into a little coffeeshop nearby.

“Jake,” she said, “a lot of people have figured out you’re a reporter now—you should be careful. People know your face. I think it’s so cool what you do. I want to be a police reporter too. Do you think you can get me into the Yomiuri?”

“If you keep studying Japanese as hard you are doing, I might be able to help. Get you in? I’m just a plebe, a lowly soldier. I don’t have any pull.”

“Oh, that’s okay. Anyway, this is all so exciting. By the way, is there really a Chinese mafia in Japan? The Snakeheads, I think.”

“You should ask Yamamoto, my boss. He knows that stuff.”

“The three of us should go out for drinks, then. By the way, have you been to Club Codex yet? One of the victims worked there, I hear.”

I assured her that to the best of my knowledge one of them had indeed worked there in the past. She gave me one more name, Melissa. Melissa had been working at the club with Lucie. Layla had spoken to her at length, and she told me what she’d heard.

According to Layla, Melissa had seen Lucie and a long-haired Japanese man talking at the Casablanca club a week before Lucie had vanished. The man had looked very rich. He’d ordered expensive brandy and champagne. He’d spoken to Lucie for almost three hours, in a very friendly fashion. He’d paid in cash.

He hated being talked to in Japanese and would make a horrible face if you did. He preferred to speak English.

Melissa had been questioned by the police several times about the customer and his interaction with Lucie. Melissa wasn’t working in Roppongi anymore; she didn’t have the proper visa, and now that the police had interviewed her, she was afraid she’d be deported if she wasn’t careful.

I thanked Layla profusely. Now I knew what the cops knew. Lucie and Obara had met each other, and there were witnesses to prove it. He wasn’t going to be able to deny that. I called Yamamoto and passed on the information. He thanked me. I thanked him for thanking me and hung up the phone. What I’d given him was enough for a big scoop on the story. I’d delivered: it was a scoop for us when we reported it. It helped justify the huge amount of cash I’d blown in Roppongi. The article pissed off the TMPD, which had wanted to spring a surprise on Obara. (The other newspapers reported it roughly a week later.)

I got in at three in the morning. Beni was crying her head off. Sunao looked completely exhausted, holding Beni, walking around trying to soothe her. I took Beni off her hands and carried the little runt in my arms while gently walking on the step machine. I put U2’s greatest hits on the boom box, low volume, and moved gently until Beni started to yawn and close her eyes. She was still completely hairless, and her eyes were so swollen that you could see only her black pupils. She looked like an alien baby from an episode of The X-Files, but it didn’t bother me. She was my own flesh and blood, even if she was an alien. She reminded me of Alien Cop, come to think of it.

As I held her in the middle of the night, I had a little time to reflect on things. I thought of Tim and Jane Blackman. They must have memories like that of Lucie.

I thought of Obara, and it made me feel sick to my stomach. I realized that having my own child was making me feel personal about this story. For a reporter, that is not necessarily a good thing. If stories become personal, they start to tear you up.

The last thing I did after laying Beni down on the futon next to Sunao was to call Dai Davies, a private investigator hired by the Black-mans to look into Lucie’s disappearance. He told me that the police had asked Mr. Blackman for a sample of Lucie’s handwriting. Obviously, they were now trying to determine who had written them a false note, trying to throw them off the scent. I suppose they had to be certain that it wasn’t Lucie’s signature, even though Tim had already told them as much.

The investigation seemed to be proceeding smoothly. Obara was arrested and rearrested on multiple charges, including the 1992 manslaughter of an Australian girl, Carita Ridgway, and several cases of rape. In Carita’s case, he had used chloroform to knock her out and then filmed himself raping her. She’d died of liver failure. Her parents had been told it was food poisoning. It’s doubtful that an autopsy was performed—they rarely are, even for Japanese people who die under suspicious circumstances.

The police searched the apartment building where Obara took women and the surrounding Miura area but didn’t find a body. At least not the first time.

Also, Obara would not confess to killing Lucie. The police response was to rearrest him on other sexual assault charges. They figured they’d break him eventually. They didn’t.

Around 6 P.M. on November 10, Obara’s lawyer sent out a statement to the mass media. Obara named the victims in the document, thus slandering them at the same time as repeating the same line he’d given the police. He did admit in the letter that he’d at least met Lucie, clearly an attempt to make sure that the letter was taken up by the mass media. It was the work of a totally unrepentant sociopath, according to one profiler I spoke with.

It began like this:

He then went on to name each of his accusers by her initials, accusing them of being prostitutes, heroin addicts, and liars. The only interesting note was the one concerning the name TM: Obara claimed that he had been shielding her from the pursuit of Issei Sagawa and had never even had paid sex with her.

