Volume Fourteen: Windrow Written by Kashiwae Masato Illustrated by Chayamachi Suguro Summary by Amparo Bertram Late October, 1999

Nobuyuki meets Serizawa for lunch, and the two discuss the Y2K problem that's been in all the news lately. Nobuyuki is anticipating a busy tourist season for New Year because of all the people who will want to be in New York for the Millenium, though he hopes the airline computers won't be subjected to any technical difficulties. They part ways, Serizawa heading off for a business meeting. No sooner does Nobuyuki get back to the Sky Travel office, however, than he receives a phone call from Serizawa. The building where his meeting was being held had caught on fire, and he had accidentally left his cell phone inside when he was evacuated. He only had a small amount of change on him for using a public phone, so he needs Nobuyuki to help him out.

Nobuyuki rushes down on foot with a spare cell phone for him to use. On the way, he meets up with Sidney and Henry, who were caught in the traffic jam caused by the fire engines. Sidney escorts Nobuyuki through the police barricade, where they find Serizawa uninjured. The fire is so fierce that the firefighters are forced to give the order to retreat and work from the outside until the blaze dies down, leaving anyone still inside trapped there. Nobuyuki is right next to one fireman who tries to protest, knowing a colleague is inside the building.

Sidney and Nobuyuki watch the news report on the fire that night. It claimed the lives of eight people: three firefighters, two construction workers who were in the middle of renovating the upper floors so LAN cables could be installed, two employees of the company that had just bought the building, and one unidentified body. The fire was started by a small explosion on the twelfth floor while old paint was being stripped from the walls. Sparks from the explosion spread unnoticed to the next room, where they lit. Fanned by strong winds and fed by the flammable construction supplies left everywhere, the fire spread rapidly.

Sidney goes to take a shower after shutting off the television. The phone rings, and Nobuyuki answers. The caller introduces herself as Ashley, a friend of Sidney's from the army. Upon hearing Nobuyuki's name, she guesses that he was the boy in the photo of Sidney's that she spotted while they were in Saudi Arabia waiting for the war to begin. As soon as Sidney gets out of the shower, Nobuyuki turns the phone over to him and takes his evening bath, leaving the two to talk in private.

When Nobuyuki finishes his bath, he notices that Sidney is staring blankly off into space. He's so lost in thought that he accidentally lets the ash from his cigarette drop onto the floor. Nobuyuki goes to clean it up, whereupon Sidney suddenly puts his arms around him and holds him tightly. He says that Ashley called because her husband, Ryan, another acquaintance from the army, had just committed suicide.

Nobuyuki doesn't get any sleep that night, and he knows Sidney just kept tossing and turning until it was time to get up in the morning. Nobuyuki looks so awful when he shows up for work, his boss orders him not to drive as he had been scheduled. Serizawa stops by with some Japanese sweets as a thank-you present for the help Nobuyuki gave him during the fire. Just then, Sidney calls and says he needs to speak with Serizawa in regard to a police investigation.

The unidentified body found in the burned building had been killed by a stab to the chest with a sharp blade before the fire started, so Sidney and Henry have been assigned to investigate. They are questioning Serizawa about the company that owns the building, M&K, since he is the most objective source who might know about any internal conflicts. All Serizawa can say is that they're a dot-com company; the CEO and board of directors seem like a college club whose members grew successful before they grew up. They tell their clients all the benefits of online commerce without advising them of any pitfalls, and this has caused some complaints. Serizawa's company has been backing M&K, but the business has been run so poorly that Serizawa had gone to negotiate with the CEO to clean up his act.

Trying the treats Serizawa had brought, Sidney comments that if he had grown up in Japan, he might prefer them over chocolate. Nobuyuki teases that Sidney doesn't care what it tastes like as long as it's sweet.

Nobuyuki is still rather dazed and depressed when he goes home that evening. He winds up missing his subway stop, and rather than take another rush hour ride back the other direction, he decides to walk. He notices that he's in the area of the fire, so he takes a look around while he's there. A man comes out of the building and stops next to him, pulling out a cigarette. Realizing that the man doesn't have a lighter, Nobuyuki takes his out and lights the man's cigarette for him. They strike up a conversation, and Nobuyuki finds out that the man, Steve Levin, is the same firefighter he saw protest the retreat order the day before. Steve invites him to go out to eat at a nearby Chinese restaurant.

