by Sam Waite
We also shared darker secrets, things that handicap the human spirit as surely as physical incapacities debase the body. Yuri told me about her mother. She'd had hepatitis B, but still she drank. She had collapsed in a bar, and a day later, died in a hospital. Yuri had been in her third year of university in New Orleans. She and her aunt arrived in time for the wake. When I was very young, my parents fought almost ceaselessly until they just gave up. They virtually stopped speaking to each other and to me as well. Yuri had had her aunt. I'd had my grandmothers, one Hispanic and one Irish. I still found refuge in their memories.
We checked out and were on our way to the train station before Yuri realized we'd forgotten to call Sayoko. She phoned, but there was no answer. Next she rang the boy with the bike. He hadn't seen or heard from her.
She called Sayoko a few more times and left messages.
No response.
Chapter 20
I had underestimated Morimoto. He was a tiger in his element. When we met at Protect Agency Monday morning, he said looked like he'd just won a prize fight.
"I found the owner of the inn."
"On a Sunday? How?" I said.
"The Internet never sleeps. You just have to know where to look." He smirked. "It's a company registered in the Caymans."
"That doesn't really..."
"Make sense." Yuri finished my thought.
"It might. I also traced a payment from a Cayman bank to the inn. It was for five hundred thousand yen."
"So?"
"The same amount was deposited the next day in an account held by Maho under her alias. I need time to make more connections. Here are the account numbers." He handed me a slip of paper.
"Take the time you need." Yuri and I had a more pressing agenda. Find Sayoko.
"So, now what?" Yuri said.
"Kuroda's my best offer. Maybe she's been reported missing."
"Not likely, but we have to start somewhere. I'll see if he can come here. We can show him the photos that put a fright into Sayoko. Long shot, but who knows."
Kuroda agreed to come. Twenty minutes later the receptionist announced his arrival.
Yuri led him to a room where she had set up a computer with the primary photo on display. "We haven't been able to contact Sayoko. Has she been reported missing?"
"Not that I have heard. I probably would have been informed, since she may have bearing on the murder."
Yuri pointed to the computer screen. "Sayoko identified this guy as one of the men in a private sex show at an inn in Izu."
A network of wrinkles deepened around Kuroda's eyes. He acted like he was the only person in the room, alternately whispering to himself and making rattling noises in the back of his throat. He traced his fingertip on the desktop as though he was writing notes to himself. In his private mumblings, he subtracted days and added hours to put events known only to him into perspective.
Finally, he turned away from the computer and lit a cigarette.
"Who are they?" I asked.
"Police."
"We already know that. Okay, wrong question. What did they want with me? What's their connection to Yokoyama?"
Kuroda pulled down the corners of his mouth and answered with a shake of his head. "I'll tell you what I do know. The one who asked you for your passport is named Okabe. He is in charge of the Maho Hosoi murder case."
"I thought you were. I just assumed."
"No, I'm not working on that. Not directly."
"Tidy as a mama cat. The guy investigating Maho's death was her stage director for live sex shows and was connected with a private investigator who was giving her money. Where do you fit in Kuroda-san? You said 'not directly.'"
Kuroda pressed his hand against the back of his neck and stared at the ceiling. "I'm working on the Okabe case." He said something in Japanese, and Yuri translated. "Internal investigation."
"The enemy of my enemy? Why didn't you tell us up front?"
Kuroda stayed with Japanese and left the English translating to Yuri. "Actually, he shouldn't have told you at all. 'We are not natural allies, are we? We had to find our mutual interests and trust that we all understood them.'"
"You once said you would try to help clear Dorian, if we produced evidence he didn't kill Maho?"
Again Yuri translated. "'It isn't my case. It never will be, but if Okabe is taken off, then you can have a real investigation. Maybe Dorian can avoid a trial.'"
It didn't sound like a big victory for my side, but it was better than a goose egg. "Okay, now what?"
"I would like to talk to Sayoko Shiyoda. I regret I have nothing to help you find her, but if you hear anything please call me."
