Yui found out Nakamura was going to double-cross him and killed him. As far as Nakamura’s murder went, all Mikuni could do was try to crack Yui’s alibi. Okayama police certainly weren’t going to bring him in for voluntary questioning yet. Zecom was far too important to the prefecture’s economy to offend without evidence.
The cigarette burned down to the filter. Miserable short things they were, these days. He ground it out on the leg of the bench and tossed it in the ashtray, then went back to the office. He told his computer to open the folder labeled Zecom.
Yui had a level of security clearance that made it possible to tamper with the security system to show nobody in the building. He said he’d gone straight from the airport to Zecom, met the president, then went home. President Tatsumi confirmed he met with Yui at five-thirty. The clock-in records also confirmed it. Yui then went home, two stops on the Zecom maglev line, and arrived “in time for dinner” according to his wife.
She seemed startled, Mikuni had added. Doesn’t sound like they eat many meals together. Mikuni had detailed a constable to track down the train records for that evening.
Something bothered Ishihara about Yui’s statement. A déjà vu thing with the words. Was it the times? But Ishihara had only spoken to Yui once, at Zecom the night Nakamura died. All the other details had come secondhand via Mikuni. That time at Zecom, Ishihara was sure Yui said something about getting home at eight o’clock. Maybe Yui wasn’t conscious of the exact time he got home, then later his wife reminded him. The man had just returned from overseas, after all. On the other hand, Yui might have let “eight o’clock” slip when he thought the police didn’t suspect him. Then he would have revised the time he got home to provide an alibi for the time of Nakamura’s death. They knew for sure that Nakamura had been alive and talking to McGuire on the phone at 7:30. His door card was last used, presumably by the murderer, at 8:05.
Yui killed him, for whatever reason, removed the discs, cut power to the computer to wipe it, fixed the internal security cameras so he wouldn’t show up, let himself out with Nakamura’s card, opened the toilet window downstairs to make it seem like an outsider got in, and left. He could then walk around to the Zecom subway entrance … no, too risky. Someone would see him, or he could be caught on camera.
Ishihara made a bet with himself that the train records wouldn’t show Yui. It wasn’t an issue as far as evidence was concerned, because the visual records weren’t admissible in court. Too great a chance of wrong identification, they said.
The Zecom Betta records, though, should show the time Yui entered. Ishihara flicked through screens of Mikuni’s notes and found … 7:35. Betta records showed Yui had entered his usual elevator from the subway. Ishihara clicked his tongue in annoyance. These records were admissible as evidence. He must have heard Yui wrongly. Yet he could have sworn …
He put in a call to Mikuni, who was in a meeting and inclined to be irritable.
“What? No, nobody saw him outside the station.”
“Did you ask the people in the houses around the Betta?” Ishihara persisted.
“Why? He went in the Betta from the subway entrance.”
“Is that on visual?”
“No, but his chip signal’s in the record. Look, I gotta go.” Mikuni dropped his voice. “We put out a call for anyone who saw anything suspicious to tell us. Okay?”
“Yeah, thanks.” Ishihara didn’t have much faith in the public’s spirit of cooperation. Either they’d get no response, or a lot of calls from a few weirdoes.
“Don’t you have any cases in Osaka?” was Mikuni’s parting shot.
Ishihara did have a case, and afterward he wished he’d looked at his mail sooner.
“The silver paint was deliberately poisoned,” said the chemicals expert. He was a dapper young man with slick hair, wearing a Toramon T-shirt instead of the usual white coat. He rolled his chair from one side of a long desk to another, and the pickup changed to a different angle.
“So it’s homicide.” Ishihara thought with dismay of the time they’d wasted.
“This isn’t a poison you’d expect to find in paint,” the expert said, his eyes on a computer screen. “It’s called ‘fu-jirin,’ after Daisuke Fujita who first synthesized it in the 1990s. At the time, he was working for one of the big pharmaceutical companies that later went bust after the Quake …”
“Can we have the gist, please?” said Beppu, who was crowding Ishihara so he could see the small screen.
