As Kubo thought all this through, a can of oolong tea appeared before him.
“Have some Hinode Oolong Tea,” Kuriyama spoke up beside him.
Kubo pondered it for another two seconds before noticing with surprise the moon cake in his left hand. He had apparently been eating the round pastry without even realizing it—all that remained now was a crescent moon. He must have found it on his desk, but he could not remember picking it up. He had no memory of his stomach conveying hunger. Resigned to sabotaging his earlier efforts at healthy eating—he had made do with a small meal of simmered fish at lunch—he washed down the rest of the moon cake with the oolong tea and hurriedly turned on his computer. Kuriyama immediately handed him a memo from the press conference.
“Here’s a rundown of the first briefing. From the chief’s notes,” he said.
Solicitous and with a breezy air about him, Kuriyama was thirty years old and still in his first year on the First Investigation beat. With his lustrous complexion and bright smile, he was a model of that new type of investigative reporter who proved that even the so-called “penal servitude” of the MPD track could be handled with ease with the right attitude and a certain knack. What’s more, Kuriyama had a fair number of sources and wrote good articles, and even if Kubo thought that the diligence of his reporting left something to be desired, it still fell within a tolerable range. As he thanked Kuriyama for the memo, Kubo realized he was measuring himself against one of his colleagues yet again.
The subject matter of the first press conference, held at 12:15 a.m., was as follows:
Kyosuke Shiroyama (58), residing at 2-16 Sanno / 22:05: Returns home in company car. Driver Tatsuo Yamazaki (60), residing at 2-13 Zoshigaya / Yamazaki departs after watching Shiroyama go through the front gate / 22:50: Police receive 110 emergency call—husband hasn’t come home / 23:16: Confirmed as incident. Victim taken hostage and abducted between front gate and front door / Note found in shrubs by path to front door. Balled up letter. White paper. Handwritten. Katakana letters: “We have your president” / Deemed abduction and unlawful confinement / Details unknown / Next briefing, 2 a.m.
“They say the CI director’s hands were trembling,” Kuriyama said.
“Really?”
“And a little while ago Hiroda-san from Criminal Administration was screaming his head off.”
“Oh, yeah?”
Kubo could not imagine what Hiroda—a mild-mannered man who had managed to remain calm even when he learned of the poison gas terror attack the other day—might have sounded like earlier. Kubo glared at the memo again and after checking the time—1:25 a.m.—he started writing down questions in preparation for the second press conference that would take place in thirty-five minutes.
Had the president taken his usual route home? Exactly how far past the gate had the driver seen him go? Had anyone at home heard anything? Why had it taken his family forty-five minutes to call the police? How were the family members doing? What had been the president’s schedule that day? What had he been wearing? What was the writing like on the note they found? Has there been any contact from the perpetrators? Had anyone seen a strange person or vehicle? What was the progress of the Crime Scene Unit? Any footprints? Evidence left behind?
A bold crime, deftly executed. Are they pros?
Kubo hunched over his laptop while his colleagues passed documents back and forth behind him and, according to their assignments on the chart Deputy Kagawa had made, the beat reporters filed out of the nook one by one. The phone kept ringing and terse retorts—“I’ve got nothing,” “Not yet,” and “What about you?”—volleyed through the air. Chief Sugano was on the phone discussing whom to deploy where once the embargo was lifted. Kubo added another line—Has there ever been any threat, blackmail, or harassment made against Hinode in the past?—and gazed at the can of Hinode Oolong Tea on his desk.
As his eyes again traced over the trademark seal of a golden phoenix, which he had never really looked at carefully before, the gravity of the situation sunk in at last.
合田雄一郎 Yuichiro Goda
By half past midnight, a total of twenty-three officers from Criminal Investigation—not counting the two standing watch at the crime scene, three from the crime scene team who had gone there for backup, as well as the chief inspector and deputy chief inspector—had assembled in the CI office at Omori Police Department. Per instructions from the MPD, they had created a large sketch of the vicinity of the crime scene and a current survey map that included the premises of the victim’s home, but once that was complete they ran out of things to do. In the back lot of their building the 103 SWAT vehicle was parked, and there were at least two officers encamped inside, but in regard to what was happening at the scene and who was doing what where, there was very little information coming in over the investigation radio, and on the third floor they had very little read on the situation at the scene. The same was true for the superintendent and vice commander, and Chief Inspector Hakamada and Deputy Chief Inspector Dohi were pacing back and forth between the superintendent’s office, the CI office, and the control room with rather bewildered expressions.
As of 12:40 a.m., there were no witnesses, no suspicious vehicles, no evidence left behind, and no movement or contact from the perpetrators.
Having been the first one on the scene, Goda had explained the situation to his fellow officers, but that hadn’t taken more than five minutes. Next, Inspector Anzai from White Collar Crime pulled out Hinode’s comprehensive asset securities report from the previous year from a forgotten corner shelf and had started reading out an overview of the company from page one but, once he got to the summary of their specialized facilities with a catalog of their twelve factories, fifteen branch offices, and research labs, he tossed aside the pamphlet and concluded, “So basically, in terms of assets, sales, operating income, and equity, there’s about a three-digit difference between Hinode and your typical local business.”
