“I don’t see what’s wrong with showing him the materials. As he says, he can’t cover up anything from the holding cell, and the more minds working on this, the better. I’d like to get this cleared up as soon as possible, too. I’ll go and tell the fellow from the conduct division,” Sugimoto had stated casually.
Thus, Miika found herself carrying a stack of printouts to Okuma. It infuriated her to do as the unlikable smoker had asked, but she couldn’t protest in Sugimoto’s presence. She headed for the holding cell in a huff, upset that she wasn’t able to get back to her job.
“The only thing present at the scene that would serve as a weapon was a short-barreled electric pump gun. The only prints on it belonged to the victim. This was the old man’s personal gun, huh?” Okuma commented while eyeing the sheets of paper.
“So it seems,” Miika responded. It wasn’t rare for company employees to carry armaments. The short guns worked the same way as the long ones employed to maintain public order. They all expelled an accelerated piece of metal from the end—but the shorter guns were far weaker. They were like slightly more powerful slingshots. The force was enough to slow a target, but that was it.
“So his face explodes, and he dies. There’s a high possibility that explosives were used, but there are no traces of gunpowder or smoke. Instead, inside his mouth is… What is that? Cloth?”
“It’s charred cotton. Not any kind of guncotton.”
“That figures. If they had shoved guncotton in his mouth, it would still need to be ignited somehow,” Okuma said, flipping through the stapled stack of paper.
“About the conversation from yesterday…”
“Yeah?”
“If I saw an unfamiliar man smoking on the street, and there was a dead body at his feet, I would think he’d probably killed that person. In other words, the analogy you used yesterday ignores the fact that there must be a dead body present.”
“Listen, outside the station, a split-second decision can have life-and-death consequences. A military woman shouldn’t be debating the logic of an argument she had the day before.”
“This is not a battlefield. We’re behind the front line, where careful, cautious decision-making is required. Also, I’m on the chemistry team of the engineering division,” Miika asserted, showing him her ID through the bars.
“Oh, right. You’re with the chemistry team. Anyway, there was a short gun at the scene, huh?”
Okuma looked up at the ceiling and bit his nails. It was more voracious than usual, a rapid, audible clicking. After ten seconds of this, he said, “So…did you do it, then?” and looked at Miika.
Without batting an eye, she replied, “I did not.”
“Then it was someone else on the chemistry team.”
Miika’s eyes widened subtly. “Why do you say that?”
“I mean, it just makes sense. Don’t you get it?”
“I don’t get it. You are insulting my team.”
“I’m not. It’s the logical conclusion.”
“Very well. You should be grateful that these metal bars exist between you and my fist, sir,” Miika stated, clenching her hand.
Okuma snorted with laughter. “You can bet on it. The killer is someone on the chemistry team. And if I’m wrong…”
“You must stop smoking,” she answered at once.
“Sure thing, but what do you gain out of that?”
“One less smoker in the world is all the profit I need.”
“Well, listen to you. Then if I win, you have to buy me a whole carton from the store near the front entrance. I’ll even give you the money for it.”
“Interesting. So you would find entertainment in the act of sending me to buy cigarettes, knowing that I despise them.”
“I can see why you’re in engineering. You’re smarter than a soldier,” acknowledged Okuma. “Anyway, do this task for me. Pick out everyone from the chemistry team who went in or out of the dorm that night.”
“You’re the one who manages that data, correct?”
“Yet to my shock, I am not currently in possession of my computer,” Okuma responded, spreading his hands to show they were empty. “If you ask that conduct division guy, I’m certain he can show you the list. They’re tasking you with solving the case, so he surely won’t withhold data from you.”
“I can give you the list, but you’ll have to single out the right members yourself,” Miika quipped.
Miika returned to the chemistry team’s office and sent a message to the conduct division, requesting the entry history to the dormitory building. The following day, there was no response, so she asked Foreman Sugimoto, freshly returned from a job of his own, if he could inquire about the information, and there was an immediate response. Miika felt like she was starting to understand how things got done in this organization.
The young woman was surprised at how many people visited and departed the dorm after dark. Questioning each individual was going to take a long time. While the list of times, names, and positions shuddered out of the ancient printer, Miika pressed the SEARCH button to look for people from the chemistry team.
