Nightshade
Page 29
Ichiro frowned. “What statement?”
“About the assault last night. We need a signed statement from Hata-san in order to prosecute the suspect.”
“She’s not going to give a statement. We’ve decided not to press charges.”
We? Kenji stared at him, not quite believing what he’d just heard. “With all due respect, Mitsuyama-san, I’m afraid this is a criminal matter and it’s not up to the victim to decide whether it’ll be prosecuted or not. The state has an interest in protecting citizens from violence by sending people like Jun Shimada to prison.”
“She’s not going to make a statement. He didn’t actually hurt her. We just want to forget it happened.”
“I’m sorry, but the victim is the only one who can decide that.” He appealed to Yumi. “Hata-san?”
Ichiro strode around the table to stand between them. “She’s my kon’yakusha. My family has decided.” As Kenji began to protest, Ichiro continued, “My father is Junichiro Mitsuyama, chairman of the Mitsuyama Corporation. It would be unseemly for my future wife to be involved in something so public and unpleasant.”
Like a slap across the face, Kenji realized Ichiro was one of those Mitsuyamas, the kind of Mitsuyamas who could get away with refusing to cooperate with the police.
“I’m afraid you don’t understand,” Kenji explained, trying to outrun the surge of outrage and disappointment. “The assault is unlikely to be prosecuted—we just need to hold the suspect on the assault charge until we have enough to indict him for the murder of Rika Ozawa. It’s extremely unlikely that Hata-san will have to appear in court. She’s already told us what happened—I just need her to sign the statement.”
Ichiro drew himself up to his full height. “Absolutely not. There’s no reason for her to be involved any further. Just because you don’t have enough evidence to charge him for his real crime, don’t expect my fiancée to do your job for you.”
Kenji opened his mouth to tell Ichiro just where he could put his privileged demands, but stopped himself just in time. In a showdown between a lowly local detective and the son of one of the most powerful families in Japan, nobody would put money on Kenji Nakamura.
He took a deep breath and said, in as calm a voice as he could muster, “Mitsuyama-san, let me explain. Because the entire station is involved in another intensive investigation, there won’t be enough detectives available to gather evidence against Shimada until that case is concluded. Without the assault charge, we’ll have to release him. If Hata-san doesn’t sign her statement, he’ll go free.”
Yumi looked up at her fiancé, dismayed. “Ichiro, don’t you think . . . ?”
“You agreed,” he reminded her, his lips set in a thin, disapproving line.
Kenji couldn’t believe what he was hearing. After badgering him into investigating her friend’s death, Yumi was going to choose social position over justice. And she was choosing Ichiro over him.
“Yu-chan,” he said, forgetting himself as frustration boiled over. “You know he did it. If we let him go, he’ll run. You’ve got to help us!”
She looked at him and said in a dull voice, “I can’t.”
Chapter 68
Wednesday, April 17
3:00 P.M.
Kenji
Kenji identified himself to the officer at the detention desk and asked to see Shimada. They were seventeen hours into the forty-eight they were allowed to hold
He signed the logbook and asked, “How is he?”
“Quiet, since I’ve been on duty. But the last shift reported he was pretty agitated off and on all night; some of the other detainees complained. He seems to have a bit of claustrophobia, doesn’t like being confined in small spaces. Maybe you should tell Inspector Mori to ask for a psych workup.”
“What I’m hoping for is a confession.”
“Good luck.” The guard picked up the phone. “Visitor for Jun Shimada.”
A few minutes later, a guard let Kenji through the armored door and ushered him into a room with a thick glass window in the wall separating the visitors’ side from Shimada. He’d curled himself into a ball on the floor, ignoring the chair near the visitors’ window.
“Shimada-san?” Kenji said, speaking through the circle of holes drilled in the glass.
The prisoner raised his head. “You!” He scrambled to his feet and pressed both hands against the glass. “What are you doing to me? Why am I here? Let me out!”
“We need you to tell us about Rika Ozawa’s death.”
He let his arms drop to his side. “You’ll just twist it into something it’s not, use it against me. You’ve already made up your mind.”
“I can change my mind. Tell me what really happened.”
“I don’t want to talk to you.”
He retreated to the center of the room and dropped to the floor facing away from Kenji.
“Fine,” Kenji said, “but I’m not your enemy. The guys from the elite murder squad downtown, they’re the ones who think you’re the predator who’s been strangling women at shrines for the past nine months. If they don’t find a more likely suspect soon, you’re it.’
Shimada didn’t move.
“You want to know what I think? I think there’s a chance you were at the wrong place at the wrong time. Tell me about Rika Ozawa and the Hamadas. I’ll go to bat for you with the brass. If you had nothing to do with the serial murders, I’ll tell them.”
Shimada curled up on his side, facing away.
