Mikami’s thoughts leapt back fourteen years. He’d been there, too. The night of the kidnapping, he’d been in Amamiya’s house as part of the Close Pursuit Team. He’d been in the same room as the Amamiyas – and the Home Unit – until after 4 p.m. the following day. As far as he could remember, nothing resembling an argument had taken place during that time. Could something have happened that he hadn’t picked up on? Could it have been after he’d left?
Koda had written the memo – all he needed to do was ask him. Yet Mochizuki had told Mikami that Koda had gone missing. Criminal Investigations was also unaware of his current location; unable to track down the source of the fire. It was why they were so terrified of Futawatari digging around.
Whatever the situation, the most direct source of information would be the Home Unit. If he managed to find out what had caused it all from someone on the team, he would be able to infer the subject of the memo. The date of Koda’s disappearance, his last known whereabouts – it was likely that the members of the Home Unit knew these details, too.
Mikami looked up at the sky.
The four members of the Home Unit had left directly for Amamiya’s house. Urushibara had been in charge; Kakinuma, his sub. Each had been pulled from Special Investigations, First Division, which was where Mikami had been stationed at the time. Koda had been number three. He had been brought in from Violent Crime, his familiarity with the neighbourhood around Amamiya’s house having secured him the place. The final member of the unit had been Iwate, an officer from Forensics; he’d been put in charge of recording and tracing calls. His first name refused to surface. He was the eccentric type, a bespectacled analyst with rimless glasses who had transferred in from an R&D job in telecommunications with NTT.
Urushibara had since been promoted and was now the acting captain of District Station Q. At the time, he’d been the section chief of Special Investigations, Mikami had been sub-chief of the same, Urushibara’s direct subordinate. Yet it had never felt like he’d worked for him. The section had been organized into two teams which functioned independently of each other; Mikami had managed one, Urushibara the other. The section had little experience when it came to kidnappings. The only real knowledge they’d been given had been the case manual, already drummed into their heads, and the few dusty sets of apparatus they could put to use in such an investigation. They had dealt with a couple of kidnappings before Six Four – one when the owner of a real-estate company was taken hostage by a crime syndicate; another when a violent husband had abducted and locked up his ex-wife – but none that had involved both a child and a ransom. For better or worse, this had biased the nature of the work sent to Special Investigations, and Mikami had spent the majority of his time in district dealing with a surplus of cases concerning serious professional negligence. Just before the kidnapping occurred, Mikami’s team had been focusing on dealing with the aftermath of a fire that had resulted in the death or injury of seventeen workers, while Urushibara’s had, following a landslide at a gravel stope, been out conducting daily tests in order to build a case for the prosecution.
Even if they had been part of the same team, Mikami doubted he could have ever grown to like Urushibara. More than anyone else, he’d used Mikami’s ‘exile’ as an excuse to treat him coldly, and had also, no doubt to harass him, developed the habit of making coarse remarks about Minako. How about it, is she a moaner?
Even so, there had been nothing remiss in his conduct as chief of the Home Unit. He’d helped calm Yoshio Amamiya’s frayed nerves and provided encouragement to his despairing wife, Toshiko, speaking in calm and level tones even as he extracted the information necessary to help with the investigation. They had ended up waiting until the next morning for the kidnapper to call. Yet even when the tension in the room had reached the point of becoming unbearable, the occasional conversation between the two men had remained candid and free from accusation.
You should try to rest a little.
No, thank you. I can relax better like this.
It’s going to be a long day. You need to sleep a little, for your daughter.
Amamiya had responded by nodding, finally relaxing from his formal posture. At that point at least, a relationship of trust had been growing between the two parties.
What had come next? What had happened to spark Amamiya’s emotional withdrawal?
Mikami suspected it would be next to impossible to get Urushibara to talk about it. Whatever his shortcomings, he was a man who had from a young age waded undaunted through the world of criminal investigations. His sense of belonging was adamantine, nothing a promotion to captain could shake.
What about Kakinuma? Mikami hadn’t heard anything about him being transferred away from Six Four. If he remembered correctly, the man had joined the Investigative HQ from Special Investigations and continued to work there even after its downgrade to ‘team’. It seemed abnormal for someone not to receive even a single transfer in fourteen years, but, Mikami supposed, it could simply be testament to the magnitude of the case. Kakinuma gave the impression of frailty, but he was surprisingly gutsy. He was quick on his feet and could hold his own against a professional architect when it came to his knowledge of buildings and construction. They’d been on different teams and Mikami could count the times they’d shared drinks on a single hand, but there was no reason to suspect he’d be anything but receptive to an approach. The hitch was that he wasn’t in a position to think of Six Four as something that had happened in the past. Assuming he was still part of the Investigative Team, the gag order would carry more weight for him than with anyone else.
The image of a man in blue overalls suddenly revealed itself.