1

Yuichiro Goda

On Monday, March 20, five thousand people were affected by a poisonous gas terror attack on the Tokyo subway during morning rush hour. The incident, widely rumored to be the work of a new religious sect, had occurred outside Yuichiro Goda’s precinct, but a comprehensive inspection of chemical agent manufacturers began the following day throughout the entire metropolitan area, including the Omori Police Department where he worked, and he ended his shift on Friday, March 24, after yet another day spent pounding the pavement.

Returning to his apartment in Yashio after nine in the evening, he grabbed his violin and immediately went back out. Playing every day—even when he only had half an hour to spare—had become a minor rhythm in his life over the past year since he had been transferred to the precinct police department. Why it had ended up being the violin rather than, say, jogging or bamboo sword practice remained a mystery, one that he had not even tried to solve. He only knew that what he truly wanted was not so much a routine in his life as time in which to think about nothing at all.

On a bench in Yashio Park near his home, Goda started by practicing his fingering, in accordance with the instruction manual on the Maia Bang method and as he had done thousand of times since he was a child. The part of his brain that was listening to each note was not his auditory cortex but most definitely the part that controlled his reflexes near the cerebellum, and as usual, before long his mind emptied for a brief respite. He was convinced that he didn’t do this out of necessity—this fact alone was what mattered—yet he was aware once again of his effort to turn himself into a machine. His own body was much more honest, however, and his fingers were soon too cold to keep moving, forcing him to put down his violin and rub his hands together. If it was this cold here, he thought, up in the mountains the heavy snow of early spring must be falling.

A lone man in a duster coat walked across the park, which had turned desolate after dark. Thinking it could be his old friend Yusuke Kano, Goda briefly followed the figure with his eyes.

Eight years had already passed since Goda divorced Kano’s younger sister, Kiyoko, but Kano, who worked as a prosecutor in the Tokyo District Public Prosecutor’s Office, was unable to reconcile his own delicate position as Goda’s former brother-in-law the way he managed to organize the documents in his office at work everyday. Even now, whenever the mood would strike, he dropped by Goda’s apartment in Yashio, which was closer to his office than his government employee housing in Setagaya, and after making small talk and downing one or two cups of whisky, he would lay out a futon to sleep and then leave in the morning. In their university days Kano and Goda had been mountain climbing partners, but now they were both so busy that the mountains felt like a distant part of their lives, and for the last few years this had been the state of their relationship.

The man walking across the park disappeared in the direction of another apartment tower. Goda put away his violin in its case and stood up. It finally dawned on him that Kano had stopped by only the day before yesterday, and he chided himself for being so spaced out.

Goda returned to his housing complex at 9:45 p.m. and started his laundry. He switched on the television, opened the refrigerator, and after taking out a withered bunch of komatsuna greens and an expired packet of tofu and throwing them in the trash, he set a glass on a platform scale and poured 150 grams of whisky into it, then turned off the lights in the kitchen.

The veranda of his tiny apartment faced east, over the elevated Bayshore Route of the Shuto Expressway, and beyond it the Shinagawa switchyard was steeped in expansive darkness. Among the sounds he could hear were the wind blowing across the landfill, cars speeding over the Shuto Expressway, steel doors opening and closing in a hallway somewhere, and the scattered echoes of children’s cries.

The television that Kano had given him for his birthday last year came with an antenna and a receiver for satellite TV, but since there was a fee for every channel, he had only subscribed to the sports channel and the BBC. Kano had told him he should at least try to keep up his English whenever he didn’t feel like doing anything else, but that wasn’t why he watched it—rather, he would give in to boredom and flip it on, listening halfheartedly to the news from overseas that he could care less about, or watching J-league soccer games so he could make small talk at work.

With his whisky in his left hand, Goda sat down on the tatami floor and gazed at the screen for a while and, pulling a few of the books scattered on the writing desk toward him with his right hand, he debated which one he should crack open. The chapter on “Art of Fugue” from the first volume of Glenn Gould’s collected writings would be his sleeping aid before bed. He would save Discourse on Commercial Transactions for another time. He still could not sing any of the songs in 100 Easy Karaoke Songs, which he had purchased out of a sense of social obligation. Then, his eyes fell on the March issue of Nikkei Science, but when he tried to drag it out the mountain of books came toppling down. He gave up on reading anything and for the moment turned his attention back to the world business report playing on the television, then in the margin of the magazine he jotted down the English word he had just heard, “squabble.” He pulled out a dictionary from the collapsed pile of books and checked the definition, and by the time he opened the magazine and started reading an article entitled, “The Birth and Death of V1974—A Nova in the Constellation Cygnus,” it was exactly 10:20 p.m.

V1974, which had erupted three years ago, was the only nova in the history of astronomy that could be observed from its onset to completion, and this recording had bolstered significant parts of the theory that novae eruptions occurred in a binary system consisting of two stars of dissimilar masses. While reading about the nuclear fusion that involved otherworldly mass, temperature, and speed, Goda’s mind emptied again and he managed to finish off about a third of his glass of whisky.

When he had been transferred to the precinct police department, Goda had considered starting a brand new life—both mentally and physically—but in the end he couldn’t afford to actively study for the certification required for a future job. Instead, he bought a new violin with the money he had been saving up for a car and started playing around with the musical instrument he had not touched since his divorce, but even that remained nothing more than hobby that barely took up an hour of his time. At the end of the day, he often fell into an unthinking void, and he would find himself idly gazing at nothing.

Even now, Goda realized that his mind was empty. After grasping around for something, he thought of Kano, whom he had seen only the day before yesterday, but he quickly thought better of it since Kano was always swamped with work and never seemed to have anything urgent to share with him.

Goda tossed aside the copy of Nikkei Science, and briefly gazed at the television screen again. There was a story about the management of nuclear power plants stemming from the privatization of electric companies in England. He scribbled the word “grid” on the back of the magazine closest to him, and just as he reached for the dictionary, the phone rang.

Lifting the receiver, out of habit he checked the time—10:55 p.m.

It was the officer on duty in his precinct’s Criminal Investigation Division. “About five minutes ago, we got a hundred-ten emergency call about a missing family member.” As he listened, Goda switched off the television with the remote control. “We sent an officer from the police box in front of Omori Station and there seems to be something wrong, so could you go check it out?”

“What’s my partner doing?”

“There was a burglary in Omori-Minami just a while ago, so he’s headed there. I’ll give you the address now, are you ready? It’s Sanno Ni-chome, number sixteen. Single-family home. The missing person is the husband, his name is Kyosuke Shiroyama. The person who made the hundred-ten call is his son, Mitsuaki Shiroyama.”

Goda mechanically wrote down Ni-16, Shiroyama on the back of Nikkei Science, and scanned the room for his socks. He had cast them off nearby and so he grabbed them and started putting them back on with one hand. Where is number sixteen in Ni-chome again? He tried to remember. Is it on the right at the end of the road past Ito Yokado supermarket?

Meanwhile, there was another phone ringing on the other end of the line and the officer told Goda, “Hang on.” The officer returned after a three-second wait. “MPD control center wants you to scope out the situation and report back. Kyosuke Shiroyama is the president of Hinode Beer.”

That’s right, he is, Goda mused. He had tracked the names and addresses of VIPs living in his precinct, and the president of Hinode Beer had been among the residents of Sanno Ni-chome.

“Got it. Be there in ten minutes. If you need to contact me just call on the scanner, don’t use the wireless. Until you hear back from me, don’t say anything to anyone for now. I’ll be right there.”

Grabbing a flashlight and throwing on a down jacket, Goda ran to the bathroom to rinse with Listerine to get rid of the whisky on his breath. He pushed the bicycle that he kept outside his apartment into the elevator, got off on the first floor, and by the time he started pedaling, it was 10:58 p.m.

Sleet mixed in with wind off the sea as it howled through the streets of the housing complex premises, where a smattering of lights glimmered here and there. Damn, it’s cold, was Goda’s first thought as he pondered whether he should take Ikegami-dori or the Dai-Ichi Keihin highway to Sanno Ni-chome, and it wasn’t until then that he finally began to wonder what might have happened. The president of Hinode would have a driver to chauffeur him around, so the fact that the family had reported to the police that he had not come home sounded an alarm. Something must have happened.

In the Sanno hills, each mansion with its lush green estate folded into the next one, protected by labyrinthine streets that all seemed to dead-end in a cul-de-sac. Late at night there were no cars passing by, and the darkness on the roads along the gated walls was total—as Goda pedaled on his bicycle, he felt as if he were swimming in the depths of the ocean. As he approached number sixteen in Ni-chome, he spotted a motorcycle from the police box parked in front of the gate of an estate walled off with Japanese andesine stone. The area was quiet, with no signs of any residents.

Goda stopped his bicycle a short distance away and checked the time. 11:07 p.m.

Next, he quickly scanned the premises from outside. The height of the wall was about 160 centimeters. A thick grove of tall trees surrounded the vast estate, and he could just make out the glass roof of a greenhouse. Beyond it stood an old Western-style home, where light from an incandescent lamp glowed in a second-floor window, as if someone had forgotten to switch it off. A single porch light was lit. He spotted another light on the first floor, obscured by the trees. Looking around, he noticed that the houses on either side and across the street were similar, and the dense trees all around offered little to no visibility.

The gate, which measured around 180 centimeters in both width and height, was made of sturdy cast iron and came equipped with an electronic lock that could only be opened with a passcode. The decorative latticework on the gate wove an elaborate arabesque design, leaving no leeway for a hand or arm to pass through. Beneath the intercom, the neon-bright red seal of SECOM home security was affixed to the gatepost. There was a straight path from the gate to the front door, about ten meters. On either side of the path were deep and shadowy shrubs, as tall as grown men.

Just as Goda was reaching for the intercom, a car turned into the street and stopped on the shoulder. Judging from the age and hurried pace of the young man who got out of the car, Goda knew it must be the son, and he called out, “Are you Mitsuaki Shiroyama-san?”

“Yes,” he replied.

“I’m Goda from the Omori Police Department,” Goda said, and showed him his badge.

Mitsuaki, who appeared to be almost thirty years old, was dressed in an exceptionally plain sweater and slacks, and his stoic features were devoid of expression.

“Are you the one who called the police? I’d like to speak with you for a minute inside,” Goda said in a low voice.

“I’ll open the gate.” Mitsuaki managed to reply in a measured tone, his shoulders heaving as he breathed, and he lifted the lid of the electronic lock on the gate and entered the four-digit passcode. As he did so, Goda asked him, “Where is your place of residence?”

“I live in the Ministry of Finance’s employee dormitory in Higashi-Yukigaya. My mother called to say that my father hasn’t come home.”

As they stepped inside through the unlocked gate, it closed automatically behind them, reverberating with the dull sound of cast iron colliding. Perhaps alerted by the noise, someone opened the front door, and Goda saw a familiar face peer out—it was Sawaguchi, the senior police officer from the Community Police Affairs Division. Goda gestured to Sawaguchi not to come out, and ushered Mitsuaki quickly through the front door.

Officer Sawaguchi stood on the concrete floor of the dimly lit entry vestibule, and an older woman sat kneeling on the wooden ledge of the raised entranceway floor. Wearing no trace of makeup, she wore a simple cardigan over her slight, petite frame. Mitsuaki, her son, called out to her immediately, “Mom, are you all right?”

“Yes, I’m fine—” the woman replied, with a rather carefree expression. Beside her, the officer spoke into the microphone of his radio, “Inspector Goda has arrived. Over.” Cutting through the static, a voice from the control room replied, “Roger.”

The woman, who appeared to be Shiroyama’s wife, bowed slowly to Goda. “I’m sorry to trouble you so late at night,” she said. “My son insisted that we call the police—”

“Forgive me for interrupting, ma’am,” Goda said, and he glanced at Officer Sawaguchi.

“I’ve just been informed of what happened,” Officer Sawaguchi said in a low voice, his notepad in hand. “Around 10:30 this evening, a man named Kurata who is a vice president at Hinode called here about a business matter, and she informed him that her husband had not yet returned home. Immediately after, Kurata called back to inform her that, according to the driver, there was no mistake he had departed the office at 9:48 p.m. with President Shiroyama and had dropped him off at his residence at 10:05 p.m. The driver confirmed that he had seen the president go through the gate and walk inside, so it was quite unclear what might have happened. She then called her son, and after hearing the details from her, he made the emergency call at 10:50 p.m. I arrived here three minutes later.”

As Goda listened to this report, the long hand on his wristwatch ticked forward again. 11:10 p.m. Since Shiroyama’s car arrived at 10:05, sixty-five minutes had already elapsed, Goda noted in his mind.

“Ma’am, please tell me your husband’s age, height, weight, and what he was wearing today.”

“He’s fifty-eight. He’s one hundred seventy-three centimeters tall. I think he weighs about sixty-three kilograms, he’s a little thin. What he wore today, let’s see, a dark navy suit, wool vest, black shoes, and he did not bring his coat with him. I believe his tie had a blue and silver pattern.”

Goda wrote this down in his notebook.

“Around 10:05 p.m., did you hear any noise by the gate?”

“No.”

“No sound of the car stopping?”

“Perhaps, but when I’m inside the house I can’t really hear any noises from outside.”

“There has been a string of incidents targeting corporate executives recently, so my father had told my mother not to go out at night. That’s why we installed the SECOM service and doubled the locks . . .” Mitsuaki added.

“Does your husband always unlock the gate by himself when he comes in?”

“Yes.”

“The SECOM alarm is turned off at that time, correct?”

“That’s right. My father always turns on the nighttime alarm system himself when he comes home.”

Goda looked at Officer Sawaguchi. “What’s the contact number for this Kurata?”

“He’s still at the main office, apparently. Here’s the direct number to reach him at night. He’s called here a number of times already.”

