Free The Silent Dead by Tetsuya Honda

one up to women’s intuition. Ultimately, her husband was just leaving the house at around six on a Sunday evening and coming back around eleven. He didn’t have the time to get up to much mischief even if he wanted to. I also asked Mrs. Kanebara about the sort of man her husband was.…”
    As Kikuta delivered his report, Reiko sank deeper into her own reflections. Who was Kanebara meeting on the evening of the second Sunday of the month?
    Her first guess was someone from the East Tokyo Bank for some corporate wining and dining. The trouble with that theory was that—if Ozawa was right—the job was simply too big for him to handle without some kind of inside track. The man worked for a medium-sized office equipment leasing company and wasn’t even an executive. Could he close a deal with a megabank single-handedly? No. It didn’t matter how much Kanebara spent on corporate entertaining. The man lacked the authority to make the required decisions. It was way above his pay grade.
    Reiko wondered about other angles. Although it went against everything people had told her of the man’s character, perhaps she should explore the idea of him spying on or harassing competitors whose business he wanted to hijack. That might help explain the flow of events that led to his death by a thousand cuts. Every second Sunday he went out to do a little corporate espionage. Someone found out, and he was tortured and killed as punishment. Reiko dismissed the idea. Normal companies would never go that far in a squabble over client business. What was he doing on the second Sunday of the month?
    This is a mystery wrapped in an enigma. Reiko pushed her thoughts to one side and looked up, returning her attention to the briefing.
    â€œIshikura will now tell you what he learned from the victim’s neighbors,” announced Kikuta, handing the baton to his older colleague.
    â€œAll right, Ishikura, it’s over to you,” said Imaizumi encouragingly. Ishikura rose stolidly to his feet.
    â€œLet me start with how Kanebara’s neighbors regarded him.…”
    The meeting lasted until 10:30.
    *   *   *
    Over the next couple of days Reiko and Ioka were busy interviewing people who knew Kanebara. No matter how deep they probed, nothing came up that suggested that anyone hated the man enough to kill him. On the surface at least, everyone was singing from the same solemn hymnal. He was a “serious man” and a “hard worker.” They had “lost someone very special.”
    Their inquiries at the East Tokyo Bank—the target of Kanebara’s quixotic one-man sales campaign—didn’t yield any significant clues. All they learned was that Kanebara had tried to win the bank’s business not by a full-frontal assault on the head office but by building up multiple individual relationships at branch level.
    â€œKanebara was a hard worker. I can’t tell you how many times he visited this branch. At the start, I turned him down flat. We can’t hand over the responsibility for all our computers to a new supplier just like that. Things aren’t that simple. Same story with copiers and faxes. Head office makes all those big decisions.… But the guy simply wouldn’t take no for an answer. He comes back at me with, ‘Look, you need office supplies, don’t you?’ and he said he was happy to supply us with paper, ballpoint pens, erasers, business cards, binders—stationery, basically. He didn’t care how it started, he just wanted to establish a commercial relationship with us.”
    It sounded plausible. Reiko imagined that Kanebara was one of those “journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step” types.
    â€œTo be frank, Kanebara put me in an awkward position. We are free to make some of our purchasing decisions at the branch level. But even in these areas, we tend to use suppliers with whom we have