Lady Joker, Volume 1 Kaoru Takamura (ereader ebook .TXT) 📖

whose contours had still not come into full relief—flashed through his mind for the first time.

The radio, he thought.

However, this amounted to no more than a fleeting hunch, so transitory that Goda could not fully grasp it. He continued to stare at the table where the DG transmitter for the system for Investigation’s first unit sat, next to another transmitter for the Victim Assistance Unit and three types of inter-unit radios, and the thought evaporated again.

The briefing had moved on to the chief inspector of Crime Scene Division. In the vicinity of the shrubs along the path leading to the victim’s home and inside the exterior wall, they had collected a total of ten incomplete impressions of canvas shoes. Four left footprints, six right, two different pairs. Both measured twenty-six centimeters. The patterns of the rubber soles, while indistinct, could apparently both be verified. By some time today they would be able to determine the manufacturer of the shoes, identifying the brand name, stock number, and even the period of production, but they would still have to identify two pairs from among the millions of shoes distributed to tens of thousands of retailers across the country. A fiber fragment collected from the Japanese andesine stone of the wall was white cotton. The glove prints that came from the switch on the electronic lock by the front gate, based on the weave of the fabric, turned out to be from a cotton work glove. Like the canvas shoes, the gloves were manufactured in units of hundreds of thousands.

The note recovered at the crime scene was written on Kokuyo letter paper, and the product ID number was Hi-51. It was from a hundred-page stationery pad with a yellow cover that cost 250 yen and could probably be found in any household in Japan. There were no fingerprints, nor any other traces of microscopic evidence. The ink of the ballpoint pen was still being analyzed.

Next up, the unit headquarters leader from First Mobile CI reported on the results of questioning conducted after they arrived on the scene. In three homes near the victim’s, two people had heard a car engine starting around the time when the crime was committed; another person had heard a sliding car door opening and closing. The leader read aloud the names and addresses of each witness. The person who had heard the sliding door was able to give an accurate time for when he heard the noise—10:07 p.m.—since he had been about to make phone call and happened to look at the clock.

Subsequently, there was a detailed report about a resident of number twenty-one on the cul-de-sac, to the north of the victim’s home, who saw a car parked in the alley from his second-floor window at “around 10 at night.” The eyewitness was a seventy-six-year-old man, and he had gone to close a small window that had been left open in his bathroom on the second floor, which was when he happened to see, over the wall and bushes that were about one meter from his home, the roof of the car parked in the alley. The car’s lights were off, and since he was looking down from above, he could not see if there was anyone inside.

The color of the car was either dark blue or black. Since there were no street lamps in the alley, it was also possibly dark green. The vehicle was either a van or a long-body RV. None of the residents of the four other homes on the cul-de-sac had seen the car. A female office worker who lived next to the sole eyewitness had returned home around 10:15 p.m., but no car had been parked there at that time. Likewise, the eyewitness had not heard the sound of a car starting in the alley.

The man who saw the car lived with his wife, and by nine every night he would turn off all the lights in the house before going to bed. Three of the four homes belonged to elderly residents who never went out at night. The eyewitness’s neighbor was the twenty-eight-year-old office worker who lived with her parents, and though she generally returned by eight every night, yesterday she had happened to work overtime and had come home late. If the van that was seen in the alley were indeed connected to the incident, it meant that the perpetrators had dedicated a significant amount of time to surveying the area beforehand.

Lastly, the director of First SIT read aloud from the deployment chart for all 105 officers, including the SIT members who were not present. There was the first squad of the Victim Assistance Team, stationed at the victim’s home, six SIT members working in three shifts. The second squad from Crime Scene would be in charge of interviewing company employees and would include one group leader and four teams, eight members from SIT, the fourth unit of White Collar Crime from Second Investigation, and Special Violence and Organized Crime from Fourth Investigation. The third squad from Crime Scene would be in charge of questioning Hinode Beer’s branch offices and sales offices, subsidiaries, affiliated companies, and distributors, and would similarly be made up of one group leader and twelve teams, twenty-four members from SIT, the fourth unit of White Collar Crime from Second Investigation, Special Violence and Organized Crime from Fourth Investigation, including the precinct’s own Noriaki Anzai. The fourth Crime Scene squad, in charge of interviewing the victim’s family, relatives, friends, and acquaintances, would be four teams, eight SIT members. The fifth Crime Scene squad, handling matters of extortion, would be five teams, ten members including eight members from Special Violence and Organized Crime from Fourth Investigation, the ninth unit of Violent Crime, and SIT, as well as Takafumi Saito from the precinct’s CID and an inspector from Crime Prevention. Saito and the other inspector had both formerly worked in Fourth Investigation at MPD.

Then, the first squad of the Communications and Relay Team would be assigned to the