When Nobuyuki gets home, Sidney is in the middle of packing to attend Ryan's funeral the next day in San Francisco. Grumpy at hearing that Nobuyuki had gone out to eat with another man, Sidney heats up some frozen pizza for his own supper. He chides Nobuyuki for his bad habit of returning to poke around crime scenes, explaining that the unidentified body was definitely murdered. The police found evidence that the body had been stuffed in a locker along with the murder weapon, a knife. The curious part is that the body itself had been found *outside* the locker, with the locker's door closed.

Steering the conversation back to the fireman Nobuyuki met, Sidney drops a slice of his pizza in shock at hearing they had eaten at a restaurant on Christopher Street, best known for its gay community and the Stonewall incident in 1969. Nobuyuki at first pretends he doesn't know what Sidney's talking about, as a joke, but he soon admits that the street is on their tour route. He adds that the female tourists tend to figure it out pretty quickly due to all the boutiques and similar shops there. However, he shrugs it off, saying that it just happens to be near the fire station, so that's where the firefighters often go to eat.

Sidney groans, "Don't tell me you agreed to see him again, or gave him your phone number..." At Nobuyuki's innocent "How did you know?" he chokes on his pizza. Nobuyuki quickly reassures Sidney that he didn't mention anything to Steve about Sidney being a detective, completely missing the point about why Sidney is concerned.

Sidney leaves bright and early for San Francisco. Upon meeting Ashley, he learns that Ryan had been suffering from a degenerative nerve disorder that may or may not have been related to the Gulf War Syndrome. One day he simply shot himself in the head to allow Ashley to go on with her life without having to watch him slowly worsen. He left a note saying that he wanted his funeral kept small, but that he wanted Sidney to attend. He felt that Sidney would understand. He wanted Sidney to be the one to break the news to Jim, whose son is a Gulf War Baby, and explain that he shouldn't lose hope because the symptoms are completely different.

Sidney chats with Ashley about Nobuyuki, talking about how he wanders blithely down Christopher Street, totally unaware of how attractive he is. Ashley laughs, commenting that she can't tell whether Sidney is complaining or bragging. When she asks Sidney if he's happy, he won't give her a straight answer, but she can see that it's written all over his face.

When Sidney checks into his hotel, he calls the apartment to let Nobuyuki know where he's staying and to provide the details of his return flight in the morning. Upon hearing Nobuyuki's voice on the answering machine, he grows so enthralled that he nearly forgets to leave his message. Nobuyuki, for his part, had borrowed a guidebook to San Francisco from the Sky Travel office and spends his free time paging through it, imagining what Sidney is doing.

Nobuyuki gets back at around two in the morning and rushes to listen to Sidney's message. He's so relieved to hear Sidney's voice that he collapses to the floor. A few minutes later, Sidney calls him again, and he talks so fast from excitement that Sidney has to tell him to calm down and breathe. Nobuyuki promises to do his best not to wander back to the crime scene, and says that he'll rent a car to pick up Sidney from the airport.

Sidney asks if there's a Sky Travel branch office in San Francisco. Upon hearing that there is, he quickly looks it up in the phone book to find the address. Seeing that it's on the same street as his hotel, he resolves to stop by before he leaves.

Ashley catches Sidney as he's on his way to look for the Sky Travel office. She laughs at how cute he is for wanting to see the building just because it's the same company where Nobuyuki works. She goes with him all the way to the airport to see him off, explaining that she doesn't know how to fill her time anymore now that Ryan's gone. She promises to send him a photo of the Sky Travel office as a souvenir.

As Nobuyuki is renting a car to drive to the airport, a fire truck drives past on its way back to the station. Steve jumps off the truck and runs up to talk. At first he assumes Nobuyuki is going to pick up a woman; when Nobuyuki tells him frankly that he's picking up his boyfriend, Steve is taken aback. He reveals that he's gay too, and he can usually tell when others are, but Nobuyuki doesn't seem gay to him. He practically doubles over with laughter when he asks what Nobuyuki's boyfriend is like and Nobuyuki replies simply, "He's handsome." Just then, Steve is called away because a fire has broken out next door to the M&K building.