The expert shrugged gracefully. “Whatever you like. Basically the victim dies of anaphylactic shock. Suffocates, you know. Fujirin can be absorbed through the skin or respiratory system.”
Bloody sarin all over again, thought Ishihara. If this is what Prefectural Office is worried about, why didn’t they tell us?
“Where would they get it?” said Beppu.
“I put a list of places in the report.” The expert finally looked up from his screen. “A few research labs handle the inert form used for cancer treatment. Otherwise, you’d go to the black market. That means international.”
“How much of this stuff exists domestically?” Ishihara asked.
“Not much. A few grams in each lab.”
Both detectives relaxed.
“But you only need a fraction of a milligram for treatment. There would have been less than that diluted in the paint.”
Ishihara rolled his eyes at Beppu. “So we’re looking for someone who knows what he’s doing.”
“Oh, yes.” He beamed. “I nearly missed it myself.”
“Thank you.” Ishihara reached to cut the connection.
Beppu put his hand out to stop him. “Is it possible these kids put the poison in the paint themselves because they thought it would help them connect with the computer? Does it work on nerves?”
Nice one from Beppu. That one hadn’t occurred to him.
The expert ran his chair in and out from the desk a couple of times. “I doubt it,” he said. “Firstly, because of the general unavailability of the substance. Secondly, because it’s almost unknown except to the people working with it. The general medical community doesn’t know about it, and it hasn’t been adapted for military use overseas because of manufacturing difficulties.”
“It’s not available as a gas or anything?” said Ishihara.
“Certainly not.” He began to look exasperated. “I really must go now.”
“One last thing,” said Ishihara. “Have you sent a report to our Prefectural Office as well?”
“Of course. First thing this morning. Good day, Officers.”
“Thanks for your help,” said Beppu, but the screen was already blank.
They looked at each other.
“PO probably already know a Silver Angels suspect working in one of those labs,” said Beppu. “You’d think they could keep us updated.”
Ishihara lit a cigarette, ignoring a number of pointed coughs from across the room. His hand shook slightly with annoyance. “Bloody hell. If PO don’t tell us what they’re doing, this is going to end up a mess.” He thought of McGuire and her niece, and the dead children, silver-painted and gone to join the angels. And of what crackpots could do with access to a poisons lab. “We can’t risk that.”
“They haven’t called us to a meeting since Tuesday,” said Beppu. “When you weren’t here,” he added reproachfully.
“Yeah, sorry. I was catching a couple of hours’ sleep after spending the night in Okayama.” Ishihara pushed his chair back until it crunched on the desk behind his. “When did this report come in?” He pointed with his cigarette at the screen.
“An hour or so ago. I went to dinner, came back, there it was.”
And Beppu had come and interrupted Ishihara’s musing on the Zecom and Kawanishi cases to tell him to check his mail.
“We need to talk to the super about Funo.” Beppu eased his backside off the corner of Ishihara’s desk.
“You bet we do.” Ishihara dropped his cigarette in a half-empty coffee cup and grabbed his
phone.
They trudged up the hill from the subway station to Osaka Prefectural Police headquarters. There was no underground connection, for security reasons.
West Station’s superintendent had been less than sympathetic. “Get over there if they won’t come to you,” he snapped. “You can’t expect them to keep calling you with updates. Especially when they don’t want us getting any of the action, anyway,” he added. But he did agree they should do their damnedest to stay part of the investigation. “If those kids were killed on our beat, we’ll find out who did it.”
Ishihara and Beppu swallowed their indignation and went.
It was hotter than the day before. Looked like another summer of record temperatures. They passed the stump of an ancient gingko tree that used to shade the footpath before it fell, just before the Great Quake, its white sacred ribbon still girdling the stump. The tree falling had been a warning of the Quake, people said, a sign from the gods.