As soon as Kuroda left, Yuri tried to contact Sayoko again. No luck.
I smacked the table with my fist. "After all this time, what in blazes do we have? A witness who can ID a dirty cop."
Yuri squeezed her arms tight across her chest. "But we can't find her."
"We have a key."
"But no lock."
"We have a friendly cop."
"But he's not working our case."
"We've got a weird link between an onsen inn and a company registered in the Caymans, along with oddly convenient bank transfers."
"And in all of it, no clear link to Dorian or any idea what happened to Sayoko."
"We've got—"
Yuri's phone signaled an e-mail.
She read it to me. "Sayo-chan wants the key."
"Who's it from?"
"It was sent from Sayoko's phone, but she obviously didn't write it. Sayo-chan is what Ito called her. What do you want to do?"
"Just say, 'Let's meet.'"
Yuri keyed in the message. We waited for a response that didn't come and weighed our options. They were few. We couldn't file a missing persons report ourselves. As far as we knew, she had no residence. Where was she missing from?
The message, "Sayo-chan wants the key," wouldn't sound like a threat to anyone but Yuri and me, but that's what it was. A little tactic to make us nervous.
Yuri and I could play too. "Turn off your phone."
She was thinking ahead of me. Her finger was on the power button before I'd finished the sentence.
If the e-mail senders had access to us, they could crack the whip while Yuri and I sweated. This way we all got nervous together. Just how far we could take it though was tricky. It wouldn't do for them to get too nervous, not if they were holding Sayoko, which I suspected they were. Except for the motorcycle boy and Sayoko, no one outside Protect Agency was likely to have known about the key. Someone might have grabbed her and pressured her to talk. If that was the case, the message "Sayo-chan wants the key" made it a dicey game.
Move number one, re-establish contact on our terms, and maybe the best way to do that was to work from the top down.
I called Will Simons. He said he was in a tapas bar and gave me directions.
Will was at a small table in a corner. He called a waiter to bring another wine glass.
"Never mind," I said. "Can you set up a meeting with the FTC commissioner's secretary?"
"So you can pop in and ask about some murder case? Misrepresenting an interview would be unprofessional, unethical and cause for termination. Mine."
"Look, I didn't mean..."
"It's not that easy anyway. Someone as high up as the commissioner doesn't open up his schedule to talk to a reporter, especially a foreign reporter. You never know what they'll do. Japanese press gets its news through kisha clubs, what we'd call press clubs, but they aren't really the same. They write handouts, unless there's a scandal, and then they attack like chickadees in a feeding frenzy. Lots of chirping, but not much blood."
Maybe it was because of his job, but Will couldn't seem to answer a question without a minute and a half of background. "Does that mean no chance?"
He poured a cup of wine and swallowed it. Then he smiled like a cat with chickadee on its breath. "It just means that it'll be tricky. I'll need some pretty good stuff going in
that would justify an interview and make the principle nervous or curious enough to agree. What've you got?"
I gave him all I had—names, photos of Ueno meeting Ito, the bugs in Allworth's office, the meeting in the park and even the Cayman/Inn connection and bank account numbers. I think Will was impressed. He stopped eating.
"I love a money trail. The bank data alone is enough for me to run with, if I can make anything of it. That wouldn't help your man, though would it?"
"He's not my main worry right now. The girl Sayoko is missing. I have reason to believe she's been kidnapped because someone thinks she knows more than she does. I think there's a connection with Ueno. If he got spooked, maybe something would happen that could open a way to find Sayoko. By the way, I know from an internal investigator that dirty cops are involved."
Will let go a sardonic chuckle. "When you get into it, Mick, you get in deep."
I called Yuri before I remembered her mobile phone was off the air. I tried her home phone, but she wasn't there. She wasn't at the agency either, but Nozaka was. I asked him to meet me.
We met at a dimly-lit shot bar near Protect Agency. It took a second or so for my eyes to adjust. The place was so small that you could hear a whispered conversation across the room. Nozaka and I sat at the only booth, just behind a man at the bar offering a sympathetic ear to a woman in a dress that barely reached her thighs. She was complaining about her husband working eighteen hours a day, six days a week.
