Nightshade: An Only In Tokyo Mystery by Jonelle Patrick (ereader manga .txt) 📕

(Tokyo Metropolitan Police Detective) Kenji (Nakamura) squinted as the sun began to break through the trees. It was a good thing Shinto priests started work early—one of them had noticed the lone Lexus shortly after 7:30 a.m. and had called the police as soon as he saw what was inside.

Kenji had been a detective for nearly a year, but these were the first suspicious deaths he’d been called to investigate. Crime in Tokyo tended toward burglary and assault; murder was rare, usually the work of drunken family members who dutifully turned themselves in afterward and confessed.

Not that these deaths would require much investigation—it looked like a garden-variety suicide pact, the kind that had become all too common. Now that the Internet made it so convenient, the despairing could plan their final deadly get-togethers as easily as cherry blossom viewing picnics. A flurry of spent petals whirled past him like a small blizzard, the classic Japanese reminder that life is fleeting.

Kenji sighed and pulled on his police-issue white cotton gloves.

He bent to peer through the window at the three bodies inside. A middle-aged man and woman in front, a young woman in back.

The twenty-something girl was obviously a Goth-Lolita, one of the doll-like eccentrics who dressed exclusively in black and white, right down to the Buddhist rosary she’d chosen to clasp while saying her final prayers. She wore thigh-high, black stockings and platform Mary Janes under lace-edged, white petticoats and a short, ruffled, black dress. A tiny top hat, jauntily canted over one ear, tied under her chin with ribbons that trailed to her waist. In her fingerless, black velvet gloves and studded-leather choker with dangling crucifixes, she must have made an arresting mixture of innocence and decay. Her heavy makeup gave her an artificial appearance, yet there was something familiar about her.

Kenji frowned. What was a twenty-something Goth-Lolita doing in a car with a couple old enough to be her parents?

Kenji leaned into the car and gently pulled the handbag from the girl’s hands. He unsnapped it and peered inside. Cheap gel pen, a piece of paper smeared with something that was the same color as the vomit by the path, and a thin, spiral-bound notebook. No phone, no ID. A ¥5,000 note was tucked into a side pocket. As he replaced the bag on the girl’s lap, he noticed the corner of a rumpled, white envelope poking from her skirt pocket. Kenji teased it out and read the front. Clearly it wasn’t intended for the “Mother and Father” in the front seat, who wouldn’t be around to read it. Maybe there was a name on the note inside. Careful not to tear the envelope, Kenji lifted the flap and drew out a sheet of folded stationery.

It was blank.

Publication Date: 06-19-2013

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