“Yuri Uguisu? Oh, right, we were classmates. It’s been a while. I assume from the timing that you must be getting in touch about Reina, right?”
I’d cut off contact with all my high school friends, so I was anxious about interacting with the Bumblebees, but Dr. Higano had given me the perfect advice.
If rumors were already spreading about Reina’s death at her workplace, wouldn’t my classmates be hearing the same rumors? And if that was the case, wouldn’t at least one of them try to verify what they had heard with the police? Dr. Higano’s prediction was right on.
Luckily for us, we learned that Otoha Tamachi, one of the Bumblebees, had gotten in touch with the police. Even better, she’d been proactive about wanting to know details of the incident and had left her contact information.
Fortunately, when I called her number, she picked up and we had a short exchange.
When I told her I was currently a police officer and that I happened to be investigating Reina’s case, she grew excited and rambled on asking for specific information about the incident.
I couldn’t leave the hotel, and considering how late it was, I thought I’d try to handle everything over the phone, but Dr. Higano stopped me.
“In order to understand this case as a whole, I think I need to understand Reina,” he said.
I agreed with him.
“Otoha may be our best chance to understand Reina on a deeper level,” he said. “We shouldn’t question her over the phone. We need to look her squarely in the face and hear what she has to say.”
I couldn’t refuse after he was so insistent.
And so though it was late, almost midnight, when I asked Otoha if she could meet right away, she agreed.
She said she was at her family home in Seijo. I asked if it was possible for her to come to the hotel, and she said she’d be there in around an hour if the Shuto Expressway didn’t have too much traffic.
Then I ended the call and let out a long sigh.
When I looked at Dr. Higano, he had an unusually serious look on his face, like he thought this aspect of the case was extremely important.
“Was there anyone else other than Otoha Tamachi she was close with?” he asked.
“Yes, she had a group of girlfriends called the Bumblebees who acted kind of like her bodyguards.”
“Really? Can we look into them in the police database?”
“If they have priors we’d be able to find their fingerprints, but…I’d keep my expectations low. I think we can find where they live and whether they have a driver’s license or not. Not exactly useful information.”
“I don’t mind. Could I ask you to do that for me?”
I nodded and quickly shot off an email to Yamaji asking him to look into the other four.
“Dr. Higano, what do you plan to ask Otoha—”
Suddenly, a spine-tingling machine-altered voice shouted out, “Gahhh!”
It wasn’t Dr. Higano, of course.
“Gahhaahaa!” the mysterious voice yelled out. It shrieked again in an unpleasantly high pitch, “Eeek!”
Dr. Higano picked up his tablet from the sofa. The sounds were coming from there.
A three-dimension CG bear—green and warped-looking—took up the whole screen. It had a red ribbon on its head, so it must have been a girl. The animation was so realistically smooth, which gave it the uncanny valley effect of being even creepier.
“Wh-What is that?!” I spat.
“This is my investigative assistant. She calls herself Noi-tan.”
“Your…assistant?”
“I like Kirin, but I like Bears more,” Noi-tan sang, playing on old TV commercial catchphrases. “Can’t stop, won’t stop—Noi-tan!” She winked and stuck her tongue out.3
This thing was just too much.
“Doctorrrr. I looked into the topic you asked me about—Wait, ahh!” Noi-tan turned toward me. She opened her bloodshot eyes widely and stared at me. She seemed to be looking at me through the camera in the tablet.
“Who are you? What are you doing at a hotel with Doctor?! Trying to sleep?! Trying to sleep with Doctor?! Is this a one-night stand? Not on my watch! Go home! If you don’t leave, I’ll get a bot army to dox you and troll you into oblivion on Twitter!”
“Noi-tan,” Dr. Higano said. “She’s the officer in charge of the case.”
“Just ‘cause she’s an officer doesn’t mean she’s not looking for a one-night stand! Oohhh…She must be the Doctor’s mistress! You were lying when you told me I was your partner!”
“My partner’s always my partner,” he said nonchalantly.
“Doctor, take a gooood look at her face. Looks like she’s trying to hit a home run tonight! She’s going to try to make herself your girlfriend! I bet she’d make you buy her dinner every month on your anniversary!”
“Yuri is a professional. She doesn’t let her private life get in the way of her work. Am I correct?”
“Absolutely,” I insisted.
But the animated Noi-tan was already baring her fangs. “We can’t trust her. She looks like a woman in heat!”
I did not! At least I hoped not.
“Doctor! You have to do something for me as a punishment for taking this other woman to a hotel.”
“And what might that be?”
“You have to kiss me!”
What the hell was this bear getting on about?
But Dr. Higano didn’t bat an eyelash. “Understood.”
He smiled, and blew her a kiss.
Complete with a wink.
Noi-tan was silent for a moment, then said, “Thank youuuu!” Her nose had begun to bleed in typical anime fashion.
“That bear is too much,” I muttered. “But she’s your…work partner? Not an AI or anything? What exactly is she?”
“Yes, she’s human. But we just have a contractual relationship, so I’ve never actually met her. Who knows, she could even be a man.”
Strange. That seemed like extremely lax oversight.
“How did you get to know this bear?”
“On Facebook.”
He was treating detective work like online dating!
“Noobs who can’t understand our relationship should stay out of it,” Noi-tan said. “Jealousy is unbecoming.”
I found the self-satisfied look on the green bear’s face strangely aggravating.
“So,” the bear said, suddenly serious. “About the research you requested this evening. Reina Myoko’s financial situation…”
Reina’s financial situation?
Dr. Higano noticed my doubt and turned to me. “People’s money has to move just like blood pumps through their body. It’s one of the first things I had to look into.”
I took in what he was saying, but inside I was brimming with questions. I expected this of a cop, but Dr. Higano was just a private detective.
“How exactly did you look into that?” I asked.
The green bear played with her ribbon as she answered. “Tee-hee, you really are a rookie. There are plenty of ways to look into someone’s money as long as you don’t care about the legality of the method.”
“You didn’t hack into her bank? Or did you? That’s…not exactly something I can just overlook!”
“And what are you going to do about it?” Noi-tan said brashly. “Arrest me? You don’t know who I am or what I look like!”
Dr. Higano lightly tapped the camera lens with his middle finger. He looked like he was scolding a child. “Noi-tan, stop getting so worked up. With this investigation, there’s no need for illegal methods. If we need to look into her bank accounts, the banks will give us that information if the request is made through the police as a registered detective.”
“Doctorrr! You’re giving away my secrets! I’m going to lose my mystique!”
Relieved, I stared daggers at Noi-tan. Shameless, she looked away from me. The CG was incredibly detailed.
“Mmphhh!” She coughed, bringing the conversation around. “So, the money. It’s only been half a day, so even with my superpowers I wasn’t able to look into everything, but I’m confident I have enough information to help with your analysis. I’ll begin with the conclusion.” Noi-tan raised an eyebrow and took on a serious tone of voice for the first time all night: “Reina Myoko had just over 100 million yen in assets.”
3 These are plays on old commercials for Calbee snacks and the Matsumoto Moving Center.