The Silent Dead (3 page)

“Afternoon, Lieutenant.”

Officer Yuda, one of her subordinates, hailed her from over the uniformed officer's shoulder. “Lieutenant! Over here!”

“Yuda? You got here quickly.”

The uniform now realized he had a lieutenant from the Metropolitan Police on his hands. The condescending look vanished. Suddenly he was all respect. The change was almost too obvious.

Reiko took her time as she ducked under the tape he was holding up for her.

That's what I love about an organization with a tight chain of command.

The police force, like the army, had a strict hierarchy. It had nine levels, and from the bottom up, they were officer, sergeant, lieutenant, captain, superintendent, senior superintendent, chief superintendent, superintendent supervisor, and superintendent general. A local police commander was the equal of a division head at the National Police Agency, while the director of any major department at the Metropolitan Police outranked the chief of any of the smaller prefectural headquarters. This system made it clear who had seniority and enabled the rapid establishment of a chain of command. In this case, the Kameari precinct, which was the local police station, and the Metropolitan Police, the citywide police force in Tokyo, were going to set up a joint task force, and it would run like clockwork.

The badge on the left side of his chest indicated that the officer was two ranks below her. Age, gender, looks, experience, character—none of that mattered. Reiko outranked the man. That was that. She loved the sheer certainty of it.

Once you made lieutenant, the police force became an almost agreeable place to work. Reiko had to work twice as hard to get there, but her efforts paid off when she made lieutenant at only twenty-seven. She had no qualms about pulling rank. She'd earned her place, owed nothing to connections, and there was no reason to hold back.

Following Yuda, she strode over to the crime scene. She guessed that the plainclothes officers standing around were from the Kameari Precinct Major Crimes Squad. She didn't recognize any of them. She was getting some stares, but she decided to ignore them. Introductions could wait.

“Where's everyone?” Reiko asked Yuda, without turning her head.

“Everyone” meant her squad, which was part of Unit 10. Four men worked for Reiko: the forty-seven-year-old Sergeant Tamotsu Ishikura; Sergeant Kazuo Kikuta, thirty-two; Officer Junji Otsuka, twenty-seven; and, last but not least, Officer Kohei Yuda, twenty-six.

“Ishikura and Kikuta are making the rounds with the Mobile Unit. As for Otsuka…”

Yuda gestured.

Otsuka was standing at the edge of the pond about twenty yards up the lane. A blue tarp, strung between the railings on the left and a utility pole on the right, blocked the way.

So that's where the body was found
.

At this stage, the forensics team from the Met was probably still inside the makeshift tent. Officer Otsuka came over to them, running down the walkway.

“Good to see you, Lieutenant,” he panted, nodding at Reiko.

“How's it looking?”

“They'll be done any minute now.”

“Which team is it?”

“Komine's crew.”

Lieutenant Komine, of the Criminal Identification Bureau, rubbed Reiko the wrong way, but he was experienced and good at his job.

“What's the state of the body?”

“Well, that's…” Otsuka shot a glance at Yuda, then turned back to Reiko.

“It'd be quicker if you had a look for yourself, Lieutenant.”

“Really? Then let me do just that.”

Reiko walked over and down a pathway marked out in yellow tape. Her men followed. On either side, forensic investigators from the local precinct and the Met were down on their haunches, hunting for the tiniest piece of evidence. The investigators from the Metropolitan Police all nodded at her. The blank and leery stares she got were all from the local police.

They stopped in front of the blue tarp.

“Lieutenant Komine, this is Reiko Himekawa from Homicide. Can we come in?”

A pause.

“I guess so,” replied a low and sluggish voice from inside.

Reiko parted the tarp and peered inside.

At first glance, it looked as if it was empty except for the forensics team. She couldn't see a body. Taking a more careful look, she spotted a bundle wrapped in blue plastic sheeting about the size of an average adult.

She stepped into the tent, looking over at the blue bundle.

“Is that our body?”

“Yup.”

“Why is it wrapped up with sheeting?”

“Search me. Only the perp knows that.”

