Tomita looked like he had been daydreaming. He jerked upright in his chair and, mouth hanging half open, rapidly nodded his head. “Right, right, of course. Might be a good idea,” he said.
“Then let’s get that started today. We’ll get all of Isobe’s men over here, for starters. We can add more as needed. Sound good?”
“Right, understood. We’ll help however we can.”
Nishiguchi gave a light sigh, watching the commissioner kowtow.
His cell phone buzzed once in his jacket pocket—an incoming e-mail. Sliding it out of his pocket, he held it underneath the table and opened his mailbox, and his pulse quickened when he saw who it was from: Narumi Kawahata.
TWENTY-TWO
Kusanagi parked his beloved Nissan by the side of the road and checked the GPS screen. Houses stood on both sides of the winding single-lane road, small fields and patches of forest between them.
“It should be around here somewhere,” he muttered. The houses had been built a distance from the road, making it hard to check the names and numbers.
“I’ll get out and look,” Utsumi offered from the passenger seat.
Kusanagi pulled out the ashtray and stuck a cigarette in his mouth. He liked being in his own car, where no one could tell him not to smoke. He cracked open the window, and warm air spilled in.
The two detectives were in Hatogaya, a small city north of Tokyo, where Masatsugu Tsukahara had lived.
“There’s something there,” Tatara had announced when Kusanagi went to see him at the police station in Shinagawa. “Hidetoshi Senba’s a part of this,” he had explained after Kusanagi shot him an uncomprehending look.
“I went drinking with Tsukahara just before he retired. I remember asking him which case he remembered the most. I was just making conversation. I figured since Tsukahara had a nearly photographic memory, he’d tell me he remembered them all the same or something like that. Except, that’s not what he said.”
Tatara paused, remembering. “‘Hidetoshi Senba,’ that’s what he said after thinking about it for a little while. Of course, I had completely forgotten the name, so I had no idea what he was talking about. It was only when he mentioned the former hostess that things started to come trickling back. It was a quick case, with no trouble in court at all, so I asked him, why that one?”
But Tsukahara hadn’t answered Tatara’s question. He just shook his head and told him he was only kidding.
“There are plenty of detectives who remember every case they’ve been on, big or small. I’ll bet most of them couldn’t tell you why, either. So I didn’t press him on it. But now that we know he paid Senba’s old house a visit, I’m starting to think there was more to it. I need you to look into this.”
Kusanagi tried to go straight to the source and set up a meeting with Senba by himself, but his whereabouts proved hard to pin down. Utsumi had found out that when he got out of prison, an acquaintance had gotten him a job working at a recycling center in Adachi, but the company had gone out of business soon afterward. No one knew what happened to Senba after that.
Which left Tsukahara as their only lead. If he was that obsessed with Senba, it was possible they’d been in contact. Kusanagi would’ve preferred to check his notebooks or phone, but both of those were being held at the Hari Police Department.
Utsumi came jogging back to the car. “I found it, just a little up ahead. There’s a place to park.”
“Thanks,” Kusanagi said, releasing his parking brake.
Masatsugu Tsukahara’s house was a simple, wooden, two-story affair. His widow, Sanae, let them in, showing them to a room with a view out on a small rear garden. There was a small alcove for the family altar in the room, with pictures of people Kusanagi assumed were Sanae’s and her husband’s deceased parents. He wondered how soon Tsukahara’s photo would be joining them.
“The mortician will be releasing the body to me tomorrow,” Sanae said, her voice as thin as her features.
Kusanagi expressed his condolences before breaking the news that there was an increasing possibility that her husband’s death had not been a simple accident. Sanae didn’t seem surprised.
“I thought it might’ve been something like that the moment I heard he died. It just didn’t make sense, him getting drunk and falling off some rocks.…” She shook her head. “That wasn’t him.”
Though her tone was soft, it held absolute conviction.
“Do you have any idea why your late husband might’ve gone to the house of a man he once arrested, one Hidetoshi Senba?” Kusanagi asked.
She frowned and shook her head. “The local police called and asked me the same question when they found out, too. I know he often thought about his old cases, but I never heard the name Senba from him myself. To my knowledge, they never corresponded.”
“Did your husband ever keep case files around the house?”
She shook her head again. “He got rid of all of those when he retired. I remember him saying he didn’t need them anymore. Since he wasn’t a police officer anymore, keeping them would be an invasion of privacy.”
Kusanagi nodded, a picture of the old, steel-eyed detective forming in his mind.
“But there’s a chance he might’ve left something in the study. Would you like to take a look?”
“If I might, yes,” Kusanagi replied immediately.
The study was a small room on the second floor. A wooden desk sat near a window, with a bookshelf beside it. Most of the books were historical fiction. There wasn’t a single mystery in sight, let alone crime fiction or anything to do with the police. On the lowest shelf sat a thick phone book.
With Sanae’s permission, he opened the drawer on the desk, but found nothing bearing any relation to the case.
The phone rang downstairs, and Sanae excused herself to go answer it.
Kusanagi pulled the phone book off the shelf.
“Something catch your eye?” Utsumi asked.
“Well, people usually put these directories by the landline phone—but there isn’t even a cordless phone up here.”
“Good point.”
“Also, this is the phone book for Tokyo, and from last year—well after he retired. Why do you think he needed this anymore?”
Kusanagi rested the phone book on the desk and began leafing through the pages, noticing several had been dog-eared. He opened them to find that most were pages showing budget hotels in Tokyo’s Taito and Arakawa wards. In particular, there seemed to be a lot of them with addresses in South Senju, near the Namidabashi Bridge.
Kusanagi exchanged a glance with Utsumi, then he smoothed out the dog-eared pages and closed the book. He’d just put it back on the shelf when he heard footsteps coming up the stairs.
“That was the Hari Police. They called to tell me someone from the prefectural police would be coming to pay me a visit tonight to ask some more things about my husband. What should I tell them?”
“Everything you told us. Just the facts should be fine,” Kusanagi said.
“Of course. So, did you find anything?”
“Unfortunately, no,” Kusanagi said, shaking his head and standing. “Sorry for the trouble. Just one more thing: I was hoping I could borrow a photograph of your husband. Something that shows his face clearly.”
* * *
“Why didn’t you tell the widow about the telephone book?” Utsumi asked shortly after they got into the car and began driving. Kusanagi was surprised she’d been able to resist the urge to ask so long.
“Because I don’t know that it has anything to do with the case. It’s never good to bring unsubstantiated evidence to the bereaved. That’s one of the golden rules of police work.”
“But you think it does have something to do with our case, don’t you?”