The rain lasted until morning.
Shindo had put in an appearance at Internal Affairs but had returned to his apartment as soon as he’d updated Takegami on the situation. It was ten thirty when Yanagi’s call came in, right on schedule.
‘The fax machine is installed.’
‘Let me send you what I have.’
Shindo faxed a copy of the letter. The response came in thirty minutes. The text was just as it had been in the original but the characters were now twice the size. Yanagi had typed the letter using a Brand K word processor, the one used by the force, and taken a copy in order to blow up the text. As it was still too early to rule out the possibility that the informant had used a word processor from the station, Shindo would take this to the crime lab for analysis.
He was getting to his feet when his eyes jumped back to the machine. The fax was in motion again. It droned and whirred, this time ejecting what seemed to be a photograph of a woman’s face.
‘I sent the original by registered mail,’ Yanagi said when he answered the phone.
The woman in the photo – the mama-san – was standing with her head poking out of the bar’s front door, perhaps bidding a patron goodnight. The fax cast her features in shadow, making them appear harsh, but even so it was easy to see that she was strikingly attractive. Yet it was the face of the man on the other end of the phoneline that preoccupied Shindo’s thoughts as he watched the paper feed through the machine. His speed off the blocks was incredible. He would have had to have headed into town late last night and used an infrared camera to get shots like these.
‘Did you go inside?’
‘No.’
‘What about the background check?’
‘I’ll have it ready by tonight.’
Shindo thanked him and hung up. He left the building. Half of him regretted having involved Yanagi. He had other assets in the station, albeit none who had the man’s investigative prowess. And he’d had the option of taking the case directly to the captain, or vice-captain, of the station. It was fairly standard, he knew, for an Internal Affairs inspector to take that route when investigating a case like this.
It’ll be fine. Too late to do anything about it now.
After another lunch at the noodle bar Shindo bypassed his office to go directly to the crime lab on the fourth floor. Mizutani was looking bored, picking at a bento. Shindo asked if they could run a comparison against the retyped version of the letter. Mizutani told him it’d be a piece of cake. He put his chopsticks down and disappeared into the back, leaving behind his half-eaten lunch. Shindo had worried that the clarity of the faxed document would make a comparison difficult, but Mizutani had said nothing to suggest this would be an issue.
With no way of knowing how long the man would take, Shindo opted to wait for the results in Internal Affairs.
‘Busy?’ asked Katsumata, clearly probing.
Shindo muttered a non-committal response then returned to his work on drafting the commendations. With Katsumata there, he knew Takegami would not press him for an update.
Mizutani’s ‘piece of cake’ turned out to take two hours.
‘It’s a completely different font.’
Shindo sighed. Still, he could at least now dismiss the possibility that the informant had used one of the force’s machines. The troublemaker Toshio Saga, and the misfit Atsushi Mitsui – if he found that one of them had a different make of word processor at home . . .
The sound of a motorbike interrupted Shindo’s line of thought. Takegami, already having put on his reading glasses, was reaching for the gloves in his drawer.