Chapter 23 chapter 2

Ohashi Hotel is located in Nihombashi Hamamachi, on the building above the Shuto Expressway.The hotel and the Hakozaki Expressway exit are also within easy reach.The main entrance of the hotel faces Qingzhou Bridge Street. When you leave the hotel and look to the right, you can see Qingzhou Bridge from the front.Presumably this is where the name of the hotel comes from. This is an old small commercial hotel, which can be judged from the only elevator in the hotel. Shunsuke Kusanagi was sitting in the small coffee shop on the first floor, drinking not-so-delicious coffee.There are no other customers.

"Mr. Kusanagi." A person walked over while saying hello.He is Kamata, acting manager of the hotel.Although the weather was not hot, his forehead was covered with sweat. "Hi." Kusanagi nodded in greeting. "May I bother you for a while?" Kamata asked softly. "Of course." Kusanagi replied. The acting manager glanced at the front desk clerk who seemed to have nothing to do, and sat down vigilantly opposite the criminal police. "How is the situation going?" "The situation you mentioned refers to..." "Search, did you find anything?"

"not yet." "Really? But I heard that there is no evidence to prove that his wife was not at the scene when the crime happened..." After hearing the middle-aged man's words, Kusanagi sat upright on the synthetic leather sofa. "We are indeed considering all the possibilities. The TV station and the media like to make a fuss about certain possibilities and spread false news everywhere. I hope you will not be swayed by these boring reports." "We don't want to be influenced by them, but our industry is afraid of this kind of thing, so I hope you can close the case as soon as possible."

"I can understand your feelings, and we are doing our best to investigate." "Then please. Also," Kamata turned his face to Kusanagi, "how long will that room be kept?" "Well, I have to ask my superiors for instructions first, and there are some things that need to be investigated further. Why, is there any problem?" "How should I put it, what happened in that room, if he keeps it as it is, there will be all kinds of rumors flying around, as a criminal policeman, you often hear it, such as ghosts haunting this hotel, etc." "Well," Kusanagi nodded sympathetically, "I do hear it often."

"So, honestly, we wanted to work on that room as early as possible." "I see, I'll talk to my boss." "Please!" The acting manager of the hotel lowered his head, got up and left. Just as Kusanagi took out the cigarette case, Yukawa in a black jacket came in from the main entrance.Kusanagi put away the cigarette case with a bitter face, in front of Yukawa, smoking is prohibited. "It's late!" "I'm sorry, a student came to talk to me." "Talking? Could it be a relationship problem?" Kusanagi was joking, but there was no smile on Yukawa's face.

"It's a bigger topic than love. He wanted to marry the girl he liked, but was opposed by both parents. He didn't know what to do, so he came to me to discuss it." "It turned out to be a matter of getting married at school, but why did he come to you to discuss it?" "How would I know?" "What advice did you give him?" Kusanagi asked with a smile. "I said, if I were a father, I would object too." "No way? Your ideas are so outdated! If it were me, I would tell him to stick to it no matter how his parents object." "It's not a matter of new or old ideas, I'm speaking from a statistical point of view."

"statistics?" "Which type of person is more likely to regret marrying early than to regret not marrying early?" Kusanagi stared at the face of the young physicist, and wanted to ask a question: Will people who live with this kind of thinking be happy?But he held back. "Can I see the crime scene?" Tang Chuan asked. "Not a cup of coffee?" "No need, as soon as you smell it, you know you don't use high-quality coffee beans." Tang Chuan twitched his nose and sniffed, and walked away. Don't you always drink instant coffee yourself? —— Kusanagi thought this in his heart, and quickly chased after him.

The scene is room 807, a double room. "The victim Yajima Tadaki checked in at 3:50 pm on the 13th. He was not brought by the waiter, but came up alone. No one has seen his figure since then—his figure when he was alive." Kusanagi stood Near the door, he read the notepad and explained, "The check-out time of this hotel is 11 am, but the next morning, when it was 11 am, Zhong Zhao hadn't shown up yet, so no one called his room. Then, when it was nearly 12 o’clock, the hotel staff came to check the seats, but there was no answer when they knocked on the door, so they opened the door with the key.”

After opening the door, I saw a male guest lying on the bed in a big "character" shape. At a glance, it was obvious that he was not sleeping, because there was an abnormal mark on his neck, and the color of his skin was abnormal. "It was strangled to death. It seemed to be strangled to death with a thin rope or something." "Are there signs of a struggle?" "No, the victim seems to have been hypnotized by sleeping pills." "Sleeping pills?" "Looks like it's mixed with canned coffee." Next to the window of the room, there is a table and two chairs for two people to sit facing each other.When the body was found, there were two cans of coffee and an ashtray on the table.Based on the results of the autopsy, police re-investigated two cans of coffee and found that one had been drugged with sleeping pills.Canned coffee seems to be bought from a vending machine in the hallway.

