“Is there any speculation that trouble has been brewing between Hinode and Okada?”
“Even if there were, the company would never say so. Besides, word is that this abduction and unlawful confinement case has nothing to do with that particular channel.”
“It’s not tied up with extortionists?”
“At the very least, they say that the twenty-five crime groups in the Kantō area as well as the seven in Kansai are in the clear. According to what I heard from Fourth Investigation, yesterday the chairman of the Seiwakai sent out a letter of inquiry to the trustees of the Kantō syndicate Hatsuka-kai to determine whether any of them are involved. Then again, that could also be a strategic move on their part.”
“You don’t say . . .”
“The point is nobody’s got a clue so far. Don’t tell anyone I told you.” With that, Anzai disappeared into the bathroom. Goda had been the one who had asked, but he couldn’t help but wonder if Anzai’s vigilance had been dulled by dealing with run-of-the-mill white-collar crime for so many years. At a Special Investigation headquarters where confidentiality was paramount, his loose tongue could be dangerous. Goda calmly concluded then and there that it would be unwise to tap this guy for further information. Nevertheless, he was intrigued to learn that the underworld was not involved in the incident.
When he returned to the conference room, the seven o’clock news on the NHK had started, and people had formed a circle in front of the television. Goda craned his neck from the back of the crowd. On the screen, a photo of the victim appeared behind the news anchor, who was rapidly reading aloud from a script. The victim had the features of an obviously genteel upper-middle-aged man, but he also seemed to have a hard outer shell that would make it impossible to intuit his exact character at first or second glance.
“I repeat. On Friday, March twenty-fourth, around 10:05 p.m, the president of Hinode Beer, Kyosuke Shiroyama, fifty-eight years old, was abducted by an unidentified person or persons in front of his residence in Sanno Ni-chome, in the district of Ota, and just a short time ago, at 6:28 a.m., Mr. Shiroyama was taken into protective custody by the staff of Fujiyoshida Police Department of the Yamanashi Prefectural Police after he arrived alone, requesting assistance, at the fire station along the Lake Kawaguchi bypass in the village of Narusawa, in the district of Minamitsuru, in Yamanashi Prefecture. . . . We interrupt our regularly scheduled broadcast to bring you this report on the abduction and unlawful confinement of the president of Hinode Beer.”
No one in front of the television uttered a single word. As the array of investigators expanded ever larger, they would have no choice but to depend on television and newspaper reports in order to gain a full picture of the incident that was not made available to each of them separately. Even Goda stared dumbfounded at the screen, as he wondered if it was too soon to show the face of the rescued victim he was desperately curious to see.
“I repeat. On Friday, March twenty-fourth, around 10:05 p.m, the president of Hinode Beer, Kyosuke Shiroyama, fifty-eight years old, was abducted by an unidentified person or persons in front of his residence in Sanno Ni-chome, in the district of Ota, and just a short time ago, after fifty-six hours, he was found unharmed and taken into protective custody in the village of Narusawa, in the district of Minamitsuru, in Yamanashi Prefecture. NHK has, until now, deferred reporting on the incident to ensure the safety of Mr. Shiroyama. Now, we go to our live coverage from outside of Hinode Beer’s main office in Kita-Shinagawa, in the district of Shinagawa, and outside of Mr. Shiroyama’s residence in Sanno Ni-chome, in the district of Ota . . .”
As the broadcast switched over, it showed the street in front of the forty-story Hinode Beer building. It was an ordinary building that he had seen numerous times before, but Goda’s eyes were drawn to it as if noticing it for the first time. The reporter, looking intent, began speaking, while a press corps had already formed a cluster behind him. The wind seemed cold, but the sky was clear.
“Since it is still early, there’s no sign of any employees coming or going just yet. Fifty-six hours ago, on Friday at 9:48 p.m., a company car with President Shiroyama inside left the entrance to the underground parking lot you can see over there, and arrived in front of his home in Sanno Ni-chome, in the district of Ota, seventeen minutes later at 10:05 p.m., where he was abducted by an unidentified person or persons . . .”
Next, the screen showed the street in front of the residence in Sanno Ni-chome, where a throng of media had already gathered. Barely a minute had elapsed since the press briefing and already lurking reporters from every media company had surrounded the front gate, where a uniformed police officer blocked the way. The trees sparkled in the early morning sunlight, worlds away from the landscape Goda had seen in the depths of the night on Friday.
“As you can see, this is a quiet residential street. At10:05 p.m. on Friday, President Shiroyama’s car stopped in front of that gate over there and . . .”
As he listened to the voice on television, once again Goda began to imagine the movements of the policeman who had patrolled the neighborhood on the night in question.
Late on Saturday night, after the investigation meeting ended, Goda had made up an excuse and snuck out of the police department, to see for himself how fast an officer on a motorcycle would have been going. He rode his own bicycle for two hours along the backstreets of the adjacent neighborhood Sanno Itchome, which wasn’t all that close to Shiroyama’s home. And last night, he secretly invited Senior Police Officer Sawaguchi from the police box in front of Omori Station out to dinner after his shift, treating him to sushi, and during the meal he inquired in detail about the route he took to the scene and the precise timing after he was dispatched there by the command center.