The only thing Ishihara liked about police headquarters was that you could see Osaka Castle from the east-facing windows, its green copper roof glinting in afternoon sun, crouching sullen and forgotten by all but a few tourists in its refuge of moat and trees. The seventeenth-century building had been restored in the 1990s. Police headquarters, also built in the 1990s, reminded him of the castle, being a squat nine-story box with defensive, inset windows. The first- and second-floor walls angled outward like castle walls, and a moatlike ditch in front ostensibly gave light to belowground offices.
The air inside the lobby almost cut his skin with the shock of coolness. Their sweaty shirts changed instantly to clammy shrouds. They nodded to the constable on the information desk, then went to the security booth beside the elevators and let the system scan their Betta chips, palms, and eyes before it would let them any farther into the building.
On the third floor they saw Funo coming out of the incident room. She was reading a printout on a clipboard and nearly ran into Ishihara.
“I was about to call you,” she said without surprise at seeing them. “Follow this up.” She thrust the clipboard at Ishihara and kept going past them down the corridor.
“Inspector …” Ishihara managed to get out, but by then she was talking to someone else. “Damn.”
“Doesn’t matter.” Beppu peered at the clipboard. “What’s the lead?”
One of the dead girls, Lissa Takada, and McGuire’s niece, Mari Kitami, had given the same person as guarantor when they paid the contract money for their rooms. In Mari’s case, for her second room.
“Footwork,” said Beppu distastefully.
“You need the exercise.” Ishihara went into the incident room and asked one of the detectives he knew for an update.
The case was now officially a homicide. Detectives had been sent to the two companies in western Japan and the three in northeast Japan that produced the poison found in the silver paint. They would cross-check the companies’ personnel records and check their safety regulations compliance. Inspector Funo was liaising with Tokyo about the Silver Angels.
Ishihara and Beppu were to report to Assistant Inspector Ube, of Prefectural Office, as his team was following up the backgrounds of the dead kids.
“So who do you think did it?” said Beppu, as they walked back up the corridor. “A rival group?”
“Dunno,” Ishihara grunted. He still felt Funo should have kept them more in the loop. “More likely they stepped out of line, and the group got rid of them.”
“True.” Beppu considered this gloomily. “Plenty of precedents.”
“Assistant Inspector Ishihara.” Funo’s voice and tapping heels came from behind them. “About our international connection,” she said as she caught up. “The other possible sources for the toxin used in the paint are all overseas. I think we should follow up your foreign contact, especially as she has family connections with the Silver Angels.”
Ishihara realized she was talking about McGuire. “It’s a waste of time …” he began. But as the guarantor lead meant following up McGuire’s niece, it was kind of the same thing. “I’ll get on to it,” he finished.
“I’ll get a level-two check on her, e-mail, phone, the lot,” said Funo. “Particularly any international contacts.”
“Is this poisoning what you meant when you said the Silver Angels had terrorist potential?” said Ishihara.
“We thought it more likely they’d disrupt network communications, but you never know.” She looked at them as though they were cleaning robots away from the herd. “Get on with it, then.”
“Ishihara.” Funo waited until he got five paces away.
“Yes?”
“I’ll decide what’s a waste of time and what isn’t.”
Ishihara inclined his head.
“Ice queen,” muttered Beppu. But he waited until they were in the elevator before saying it.
The name of the mystery guarantor was Tomonaga Ikujiro. Address: 501-3-16, Muko-machi Betta, Amagasaki. There was no such person at that address, of course, and the owners of the flats hadn’t bothered to check. There was no such person on record anywhere and no record of the same alias being used before. The flat owners hadn’t seen the man, so the police couldn’t get a description.
“No wonder people get ripped off,” Ishihara said disgustedly. “What do we have this national database for, anyway? All they need to do is touch the screen to check an address.”
They had bought take-away eel for lunch on their way back to West Station.
