Chapter 36: Parking Surveillance

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Tuesday, October 4.

With a proper search warrant in hand, Akasaka managed to obtain Ms. Hayashida’s parking surveillance storage device. However…

“Chief, the recordings are only retained for one month. The footage from September 3 was deleted yesterday, exactly as scheduled. The Forensics Unit is currently trying to recover it,” Akasaka reported helplessly.

“What does Forensics say?” Shiraishi pressed.

“Fifty-fifty,” Akasaka replied honestly.

When it came to forensic expertise, a local police station naturally could not compare with the Metropolitan Police Department.

The enormous Beika Police Station did not even have a dedicated medical examiner. Under the Criminal Affairs Division, there was only a Forensics Unit, primarily responsible for collecting traces at crime scenes and conducting external examinations of corpses. As for electronic data, all they had was a university student who had graduated from Beika University less than two years ago, majored in a related field, and attended several standardized training courses held by the Metropolitan Police Department.

Shiraishi remembered that the young man’s ability was rated merely N. All he could do was lament inwardly…

Did Beika University even count as a university?

Still, there was no other officer in the entire station better suited to the job.

“If there’s still no result by the end of the day, bring the equipment straight to me,” Shiraishi instructed.

Shiraishi had no expertise in this area either, but…

If all else failed, he could ask some old colleagues from the First Investigative Division and the Scientific Investigation Bureau to make an exception and lend a hand.

The retrial was scheduled for Friday. Both “training his subordinates” and “solving the case” were important.

…

Fortunately, Shiraishi was spared the need to call in any favors.

Before the end of the workday, the Criminal Affairs Division reported a “major breakthrough”: the parking surveillance footage had been fully recovered.

Shiraishi therefore convened a case conference after work.

Every officer involved, including several patrol officers connected to the case, was summoned.

Aoki was already at the projector, playing selected portions of the surveillance footage for everyone.

“This is the surveillance record from around the time of the incident. First, when Ms. Hayashida got out of her car. Since the door had been scraped, the system captured a segment…”

The parking surveillance did not record continuously. It activated only when a moving object approached within range.

The first segment showed Ms. Hayashida getting out of her car at 12:32. Everyone hurriedly took notes.

In the second segment, they saw a little girl laboriously squeezing through a narrow gap.

“Ahem. She’s an informant for the station. You don’t need to write that down,” Shiraishi added.

That day, she had not “taken” anything. She had merely “paid a visit” to an empty house that had been unoccupied for years…

The third segment was from 1:18 p.m. Ms. Hayashida passed by her car again and left the apartment building.

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“It does match Mrs. Hayashida’s statement.”

“But we can’t establish that Hayashida was still alive at that point.”

“Exactly. The time of death was between one and two-thirty in the afternoon.”

…

“The next part is the important one,” Aoki said.

The fourth segment began.

“Ah!”

“That bastard…”

“1:57 p.m.!”

“We’ve got him now.”

Indeed, the person captured in the fourth segment was unmistakably Tsubokura, wearing a hat and dressed entirely in black.

Even with the hat, the camera had caught him at such close range that his features were perfectly clear.

In any case, his alibi could now be confirmed as fabricated.

But…

Shiraishi and Fuji, who had been standing nearby, suddenly changed their postures. Shiraishi, who had been seated in the middle facing the projector with both hands resting naturally on the table before him, now leaned back with his arms folded across his chest.

Fuji, who had been standing behind the table, stepped forward and placed both hands lightly against its edge, as though trying to see the image more clearly.

“Wait… Assistant Inspector Aoki, could you play that again?” Fuji interrupted the sounds of figurative champagne being popped around the room.

The officers of the Criminal Affairs Division all knew Fuji, so no one objected. Aoki immediately replayed the footage.

At the moment when the passing figure’s face could not be seen, Fuji suddenly spoke.

“Stop…”

“He’s wearing gloves?” Fuji paused before continuing.

“Exactly. Very suspicious!” Yamada declared from the side with absolute certainty.

It was indeed suspicious. It was only September, yet the man was wearing both a hat and gloves. However…

“Suspicious? What’s more suspicious is that his fingerprints were found on the murder weapon—the kitchen knife, weren’t they?” Fuji countered.

The other detectives realized it as well.

They had been distracted by the revelation that the alibi was false. Now that they thought about it, there was clearly something wrong here.

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Why would a murderer remember to put on gloves before entering the crime scene, only to deliberately remove them when stabbing someone?

While everyone murmured among themselves and considered the possibilities, Shiraishi continued, “What does the next recording show?”

Aoki resumed playback.

At 2:05 p.m., Tsubokura hurriedly left. He was still wearing his gloves.

Fuji fell even more silent, while Shiraishi simply said, “Next segment.”

At 2:43 p.m., Ms. Hayashida returned from outside and immediately unlocked the door. Once the car lock was opened, the surveillance stopped recording.

Several puzzled voices rose at once.

“This directly contradicts much of Mrs. Hayashida’s statement,” Aoki was forced to admit.

Hayashida had previously claimed that, before the murder, she went to a supermarket on the neighboring street that carried a wide selection of spices. By the time she returned, the murder had already taken place, and she had been too frightened to call the police.

Minamoto and Yamada had checked the supermarket’s surveillance footage. It did indeed show Ms. Hayashida paying for her purchase at around that time.

But…

When Ms. Hayashida returned just now, she had not gone upstairs at all. She had left immediately.

“After buying something at the supermarket, leaving right away seems unlikely,” Aoki said. “She may have returned to the scene through the main entrance, confirmed that the victim was dead, and then gone back out through the main entrance before taking her car from the alley behind the building.”

“Mm. And if that’s the case, then even if Tsubokura really was the killer, we still can’t establish that she wasn’t at the scene when the murder occurred. In fact…”

Akasaka did not finish, but everyone understood what he meant.

It was even possible that Tsubokura was the one who had “arrived too late.”

“What time does the supermarket footage show Ms. Hayashida?” Shiraishi asked Minamoto for confirmation.

“1:49 p.m.” Minamoto checked his notes.

“If I remember correctly, that supermarket is about 1.2 kilometers from the crime scene,” Fuji said, calculating the timing. “The time spent completing the purchase is consistent with walking there and shopping—thirty-one minutes in total. But more than fifty minutes passed between the end of the transaction and her return. That’s too long. She may have learned during that interval that the victim was dead.”

In other words, Ms. Hayashida had returned to the crime scene once during that period, but the cameras had not captured it.

“Could she have had some way of monitoring the scene remotely?” Yamada speculated, his imagination running wild.

“Impossible.” Akasaka shot him a glare. “The officers who processed the scene couldn’t have been that careless. It was a murder scene. How could they possibly have missed a monitor or a listening device?”

“But… if she returned without knowing anything beforehand and saw the body, why didn’t she use the concealed alley when she left? Wouldn’t she have wanted to avoid being seen?” Yamada asked, puzzled.

Team leader Akasaka glanced at him several times from the side.

Wasn’t their team supposed to be investigating the possibility that “Tsubokura was not the real killer”? So why did the idiot keep approaching everything from the angle that “Tsubokura committed the murder”?