Rules of the Hunt (7 page)
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He bowed respectfully.
He had enormous respect and affection for the
senior prosecutor.
They were both of the
same social class, their families knew each other, and both the prosecutor and
the superintendent were graduates of Todai —
Even more to the point, they had both taken
law degrees.
That made them the cream of
the crop.
an elite
, and the inner circle
came from the law faculty.
Todai alumni
practically ran the country.
Senior
Prosecutor Sekine had not selected
The investigation of political corruption
linked to organized crime was a tricky and dangerous business.
It was essential to have people on your team
you could trust and who were predictable.
Sekine trusted Adachi to serve him well.
The prosecutor
gave Adachi time to relax, collect his thoughts, and sip his tea.
The policeman had just come from the crime
scene and had supervised the removal of Hodama's body.
He had had a long day, and his fatigue was
showing.
"Hodama?"
the prosecutor said, after Adachi had sipped at his tea.
Adachi
grimaced.
"An extremely unpleasant
business,
sensei
," he said,
"a massacre.
Everyone in the house
was killed.
The bodyguard in the front
was shot where he stood.
Two others died
inside the house.
The manservant was
shot in the bathroom.
Hodama himself was
boiled alive in his own bathtub."
The prosecutor
made a sound of disapproval.
"Guns," he said disdainfully.
"Guns.
This is very bad.
This is not the
Japanese way."
Adachi nodded
in agreement but silently speculated whether or not the victim would have been
any better off chopped to death with a sword in the more usual Japanese
style.
On the issue of being boiled
alive, he thought a couple of 9-mm hollow-points were preferable any day of the
week.
Anyway, execution by boiling had
not been much in vogue since the
Middle
Ages.
The last person he had heard of being killed
that way was
He had been a Robin Hood figure, supposedly
robbing the rich and giving to the poor — less deductions for expenses.
Hodama had not quite been in the same
tradition.
"The
method of Hodama's death," he said.
"I wonder if that is indicative in
its own
right."
The prosecutor
shrugged.
"Let's not speculate just
yet.
First the
facts."
"We think
the killings took place around seven in the morning," said Adachi.
"Hodama was a man of regular habits, and
the physical evidence would tend to support this
.
The
police doctor cannot be quite so precise.
He puts the time at somewhere between six and eight.
"The
bodies were not actually found until 3:18
P.M.
.
Hodama normally received from 2:45
P.M.
onwards.
Today, the outer gate was not
open and there was no reply to either the bell at the gate or the phone, so
eventually a local uniform was called.
He nipped over the wall to check out if anything was wrong and left his
lunch all over the first body he found.
They are not used to blood and guts in that part of the world."
"So the
Hodama residence was unguarded from about seven in the morning until after
lunch," said the prosecutor.
"Plenty of time to remove what needed to be removed."
Adachi
nodded.
He knew exactly what the
sensei
was getting at.
Hodama was one of the most powerful men in
constant stream of visitors brought money in exchange for favors.
The operation was extensive.
There should have been some written records
and considerable sums of money on the premises.
The first question the prosecutor had asked when they had spoken by
phone earlier in the afternoon was whether any records had been found.
"We went
over the place again," Adachi said.
"We used the special search team, optical probes, and all the
gizmos.
We turned up nothing written at
all — nothing — but we found thirty million yen in a concealed safe."
He grinned.
"It was in a series of Mitsukoshi shopping bags."
The prosecutor
snorted.
Thirty million yen — roughly
three million dollars — was chicken feed for Hodama.
As for the shopping bags,
gift-giving country and Mitsukoshi department stores were favorite places to
buy gifts.
Their elegant wrapping and
ornate shopping bags were part of the symbolism.
Shopping bags were also the containers of
choice for carrying the large bundles of yen notes that were the preferred
currency of Japanese politicians.
He had
heard that American politicians preferred briefcases.
"Do you
have any leads so far?" he said.
Adachi took
his time answering.
He felt extremely
tired, but the thought of a nice long soak in a hot tub was not as appealing as
usual.
"The
scene-of-crime people are still rushing round with vacuum cleaners and the
like," he said, "but it does not look encouraging.
We found a couple of empty shell casings and
a neighbor reported seeing two black limousines arrive around seven in the
morning.
And that is mostly it."
"Mostly?"
said the prosecutor.
Adachi removed
an evidence bag and placed it on the table.
The prosecutor picked it up and examined it carefully.
The he took a file out of his desk and opened
it.
He removed a photograph from the
file and compared it to the object.
