Less Than Human (14 page)

Ishihara opened his mouth to say that McGuire wasn’t “his” foreigner, then shut it again.

“What do you mean?”

“She says it wasn’t an accident.”

“Give me an hour,” said Ishihara.

“Good.” Mikuni sounded relieved. “Go to the Zecom Industrial Engineering complex. If you’re driving, come off the highway
at Kusakabe interchange. Or change from the fast train at Zecom Hayakawa and go to the last stop on the Zecom monorail.”

“No worries.” Leave it to Mikuni, a dry, observing part of him said. It’s not likely the two incidents are connected. McGuire
can take care of herself. But his instinct screamed, “go,” and he knew better than to ignore it.

“Forensics are still crawling around here,” said Mikuni. “By the time you come we should have some results.”

“Right.” Ishihara signed off quickly and left.

*     *     *

Mikuni met him in the lobby at Zecom. A good thing, too, as he’d never have found his way in the huge complex. Mikuni hadn’t
changed much—the horn-rimmed glasses still gave him the deceptive look of a mild-mannered academic. His solid frame was a
bit thicker around the waist, and his short hair was still dark, but had receded to a fringe around his ears. Ishihara stopped
himself from touching his own gray thatch of hair just in time.

“You were quick.” Mikuni pointed to a door at the back of the lobby. “We’ve got a temporary incident room set up in there.”

“What happened?” said Ishihara as they walked.

“One of the researchers, Shigeo Nakamura, got hit with a robot arm. Looks like an accident, but we’re not sure yet.”

“What aren’t you sure about?”

“Local constables found a window in a ground-floor toilet open. But the main building security system showed no intruders.
Nobody on camera.” He ushered Ishihara into a small room, set up as an interview room with comfortable chairs and a small
desk. It was also now crammed full of laptops and handcoms, uniform jackets on the back of chairs, briefcases and incident
cases on the floor, and disposable coffee cups everywhere, many of them used as ashtrays.

“This is Assistant Inspector Ishihara from Osaka, West Station,” Mikuni announced to the two men and a woman who were arguing
over something on a computer screen. They all said hello cheerfully and turned back to the screen.

Ishihara didn’t catch their names and didn’t worry about it.

“And?” he said to Mikuni.

“And your specialist says the robot was set up.” Mikuni picked up a coffee cup and swirled the dregs in the bottom. “How reliable
is she?”

Ishihara raised a hand in protest. “I only talked to her briefly about that Osaka case. It seemed like she was pretty clued
in about the industry.”

“I guess we should listen, then. We confirmed Nakamura did call her at seven-thirty. I’ve got one of our engineers standing
by to examine the scene, but I wanted to let her explain first. We can always get our man to confirm what she says.” Mikuni
took off his glasses and polished them on his shirt. “You want to see the lab first, or the gaijin?”

“Is seeing the lab going to tell me anything?”

“Didn’t tell me much.”

Mikuni said that McGuire had been waiting in another meeting room for two hours. Ishihara hoped she wasn’t too pissed off—he
didn’t want to waste time calming her down.

He needn’t have worried. She was curled up asleep in one of the low chairs, shoes on the floor beside her. She was wearing
a cream suit, and looked small and pale against the dark pink cushions.

He hesitated, then coughed loudly.

She jumped and half sat, smoothing down her rumpled jacket in an automatic movement. Her face relaxed a bit as she recognized
him. “What are you doing here?”

Ishihara inclined his head. “That’s my line.”

She squished her feet into her shoes and stood up, smoothing her hair. “If you’ve come to get me out of here, you can have
any line you like.”

“Why are you here? Does it have anything to do with the death at Kawanishi Metalworks?”

She sighed. “I don’t know if it’s anything to do with the death. It’s certainly something to do with the robot. The welder,
you remember?”

Ishihara nodded.

“Which reminds me.” She smacked her hand on her thigh in a flamboyantly foreign gesture. “My report on the Kawanishi robot
is available. I suggest you request a copy.”

“Okay, but when did Nakamura …”

“I called Kawanishi this morning …” She glanced up at the wall clock. “Yesterday morning, to ask if they’d had any problems
with their other welder, the Zecom one. They said no, but it had been recalled. So I called Zecom, who said they basically
only recalled it as a PR exercise.”