That night, while taking a breather after some strenuous welcome-home activity, Nobuyuki brings up that he met Steve again. Sidney is Not Pleased to hear that, as he had guessed, Steve is gay. Nobuyuki presses him to find out how he can tell just by looking at someone, since Steve said the same thing. Sidney can't put it into words, he can only say that some people have a certain vibe about them that one learns to pick up on after a while. Nobuyuki just doesn't have that vibe.

Nobuyuki makes Sidney choke again by saying he's beautiful. Thinking about how he had made Steve laugh earlier, he wonders why people are always surprised to hear him say that.

About a week later, Nobuyuki meets up with Sidney and Henry in front of Police Headquarters to discuss the case. They've investigated all the members of M&K as well as the construction company, but they haven't come up with any motive for murder. Nor can they figure out why someone would have started a second fire in the building next door, particularly since the M&K building was crawling with investigators. Nobuyuki is reminded of a Japanese kabuki play about a woman who was caught in a fire and took refuge in a temple. She fell in love with a man there, but soon she had to go back to her normal life and be separated from him. She wanted to see him again so much, she started another fire as an excuse to go to the temple again. The point, Nobuyuki explains, is that motives are not always in proportion to the crime.

In order to prevent Nobuyuki from poking around the crime scene alone, Sidney agrees to escort him on his next day off. They go to the burned building, and Nobuyuki looks at the third-floor room where the body had been hidden. Seeing that the room is near an elevator, he's suddenly overcome with a burst of insight. The odds against such a huge fire happening at nearly the same time as the murder by pure chance, obscuring the evidence, must be astronomical. However, if the murderer somehow knew the fire was going to happen, then it would make more sense.

Nobuyuki asks whether it would be possible for someone on the construction crew to use the materials and equipment at their disposal to start a fire on the twelfth floor that would burn the entire building. Sidney consults his father, who is in the same line of work. Ted replies that fire is far too unpredictable to plan it that exactly.

Nobuyuki mentions that he thinks Sidney's father is cute. Sidney tells him, "First 'beautiful'...now 'cute'...there's something wrong with your adjectives."

They confront the architect in charge of the construction, Welch. Upon hearing everything Nobuyuki has to say, he confesses that he is responsible for both the murder and the fire. The victim was his son, who was supposed to be studying abroad in Germany. The son had gotten addicted to drugs, unfortunately, and had come back to New York, demanding money. Welch's wife was in the terminal stages of cancer, and he didn't want to destroy her illusion that their son was doing well in college. Thus, he had his son meet him at night on the third floor in the M&K building. Upon being refused any money, the son tried to attack him with a knife, and in the struggle the knife stabbed the son in the chest.

Afraid that if the police found the body, his wife would hear the news, Welch devised a plan to burn the body so it would be unrecognizable. He intended to start a small fire on the twelfth floor and then carry his son's body up there using the elevator. By the time he got down to the third floor and had taken the body out of the locker, though, the fire had grown out of control. Welch had no choice but to leave the body where it was. When he heard that the police had discovered that the unidentified body had been murdered, he felt like everything had been in vain. He started the fire in the building next door to distract the investigators so he could take one last look at the scene of his crime. He is now ready to turn himself in to the police, because his wife just died the previous night.

Two weeks later, on Nobuyuki's day off, Sidney invites him out to lunch--at the same Chinese restaurant he had gone to with Steve. Sidney had barged into the fire station in search of Steve, giving him quite a fright, and got him to attend as well. At the meal, they discuss the case, Steve venting his anger that three of his fellow firefighters died for such a selfish and poorly thought-out reason. The conversation then turns to the subject of Nobuyuki and Sidney's relationship--a topic that goes mainly over Nobuyuki's head.

Ashley sends the picture of the San Francisco Sky Travel office as promised, inviting both Sidney and Nobuyuki to come visit sometime. Sidney goes to see Jim, whose son is once more being hospitalized for surgery. Nobuyuki says he'll spend the rest of his day off doing the laundry...particularly the sheets.

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