“Sorry?”

“Only the killer knows why he bothered to giftwrap the victim.”

“The body was in this condition when it was dumped here?”

“Not exactly. It was tied tight with plastic cord—at either end, then around the neck, the elbows, the waist, and the knee area. Other than that, yes, it was like this.”

A young investigator was holding up the cord, plastic and white, that Komine was talking about. They'd cut it off and rolled it into a ball.

Reiko took a step forward. “Could I have a look?”

“Be my guest.” Sullenly, Komine peeled back the sheet to reveal the corpse. The body was a welter of different colors, a camouflage pattern of white, red, brown, black, and purple blotches against the blue of the tent.

Reiko grimaced involuntarily.

“That's quite something,” she said.

“Yeah, and take a whiff of it. He's pretty ripe.”

Reiko took a closer look at the body. It was completely naked; clearly male. Midthirties, around five feet six, medium build. Innumerable small lacerations on the face and the upper body. The blood from the cuts had dried, caking the whole body in a reddish-black crust. There were multiple contusions and abrasions, and several of the cuts had something glittering embedded in them. None of them, however, appeared to be fatal. The fatal wound was probably the one to the throat—the left carotid artery was sliced open, the incision made by a sharp blade.

The weirdest cut, though, was the long broad one that went from the solar plexus to the hip. The wound appeared to have been inflicted after death, and, unlike the incision at the throat, the edges of the wound were not puckered. The corpse's lower body was almost wholly uninjured. It was high summer, and the wounds were all in a state of advanced decay.

Komine cleared his throat. “Reckon he's been dead a couple of days.”

“And the cause of death … blood loss?”

“Most likely. This was the fatal wound,” Komine said, pointing briefly at the throat. He then directed Reiko's attention to the abdomen.

“This cut here was inflicted postmortem.… But you probably already noticed that, given your fetish for corpses.”

A corpse fetish? Me?

Reiko refused to let her annoyance show and went on with her questions.

“What's the shiny stuff?”

“Glass fragments. I'll need to get the lab to take a look, but my guess is it's just ordinary window glass. It's not going to be easy to trace. The sheeting and the plastic string probably won't help us much either.”

That type of blue sheeting could be found on any construction site, and anyone could get their hands on it. The homeless frequently used discarded pieces to rig up shelters. If they were lucky, this particular variety would have been made by a small manufacturer. If it was from a larger firm, though, it would be hard to trace. All Reiko could get from the choice of the sheeting and the cord was that the killer was careful.

Reiko gazed into the victim's face, moving in close enough to touch him.

“Oh, here we go,” spat Komine.

This was how Reiko always communed with the murder victims. She couldn't avoid it. It was a ritual she had to observe.

You can tell me. What was the last thing you saw? Tell me.

The man's face was expressionless despite rigor mortis having worn off. His cloudy, half-open eyes gazed at a single fixed point in space. In her experience, corpses sometimes expressed emotions like terror and resentment. How about this man? Was he regretful? Sad? Scared? Angry?

Didn't you feel anything at all?

The body in front of her remained silent. What would Kunioku be able to learn from it? The man had been murdered—that much was obvious—and as such his body would be sent to the forensic pathology laboratory for examination, rather than to the coroner's office. But there was nothing she could do about it. Kunioku, she was sure, would have been able to get the corpse to speak to him.

*   *   *

Legwork was the first stage in any investigation and often the most crucial. That meant canvassing the neighborhood, knocking on the door of every house in the area.

Sergeant Kikuta called out to all the investigators scattered around the crime scene.

“Everyone, fall in.”

In Reiko's squad, Kikuta was in charge of giving orders. Soon after her promotion, Reiko had humiliated herself when she'd tried to bark an order only to have her voice crack and go shrill. Ever since, Kikuta made it a point to give orders for her. He was little bit older than she was, honest, and always willing to help. He was her number two, her most reliable subordinate, as well as the biggest of them physically.

“I want Homicide and the Mobile Unit in the front row. Everyone else, line up behind them. On the double.”

