Six Four (5 page)

‘Because of me?’

‘Not at all. I think you did all you could. Win or lose, nothing goes to plan when anonymity is on the agenda.’

His view of the job was similar to Director Akama’s. The only difference, Mikami supposed, was that Suwa employed the carrot as well as the stick. A ball of candy, wrapped in the expertise, skill and pride of a natural spin doctor.

Mikami relaxed back into his chair. He watched Suwa move briskly off to answer a call.
Reinvigorated
, Mikami found himself thinking, uncharitably. Perhaps Mikami’s arrival had transformed the office into a place difficult for Suwa to do his job. His
raison d’être
had been threatened by a press director with a background as a detective, inexperienced in Media Relations. Mikami wondered if that was how Suwa felt.

Okay, let’s see what you can do.

Mikami changed tack. He couldn’t allow himself to dwell on
the failure of trust and do nothing about the current situation. Whatever action they ended up taking, if they discontinued their relations with the press, it would be equivalent to a detective refusing to investigate a case.

‘Everyone, listen up.’

Having just finished his call, Suwa got to his feet at the same time as Kuramae. Mikumo was on the edge of her chair, looking unsure whether she was included. Gesturing that she didn’t need to join them, Mikami waved Suwa and Kuramae over.

‘See if you can soften the blow next door. And see if you can’t work out who is really pushing this.’

‘No problem.’

Suwa had definitely perked up. He grabbed his jacket and, without waiting for further instructions, strode confidently from the room. Kuramae followed, his steps lacking the same self-assuredness. Mikami rolled his neck in a circle. His optimism was keeping his unease at bay.

The Press Room was a unique environment. As rivals in the same industry, the reporters sought to keep tabs on each other; at the same time, they had the solidarity of co-workers in a single workplace. When they came up against the police, this solidarity could grow into a sense of joint struggle. Sometimes – as they had just now – they were able to put up a monolithic front that could put even the police to shame. Even so, when it came down to it, they were all subject to different paymasters. Their companies all had their own unique policies and traditions, and this meant appearances were not always in sync with reality.

Yamashina came back into the room just as Mikami was considering this. His eyes darted around nervously, completely different to fifteen minutes earlier when they’d tried to measure Mikami’s mood.

‘Got something you want to say?’

He seemed to relax at Mikami’s tone, breaking into a grin as he walked across the room.

‘You’d benefit from being a little softer on us, you know. Just now? That was crazy.’

‘Crazy?’

‘They’re all furious.’

‘You were the one who set them all off.’

‘Now why would you go and say that? I was only trying to hold out an olive branch.’

He was scared of the police pulling away. Mikami realized his power had quietly persisted over the more ineffectual reporters like Yamashina.

‘How are things in there?’ Mikami probed.

Yamashina made a show of lowering his voice. ‘Like I said, they’re going crazy. The
Toyo
’s angry. Then there’s Utsuki from the
Mainichi
. And the
Asahi
’s –’

The phone in front of Mikami started to ring. He picked up the receiver, annoyed at the interruption.

‘The director wants you in his office.’

It was Secretariat Chief Ishii. He sounded pleased about something. Mikami could already imagine the look on Akama’s face. He felt a sudden foreboding. News that was positive for Ishii was often not so for him.

‘You’re needed somewhere?’

‘That’s right.’ As Mikami got to his feet he noticed a Post-it note on the floor, hidden in the shadow of the desk’s leg. Mikumo’s handwriting. He read it, taking care that Yamashina didn’t notice.

Call from Inspector Futawatari. 07.45.

Shinji Futawatari. They’d joined the force in the same year. Mikami felt the corners of his mouth tighten. He glanced at Mikumo but said nothing, squeezing the note in his hand. What could Futawatari be calling about? He’d know Mikami was avoiding him. Maybe it was just office business. Or maybe he’d heard about the previous day’s ID and felt he should say something as a colleague.

Mikami remembered Yamashina was there.

‘We can continue this later.’

Perhaps imagining he’d made progress, Yamashina gave a satisfied nod, sticking close to Mikami as he headed for the door. Just as Mikami reached the corridor, he said, ‘Oh, Mikami.’

‘What is it?’

‘Yesterday – was it true? That one of your relatives is in a critical condition?’

