The guy’s a jerk, Uesugi thought. It was a letdown after all the stories he’d heard about Kaga and his razor-sharp mind and bloodhound nature. When had he lost it? Perhaps the rumors had exaggerated his skills out of all proportion. When you got down to it, if the guy was that good, the Tokyo Metropolitan Police would have plucked him out of a precinct posting long ago.
It didn’t take long to build a profile of the murder victim. Her name was Mineko Mitsui. Divorced about six months ago, she lived alone and worked as a translator. The friend who found her was in the same business.
The day after the body was found, the captain ordered Uesugi to take a junior TMPD detective with him and go to see the ex-husband of the victim, a Mr. Naohiro Kiyose.
When they broke the news of his former wife’s death to Kiyose, he seemed unable to process it. He just sat there with a bewildered look, providing only the most mechanical responses to Uesugi’s questions. It took a while for the news to sink in.
“Is it really true?” he suddenly muttered in an interval between questions. “The poor thing was murdered...? Why her, of all people...?”
Kiyose’s reaction struck Uesugi as too genuine to be faked.
Naohiro Kiyose was cooperative but had no information likely to help solve the case. It was understandable; the man hadn’t seen his wife for over half a year. He claimed to have been having dinner with a client in Ginza when the crime was thought to have occurred, and it didn’t take long to confirm his alibi.
The next person whom Uesugi and his partner from the Homicide Division of TMPD spoke to was Koki Kiyose, Mineko Mitsui’s only son. He was an actor with a small theatrical company.
Like his father, the young man appeared to have no idea why anyone would want to kill his mother. For his part, he hadn’t been in touch with her for nearly two years. He seemed to have no interest in his parents’ divorce and claimed to know nothing about why they’d split up.
“These days, plenty of people get divorced when they’re older,” was his blasé comment. “I was like, hey, if that’s what you want, go for it.”
Typical stupid kid, thought Uesugi to himself. They’re always so sure that they’ve grown up under their own steam, without their parents’ support or protection counting for anything. After dropping out of college, Koki Kiyose was trying to launch a career as an actor. Of course, the boy was too blind to realize that he’d only been able to develop an interest in something so flaky because of the freedom and privilege he’d enjoyed as a college student.
He’s still a child, was Uesugi’s take on Koki. He was still immature; his parents would have to keep an eye on him to make sure he stayed on track. His parents would need to make sure he was making the transition from boyhood to manhood. That was something only parents could do.
Koki was living with a waitress by the name of Ami Aoyama. The apartment they shared was registered in her name.
Why am I not surprised? thought Uesugi, sneeringly. Like I thought, this kid can’t stand on his own two feet. He just went and found someone else to mother him. If I were his dad, I’d grab him by the scruff of the neck and drag him home kicking and screaming.
Uesugi and his partner failed to get any meaningful leads out of the victim’s son or ex-husband; nor did the other investigators have better luck. The only witness testimony they had was from someone who’d seen an insurance salesman leaving the victim’s apartment at 5:30 p.m. on the day of the murder. When the salesman’s statement was found to contain inconsistencies, they thought they might be on to something, but his alibi was corroborated not long after. (Uesugi didn’t know how this had been done.)
Although the task force held a big daily meeting attended by all the investigators, even drawing up a basic list of suspects proved a struggle. Mineko Mitsui, the victim, didn’t have a wide circle of friends. Everyone who knew her was adamant that she was the last person on earth to have enemies. The police, meanwhile, hadn’t managed to find anyone who stood to gain from her murder. From the crime scene, it was clear that the perpetrator had neither robbery nor rape in mind.
The only progress the police could claim to be making was in clearing up a number of little mysteries that had initially appeared hard to explain. These were things like why one of the little cakes at the crime scene had wasabi in it, and why the victim had a brand-new pair of kitchen scissors, despite already having a perfectly good pair. At the daily meeting, the top brass would simply announce that they had “established that such-and-such a detail was irrelevant to the case.” Uesugi had no idea who had solved these mysteries, or how.
On the sixth day after the murder, they finally came across something that deserved to be called a lead. Someone had called Mineko Mitsui’s cell phone a matter of minutes before her murder. Now they managed to establish where she was when she took the calclass="underline" a clerk at a pastry shop not far from her apartment had overheard snatches of the conversation. The gist of it was:
“Hello, yes?... Oh, it’s you. But why are you calling from a pay phone?... Oh, poor you. Okay, just hang on a second.”
The most striking thing was the complete absence of formality. It was reasonable to assume that Mineko Mitsui was talking to a member of her immediate family, a relative, or a close friend.
Although it was far from certain that the caller was the perpetrator, the chances were that he or she had some kind of connection to the murder. A decision was made to take another look at all the victim’s acquaintances from the present to her previous life as a housewife, and, even before that, when she was a student. A thorough investigation was launched to see if any old acquaintances had recently contacted the victim.
Uesugi was one of the detectives assigned to this task. One thing, however, bugged him. Who’d found out that Mineko Mitsui was in the pastry shop in the first place? No one saw fit to explain that to the investigating team.
Uesugi had a vague sense that there was something not quite right about the whole investigation.
2
While the testimony of the pastry shop clerk was something of a morale boost for the investigative team, neither the relatives nor the friends of the victim could provide them with anything useful. Only one new piece of information came to light — that Mineko Mitsui was consulting about money matters with the same lawyer she’d used for her divorce. Although the division of the assets was over and done with, Mineko Mitsui was hoping to reopen negotiations with her ex-husband. Clearly she’d realized that supporting herself was going to be harder than she thought.
It was thought that Mineko Mitsui could have been planning to sue for compensatory damages based on Naohiro Kiyose having been unfaithful during their marriage. Mineko Mitsui had discussed it with her lawyer only on a hypothetical level. That was why Shizuko Takamachi, the victim’s lawyer, hadn’t seen fit to bring this to the attention of the police earlier.
They immediately started looking into Naohiro Kiyose, and it didn’t take long to unearth someone who looked like mistress material. Kiyose had hired a woman by the name of Yuri Miyamoto as his personal secretary right after the divorce. Rumor inside the company had it that the two were lovers.
If she could prove that the relationship predated her divorce, Mineko Mitsui stood a decent chance of winning compensatory damages. Now, finally, they’d found someone who would profit from her murder.
Naohiro Kiyose had an alibi for the day. But that didn’t mean he hadn’t hired someone to do it. Hiring contract killers off the deep Web was becoming more common. Uesugi was put in charge of investigating Kiyose’s relationship with Yuri Miyamoto.