She paused as if she didn’t want to go on.

“And?”

She avoided his eyes this time and spoke to the pink carpet. “I spoke to Nakamura in the morning. He called me back last night
and said he wanted to tell me something about the welder. Or something connected with it. When I got here, he was dead.” She
said the last quite flatly.

“Do you know what he wanted to tell you?” said Ishihara.

She shook her head.

“Why call you and not the police?” he wondered out loud.

McGuire shifted from one foot to the other, then looked up to meet his eyes directly. “He used to work at Tomita, in my department.
Maybe he felt he could confide in me. Or maybe it wasn’t a matter for the police.”

Ishihara, momentarily distracted by the gray of her eyes, took out a cigarette and lit it. “Why did he leave your company?”

“He didn’t like the way we did things,” she said shortly.

Ishihara decided to leave it at that for the moment. “What did you tell Inspector Mikuni?”

She stared at the floor for what seemed a long time before replying, as though trying to decide something.

“It’s not what it seems.”

“What isn’t?”

“Nakimura’s … death.”

“Were you good friends?”

She snorted and looked up. “I couldn’t stand him.”

“Then don’t feel guilty if you’re not upset.”

“I’m not … this isn’t a matter of how I feel. The evidence points to murder.” She threw her hands up helplessly. “It sounds
like a TV melodrama.”

“Show me.”

“He clocked in at seven-thirty last night,” said Mikuni. They were in an elevator on the way to the lab. “We’ve got witnesses
who saw him eating dinner in the canteen after six-thirty, but he didn’t talk to anybody.”

“These researchers work all bloody hours.” Ishihara glanced at McGuire, but she stared blankly at the elevator doors.

“He wasn’t supposed to.” Mikuni let both Eleanor and Ishihara leave the elevator, then followed them out into the corridor.
“They’re fussy here. He had to get written permission from his supervisor.”

“Who’s that?”

“Director of research. Fellow called Yui.”

“Weird name. Was he here when the body was discovered?”

“No, we called him at his apartment. He’s been overseas, only got back this afternoon.”

They went past the constable at the door of the lab and down to an area in the middle, cordoned off with familiar orange tape.
McGuire looked a bit pale, but not like she was going to puke or anything.

A robot as tall as a man stood on a stand in the middle of the room, surrounded by equipment on a table and benches. He called
it a “robot” in his mind, but it still only looked like an arm on a base, like a crane. Beside the robot was a chalked outline
on the floor. Uniform branch liked their traditional chalked outlines.

“So what’s the problem?” said Mikuni. “What’s she going to show us?”

He looked at Ishihara as he spoke, as if expecting him to translate. Ishihara passed McGuire a pair of platex gloves and pulled
on some himself.

She fiddled with controls at the bottom of the robot stand.

“I’m turning off the alarms,” she said, without looking up. “Please stand where Nakamura would have been standing when he
fell.”

Ishihara looked at the chalk lines and positioned himself facing the table. ‘This right?”

“Yes,” said Mikuni and McGuire together.

Ishihara shifted one foot onto the rubber mat next to the robot and an alarm squawked, making everyone jump.

McGuire flicked a switch hurriedly. “Sorry.”

Ishihara waited, keeping an eye on the long robot arm.

“I’ve disengaged the grasping part of the program. And I’ve got my finger on the stop button.” She pointed to a large, red
button on the other side of the robot’s control box.

With a shudder, the robot started up. Ishihara stood quite still. For an insane second he wondered if McGuire was behind both
deaths and he’d just given her the chance to dispose of himself.

The robot’s arm moved quickly, but not too fast to follow. Back, forward, turn, dip swivel. And repeat.

“This is at one-eighth speed,” said McGuire, loudly to be heard over the rumble of the engine.

Sweat dripped off Mikuni’s forehead.

“Normally, it wouldn’t use a continuous series of movements. It waits until a piece is placed on the table and the signal
is sent to perform the next task.”

The table on Ishihara’s left ground around 180 degrees and fixed itself with a thunk directly in front of him.

“I’m skipping the next part because it doesn’t move around.”

