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

On the victim’s head there was a laceration above the right auricle, which appeared to have been made by a blunt weapon with a relatively large surface of impact. Since there was no evidence of a struggle, at first it was suspected that the crime had been committed by an acquaintance, but when Handa saw the crime scene, his immediate thought was, Practice swing with a baseball bat or a golf club. Handa did not play golf, but to relieve stress he often went to a park in his neighborhood to swing a bat or a bamboo sword. He always made sure there was nobody around him before he started swinging, but once in a while a child would dart out from nowhere and give him a scare. Perhaps his hunch sprang from this habit.

From the results of a detailed analysis of the crime scene, it was known that, based on bloodstains and bits of skin and clothing fibers recovered from the pavement, the victim had been struck in the head, then—with both hands holding his right auricle—he had been thrust down diagonally, falling on his side, after which he was dragged for about one meter and laid down in the bushes. The temporal bone where he had apparently been struck with a heavy blunt weapon suffered a depressed fracture, and from the cut on his scalp, they recovered a piece of film coated with traces of carbon resin. Judging from the victim’s height and angle of the active surface of the fracture, the presumed weapon was either a driver or 2- or 3-wood golf club with a heavy carbon head that had been swung diagonally from below—and based on the paint chip, it could even be narrowed down to two or three brands. Handa’s intuition had been correct.

The investigation began during the hottest part of summer, and Handa too had been dispatched from his precinct to Investigation Headquarters; for days he had canvassed the immediate vicinity of the crime scene on foot. An investigation could not move forward unless it could be backed up with the goods.

Early on in the initial investigation, he learned that the victim had no debt or savings to his name, and given his age, it was unlikely a crime of passion, so the investigation could reasonably be narrowed down to two possibilities: a grudge attack or a random crime. The victim’s wanderings were just that—they had no fixed course—and although the nursing home had filed a missing person report on the ninth, the day before the crime, it was unclear even when he had disappeared from the facility. A few witnesses had been in the vicinity of the building, but the time and location of these sightings were all different, and when pieced together, one could only surmise that the victim had been roaming about a five-hundred-meter radius of the facility until early evening.

What was more, the victim’s social circle was particularly limited; he had no friends at the nursing home and was not in correspondence with anyone outside of it. No one in either of his two sons’ families had visited the home for years. The family members had no motive, and their whereabouts before and after the estimated time on the day of the crime had all been confirmed. Under these circumstances, it seemed unrealistic to imagine the profile of a suspect who held such a hardened grudge against the victim that they had attacked him and bashed in his skull with a golf club.

On the other hand, following the theory that someone happened to be taking a practice swing in the park with a driver, the first step was to determine whether someone may have been near the crime scene with an object of appropriate length, or whether there was someone who regularly practiced swinging in the park. This process had to begin along the road that led to the crime scene, gradually expanding outward and checking off the thousands of businesses and residences one by one.

Reports had started to filter in little by little during the investigation meetings that took place each morning and evening. However, hardly any strayed from a variant of: “So-and-so keeps a driver in his locker at the office. On the day of the crime he was at work.” Everyone kept any further information to themselves so that nothing seemed clear, no matter how many of these reports came in. As a result, it was impossible for the lowest-ranking investigators to gain any perspective on where to focus their search. There was no evidence to be found in the area where Handa’s team had been assigned—not even anything worth hiding—and as the autumn equinox came and went, that was still the case. To be sure, the area within a two-kilometer radius of the crime scene had been divided into six sections, and the eastern section assigned to Handa’s team consisted largely of landfill in Higashi-Shinagawa with Shibaura canal in between, as well as the southern half of the Shinagawa wharf on the opposite shore.

On the wharf, there was only a container terminal, a thermal power plant, and oil storage tanks. The landfill in Higashi-Shinagawa, on the other hand, was occupied by three warehouse companies, the storage facility of a trading company, two buildings that housed, respectively, the Toyo Suisan seafood corporation and the fishing industry union, three municipal housing complexes, and finally, a facility under construction, a vacant lot, and the Tennozu baseball field. Handa spent all day long wandering back and forth along roads where only trucks passed, peering into trash cans, writing down the license plate number of every car that occasionally drove by, learning the faces of all the residents of the housing complexes—he even tracked down about a dozen of them who practiced their golf swings—but that was it. And yet, every morning and evening at the investigation meetings, his nature as a detective made him listen keenly in