Tsk.
"Are you ready to have another go at Yokoyama?" I said.
Nozaka wrinkled an eyebrow.
"We know where he works, where he lives, what he looks like."
"What do you have in mind?"
"A surprise visit. We need to shake every tree we can find."
"To help find Sayoko?"
"Uh huh."
"That guy not only put the cops on us, they were dirty cops. I was scared, and he knows it. Yeah, I'm in for payback."
We walked back to Protect Agency to get a company car. A cloud cover sagged below lampposts and spun their light through the air like a fine mist. The yellow glow enveloped us in a cold, eerie fire that burned away shadows. The sounds of tires and car engines echoed off the sky. For what Nozaka and I had in mind, a night like this could be your friend, if you played it right. It could also turn on you like a rabid hound.
Nozaka entered Yokoyama's address into the car's navigation system. He lived in a nine-story condo near Den-en Chofu, a ritzy residential area in rolling wooded hills. The building was at the top of a rise that put the clouds about head high. The front door was secured by a four-code digital lock. Tough to get into. Nozaka hung by the entrance while I went back down the hill.
It was a cheap plan, but workable. Anyway, I'd done worse. We waited and watched a couple with a child go in. We left them alone. The next resident was a young woman. I let her get a few paces past me then started walking behind her. She quickened her step. I did too. She looked back and there I was, the biggest, baddest thumb-in-the-eye she'd ever seen. She ran toward the door. Nozaka seemed to materialize out of the mist and put himself between her and me. She punched in the code, swung the door open just enough to squeeze inside and started to push it closed.
Nozaka stopped it with his shoulder, stuck his head inside and asked if she was okay. The woman looked terrified and grateful at the same time. She ran to the elevator and looked over her shoulder. She was visibly relieved to see the door close. What she hadn't seen was Nozaka slip a plastic card against the bolt. After the woman entered the elevator, he and I stepped into the building.
Sorry Miss, it's just that kind of night.
Yokoyama lived in 7-D. Nozaka stood in front of the door's peep hole, swayed from side to side, drooped his head and planted one hand against the door for support. Then he pressed the buzzer.
Yokoyama asked who it was through the intercom.
"Akero, 'too-chan!" Nozaka said, in a drunken slur. "Open up, Papa."
Even I understood Yokoyama's response. "Wrong apartment, go away!"
"Otoo-san!" Nozaka hammered the door with the heel of his fist. "Kimochi warui zo." He made a gagging sound.
Yokoyama opened the door and Nozaka stumbled inside. Before Yokoyama could push him out, I shoved us all into the entry. I closed the door and Nozaka and I backed Yokoyama into his living room. He looked as shocked that we'd come into his home wearing shoes, as that we were there at all. That didn't last. His shock turned to rage.
Nozaka was in his face telling him to be quiet. He was a little closer than me and saw Yokoyama's haymaker coming. He jerked his head back. Yokoyama's fist swished past and caught me on the side of the face. No harm done.
I jabbed the tip of Yokoyama's floating rib. He was having trouble breathing now. At least he was quiet. We put him on a sofa and waited for him to get his breath.
"Where's Sayoko?" Nozaka asked.
"How can I know where she is, if I don't know who she is?"
"Sure you do," I said, "Maho's friend. We'll get to her later. First, you'll tell us about Sayoko Shiyoda."
He shook his head and glared.
I hated men who used women, but I'd just frightened a girl trying to get home, so I could get to this man. I hated him for what he'd done and for what I'd done to get to him. In a flash, I lifted my knee and snapped the toe of my shoe into his chest. I pushed his head back and broke his nose with the heel of my hand. My face was an inch from his. My spittle mixed with his blood. "Where is Sayoko?"
He didn't answer immediately. He just held his nose.
"If you die tonight, I don't care. We have another source."
Fear replaced the spite in his eye. "Ito has her. I don't know where."
