Thursday March 27
Azabu 8:14 am
Pulling the straight razor across his cheek, Hayao thought back to his time with Kazuhiro, when they were both in training, sharing a dorm room together. Their personalities had been polar opposites––Hayao rash and impulsive, Kazuhiro quiet and methodical, and they had butted heads frequently those first few days. Yet over the weeks a deep-seated friendship had emerged. Kazuhiro had imparted some of his careful, reflective qualities on Hayao––lessons from which he still drew sustenance. When Hayao had wound up working in Tokyo and Kazuhiro in suburban Chiba, they had continued to collaborate on cases in which criminal activities overlapped. This occurred fairly frequently, as the distinction between Tokyo and its suburbs meant far less to criminals than to the officials who held competing jurisdictions. To his profound regret, Hayao had not been afforded a window into the case that had taken his friend’s life. The stakes had been high and Kazuhiro had apparently wanted to keep everything to himself until he was sure he had the evidence nailed down.
It was understandable––there was something inherently slippery in the Japanese system, particularly when any combination of politicians, yakuza, or business leaders stood in the crosshairs. Tentacles of corruption easily pried lose all but the most carefully constructed cases long before they reached the prosecution stage. This had been one of those cases, Hayao found out too late, and all tangible evidence had disappeared by the time Kazuhiro’s body was discovered in the Tokyo Bay. Beyond the pain, Hayao remembered a strange sense of inevitability at the news of his friend’s death. He had noticed in Kazuhiro’s infrequent phone conversations those last few weeks a crackling, nervous energy, at odds with his usual cool self-possession. It was as if he knew he had stumbled onto something far more immense than imagined, was engaged in a high wire act requiring the greatest precision. Or maybe that was just how it played out in Hayao’s head after the fact, trying to puzzle out the significance of their last, truncated conversations.
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