Goda looked at the eight-digit number scrawled across the notepad that the officer handed him. “I’d like to borrow your phone,” he said to the son. Mitsuaki immediately offered him his cell phone, but Goda declined and reached for the landline that was on one side of the hall stairs.

He dialed the number from Officer Sawaguchi’s notepad and someone answered immediately.

“Hello, this is Kurata. Has the president returned home?” Kurata spoke in a hushed whisper, as if he had been holding his breath.

“No, not yet. This is Goda from the Omori Police Department. How would you say the president appeared today?”

“Exactly the same as usual. Tonight was the launch for our new product and it was a great success so he was very pleased. I had just seen him off personally in the underground parking lot a little before 9:50.”

He sounded as if he was calmly choosing his words, but the edge in his voice belied his suspicions and fears—the panic he was suppressing showing through. Of course Goda wouldn’t expect him to sound upbeat under these circumstances, but he thought that the man sounded particularly gloomy.

“The driver, how long has he been working for the company?” he asked.

“Going on twenty years. He’s been driving our executives for a long time.”

“Please tell me the name and address of the driver, as well as where to contact him.”

“His name is Tatsuo Yamazaki. I don’t have his contact information, so I’ll get back to you. In any case, please begin your search immediately. You must find the president!”

His composed voice finally gave way to an angry cry. This, Goda thought, sounded much more normal.

“We’ll do everything we can, so please listen carefully to what I’m about to tell you. First, please designate a single contact person for the police on your end, and make sure that person will always be able to answer the phone. Next, for the time being please tell all of the executives in the main office, as well as those in management at the branch offices, to be mindful of any phone calls they may receive at home.”

“Has the president been kidnapped—?”

“At this point, we don’t know anything. It’s possible he’s been involved in an incident, so stay off your cell phones and car phones, as those could be tapped. Now, the police will be in touch shortly so please have that contact person ready.”

Goda hung up first, and then dialed the number of his precinct.

“It’s Goda. Get me CID.” As he said this to the operator, various images began to whirl around the core of his mind, emitting bright flashes of light: the hushed alley he had seen just a few minutes ago; the wall of Japanese andesine stone; the gate with its electronic lock; the ten-meter path to the front door, with the dense towers of shrubs on either side.

“Yes, CID,” answered the officer on duty, whose name was Sakagami.

“It’s Goda. The president hasn’t returned. Around 10:05 p.m. he was dropped off at home in his company car, and the driver saw him enter through the front gate, but he’s gone missing since. Relay all that to the chief and put a call out to every officer in CID. Tell Konno and Izawa to report directly here. Radios and cell phones are prohibited. Everyone else stand by at the department. All activities should be kept strictly confidential. Next, about contacting MPD . . .”

Goda was aware of Mitsuaki’s 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 by landline that we’ve found a note. If they have any messages for us, come here to let me know. Try to make as little noise as possible when coming and going.”

Officer Sawaguchi gave a brief assent, and then opened the front gate and rushed off. Goda held his hand against the gate so that it would not make another loud clang as it automatically closed, but the cast iron still shuddered heavily. With the exception of the branches above his head rustling in the cold wind, there was not a single sound coming from the surrounding alleys and houses.

Now alone, Goda took out his tape measure and quickly determined the distance from the spot where he had retrieved the note to the front gate, then wrote it down in his notebook. He would not be the one to write up the investigative report; he was merely doing what any detective first to arrive at the scene would do. However, as he went through these motions, he had the feeling—one that he hadn’t experienced in a long while—of scrambling around in the cold depths on his own, and he was forced to recognize that a terrible incident had occurred.

The time was 11:21 p.m. Seventy-six minutes had passed since the incident was assumed to have taken place. It was too late to issue an emergency deployment.

With the note in hand, Goda went back in through the front door. He held up the crumpled paper to show the president’s wife and son, who had planted themselves on the wooden ledge of the raised entranceway platform. “I found this out in the yard. I’m sorry, but please refrain from touching it.”

They both blinked vacantly and then, unable to utter a word, they each looked away quickly.

“Mom, we don’t know anything yet so don’t worry. I’m going to call Shoko.”

Mitsuaki reached for the cell phone, and Goda called out to him, “Please make sure this stays within your family.”

“I know,” Mitsuaki replied with irritation. Then he started to dial his sister.

The president’s wife drooped her shoulders forlornly. Seeming not to know what kind of expression she should be wearing at a time like this, she put on the faintest smile and began to murmur, almost to herself, “My husband, he always says that if something were to happen to him it would cause trouble for other people, so he is rather vigilant about his own safety and yet . . . He’s so concerned with everyone around him, he didn’t want to alarm the neighbors, so since the beginning of the year he has refused the bodyguard that his company had hired for him. I have no idea what we should do . . . And next week is the shareholders’ meeting, too. I’m sure he is out there somewhere now, worrying about the company. He’d been in such a good mood lately, what with orders for the new product coming in so well. Just this morning, as he went off to work, he was telling me that as long as the shareholders’ meeting goes well, he would finally be able to take a break.”

“Does your husband have any chronic illnesses?” Goda asked.

“No, not really.”

“So he is in good health?”

“Yes. I wouldn’t say he’s particularly energetic, but he’s fine.”

No chronic illness. Good health. Goda wrote in his notebook.

11:30 p.m. The intercom buzzed, and when Goda stuck his head out the front door, he saw two men wearing jeans and sneakers outside the front gate. Goda stepped out and opened the gate, letting the two of them in.

Both were young police officers in their twenties; their names were Izawa and Konno. It had been barely six months since they were transferred from Community Police Affairs to CID, so for these rookie detectives, no doubt this situation made their heads spin, and both of them appeared tense. Goda intended to teach them everything from scratch, and he looked the two young men squarely in the eyes.

“Now listen. No matter the circumstances, always put the safety of the victim first. This requires strict confidentiality. Unless instructed from the top, no matter what anyone asks, play dumb and say you’ve got nothing, haven’t heard anything.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Until the Mobile CI Unit gets here, you guys control traffic. Izawa, you’re in charge of the corner of that T-intersection. Konno, you get the corner of the other T-intersection. Confirm the name and address of any passerby and don’t let anyone through other than residents returning home. Same for cars. Be especially on the lookout for newspaper journalists and TV reporters. All right, get to it.”

Goda watched the two men dart out on either side to the T-intersections about seventy meters apart, and he gently closed the gate so as not to make a sound. 11:32 p.m.

He went back inside and confirmed with the wife and son, who were still sitting by the front door, that they had not received any suspicious calls to the house. “It’s getting cold, please wait in the living room,” Goda told them.

Goda had barely finished his sentence when Mitsuaki cried out, “It’s already been an hour and a half! Hurry up and find my father!” and buried his head in his hands.

Goda surmised that by now the perpetrators who had abducted the victim would have already fled to a neighboring prefecture, rather than staying within the city limits where the police hunt could easily reach them. What was more, it was customary for the police to wait until the victim was safely in protective custody before launching a formal investigation, which may have seemed contrary to the family’s wish for a speedy implementation. The victim being who he was, Goda predicted that the heads of MPD would be even more cautious than usual going forward.

Contemplating his own lack of agency both in the present and the future, Goda’s gaze dropped to his feet. As a precinct detective, he did not have the authority to move things from the right to the left. Once the investigation started, he would be lucky if he could gain access to even a nugget of information, and by this time tomorrow, he would no longer have any knowledge of the situation. These thoughts made him feel as if he were as useless as a twig.

When the intercom buzzed at 11:35 p.m., it signaled the arrival of the Mobile CI Unit at last. As soon as he heard the buzzer Goda raced outside and opened the front gate from the inside.

Four officers from the Kamata sub-unit had arrived, as well as the leader of the First Mobile CI Unit’s main squad and another four officers from the Crime Scene Unit. Each of them wore wireless earpieces connected to the investigation radio; some held bulging paper bags, while others carried toolboxes as they slipped stealthily onto the property. Perhaps there had been trouble deciding how to handle the case or securing a wireless vehicle—either way, it was unclear why it had taken them half an hour to get here.

The first man through the gate looked at Goda and demanded, “Has the NTT arrived?”

“Not yet,” Goda responded. As he spoke, he realized that he recognized the sergeant from the sub-unit, but the man with the fierce expression paid him no notice.

The squad leader, who walked in next, shouted instructions to the officers from the sub-unit: “Get them to sign the consent form first, then ask for a photo of the vic!” He quickly turned his attention to Goda. “Where was the note found?”

“Over there.” Goda pointed with his flashlight to the spot on path. The squad leader glared at the circle of light on the paving stone, then summoned the Crime Scene Unit officers behind him, “Go to it.” Two of them immediately spread out a tarp and began the task of collecting and preserving any evidence from the scene.

“And the note itself?” The squad leader stuck out his hand. Goda handed him the piece of paper.

The squad leader looked at the paper without saying a word, while behind him, the Crime Scene Unit swiftly set up another tarp inside the front gate to block the view from outside. The squad leader lifted his gaze and verified, “There’s been no call from the perpetrator, correct?”

“Correct,” Goda answered.

“You’ve spoke with the family?”

“Yes.” Goda ripped about five pages out of his notebook and handed them over. The squad leader quickly scanned the notes with his flashlight.

“No chronic illness, in good health. Good,” he murmured. Then, “We’ll take it from here. Those two men controlling traffic outside, leave them where they are until we say so. I want everyone at the department on stand by.” The squad leader spoke brusquely, as if he were loath to waste a minute, before hastening inside the front door.

One of the officers from the sub-unit called out to Goda. “Hey, this gate—how do you open it from inside?”

“Like this.” Goda showed him how the inner switch worked.

“I see. If it can be opened that easily from inside, then this has gotta be their ‘out.’ They must have had a car . . .” the officer mumbled to himself. He called out to a fellow officer, “Omura!”

They spread open a map, and shined the beam of a flashlight on it. “First, see if anyone heard any noise or the sound of a car ignition right around 10:05. Then, check if anyone saw any suspicious vehicles—”

“Many of the streets around here dead-end in a cul-de-sac, so pay attention,” Goda said and marked the map with his own ballpoint pen.

“Got it. Omura, you go right. I’ll take the left. We’ll circle back here in half an hour. We’ll communicate via radio over 100A.”

The two sub-unit officers quickly went off down their respective streets and were soon replaced by two new faces that ducked through the tarp covering the front gate. It was a lieutenant and a sergeant from the second unit of MPD’s First Special Investigation Team whose names and faces Goda knew, but for the moment neither of them gave Goda even a nod in greeting.

The two men glanced over to where the Crime Scene Unit was working, then took in the entire view of the mansion before the lieutenant, whose name was Satoru Hirase, spoke up.

“Goda-san? Is that you?”

“Yes, it’s me.”

“Where’s the squad?”

“They’re here.”

“Sure is cold tonight . . . was the vic wearing a coat?”

“No.”

“I see—”

The proficient engine of the Special Investigation Team had taken over the situation in which the president of a major corporation had been abducted, and was only just getting revved up. After repeatedly surveying the premises of the estate, which was now a crime scene, the lieutenant and the sergeant also disappeared behind the front door. The four officers from the Crime Scene Unit were crawling around on the path, having already placed five markers. Taking a last look at it all, Goda ducked under the tarp and went out the front gate.

Mounting the bike he had left on the street, Goda looked up again at the mansion enveloped by the pitch-black shadows of the trees and let his imagination run free, just for the sake of it. Bet there are at least three perps. Two of them must have jumped the wall and waited by the shrubs along the path for the victim to come home, and after capturing the victim, they whisked him out the gate, where someone else had a car by the roadside that they forced him into, and then drove away. Goda was easily able to imagine the details of such a crime from beginning to end, but the profiles of those who might have actually executed it were obscured by a thick haze.

Even if the perps had closely examined the area in advance, how could they have pulled off a crime that exploited the exact gap in time when there was no policeman on patrol nearby? They could not have done so by sheer chance—how on earth could they have been confident that the patrol would not return during those few minutes that they needed? The question that had flickered in his thoughts while speaking with Officer Sawaguchi still pulsed in a corner of his mind.

But in reality, as Goda peddled away on his bicycle, he wondered where he would be and what he would be doing come tomorrow. He might be canvassing this neighborhood on foot or investigating suspicious vehicles; on the other hand, he might not even be recruited to Special Investigation headquarters, and he’d find himself back with the rank and file at the precinct, writing up cases as usual. No matter what, he had no doubt that he would be somewhere far away whenever any developments occurred.

11:42 p.m. The alley was as silent as it had been half an hour earlier. It would still be a while before the MPD held a press conference, but for the time being, it seemed as if nothing had been leaked to the public. After telling the two young officers who were controlling traffic to stay put until instructed otherwise, Goda set off toward the police box by Omori Station only a short distance away. As he traveled back through the maze of alleys, he spotted three unmarked cars of the Crime Scene Unit and the Special Investigation Team parked in the darkness.

根来史彰　Fumiaki Negoro

On the copy desk of Toho News’s Metro section, Kei’ichi Tabe, the slot editor, tore off a sheet from his page-a-day calendar. His arm inscribed a large arc in the air and the ripped-out piece of paper sailed away from his hand.

Tabe had a habit of doing this when the date changed at midnight. The slot editor’s desk had a conspicuously large desktop computer on it, so that Fumiaki Negoro, sitting a little distance away in the section for reserve reporters who floated wherever they were needed among the various hard news sections, could only see Tabe’s arm and the flyaway paper behind the massive monitor.

The clock showed the time as one minute after midnight. It was Saturday, March 25.

Ripping off and throwing away the page from his own small daily calendar with one hand, Negoro resumed working on his unfinished draft. It was the next day’s installment of a six-part series, “Waste or Resource?” and he had taken this brief moment of free time to begin writing it. The thirteenth edition of the morning paper had gone to press half an hour ago, and there was an hour and a half until the final deadline for the fourteenth edition. The crowd in the news room could best be compared to that in the lobby of a theater running a play that boasted a relatively good turnout, if not a full house. Directions to confirm or finesse articles before press time bounced from one corner of the office to another, and phone calls came in now and then from reporters in the field. However, since everyone spoke in low tones and with few words, their voices didn’t travel far.