In 1981, while studying abroad, Issei Sagawa had shot and killed a Dutch girl, committed necrophilia, and then eaten parts of her body. He had been declared insane by the French courts, released to Japan, and never served a day in prison. It wasn’t surprising to see him linked with Obara.

Obara also tried to clear up some questions that had everyone puzzled. One of them involved the frozen carcass of his pet dog being found in a meat locker he owned.

He went on to explain why he possessed large amounts of human growth serum.

He also insisted that he was using sleeping pills only to access his unconscious and fully develop his potentialities to the max. He also used them to cure his insomnia but never used them for sex play.

He had been using cement to fix the tiles in the apartment building.

Point by point, he denied the reports about him. He denied knowing Akira Takagi. He denied reports of dressing in women’s clothing and having been arrested for Peeping Tom activity.

He threatened to sue the media for their misleading stories and file criminal complaints for slander. Finally, he notified us that the police were planning a large-scale search of the places where he had been living, noting that mobile police forces and helicopters would be used, all to take place within seven days.

The chief detective on the case was furious about the statement. He wanted to strangle Obara’s lawyer. On that day, at the Azabu police station, he let everyone know just how pissed off he really was.

“I warned that lawyer a thousand times that if he writes about the victims, it’ll be criminal slander, and he did it anyway. What the hell is this lawyer guy thinking? We’re not supposed to be stopping in the middle of a critical interrogation to give him time to meet with the client for this crap. If this is made public and the victims make a criminal complaint, I’d love to arrest this lawyer as an accomplice for criminal slander. I’d do it. With this letter and with all the crap that’s been in the press, it’s pretty damn easy to figure out who the victims are. It’s a whole different level from the mistaken, off-centered stuff the press is writing. It’s slander.

“This giant search of the area he’s talking about. Crap.

“Does he use the phrase ‘subjugation play’ in the interrogation? I have no damn idea.

“It’s true that some of the victims received money, but that has nothing to do with the crime. They hadn’t agreed in advance; when the victims awoke after he’d finished with them, he’d give them money to try to buy their silence. The victims, they’d lost consciousness, so they don’t remember anything.

“They’d wake up and know that something was funny, wrong, and Obara would go into his usual song and dance. ‘Oh, you got so sick.’ He’d give them cab fare to get home.

“Even if he gave them money, the facts don’t change. He tricked those women, made them drink alcohol laced with drugs. It’s attempted murder. I want to get this bastard on charges of attempted murder.

“If you really read this letter, you’ll see that it’s nothing but convenient information for him. It doesn’t touch on the videos at all. Not one line.

“And the tile explanation? Bullshit. Everyone knows that to fix a tile you don’t need to use cement; any strong glue will do the trick.”

If Obara’s motive was to shake up and infuriate the police, he’d succeeded with that letter beyond his wildest dreams. He was taunting the cops and ridiculing the victims. The man knew no shame.

On February 9, based on a new “tip,” the TMPD sent nearly a hundred officers back to the beach in Miura where they had searched for Lucie’s body almost four months previously. The explanation was that after analyzing the distance on the speedometer of a car rented by Obara shortly after Lucie vanished, they had made a determination of where he’d likely buried the body. One veteran police reporter from the Mainichi said he believed that the police had found Lucie’s body on the first run and were waiting for Obara to substantiate their find before officially announcing it, just to make sure the case was solid and waterproof. It’s possible.

I was awakened at five in the morning on that day and told to go to the City News Department and be on hand to talk to any foreigners involved in the story as soon as the body was found.

I was hoping that the TMPD would already have notified Tim, but I knew they wouldn’t. The cops didn’t like him because he had been critical of their methods, which he had every right to be.

The whole squad was grouchy and angry and tired. Accusations of incompetence and criticism, real or perceived, were not being taken well. The two factions were clearly at odds with each other. Tim was kept out of the picture, as much as possible.

Instead, the police had brought Jane Blackman to Japan a week before the search. They’d hidden her in a hotel room away from the press and wouldn’t even let her take a call from another family member. She’d been accompanied by victim support officers from Scotland Yard. The Japanese police had quizzed her about Lucie in detail: What special physical features did she have, what illnesses had she had, what did she normally eat, what were her habits? Mrs. Blackman knew that something was about to break, but the police were giving nothing away. Tim was in the dark.

It didn’t take the police long to find the body this time, hidden in a makeshift wall in a cave along the oceanfront. Supposedly, the smell of decomposed flesh was so strong that a few of the younger cops became physically ill. They found Lucie’s head encased in concrete. Identification couldn’t be done that day, but everyone knew who it was. Googly called me from the scene and let me know what was going on. He knew that I was talking to Tim. I guess he wanted Tim to know.

In the end, it wasn’t hard to break the news. Well, not as hard as I thought. When Tim Blackman answered the phone, he already knew why I was calling and what I had to say.