After a long moment of looking at
At the desk outside, Oki was presenting papers authorizing him to take Jiro Yamaboshi to the public prosecutor’s office. He took one look at Kenji and said, “You look like you need a dose of twelve-year-old Macallan.”
“Shimada won’t talk. And Hata-san won’t sign a statement about the assault, so we won’t be able to hold him past nine o’clock tomorrow night unless I can convince him to incriminate himself.”
“Why won’t she make a statement?”
Kenji told him about Ichiro’s edict.
“Huh,” said Oki when he was finished. “Bad luck your victim is so well-connected. What will you do now?”
“I don’t know. I told Shimada that the boys from downtown are ready to hang a whole lot of crimes he didn’t commit on him if he doesn’t admit to the Ozawa death, but he refuses to talk. I guess I’ll try again later, after he’s had time to think about it.”
The guard appeared with a handcuffed Jiro Yamaboshi. Oki stamped his hanko on the paperwork, then turned to Kenji. “You know, last night when Inspector Mori was questioning Shimada, he tried everything—threats, tricks, good-cop/bad-cop, and nothing worked. Mori couldn’t get him to admit what he told Hata-san—” He paused. “—and I couldn’t help but think it was because Mori didn’t know why he told Hata-san.”
Chapter 69
Wednesday, April 17
3:30 P.M.
Kenji
Upstairs, Kenji slumped at his desk, thinking about what Oki had said. He flipped open his phone and reread the e-mails Yumi and
Kenji forwarded the e-mails to his computer and copied the messages into a document, alternating them in chronological order. Yumi had accused him of letting down her friend and Shimada had suddenly become
frantic to convince her otherwise. Maybe she wasn’t the first person to hit that sensitive spot. Maybe he had failed someone important to him.
What if he offered Shimada a chance to talk to her again? Would he do it? Would he finish telling her what he’d begun at the shrine, this time with witnesses?
And if Shimada agreed, would Yumi? If he made a confession, there would be no trial. Yumi would never have to testify. Kenji shut his laptop and stood. It was worth a try. He took out his phone to call her, then remembered she hadn’t answered his calls or texts for days. He needed to see her face to face, without Ichiro Mitsuyama standing between them. Maybe her parents would help.
He lifted his jacket from the back of his chair and ran for the elevator. Straightening his tie and squinting into the chrome trim to make sure he looked presentable, he decided he would go to her house, talk to her parents, wait for her to come home, and hope her fiancé wasn’t with her.
The doors slid open and he strode across the lobby toward the front door. A figure jumped up from the orange sofa.
Yumi.
He stopped. “What are you doing here?”
“I . . . came back after Ichiro went to work. I didn’t want to interrupt you after what happened in the interview room, but . . .”
Kenji glanced over her shoulder. The desk officers looked busy, but he knew they’d had over an hour to wonder why an attractive young woman was waiting to ambush one of their detectives.
He pulled her through the big glass door. “Rikugi-en?” he suggested.
She nodded, and they walked in silence to the famous garden nearby. He handed her a ticket and they followed the gravel path past the famous weeping cherry tree, surrounded by amateur photographers taking shots of the cascading blossoms. The path continued around the pond, past manicured globes of azalea bushes just beginning to pop with magenta blossoms. Across a low bridge, a path branched off to the maple grove—packed during leaf-viewing season in November but deserted in springtime. Yumi sank onto a bench and Kenji seated himself beside her.
Birds sang, a bee buzzed lazily between them, then soared off into the trees, but Yumi hunched into her jacket as if it were the dead of winter.
“I want to apologize,” she said.
“For what?”
“For . . . everything. For the way Ichiro treated you. For not signing a statement. For what we did at the—”
“Don’t.”
Yumi looked at him.
“Don’t apologize for that.”
Yumi was silent.
“If you have to apologize for something, say you’re sorry that you’ve decided to marry someone who . . .” He stopped himself. “Never mind. At least now I understand.” He gave a bitter laugh. “Even I know who Junichiro Mitsuyama is.”
“That’s not it,” she protested. “That’s not why I’m marrying him. It’s—”
“Stop. Don’t explain. It doesn’t matter.” Time to get off this subject before it became any more painful. “If you’re really sorry about not signing the assault statement, would you consider helping me in another way?”
“I can’t go against the Mitsuyama family’s wishes.”
“I won’t ask you to. But if you could help me in a way that wouldn’t require you to testify in court . . . ?”
Yumi nodded cautiously, listening.
“Shimada is refusing to talk to us, but at one point he wanted to talk to you so badly he tied you up to do it. If you could get him to repeat what he said to you at the Nezu Shrine—this time recorded and with witnesses—we wouldn’t have to charge him with assault. We could hold him for Rika’s murder.”
“Do you really think he’d talk to me?”
“It’s worth a shot.”
“When?”
Kenji stood. “How about now?”
Chapter 70
Wednesday, April 17
4:30 P.M.