"It is inferred that the time of death was from 5 pm to 7 pm on the 13th, which is certain. The victim ate snacks around 3 pm, and the digestion of the snacks is also consistent." "Also," Kusanagi continued, "Yajima Tadaaki went out to get back the money owed to him by others, and the hotel was booked under the name of Yamamoto Koichi." He knew that Yukawa was a man of strict tone, and When he discusses something, it is best to tell him the whole situation. "From what I've heard, there's nothing wrong with it." Tang Chuan looked around the plain room, "Could the prisoner be the one who claimed to pay him back? Go to this hotel and kill him."

"That's what we thought of first, but we haven't found such a person until now." "That's a problem with your investigation method? Anyway, I don't understand why you called me? Is it necessary to bring out a physicist for a simple strangulation case?" "That's the problem. If this is a simple case of strangulation, there are two things I can't figure out." Kusanagi stretched out two fingers, and then pointed two fingers to the ground and said, "First of all, the place next to the bed , take a good look at the carpet." Tang Chuan walked over and bent down: "Well, it's burnt." The floor was covered with a brown carpet, and there was a charred mark about 1 cm wide and 5 cm long. "I asked the people in the hotel, there was no such trace before." "It's not a lie, is it? This hotel is quite old." "I don't think they're vain enough to lie to the police." "Leaving aside this point, what is the other point you suspect?" "This is it." Kusanagi reached into his coat pocket and took out a photo. "Originally, ordinary people are not allowed to see such things." Looking at the photo, Tang Chuan frowned slightly: "I really don't want to see this kind of photo." "Be patient, we have even seen the real thing." The photo shows strangle marks on the corpse.What was different from the usual situation was that the skin along the strangle marks were all open, and of course, there was blood coming out of it. "Strangled the skin." Tang Chuan muttered in a low voice. "No, according to the autopsy report, this is closer to an abrasion. That is to say, it is very likely that a thin rope was strangled on the skin, and then pulled horizontally, and it became like this." "If it was a normal strangulation, it shouldn't be like this." "Absolutely not." Kusanagi said firmly. Tang Chuan muttered something, still holding the photo in his hand, and just lay on the bed, the same bed where the corpse lay.Although the work of collecting evidence is over, his doing so will not have any impact on the search, but Kusanagi still admires this scientist from the bottom of his heart for making such an action without any scruples. "That is to say, the suspect has not been identified yet." Tang Chuan asked. "Well, it's not impossible," Kusanagi stroked the hair in front of him, "The one we suspect the most is his wife." "His wife? Motive?" "Insurance." "Hey, that means the victim had taken out a lot of personal insurance before his death?" "Invested in 5 companies, with a total amount of more than 100 million yen." "So that's the case, it's really doubtful." Tang Chuan propped his elbows and moved closer to Kusanagi, "So, you must have questioned her seriously?" "I don't know if it can be called strict questioning, but I have been summoned several times." "how does it feel?" "It's suspicious," Kusanagi replied bluntly. "She went out at 4 o'clock in the afternoon and came back around 8 o'clock. She said she was shopping, but there is no definite evidence of her absence. She was indeed at the Ginza Hotel around 5 o'clock. She was looking at children’s clothing in a department store. The clerk who received her could confirm this. After 7 o’clock, she went to another shopping mall’s underground food supermarket to buy pork chops, and the clerk also testified. But this could not be proved. Not at the scene of the crime. It takes only 10 to 15 minutes by taxi from Ginza to this hotel, so she has plenty of time to commit crimes." "What did she say herself?" "She said that she drank tea in a coffee shop, but she couldn't remember which store it was, and she didn't have the cashier slip from that store. Her memory of that store was too suspicious." "So that's how it is." Tang Chuan leaned back again, lying flat on the bed, staring at the ceiling, "If it's a shopping mall in Ginza, there are usually a lot of people, how can the clerks in children's clothing stores and food supermarkets remember What about her?" "In the children's clothing store, she hesitated for nearly an hour on whether to buy a small shirt, but in the end she didn't buy it. The clerk who received her was impatient, so she was very impressed. When she asked for pork chops, she wanted to I bought a discounted item and stood in front of the store until it was about to close, so the clerk who sold pork chops remembered her. But no amount of such alibi is useless, because the most important thing is the time in the middle.” After hearing Kusanagi's words, Yukawa said nothing, with a thoughtful expression on his face.Kusanagi knew that it would be useless to say anything to him at this time, so he sat on the chair and waited. Finally, Tang Chuan spoke: "Can you take me to the victim's house to have a look?" "Of course." Kusanagi straightened up, "Are you finally interested?" "What interests me," Tang Chuan straightened his upper body, "is that his wife didn't have an alibi. Why didn't she have an alibi?"