Free A Dog in Water by Kazuhiro Kiuchi Page B

face. A compact revolver glinted silver in her grip.
    Just as the man peered into the dark hole to see what could have been thrust into his face, a burst of flame shot out with a roar. The 130-grain .38 Special bullet pierced his eyeglass lens and right eye, splattered the walls with an outpouring of blood and gray matter through the back of his head and then vanished from sight. The man’s body collapsed backwards.
    Inserting the barrel into the crack in the door, the woman fired at the supine form repeatedly. She kept pulling the trigger even after she’d run out of ammunition. When she realized the deafening sound had stopped, she removed her finger from the trigger and heaved a sigh. She took in the sight of the blood-soaked mass and stepped backwards. She turned heel and started to run.
    Sergeant Arita of the Yoyogi Precinct’s Criminal Investigations Sub-Section One climbed the staircase of the mixed-use building. Unable to find a spot nearby to park the patrol car, his partner Officer Koga had stayed in the vehicle.
    When Arita opened the door to the office, there was a man sitting at a desk in the back. He seemed to be assembling a plastic model.
    “Are you the P.I.?”
    The man looked up when he heard Arita’s voice but only stared at him in silence. The “P.I.” wore a large protective device in the center of his face to shield a broken nose, and the ring and little fingers of his left hand were in a cast.
    “The hell happened to you? Get into a car accident?”
    The man ignored Arita and continued to work on the model, depositing adhesive on a mouse-gray piece. Apart from the desk at which the man worked, the fifteen-mat-sized room was furnished with a shoddy sofa set and several steel cabinets. Arita rudely sauntered over to the desk.
    “Seems like you’ve got time to spare.”
    The detective still didn’t respond. He seemed to be working on an Imperial Navy battleship. Arita felt a small twinge of anger.
You’re too old to be engrossed in a damn plastic model
. He skipped the niceties and dove into the main subject.
    “You know who Koichi Yamamoto is, don’t you?”
    The detective continued to work in silence as if he hadn’t heard Arita at all.
    “He was killed last night. Took five bullets from a .38.”
    Arita was mystified by the fact that the detective’s face didn’t shift even slightly.
Why? Can it be that he already knows?
    “Sorry for the intrusion, but please accompany me to the station, Mr. Detective.”
    Placing the cap on the tube of adhesive, the detective slowly got to his feet.
    Arita let Koga drive and was in the backseat with the detective.
    “So, what was your case on Koichi Yamamoto concerning?”
    “I don’t discuss matters that touch upon my clients’ privacy,” the detective finally spoke.
    Arita snorted, “Hmph, gimme a break. You’re an accomplice to a murder.” He pulled his pocketbook out of his jacket pocket and flipped through the pages. “On the sixteenth of this month a woman calling herself Eiko Yamamoto requested that you determine his whereabouts after he took up with another woman and stopped coming home. You reported your findings to her around 5 p.m. yesterday. Isn’t that so?”
    The detective did not respond.
    “The driver’s license she showed you was well-made but a fake. The real Eiko Yamamoto left for her parents’ house in Utsunomiya last month, apparently in preparation for childbirth. Was the woman you met heavily pregnant?”
    “She wasn’t showing yet …”
    “Yet?” Arita couldn’t begin to wrap his head around the detective’s reply.
    “She turned herself in this morning along with the instrument of murder …”
    The detective’s face seemed to contort slightly at those words.
    The woman sat in the interrogation room, her face visible through the one-way mirror. The detective stared at her in silence. On pins and needles, Arita spoke to the detective.
    “No mistake?”
    “No. That’s my client …”
    “Her real name