Yumi
Yumi clutched her purse in front of her as Kenji signed them into the detention area and handed her a visitor badge. “When we get in there, I’ll stay with you, but out of his line of sight. He might not talk to you if he sees me—he doesn’t like police and he especially doesn’t like me.” Kenji paused. “I think the reason he decided to open up to you in the first place is that you said something that made him desperately want to defend what he’d done.”
Yumi clipped the badge to her blouse.
“Remember, our goal right now is just to convince him to talk to you in a room where we can monitor him and record what he says. One step at a time, okay?”
Yumi swallowed and nodded. The guard opened the door and led them to the same interview room Kenji had used before. Kenji hung back by the door as Yumi seated herself in front of the glass, trying not to remember that the last time she’d seen
“
He raised his head at the sound of her voice and turned toward her. Scrambling to his feet, he came to the window, placing his hands flat against the glass. She shrank back, reminded how much bigger he was, how strong his hands had been. But his eyes were hollow, his black eyeliner smudged. The tailcoat he’d been so proud of was now rumpled and torn, and his hair hung in his eyes, unwashed.
“You ran away,” he moaned, his voice filled with anguish. “Why did you run away?”
“You scared me,” Yumi said.
“I didn’t mean to. I only wanted you to listen.” He rested his forehead on the cold glass.
A flicker of pity surprised her.
“That’s why I’m here,” she said. “You didn’t finish telling me about Rika before . . . before that priest came. Before he interrupted.” Yumi made herself lean closer. “I still want to understand why you did what you did. How you . . . ‘helped’ her.”
Shimada slumped back into the hard chair, sighed, and stared down at his hands. “What does it matter now?” he said, worrying a hangnail. “The cops are going to find a way to charge me with every unsolved murder they have, really clear the books. I could tell by the way that inspector talked to me, shooting questions at me faster than I could think, accusing me. They were asking me things I didn’t know anything about. The truth doesn’t matter to them.”
“I think it matters to you,” she said. “And it matters to me.”
He looked at her.
“Tell me about Rika,” she urged. “I’ll make them listen. Rika was different from the others, wasn’t she? Something about her death bothers you. Finish telling me what happened.”
“If I do . . . if I do, will you tell the police I didn’t kill anybody? Not
“I can only do that if you talk to me.”
Shimada frowned. “I’ll talk to you, but not to them.” He stood and moved closer to the glass, beseeching her with his eyes. “But I can’t talk in here. I hate small spaces. Please get me out. Please.” He put his palms against the glass and bowed his forehead against it, squeezing his eyes shut as he whispered. “Onegai-shimasu.” I beg you.
She stood. “I’ll see what I can do.”
Chapter 71
Wednesday, April 17
5:00 P.M.
Yumi
Yumi listened as Kenji called Superintendent Noguchi. The superintendent was furious that the Mitsuyamas were preventing Yumi from signing a statement and didn’t believe Yumi could get a confession from Shimada. But eventually Kenji wore him down, convincing him it might be their only shot. Noguchi grudgingly ordered him to draft an outline of the interview questions and take care of the legalities while a police driver ferried him from the manhunt command post at
headquarters to Komagome Station.
Kenji collected the forms he’d need the prisoner to sign, explaining to Yumi that although Shimada had been told he had the right to an attorney when he was arrested, he hadn’t responded to anything Inspector Mori had said last night. Noguchi wanted Kenji to tell him again, and if Shimada refused counsel, to get it in writing. Japanese law also required Kenji to read him the charges on his arrest warrant, which at the moment only described his attack on Yumi at the Nezu Shrine. Kenji hoped that would work to their advantage; if Yumi could get him talking about Rika’s death, Shimada wouldn’t be reminded that what he saw as “help,” the law viewed as murder.
They returned to the interview room and Yumi went in first. Shimada rose and stood on the other side of the glass as she approached.
“They agreed to let us talk upstairs in an interview room,” Yumi said.
“Just you and me?” Shimada asked, ignoring Kenji standing behind her.
“No. They’ll be observing and recording, but they won’t talk to you. At least you’ll be out of your cell.”
Shimada nodded.
“Detective Nakamura needs to talk to you again.” She paused. “I’ll wait for you upstairs.”
Shimada sat down and stared at his hands while Kenji read the warrant and advised him of his rights. He gave no sign of having heard until it was explained that he wouldn’t be allowed to talk to Yumi until he’d either called a lawyer or signed a statement saying he didn’t want one.
“I don’t need a lawyer. I didn’t do anything wrong.”
Kenji gave the form and a pen to the guard, who ferried them to the other side of the glass, where
Kenji took the signed papers up to the squad room. Noguchi looked at Kenji’s interview outline, made a few additions, then sat down with Yumi to go over it. She listened to his crash course on questioning suspects, but in the end the only thing she remembered was his final piece of advice: “Get him talking and keep him talking.”