The Silent Dead Read online

  “Worth being hated for?”

  Ozawa laughed listlessly.

  “I don’t think so. Because in the end, Kanebara couldn’t pull it off. He didn’t win the contract, so no one had any reason to hate him. Frankly, if you were serious about winning a contract of that size from ETB, you’d need to pull together a twenty-person project team just to initiate the negotiations. That’s the way the business works. One man launching himself at them all by himself isn’t such a smart move. If you had personal connections, it might be a different story—but Kanebara didn’t.”

  “So you guys, his colleagues, just sat there and watched him bust his balls for six months?”

  Ozawa’s brow creased. Reiko’s choice of words was hardly tactful.

  “Like I said, our business is mostly about holding on to existing clients. Kanebara was doing a magnificent job at that. None of us had any complaints on that score. As I said, I’m not here to badmouth the guy. He was a real nice guy—amazing, really. There was just this one aspect of his personality that made him … a bit exhausting to be around. I’m ashamed to say that I kind of wanted to keep my distance. I’m being totally honest with you here.”

  “Thank you,” said Reiko, and she brought the interview to an end. As Ozawa shuffled out of the room, his retreating figure looked somehow diminished. Was he having second thoughts about having said too much?

  Ozawa, and Asada before him, struck her as harmless. Her goal right now was to eliminate any grounds for suspicion, cross the person off her list, and move on.

  “The way Kanebara snuffed it—that was going a bit far even for someone who prided himself on being hardcore,” Ioka said, as he threw himself back in his chair and stretched.

  Reiko consulted her watch. It was already ten to one.

  * * *

  They gobbled down a bento box lunch from the local convenience store. Asada offered to provide a catered lunch for them, but it was against regulations, and Reiko turned him down. The only thing they accepted was green tea. It was served to them by a female office clerk.

  The afternoon kicked off with an interview with a Mr. Nukui from Kanebara’s sales team. Unfortunately, the rest of the members of the team were out calling on clients. Reiko would have to postpone their interviews to the next day. Instead, they interviewed two of Kanebara’s female colleagues, a man from another division who’d been part of the same graduate intake as Kanebara, and a couple of HR people. By the end of the day they had completed eight interviews.

  5

  WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 13, 9:00 P.M.

  EVENING MEETING OF THE TASK FORCE

  The Mobile Unit, which had taken over responsibility for the neighborhood canvass from Reiko’s team, had nothing new or interesting to report. Reiko felt sorry for them. After all, it was hardly their fault.

  Next on the agenda were the interviews with the victim’s family and other known associates. Homicide was in charge of this line of inquiry, and Reiko was the first to speak. She summarized what she had learned from the first set of interviews at Okura Trading.

  “Everyone who worked closely with Kanebara had the same impression of him, as a serious, hardworking man. Within this group, however, a couple of his direct subordinates, Ozawa and Nukui, told me that they found it hard to keep up with him. Kanebara never said anything explicit, but his approach to work was enough to pile indirect pressure on them. Ozawa was very specific about that having started in early spring this year. I’ll be interviewing the other three members of Kanebara’s sales team tomorrow morning. I also got the names and job titles of the people at the East Tokyo Bank Kanebara was dealing with. I plan to see them in the afternoon. That’s everything.”

  “Anyone got any questions?”

  Since Director Hashizume was not there, Captain Imaizumi was running the meeting this evening. No one raised a hand.

  “Okay, let’s move on to the victim’s family.”

  “Yes, sir.” Kikuta, who was sitting in the row immediately behind Reiko, got to his feet. “We went to the victim’s residence to speak to his wife today. She informed us that her husband went out to meet someone in connection with work on the night of his murder. She doesn’t know the identity of the other party. Kanebara left the house a little after six thirty p.m. He has a car, but he didn’t use it. He must have gone by train, taxi, or bus.”

  Train, taxi, or bus. That doesn’t exactly narrow the field! Checking them all would require a ton of manpower.

  “His wife saw nothing unusual in Kanebara going out drinking for his work. It was something he often did. What did strike her as strange was that he hadn’t contacted her by one or two a.m. When she tried calling his cell, she couldn’t get through. When he was still not back by morning, she called his office and found out that he’d not showed up to work either. She checked in with the company again around lunchtime. When she learned he was still a no-show, she discussed the situation with her husband’s boss, a Mr. Asada. Asada advised her to hang on a little longer before filing a missing persons report, which is what she did. She waited a day, then filed a report at Nerima police station at seven p.m. last night.”

  Kikuta’s information tallied with everything Reiko had heard directly from Asada.

  “Kanebara and his wife went to the same university. He was a year ahead of her. They went out together as students and got married seven years ago. They don’t have any children, but the marriage was a happy one. From spring this year, however, Kanebara started to go out once every month on a weekend evening. He gave a different explanation every time. It took Mrs. Kanebara a while to realize that something was going on. After six months, she began to get suspicious. She’s not sure about the dates up until June, but she’s confident that in July, he went out on the thirteenth, the second Sunday in the month. August tenth—the day Kanebara was murdered—was also a second Sunday. In other words, her husband was killed just after she’d realized that something wasn’t quite right.”

