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

used for years. Electric, gas, water have all been turned off. A police dog detected the place by scent. Fingerprints and footwear impressions are forthcoming—”

“Matsuoka! Add what you just heard to your article. Yamane, you contact the owner. Layout, hold off on the Metro page! Negoro, I need that draft now, quick!”

“Hurry it up!” Layout replied with typical urgency.

An abandoned, snowbound vacation home with no one around, Negoro thought. For a brief moment he tried to imagine the house that served as the hideout, but his eyes were already racing after the wording “they gave him paper cartons of oolong, tea, orange juice, and fruit-flavored milk.” No sooner had his hand automatically changed “they gave him” to “he was given,” he passed back the draft, saying, “Give this to the slot.” It wasn’t until after he had handed it off that his mind finally made the connections—the six heat patches; the details about the food; the reason the victim had appeared so calm when he arrived at the fire station; why, at the Fujiyoshida Police Department, when asked if he wanted anything to eat, he had requested only a cup of hot tea—but it was too late.

Negoro glanced over at his colleagues in the Reserve section. Then, after checking the pile of paper on his desk to make sure there were no stray drafts, he went ahead and let out a deep sigh of relief from his seat. The clock on the wall read 1:32 p.m.

Having filed their articles, the reporters were beginning to stretch and quietly drift away from their desks. The slot editor announced, “There’ll be a five-minute meeting at one fifty-five!” Negoro sipped an oolong tea—his third of the day—from the vending machine and bit into a piece of dried sour kelp from the stash he kept in his desk drawer. He had been glued to his seat since the incident occurred, and his lower back felt heavy. He didn’t have the luxury of taking a walk to clear his mind, though the younger fellows had already disappeared, using the brief window to make personal calls to their sources or take a break, leaving the Reserve section completely empty.

Negoro knew the evening edition that had just gone to press would be the last time they got away with inconsequential factoids such as orange juice and fruit-flavored milk. Starting with tomorrow’s morning edition, their pages would have to zero in on the truth behind the incident. More than anything, there was the mystery of why the crime group had suddenly released their hostage while demanding six hundred million in ransom. In the meeting that was about to begin, no doubt the Metro chief would ask, “So, Negoro, what do you think?” Just how would he respond?

For now, it was certain that this crime had targeted the Hinode Beer corporation. Since Negoro was in charge of feature articles, his first task was to gather a wide range of reactions and testimonies from the main player and victim—Hinode—as well as from those connected to the organization. Follow-up stories spanning the public and private life of the individual victim, Kyosuke Shiroyama, were also crucial. Since the victim had returned unharmed, another option would be to double down on covering the peripherals of the incident—depending on how the investigation developed. For instance, he could run a three-part series about why the CEO had been targeted. The first installment would list kidnapping cases involving executives of Western companies. The second installment would cover how Japanese companies, in the context of the current economic stagnation and stalled structural development within industries, have detected and responded to various corporate risks, and so on.

But there was a limit to how many features he could run on the topic of corporations. There had to be a reason the perpetrators had chosen Hinode from among the multitudes of major companies. No doubt backroom deals had been made, but the persons in question would never admit anything, and if the police did not formally release the information, he could not write about it anyway. From his position at the helm of the Metro page, he knew they had no choice but to wait for a criminal profile on the perpetrators to become a little clearer. If nothing emerged, coverage of the impending elections would supersede articles about the incident, forcing them back to the drawing board.

He mulled over such things as he bit into another piece of kelp. Just then he saw a light on the phone blink, signaling an incoming call on the outside line, and he reached for the receiver.

“Metro,” he answered. His eye caught the wall clock. 1:39 p.m.

“Is Takeshi Kikuchi-san there?” A man who sounded like he was in his sixties or seventies, his voice muffled with a thick Kansai accent.

In that instant, Negoro managed to rouse his rusty instincts as an investigative reporter, and he pressed the receiver to his ear. “May I ask who’s calling?”

“Name’s Toda. Wanna talk to Kikuchi-san. Go get him.”

A person in whom, in various ways, very little patience remained. Either he had given up on society or had never trusted it in the first place—whichever the reason, there was a sense of arrogance, or perhaps it was despair, in the way he refused to even bother speaking in complete sentences. A life lived in defiance. Negoro’s imagination spun out in a conditioned reflex. Nevertheless, he was sure that the speaker on the other end of the line was not an underworld character—distinguishable by a subtle difference in his tone.

“I’m sorry, but Takeshi Kikuchi works for the Metro section of the Osaka bureau. Perhaps I can help you instead? My name is Negoro, I work in the Metro section here.”

“If Kikuchi-san’s not there, then who’s responsible for writing that article about the Ogura Transport and Chunichi Mutual Bank scandal? Get me that guy.”

Ogura Transport. Chunichi Mutual Bank. Hearing these two names struck something of a chord with Negoro. Back in 1990, Negoro, who had been working out of the