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

gaze as he held his breath right beside him, so he lowered his voice even more and held the receiver closer to his mouth. “It’s possible he’s been abducted, so let the head of the First Investigation Division know that I want to mobilize every relevant department. SIT, Mobile CI Unit, Crime Scene Unit, NTT Task Force—all of them. I’ll wait here until MPD arrives. Also, I’d like to keep the landline at Shiroyama’s residence open, so no more calls here going forward. All communication should be made via landline to Senior Patrol Officer Sawaguchi at the police box in front of Omori Station. Also, Sakagami-san, do you see a corporate directory lying around on a desk nearby? Check if any other Hinode executives live in this precinct. As for the rest, we’ll wait for instructions from MPD. Any questions so far?”

“Hey, wait up!” Goda heard Sakagami yell, then he was on hold for five seconds. “It’s the officer on duty from First Investigation Division. He wants to know if you’re sure he’s missing.”

“I’m sure.”

Goda hung up the phone, and as Mitsuaki started to say something he turned his back to him and addressed the officer. “Sawaguchi-san, let’s step outside for a minute.” Officer Sawaguchi turned the switch on the electronic lock on the front door to open it and, letting Goda out first, he wedged an umbrella stand in the doorway to keep it from closing. With the door ajar, they stepped onto the path.

“Can that front gate also be opened from inside with just a switch?”

“Yes. Works the same way as the front door. The wife told me earlier,” the officer replied.

“Sawaguchi-san. Many VIPs live around here, so it was my understanding that these parts were considered a priority for police patrol.”

As he briefly questioned the officer, Goda pointed his flashlight at the shrubs growing on either side of the path. With their pliable branches, they turned out to be cryptomeria, a kind of Japanese cedar. The trees were planted only 50 centimeters apart and, sprouting from the ground in conical shapes, the dense wall of needles glimmered blue-silver in the beam of the flashlight.

“Yes, that’s right. The president of Hinode returns home around 10 every night, so we always patrol the vicinity between 9:45 and 10:15. The president’s car always drives right past the police box and straight down the alley as it makes its way here.”

“Where were you around 10 tonight?”

“I’m always circling the area, so I’m not sure. But I made sure to drive by so I could see the road in front of here every five or ten minutes.”

“You mean you take a different route depending on the day?”

“Yes. I also constantly receive instructions over the radio to go here or there . . .”

This was true. In a precinct containing around 58,000 households, there were eleven police boxes. The average number of households in the area patrolled by one police box was 5,000. If one were to judge based solely on the incidence of burglaries and violent crime, nights in the Sanno neighborhood were peaceful for the most part, but the department-level radio incessantly blared out crimes that were occurring in adjacent areas. If something were to happen in neighboring Omori-Kita, precautionary instructions would come flying to the police box by Omori Station in Sanno Ni-chome, and the patrol routes would shift immediately. Even though there were a lot of high-income taxpayers in this district, with several thousand households to watch over, the emergency calls—a family member is late coming home, the neighbor’s dog won’t stop barking, an unfamiliar car is parked on the street, and so on—never seemed to end.

“Did you get any calls around 10 tonight?”

“That single-motorcycle accident beneath the overpass in Magome Ni-chome.”

“So you were over there then?”

“Yes. It only took about five minutes to deal with, though. Immediately after that, there was a car parked illegally on Ikegami-dori. Then I had to conduct some questioning on another matter . . .”

As he listened to Sawaguchi, something snagged in Goda’s mind, but perhaps because he was inspecting the shrubbery at the same time, in that moment he failed to fully process it.

“I’ll stop by the police box later, I’d like to see the logbook. Anyway, so you never saw the president’s car tonight, correct?”

“That’s correct.”

“Which means you just so happened to be away from this area around 10.”

“That’s correct . . .”

Goda suddenly stopped midway along the path. Scattered in the pool of light cast on the paving stone by his feet were several tiny conifer needles. Along with the silver-blue needles, around a millimeter wide and a centimeter long, he identified a few clods of earth that had been trampled over and caked onto the stone. The front gate was about five meters away.

He retrained his flashlight on the shrubs to either side of him and, facing the gate, he saw something in the depths of one on the right side. Kneeling on the paving stone, he stuck his hand all the way into the shrub, down by the roots, and scooped up what turned out to be a piece of paper crushed lightly into a ball around three centimeters in diameter. He uncrumpled it with his white-gloved hands, and as he cast his flashlight upon it, the characters written in ballpoint pen leapt out at him.

Without warning, Goda sneezed, and Officer Sawaguchi let out a short groan. The characters, written meticulously with a ruler and each measuring two centimeters square, conveyed a clear message: we have your president.

Goda looked beneath the shrub where he had just found the paper and, surveying the dense shroud of trees over the shrubs in the yard, as well as the wall and the front gate, he concluded that there was virtually no chance that it could have been thrown in from outside. Then, he felt another little snag in his consciousness, but his mind failed to process the thought any further.

“All right, you go back to the police box, and please relay