There was no doubt.
The symbol
was the same.
The object was a
shasho
— a lapel pin — of the kind worn
by tens of millions of Japanese to identify their particular corporate or
social affiliation.
The symbol on
that particular pin was that of the Namaka Corporation.
"Namaka?"
he said, puzzled.
"Where did you
find it?"
"In the
copper bath, jammed down by the wooden seat under Hodama's body," said
Adachi.
"Very
convenient."
The prosecutor
nodded and sat back in his chair and closed his eyes.
His arms were folded in front of him.
He said nothing for several minutes.
Adachi was used to this, and quite relaxed
about waiting.
The telephone
rang.
The prosecutor took the call
facing half away from Adachi, so the policeman could not hear much of what was
being said.
It did not seem to be a
deliberate gesture, and after he put the phone down the prosecutor went back to
his eyes-closed position.
Eventually he
opened them and spoke.
"This
investigation will be difficult, Adachi-
san
,"
he said.
"Difficult,
complex, and quite probably dangerous.
There is scarcely a politician or an organized-crime leader who had not
had something to do with Hodama over the years.
Whatever we find, powerful interests and forces will be
displeased."
He smiled with
some affection, and then his expression turned serious.
"You will always have my support.
But you must be careful who you trust.
You must take the fullest security precautions.
At all times, you — and your team — will be
armed."
Adachi's eyes
widened.
Although the uniforms were
armed, he rarely carried a gun.
It just
was not necessary except in certain specific circumstances, and it was
difficult to get his suit jacket to hang right with a lump of metal strapped to
his belt.
He said the Japanese
equivalent of "Holy shit!"
"One
extra thing," said the prosecutor.
He pressed a button on his desk twice, and a buzzer rang in his
assistant's office.
"Koancho will
be involved."
Adachi heard
the door open, and he could smell her perfume before he saw her.
Koancho's brief was internal security and
counterterrorism.
It was a mysterious
and sometimes feared organization and officially reported directly to the Prime
Minister's office, though there were links with Justice.
It did what was necessary to preserve the
constitution.
Whatever
that meant.
It was not an
organization that pissed around.
It was
small.
It was effective.
"Involved
how?" said Adachi.
"A
watching brief," said Chifune.
"Quite
so," said the prosecutor.
He returned her bow.
"I think
you two know each other," said the prosecutor, "and, I hope, trust
each other.
I asked specially for
Tanabu-
san
."
I know your
lips and your tongue and your loins and every inch of your exquisite body,
thought Adachi, but trust?
Here we are
in uncharted waters.
"I am honored,
sensei
," he said to the
prosecutor, but including Chifune in the remark.
He bowed again toward her.
"It will be a pleasure," he added,
somewhat stiffly.
He felt decidedly
disconcerted.
Chifune said
nothing.
She did not really have
to.
She just looked at him in that
peculiar way of hers and smiled faintly.
*
*
*
*
*
Adachi's
apartment was not a ninety-minute commute away in some godforsaken suburb.
It was a comfortable two-bedroom,
one-living-room affair of reasonable size on the top floor of a building in the
Jinbocho district conveniently close to police headquarters.
The area specialized in bookshops and, for
some obscure reason, cutlery shops selling an intimidating array of very sharp
instruments.
Just up the
road was Akihabara, where anything and everything electronic could be
purchased.
Turn in the other direction
and there were the moat and grounds of the
The area had
character and amenities, and it was on a subway route.
It was a nice place to live.
Occasionally, Adachi jogged up the road and
rented a rowing boat and paddled around the moat of the
Other times, he took his ladder and went up
through the roof-light onto the flat roof with a bottle of
sake
and sunbathed.
There
was a low parapet around the edge of the roof, so he had a modicum of privacy.
He also used
to make love on the roof from time to time, but the advent of the police
airship rather took the fun out of that.
It tended to hand around central Tokyo quite a lot, and he had been up
in it and knew what you could see from a thousand feet with good surveillance
equipment.
Like most
Japanese homes, Adachi's was decorated in a mixture of Japanese and Western
styles but all blended in a distinctively Japanese way.
Western furniture, where used, was modified
for the shorter and slighter average Japanese physique.
In Adachi's case, since he was tall, it was a
modification he could have done without.
Adachi had
been reared to sit upright on the floor when required like any civilized human
being, and could maintain that position for hours without any discomfort.
But his present posture was less traditional.
He was sprawled out on the
tatami
mat floor of his living room with
his head on a pillow.
The room was in
semidarkness, lit only by two candles.