The robot arm swept up to rest for thirty seconds before swinging back to its original position. At no time had the arm come
near Ishihara’s head or the upper half of his body, and he was a lot taller than Nakamura.

“Thank you, Assistant Inspector. That’s the entire sequence.” McGuire turned the robot off and faced them. “You see? It couldn’t
have hit Nakamura, even if he disabled the safeties for some reason. Which he wouldn’t. And if something happened in the middle
of its routine, I wouldn’t have been able to start it up and put it smoothly through the program.”

Ishihara stepped away from the work cell.

“So what are you saying?” Ishihara pulled his cigarettes from his pocket, then twisted the empty packet with a scowl.

“He was either assaulted here by someone and left to be found. Or he must have been hit somewhere else and brought here.”

“But it’s Nakamura’s blood on the end there all right,” said Mikuni. “And Forensics confirmed the wound fits the machine.”

McGuire tapped at the controls again, then walked around to the front of the robot. She reached up, grasped the bloody end-part
with her gloved left hand and unclipped some leads with her right. Two good twists, and she held the welding tool as a separate
piece of machinery. Ishihara could see her wrist droop, and when he took it from her it was so heavy he could barely hold
it in one hand himself.

“Will that do as a weapon?” she said.

Ishihara put the chunk of steel on the table. “We’ll need to print this,” he said to Mikuni. “Who could get in?”

Mikuni shook his head, his eyes on the robot hand. “It’s a card-key entry. Only employees, and only those with permission
can get their cards enabled after hours. The day shift finishes at six, and the factories are clear by half past. Senior duty
staff and security services make sure the rooms are clear before locking up.”

“There’s no night shift?”

“Not people. The robots keep working all night. There’s one person on duty in the central monitoring station of each factory.”

The fingerprints and other residues would have to be checked against those of people with access authority and, possibly,
with the rest of the company. Shit of a job, and sometimes the results took so long it was easier to try and break a suspect’s
alibi. Especially as organic residues weren’t admissible as sole evidence.

“Nobody came in the front?”

Mikuni shook his head. “Only McGuire-san.” He turned to McGuire. “Who would know how to do this?”

“Someone with a basic grasp of industrial robot maintenance who has access to the controller.”

Ishihara raised an eyebrow. Half the company had a basic grasp of industrial robot maintenance.

McGuire saw his expression and shrugged crossly. “I don’t know. This lab’s supposed to be top secret.”

“So you don’t think it was someone from outside the company?” Mikuni seemed to be thinking aloud, and Ishihara enjoyed seeing
McGuire look down her long gaijin nose at him.

“I don’t think that’s likely. How would they know about the robot, and how could they get in?”

“Nakamura might have let them in,” said Mikuni.

There were no names on the visitor’s list last night, not even McGuire’s. If Nakamura forgot to list her, he might have forgotten
to list someone else. Or the murderer might have entered through the downstairs toilet window, and Nakamura let them into
the lab. And watched while they disconnected a weapon? Ishihara frowned. Unless Nakamura had already disconnected the hand
and the murderer picked it up because it was the handiest weapon.

“Whatsisname … the director of research, Yui, said he heard Nakamura has gambling debts in town.”

In other words, it might be a gang killing. But someone from the gangs would carry his own weapon. And Nakamura surely wouldn’t
have stood placidly by while some gangster wandered around the lab and hefted heavy objects. He’d raise the alarm. Or try
to leave. Or at least try to defend himself. And a gangster wouldn’t know how to set up the death to make it look like an
accident.

“If you don’t need me anymore, I should get back to Osaka,” said McGuire. She peeled off the gloves and dropped them on the
table. “When you start up that computer again, I’d appreciate it if you could pass on to me any information about this welder
or about Kawanishi Metal works that you find. It might help me determine what happened there.”

Mikuni gave Ishihara a look that meant trouble. “We looked in that computer. There’s nothing in it.”

McGuire raised her eyebrows. “But that’s the workstation Nakamura would have been using.”

Mikuni rubbed his forehead tiredly. “Someone’s wiped it, then.”

“That’s all right. Nakamura always made backup files,” said McGuire.

“What do you mean by backup files?” Mikuni gave Ishihara another troubled glance.