Lady Joker, Volume 1 by Kaoru Takamura (lightest ebook reader .txt) 📕

of notes and walked away. Up until the previous night he had been part of the election reporting team.

Negoro turned on his computer and glanced at the first line of the notes. But his gaze soon drifted away, and he wasted several more minutes before starting to work. By and large, the distance he felt toward each new incident widened year after year, and the victim’s suffering resonated less and less with him, but still, in his own way, Negoro could not keep himself away from the scent of the trail. He left his computer as it was and reached for the receiver of the outside line. He dialed the eight-digit number and stared into the void outside the window as he listened to the ringtone.

The call should have connected with a desk of one of the prosecutors on the eighth floor of the joint government building of the Legal Affairs and Public Prosecutors Bureau, not so far away from Toho’s main office. The occupant of said desk, if Negoro’s assumption was correct, was currently in charge of the fraudulent loan case involving the two credit unions, and he and his clerk should have been knee-deep in a mountain of confiscated documents, flipping through payment slips and slaving away from eight in the morning till all hours of the night. He was a guy Negoro had become friendly with three years ago, while he was the chief reporter at the courthouse kisha club, but it had been at a used bookstore in Kanda where they had gotten to know each other. He was an avid reader with a sincerity about him, yet for someone who worked in the special investigation division he was surprisingly unconcerned with ranks or factions—still in his youth, he was that rare prosecutor who did not consider himself a member of the elite.

The phone picked up after three rings. The fact that the guy who answered was at his desk now meant that he was not among the special investigation prosecutors who had been temporarily summoned onto the Hinode Beer case, but since Negoro’s acquaintance with him had never been about work, he had no reason to be disappointed.

“I’m calling from Sanseido Bookstore in Kanda,” Negoro identified himself with their standard code.

“I thought I’d deposited my payment last month,” came the prosecutor’s reply. “How’re you hanging in over there? Must be busy. Did you stay overnight?”

“Yeah, pretty much. How about you?” Negoro asked.

“Seems like I won’t be involved.”

“Does that mean you’ll still come out for some saké under the cherry blossoms? It’s almost that time of year.”

“Let’s do that, if it ever stops snowing,” the prosecutor replied affably.

“By the way, and I guess I’m not entirely without ulterior motives here, but your brother-in-law, he’s at Omori Police Department now, isn’t he?”

As soon as Negoro broached the subject, he thought he heard a bitter laugh on the other end of the line.

“Well that one, he’s much more of a stiff than I am, so I doubt he’ll be of any use to you. Though he has changed somewhat lately . . . I guess he’s heading into a pretty difficult stage in his life, age-wise.”

Whenever he talked about his former brother-in-law, the prosecutor allowed fragments of his emotional life to slip out from beneath the armor of his work, and the tone of his voice also turned ambiguous. As far as Negoro knew, the prosecutor’s former brother-in-law, Yuichiro Goda, was the only person he ever allowed into his simple bachelor life, and he was the only person whom the prosecutor ever spoke about.

Last year, when this detective Goda had been transferred from MPD’s First Investigation to a local precinct, there had been talk that he had been demoted over mismanagement of some case, but at the time Negoro recalled that the prosecutor, in a moment of confidence, admitted, “The mid-thirties are a difficult time for a man.” He must have been close in age to Goda, so perhaps he had been talking about himself.

At any rate, Negoro had met Goda three years ago under some circumstance or other, and he could vividly recall the fierce look in the eyes of the shrewd detective from First Investigation, who was at the time in the throes of an investigation, with no time to care about other people. Negoro didn’t know how a person like that might have changed in three years, but he remembered his impression of the raw fragility and youthfulness peeking out from the fringes of Goda’s arrogant gaze. Whatever his motives were, Negoro felt a desire to meet him again.

“We don’t have to talk about work, let’s meet for a drink soon. I’d like to see Goda-san again. I don’t know how to say this, but there was something magnetic about his eyes.”

The prosecutor once again let out a private, amiable laugh, and replied gamely, “Give me a call when you have the time. I’m not sure if he’ll go along, but it might do him some good to breathe in some fresh air, too. I’d love it if you could school him on the everyday world.”

“Of course. I’ll definitely call you.”

“Talk to you soon then. Goodbye.”

As he replaced the receiver, Negoro blinked away the image of the noble-faced prosecutor, whose courtesy always remained genuine. He also pushed aside the image of Detective Goda’s slender face, which had seemed both haughty and delicate when he had seen it three years ago. Returning to the second line of the reporter’s notes, he began gathering the comments of the gubernatorial candidates.

2

Kyosuke Shiroyama

Kyosuke Shiroyama lost consciousness, hurtling into a void of spiritual darkness, shuddering beneath a force that pressed down on him like densely packed mud. When he came to for the briefest of moments, there was again a suffocating heaviness, now the mud was jolting up and down, he heard a groaning sound, and again he sank deeply into nowhere.

He did not know how much time had passed, but as he ever so briefly floated up