Reiko waited in silence for the men to form up. The next step would be to assign two-person teams, each with one officer from the Met and another from the local precinct, to canvass a specific area. Reiko did a headcount: four investigators from Homicide, six from the Mobile Unit, and from the local precinct—

“—eleven from Kameari,” Reiko reported to Captain Imaizumi, who had just arrived.

“Okay, add yourself to the group then.”

“Yes, sir.” Reiko walked over to the one local officer who did not yet have a partner. She gasped when she saw who it was.

Kikuta, who was standing next to her, looked over. “Oh. My. God.
You?
”

The officer smirked, mumbled something incoherent, then stuck his tongue between his teeth. “Yeah … um … me.”

It was Senior Officer Hiromitsu Ioka. They had worked on a homicide together in Setagaya last year. Ioka was an odd-looking fellow—bug eyes, buckteeth, and jug ears. Ioka was a year or two older than Reiko. His title of senior officer wasn't even official. He was at the same level as an ordinary patrolman.

“Aren't you based in Setagaya?”

Ioka scratched his head. “Yeah, well, I got transferred to Oji in April, then was moved here last month.”

“What's with all the transfers?”

“Everyone wants a piece of my investigative talents?”

“Doubtful. You probably just piss people off everywhere you go.”

“That's enough of that,” Captain Imaizumi called out to her, squaring his shoulders impatiently.

“Sorry, sir.” She got a grip on herself and took her proper position in the lineup. Ioka snickered and winked at her.

That's Ioka for you
, thought Reiko. Despite his rank, the man didn't just make off-color remarks, he even flirted with her. He wasn't a bad guy—just not cut out for the police.

“Himekawa, you take the first sector. Houses one through eight in Block 40.”

“Understood.”

“Understood,” Ioka chimed in, stretching out the last syllable of the word.

The man was hopeless! He constantly played the fool. It was infuriating. Last year, Kikuta almost punched him a few times. Now Reiko was worried about how this investigation was going to go.

Once all the sectors were allocated, the eleven groups dispersed for the door-to-door. As he was leaving, Kikuta directed a scowl at Ioka.

“Shall we get going, Lieutenant Reiko?”

“That's Lieutenant Himekawa to you.”

“Come on. It's not like we don't know each other.”

“Watch what you say. I don't want people getting the wrong impression.”

“That's so harsh.”

“Why don't you just stay here and go fishing instead?”

As if taking Reiko's sarcasm at face value, Ioka swung around and mimed casting a line into the pond.

He was such an idiot, you almost had to admire him.

*   *   *

In a door-to-door canvass, the closer your allotted sector was to the crime scene, the better it was for you. It meant more information and a higher likelihood of finding clues. As a lieutenant, Reiko was guaranteed the pick of the bunch.

Just as with individuals, some departments outranked others in the police. Since Homicide, as the name implied, specialized in murder cases, they automatically took the lead here, with the Mobile Unit slotting in under them. The allotted sectors for the door-to-door got further away from the crime scene the further they went down the ranks of Homicide, and then the Mobile Unit. A local precinct officer like Ioka was very fortunate to be paired up with Reiko, a lieutenant in Homicide.

“I can't believe that fate has brought us back together, Lieutenant.”

Ioka's tone was familiar. Inappropriately familiar. The investigation had barely begun, but Reiko felt suddenly drained at the thought of all she was going to have to put up with.

“We'll start by talking to the person who found the body,” sighed Reiko, shaking her head and turning away from Ioka.

She pushed her way through the right-hand wall of the crime-scene tent and emerged onto a road. Another yellow walkway had been laid on this side; again the forensics guys were hard at work all around it. Beyond them, she could see all the parked police vehicles. There was a sidewalk and a narrow watercourse off to one side of the road. Reiko wondered if the watercourse connected to the flood basin in the park.

The person who found the body was a housewife whose home directly overlooked the crime scene. Reiko pressed the intercom on a gatepost with a nameplate saying “Hirata.” A short, plump, middle-aged woman stuck her head out the door.