The police arrived within five minutes of Mr. Dillinger’s call. They brought translators, and they even had a precision video player that could freeze a single frame of tape so that it looked like a sharp, crystal-clear photograph. Travis couldn’t believe how efficient they were.

Nish was in his glory, bowing left and right to every Japanese person who looked like he or she might be even remotely connected to the investigation. He acted as if he alone had solved the crime–even if, so far, no crime at all had been solved.

The police interviewed Muck about the switch in places at the head table. They brought in Sho Fujiwara and interviewed him separately, and then Sho and Muck together. They interviewed Data alone, Travis alone, Nish alone, Sarah alone, and then talked to them in a group. Nish was taken to a special investigative van that had pulled up outside the Olympic Village and was asked to look at possible suspects on a computer screen. He claimed he had found Eyebrows within a matter of minutes. The police packed up and left. They made no mention of what they were going to do. No hint of what might happen now. Nothing.

Six hours later, they were back–with the full story.

 

The man the Owls called Eyebrows–“I identified him,” bragged Nish–was a well-known yakuza, a Japanese gangster. “Yakuza means good for nothing,” explained Sho Fujiwara, who was also called back for the meeting with the police. “We have bad people here in Japan, too.”

Eyebrows had been hired to do the murder. But the mayor of Nagano was never intended to be the victim. The man they wanted to kill was Mr. Ikura, the owner of the ski hill. The blowfish plot had, apparently, been Eyebrows’ idea, and he had botched it so badly–dressing up like a waiter and serving the poisonous dish to the wrong person at the head table–that he’d been scrambling to make up for it ever since.

The avalanche was also Eyebrows’ idea. He was worried that the very thugs who had hired him might now want to kill him for botching the job, so he’d tried to frighten Mr. Ikura into selling off.

That turned out to be a huge mistake, and a key break in the case for the police. Mr. Ikura had been under enormous pressure to sell to a corporation, but had refused to do so. This company had plans to turn the site of the Olympic skiing and snowboarding competitions into a major international tourist complex for the very rich, complete with a huge chalet development, that would have closed off the hill to the likes of the Owls and the people of Nagano. Mr. Ikura could have made millions by selling, but chose not to.

He was saying no to the wrong people, apparently. When they couldn’t convince him to sell, they hired Eyebrows to kill him, believing that Mr. Ikura’s heirs would quickly agree to the sale.

If the death looked accidental, no one would ever connect it with the sale. Eyebrows’ idea was that the blowfish poisoning would look like a heart attack. But when he accidentally killed the mayor of Nagano, he aroused the police’s suspicions. The sudden death of a well-known politician could not go uninvestigated, and the police had ordered an autopsy that discovered the blowfish.

Even so, there was still nothing to throw suspicion on the big corporation and its plans for Mr. Ikura’s ski lodge. It wasn’t until the avalanche that the pieces of the puzzle finally started to fall into place. First, the avalanche was out of season, and while looking for the cause they had found the dynamite caps not far from where they figured the slide had started.

The final, essential, clue was Data’s video. It not only placed Eyebrows at both the banquet and the ski hill–with no real proof of wrongdoing, the police pointed out–it also showed the switch of places at the head table.

Once the police knew that the intended victim had been Mr. Ikura, and that the avalanche had been deliberate, they quickly came up with a pretty good idea of what had happened.

Data’s tape had also helped the police track down Eyebrows’ accomplice. The man helping Eyebrows unload the snowmobile and sled from the Toyota 4x4 had cracked almost immediately. He hadn’t even known what Eyebrows had in the sled. And once he realized he was caught up in a murder, he told them everything he knew–including where to find Eyebrows.

“He’s in jail right now,” Sho told the Owls. “And he’ll probably spend the rest of his life there.

“The City of Nagano–all Japan, for that matter–is deeply indebted to you, Mr. Data. We thank you and your friends.”

 

Data was a hero. The newspapers came to do stories on him. Television stations came to interview him.

“I identified the guy,” Nish told each and every one of the reporters as they and their film crews arrived at the Olympic Village.

But no one was interested in Nish. The hockey player in the wheelchair–the master sleuth, the Canadian Sherlock Holmes–was the biggest story in Japan. Next to Anne of Green Gables, he was, for a few days, the most-beloved young Canadian in all of Japan.

“I identified the guy,” Nish kept saying.