Volume Eighteen: Shadow Written by Kashiwae Masato Illustrated by Chayamachi Suguro Summary by Amparo Bertram May, 2001

In the present, the Golden Week tourist rush has finally ended, so Nobuyuki will at last have the opportunity to spend some quality time with Sidney to celebrate his thirty-third birthday. Sidney himself just wrapped up a case. After agreeing to go out to dinner together that night, Nobuyuki sets off for work.

When Nobuyuki wakes up and sees Sidney lying beside him, he sits there and appreciates the view until Sidney speaks up and points out that he's been staring for a good five minutes.

Shortly after arriving at the Sky Travel office, Nobuyuki is called to go to the World Trade Center and search for a tourist named Yuri who didn't show up for the tour bus on time. He hangs out at the World Trade Center for a while with his official Sky Travel clipboard, in the hope that Yuri will notice him, but eventually he gives up and tells the police she's missing. She had come to New York the previous night with two friends, Naoko and Emi. Emi had rented a cell phone, but when he tries calling her, she reports that she hasn't heard from Yuri at all. They're all worried that Yuri would be missing for hours without contacting anyone.

That night, Sidney and Nobuyuki go out for sushi and discuss the missing tourist. They're interrupted by Nobuyuki's cell phone. It turns out to be Steve, asking if Nobuyuki's schedule has eased up, but he has to run when the fire station alarm sounds. Then, just after Sidney and Nobuyuki return home to their apartment, Sidney gets a call about a case. Steve and the other firefighters put out the fire before too much damage was done, but they found Yuri's purse next to a stabbed Asian woman at the scene.

Nobuyuki contacts Emi and Naoko and the police take the three of them to the crime scene to help identify the woman. They aren't actually allowed to see the body, but the purse and some articles of clothing are brought down for them to check. The purse definitely belongs to Yuri, but the two women notice that the clothing is slightly too large, plus it's all in American rather than Japanese sizes. They're relieved that the victim wasn't Yuri, a fact that is soon confirmed when the police check fingerprint evidence.

Steve has the next day off, so he decides to hang out at the Sky Travel office in case he can be of any help. He goes with Nobuyuki to the World Trade Center, where they find that Naoko realized she had a good picture of Yuri on her digital camera and printed out color copies for the police. Naoko and Emi are going around showing Yuri's picture to people and searching. Thanks to the clear picture, one of the uniformed officers recalls that Yuri asked directions to the memorial for those killed in the 1993 car bomb attack. Sidney and Henry show up to question him, and he reveals that he also remembers seeing the victim standing in front of the memorial as well.

Steve, Nobuyuki, Sidney, and Henry all eat dinner together and discuss the case. The victim's name was Mari, and she was living with her boyfriend, a janitor on second shift at the World Trade Center. So far all the police investigation has turned up is that she was in the US on a student visa, but her visa expired six months earlier, making her an illegal alien. The boyfriend, Darrell, is an immigrant with permanent residence but not citizenship. Darrell was at work at the time of the murder and the fire. The fire was almost certainly arson. They speculate it was an attempt to hide the murder, but Nobuyuki thinks the fire was too small and set too far from the body for that to have been the motive. He can't help but wonder whether Yuri might have been the murderer.

Sidney is grumpy that Steve was hanging out with Nobuyuki at his workplace. Nobuyuki and Henry are hard put to stifle laughter at their bickering.

After the group splits up, Sidney talks to Henry about the 1993 bombing. He remembers that he had run to the scene to try to help, but as a plainclothed detective, no one could tell that he was a police officer, so he was just in the way. Realizing he wasn't doing any good, he tried calling Nobuyuki, but there was no answer at his apartment. He tried the Sky Travel office, but the line was busy. It was only after he gave up trying to reach Nobuyuki that it occurred to him to check on his then-boyfriend Rod.

The two detectives go to question Darrell. He is staying temporarily with his parents, his grandmother, and his youngest brother Roberto. They all cared for Mari as if she were a member of the family. Roberto in particular had been studying Japanese and hoping that he could go to Japan with her someday to buy manga. They are all shocked to hear about her murder. None of them had known that she had overstayed her visa. She hadn't even told Darrell that she graduated from the beauty school she had been attending; her visa was such that she was supposed to have gone back to Japan upon graduating.

During a discussion with his coworkers, Nobuyuki realizes for the first time that the 1993 bombing was related to Islamic extremism in connection with the Gulf War. He suddenly begins to worry if Sidney will be all right with this case, since the one point of connection between Yuri and Mari is the bombing memorial. He calls Rod and asks to meet him for lunch the next day to talk about it.

That night, Sidney and Nobuyuki finally get the chance to have sex for the first time in two weeks. Thinking about how long it's been, Sidney comments that they seem like a middle-aged couple who have grown sick of each other. Nobuyuki quickly comes back with, "I'm not sick of it. Are you?" Sidney hastens to deny it, insisting it was just a poorly thought out comparison.

They talk about Mari overstaying her visa. It's possible that she stole Yuri's purse in an attempt to get her passport, though in the hands of an amateur simply having someone else's passport doesn't do much good. Sidney learned from Darrell that Mari often stood in front of the memorial. Though there were six names carved on the memorial, one of the victims had been a pregnant woman, so the unnamed baby had died as well. Mari had once said that it was possible other pregnant women had miscarried due to the shock from the explosion, but Darrell had never pursued the matter further, feeling that the subject was too sensitive. Calculating back, however, Mari would only have been a high school student at the time, so it's questionable whether she was referring to herself.