Someone else then picked up the pamphlet and leafed through it, and it was passed around a few hands, but before long that stopped too, and without any other idle chatter, the team was once again engulfed by silence. Every one of them looked melancholy, torn between the desire to get a little shut-eye before work tomorrow and dismay over their misfortune that a VIP had been kidnapped within their jurisdiction, of all places.
The CI office was not designed to accommodate a full turnout of their team. There weren’t enough chairs, and no personal space to speak of. Aside from the chief inspector’s and the deputy chief inspector’s spots by the window, there were four rows of steel desks belonging to no one in particular, five desks to a row arranged close together, while along the wall were file cabinets and shelves of the same steel, and blackboards covered with various flyers and posters. When twenty-three grown men filed into the room, it was nearly as stifling and gloomy as the area around the betting windows at the racecourse. Goda found this to be an unacceptable work environment given the mountain of investigation documents they were required to produce day after day, and the only solution that he had ever come up with was to get outside as much as possible, and to use one of the unoccupied interrogation rooms to write up his case files.
On the steel desks, there were eight phones for internal use and four phones with an outside line, four computer terminals connected to the mainframe that managed all inquiries and two word processors that were dirty and discolored from use. There were also several string-bound MPD telephone directories, a worn-out copy of the White Pages, ballpoint pens and pencils, official directive paperwork and newspaper flyers with notes written on the flipside, ashtrays, and a few heavily stained tea mugs.
Goda was sitting with his back to the wall in a spot close to the door. In his shirt pocket was a detailed, minute-by-minute record of officer activity prior to the incident, which he had gotten from the police box by Omori Station before coming here, but his instinct had not yet managed
to clearly work out what each emergency call or command from the department might signify. The excitement he had felt when he had first arrived on the scene had dulled, but now it circled slowly around his instinct. Was the president the target, or the company itself? Why Hinode Beer? Were there troubles within Hinode that would provoke a crime? Did they have any connections to extortionists and organized crime? When he had spoken with the Vice President Kurata on the phone, something about the man’s forceful tone and the way he cautiously chose his words seemed out of balance to Goda’s ear—did Hinode already know something about what had transpired tonight?
Finally, what was their motive? If the perpetrators’ ultimate aim was money, why choose such a high-risk scheme as kidnapping? The end result would be the same had they abducted any other executive, so why did it have to be the president?
Technically Goda was the designated investigator at his precinct, but as the guy who had been chucked sideways from the MPD to a local department, this entire past year he had not received a single call to report to Investigation Headquarters. This time, even if he were to be pulled in because they were short-handed, the only tasks that might trickle down to him would be either canvassing the vicinity on foot or searching for evidence. Even as he contemplated all this, it was his natural tendency to keep turning the pages of the financial report pamphlet to learn more, however mechanically, about Hinode as a company.
First, he checked the important figures in the management index. The company’s sales revenue for 1993 was 1.35 trillion yen. For consolidated accounts it was close to 1.6 trillion. The company’s operating income was 77 billion. Net profit was about half that amount. Total assets were 1.2 trillion. Equity ratio, 47 percent. One share of their stock cost 10 yen. Number of employees, 8,200. Each and every number told the same story—they were a behemoth, “the bluest of blue-chips”—but how they could yield 1.35 trillion by peddling two-hundred-yen-or-so cans of beer—with a high liquor tax, to boot—was not something he could readily fathom. These figures were from two years ago, so now they would have swelled even more.
Next, he turned to the section on the 105-year history of the company. Even before the war, the company already had four factories, and after the war ended they steadily expanded with more factories, branch offices, and sales offices, while aggressively making headway in developing technological fields such as pharmaceuticals, biotechnology, state-of-the-art medical treatment, and data network systems—the corporation’s ultimate goal of diversification gradually came into focus for Goda.
Once he had scanned their current stock condition, he saw that Toei and several other major city banks as well as life insurance companies dominated the list of their biggest shareholders, as expected, and their aggregate covered 27 percent of shares outstanding. The company’s stock price had remained stable even after the economic bubble burst, and their dividend payout ratio had maintained the high rate of 25 percent.
Then he turned to their current executives. He quickly familiarized himself with the names of the thirty-five executives under the president and the multiple titles they held, such as general manager of beer division and general manager of business development. Perched at the top of the list, Kyosuke Shiroyama was described as a graduate of the faculty of law at the University of Tokyo. Judging from how, after he joined the company in 1959, he had risen to general manager of beer division after years of working as a sales manager and then a branch manager in Sendai and Osaka, he had clearly been in the sales trenches all along. The world of selling things was the furthest from what a detective knew, and as Goda stared at the name—Kyosuke Shiroyama—he allowed himself to wonder what kind of man Shiroyama was. Guessing from the appearance of his home and the impression made by his wife and son, Goda reasoned that Shiroyama must be a rather modest and conservative individual.
