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

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, the 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