In addition to Tabe, the slot editor, there was a rim editor on duty and four overnight reporters on the Metro desk. In the Reserve section, the only one left was the chief, Negoro. Until half an hour ago, there had been at least three other reporters getting their research materials together, but after Tabe asked them to do some additional reporting for the final edition, they had gone off somewhere, leaving behind an ashtray with a mountain of cigarette butts.

During the Great Hanshin Earthquake that struck in January, the reserve reporters—eighteen in total—were for the most part allocated to the earthquake and disaster news crew, but just when they thought the confusion in the aftermath of the disaster had subsided, March brought a succession of major incidents beginning four days ago with the unprecedented crimes of a poison gas terror attack and random killings by a religious sect, followed by the bankruptcy of two credit unions within the metropolitan area. Added to this were suicides of children being bullied, a spate of gun-related crime, city expos, waste issues, urban disaster prevention, a resolution to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the end of the war—the reserve reporters were hardly at their desks long enough to warm their seats. It was rare to have such a bustling year, and Negoro did not have to wait until spring to complete his annual transformation into “the solitary reserve,” the lone reporter rooted to his desk, churning out article after article.

Always watching the clock, all year long Negoro assembled the drafts filed from all over by the other reserve reporters into a coherent whole, revising and rewriting to create feature articles to fill the Metro page and sending them off to the slot editor. In between all this he would touch up articles for his own column and pre-write advance articles on occasion. As it came down to the wire before press time he would check headlines, and in the event of an exclusive he would immediately swap around, punch up, or correct articles as per the slot editor’s specs. For the most part the work felt automatic, and after twenty-three years on the job his body had grown accustomed to it, but when the clock ticked past midnight, his lumbago, the result of a car accident four years ago, would start to trouble him. To make matters worse, yesterday he had stayed up reading a book—knowing all along that he should get some sleep—and he was paying for it now, his eyes hurting a little as he looked at the computer screen.

“Hey, Yoshida, this piece on the Product Liability Act—I think the consumers come out too strong,” Tabe was saying on the other side of the desktop computer. “Which do you prefer, add in some corporate voices, or shorten the opinions of the consumer group?”

With the phone in one hand, Tsutomu Yoshida, the overnight reporter covering the Ministry of International Trade and Industry, responded, “Please shorten it.” The rim editor, Takano, sat in front of another desktop computer next to Tabe, and he turned to him, putting a hand over the receiver he had tucked between his ear and shoulder. “That fire in Itabashi, apparently it’s arson. What do you want to do?”

“Just keep it below the fold,” Tabe said brusquely. On the six-man Metro desk, Tabe was the most blunt. Judging from the tone of his voice, it seemed unlikely that there would be any last-minute prime scoops for the final edition. With this thought in the corner of his mind, Negoro continued to type up his draft.

Over on the Political desk, which was preparing for the nationwide local elections, things seemed a bit busier, with continuous calls coming in from the Prime Minister’s Official Residence and the reporters gathered at the Hirakawa kisha club. Just a moment ago, their slot editor had run over to the Layout desk across the aisle and even now an argument could be heard from that direction. “With this election as dull as it is, why not hit ’em with a headline like aoshima in the lead?” followed by, “Can’t you be a little more reasonable? It’s the front page!”

Across from the Political desk, there were still about five or six people on Foreign, but aside from their slot editor crying out in a high-pitched voice, “Call New York!” no other sounds rose above the fray. On the other side of Foreign was the Business section where—thanks to a recent string of financial scandals, the strong yen, and slumping stock prices—reporters were coming and going even at this hour, leaving their computers connected to the internet, the screens streaming figures from markets overseas.

Further over, where the National, Culture, and Sports sections were side by side, several people still lingered, but nothing about their desktop computers or mountains of files suggested anything notable would crop up. Beyond them the photo room was partitioned off. While a few overnight photographers should have been around, they might either be taking a nap or getting some coffee, since there hadn’t been any signs of them running out on assignment.

The news room floor, measuring roughly 1,300 square meters, was illuminated by the same overhead lights as during the day, yet it appeared slightly dim, and even though there were nearly a hundred people spread out everywhere, the atmosphere could be described as both lively and quiet, enveloped in a fog of ennui unique to these late hours of the night. Looking around him, Negoro noticed how each section had one or two televisions on which brightly colored images danced on the screen without any sound, and in his mind they appeared like underwater mirages of Ryugujo, the Dragon Palace Castle.

He rubbed his eyes, wondering if something was wrong with them, and just then Tabe’s voice came hurtling toward the Reserve section.

“Hey, Negoro, about your series. Would you mind cutting the chart and adding five more lines to the main text to adjust? We secured an interview with a member of the credit association so I’d like to run it there.”

Negoro raised a hand and replied, “Okay.” He saved the draft he had been working on for tomorrow and pulled up today’s draft instead. If he were to cut out the chart that detailed the recycling process, those five lines allotted him only seventy characters in which to explain it.

He tried adding a sentence—In the process that begins with the production and output of industrial waste and ends in its permanent disposal, the technology and costs required for handling it become progressively more expensive for in-house disposal, reuse, and recycling—and as he was counting the number of lines again, the overnight reporter covering the Ministry of Health and Welfare called out to him. “Negoro-san, telephone.”

Reaching for the phone with an outside line, Negoro looked at the clock out of habit. 12:05 a.m.

The caller was the chief of CID at the Setagaya Police Department, whom Negoro had been friends with for going on fifteen years. When he was thirty, Negoro had been assigned to the MPD beat, but he had struggled. As bad as he was at finding sources, he was at least as inept at socializing. He had never gotten used to the police force, no matter how much he tried, and thus he had little incentive to try harder, but he still maintained cordial friendships outside of work with a handful of detectives he had gotten to know over time, and this guy was one of them.

“Negoro-san, I might not be able to make it to the rose show tomorrow after all,” the chief said.

This formidable man, who held a fifth dan in judo, had begun growing roses in his garden at home in Komae ten years ago, and since then he had been busy creating new rose hybrids and submitting them to international competitions. Negoro, on the other hand, lived in an apartment building and had no garden, but acting on a whim to take advantage of the chance to admire at least a flower or two, he had promised to go see the rose show at the Jindai Botanical Garden tomorrow afternoon.

“Did something happen?” As Negoro asked this, he noticed that the chief was not calling from his home phone but from the police department, and he wondered if there could have been an incident.

“Seems like something happened in Sanno. You should check it out.”

“Sanno, in Ota district?”

“Something’s going on with the department radio.”

After this brief exchange, the call ended. It took about two seconds for him to get goose bumps from the realization that—for the first time in a long while—one of his sources had leaked a story. In the past, all the hairs on his body would have stood up at once. Negoro quickly reached for the receiver of the direct line to their nook in the kisha club at the MPD.

“This is Negoro. Did anything happen in Sanno, in Ota district?”

“No.” The person who picked up was Tetsuo Sugano, the chief reporter. “Everything’s quiet here.”

“A friend just called, he said something’s going on with the police radio.”

“The radio—? Anything else?”

“That’s it.”

“Sanno, huh. I’ll ask one of the guys who’s out at the evening session.”

This call ended briefly too. Sugano was a shrewd reporter with years of experience on the MPD’s Public Security Bureau beat. In addition to being a man of few words, he always thought of three things in the time it took a normal person to think of one, so with both younger colleagues and his contemporaries, he couldn’t hold much of a conversation. In spite of this Negoro had managed to be friendly with him for quite a while, though no matter how many years they had known each other, every time he heard Sugano’s voice he felt as if he were consulting a workbook that gave him all the right answers without offering any insight on how to solve the questions. Actually, Sugano was one of the heaviest drinkers on Toho News’s hundred-member-strong Metro section, but since he never mentioned it himself, not many people knew about it. That’s the type of man he was.

As soon as Negoro replaced the receiver, Tabe, famous for his keen ears, called out from his desk, “Something up?”

“No, not yet,” Negoro replied briskly, annoyed that he couldn’t really focus as he returned to his draft. For the time being he printed out the article to which he had added five lines, circled the revisions in red, handed it to the overnight reporter nearby, and asked, “Can you get this to copy?” Having left the matter up to Sugano, he felt confident that things would move forward without a hitch, but at the same time his own hands were now idle. The goose bumps from only a few seconds ago had also passed, so Negoro was at a bit of a loss.

Returning to his earlier draft, he continued writing—When it comes to thermal energy from urban waste—and looked at the clock. 12:10 a.m. By now, the beat reporter for MPD’s First Investigation Division, having been paged by Chief Sugano, would be in a hired car, rushing to Omori Police Department and Sanno Ni-chome. For a moment Negoro tried to remember how, fifteen or sixteen years ago, he used to go running around like that, but he could not immediately retrieve a single memory, and as he caught himself wondering if this were the fate of the brain cells of a third-rate reporter, his fingers had typed, When it comes to thermal energy from urban waste, its fate is . . . He deleted and retyped, When it comes to thermal energy from urban waste, its current state is . . .

The clock said thirteen minutes after midnight. Over at the copy desk, the direct line to the press box rang once, and the rim editor Takano grabbed the receiver. The call lasted a few seconds, and Takano turned and said something to Tabe next to him. Tabe’s head, with its hairline that had receded five centimeters, rose above his desktop computer as he shouted toward the layout desk across the aisle, “The front page and the Metro page, we might have to swap out an article!”

Then Tabe cried out in a voice that resounded through the entire Metro section, “There’s an unmarked police car in Sanno Ni-chome. They’ve also spotted vehicles from the investigation unit in the back lot of Omori Police Department.” Right away, the overnight reporters looked up, asking, “Something up?”

“Don’t know yet. In any case, the chief inspectors of the First Investigation Division and the Crime Scene Unit have not returned to their official residences. The police departments in each of the two areas are keeping mum. The kisha nook is waiting for the broadcast. Hey, Doi, make sure we have a residential map of the Sanno neighborhood. And keep the overnight staff in the photo section on standby.”

As he spoke, Tabe’s eyes darted to the large wall clock. Negoro also looked up at it. 12:16 a.m. No matter how much they pushed back, they had only an hour and a half until deadline. Whatever had happened, they wouldn’t be able to write much about it.

“Negoro, could you mark down two places where we can set up near Sanno Ni-chome and Omori Police Department?”

Negoro acknowledged Tabe’s directive with a raised hand. Setting aside his half-finished draft, from the files in his desk drawer he pulled out a list of the five hundred newspaper vendors in the entire metropolitan area. He had used this same list every time there had been an incident, so the pages were well worn and tattered. As he opened the list, he immediately thought of the vendor next to the post office at the intersection in Sanno Ni-chome, but it took a little while for him to call to mind the area where Omori Police Department stood.

Omori Police Department was located on the east side of Omori-machi Station on the Keihin Kyuko Line. It was where the Dai-Ichi Keihin highway branched off from Sangyo Road; at the fork in the road there was a Denny’s, and adjacent to the restaurant’s colorful roof was a small and inconspicuous four-story government building. On the same side of the street as the building, which could easily be overlooked if not careful, there were private apartment buildings and warehouses, as well as various small office buildings. The entrance of the police department faced the Dai-Ichi Keihin highway, and the rear exit faced Sangyo Road, and both sets of doors were shielded from view by the elevated road directly in front of them. Yes, that’s right, the entire area is like the bottom of a ravine, deprived of sunlight even during the daytime—as all these vivid details finally came back to him, he found a suitable vendor from the list and wrote down the telephone number. It was positioned along Dai-Ichi Keihin and about three hundred meters away from the police department, but with a pair of binoculars, it would be an ideal spot to stakeout the coming and goings of investigators.

He put the list back in the drawer. Since there was no way he could concentrate now he gave up on his draft, and saved and closed the file. Then, from his drawer he took out a pencil that did not get much use these days, and started to sharpen it with a Higo no Kami pocket knife. This is what Negoro did whenever he was waiting for something. Tabe, at his desk, was talking on the direct line. “Has there been any broadcast yet? What are the other papers doing?”

Just as Negoro had started sharpening a second pencil, the phone rang for the umpteenth time, and Negoro froze, his hand still on the Higo no Kami. He checked the clock on the wall. 12:18 a.m.

Tabe picked up the receiver, his body bent forward as he stooped over the computer and his forehead shining.

“I see—got it. Let me know the details ASAP. I’m calling the Metro chief.” He nodded once and straightened himself as he put down the receiver, but he hesitated before letting the next words escape from his mouth. “Kidnapping. They’ve got the president of Hinode Beer—!”

His voice was not all that loud, but it reached every corner of the 1,300-square meter office in a flash, and for a second or two, it seemed as if time had stopped on the whole floor.

Then, Takano the rim editor’s bellow rumbled through the office. “The president of Hinode Beer has been kidnapped! Hinode’s president! Kidnapped!” His shouting was drowned out by the hum of voices erupting all at once, chairs scraping the floor as the reporters got to their feet, and footsteps rushing toward Metro.

“Well, the election’s a bust,” the Political slot editor nearby huffed, looking up at the ceiling.

“Hinode Beer? You sure it’s Hinode Beer?” yelled the Finance slot editor as he raced over.

“What do we do for space? How many columns should we keep open for now?” This from the layout editor as he came running.

“If it really is a kidnapping, I’m sure they’ll force a news embargo on us—” That was the voice of the acting deputy managing editor.

A throng had formed in a matter of seconds. In its middle, Tabe rapidly launched into a short summary of the situation at hand. MPD’s Public Information Division had already put a call out to the chief reporters from each newspaper, and Sugano was on his way there now. It seemed to be a given that a temporary embargo would be requested—that much they knew. Everyone turned to look at the clock at once. If the news embargo were issued, all reporting activities would be shut down. Even if talks over the details of the embargo with the publishing managers dragged on, there was a finite limit to how much time they had. Until the embargo officially would take effect, they had one or two hours, tops. In any case, gathering news was a race against time.