Mikami turned slowly around to face Yamashina. The latter was looking up intently.

‘Of course. Why are you asking?’

‘Oh, it’s nothing,’ Yamashina said hesitantly. ‘Only, I heard it might be something else.’

Bastard.

Mikami pretended he hadn’t heard and started off down the corridor. Yamashina gave him an overly familiar tap on the shoulder before disappearing into the adjacent Press Room. Through the half-open door Mikami caught a glimpse of the reporters, looking stern as they huddled together.

Outside of the lunch hour it was rare to pass anyone on the first-floor corridor.
Accounting. Training. Internal Affairs.
The doors to each division were shut tight, keeping prying eyes out. It was quiet. Mikami’s footsteps provided the only sound as they echoed on the corridor’s waxed floor.
Administrative Affairs
. The words on the faded doorplate seemed to demand a certain feeling of apprehension. Mikami pushed open the door. Division Chief Shirota was sitting up ahead, at the far end of the room; Mikami bowed in silence before walking over, checking the inspector’s window desk out of the corner of his eye. Futawatari wasn’t there. His light was off, and the desk was clear of papers. If he wasn’t having a day off, he was probably in Personnel, on the first floor of the north building. Rumour had it that planning was already under way for the following spring’s personnel transfers. Futawatari was in charge of putting together a proposal for changes in executive positions. This fact had been a source of discomfort ever since Mikami had learned about it from Chief Ishii. What did it mean for his own transfer? Had his unplanned return to Media Relations really been the sole decision of Director Akama?

Mikami cut through the room and knocked on the door to Akama’s office.

‘Enter.’ The response came from Ishii. As it had been on the phone, his voice was pitched an octave higher than usual.

‘You wanted to see me?’

Mikami made his way over the thick carpet. Akama was
sitting back on a couch, his fingers scratching at his chin. The gold-rimmed glasses. The tailored pinstripe suit. The distant, angled gaze. His appearance was no different than usual – the image of executive management, the kind new recruits were so apt to dream of emulating. At forty-one, he was five years Mikami’s junior. The balding man in his fifties, typically sycophantic as he sat bolt upright next to Akama, was Ishii. He gestured for Mikami to come over. Akama didn’t wait for Mikami to sit before he opened his mouth.

‘It must have been . . . unpleasant.’ His tone was casual, as though to suggest Mikami had been caught in an evening shower.

‘No, it’s . . . I’m sorry to let personal issues get in the way of my work.’

‘Nothing to worry about. Please, take a seat. How were the locals? I assume they treated you well?’

‘They did. They took good care of me, the station captain in particular.’

‘That’s good to hear. I’ll make sure to send my personal thanks.’

His custodial tone grated.

It had happened three months earlier. Seeing no possible alternative, Mikami had approached Akama for help. He had confided that his daughter had run away from home just one day earlier, and appealed for the search to be expanded from his local district station to include the other stations throughout the prefecture. Akama’s reaction had been completely unexpected. He had scrawled a note on the search request Mikami had brought with him, then called Ishii in and instructed him to fax the document to headquarters in Tokyo. Perhaps that meant the Community Security Bureau. Or the Criminal Investigations Bureau. Maybe even the Commissioner General’s Secretariat. Akama had then put down his pen and said, ‘You don’t need to worry. I’ll have special arrangements in place before the day is out, from Hokkaido to Okinawa.’

Mikami couldn’t forget the look of triumph on Akama’s face.
He had known immediately that it contained more than a simple look of superiority at having demonstrated his authority as a Tokyo bureaucrat. Akama’s eyes had lit up with the expectation of change. They had become fixated on him, peering from behind those gold-rimmed glasses, desperate not to miss the moment this upstart regional superintendent who had resisted for so long finally capitulated. Mikami had shivered to the core, realizing he’d given Akama a weakness to exploit. How else could he have responded, though, as a father concerned for the safety of his daughter?

Thank you. I am in your debt.

Mikami had bowed. He’d held his head under the table, lower than his knees . . .

‘And this, the second time now. I can’t imagine how difficult it must be to make those trips.’ Not for the first time, Akama was dwelling on the subject of Ayumi. ‘I know I’ve suggested this before, but perhaps you might consider releasing more of your daughter’s details? More than just her photo and physical characteristics. There are all sorts of other things – fingerprints, dental records, for example?’

