“Huh? Ah yes. Of course. I understand. The dormitory. I see. I’ll be right over there.”
She could hear Foreman Sugimoto’s voice coming through the open doorway of his little office. There was still a bit of time before the workday started, so only a few others besides Miika were in the building.
Sugimoto emerged from the office and said, “Er, good morning, everyone.” He looked around the large open office of the chemistry team. “Is there anyone with nothing else to do who might come and help me? Yoshida, and…ah, Miss Shimabara, you come, too.”
“Yes, sir.” Miika put down the files she was about to read at her desk.
“There’s been a bit of a happening in the company. They need us to take a look at it, so you’ll have to do.”
Miika found herself heading toward the worker dormitory with Yoshida, an older employee with tanned skin. The dormitory was where new hires lived during their training period and where employees could sleep during long, intensive work sessions. Unmarried employees could also request to live there semi-permanently.
September in Kumamoto was still muggy and sticky. After the rain the night before, the odor of geosmin wafted up from below. The three of them trod on soggy ground as they made their way to the dormitory, where an odd scent became apparent to Miika.
“Did a wild bear wander into the building?” she asked.
“Why do you ask that?”
“I smell blood. Did they kill it already?”
Behind her, Yoshida muttered that the bears on Kumamoto had already gone extinct.
“Hmm. Well, you’re not far off, I suppose. Here, put these on,” Sugimoto said, handing gloves and masks to the two. He stepped up to a door and checked the room number. “Just don’t be too shocked when you see inside.”
After he’d pulled the knob, the smell of blood got much stronger. A young man from the military division stood at the window and greeted Sugimoto politely when they walked in. Then he noticed Miika and Yoshida and gave them a suspicious, worried look. According to his employee badge, he was in the conduct division, the part of the military that focused on eliminating corruption.
There was a person lying faceup on the bed. His face was red, as though splattered by tomatoes. But on closer inspection, it was not smeared with a red substance but had instead been gouged out. The throat was blown wide open, the jaw had fallen off, and the facial muscles were visible. Almost none of the teeth were left.
The man’s large figure and hairy arms sticking out of his short-sleeved shirt were familiar. Behind Miika, Yoshida made a guttural convulsion.
“This is…Instructor Yokoi, isn’t it?”
“You know him, Miss Shimabara?” asked Sugimoto calmly.
“Yes. He was in charge of my onboarding training period.”
“I see. So he’s doing instruction now, eh?”
The man from the conduct division said, “The time of death was about two in the morning, apparently. He didn’t show up for work, so someone came to check if he was in his room and discovered he’d lost his face.”
“So it’s a homicide, then. Was his room locked?” Yoshida inquired.
The conduct member looked at the clipboard in his hand. “The door was not locked, it says.” Yoshida appeared disappointed for some reason.
“Foreman,” Miika called softly.
“You have a question?”
“Yes. Is handling this incident part of the chemistry team’s job? Not the conduct division?”
“Good question. I can’t recall many things like this happening. But circumstances being what they are…,” Sugimoto said, sounding troubled.
“Do murders happen often within the company?”
“It’s been a long time since a body turned up. When was the last one?”
“Ten years ago,” answered the conduct member.
“Ah yes. But that wasn’t murder so much as a riot, wasn’t it? Some extremists connected to the refugees from Shikoku made their way into a company building. The poor girl at the company store fell victim. At the time, we marshaled all the civilians, looked at fingerprints, and got all the evidence we needed.”
Miika had seen that on the news. The head of the military division at the time had lambasted the horrid actions of the attackers and delivered an impassioned speech at the victim’s funeral. She remembered the words being very frightening to her as a child. After a thorough investigation, the extremists were wiped out.
“But it’s not going to be easy to clean it up that way. This is very likely an inside job.”
“Why is that?”
“The dormitory is automatically locked at eight o’clock. You need an employee badge to go in or out after that,” explained the conduct division man.
“Ah, that makes sense. So for it to be an outsider, they would have had to hide in this building for at least six hours, until two in the morning, when the crime happened. That would be difficult,” said Yoshida.
