Eventually his eyes adjusted and Sasagaki realised he was standing in what would have been an elevator bank. Two elevator doors stood off to the right behind a pile of loose construction materials and tangled electrical wires.
Straight ahead of him was a wall with a square, unfinished hole in it for a doorway. The blackness beyond was too dark to penetrate, but Sasagaki guessed he was looking at what would have been a car park.
There was a room to the left, set with another temporary plywood door, the words NO TRESPASSING scrawled on it in chalk. The door opened and two familiar faces emerged, both of them detectives in his unit.
‘Hey. Enjoying your day off?’ the older detective, a man by the name of Kobayashi, said. He was two years Sasagaki’s senior. The younger man, Detective Koga, had joined Homicide less than a year before.
‘I had a bad feeling when I woke up this morning,’ Sasagaki said. ‘Wish I’d been wrong for a change.’ He lowered his voice. ‘How’s the old man’s mood?’
Kobayashi frowned and shook his head. Koga gave a wry smile.
‘That’s what I figured,’ Sasagaki said. ‘Well, no rest for the wicked. What’s he up to in there?’
‘Dr Matsuno just got here.’
‘Right.’
Kobayashi cleared his throat. ‘We’re going to take a look around outside, OK?’
‘Have at it.’
Sasagaki watched the two leave. Sent out to do questioning, no doubt. Putting on his gloves, he slowly opened the door. The room was sizeable, a little over twenty square metres. Thanks to the sunlight slanting in through the windows it wasn’t as dim in here.
Detectives stood in a huddle in the shadow opposite the windows. There were a few faces he didn’t recognise, probably people from the local station. The others he knew all too well. Was tired of seeing them, to be honest. The first to acknowledge him was Captain Nakatsuka. He had a buzz cut and wire-frame glasses with the top half of each lens tinted light purple. The deep wrinkles between his eyebrows never went away, even when he smiled.
No greetings or jibes about being late. Nakatsuka just motioned him over with a jerk of his jaw. A sofa upholstered with black suede had been pushed up against the wall. It was big enough to seat three adults, if they were friendly.
The body was lying on the sofa. Male.
Dr Hideomi Matsuno of Kinki University was in the process of examining the body. He had been a medical examiner in Osaka for more than twenty years.
Sasagaki craned his neck to take a look at the corpse.
Age, he guessed, was about mid-forties, maybe fifty. Height, just shy of one seventy metres, and a little plump for that. He was wearing a brown jacket, but no tie. Designer clothes, top-of-the-line and impeccable save for the wine-red bloodstain on his chest that had spread to about ten centimetres in diameter. There were a few other stab wounds, but nothing else bleeding much.
It didn’t look as if there had been a struggle. His jacket was in order and his hair, drawn back into a knot behind his head, wasn’t dishevelled in the least.
The diminutive Dr Matsuno stood and turned to the huddle of detectives. ‘Well, it’s a homicide. Stab wounds in five places. Two on the chest, three on the shoulder. The only fatal one was here, on the lower left chest, several centimetres left of the sternum. The weapon passed between the ribs, straight into the heart. A single thrust.’
‘He died immediately?’ Nakatsuka had asked the question.
‘Within a minute, tops. Haemorrhaging from a coronary artery put pressure on the heart. Classic case of cardiac tamponade is my guess.’
‘Any blood splatter on the killer?’
‘I doubt there was much.’
‘And the murder weapon?’
The doctor stuck out his lower lip and shrugged. ‘Something thin and sharp – a blade. Maybe a little thinner than your average fruit knife. I can tell you right now it wasn’t a cleaver or any of your typical survival knives.’
‘Time of death?’ Sasagaki asked.
‘You’ve got rigor mortis over the entire body, lividity has settled nicely, corneas are opaque. I would say anywhere between seventeen hours to an entire day. You’ll have to wait for the autopsy to get any closer than that.’
Sasagaki looked down at his watch. It was two-forty, meaning the victim had been killed between three in the afternoon and ten at night on the previous day.
‘Well, let’s get the autopsy going,’ Nakatsuka said.
‘Works for me,’ Dr Matsuno agreed.
Koga came in and announced, ‘The wife’s here.’
‘Took her long enough,’ Nakatsuka grunted. ‘Let’s get her to ID him now, then. Bring her in.’ Koga nodded and went back outside.
Sasagaki leaned over to one of the other detectives in the huddle and whispered, ‘How’d they know who he was?’
‘He was carrying his driver’s licence and a business card. Runs – ran a local pawnshop.’
‘Pawnshop? They take anything from him?’
‘Don’t know. They can’t find a wallet, though.’
There was a noise by the door and Koga ushered in the widow. The detectives took a few steps back from the body on the sofa.
The woman’s checked black and burnt-orange dress made the room seem several shades darker. Her high heels must have been nearly ten centimetres and her long hair was set in a perfect perm, as though she had just stepped out of the beauty salon.
Large eyes, lined with thick eyeshadow, turned towards the sofa along the wall. She brought both hands to her mouth and made a noise like a hiccup. For a few seconds she didn’t move at all. Finally, she took a few hesitant steps towards the body. Stopping just in front of the sofa, she looked down at the man’s face. Sasagaki could see her chin tremble slightly.
‘Is that your husband, ma’am?’ Nakatsuka asked.
She didn’t answer, just cradled her cheeks in her hands, then gradually slid her hands up to cover her face before her knees buckled and she crumpled on the floor. A bit put on, Sasagaki thought. Then came the sobs, muffled through her long fingers.
Yosuke Kirihara was the deceased’s name, proprietor of the unsurprisingly named Kirihara Pawnshop. The shop, which also served as a home, was about a kilometre away from the building where his body had been found.
They carried the body out immediately after the widow, Yaeko, made the ID. Sasagaki was helping the Department of Criminal Identification guys get the body on the stretcher when something caught his eye. ‘Think our boy had been out eating?’
‘What makes you say that?’ Detective Koga raised one eyebrow.
Sasagaki pointed to the victim’s belt. ‘His belt’s fastened two holes wider than he usually fastens it.’
‘Hey, you’re right.’
Mr Kirihara had been wearing a brown Valentino belt with clear buckle marks near the fifth hole from the end, which was slightly widened from use. But now the belt had been loosened to the third hole from the end.
Sasagaki had one of the young Criminal Identification officers take a photo of the belt and, once the scene had been cleared, the detectives spread out to start questioning the neighbours, leaving only Criminal Identification, Sasagaki, and Captain Nakatsuka inside.
Nakatsuka stood in the centre of the room, taking another look around. He’d assumed his customary deep-thought posture: left hand on his waist, right hand to his forehead. ‘Sasagaki,’ he said. ‘What do you make of it? What kind of killer we looking at here?’
‘Haven’t the faintest idea,’ Sasagaki replied with a shrug. ‘Except, whoever it was, the victim knew him.’ The tidiness of the man’s clothes and hair, the lack of any signs of a struggle and the frontal stab wound told him that much.