“I reckon it’s the same bloke.” Beppu picked his teeth reflectively. “He must be connected with the Angels. The whole point is to get these kids away from their families and former lives, right?”
“The girls gave his relationship as ‘tutor.’ Maybe he was, but his real name’s not Tomonaga.”
Beppu flipped open his notebook, and told it, “Check tutors and teachers in common, Lissa Takada and Mari Kitami.”
“Could be a boyfriend.”
Beppu paused. “Then it’s more likely to be two men using the same alias.”
Ishihara pushed his empty styro box over the side of the desk into the waste bin. “There might not have been a man at all. The girls could have bought the seal and written the name themselves.”
Beppu shook his head. “They’d have someone ready in case the flat owners got fussy.”
Ishihara wasn’t so sure, but they had to follow the lead. “I’ll go to the university.” He pocketed a pen and his cigarettes. “You check out the neighbors of the flats. Get a description of any man the girls were seen with and see if it matches up.”
“See you later.” Beppu went back to his own desk and started collecting his things.
University administration was icily cooperative. Ishihara got the message clearly—they’d talked all this over with the police already, but they would make one last effort.
A polite young clerk sat with him in front of a computer screen and compared Mari’s academic record with that of Lissa Takada.
Mari and Lissa had taken three common subjects: English, western history, and communications theory.
“But their teachers are all different?” Ishihara asked the clerk.
“English is divided into several areas.” He flicked to another screen that showed a class schedule in table form. “Lissa took English IIA, which is reading comprehension. Mari took IIC, which is travel conversation.”
He flicked to another screen that showed an example of a timetable. “As you can see, Mari would have taken western history in first period Tuesday, because it clashed with her prac classes. Lissa took the same subject in first period Wednesday, but with a different teacher because the professor has a senior seminar at that time.”
Ishihara left eventually with a printout of the girls’ subjects and his head spinning with curriculum details. No wonder university students spent most of their time playing around—by the time they worked out their timetables, they’d be too tired to study.
He’d arranged to meet one of
Lissa’s friends in the Student Welfare Office. She said she was at the library studying, in spite of the holidays. The woman in charge of the Student Welfare Office had sounded properly protective and insisted on being present.
He stopped to buy a can of orange juice from a vending machine near the main courtyard. Shade from chestnut and gingko trees dappled the flagstones and benches. His imagination peopled the courtyard with girls, chattering and giggling, adjusting their makeup or eating slivers of the latest fad food. He tried placing Junta with them, laughing at whatever they laughed at because they were girls and pretty.
He swallowed the last of the juice. The courtyard was empty. Junta would be twenty-seven now, and beyond eighteen-year-old girls.
Ishihara crumpled the juice can, all his strength going into the simple plea that wherever his son was, he’d be happy.
At the Student Welfare office he talked to Lissa’s friend. She seemed puzzled, more than anything, at Lissa’s death. A detective from Prefectural Office had already interviewed her, so she seemed relieved that Ishihara only wanted to know about boyfriends, and whether Mari and Lissa had been friends.
“When she was still talking to me, Lissa didn’t have any steady boyfriend.” The girl looked down at her hands, folded in her lap around a pink handkerchief. She was thin and conservatively dressed in a knee-length skirt and cotton shirt. “But after she stopped telling me things, I don’t know.”
“When did she stop telling you things?” Ishihara tried to keep his tone gentle, but the burly head of Student Welfare kept glaring at him from her seat in the corner. A small air conditioner on the wall rattled ineffectively against the heat.
“About November last year. I was busy with exams, so I didn’t worry too much. Then when we came back after the New Year break, she seemed like a different person.”
“Was that when she moved apartments?”
“Probably. I didn’t find out until I went around and found she’d moved.”
Lissa had moved in early March.
“I don’t suppose you know who she asked to be guarantor for the key money at her new place? She couldn’t ask her parents, of course.”
Less Than Human Page 20