As if to signal the start of a hundred-meter race, the crowd that had gathered dispersed in all directions.

“Get all staff who’s available back here now!” Tabe cried out. “Doi, Harada—you guys first look for anyone with a family member who works for Hinode. Negoro, I need you to work on the assignment chart. Yoshida, you get everyone from the photo section over here. And find any material we have on Hinode—everything we’ve got in the archives! Also get anything on the beer manufacturers’ labor union. Arai-san, you’re in charge of the financial side and the liquor industry!”

“Ah!” From the Business desk, Arai cried out hysterically. “Hinode has a shareholders’ meeting at the end of March—”

“Then we’d better interview shareholders too! Be sure not to let on about the incident, keep the conversation on the economy and the industry and so forth.”

Negoro was busy paging each reserve reporter who could be called back to the office, one by one, as he turned over a commemorative poster from the 100th anniversary of the newspaper and spread it on the Reserve desk to start creating the assignment chart.

Behind him, the rim editor Takano was on the direct line with the press box, furiously scribbling on his notepad. As soon as the call ended he read these aloud in a voice that reverberated across the floor.

“The name of the victim, Kyosuke Shiroyama. Fifty-eight years old. President of Hinode Beer. At approximately 10:05 p.m. on the twenty-third, after returning in a company car to his residence at 2-16 Sanno, he was ambushed and abducted by a person or persons who had been lying in waiting inside the front gate. In the shrubs of the front yard, a crumpled letter has been found that appears to have been left by the perp. It said, ‘We have your president.’ The case is being treated as abduction and unlawful confinement. As of now, 12:20 a.m., there has been no contact from the perp. The name of the president’s driver is Tatsuo Yamazaki. Sixty years old. Employed by the company for twenty years. The next briefing will be at 2 a.m.—that’s all that’s been released to the press for now!”

Negoro picked up the receiver of the direct line.

“Yes, Sugano speaking!” he shouted. He sounded like a different man than he’d been half an hour ago.

“Do you have somewhere you want me to send the reserve reporters?” Negoro asked.

“I need you to follow up with the Hinode executives. Not one of them is returning our calls. Have them try going directly to their homes, knocking on doors.”

Negoro hung up and called out to Yoshida, who had just run back from the archives. “Can you look up the names and addresses of Hinode executives?”

The clock read half past midnight. As Negoro conveyed Sugano’s instructions to the reserve reporters responding to his page, he was also working on the assignment chart with Tabe. On the reverse side of the poster, first he wrote out the headings in large characters, ten centimeters square, and then added names of the reporters. Excluding the reporters on the MPD beat and those covering the District Public Prosecutor’s Office and the courts, the players he had left totaled about fifty reporters.

Across the top, he had written 1) Supervisor and 2) Deputy Supervisor, followed by 3) Hard News 4) Feature Articles 5) Victim, et al. 6) Hinode Main Office 7) Hinode Executives 8) Hinode Employees 9) Hinode Affiliated Companies 10) Distributors 11) Competitors & Labor Union 12) Liquor Shops 13) National Tax Agency 14) Omori Police Department Stakeout 15) Sanno Stakeout 16) Standbys, and so on.

He put the Metro chief under “Supervisor” and the deputy chief under “Deputy Supervisor.” For each team in charge of replacing stories for Hard News and Feature Articles, he would assign one slot editor from each section along with a supervising chief and three reporters. For each reporting crew and the two stakeout headquarters, he’d assign a chief and a few more reporters. The name of Yoshida, the overnight reporter who had covered the joint venture between Hinode and Limelight last year, was listed under 10) and 13), while Tabe wrote his own name under Hard News, and Negoro put himself down for Feature Articles as a supervising chief.

The overnight photographers had already raced off in the direction of the victim’s residence and Hinode’s main office in Shinagawa. The news room floor had become a vortex of noise—calls being made, phones ringing, footsteps coming and going, and voices flying across the room. As his Magic Marker darted around the assignment chart, Tabe was unable to contain the excitement in his voice. “Looks like we’ll be spending nights here for a while,” he muttered.

Once the managers and section editors gathered, they would be entrenched in meeting after meeting. Negoro would pull together the articles that would flood in during the intervals and, with one eye always on the clock, just when he thought he had a final draft, things would get switched around and he’d be rewriting articles down to the last second. While every staff member embedded at the main office—including Negoro—was transformed into human word processors, the reporters were working in the field, hunting down interviews as they launched into their dog race. Negoro was concerned about his own engine, which seemed to be taking a little longer than usual to rev up, and as he blinked his sleep-deprived eyes, the thought of the rose show floated into his mind again. He realized that he would miss the opportunity—again and for the foreseeable future—that he had secretly hoped would bring about a small change in his life.

久保晴久　Haruhisa Kubo

Earlier that evening, the check-in for the regular interview session at the official residence of the chief inspector of the First Investigation Division hadn’t started until 11 p.m. since the MPD was hosting a party for incoming and outgoing officials at the Hanzomon Kaikan. That night, Haruhisa Kubo, on his second year as the beat reporter for the MPD, arrived in front of the chief inspector’s official residence in Himonya in Meguro district a little more than ten minutes past eleven, and was ninth on the list after reporters from various commercial broadcasting companies, NHK, Asahi, and Kyodo. Other media companies followed, arriving in groups of twos and threes, and the line of reporters quickly materialized in the alley, standing silently with their shoulders hunched, wearing headphones from their portable radios.

For the majority of those present, the night’s topics of interest related to First Investigation included the whereabouts of the cult leader, who had an arrest warrant out on him on suspicion of a murder plot to unleash poisonous gas, and developments in the interrogation of senior members of the cult who had already been arrested. Since there had only been a handful of official announcements from the MPD, each organization had spent these last few days feeling out the leader of First Investigation. Kubo, curious to know what leads his competitors might have up their sleeves, approached this evening’s session by gulping down his requisite nightly antacid and energy drink. In spite of this practice he never lost any weight. Even in his student days, he had had a large build, but since becoming a Metro reporter, thanks to the irregular lifestyle, he had put on another ten kilograms, and during his company medical checkup the doctor had told him that he was on the verge of fatty liver disease.

The night was terribly cold for the beginning of spring, with rain drizzling off and on. At 11:25 p.m., a complaint rose from the scrum of reporters from the commercial broadcasting companies. “He’s late.” It was past the expected arrival time of the official vehicle for the chief inspector, but since he was sometimes even a full half hour late, Kubo wasn’t particularly concerned. No doubt the other reporters had come to the same conclusion, for no one joined in the grumbling.

But the second time someone murmured, “He’s late,” it was contagious, and the words were repeated over and over. It was now three minutes past midnight. Along with the mumblings of “Did something happen?” and “Something’s up,” another voice quipped, “His neighbor hasn’t returned yet either.” The official residence of the chief inspector of First Investigation stood next to that of the chief inspector of the Crime Scene Unit, and since the latter didn’t drink, there was no way he would have stayed out late for an after party or some other social gathering. This fact, and that it was now past midnight and the chief inspector of First Investigation had still not returned home either, did not take more than a few seconds to sound an alarm in the minds of the dozen or so reporters huddling in the alley.

Had they located the cult members wanted by the police? Or was it another incident? The reporters exchanged dubious looks of suspicion, and after another moment, the impatient ones began disappearing from the alley without a sound. Kubo told himself that if something had happened he would hear from the kisha club and so he did not budge from his spot, yet during the couple of minutes he continued to stand there, needles of anxiety and irritation that his competitors would beat him to a story continued to prickle him. At six minutes after midnight, one of those needles suddenly sunk in deep when his pager went off.

The number that showed on the LCD belonged to the kisha club at MPD. The other newspaper reporters immediately shouted out, “Did something happen?” and “What do you know?”

“I have no idea,” Kubo replied, which wasn’t a lie, and he began trotting away from the alley at last. For the fifty meters he had to run to the side street off Meguro-dori where his hired car was parked, his ample belly swayed beneath his jacket, and the strained buttons of his dress shirt threatened to pop off.

When he dialed the number from the car phone, Chief Sugano answered immediately and asked in his perpetually aggressive tone, “Can you get to Sanno Ni-chome?”

It was still unclear what exactly might have happened in Sanno, but just hearing that something was going on made his heart leap before his mind could catch up.

“Head for Sanno Ni-chome, please,” he told the driver, and as he quickly opened a map, he felt himself already anticipating what had yet to take shape. A new incident had occurred, and every time his point of focus shifted the illusion swelled in his heart that a new horizon might unfold before him, that he might break away and discover a place that was—at the very least—different from the one in which he found himself scrambling around now.

The car passed through the intersection in Kakinokizaka and headed toward Kanpachi, and it took about twelve or thirteen minutes to cover the distance to Sanno Ni-chome, but it wasn’t until they crossed the tracks of the Tokyu Ikegami Line that the deputy chief reporter finally made first contact. “Apparently there’s an unmarked police car in the backyard of Omori Police Department. Try circling around the Sanno neighborhood.”

From what he said, Kubo’s partner on the First Investigation beat, Yuichi Kuriyama, had scoped out the precinct already and reported back, but they still did not know the scene of the incident.

As soon as Kubo heard about the unmarked police car, his vision of a new horizon was supplanted by ambitions of an exclusive story, which lit a fire under him. Stuck in traffic at the Magome intersection, he glared first at the hands on his wristwatch, which showed seventeen minutes after midnight, then at the chain of red tail lights on the cars in front of him, and was just wondering which alley in Sanno he should go down when the second call came in.

“Get to Hinode Beer’s main office in Kita-Shinagawa now! The president of Hinode has been kidnapped!” blared the voice over the phone.

It wasn’t that his mind immediately reacted to the name of the company Hinode Beer and the news that its president had been kidnapped; he just automatically absorbed the instructions he was given. He was to report directly to Hinode’s main office and observe the comings and goings of employees. If possible, he was to get the first comment from an employee or executive. There was no time—the news embargo would soon take effect.

If this really were a kidnapping, the upside of not being able to report whatever they uncovered was that at least they would not be scooped by a rival paper—an inappropriate sense of relief at this briefly crossed his mind in the next moment. Before he knew it, the ambition to snag an exclusive was replaced by speculation about how they would gain an advantage over their competitors once the embargo was lifted, but this too only lasted a second—as soon as Kubo had informed the driver of their new destination, he suddenly came to his senses and leaned forward in his seat. The black shadows of trees in the Sanno hills streamed past his car window. As he watched them go by, in his mind three or four question marks lined up after the intangible word—kidnapping???

12:35 a.m. During the third phone call he learned the simple yet implausible fact that the president of Hinode had been abducted from his own home, and when Kubo’s car arrived in front of the building of Hinode’s main office in Kita-Shinagawa, he found the street along Yatsuyama-dori completely empty. At first Kubo was surprised that there was no sign of any other newspaper or TV reporters and, realizing that he was first on the scene, his heart skipped a beat. He looked up at the luxurious forty-story high-rise and tried once again to imprint upon his mind that the master of this tower had been kidnapped—it remained a fuzzy reality to him.

There was only a smattering of lights on on the bottom three-quarters of the building—the rest was pitch dark. The remaining top floors were shrouded in a low-hanging mist, and the red beacons that must have been on each of the four corners of the roof flashed blurrily in the mist. When his gaze returned to the ground, he saw that the entrance to the building, which was set back twenty meters from the sidewalk, was also dark, with no signs of people there, either.

On the signpost facing the sidewalk, gleaming gold lettering and arrows pointed the way to Hinode Opera Hall, Hinode Contemporary Art Museum, and Hinode Sky Beer Restaurant, but the entrance for the general public that could be seen just beyond was shuttered, and a fence barricaded the walkway leading up to it. The entrance to the underground parking lot was on the west side, but this too was shuttered at the bottom of the slope leading down to it.

Trotting back to Yatsuyama-dori where his hired car was parked, Kubo called the kisha club and asked them to try calling Hinode’s night-time number. He spoke with the overnight reporter covering Second Investigation, who told Kubo that they had already tried calling Hinode’s main office as well as their Tokyo and Yokohama branch offices, and all they got was a recording that business had closed for the day. Right now, he said, they were calling Hinode’s branch offices, regional offices, and sales offices one by one, but the result was all the same. Calls to the executives’ homes all reached answering machines, and while surely the executives and managers were gathered together somewhere, they had no clue where. Moreover, MPD’s Public Information director had called in the chief reporters from every media organization, so it was certain that they intended to request a temporary embargo.

As Kubo replaced the receiver, worried that time was running out, he saw that several hired cars from other media companies were now flanking his. The time was 12:41 a.m. There were even TV crews with video cameras in tow. Just as Kubo had done when he first arrived, the other reporters ran around the darkened building, then, once they had given up, gathered on the sidewalk. A reporter Kubo recognized from the Yomiuri Shimbun scurried toward Kubo’s car, where he rapped on the window.

“You got here first, didn’t you? Any way we can get in?” he asked, sticking his neck in as soon as Kubo had opened the car door.

“I wouldn’t be here if there were. Any bright ideas?” Kubo shot back, and he heard the other reporters who had gathered behind him sigh in unison.

It was obvious that none of the other journalists had made contact with anyone at Hinode. Still, every one of them standing there in the road knew the Hinode executives must all be together somewhere, and their eyes darted around like foxes as they racked their brains trying to figure out where that might be.

“This is going to be an uphill battle . . .” someone muttered.

Fifteen meters away by the side of the road, where a van from a commercial broadcasting company was parked, one of the crew members signaled to them by making an X with his arms. The time was now 12:45 a.m. The embargo had been issued.