Once Goda had deduced the minute-by-minute locations of the motorcycle patrol and drawn up his own map, the results backed up his theory about how the perpetrators had abducted the victim without ever attracting the attention of the police. But how were the perpetrators able to trace the random patrol routes of the police?
The answer had to be the wireless radio. By now Goda was practically convinced that the perpetrators had ears on the department-level radio that the police listened to at all times. What’s more, considering that it was impossible for an ordinary person to intercept the police radio, which further scrambled a traditional digital signal, it was clear who was listening to the radio to carry out the crime that night—a police officer on active duty.
A police officer.
The shape of the words appeared out of the haze that had permeated his mind ever since he had arrived at the crime scene. However, the solid logic of it prevented Goda’s mind from proceeding further. He would have preferred to be unaware of it. In truth, Goda had already stopped thinking about it, simply and prudently shifting his brain to the allocated task before him. His ego no longer allowed him to make a disappointing mistake in a crime scene that was already disappointing enough—he wouldn’t give anyone in the police force more reason to look down upon him. Besides, come April, he would turn thirty-six—what else could he do with his life if he were to quit being a detective?
Goda stepped away from the television and moved over to the corner of the conference room where the Evidence Investigation Squad had set up camp. Stacked on the table were copies of rental records submitted by various rental car companies within the metropolitan area and neighboring prefectures, and the list of stolen vehicles compiled by the Criminal Information Management System. They had finished going through the rental cars yesterday, but for the stolen vehicles they had to check each theft report one by one, and they were still in the midst of conducting further questioning with the owners of the cars for which the exact nature of the theft remained unclear. The number of stolen vehicles for which a theft report had been submitted, during the three months from January to March 24, totaled about 350.
When Goda picked up the list assigned to his team, t
he head of the ninth Violence unit, who was serving as their squad leader, said, “He might specify the model of car or color, so let’s wait for the president’s statement.”
Goda agreed, so he returned the computer printouts in his hand to the table. With the victim now safe, the fact was that tracking down the vehicle no longer seemed as urgent a matter.
“They nabbed him on a Friday night and released him on Monday morning without even demanding a ransom. Gimme a break . . .” Goda heard someone say wearily.
“Bet these perps have day jobs with weekends off,” quipped another. “If they have time to pull off a kidnapping over the weekend, things must be awfully slow at work,” he went on, inciting laughter.
Goda, avoiding the banter his colleagues, sat down in a chair as he murmured to himself, You’re wrong. At least one of the members of the group does not have weekends off, as his thoughts shifted back to the issue of the radio. On the night of the incident, whoever had been listening to the department-level radio and informed the abductors of the whereabouts of the police patrols in Sanno Ni-chome would most likely have been working the night shift. On March 24, the number of officers who had been on night duty at the nine police departments within the two areas including Omori Police Department could not have been more than 400. There were officers carrying department-level shortwave 101 transceivers, those on duty in the communications room, those inside patrol cars, and detectives on stakeout or on the trail who were carrying the wireless, and if an accomplice were among them, then it would be a cinch to narrow him down. No, Goda thought, Crime Scene must already be investigating this very thread.
Before disappointment could set in, Goda pushed this lead out of his mind—seems it would never see the light of day anyway—and he opened the morning paper out of boredom.
He remembered that Hinode’s full-page ad had appeared yesterday in the Sunday national papers. A Japanese beer for the 21st century. Introducing the Hinode Meister. Even though their president had returned safely, if the incident itself were to drag on in some form or another, it could have an effect on the summertime sales war that had already launched. Goda picked up the financial report on Hinode that he had leafed through while waiting to be summoned to the CI room before dawn on Saturday, and now his eyes leisurely considered a single number—3.5 million kiloliters—which represented the company’s annual sales volume of beer. That’s right, they may have released the president, but there is still the beer to bargain with, the thought occurred to him.
Goda’s mind then drifted back to several hours earlier, and he tried to recall what he had been doing before he had been called to the crime scene in Sanno Ni-chome. His efforts were in vain. Instead, realizing that Kano might have dropped by his apartment, which had been empty since Friday night, he took out his cell phone and quickly checked his answering machine at home. Sure enough, Kano had called.
“Right now, it’s 10 p.m. on the twenty-sixth. I figure you won’t be coming home for a while, so I checked in on the apartment. I’ll lay out the money for the payment due at the end of the month. Give me a call when things settle down.”
No big deal, should be home today, Goda thought as he put away his cell phone and glanced out the window. The press corps, which had been milling about since seven this morning, had become a swirl of footsteps and voices.
城山恭介 Kyosuke Shiroyama
Shiroyama now sat in a room inside the Fujiyoshida Police Department.