There was just one hit: Kuroki.
The time was at 11:42 PM, just hours before the incident occurred.
Miika swung around to examine the office, but Kuroki was not in her usual seat. As she thought about it, Miika realized Kuroki had been absent yesterday and the day before, too. Typically, Miika would not have failed to notice something like this. It was a sign of how much dealing with this incident was putting her out of sorts.
“I told you,” said Okuma when he had a chance to see the list Miika handed to him. “That guy was a real piece of shit.”
He spared no pleasantries for the murdered instructor. It was strange that the man who had laughed when he was imprisoned for suspected murder was only now showing the slightest bit of anger.
“What do you mean?”
“It boils down to this. How do you explode a person’s face? This is Kumamoto; you can’t just whip up bombs like they do in Fukuoka. So instead, you use a gun. The short ones have a limited range, but it’s not that hard to aim at a close target. It doesn’t shoot that fast, but that also means the trajectory stays pretty level.”
“You seem to know a lot about this,” Miika commented archly. “But without the velocity, it won’t kill anyone. And it’s certainly not enough to blow their face off of their skull.”
“Right. So you use a piece of sodium metal instead. The gun can turn any piece of metal into a bullet.”
“…?”
“Or if you want power, maybe potassium? Either one works. The point is, only the chemistry team is going to have access to something like that. You’d have to heat salt to melting, then perform electrolysis, after all.”
Miika recalled how Instructor Yokoi looked in life, the way his poor nasal passage forced him to keep his mouth open at all times.
“Yes, I think that would be fatal… But it’s such a crude method, don’t you think?”
“Crude?”
“Yes. It wouldn’t leave shrapnel like an explosion would, but there would surely be traces left behind. Like you said, using such specialized materials would only make it easier to narrow down the suspect list. We still have the entry history, so it would be an easy thing to look up.”
“Yes, exactly. This one wasn’t trying to hide that she committed the murder. She did it so that you’d be able to figure it out with a little effort,” Okuma stated, flipping through the printouts about the murder scene.
“Why?”
“I already told you. They’re not going to officially announce there was a murder within the company. It’ll probably be treated as an accident, but anyone who does a little research will know it was a killing. The point was to leave that distrust behind. Real interesting idea she had.”
“You knew Miss Kuroki, then?” Miika questioned, in the past tense, for some reason.
“I talked to her a few times when I first joined the company. We were in the same year.”
“I have a question.”
Miika sent Kuroki an e-mail later that night. She told the woman about the late-night murder in the dormitory, the entry history that the intelligence division sent over, the fact that the chemistry team had been assigned to investigate, and the suspicion that Kuroki was the culprit.
At the end, she mentioned that if this was all a big mistake, she would do whatever she could to protect the woman’s standing in the company.
It was a relatively short message, only a few dozen words, but Miika remained in the office until nine o’clock composing it. She couldn’t be sure if she was overstepping her bounds or if the way she was stating things was really ideal. The chemistry team had never seen Miika act like this, so out of her earshot, they wondered what had gotten into her.
The reply came back at once. All it said was, “You’re very smart, Mii.” After five minutes of careful consideration, she decided to take this as an acknowledgment of guilt.
Miika then thought some more and wrote, “I don’t know your circumstances, but I think the conduct division will deduce your involvement very quickly if they investigate. Please think about yourself.”
Once again, the reply was prompt.
“I’m sorry it came to this all of a sudden. But it’ll all be fine. Do your best with your work, Mii.”
The next morning, Miika resumed investigating the crime scene with the chemistry team and noticed that there were discolorations in several spots on the floor of the dormitory room.
On the photos taken as evidence, she added an arrow with a note indicating them. The marks were likely the result of sodium hydroxide created by sodium metal reacting to water, but the conduct division was unlikely to recognize what the discoloration meant. Right now, that was for the better. There was no concern that they’d delete the record of it.
If Miika was going to trust in two statements—Okuma’s “She did it so you could figure it out with a little effort” and Kuroki’s “Do your best with your work”—this seemed the optimal route.
According to Okuma, the only reasons to kill another in such a gruesome method were terrorism or personal hatred. This was probably both. Contempt for the man and terrorism against the system. Or if that was too extreme a way to put it, a protest.