Kubo and the rest of the reporters looked at one another, and signaled back “okay” to the crew. Cries of “Shit” and “Damn it” erupted all around him, followed by pitiful goodbyes and “See ya”s as the group scattered to their hired cars. In Kubo’s window as his car pulled away, the towering Hinode building seemed even more formidable than a few minutes earlier, as if mocking the challenges the reporters would face in the days ahead—but at the same time, the few lights visible on perhaps the thirtieth floor appeared blurry in the mist, almost weakened and cowering in such unexpected circumstances. Looking up at the skyscraper, Kubo tried to convince himself for the third time that night that the master of this castle had been kidnapped.

It was 1:18 a.m. when Kubo returned to MPD in Sakuradamon. In the elevator, he ran into a few other reporters who had also returned there after the embargo went into effect. In lieu of a greeting, they searched one another’s faces and asked tersely, “So?” “Got anything?” “What about you?” There was no need to answer—it was clear from their expressions that none of them had managed to reach Hinode.

There were three kisha clubs on the ninth floor, and Toho’s press nook was located inside the Nanashakai kisha club, to which the six major national daily newspapers belonged. Even the entrance to the Nanashakai was crowded, and Kubo had to weave this way and that to slip past the tumult of people and reach his paper’s nook. Every paper had assembled their chief kisha club reporters as well as all of their beat reporters. Toho’s nook was partitioned off from the others, and when Kubo parted the entry curtain he bumped up against an unfamiliar back right away. In the few steps it took him to make his way to his desk, calling out “Excuse me, coming through,” he became nauseated from the stench of hair tonic and cigarette smoke, several times more potent than usual. The nook, which was as tiny as an eel’s lair, typically accommodated at most four or five journalists working at the desks while others were out reporting or sleeping in the built-in bunk bed, so now that it was packed with all seventeen or eighteen members of their team, including the beat reporters, there was not even standing room. Amidst this melee the direct line to the news room rang incessantly, and the fax machine spat out pages that everyone scrambled for and passed from hand to hand.

In the innermost seat amongst this crowd, there was Chief Sugano, his expression immutable no matter the situation, holding the receiver for the outside line in one hand while raking a comb through his salt-and-pepper hair with the other. Whenever there was a crisis, Sugano had the indelicate habit of taking out his comb, no matter where he was.

“Apparently the Hinode executives are gathered at the Hinode Club in Kioi-cho,” Kagawa, the deputy chief reporter, called out from beside Sugano. Makes perfect sense, Kubo thought, immediately recalling the old European-style stone mansion near the New Otani Hotel in Kioi-cho. It was a corporate guesthouse used for entertaining, and sometimes there would be luxury cars in the driveway, idling in front of the entrance tucked away from the main road.

“Did somebody go check it out?” Kubo asked, looking around him.

“No. We heard them talking about it next door,” responded Yuichi Kuriyama, the reporter in charge of First Investigation, as he rapped on the partition wall with his fist. Beneath the spot where he knocked sat Kondo, another reporter on the First Investigation beat, along with Maki and Kanai, who were on the Second and Fourth Investigation beats, respectively, and were now manning the phones that were ringing off the hook. The Reserve section of the Metro desk had already created an assignment chart and launched into action, and was now relaying information—“We sent copies of all the materials from the archives” and “We sent you the articles related to Hinode that we pulled from our database”—and haranguing them for a story: “Did you get anything?” and “Any movement?”

In due time, Chief Sugano finished his phone call. “Listen, everyone.” His voice carried through the entire nook, and Kubo and the rest of the reporters pricked up their ears at once. “We’ll prepare two advance articles: one in the event that the president is safely rescued, and the other in the event that things take a turn for the worse. If a criminal profile or motive is not clear at the point when the president is in protective custody, the first draft will cover everything chronologically from abduction to rescue, and then let’s plan on steadily spotlighting the unresolved issues, one by one. First and foremost, I want it made clear that this is a heinous crime. Your team can handle that, Kubo.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Maki, Kanai, and Momoi will track the movements of the extortionists and the ultranationalists. Tazawa and Ogawa will focus on any issues related to roadblocks and checkpoints, and also check whether any of the vehicles come from a car rental company. The beat reporters will work in three shifts, and take turns staking out Hinode’s main office, their Tokyo branch, and the Hinode Club until the embargo is lifted. Observe the comings and goings of the executives and any unmarked cars. I’m sure Hinode will put up a formidable defense—they’ll have strong corporate security and protection in place—so don’t overdo it. Kagawa, you make the assignment chart for the beat reporters.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Once the chart is worked up I need the beat reporters to go out to their assigned posts. Everyone, make sure you look over the materials on Hinode. Finally, this case may take a while to crack, so we need all hands on deck. That’s all from me.”

Sugano always gave such specific instructions, and as far as Kubo knew, he had never erred in his judgment.

And Sugano, who took out his comb again, held in his arsenal a vast network of sources the likes of which Kubo could only dream about. Whenever Kubo marveled at the technique, time, and toil that must have been required for Sugano to build such a tremendous wealth of information—which awed one and all alike—a tangle of jealousy and suspicion came over him, and he was forced to question his own capabilities as a journalist.

Even now, as he repeated Sugano’s speech in his mind, Kubo imagined that, ultimately, MPD’s Public Security Bureau would be moving with a suspicious eye on the actions of ultranationalist groups embroiled in underground banking, and Sugano himself must have information on the bureau within his grasp. If ultranationalist groups were involved, there would be politicians on the outside, with crime syndicates and extortionists underneath. Kubo quickly ran through his own dossier of sources, but he could not come up with a single person who might provide the kernel of a story from that angle.

As Kubo thought all this through, a can of oolong tea appeared before him.

“Have some Hinode Oolong Tea,” Kuriyama spoke up beside him.

Kubo pondered it for another two seconds before noticing with surprise the moon cake in his left hand. He had apparently been eating the round pastry without even realizing it—all that remained now was a crescent moon. He must have found it on his desk, but he could not remember picking it up. He had no memory of his stomach conveying hunger. Resigned to sabotaging his earlier efforts at healthy eating—he had made do with a small meal of simmered fish at lunch—he washed down the rest of the moon cake with the oolong tea and hurriedly turned on his computer. Kuriyama immediately handed him a memo from the press conference.

“Here’s a rundown of the first briefing. From the chief’s notes,” he said.

Solicitous and with a breezy air about him, Kuriyama was thirty years old and still in his first year on the First Investigation beat. With his lustrous complexion and bright smile, he was a model of that new type of investigative reporter who proved that even the so-called “penal servitude” of the MPD track could be handled with ease with the right attitude and a certain knack. What’s more, Kuriyama had a fair number of sources and wrote good articles, and even if Kubo thought that the diligence of his reporting left something to be desired, it still fell within a tolerable range. As he thanked Kuriyama for the memo, Kubo realized he was measuring himself against one of his colleagues yet again.

The subject matter of the first press conference, held at 12:15 a.m., was as follows:

Kyosuke Shiroyama (58), residing at 2-16 Sanno / 22:05: Returns home in company car. Driver Tatsuo Yamazaki (60), residing at 2-13 Zoshigaya / Yamazaki departs after watching Shiroyama go through the front gate / 22:50: Police receive 110 emergency call—husband hasn’t come home / 23:16: Confirmed as incident. Victim taken hostage and abducted between front gate and front door / Note found in shrubs by path to front door. Balled up letter. White paper. Handwritten. Katakana letters: “We have your president” / Deemed abduction and unlawful confinement / Details unknown / Next briefing, 2 a.m.

“They say the CI director’s hands were trembling,” Kuriyama said.

“Really?”

“And a little while ago Hiroda-san from Criminal Administration was screaming his head off.”

“Oh, yeah?”

Kubo could not imagine what Hiroda—a mild-mannered man who had managed to remain calm even when he learned of the poison gas terror attack the other day—might have sounded like earlier. Kubo glared at the memo again and after checking the time—1:25 a.m.—he started writing down questions in preparation for the second press conference that would take place in thirty-five minutes.

Had the president taken his usual route home? Exactly how far past the gate had the driver seen him go? Had anyone at home heard anything? Why had it taken his family forty-five minutes to call the police? How were the family members doing? What had been the president’s schedule that day? What had he been wearing? What was the writing like on the note they found? Has there been any contact from the perpetrators? Had anyone seen a strange person or vehicle? What was the progress of the Crime Scene Unit? Any footprints? Evidence left behind?

A bold crime, deftly executed. Are they pros?

Kubo hunched over his laptop while his colleagues passed documents back and forth behind him and, according to their assignments on the chart Deputy Kagawa had made, the beat reporters filed out of the nook one by one. The phone kept ringing and terse retorts—“I’ve got nothing,” “Not yet,” and “What about you?”—volleyed through the air. Chief Sugano was on the phone discussing whom to deploy where once the embargo was lifted. Kubo added another line—Has there ever been any threat, blackmail, or harassment made against Hinode in the past?—and gazed at the can of Hinode Oolong Tea on his desk.

As his eyes again traced over the trademark seal of a golden phoenix, which he had never really looked at carefully before, the gravity of the situation sunk in at last.

合田雄一郎　Yuichiro Goda

By half past midnight, a total of twenty-three officers from Criminal Investigation—not counting the two standing watch at the crime scene, three from the crime scene team who had gone there for backup, as well as the chief inspector and deputy chief inspector—had assembled in the CI office at Omori Police Department. Per instructions from the MPD, they had created a large sketch of the vicinity of the crime scene and a current survey map that included the premises of the victim’s home, but once that was complete they ran out of things to do. In the back lot of their building the 103 SWAT vehicle was parked, and there were at least two officers encamped inside, but in regard to what was happening at the scene and who was doing what where, there was very little information coming in over the investigation radio, and on the third floor they had very little read on the situation at the scene. The same was true for the superintendent and vice commander, and Chief Inspector Hakamada and Deputy Chief Inspector Dohi were pacing back and forth between the superintendent’s office, the CI office, and the control room with rather bewildered expressions.

As of 12:40 a.m., there were no witnesses, no suspicious vehicles, no evidence left behind, and no movement or contact from the perpetrators.

Having been the first one on the scene, Goda had explained the situation to his fellow officers, but that hadn’t taken more than five minutes. Next, Inspector Anzai from White Collar Crime pulled out Hinode’s comprehensive asset securities report from the previous year from a forgotten corner shelf and had started reading out an overview of the company from page one but, once he got to the summary of their specialized facilities with a catalog of their twelve factories, fifteen branch offices, and research labs, he tossed aside the pamphlet and concluded, “So basically, in terms of assets, sales, operating income, and equity, there’s about a three-digit difference between Hinode and your typical local business.”

Someone else then picked up the pamphlet and leafed through it, and it was passed around a few hands, but before long that stopped too, and without any other idle chatter, the team was once again engulfed by silence. Every one of them looked melancholy, torn between the desire to get a little shut-eye before work tomorrow and dismay over their misfortune that a VIP had been kidnapped within their jurisdiction, of all places.

The CI office was not designed to accommodate a full turnout of their team. There weren’t enough chairs, and no personal space to speak of. Aside from the chief inspector’s and the deputy chief inspector’s spots by the window, there were four rows of steel desks belonging to no one in particular, five desks to a row arranged close together, while along the wall were file cabinets and shelves of the same steel, and blackboards covered with various flyers and posters. When twenty-three grown men filed into the room, it was nearly as stifling and gloomy as the area around the betting windows at the racecourse. Goda found this to be an unacceptable work environment given the mountain of investigation documents they were required to produce day after day, and the only solution that he had ever come up with was to get outside as much as possible, and to use one of the unoccupied interrogation rooms to write up his case files.

On the steel desks, there were eight phones for internal use and four phones with an outside line, four computer terminals connected to the mainframe that managed all inquiries and two word processors that were dirty and discolored from use. There were also several string-bound MPD telephone directories, a worn-out copy of the White Pages, ballpoint pens and pencils, official directive paperwork and newspaper flyers with notes written on the flipside, ashtrays, and a few heavily stained tea mugs.

Goda was sitting with his back to the wall in a spot close to the door. In his shirt pocket was a detailed, minute-by-minute record of officer activity prior to the incident, which he had gotten from the police box by Omori Station before coming here, but his instinct had not yet managed to clearly work out what each emergency call or command from the department might signify. The excitement he had felt when he had first arrived on the scene had dulled, but now it circled slowly around his instinct. Was the president the target, or the company itself? Why Hinode Beer? Were there troubles within Hinode that would provoke a crime? Did they have any connections to extortionists and organized crime? When he had spoken with the Vice President Kurata on the phone, something about the man’s forceful tone and the way he cautiously chose his words seemed out of balance to Goda’s ear—did Hinode already know something about what had transpired tonight?

Finally, what was their motive? If the perpetrators’ ultimate aim was money, why choose such a high-risk scheme as kidnapping? The end result would be the same had they abducted any other executive, so why did it have to be the president?

Technically Goda was the designated investigator at his precinct, but as the guy who had been chucked sideways from the MPD to a local department, this entire past year he had not received a single call to report to Investigation Headquarters. This time, even if he were to be pulled in because they were short-handed, the only tasks that might trickle down to him would be either canvassing the vicinity on foot or searching for evidence. Even as he contemplated all this, it was his natural tendency to keep turning the pages of the financial report pamphlet to learn more, however mechanically, about Hinode as a company.

First, he checked the important figures in the management index. The company’s sales revenue for 1993 was 1.35 trillion yen. For consolidated accounts it was close to 1.6 trillion. The company’s operating income was 77 billion. Net profit was about half that amount. Total assets were 1.2 trillion. Equity ratio, 47 percent. One share of their stock cost 10 yen. Number of employees, 8,200. Each and every number told the same story—they were a behemoth, “the bluest of blue-chips”—but how they could yield 1.35 trillion by peddling two-hundred-yen-or-so cans of beer—with a high liquor tax, to boot—was not something he could readily fathom. These figures were from two years ago, so now they would have swelled even more.

