“All done—eat up while it’s hot,” Muroi said, spreading some rich, dark sauce on the okonomiyaki before sprinkling it with seaweed and bonito flakes and cutting it on top of the hot plate. “Oh, almost forgot the beer.”
“Can’t drink while I’m on duty, but I’ll definitely help myself to this,” Kusanagi said, breaking off a piece of the pancake with his chopsticks and putting it in his mouth. The surface was nicely browned, but the inside was still soft and moist. He could clearly taste each of the ingredients. “That’s really good,” he said through his first mouthful.
Muroi smiled. “I get a lot of people in here from down south, and they always say I nailed the taste. Okonomiyaki is comfort food down there.” Then his face got more serious, and he said, “Actually, that reminds me.” His eyes got a faraway look in them.
“Yeah?” Kusanagi prompted him.
“No, it’s just,” he began, rubbing his forehead and trying to remember something. “I just remembered them talking a bit about comfort food once.”
“You mean Senba and Nobuko?”
“Yeah. They were talking about the food from back home. They even brought me something once.”
“What was it?”
Muroi folded his arms across his chest and groaned, deep in thought. Finally, he shook his head. “Sorry, I don’t recall.”
“If you remember, could you drop me a line?” Kusanagi asked, writing down his cell phone number on a piece of paper and placing it next to the hot plate.
“Sure thing. But don’t get your hopes up. I can’t see how it’ll help, even if I do remember. Sorry, I probably shouldn’t have said anything.”
“Not at all. You never know what you’re going to find until you start looking.” Kusanagi took another bite of his okonomiyaki, then heard the sound of an e-mail being delivered to his phone. He glanced down at the screen. It was from Utsumi.
He looked at his mail after leaving the restaurant. It read: “Checked Arima Engines. Shigehiro Kawahata was in the records.” He called Utsumi.
“Yes?” she answered.
“Good work. How’d you get access?”
“I went to the main office in Shinjuku and asked someone in HR if I could see their employee records.”
“And they just showed them to you?”
“They had me sign a piece of paper saying that I wouldn’t use them outside of the investigation, and I wouldn’t pass them on to any third party. They wanted me to write the name of my supervising officer, too, so I gave them your name.”
“Fine. If that’s all it took, we got off easy.”
“Also, they really wanted to know what our investigation was about.”
“Please don’t tell me you told them anything,” Kusanagi said, a growl in his voice.
“Of course not.”
“Well, that’s a relief,” Kusanagi said. “So he worked there.”
“Yes, he was a section chief in the technological services division of their Nagoya branch until he left the company fifteen years ago.
“Nagoya? So he wasn’t in Tokyo?”
“That’s what it said in the records. Except, his residential address was in Tokyo.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“I don’t know. He was listed as living at an address near Oji Station. There was a note on it indicating that he was in a subsidized apartment that belonged to the company.”
That probably meant his family was living in Tokyo while he was on an extended business trip in Nagoya. It wasn’t that unusual in the tech industry.
“Anything else in there other than his address and workplace?”
“I have an employee number—which is determined by the year the employee enters the company, I’m told. I got the name of the school he graduated from, and a home phone number as well.”
“Was there anyone who entered the company the same year as Kawahata and came from the same school?”
“Unfortunately, no,” was Utsumi’s reply. “But I did copy the records for about fifty people who entered the company around the same time. Also, I got the records for the four people who were working beneath him during his last year. Incidentally, all of their addresses are in Aichi Prefecture, near Nagoya.”
“Got it. I think our first stop should be the subsidized housing. If it even still exists, that is.”
“It does. Though it’s getting pretty old.”
“Okay. Meet me at Oji Station, then.”
Kusanagi hung up and began walking with long strides toward the subway. As he made his way down the steps into the station, he reflected on his phone call with Yukawa the night before. The physicist had tantalized him by throwing out a possible suspect, yet not even hinting as to what he was thinking. He wouldn’t even tell him why he wanted him to look into the Kawahata family. That was all par for the course, but it was what Yukawa had said before he hung up that stuck with him the most.
“I trust you, and I’m telling you this because I think it will lead to the resolution of this case. Please understand, I’m not acting as an official informant to the police here.”
Kusanagi failed to see the distinction Yukawa was trying to make, but he grunted over the phone to show he understood.
“I’m almost a hundred percent certain that the Kawahata family is involved with this case,” Yukawa continued. “But I need you to refrain from telling that to the police here. In fact, I’d prefer if we could uncover the truth of this on our own. If the local police tried to force the truth out into the open, I’m afraid there might be some … irreparable collateral damage.”
This also made little sense. Kusanagi had asked him what he meant by “irreparable collateral damage,” and Yukawa had told him, “If this case isn’t handled properly, there’s a good chance it will seriously disrupt a certain person’s life. I’d like to avoid that, if at all possible.”
But Yukawa wouldn’t say who that person was. He had continued, his voice lower, almost solemn. “I know this is asking a lot, but I promise, if I do uncover the truth, I’ll tell you straight away. And what you do with that knowledge will be entirely your decision.”
Something very unusual was going on, that was certain. Kusanagi had learned a long time ago that asking a lot of questions at this point would do no good. Instead, he had agreed to look into the Kawahata family and hung up.
Now he was left in a bit of a bind. They’d received hardly any information about Shigehiro Kawahata from the local police. The local police didn’t consider him involved enough that there was any need to share more information with Tokyo. Nor could he ask directly about Shigehiro or his family without raising a lot of uncomfortable questions and potentially directing suspicion toward the proprietor of the Green Rock Inn. Doing that would constitute a breach of his agreement with Yukawa.
He had been wondering exactly how they were going to start this investigation when, that morning, Yukawa had called him again with the name of the company where Shigehiro used to work. He had sent Utsumi off to Shinjuku right away.
It was an interesting case, Kusanagi thought as he sat in the gently rocking subway car. A man dies out in the countryside, but the key to finding out why is far away in Tokyo—and the task force officially assigned to solving the case hasn’t a clue.
Kusanagi looked out the window at the sliding gray walls of the subway tube, picturing his physicist friend’s face and wondering just who it was he’d met out in Hari Cove.
THIRTY-TWO
Kyohei’s eyes opened wider behind his goggles as he watched the little fish dart from behind the shadow of a rock. It was only the length of his fingertip, its scales a bright, shimmering blue. He reached out for it, but it was far too swift, so he settled for following its quick, jagged movements with his eyes until it disappeared behind another rock. He waited a while for the fish to come back out, but he was running out of air, and his snorkel was entirely submerged.