Ever since he had been taken into custody at the fire station, different people had materialized one after another, repeating a similar line of questioning—Where did you start walking from? Was there anyone with you? Two people, you say? Men? Do you have any idea what they looked like or what their build was? Where were you with these two men? When did you realize you were alone?—and when Shiroyama replied that he did not know, this time they spread out a map and started up again—Is this the road you walked along? Where on the road exactly? How long were you walking?
In the midst of the questioning, he was asked, “Would you like something to eat?” and all Shiroyama asked for was a single cup of tea. He did not feel any hunger, and the pain in his shoulders and elbows did not even seem like it was part of his own body. Once he had been moved over to the police department, he was given a simple physical checkup, and was surprised to find that there were five or six adhesive body warming patches on his body—on the abdomen of his vest, on his back, and along the waistband of his slacks—but there was no need to hide the truth about them, so he told the police that the criminals had stuck them on right before they released him. His necktie, the scraps of duct tape, and his own crumpled handkerchief, which had been used as a blindfold, also emerged from the pockets of his jacket. Those items were promptly collected by the white-glove-wearing department staff.
First Shiroyama asked if he could wash his face, and in the lavatory he did so for the first time in dozens of hours, but he was dumbstruck when he saw the change to his own reflection in the mirror. His salt and pepper hair, which was quite abundant for his age, looked much greyer than he remembered it. His eyes and cheeks were so sunken that water could have pooled there, and the wrinkles around the corners of his eyes and mouth had increased tenfold, all of which made him wonder who was this old man staring back at him. What struck him the most was how somber his eyes were. Looking into them, these eyes that did not register any sense of relief or happiness at being released from his captors, he felt a vague though deep-seated terror.
Shiroyama draped a blanket over himself and an electric heater was placed at his feet. Inside the room were three metal folding chairs and two desks, and the frosted glass on the iron-barred window prevented him from looking outside.
Shiroyama was not a criminal, but his present state of mind made him feel like one. Ever since he had stood outside the fire station, wondering what he should tell the police and how, once inside, he had stubbornly insisted, “I’m fine. Nothing’s wrong with me. I can walk by myself. I’m not hurt,” evading their questions of his whereabouts for the last fifty-six hours with ambiguous replies of “I don’t know” and “I can’t remember.” Had his company received any demands from the criminals? If so, how were they handling them? How were they explaining things to the police? As long as he did not know those things, it was a given that he couldn’t say anything imprudent to the police, but also the photo he had been given by the criminals upon his release suggested the possibility that the crime group could be connected to the Okada Association. Shiroyama wished he could clam himself up in a shell, but he could only obfuscate like this for a few more hours. Once a formal interview began, he would have to say something.
Shiroyama turned over and over in his mind the fact that, no matter which path he decided to take, he would end up lying to the police and to his company. He intended to conceal his family’s scandal from both parties and somehow remedy the situation by bowing to the criminals’ demands. He confirmed this with himself repeatedly. The trouble was, now that he had been rescued and was seated before the warmth of a heater, he had started to gravitate toward the idea that it would all be easier if he disclosed everything to the police. Each time Shiroyama reminded himself that as long as the Okada Association was involved, he could not expect anything from the police anyway, and admonished himself to stay calm and hold his ground. Shiroyama spent his brief respite in such internal conflict as he waited for the investigators from the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department who were expected to arrive shortly.
At half past eight, four men appeared, saying they were from MPD. Shiroyama greeted them with a bow and apologized for putting them to this trouble, but when he realized that the investigators were already scrutinizing his expression and demeanor, he felt a sudden chill and had to turn his eyes away.
The investigators confirmed his identity once more—Shiroyama repeated his legal domicile, current address, full name, age, and occupation. For his part, all Shir
oyama could manage was to inquire about the wellbeing of his family. He was told that no harm had come to them.
Next, they asked him to undergo a more thorough medical examination by a physician before traveling back to Tokyo, and when he insisted that he was fine, that it wasn’t necessary, they pushed back, saying, “Just in case.” Even in that moment, he felt the piercing eyes of the investigators on him. Part of him wondered if such looks weren’t just a hazard of their occupation, but on the other hand, Shiroyama had his own doubts and fears that the police suspected him of something, and for some time, he fell prey to speculating why this might be, growing ever more cautious.
The physician checked his eyes and the inside of his mouth, pressed a stethoscope to his chest, and took his blood pressure. After the physician announced that there were no significant problems and left, one of the investigators finally acknowledged the incident by saying, “You’ve been through quite an ordeal.” Spoken in such a formulaic and unemotional tone, the words did not sound the least bit sympathetic.
“To get right to the point, do you have any idea who the kidnappers are?” an investigator asked.
“No,” Shiroyama replied.
“You say you were blindfolded the entire time, meaning you did not see the perpetrators at all?”
“I did not.”
“We will ask for more details later at Investigation Headquarters, but at this point in time, the perpetrators have not made any contact whatsoever with your family, either. However, there is no mistake that this is a premeditated crime, so whether it is financially motivated or has to do with some kind of grudge, we are currently doing our utmost to pursue an investigation of anyone with a connection to your company along those lines.”
Lady Joker, Volume 1 Page 40