  They’d been going out since university. They’d been together for over ten years. I think we all know what that means.…

  “I asked Mrs. Kanebara about the possibility of another woman. She couldn’t rule it out completely, but she thought it unlikely. She couldn’t explain why she was so sure, so we’ll just have to chalk that one up to women’s intuition. Ultimately, her husband was just leaving the house at around six on a Sunday evening and coming back around eleven. He didn’t have the time to get up to much mischief even if he wanted to. I also asked Mrs. Kanebara about the sort of man her husband was.…”

  As Kikuta delivered his report, Reiko sank deeper into her own reflections. Who was Kanebara meeting on the evening of the second Sunday of the month?

  Her first guess was someone from the East Tokyo Bank for some corporate wining and dining. The trouble with that theory was that—if Ozawa was right—the job was simply too big for him to handle without some kind of inside track. The man worked for a medium-sized office equipment leasing company and wasn’t even an executive. Could he close a deal with a megabank single-handedly? No. It didn’t matter how much Kanebara spent on corporate entertaining. The man lacked the authority to make the required decisions. It was way above his pay grade.

  Reiko wondered about other angles. Although it went against everything people had told her of the man’s character, perhaps she should explore the idea of him spying on or harassing competitors whose business he wanted to hijack. That might help explain the flow of events that led to his death by a thousand cuts. Every second Sunday he went out to do a little corporate espionage. Someone found out, and he was tortured and killed as punishment. Reiko dismissed the idea. Normal companies would never go that far in a squabble over client business. What was he doing on the second Sunday of the month?

  This is a mystery wrapped in an enigma. Reiko pushed her thoughts to one side and looked up, returning her attention to the briefing.

  “Ishikura will now tell you what he learned from the victim’s neighbors,” announced Kikut
a, handing the baton to his older colleague.

  “All right, Ishikura, it’s over to you,” said Imaizumi encouragingly. Ishikura rose stolidly to his feet.

  “Let me start with how Kanebara’s neighbors regarded him.…”

  The meeting lasted until 10:30.

  * * *

  Over the next couple of days Reiko and Ioka were busy interviewing people who knew Kanebara. No matter how deep they probed, nothing came up that suggested that anyone hated the man enough to kill him. On the surface at least, everyone was singing from the same solemn hymnal. He was a “serious man” and a “hard worker.” They had “lost someone very special.”

  Their inquiries at the East Tokyo Bank—the target of Kanebara’s quixotic one-man sales campaign—didn’t yield any significant clues. All they learned was that Kanebara had tried to win the bank’s business not by a full-frontal assault on the head office but by building up multiple individual relationships at branch level.

  “Kanebara was a hard worker. I can’t tell you how many times he visited this branch. At the start, I turned him down flat. We can’t hand over the responsibility for all our computers to a new supplier just like that. Things aren’t that simple. Same story with copiers and faxes. Head office makes all those big decisions.… But the guy simply wouldn’t take no for an answer. He comes back at me with, ‘Look, you need office supplies, don’t you?’ and he said he was happy to supply us with paper, ballpoint pens, erasers, business cards, binders—stationery, basically. He didn’t care how it started, he just wanted to establish a commercial relationship with us.”

  It sounded plausible. Reiko imagined that Kanebara was one of those “journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step” types.

  “To be frank, Kanebara put me in an awkward position. We are free to make some of our purchasing decisions at the branch level. But even in these areas, we tend to use suppliers with whom we have long-standing relationships.” He paused a moment. “It’s not the nicest way to put it, but this dime-store haggling went on for six months. Eventually I just thought I should do something for the guy, you know, throw him a bone. And then this. It’s so tragic.… I have trouble believing he’s dead. We didn’t yet have a full-fledged business relationship, but I’m sure this will be a blow for Okura Trading. Kanebara was quite a salesman. We’d have been happy to have him working for us.”

  That was what the deputy manager of the Nakano branch of the East Tokyo Bank had to say about Kanebara. Kanebara was also supplying other branches of the bank, albeit on the same modest scale. More for background than anything else, Reiko visited some of the other similar-sized leasing companies that dealt with East Tokyo Bank. None of them were involved in a tooth-and-claw battle with Okura Trading over the bank’s business. No one had any reason to resent Kanebara.

  “This whole line of inquiry looks like a dead end.”

  Reiko and Ioka were riding a train back to the Kameari police station. Dangling by both hands from the straps, Ioka looked uncannily like a monkey to Reiko.

  “I agree,” she replied. “Things might have been different in his private life, though. There are people who undergo a complete personality change when they’re away from work.”

  Reiko grinned ruefully. The men on her squad were champions of that sort of work-life imbalance. The private lives of Kikuta and Ishikura were a morass of poisonous relationships. Still, right now all that really mattered was for her guys to close the case. They had to find the perpetrator before the Mobile Unit did. It was a status thing.

  “Not Kanebara, though. Remember what the wife was telling us? It might be different if theirs was an arranged marriage, but those two were college sweethearts who married for love. If the guy had a secret side to his personality, his wife would have told us.”