Next, he turned to the section on the 105-year history of the company. Even before the war, the company already had four factories, and after the war ended they steadily expanded with more factories, branch offices, and sales offices, while aggressively making headway in developing technological fields such as pharmaceuticals, biotechnology, state-of-the-art medical treatment, and data network systems—the corporation’s ultimate goal of diversification gradually came into focus for Goda.

Once he had scanned their current stock condition, he saw that Toei and several other major city banks as well as life insurance companies dominated the list of their biggest shareholders, as expected, and their aggregate covered 27 percent of shares outstanding. The company’s stock price had remained stable even after the economic bubble burst, and their dividend payout ratio had maintained the high rate of 25 percent.

Then he turned to their current executives. He quickly familiarized himself with the names of the thirty-five executives under the president and the multiple titles they held, such as general manager of beer division and general manager of business development. Perched at the top of the list, Kyosuke Shiroyama was described as a graduate of the faculty of law at the University of Tokyo. Judging from how, after he joined the company in 1959, he had risen to general manager of beer division after years of working as a sales manager and then a branch manager in Sendai and Osaka, he had clearly been in the sales trenches all along. The world of selling things was the furthest from what a detective knew, and as Goda stared at the name—Kyosuke Shiroyama—he allowed himself to wonder what kind of man Shiroyama was. Guessing from the appearance of his home and the impression made by his wife and son, Goda reasoned that Shiroyama must be a rather modest and conservative individual.

On the other hand, the vice president he had spoken to on the phone, Seigo Kurata, also held the title of general manager of beer division, so there was no doubt that Shiroyama and Kurata were the most closely connected among members of the board of directors. Thinking Kurata might be the one to prod, Goda briefly recalled the voice of the seemingly complicated man he heard on the line.

Moving on to the index of their various business sectors, Goda found their company organizational chart. Beneath the shareholders’ meeting was the board of directors and board of company auditors; then beneath that the president and the management council. The company, with various departments such as general affairs, human resources, accounting, public relations, data network development as well as a planning office, secretarial office, and a consumer advisory office was as common as could be, with the business itself divided into beer, pharmaceutical, business development, laboratory, and the like. However, although the company was pursuing diversification, when he looked at the figures of each primary business sector, beer still counted for 96 percent of sales.

As Goda skipped over a few pages to look at performance details, a voice nearby asked, “Interesting?”

He looked up to see Osanai, an inspector from Burglary Investigation, casting a sullen gaze his way. Osanai had been on duty tonight, but when the call came in from Sanno Ni-chome, he happened to be in Omori-Minami where a robbery had taken place, so he had missed the chance to be first on the scene in Sanno Ni-chome. His look conveyed that he would not soon forget this resentment.

“I guess. The names of the beers I drink every day are all here,” Goda said in response. “Hinode Lager, Hinode Supreme, Supreme Draft, Limelight Diner . . .”

“I doubt you drink beer,” Osanai scoffed, and Goda ignored him after that.

It was true that the familiar brand names were listed on the page, which reported this quarter’s business conditions, along with the sales performance for each product. The current situation for liquor sales—affected by last year’s increase in the liquor tax, which had caused every company to raise prices across the board, the intensified discounting at mass retailers, and Limelight’s full-scale entry into the market—seemed to indicate that the things were not in fact so easy for the company. Despite this, thanks to the steady performance of their two pillars—the lager and the supreme—as well as their efforts to stabilize the cost of raw materials and to streamline their distribution, Hinode’s operating income for 1993 had apparently sustained a slight increase over the previous year. Incidentally, the total volume of beer sold in one year was 3.45 million kiloliters. Unable to grasp such a number quantitatively, Goda reached over to the blackboard behind him and did a bit of long division to figure out how many large bottles this could be converted to, but the number he came up with—5.45 billion—was all the more incomprehensible to him.

Goda wiped away the number with the eraser, and went back to patiently turning the pages. In the section on sales performance, there was a chart explaining their distribution channels, how the product flowed from primary wholesalers to secondary wholesalers before it got to retailers, until finally reaching drinking establishments and consumers. The words “drinking establishment” caught his eye, and as he wondered what proportion of total sales was beer sold on commercial premises, and had just started to flip around the pages when the door to the CI office opened.

Deputy Chief Inspector Katsuhiko Dohi stuck his head in the opened doorway and fixed his saucer-like eyes on Goda nearby. Goda glanced at the time—12:50 a.m.—and with every eye in the CI office on him, set down the pamphlet and walked out into the hallway.

As soon as Goda was in the corridor Dohi demanded, “Two guys from SIT are downstairs. You were at MPD so you should recognize them. Go ask them when the brass are coming down here.”

This spring, ahead of his compulsory retirement next year, Dohi would be promoted to the rank of chief inspector, having assumed that title after his time as inspector in Burglary Investigation. Stubbornly earnest, his face managed to be both complex and dull at the same time—as if all the good and bad of his generally lackluster police career were cobbled together in his expression. As long as nothing was on the blotter he would laugh and say this was his last year, he had nothing to worry about, but when push came to shove, he was a cop, always wringing his hands and trying to gauge his superiors. Even now, his demand was born of his conscientious desire to deliver even a fragment of news to the superintendent and chief inspector, who were anxious about the lack of information.

Goda answered, “Yes sir,” headed downstairs, where there was no one at the back door, and after stepping outside to take a deep breath of air, he returned directly to the third floor and told Dohi, “Apparently they don’t know yet.”

With the addition of Dohi, the CI office was now even more claustrophobic; the majority of those inside had their arms folded and eyes closed, while a few of them had a newspaper or magazine spread open in front of them, with the earphone for the scanner in their ear, as Goda returned to his seat and resumed leafing through the pamphlet back in his seat. Tonight of all nights the police phone didn’t ring even once; every now and then the siren from a patrol car or ambulance speeding along the Dai-ichi Keihin or Sangyo Road echoed as if from a faraway world.

Goda moved on to the section for the so-called cost of goods sold on the profit and loss statement, tracking his eye across the heading for each figure for the current quarter—manufacturing costs, three hundred fifty billion; liquor tax, seven hundred billion. From time to time he looked up at the clock and, listening to the sound of the rain falling on the pavement outside, thought about how it must be snowing in the countryside and the mountain regions by now, imagining the cold that the victim and the perpetrators must be feeling, wherever they were. With the passage of time, however, the visceral sensations that he had first experienced when the incident occurred were starting to wane.

At half past one in the morning, those who had been listening to the investigation radio looked up and murmured to one another, “Sounds like they got an eyewitness who saw a car . . .”

Goda, Dohi, and even those who had been dozing off pricked up their ears at once. “What’s the location?”

Someone spread open the map. “Number twenty-one at the cul-de-sac. Katsuichi Sasaki, seventy-six years old . . .”

“It’s here,” said someone near the map.

“Circle it in red and put it up on the board!” barked Dohi, and the residential map was promptly taped to the black board.

“Time witnessed, around 10 p.m. Witness saw the car from the second floor of his home. Color was either navy or black. A van or possibly an RV. Make and model unknown, license plate unknown . . .”

That was the extent of the information from the wireless, and the twenty-four officers, who had perked up somewhat, sunk back into their seats. Since the details from the car eyewitness were unknown, this seemed unlikely to lead to a clue. Nevertheless, number twenty-one bordered number sixteen to the north, and if there had been a car lurking on the cul-de-sac just before the incident occurred, the likelihood of it being connected was about fifty-fifty. Goda considered this, his partially deflated hope suspended in midair.

At the exact same moment, he again recalled the copy of the dispatch record from the police box in his pocket and felt convinced of the need, while the officer’s memory was still fresh, to calculate the precise, minute-by-minute route that the patrol car had taken before and after 10 p.m., but that thought too hung in midair.

The hands on the clock pointed to just before two in the morning. Goda turned back to the next heading on the profit and loss statement, details regarding sales costs and general administrative costs. Just as he registered the number twenty-five billion listed under advertising costs, a commercial for Hinode Lemon Sour flickered through his mind—a strange beast dancing along to a gamelan under a moonlit night.

久保晴久　Haruhisa Kubo

Two-oh-two a.m. Appearing in the press conference hall on the ninth floor of the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department, the director of Criminal Investigation, Tsuyoshi Teraoka, took a small silent bow in front of the more than sixty gathered reporters from seventeen media companies, then bent his head over the notebook in his hands.

“Unfortunately, as of 2 a.m., there has been no contact from the perpetrator. The situation remains the same.”

As those first words were uttered, the unspoken incredulity of the reporters pressed heavily into every corner of the hall.

“And I’d like to take this opportunity to express my gratitude for your cooperation with the media embargo,” Teraoka addressed them formulaically. “Currently, we’ve acknowledged the incident as abduction and unlawful confinement, but we consider the victim to be in an extremely precarious situation. It goes without saying that the entire police force will do all it can to conduct a thorough investigation, and in respect to the spirit of the embargo we will strive to respond to the media in good faith, so I ask for your continued cooperation.”

Director Teraoka’s voice sounded as stiff and monotonous as ever, at least to the ears of those in attendance, and without looking up to meet the eyes of the reporters, he solemnly continued to recite only the words in his notebook.

“The layout of the victim’s home is as you see it in the map we’ve distributed to each of you. The victim was captured in the location marked with an X and we believe he was taken out through the front gate. At this time, that’s the extent of what we know. The front gate, marked A, has an automatic lock manufactured by the company SECOM that can be opened from the outside with a passcode and from the inside with a switch. After arriving home, the victim manually turns on the nighttime alarm system himself, therefore, at the estimated time of the incident—10:05 p.m. on the twenty-fourth—the alarm system was turned off. We’ve detected several footwear impressions near the shrubbery as well as in numerous spots inside the exterior wall surrounding the property, and we are currently analyzing them. As for the note retrieved from the spot marked with a circle, we are working quickly to identify any fingerprints and the type of ink used. As of 2 a.m. right now, we have not managed to find any witnesses. That’s all.”

As soon as the director’s voice broke off, there was a barrage of questions from the assertive commercial broadcasting reporters. “Does that mean they jumped in over the wall and escaped through the gate?” “Do you have a profile of the suspect?”

Without missing a beat, the director of Public Information standing next to Teraoka replied sharply, “One question at a time, please,” and the voices died down. In the momentary silence, Haruhisa Kubo, encamped in the front row, clearly registered the beads of sweat running down Director Teraoka’s forehead, even though the room wasn’t the least bit warm.

The questions began immediately in the usual order by the usual suspects from the Nanashakai kisha club who were also installed in the front row. Each question was short, as was its reply, exchanged at rapid-fire speed. The reporters took notes while organizing everything in their heads, forced to decide what was important and what wasn’t on the spot. Kubo’s hand gripping his ballpoint pen quickly turned clammy with sweat.

“First, please name the family members who were home at the time of the incident.”

“The victim’s wife, Reiko Shiroyama, fifty-eight years old.”

“What was the wife doing last night around 10, and where was she exactly?”

“She told us she was in the living room on the first floor, reading.”

“Does she usually hear the front gate close?”

“She said it depends. Sometimes she hears it, sometimes she doesn’t.”

“Last night, did the driver take the same route home as usual?”

“He did.”

“Does the president always return home at a specific time?”

“It depends on the day, but she told us he most often returns around 10 p.m.”

“You said they made the hundred-ten call at 10:50 p.m. How did the family come to the decision that they needed to make an emergency call?”

“Around 10:28 p.m., there was a call from the office to the president’s home, and when the person from the company learned that he had not returned home, they contacted the driver and as a result determined that something was wrong.”

“What is the name of the individual who called from the company?”

“I’m not able to disclose that information.”

“How many different footwear impressions were collected from the crime scene?”

“I am not able to answer that as they are still under analysis.”

“So you’re saying there are several?”

“I’m not able to disclose that at this time.”

“There’s no way one guy can hold down a grown man and drag him off without making a sound. It has to be the work of a team, is that what you think?”

“We do not know that at this time.”

“So the perp breached the wall beforehand and was waiting in the bushes, correct?”

“At this time, we are not able to confirm either way.”

“Describe what the victim was wearing.”

“Navy suit, black wool vest, blue and silver necktie, black shoes.”

“What about a coat?”

“He wasn’t wearing one.”

“A briefcase?”

“An attaché case by Burberry. Brown in color.”

“It’s unlikely that they’d abduct a person without a car. Do you or do you not have any information about that?”

“At this time, we have not obtained accurate eyewitness information.”

“So you do have some information?”

“We have not received any reports of that nature.”

“The note—what else was written besides the four words, ‘We have your president’?”

“Four words, that’s it.”

“Will the note be released?”

“We have not reached the stage to consider that.”

“You said the incident is being treated as abduction and unlawful confinement, but could it possibly develop into kidnapping for ransom?”

“We are not able to comment at this time.”

“What about corporate extortion?”

“At this point, we do not know anything about the perpetrators’ objective.”

“Before this incident, have there been any harassment or threats made against Hinode? Are there any matters that the police are aware of?”

“Not at this time, no.”

“Could this be considered part of a series of corporate terrorism incidents?”

“We are not able to comment at this time.”

“Is it possible that they’ve targeted the victim as an individual?”

“We are not able to determine that at this time.”

“What’s your understanding of the perpetrators’ profile?”

“At this time, I cannot say.”

“I think it’s impossible for an amateur to pull off a crime like this—have you considered that pros, like a crime syndicate, could be involved?”

“We have not come to such a conclusion at this time.”

“No way an amateur would sit and wait in the yard, a stone’s throw from the front door.”

“We can’t know that until we ask the perpetrator.”

“What’s your outlook for the investigation ahead?”

“We will make every effort. That’s all I can say about that.”

