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

trades are small in size, but given what’s going on right now, it concerns me a bit that Hinode’s stock is attracting the attention of investors in this way. It feels as if they are laying the groundwork for an overcorrection, if and when something happens. I’ll look for the source of the rumor, too.”

Negoro said no more. He raised a hand in parting to head back the way he came, but when Kubo turned again to look before crossing the intersection, he saw Negoro standing at the edge of the pedestrian path, not having gone very far, looking out at the moat as he massaged his lower back.

合田雄一郎　Yuichiro Goda

Evening fell on Friday, May 5th, without any developments. In a corner of the main meeting room on the second floor of the Omori Police Department, there were two cardboard boxes filled with energy drinks, each one bearing a note written with a calligraphy brush: Compliments of Chief Kanzaki, First Investigation Division and Compliments of Chief Inspector Hakamada. Goda saw the lettering—the exaggerated flourishes obviously the hand of Omori’s Deputy Chief Inspector Dohi—and, as he took a bottle from the box, briefly wondered how the guys up on the third floor were getting along. Last week, when he had peeked into the CI office, where they were busy with an array of matters that the public prosecutors had told them to investigate further, Dohi had grumbled, “We’re busy organizing the scraps.” The next day, Goda had been summoned to the third floor by Chief Inspector Hakamada, who told him, “I need your stamp on this,” and handed over a formal letter of apology submitted by the two-man team of rookie detectives, Izawa and Konno. According to Hakamada, the pieces of evidence seized at the scene of an attempted robbery did not match up with the number the woeful duo had written up in their case file.

After opening and knocking back the energy drink, Goda threw the empty bottle in the trash and noticed Handa from the Kamata Police Department next to him, also reaching into the cardboard box. “Long day,” Goda said.

“For you too,” Handa replied. Most officers, after being out and about all day, usually found it tiresome to even open their mouth to speak, but Handa did not let his dutiful manner falter. Goda still couldn’t remember what had set Handa off that day on the stairs at the Shinagawa Police Department, but lately Goda had begun to suspect that Handa’s punctiliousness was a pretense. As his own frustration and dissatisfaction mounted day after day, Goda would let his feelings take rein, and had been occasionally trying to strike up conversations with Handa. Even the most inconsequential notions nagged at him once he started worrying.

The third week in April, another restructuring had come down from Investigation Headquarters, and at the end of the fourth week they were scrambled again. The teams investigating the cross-sections of corporate and crime-syndicate connections were nowhere in sight, as they had been organized under a separate heading since mid-April. That night, May fifth, the number of officers who filed into the main meeting room totaled fewer than thirty, down from the hundred who had once come and gone, and now the meeting room called to mind an art house cinema on the outskirts of town. This ragtag crew who still barely knew each other’s names now waited in silence, not even engaging in small talk, for the start of the 8 p.m. meeting.

Not counting the ten members of the ninth unit of Violent Crime from MPD, the remaining men all had at least ten years of experience as detectives. The majority were seasoned but unremarkable officers—among them a group who had made lateral transfers from the MPD to precinct posts, a perpetual sergeant who might fall just short of a promotion before his retirement, as well as an old-guard assistant inspector. It might have sounded good to describe them as an elite corps, but to Goda’s cynical eye, they looked more like an arbitrary assemblage of guys who were destined to live out the rest of their careers like this, forever detectives. Goda’s partner, an inspector from Crime Prevention with whom he had been working for just a month, had left at the end of April, so his only colleague from Omori Police Department was Inspector Anzai from White Collar Crime, currently assigned to the cross-sections.

The contraction of the Search Squad and Evidence Investigation Squad was a direct result of the already-reduced target area of investigation. Depending on how the case developed, who knew whether one day the same meeting room might again be filled with people, and it was against just such a possibility that Goda and the rest of the Vehicle Squad kept up their shoe-leather investigation for the right vehicle.

They had looked into every one of the seventy navy-colored Nissan Homys in the Tokyo metropolitan area registered at the District Land Transport Bureau, but were unable to find either a suspicious owner or any vehicles that had gone missing on the night of the incident. They had marked about ten of those as company-owned vehicles of construction firms that had been left in private parking lots, but there were none among them that the owner had forgotten to lock on the night of the incident, and none of the owners noticed anything unusual about their cars at the start of the following week, such as signs of the locks being tampered with, or decreases in gas or increases in mileage.

However, since the owners of commercial vehicles with fifty or sixty thousand kilometers on them could not be expected to closely monitor their mileage, the squad had not ruled out the possibility that the perpetrators could have snuck a Nissan Homy out of a corporate lot for the weekend. If that were the case, it meant that the perpetrators had the skills to duplicate car keys, which added a new facet to their profile.

Speaking of the perpetrators’ profile, Goda had written the