Mari's family members will be arriving the next day, so Sidney will have the opportunity to ask them about Mari's involvement with the bombing. Yuri's family will also be coming, though on a different flight. They know that Yuri was in New York on a tour at the time of the bombing, though she hadn't specifically been at the World Trade Center. When discussing the different flights the two families will take, Nobuyuki mentions the three big international airports in the Japanese cities of Tokyo, Nagoya, and Osaka, comparing them for Sidney's benefit to New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles. [Note: The author only did this because Japanese consider Tokyo to be "the East" and Osaka to be "the West." Tokyo and Osaka are nowhere near as far apart as New York and LA.]

Sidney catches Nobuyuki staring in the direction of the door leading to his old apartment. Nobuyuki hurriedly explains that Steve's older brother is getting a new computer, so he's letting Nobuyuki have the one that's being replaced. Nobuyuki is thinking of setting it up in his old apartment and using it to email his grandparents. While this is true, it is only to cover the fact that he had really been wallowing in a bit of jealousy at remembering that, back in 1993, it had been Rod sharing Sidney's bed.

Nobuyuki finishes up the conversation with, "Earlier you said you weren't sick of it, right? We don't have much time, but let's go one more round." That is, of course, exactly what Sidney was planning.

The next day, Nobuyuki meets up with Rod, who is surprised to see his short hair. They chat amicably for a while. Rod describes his experiences during the bombing, and how it had felt like an earthquake even though his building was some distance away. He wraps up by saying that Sidney had a nightmare that night, which is just what Nobuyuki had feared.

Later that afternoon, as Nobuyuki is driving Yuri's family back from the airport, his cell phone rings. Takada answers it for him, but he soon hangs up, deciding it must have been a wrong number. All he heard was a woman who said "Um..." in Japanese. Nobuyuki wonders who it might have been. When he gets a chance, he calls back the number, and it turns out to have been from the same hotel where he had found the last couple of tourists that had gone missing intentionally the year before. That seems too much of a coincidence to be pure chance, and it gives him the clue he needs to put together the puzzling pieces of the case. He questions Yuri's two friends, Emi and Naoko, about their actions the day Yuri vanished, and what they tell him confirms his suspicions. He contacts Sidney and asks him to come to the hotel where the cell phone call originated.

Meanwhile, Sidney had met up with Mari's family and found out her connection to the bombing. When she was in high school, the art teacher she admired had gone to New York on her honeymoon and had the misfortune of being there for the explosion. The shock caused her to have a miscarriage, before she had even known she was pregnant. This lead to her having an emotional breakdown, making her feel she could no longer handle being married, so she got a divorce upon returning to Japan and quit her job. Mari was devastated and dropped out of school. Years later she finally grew interested in becoming a hairstylist, and she decided to go to New York to study the subject.

Upon arriving at the hotel, they find a room reserved under Emi's name. They go to the room, where Yuri has been hiding out. She had been at the department store across the street from the World Trade Center at the time of the explosion, which is why she wanted to see the memorial. She was distressed that the location of the memorial wasn't mentioned in any of her guidebooks. Sidney comments that it's probably because people "want to forget." It's the first time Nobuyuki has ever heard him say that, and in a voice devoid of the kind of stress and pain that he previously displayed at the mention of anything related to the Middle East. Nobuyuki is hopeful that this means Sidney is finally healing.

Yuri asked directions to the memorial and met Mari there. The two got so involved in talking that Yuri missed her tour bus. Not realizing that Sky Travel would send someone to look for her, she decided to spend the day with Mari, who volunteered to guide her around the town. She ended up stopping at Mari's apartment for tea, which is when Mari revealed that she had overstayed her visa accidentally. At that point in the conversation, Darrell's younger brother Roberto burst in. He was born in America, so he has citizenship, but the rest of his family doesn't, which made him very sensitive to the issue. As soon as he heard how similar Yuri's name was to Mari's he grabbed a knife in an attempt to threaten her to get her passport. Mari tried to stop him and wound up being stabbed. Roberto ran away, leaving Yuri not knowing what to do.

She would have called an ambulance, but she didn't know what to say in English, so instead she called Emi's cell phone. By the time Emi arrived, Mari was already dead. The two of them, afraid to be found in the apartment, left. Yuri realized afterward that she had left her purse there, but it was too late to retrieve it because the apartment had autolock doors. Without telling Naoko anything, Emi reserved a hotel room for Yuri to hide out in, following the example of the couple that had done the same thing before. Emi had written down what she thought was her rental cell phone's number for Yuri, but she wrote down Nobuyuki's cell phone number by accident.

Sidney later questions Roberto, who admits that he came back to the apartment and set the fire. He hadn't done it to destroy the evidence. Rather, he did it so that the firemen, rather than his brother, would be the ones to discover the body. Upon hearing this when he comes to help set up Nobuyuki's computer, Steve is upset, wishing that the boy had just phoned them anonymously rather than actually setting a fire. They would have had to investigate the tip, regardless of whether there was a real fire or not. That said, Steve volunteers to hook up the computer, but Sidney grabs the cords and insists on doing it. If something goes wrong, he doesn't want Nobuyuki wind up calling Steve for help. Nobuyuki has to come between them and say he'll do it himself.

Sidney wanted to keep the connecting bathrooms a secret from Steve, but Nobuyuki blows it by coming in through the bathroom door. Steve merrily proceeds to check out the rest of their shared apartment, completely ignoring Sidney's protests.

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