On the other hand, the vice president he had spoken to on the phone, Seigo Kurata, also held the title of general manager of beer division, so there was no doubt that Shiroyama and Kurata were the most closely connected among members of the board of directors. Thinking Kurata might be the one to prod, Goda briefly recalled the voice of the seemingly complicated man he heard on the line.
Moving on to the index of their various business sectors, Goda found their company organizational chart. Beneath the shareholders’ meeting was the board of directors and board of company auditors; then beneath that the president and the management council. The company, with various departments such as general affairs, human resources, accounting, public relations, data network development as well as a planning office, secretarial office, and a consumer advisory office was as common as could be, with the business itself divided into beer, pharmaceutical, business development, laboratory, and the like. However, although the company was pursuing diversification, when he looked at the figures of each primary business sector, beer still counted for 96 percent of sales.
As Goda skipped over a few pages to look at performance details, a voice nearby asked, “Interesting?”
He looked up to see Osanai, an inspector from Burglary Investigation, casting a sullen gaze his way. Osanai had been on duty tonight, but when the call came in from Sanno Ni-chome, he happened to be in Omori-Minami where a robbery had taken place, so he had missed the chance to be first on the scene in Sanno Ni-chome. His look conveyed that he would not soon forget this resentment.
“I guess. The names of the beers I drink every day are all here,” Goda said in response. “Hinode Lager, Hinode Supreme, Supreme Draft, Limelight Diner . . .”
“I doubt you drink beer,” Osanai scoffed, and Goda ignored him after that.
It was true that the familiar brand names were listed on the page, which reported this quarter’s business conditions, along with the sales performance for each product. The current situation for liquor sales—affected by last year’s increase in the liquor tax, which had caused every company to raise prices across the board, the intensified discounting at mass retailers, and Limelight’s full-scale entry into the market—seemed to indicate that the things were not in fact so easy for the company. Despite this, thanks to the steady performance of their two pillars—the lager and the supreme—as well as their efforts to stabilize the cost of raw materials and to streamline their distribution, Hinode’s operating income for 1993 had apparently sustained a slight increase over the previous year. Incidentally, the total volume of beer sold in one year was 3.45 million kiloliters. Unable to grasp such a number quantitatively, Goda reached over to the blackboard behind him and did a bit of long division to figure out how many large bottles this could be converted to, but the number he came up with—5.45 billion—was all the more incomprehensible to him.
Goda wiped away the number with the eraser, and went back to patiently turning the pages. In the section on sales performance, there was a chart explaining their distribution channels, how the product flowed from primary wholesalers to secondary wholesalers before it got to retailers, until finally reaching drinking establishments and consumers. The words “drinking establishment” caught his eye, and as he wondered what proportion of total sales was beer sold on commercial premises, and had just started to flip around the pages when the door to the CI office opened.
Deputy Chief Inspector Katsuhiko Dohi stuck his head in the opened doorway and fixed his saucer-like eyes on Goda nearby. Goda glanced at the time—12:50 a.m.—and with every eye in the CI office on him, set down the pamphlet and walked out into the hallway.
As soon as Goda was in the corridor Dohi demanded, “Two guys from SIT are downstairs. You were at MPD so you should recognize them. Go ask them when the brass are coming down here.”
This spring, ahead of his compulsory retirement next year, Dohi would be promoted to the rank of chief inspector, having assumed that title after his time as inspector in Burglary Investigation. Stubbornly earnest, his face managed to be both complex and dull at the same time—as if all the good and bad of his generally lackluste
r police career were cobbled together in his expression. As long as nothing was on the blotter he would laugh and say this was his last year, he had nothing to worry about, but when push came to shove, he was a cop, always wringing his hands and trying to gauge his superiors. Even now, his demand was born of his conscientious desire to deliver even a fragment of news to the superintendent and chief inspector, who were anxious about the lack of information.
Goda answered, “Yes sir,” headed downstairs, where there was no one at the back door, and after stepping outside to take a deep breath of air, he returned directly to the third floor and told Dohi, “Apparently they don’t know yet.”
With the addition of Dohi, the CI office was now even more claustrophobic; the majority of those inside had their arms folded and eyes closed, while a few of them had a newspaper or magazine spread open in front of them, with the earphone for the scanner in their ear, as Goda returned to his seat and resumed leafing through the pamphlet back in his seat. Tonight of all nights the police phone didn’t ring even once; every now and then the siren from a patrol car or ambulance speeding along the Dai-ichi Keihin or Sangyo Road echoed as if from a faraway world.
Goda moved on to the section for the so-called cost of goods sold on the profit and loss statement, tracking his eye across the heading for each figure for the current quarter—manufacturing costs, three hundred fifty billion; liquor tax, seven hundred billion. From time to time he looked up at the clock and, listening to the sound of the rain falling on the pavement outside, thought about how it must be snowing in the countryside and the mountain regions by now, imagining the cold that the victim and the perpetrators must be feeling, wherever they were. With the passage of time, however, the visceral sensations that he had first experienced when the incident occurred were starting to wane.
Lady Joker, Volume 1 Page 33