After responding to this point, with sweat glistening on his blue-veined forehead, Teraoka put away his notebook. Without waiting for the director of Public Information to announce, “That’s all for now. Next briefing at four,” Teraoka walked out quickly, looking straight ahead with an even more obstinate expression than when he had first appeared in the hall. The reporters also withdrew without a word, but since there wasn’t a single newsworthy item, all of them moved slowly. Whenever a significant incident occurred, invariably the press conference would be peppered with phrases such as, “We’re not able to say,” “We’re not sure,” and “We’re not aware,” but even the same “not” would be uttered with a subtly different nuance each time. Kubo felt that just now, in addition to appearing jittery and pained from beginning to end, Teraoka seemed abstracted as he repeated over and over that he didn’t know. Four and a half hours had already passed since the current president of Hinode Beer had been abducted. If the police didn’t have a clue at this point, Kubo thought—just as the Chief Reporter Sugano had predicted—it could take a while to crack this case.

合田雄一郎　Yuichiro Goda

At three in the morning, the announcement came in from the chief inspector of First Investigation at MPD that, with the exception of the ten members of the Criminal Investigation Division and another two from the Crime Prevention Division who were to be absorbed into Investigation Headquarters, the rest of the department was dismissed for the time being. Since the grounds for mobilizing a large group of investigators had never materialized, MPD decided that the perpetrators were unlikely to make any moves until dawn. The other officers who had been standing by at Omori Police Department since right after the incident occurred were left with nothing but a sense of regret and fatigue from lack of sleep. Although they had been released, it wasn’t as if there were any trains running at that hour to take them home, so a few of the unelected left the CI office to lie down until morning in the dojo on the fourth-floor, while others retreated elsewhere or nowhere in particular.

Remaining in the Omori CI office were four inspectors—Goda from Violent Crime, Noriaki Anzai from White Collar Crime, Takafumi Saito from Organized Crime, and Takuya Osanai from Burglary—as well as six police sergeants from these units, along with Deputy Chief Inspector Dohi acting as the self-proclaimed head of liaison and coordination, which came out to eleven men in total. Everyone but Dohi and Anzai went back to dozing while they waited for the investigation meeting, whose start time remained unknown.

Inspector Anzai, having perked up as soon as he realized he was likely to be called up to Investigation Headquarters, nudged Goda’s shoulder just as the latter had buried his face in his arms on the desk. Anzai whispered, “Think we’ll find out about Hinode’s financial standing?”

Goda thought it was too soon for that but, detecting a whiff of expectation in Anzai’s loaded question, he replied vaguely, “Who knows?”

Anzai had spent the majority of his thirty-three years of service specializing in white collar crime, transferring from one precinct to another every five or six years, but Goda had heard that he had never had the opportunity to take part in a large-scale bribery case or commercial law violation. Goda didn’t know why Anzai, despite being a licensed CPA, had never been called in to work at MPD, but he could easily imagine the kind of work Anzai had toiled over for years: real estate transactions involving unlawful registration and sales contracts, fraudulent promissory notes, scams, a miscellany of complaints and charges that could hardly be distinguished from civil suits, petty election violations over the placement of flyers, and so on and so forth. Over the past year, even the cases occurring within Goda’s scope of vision were mostly along the lines of complaints against door-to-door sales, counterfeit calling cards, unauthorized use of credit cards and loan shark troubles, and creditors rushing in when their debtor had skipped town. Most of these never resulted in prosecution, or were resolved with a minor punishment or a dialogue among the parties involved, so all in all his job was not very different from that of a jack-of-all-trades consultant.

Sitting beside Goda, Anzai had started flipping through the Hinode financial report, which Goda had tossed aside. “You had better get some sleep,” Goda suggested.

“I doubt you’ll understand,” Anzai muttered and flashed him a small, crooked smile. “I’ve been counting money all this time, but the loot in the cases I’ve handled only went up to ten digits. Suddenly dangling thirteen digits in front of me, well, that’s like a monkey that sees a banana—there’s no chance I’m sleeping now.”

As he whispered this, Anzai hung his head over the report spread open on the desk. Given his age and experience, Anzai was likely to be promoted to chief inspector soon, but he must have been anxious—if he wanted to move up to MPD with distinction, this might be his last chance. Goda could relate to this, at least.

Even Goda had been relieved to be whisked up to Investigation Headquarters. If he were honest, he had had enough of lovers’ quarrels involving kitchen knives, drunken brawls, and the dead bodies of vagrants by the roadside. I’ve been desperate for a big case, doesn’t matter what it is, Goda thought as he closed his eyes atop the pillow of his arms. Just then, like a reflex springing from his selfish desire, the faces of the victim’s wife and son flashed through his mind. Deputy Chief Inspector Dohi, over at his desk, was on a call with a nearby 7-Eleven. “Get me thirty Makunouchi bento boxes. Make it out to the Omori Police Department, Police Affairs Division.”

The investigation radio didn’t make a peep. By four in the morning, the sound of rain beating down on the roof of the building and the asphalt of the highway had subsided as well, and the CI office filled with the silence of early dawn and a chill that numbed his hands and feet. Drawing up the collar of his down jacket, Goda fell into a brief but deep sleep. Just as he reached the brink of some dream, he was pulled back into consciousness by the abrupt ringing of the police phone, and his conditioned reflex was to peek at his wristwatch.

4:30 a.m. Dohi, who had answered the phone, replaced the receiver and announced, “The investigation meeting will convene at 7 a.m. The official name of the HQ is Hinode Beer President Abduction and Unlawful Confinement Special Investigation Headquarters.”

After hearing as much, Goda and the others went back to sleep. Dohi set himself to the silent task of taping together four sheets of B4 copy paper and, with a calligraphy brush, inking the solemn name that had just been bestowed upon the incident. Regardless of what his countenance might suggest, Dohi had beautiful penmanship, and all the cautionary postings on the walls of the department—Keep It Neat, Be Polite on the Phone, and Point & Check—were his handiwork.

It was before six when Goda was awakened again, this time by the sound of cars pulling into the back lot. The officer on duty from Police Affairs came in and asked for help setting up chairs. When he went down to the main conference room on the second floor, he saw that the Communications Bureau from MPD had arrived to install equipment and add police phone lines in preparation for the investigation command headquarters. They had been told that roughly one hundred members would be coming from MPD, so all department staff helped with gathering every available folding table and chair, and once these were all crammed into the conference room, it looked like they were ready for a meeting of creditors. Outside the door to the room, Dohi’s poster had already been put up.

Next, Goda and the other officers went back up to the third floor to wash their faces, shave, and eat the Makunouchi bentos from 7-Eleven. Goda had a tendency to become sleepy when full, so he threw away his bento half untouched, then started to write out the tasks he would be turning over to his subordinates in Violent Crime. The ones who would remain in his unit were a sergeant with a bad back named Hirai, along with the duo Konno and Izawa, neither of whom could write a decent case file.

Saito from Organized Crime, having scarfed down his entire bento, mumbled with a tooth pick in his mouth, “My head’s getting cold.” Back when he was with the Fourth Investigation Division at MPD, Saito got into a physical altercation with a member of the yakuza family Inagawa-kai and earned himself ten stitches on his now shaven head, which he rubbed as he walked all the way to the window. He raised the blinds only to cry out, “Oh, hell!” Outside, spring snow had turned everything the color of quartz.

At 7 a.m., a photograph of the victim and a large sketch of the layout of his home were posted on the blackboard at the front of the main conference room. The members who had managed to assemble there after being called in during the early morning hours included the first and second units of the First SIT as well as the fourth unit of the Second SIT from MPD’s First Investigation Division. It was an impressive gathering of thirty-five SIT officers, not counting those stationed at the victim’s home and in the communications vehicles. Among them were also undercover investigators who specialized in apprehending perps.

Since this matter involved a major corporation like Hinode Beer, the arrival of a few members from MPD’s Second Investigation Division was to be expected, but Goda was a little surprised to see all ten members of the third unit from Fourth White Collar Crime specializing in corruption and bribery. All eight members of the first unit of Special Violence and Organized Crime Investigation specializing in commercial law violations and extortion had come from the Fourth Investigation Division. In addition, ten members from the ninth unit of Third Violent Crime Investigation from the First Investigation Division were in attendance. Since there were few faces he recognized, Goda resorted to giving them a quick bow. Then, there were another seventeen members from among the eight sub-units of the First Mobile CI Unit as well as the leader of the unit headquarters. From the precinct, there were ten detectives from CID, including Goda, and the assistant police inspector and sergeant from the Crime Prevention Division, and six members combined from the on-scene forensics team and the precinct’s crime scene team from CID. All told, Investigation Headquarters headcount totaled ninety-nine officers.

The seats at the front were helmed by Hidetsugu Kanzaki, chief inspector of First Investigation, along with other top brass, including the chief inspector of the Crime Scene Division; the respective directors of First and Second SIT, Third Violent Crime, Fourth White Collar Crime, and Special Violence and Organized Crime; the deputy leader of First Mobile CI and Superintendent Tobita from Omori Police Department; while off to the side sat inspectors from various units and the leader of the unit headquarters, with Omori’s very own Chief Inspector Hakamada of CID hunkered down on the far end.

“Attention!” On command, everyone rose to their feet, standing straight and still. This morning, as he strode into the room, Kanzaki had worn his usual detached expression, neither confirming nor denying that he was an absolute authority who inspired awe from every detective within the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department. His stature and facial features, all of them average, were indistinguishable from that of any middle-aged salaryman swaying on the commuter train, but as soon as his short greeting—“Thank you all for coming so early”—issued from his mouth, it was as if a stick ruler had been thrust into the back of each investigator in attendance. Their fingers extended tautly along the seams of their slacks, and a tremor rippled through the entire conference room.

Back when he was at MPD, Goda knew Kanzaki as chief inspector of the Crime Scene Division, but even back then he was known as “walking efficiency.” From his greeting and demeanor to his interpersonal relationships and the way he commanded investigations, everything he did seemed to run with accuracy, speed, and clarity. This spring, when he was promoted to first investigation chief inspector, he made the following remarks in Frontline, the internal newsletter for detectives: “When we consider the anxiety of citizens and the distress of victims exposed to increasingly heinous crimes, as well as the duty that detectives and police officers must fulfill, all logic, compromises, and excuses arising from the internal organization of criminal investigation become utterly superfluous.”

As Goda had read these remarks, he had pondered just what the resolve of the police force was, but when all was said and done, no doubt Kanzaki’s own resolve was buttressed by a byzantine, quake-proof resilience that was essential to ascending the ranks of a bureaucratic organization. Lost in such thoughts, Goda never managed to fully extend his fingers, pressed against the casual khaki pants he had been wearing since last night.

Kanzaki opened his notebook as soon as he took the seat directly before the blackboard, and fixed his immobile gaze on the investigators.

“Regarding the incident that occurred last night on the twenty-fourth at approximately 10:05 p.m., in which the president of Hinode Beer, Kyosuke Shiroyama, age fifty-eight, was taken from the front yard of his home in Sanno Ni-chome: irrespective of the perpetrators’ motive, I would like all of you to consider this an extremely serious crime that poses a definitive threat to the well-being of our country’s citizenry and economic activities.” Kanzaki’s briefing began with this introduction. He had a tendency to speak softly, and even with the microphone his voice was nothing more than a murmur—nonetheless, every word was trenchant and sharp.

“Other than a note stating, ‘We have your president,’ which was left behind at the scene of the abduction, at this point the perpetrators have not made any contact whatsoever. Therefore, as of now we have no choice but to treat this as a case of abduction and unlawful confinement, whereas in time we will either receive a specific demand from the criminals, or we will hear nothing at all. In addition to preparing to the best of our abilities for both outcomes, we must dedicate ourselves to the immediate task of narrowing down suspects and criminal objectives. Furthermore, judging from the meticulous and premeditated strategy of leaving behind a single note and then breaking off all communication, and the abduction’s close resemblance to the work of a professional crime group, this incident bears the hallmarks of both a violent crime and what could develop into a white collar crime, so we must avoid any assumptions or prejudgments during the course of our investigation. As for the direction of the investigation, for the time being, as we work toward a swift rescue of the victim, we will focus first on deducing the suspects. In addition to canvassing on foot, tracing their movements through legwork, identifying vehicles used in the crime, and establishing any connections to the perpetrators, the cross section of the victim’s personal network will commence with a request to provide all necessary materials regarding Hinode Beer, and inquiring of those involved about every detail of the situation, so that we can quickly gather precise information to conduct our analysis. Lastly, because this is a situation in which we have reason to fear for the safety and welfare of the victim, all information related to the incident will be kept strictly confidential. Therefore all communications and reports will be made via a communications specialist in charge. That will be all from me.”

Kanzaki seemed to be taking a particularly cautious stance concerning the incident. Looking at it another way, this could also mean that he did not have a specific trajectory for the investigation at this point in time, but as long as Second Investigation and Special Violence and Organized Crime had shown up at such an early stage, it was clear that the concerns of the top brass—guided by causes inscrutable to those on the fringes, like Goda—must veer toward Hinode’s conflicts with extortionists.

Then, using the sketch posted on the blackboard, the director of First SIT gave a detailed explanation starting with the onset of the incident. It did not cover anything more than what Goda, as the first detective to arrive upon the scene, had seen. The director continued reading from his notebook: “At this time, we have established two lines of communication: the victim assistance hotline, and another exclusively for any threats or demands coming in from the perpetrators. Two SIT members, including policewomen, are on duty at the victim’s home, working in three shifts, and there are another two officers at the relay point . . .”

As he listened, Goda stared at the communications equipment set up on the table near the blackboard. Once again, he remembered the police dispatch record tucked into his shirt pocket.

How did the perpetrators manage to carry out the abduction while evading the cops, who could have appeared at any time? The full shape of this idea—which had originally snagged his thought process at the crime scene and whose contours had still not come into full relief—flashed through his mind for the first time.

The radio, he thought.