"Call Ito. Tell her she's out of the loop. I'll be discussing the key with a man named Ueno. She knows him. There's no reason for her to keep Sayoko. Tell her..." Tell her whatever it takes. Just don't hurt the girl. I conjured an image of Sayoko. My private storm died as suddenly as it had swirled in. "Ask her to let the girl go, tonight. Ueno's the one who wants the key."
Yokoyama called. He talked for a long time. I couldn't understand him, but Nozaka's expression didn't look good. Finally, he pressed the receiver against his thigh.
"Ito said that Ueno will pay a lot for the key. You'd better give it to her."
"I'll make sure Ueno pays whatever he said he would."
Yokoyama relayed my message. Then he hung up the phone.
"She said no. She has an understanding with Ueno. After she has the key, she'll let Sayoko go." Yokoyama's hands were trembling. He tried to steady them in his lap.
Sayoko on the loose would be too big a risk for Ito.
"The money you paid to Maho, did it come from Ito?"
Yokoyama looked confused.
"I'll be more specific. There's a Spanish restaurant in Aoyama, El Castellano. You gave her an envelope filled with ten-thousand yen notes. What was it for?"
"I don't know."
Nozaka took over the questioning. I couldn't follow what he said, but Yokoyama was pressing himself deeper into the sofa. He gave a few short answers before Nozaka gave up.
"He still says he doesn't know what the money was for. You want me to try harder?"
"Just a little."
Nozaka took a pen out of his coat pocket and slowly slid off the body case. Underneath was a triangular blade about two inches long. Not all that frightening unless it was in the hands of someone who knew how to use it. Nozaka looked like he did. He stepped back in a slight crouch and pointed it at each of Yokoyama's eyes, his throat and his groin. With scarcely a twitch of his legs, he leapt onto Yokoyama and cocked the hand holding the knife.
"Dorian!" Yokoyama screamed.
"Wait." I grabbed Nozaka's arm.
Yokoyama was talking fast now.
"He still insists he doesn't know what the money was for." Nozaka translated. "He says to ask Dorian. I believe him."
I did too.
Chapter 21
We had more questions for Yokoyama, but he didn't have many answers. He had been contacted by Hashimoto, the optics chief who was killed in a car wreck. They'd met twice. At the second meeting, Hashimoto asked for a girl who would do particular requests. Yokoyama had sent him to Ito. He didn't hear anything else until Hashimoto gave him money to make a payoff. I asked him why he'd paid Maho directly instead of Ito. He didn't know. He also said he wasn't sure whether Dorian knew anything or not, but he was in charge of the company. It didn't look like a coincidence to him.
To me neither.
Nozaka asked him about his police friends, but Yokoyama was vague. He said they'd helped him on some cases in a "private capacity," and he'd paid them for it. They were just returning a favor when they checked us out. I didn't buy that. I don't think Nozaka did either, but we'd pushed intimidation as far as we could. By then, Yokoyama had figured a sore rib and a broken nose were all we were good for. He was right.
It was too late to do anything but go back to the hotel. The next morning, I itched to talk to Dorian, but Ueno, the secretary to the FTC commissioner, was a higher priority. He was the best leverage I had to make Ito free Sayoko. I tried to call Will to see if he had set up a meeting, but he was at an interview and couldn't be reached. Next, I checked in with Yuri and asked her to make copies of the photos she took of Ueno and Ito. By the time I got to Protect Agency, they were ready.
"You and Nozaka ought not be alone together." Yuri dropped the photographs in front of me. "You two are bad chemistry. People get into situations and their psyches race each other into the fire. Then who gets burned with you?
"Me. I'm standing too close, in more ways than one."
"You and I shared a run, didn't we?"
"We went to pick up something that belonged to us, and we ran away from people trying to hurt us. That's normal. You and Nozaka broke into a private home and tortured the resident. That's criminal."
"So was our break-in at Foxx Starr."
"No one got hurt."
"We got information that could help Sayoko. I don't believe Yokoyama will get us burned by anyone we're not already in trouble with. Even among sleaze, the guy's a bottom feeder."