The Vanished 2- More Facts

Mauger and friends travel by shinkansen from Tokyo to hot-spring town Atami, Shizuoka. Why? Because our journalist has been told that people on the run "wash away their pasts in the sulfurous steam of the baths before being reborn elsewhere". Whatever. Because bustling hot-springs resorts are the perfect place to disappear, and easy on the pocketbook. Our investigators stroll through town asking for the evaporated people, Where are they, the 'johatsu'?- and are met with evasion, in Mauger's telling (it's not just Americans that are ugly overseas). Finally, they are directed to one Doctor Uchida, "the physician of the springs". Meaning? So they troop off, locate the good physician, ask him about vanished people and springs (well, Guy does, presumably), who shares this:

Now. Either the sawbones is in his dotage or, as I prefer to think, it's complete bullsh*t. Fukuda murdered a co-worker. Former. Singular. This was in Matsuyama, Ehime. During her 15 years on the lam, from 1982-1997, she was in a number of places: Nagoya, yes, Osaka, yes, Kanazawa and Fukui, yes and yes, but Shizuoka? No.