  “How can you be so sure?”

  “What, you think the guy had a double identity that he managed to conceal from her for an entire decade?”

  “Hell, you make it sound like he was moonlighting as a ninja assassin. I think it’s possible he was concealing something from her, even if you don’t.”

  “Oh yeah? Well, it’s an idea, I suppose.”

  The conversation tapered off. Discussing a case in any depth on the train was never easy. Since anyone could listen in, you had to lower your voice and pussyfoot around the subject.

  “Those ramen noodles we had for lunch were fabulous.”

  “I really wanted to get a side-order of gyoza dumplings, but they make your breath stink of garlic.”

  “Shall we go to the same place tomorrow? We could reschedule our interviews at the Sugamo branch of the bank for around lunchtime.”

  “Not interested. Tomorrow it’s my turn to choose, and I’ve already set up the schedule for the day. Which should let us eat lunch in a nice new Italian place in Koishikawa.”

  They exited at Kanamachi station. Reiko checked her watch. It was seven thirty. The setting sun still gave off a pale glimmer of light. The sky behind the dancing neon signs on the rooftops was pale purple. The asphalt still smoldered with the daytime heat. Just standing there, Reiko began to perspire.

  God, I hate these summer nights.

  The thought came and went. That’s not who I am anymore, Reiko told herself firmly, willing the toxic thoughts of her gloomy past out of her mind. Summer nights were hot, humid, and enervating. Hardly pleasant, but that was as far as it went. Besides, she had her workmates now. They had all gone out for a drink together yesterday. With an effort, Reiko dragged herself firmly back into the present.

  She noticed the bar she and Kikuta had gone to on the first day of investigation. She realized with a start that they hadn’t had time for a private word since. Since then, whenever they went out in the evenings, Otsuka and Yuda came along; last night even Ioka had joined them. Ioka was bunking down in the dorm at the Kameari station set aside for officers on standby, while the boys from her squad were making do with futons on the floor of the gym.

  Poor things. They’re having a hard time. The air conditioning is turned up too high, and it’s freezing.

  Reiko herself was staying near the railway station in one of those cheap, nondescript hotels for business travelers. The station commander had offered her a vacant room in the policewomen’s dorm. For whatever reason, she found hotels less awkward, plus she loved the feel of freshly laundered sheets. The hotel was close enough for someone to walk her back every day. Living at home on a lieutenant’s salary, she had money to burn; besides, the room didn’t cost that much. Of course, if the investigation ended up dragging on for months, it would be a different story.

  At the bus stop, Reiko pulled out her cell phone to double check that the ringer was on silent. She was pretty sure she’d set it before getting the train earlier.

  Oh, that reminds me, someone called me from my parents’ place earlier.

  As a matter of principle, Reiko didn’t answer calls from her parents when she was out in the field. Nor did she bother calling back later. She was pretty certain it would just be more nagging about meeting prospective husbands. She just didn’t have the time to waste on nonsense like that.

  Since she had the phone in her hand, Reiko took the opportunity to delete the recent call record.

  When she looked up, she spotted the bus that went to the local bus depot via Mizumoto Park. She’d ridden it once, on the first day of this investigation. After that, she’d moved on to interviewing the victim’s work colleagues and hadn’t been back to the place where his body was found. She had yet to see the crime scene in the dark.

  Maybe it would be helpful to revisit the scene.

  Ioka was about to board another bus when Reiko called him over.

  “What’ve you got in mind?”

  Judging by the grin on Ioka’s face, he’d gotten the wrong idea.

  “Let’s go take another look at the crime scene in the park.”

  “Huh? Why?”

  “Just get a move on. It’s that bus there, the one that’s pulling out.”


  “We’ll be late for the evening meeting.”

  “Big deal. First order of business will be the door-to-door. It’s hardly urgent. If anything important comes up, they’ll contact us.”

  “If you say so, Lieutenant. To the ends of earth will I follow you.”

  In the heat of the moment, Reiko squeezed Ioka’s hand. She was excited.

  * * *

  It was dark by the time they disembarked.

  They crossed the thoroughfare at the crosswalk, then walked up the lane that ran alongside the pond. The expanse of water behind the fence to their left was black and silent. They couldn’t see the fishing boats although they had to be moored out there somewhere. Apart from the occasional resident heading home, the place was every bit as dark and lonely as Reiko had imagined.

  “Lieutenant?” said Ioka behind her.

  Reiko blanked him out.

  It must been just like this the night the body was dumped here. A bit later, though. By the time Kanebara was brought here, the locals had probably all put out their lights and gone to bed.

  Reiko pushed on toward the place where the body was found. The lane was getting darker with every step, but Reiko found herself inexplicably unafraid of the summer night.

  “Lieutenant, why are you bringing me somewhere so dark?”

  The body must have been brought here by car. Which road did they use?

  “The moment I saw you for the first time, I…”

  They had to use this lane or the road that runs through the park, the one where the forensics guys parked their vans that day. They dumped the body at the junction of the two roads. Which one did they use?… Shit, I just don’t know.

  “… thought to myself, ‘The woman’s beautiful, gorgeous.’”