However, this amounted to no more than a fleeting hunch, so transitory that Goda could not fully grasp it. He continued to stare at the table where the DG transmitter for the system for Investigation’s first unit sat, next to another transmitter for the Victim Assistance Unit and three types of inter-unit radios, and the thought evaporated again.

The briefing had moved on to the chief inspector of Crime Scene Division. In the vicinity of the shrubs along the path leading to the victim’s home and inside the exterior wall, they had collected a total of ten incomplete impressions of canvas shoes. Four left footprints, six right, two different pairs. Both measured twenty-six centimeters. The patterns of the rubber soles, while indistinct, could apparently both be verified. By some time today they would be able to determine the manufacturer of the shoes, identifying the brand name, stock number, and even the period of production, but they would still have to identify two pairs from among the millions of shoes distributed to tens of thousands of retailers across the country. A fiber fragment collected from the Japanese andesine stone of the wall was white cotton. The glove prints that came from the switch on the electronic lock by the front gate, based on the weave of the fabric, turned out to be from a cotton work glove. Like the canvas shoes, the gloves were manufactured in units of hundreds of thousands.

The note recovered at the crime scene was written on Kokuyo letter paper, and the product ID number was Hi-51. It was from a hundred-page stationery pad with a yellow cover that cost 250 yen and could probably be found in any household in Japan. There were no fingerprints, nor any other traces of microscopic evidence. The ink of the ballpoint pen was still being analyzed.

Next up, the unit headquarters leader from First Mobile CI reported on the results of questioning conducted after they arrived on the scene. In three homes near the victim’s, two people had heard a car engine starting around the time when the crime was committed; another person had heard a sliding car door opening and closing. The leader read aloud the names and addresses of each witness. The person who had heard the sliding door was able to give an accurate time for when he heard the noise—10:07 p.m.—since he had been about to make phone call and happened to look at the clock.

Subsequently, there was a detailed report about a resident of number twenty-one on the cul-de-sac, to the north of the victim’s home, who saw a car parked in the alley from his second-floor window at “around 10 at night.” The eyewitness was a seventy-six-year-old man, and he had gone to close a small window that had been left open in his bathroom on the second floor, which was when he happened to see, over the wall and bushes that were about one meter from his home, the roof of the car parked in the alley. The car’s lights were off, and since he was looking down from above, he could not see if there was anyone inside.

The color of the car was either dark blue or black. Since there were no street lamps in the alley, it was also possibly dark green. The vehicle was either a van or a long-body RV. None of the residents of the four other homes on the cul-de-sac had seen the car. A female office worker who lived next to the sole eyewitness had returned home around 10:15 p.m., but no car had been parked there at that time. Likewise, the eyewitness had not heard the sound of a car starting in the alley.

The man who saw the car lived with his wife, and by nine every night he would turn off all the lights in the house before going to bed. Three of the four homes belonged to elderly residents who never went out at night. The eyewitness’s neighbor was the twenty-eight-year-old office worker who lived with her parents, and though she generally returned by eight every night, yesterday she had happened to work overtime and had come home late. If the van that was seen in the alley were indeed connected to the incident, it meant that the perpetrators had dedicated a significant amount of time to surveying the area beforehand.

Lastly, the director of First SIT read aloud from the deployment chart for all 105 officers, including the SIT members who were not present. There was the first squad of the Victim Assistance Team, stationed at the victim’s home, six SIT members working in three shifts. The second squad from Crime Scene would be in charge of interviewing company employees and would include one group leader and four teams, eight members from SIT, the fourth unit of White Collar Crime from Second Investigation, and Special Violence and Organized Crime from Fourth Investigation. The third squad from Crime Scene would be in charge of questioning Hinode Beer’s branch offices and sales offices, subsidiaries, affiliated companies, and distributors, and would similarly be made up of one group leader and twelve teams, twenty-four members from SIT, the fourth unit of White Collar Crime from Second Investigation, Special Violence and Organized Crime from Fourth Investigation, including the precinct’s own Noriaki Anzai. The fourth Crime Scene squad, in charge of interviewing the victim’s family, relatives, friends, and acquaintances, would be four teams, eight SIT members. The fifth Crime Scene squad, handling matters of extortion, would be five teams, ten members including eight members from Special Violence and Organized Crime from Fourth Investigation, the ninth unit of Violent Crime, and SIT, as well as Takafumi Saito from the precinct’s CID and an inspector from Crime Prevention. Saito and the other inspector had both formerly worked in Fourth Investigation at MPD.

Then, the first squad of the Communications and Relay Team would be assigned to the victim’s home, while the second squad would be assigned to the 103—each included six SIT members working in three shifts. The Search and Inquiry Squad would consist of one group leader and five teams, ten members total that included three members of the Mobile CI Unit along with five members of the ninth unit of Violent Crime and two officers from the precinct. The Evidence and Vehicle Investigation Squad would be made up of fourteen members of the Mobile CI Unit and seven officers from the precinct, including Osanai and Goda. The head of the ninth unit of Violent Crime would be squad leader. Since no evidence had yet surfaced, they would all commence with vehicle searches.

When his name was called, Goda felt a little shudder, but he consoled himself with the fact that he would be working with inanimate objects. He automatically thought, First stolen vehicles, then rental cars, then reminded himself, Patience, patience, patience, emptying his mind of all distractions. The director of First SIT had designated the Communications and Report Commanders, and Director Miyoshi of Third Violent Crime Investigation had been named as the contact person for the Evidence and Vehicle Investigation Squad. Goda had met him some five years ago, back when Miyoshi was chief of CID at Shinagawa Police Department, during a murder investigation in which an old man who liked to wander had been struck in the head with a golf club and killed. Even though both he and Dohi were self-made men who had climbed the ranks, Miyoshi gave a different impression, that of a man who took pride in being a cop, to the marrow of his bones.

Thus the first investigation meeting ended at 7:30 in the morning, and each squad broke off for their own short meetings. The majority of SIT dispersed immediately, followed quickly by the Search and Inquiry Squad and then the Crime Scene Squad, which was interviewing company employees, but the remaining three squads were faced with armfuls of documents to review, and the directors of both fourth unit of White Collar Crime from Second Investigation Division and Special Violence and Organized Crime from Fourth Investigation Division continued to give out instructions in a low voice.

Goda and his cohort gathered in a corner, away from them.

“First, we’ll go down the list of stolen vehicles and rental cars,” Abe, the head of the ninth unit of Violent Crime, said tersely to Director Miyoshi.

“That’s fine.” Miyoshi nodded, and their meeting was over within five seconds.

As they waited for a fax of the list of stolen vans and RVs from the Criminal Information Management System, they divided up the string of tasks: calling the dealerships of car rental companies, requesting yesterday’s rental records from each office, addressing formal documents of inquiry related to the investigation to each dealership under the name of the superintendent of Omori Police Department, administering the superintendent’s seal, and faxing them out. Since they didn’t know the type of car or the license number of the vehicle connected to the crime, they had no choice but to eliminate, one by one, each and every stolen vehicle or car rented in the city, with only the color and the shape seen by a seventy-six-year-old man as clues. If this led nowhere, next they’d have to cast their net wider to neighboring prefectures, to the entire Kantō region, and then to the whole country. And if they still came up empty-handed, they’d have to go to every parking lot in the city on foot, and if that failed, they’d have to check each of the hundreds of thousands or even millions of vans registered at the District Land Transport Bureau.

The time was now 7:40 a.m. The radio connected to the victim’s home and the staging points remained silent; Chief Inspector Kanzaki and the other directors looked like nothing more than figureheads on a tiered doll stand; and outside the window above Goda’s head as he continued to write out his documents, the light snow was starting to accumulate.

根来史彰　Fumiaki Negoro

The MPD’s fifth press conference at 8 a.m. stuck to the same script: “No contact from the perpetrators. Situation remains unchanged.”

At the same time, over on Toho News’s Metro section, the slot editor for the evening edition, who was named Murai, had just taken his regular seat and shouted out, “Better get moving.” The evening edition for Saturday, March 25, had to be put together as usual, provided no sudden developments such as the rescue of the president of Hinode Beer occurred before the final deadline at 1:30 p.m. Murai had already been in the office by three in the morning after receiving a report of the incident, but once he had skimmed through early editions of the other morning newspapers to confirm that they had not missed any scoops, he had managed to fall asleep on the sofa despite the utter chaos swirling around him. He woke up before eight, in time to hear the outcome of the MPD’s press conference and, agreeing with his colleagues that there was, in fact, “Nothing we can do,” he planted himself in front of his desktop computer and cracked open the notebook with takeover instructions from the slot editor before him. Next to him, the rim editor on duty echoed the words, “Nothing we can do,” and took his own seat.

Once he had shifted into gear, Murai started barking out instructions even to Negoro, who sat half-asleep over in the Reserve section. “If this keeps up, we won’t have much to fill pages, so make those articles on the two credit associations and the candidates in the gubernatorial election on the longer side. You can even run each candidate’s self-recommendation remarks.”

“Yes,” Negoro replied, but instead of turning on his computer, he stood up to go to the lavatory and devoted ample time to washing and shaving his face.

A pale seamless gray filled the world outside the windows of the news room, as if they were ensconced in a cloud, and large snowflakes continued to fall on the moat of Chidori-ga-fuchi just beneath them. Several of the reporters who had been called in during the wee hours after news of the incident broke were stretched out on the row of sofas near the windows. The rest were either staked out on the frontlines in Omori and Sanno or stalking an early-morning interview subject, mindful of the news embargo.

On the other side, the editor-in-chief and managing editor, along with the chiefs of Metro, Political, Finance, and Layout, had been locked in a meeting since around 7:30 a.m. Based upon Chief Sugano’s assessment from MPD that there was unlikely to be any movement in the abduction and unlawful confinement of the president of Hinode Beer, and that the police had not yet narrowed down any suspects, they were discussing what to do with the Metro pages should the situation remain unchanged for the foreseeable future.

The Political and Finance sections had the nationwide local elections in two weeks to worry about, and if the news embargo were not lifted until right before the election, media coverage would then be dominated by news about the kidnapping, which would have a detrimental impact on voter turnout, so they were rightly concerned about the outlook of the situation. Depending on how it developed, they might have to redraw a significant portion of their election projection map, and the anticipation of election results could even have considerable effects on both exchange rates and stock prices.

Meanwhile the Metro section had a backlog of crucial incidents all requiring follow-up articles, so if the present situation were to drag on, they would run into complications with dispatching reporters. What was more, their branch manager in Hachioji, whose older brother was a human resources manager at Hinode Beer’s main office, proffered the information that late last year, Hinode had distributed a strictly confidential manual detailing the company’s crisis management system to the leadership at each of their branch and sales offices, which did not bode well for Toho’s reporting going forward.

Hinode had overhauled their online system last fall, and the company had installed a new access management and feedback system, in addition to strengthening their system surveillance. Since then the addresses and phone numbers of all executive staff above the level of manager had apparently been scrubbed from company directories and computer files. This meant that Hinode had presumably contracted with a specialized overseas insurance affiliate to install a risk management system—these were not yet widespread in Japan—and since the existence of such a contract itself would be considered a trade secret, no one outside the company would have known about it. When Negoro floated this story past Sugano, he gave his own opinion on the matter. “I’ve heard that Hinode’s negotiations with Limelight over their merger leaked straight to the CIA, so no doubt Hinode’s on their toes now.”

Before going into the executive meeting, the Metro chief, Toru Maeda, had rubbed his ample belly and remarked, “This is a quandary . . .” But from where Negoro sat in the Reserve section, the elation evident on Maeda’s face suggested that the situation, though still a quandary, was not entirely unwelcome.

The first words out of Maeda’s mouth when he got to the office shortly after two that morning had been, “Bet this is linked to extortionists.” And shortly after, a reporter covering the evening interview session at the District Public Prosecutor’s Office informed them from the courthouse kisha club that some of the officers from the special investigative division of the District Public Prosecutor’s Office had indeed been summoned to meet at 7 a.m., and another reporter on his morning interview prowl at the MPD kisha club—this was before 6 a.m.—confirmed that the Fourth Investigation Division in charge of corporate extortion would most likely be convened at the Special Investigation Headquarters set up at Omori Police Department. Following Maeda’s speculation, at dawn the Metro section had tweaked the assignment chart and rounded up however many reporters they could find to hit up extortionists and their corporate underlings, and they had just fanned out.

If extortionists were involved then organized crime would soon follow. In certain cases even ultranationalists and politicians might be in the mix. Before the war, because of the liquor tax, Hinode Beer had a history of involvement with the political world, and though they treaded much more carefully after the war, there was no doubt that they were among the corporations inducted into the troika of politics, bureaucracy, and business established alongside the “1955 system” of the Liberal Democratic Party’s decades-long dominance. There was also no doubt that, judging from their purchase record of political party fund-raising tickets, Hinode’s pipeline to the current political world ran through Taiichi Sakata, who served as the Secretary-General of the LDP. There had been no particular problems as of yet between Sakata and Hinode, but the so-called “S. Memo” that emerged during the infamous Ogura Transport and Chunichi Mutual Savings Bank scandal had belonged to none other than Sakata himself. Behind the ultranationalist Zenzo Tamaru, who had maneuvered behind the scenes to bring down Chunichi, was the group known as the Okada Association, which held in its arsenal extortionists, corporate raiders, and loan sharks, and behind Okada the vast crime syndicate the Seiwakai stood in the wings. Now that the head of the corporation had been kidnapped, it would be impossible for the investigating authorities not to be gravely concerned about these mysterious connections.

Negoro returned to his seat as he ran through all this in his mind. “Go get some coffee,” he said to the reporter in the Reserve section who was yawning repeatedly beside him. “But before you do—those interviews you got from the campaign offices of the gubernatorial candidates? For the piece that didn’t make it in yesterday? I’m going to use some of the comments, so could you show them to me?”

“If you like, I also have what I call the Collected Off-the-Record Pomposity,” the reporter said as he slid over a few pages 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.