Although Natsumi never heard the three men mention Hasunuma by name, she did catch the occasional phrase like “that bastard” and “divine punishment.”
Niikura was the one who brought up the subject of the Prosecutorial Review Commission. Yukawa mentioned that Tomoya Takagaki had been talking about the same thing. Tojima hadn’t yet been visited by the police, but he was listening intently to this part of the conversation.
Natsumi looked into the kitchen. She guessed that the conversation was probably inaudible to Yutaro and Machiko. At the same time, she got the impression that the two of them were silently focusing on cooking as part of a deliberate effort not to hear what was being said.
21
Someone made a noise and he awakened. When he opened his eyes and saw the white wall and fluorescent lighting, it took him a second or two to remember where he was. He blinked, looked around, and finally realized he was in one of the meeting rooms in the Kikuno Police Station.
“Sorry. I seem to have woken you up,” said a voice from behind him. Swiveling around in his chair, he saw Detective Kaoru Utsumi standing near the door.
Kusanagi plucked at the blanket, which was draped over his shoulders. “You do this?”
“Yes,” replied Utsumi. “We don’t want our chief catching cold, do we?”
With a sardonic smile, Kusanagi dumped the blanket on the chair beside him. “Must have dozed off for a while.”
He looked at his watch. It was a little after 11 P.M.
“It’s late. Why are you still here?”
“I’ve been verifying Tomoya Takagaki’s alibi. I went to speak to his two colleagues, the ones he went to the parade with.”
“How was it?”
Utsumi advanced farther into the room.
“For the most part, their statements tallied with his. They seem to have been together for most of the time.”
“In your earlier report, you mentioned that they’d split up and done their own thing.”
“Yes, for about forty minutes, plus after subtracting time needed for walking.”
“Forty minutes?” Crossing his arms on his chest, Kusanagi noticed that Utsumi was holding up a white convenience store plastic bag. “What have you got in there?”
“Two cans of beer and some snacks,” Utsumi replied. “I thought you might enjoy a bit of a break, sir.”
“Out with it, then. Chop-chop.” Kusanagi pointed at the tabletop.
Keeping one eye on Utsumi as she extracted the beer and snacks from the bag, Kusanagi looked down at the report that he was working on.
He had compiled a list of bullet points, but it wasn’t good enough yet to show to Director Mamiya and the rest of the top brass.
The Kikuno local police had filed an official request for support of the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department. In line with the original plan, Kusanagi’s team was sent to Kikuno but the head of the Homicide Division wanted to hold off on setting up an investigation task force.
“We’re not yet sure it was murder,” Mamiya had explained. “The executive team has agreed to adopt a wait-and-see attitude at least until we have a clear cause of death. On the other hand, there’s a risk of falling behind if we don’t start gathering information until we know that for sure. We want you to get started with the understanding that an investigation task force will be set up soon.”
Kusanagi summoned his team and held a meeting with the detectives of the Kikuno precinct. Even if this wasn’t yet officially a murder case, they were going to treat it like one.
The first thing Kusanagi wanted to get a handle on were the alibis of the Namiki family, in particular Yutaro, the father. It turned out that the Kikuno investigators had interviewed all three of them the night before.
What they’d found tallied with what Kusanagi had heard that morning from Yukawa. Just as the restaurant was about to stop serving lunch, a female customer had complained about feeling unwell. Yutaro Namiki had driven her to the hospital; his wife, Machiko, joined him not long after. The two of them had waited in the ER until a doctor was able to see the woman. There turned out to be nothing seriously wrong with her, so the Namikis left the hospital at about four thirty and headed home. They went straight into the kitchen and got everything ready before opening up the restaurant as usual at five thirty. Yukawa, one of their regular customers, showed up soon after—
Another local policeman had gone to the hospital this morning to verify the Namikis’ story. He got corroboration from the receptionist in the ER who remembered the Namikis hanging around anxiously in the waiting area.
There was a hiss as Utsumi pulled the tab on one of the beer cans. “Here you go, sir,” she said, placing the beer in front of Kusanagi.
“Cheers.” Kusanagi lifted the can in a gesture of thanks, then took a swig. As the slightly bitter liquid flowed over his tongue, he felt the tiredness of a long day being transformed into a sensation of mild pleasure. He sighed heavily.
“My impression is that Tomoya Takagaki’s innocent,” said Kaoru Utsumi, tearing open a bag of kakinotane spicy baked chips.
“Appearances can be deceiving.” Kusanagi stretched a hand into the bag and crammed chips and peanuts into his mouth. “You’re a detective. How often do I have to remind you of that?”
“Yes, I know.” Utsumi picked up her beer can. “But he was just too panicky.”
“Too panicky?”
“I asked him this question: ‘If your friends knew that you were the one who had killed him, how do you think they would take it?’”
“What was his reply?”
“That no one who knew me well would believe it, because they all know he’s a coward at heart.”
“Sounds like a pretty standard response. What about it?”
“I got the impression that he was extremely on edge before he came out with his answer. Like it had never occurred to him that people who knew him might see him in those terms. I don’t think he’d have been so openly flustered if he was the killer.”
Kusanagi grunted ambiguously and took a swig of beer.
There was some truth to what Utsumi was saying. If Takagaki was the killer, he’d have anticipated the kinds of questions he was likely to be asked by the police and been prepared not to display any nervousness.
“Tomoya Takagaki said he was away from his workmates for forty minutes. What’s he saying he did in that time?”
Utsumi took her notebook out of her bag and opened it up.
“He went to the end point of the parade to say hi to the Team Kikuno performers.”
“Have you confirmed that?”
“I spoke to Maya Miyazawa, the woman who manages the team. According to her, yes, Takagaki came by to say hi to them all right after the parade ended. But—” At this point, Utsumi broke off in a rather histrionic fashion. “Despite what he said about talking to the team, he barely exchanged more than a few words with them. ‘Nice work. Great job.’ That was about it. Probably took him all of thirty seconds.”
“Could you confirm the exact time?”
“Miyazawa couldn’t remember. That’s legitimate enough; we know it was right after the parade ended. Besides, as team leader, Miyazawa probably had a thousand and one things to do.”
“Let me see if I’ve got this right. At just after three, immediately after the parade ended, Tomoya Takagaki was in the vicinity of the finish line. We know that for a fact. But he has no alibi for the next forty minutes, until he joined his friends at the beer bar.”
“Correct.”
“Roughly how far is it from the parade finish to Hasunuma’s place?”
“Something over a mile,” Utsumi answered promptly.