Miika looked at what remained of Instructor Yokoi’s face. During Miika’s shooting instruction, he’d told her to be the judge of whom to shoot to protect the populace. If the person who did this was a company member, they had judged the necessity of the matter and decided to shoot the instructor.
“Perhaps it was a small grenade,” Yoshida offered.
Sugimoto chuckled at that. “A classic trope. Yoshida, do you like old war movies? If it was an explosion like that, there would be metal shrapnel and damage all over the place.”
“Then maybe they filled the room with flammable gas. And when the victim tried to smoke a cigarette and sparked a light, boom.”
“That would have blown out the windows. And you’d have to completely surround him with gas. In purely entropic terms, it’s hard to accomplish.”
“And he doesn’t smoke,” added Miika.
“Is that right, Miss Shimabara?”
“Yes. If he had smoked within the past three months, I would know by the smell. Also, I don’t think explosives of any kind were utilized. Assuming we’re talking about the same kind used close to the station.”
“Very impressive,” marveled Sugimoto. For some reason, Yoshida looked just a little irritated. The team leader asked, “Was there anything here that could have been the weapon?”
The conduct member produced a short gun in a clear plastic bag. “Only thing left in the room was this electric pump gun. This was the victim’s personal firearm.”
“Hmm. You couldn’t kill a person with this. It’d probably hurt like hell if you used a sharp piece of metal as a bullet, but it certainly wouldn’t blow someone’s face off,” Sugimoto remarked.
“Perhaps they gouged his face off with a knife.”
“You’ve got a very grotesque imagination, Miss Shimabara. Do you like gory movies? Anyway, it’d be tough to cut someone up while they were sleeping. They’d wake up,” he replied with a laugh. Miika had noticed that Sugimoto would chuckle about almost anything.
Judging by the map of the building, this room was all the way in the corner of the dormitory. Next door was a large group space used during the new recruit training period, but no one was there at this time of year. A bit of noise late at night wasn’t going to attract any attention here.
Nearly a hundred employees had stayed at the dormitory last night, but almost no one was out walking the halls in the middle of the night.
“In other words, it could have been anyone,” stated the conduct member.
“Pretty tough situation,” Sugimoto observed with a laugh. “We can do a weapon search as a matter of protocol. I’m guessing it might be a better idea to look into the building entry history.”
“Yes, we are working on that, too.”
“Entry history?” interrupted Miika.
Yoshida explained, “The building is automatically locked at eight o’clock at night. You need an employee ID to get in or out after that. So there should be a record of everyone who came in.”
“That would be this,” said the man from the conduct division, showing them a flat device. It contained a list of all the people who had opened the locked door between eight last night to this morning and the times at which they did so. There were a few dozen entries.
“This list doesn’t make sense,” Yoshida commented. “Foreman, part of this entry history has been deleted.”
“What? How can you tell?”
“About ten o’clock last night, I passed by the dormitory to buy a can of coffee from the vending machine outside, and I just happened to see someone I know entering the building. There’s no mention of that here,” he replied proudly.
This caught Sugimoto’s interest. “Who was it?”
“A man named Okuma from the intelligence division.”
“Ah, I see. So you’re suggesting he sneaked in here, then deleted his instance from the building’s entry history.”
“The intelligence division is who controls the entry history to begin with, so that’s quite possible.”
“Hmm.” Sugimoto considered this. “Miss Shimabara, I hate to ask, but could you go to the intelligence division and call Okuma here to speak with us?”
“Me?” Miika said. She glanced at the conduct division man next to her.
“If a military man goes, he might figure out what’s going on and cover up any evidence. But there’s much less danger of that if he’s approached by, er, a young woman like you.”
“Doesn’t Mr. Yoshida know him already?”
“If I go, it’s only going to get messy. Please, Shimabara, you gotta do this for us,” Yoshida pleaded.
Here we go again, she thought. When she was the only woman in a group of men, she knew from experience that they tended to push the most menial tasks onto her.
“Miss Kuroki said that I have the demeanor of a soldier,” she asserted.
Sugimoto and Yoshida looked at each other, then tilted their heads and raised their eyebrows as if to say, Yes, that seems right.