A Midsummer's Equation

TWENTY-ONE

“So we’ve concluded that none of the heating or cooking appliances present at the Green Rock Inn were malfunctioning. Though everything we saw had been in operation for some time, some of them more than twenty years, we found nothing out of order. A thorough search of Masatsugu Tsukahara’s room also revealed no traces of anything having been burned, such as charcoal briquettes, making the possibility of carbon monoxide poisoning slight in the extreme.”

The man dispassionately giving his report on the team’s findings was the chief forensics officer from the prefectural police. Nishiguchi sat in the corner of the conference room, rubbing a hand over his chest. He had been too worried to sleep much the night before. Though he had been with the forensics team at the inn until nearly eight, they hadn’t told him anything, leaving him to infer everything from their tone of voice. Not that anything they said made him think they’d found a problem. His main cause for worry was that he had stupidly confided this to Narumi, which meant he had to spend the entire morning worrying that something might actually come up.

“So the inn had nothing to do with it. Which makes sense, because you’d think their first reaction if somebody got poisoned would be to call an ambulance,” one of the officers said, a section chief from prefectural homicide named Hozumi. He had a thick head of black hair, with a few white streaks through the bushy mustache beneath his hawklike nose.

Everyone was taking the autopsy report from Tokyo very seriously. Yet, while their initial assumption that Tsukahara had slipped and fallen to his death by accident had been thrown out the window, they lacked any evidence indicating murder. Without any evidence of murder, there was no official homicide task force.

“Have we entirely ruled out the possibility of this being an accident?” Hozumi asked the room.

“I think it’s safe to say there is a zero possibility he developed acute carbon monoxide poisoning on top of that seawall,” the forensics chief said. “I looked over the initial report from the team that examined the body as it was found, and there were no traces of anything having been burned, nor is it particularly easy to poison oneself by burning charcoal outside.”

“Is it possible he breathed in enough carbon monoxide to poison himself somewhere else, then went to the seawall, where he expired? I’ve heard of delayed symptoms in these cases.”

“Er, regarding that,” Isobe said, gingerly raising his hand. “I had one of my men talk to an expert yesterday.” He turned and glared at a young officer sitting in the corner of the room.

The officer stood and pulled out a notepad. “I spoke with Professor Yamada at the medical university, and apparently there have been instances where someone with light symptoms becomes confused, occasionally suffering severe mood swings and other personality changes. This can happen particularly in cases where carboxyhemoglobin concentration is above ten percent. However, the autopsy report showed a concentration so far above ten percent that it would be practically impossible for him to have moved to another location on his own. It was Professor Yamada’s opinion that he likely expired in the place where he was poisoned.”

“In other words,” Hozumi said, “he got poisoned someplace else. Anyone have any ideas on how somebody could’ve poisoned him intentionally?”

“The most orthodox method of carbon monoxide poisoning would be to situate oneself in a small, confined space, like an automobile, and burn charcoal. There was a bit of a boom in suicides using this method after an Internet post labeling it a ‘painless suicide’ gained some traction.”

“Which reminds me,” Hozumi said, his mustache twitching. “Did the autopsy report also mention sleeping pills? Is it possible that our perpetrator here forced the victim into the car, force-fed him some pills, then burned some charcoal?”

“Then, after ascertaining he was poisoned, they dropped him from the seawall,” Isobe concluded. “After which the perpetrator could simply drive off. I suppose that would make sense.”

Hozumi nodded. “It does. Unfortunately, there’s no evidence to support that. So it’s still impossible to say whether the carbon monoxide poisoning was done intentionally by a third party or was the work of the victim himself.”

“Absolutely, sir,” Isobe quickly agreed.

“And there were no records of unusual calls having been made from the victim’s phone?”

“That’s correct. We checked with the phone company too, just in case someone erased his history. There was nothing.”

This meeting is all kinds of wrong, Nishiguchi thought. So far, it seemed, the only people saying anything substantive about the case were from the prefectural police. Motoyama, Chief Okamoto, and even Hari police commissioner Tomita were sitting like obedient dogs, waiting for scraps at the table.

“What’s this about the victim taking a detour to see the house of someone he arrested?” Hozumi said suddenly, turning toward the Hari contingent. Nishiguchi stiffened in his chair.

“Ah, right,” Motoyama said. “You have a report for us, Detective Nishiguchi?”

Nishiguchi stood, opening his notebook. “The victim visited a house in East Hari, part of a summer home development. The house was purchased by one Hidetoshi Senba, and was his primary residence for some time, until he put it up for sale and moved to Tokyo for work reasons. There, he was arrested for murder by Detective Tsukahara. We’ve requested the case files from Tokyo, and they should already have been sent to Chief Isobe.”

Isobe opened the folder on the table in front of him and showed it to Hozumi.

“So a man from the countryside goes to the big city and stabs a former hostess … that’s so straightforward it’s a little sad,” Hozumi said, his lack of interest evident.

“I spoke with the widow over the phone,” Isobe added. “She said he frequently wondered about the people he’d arrested. It’s not inconceivable that he decided to drop in on Senba’s old residence while he was in the area.”

Hozumi rubbed his jaw and nodded. “He wouldn’t be the first detective like that. Nor would this Senba guy be the first perp to hold a grudge against his arresting officer. Find out where he is and what he’s up to.”

“Right away,” Isobe said, turning to one of his men and passing the order down with a nod of his head.

“Well, Commissioner?” Hozumi said, turning to the ever-taciturn Tomita. “I’ll talk to the chief back at the Shizuoka PD, but it looks like we’ve at least got a case of an abandoned body. That should be cause enough to set up an investigative task force here.”

Tomita looked like he had been daydreaming. He jerked upright in his chair and, mouth hanging half open, rapidly nodded his head. “Right, right, of course. Might be a good idea,” he said.

“Then let’s get that started today. We’ll get all of Isobe’s men over here, for starters. We can add more as needed. Sound good?”

“Right, understood. We’ll help however we can.”

Nishiguchi gave a light sigh, watching the commissioner kowtow.

His cell phone buzzed once in his jacket pocket—an incoming e-mail. Sliding it out of his pocket, he held it underneath the table and opened his mailbox, and his pulse quickened when he saw who it was from: Narumi Kawahata.