“Tim, this is Jake at the Yomiuri.”

“Yes, Jake.”

“I don’t know any way to break this to you gently, so I won’t. It’s just as you feared it would be. The police found her body this morning.”

There was a long silence.

“Buried?”

“The body was partially dismembered; it looks like she’s been dead for several months, judging by the decomposition. The identification is not official, but all indications are that it’s her. I’m very sorry for your loss. Is there anything else you’d like to know?”

“No, Jake. Thank you very much for calling. It’s good to know what really happened.” You could barely detect a waver in his well-chosen words, a murmur of something else. I was ready to hang up, and then he spoke again.

“Yes, I have one question. Where did they find the body?”

“Near his place. Hidden in a cave along the beach.”

There was another long silence.

“Are you all right, Tim?”

“Oh, yes, it all comes as, well, not a shock, but it … it is … not what I’d hoped for. Didn’t they search the beach before?”

“They did, Tim. I don’t know why they didn’t find her then, but they didn’t. Do you have anything you want to say to the press, to the police?”

“I’m very happy that the police found Lucie. We’ll have to come to Japan and pick up the remains to give her a proper burial once everything’s confirmed.”

“Understood. Tim, I wish I could say something to make it less painful for you. All I can do is keep you up to date on what comes next in the investigation.”

“Yeees,” said Tim, drawing out the word almost dreamily. “Yes, please do. You’ve been very good to keep us abreast of all the events in the investigation up to now, much more than the Japanese police, in fact. Thank you.”

“Well, I’ll talk to you later.”

“Yes, yes. Thank you for calling me.”

“You’ll be getting a lot of calls from the other media about this, quite soon I would imagine.”

“Yes, thanks for the warning. I may turn the phone off for a bit. Good night.”

“Good night, Tim.”

Several hours later, I had to call Tim back. The Yomiuri wanted an official comment. This is the life of a reporter. I didn’t feel like intruding on his personal grief any more than I already had, but the job is the job.

Tim had prepared a comment by then.

“In my heart of hearts, I’d like to think that Lucie was still alive, but I have to face the reality that this might not be the case. If I stop and think about all the circumstances involved, I can’t deny the strong possibility that the body in question is, in fact, my daughter Lucie. In a ghastly way, I’m kind of relieved. Not knowing whether she is alive or has been killed … is the hardest thing of all. I only hope that there are no more bodies.”

Lucie was positively identified on the tenth. In early April, Obara was officially charged with raping her, causing her death, and then mutilating the body and abandoning it in the cave. In his first trial he was found not guilty of the charges involving Lucie. Sometimes Japanese courts simply baffled me. On the other hand, he received life imprisonment for eight rapes and other charges. The case is in appeal, where it will probably be for years and years to come.^4*

A lot of people in Japan would like to shrug off the Lucie Blackman case as just some sort of freak crime in one of the world’s safest countries. Although it was an unusual crime, it raises questions. The biggest question for me was always this: how did this man get away with allegedly raping woman after woman for more than a decade, and why didn’t the police catch him sooner?

It’s not that the police have a bad attitude toward crimes against foreign women—it’s all women. They still don’t seem to anticipate how stalking behavior such as the kind demonstrated by Obara can lead to serious injury and even death.

I think—and since I’m not writing for the newspaper, I can actually express my opinion here—that sexual assault against women was always a low-priority crime for the police. The penalty for rape is so negligible (usually two years maximum) and the possibility of a suspended sentence for a first offender so great that it hardly seems like a felony at all.

Hostesses aren’t seen as victims by many of the police; they’re seen as victimizers, greedy, manipulative prostitutes. Especially the foreign hostesses. I don’t know how you can change that frame of mind. Even if the victim is a prostitute, she’s still a victim. Prostitutes are entitled to say no. Women who are drugged against their will can’t say anything at all.

In the last five years, the TMPD has started putting female officers in charge of investigating sexual assault; it’s a good start. Male officers have tended to treat the victims like criminals in the past, asking questions such as, “How did you egg him on?” or “Why didn’t you say no?” I’ve talked to three women who have had very unpleasant experiences with the police after being raped. Each of them was made to wait between three and eight hours before being taken to a hospital for examination. During that time, all of them were allowed or encouraged to go to the bathroom, thus, of course, destroying the physical evidence.

Rape kits are not a standard item at police stations, and very few officers know how to use them, though I’ve been told that rape kits themselves do exist. In a country where rape is not considered a serious crime, it’s not surprising that people like Obara flourish.

A source in the British Embassy told me that there had been complaints filed with the police about Obara many years before Lucie vanished. I don’t know if that’s true; I can’t find anyone in the TMPD who will confirm that officially. I know this much: if someone had taken those complaints seriously, not only would Obara have gone to jail long since but Lucie Blackman would still be alive.