Mikami had of course considered all of these before Akama suggested it. It was close to torture each time he was called out, each time he had to peel the white cloth from the face of a corpse. And Minako’s nerves were stretched to breaking. Yet he remained hesitant. Fingerprints. Hand prints. Dental impressions. Records of dental treatment. All were types of data most effectively used in the identification of dead bodies.
I want you to look for my daughter’s corpse.
It was tantamount to saying exactly that, and Mikami couldn’t bear the idea.

‘I’ll need some more time to think about it.’

‘Well, be quick. We want to keep any losses to a minimum.’

Losses?

Mikami called on his sense of reason, forcing down the surge of anger. Akama was trying to provoke him. Testing the extent
of his submission. Pulling himself together, Mikami said, ‘What was it you wanted to see me for?’

All the curiosity drained from Akama’s eyes.

‘The truth is,’ Ishii said, leaning forwards in his stead – it was clear he’d been itching to speak the whole time – ‘the commissioner general is going to pay us an official visit.’

It took a moment for Mikami to respond. This was not what he’d expected.

‘The commissioner general?’

‘We’ve just been notified ourselves. It’s scheduled for this time next week, so as you can imagine, we’re in a bit of a flap. I can’t think how many years it’s been since the last commissioner’s visit . . .’

Perhaps it was the presence in the room of Akama – a career officer from Tokyo – that worsened the effect. It was embarrassing to bear witness to Ishii’s obvious excitement. The commissioner general, the National Police Agency. The commissioner was a man who sat at the very top of the pyramid, above the 260,000 officers in the police force. To the regional police, he was like an emperor. And yet, was an official visit really something to get so worked up about? It was at times like this that Ishii showed his limitations. He held the National Police Agency in awe, looking on with an artless longing, just as a youth raised in the country might dream of the city.

‘What’s the purpose of the visit?’ Mikami asked, his mind already on the job. He had been summoned as press director, which meant there was probably a strong PR element to the visit.

‘Six Four.’

This time, it was Akama who replied. Mikami looked at him, taken aback. There was an expectant smirk in Akama’s eyes.

Six Four.
The term for a fourteen-year-old case, the kidnapping and murder of a young girl named Shoko.

It had been the first full-scale kidnapping to take place within the jurisdiction of Prefecture D. After the kidnapper had successfully made away with the ransom of 20 million yen, the police
had tragically discovered the corpse of the kidnapped seven-year-old. The identity of the kidnapper remained unknown. The case was unsolved even after all these years. At the time, Mikami had been working for Special Investigations in First Division and, as a member of the Close Pursuit Unit, had followed Shoko’s father as he drove to the ransom exchange point. It was enough to have the painful memory revived, but the greatest shock was to hear Akama – a career bureaucrat and an outsider who’d had nothing to do with the investigation – use the term Criminal Investigations had privately adopted to describe the kidnapping. Behind his back, people referred to him as a data freak, a compulsive researcher. Was Mikami to take it that Akama’s network of informers had, after only a year and a half of him being in the post, already infiltrated the inner workings of Criminal Investigations?

Even so . . .

The question was replaced by another. It went without saying that Six Four was the Prefectural HQ’s greatest failure. Even in Tokyo, at the level of the National Police Agency, it still ranked as one of the most significant cases that had yet to be closed. At the same time, no one would dispute the fact that, as fourteen years had slipped by since the kidnapping, the memory of the case had begun to fade. What had once been a two-hundred-strong Investigative HQ had, over the course of time, undergone a process of downsizing so that now only twenty-five detectives remained on the case. While the Investigative HQ hadn’t been shut down, it had been downgraded internally to Investigative Team. Just over a year remained until the statute of limitations came into effect. Mikami no longer overheard the case being discussed in public. And he’d heard that information from the general public had dried up a long time ago. It was the same for the press, who seemed only to remember the case in one article a year, a token gesture to mark the date of the kidnapping. It was gathering moss; why, now, had it become the focus of a commissioner’s visit?
We intend to do everything we can before the statute comes
into effect.
Was that what it was, a show of fireworks for the public?