The Saitama Dog Lover Serial Disappearances, Part One:
So You’re Asking Me to Trust You?

My focus now was on organized crime, theft, and public security. In other words, the yakuza 24/7.

Yamamoto had moved up and was running the show, which made Nakajima number two in the office. Nakajima and I weren’t really getting along, and everyone had started to refer to us as “the Cobra and the Mongoose.” I got the mongoose moniker because, one, I had more hair, and, two, I was more squirrely, running around manically all the time. Nakajima, on the other hand, had what the Japanese call “a poison tongue” (dokuzetsu), meaning that he was very critical, sarcastic, and good at putting people down. He also had less hair, and he moved with precision. He was orderly, precise, and organized, and I was none of those things. I could see why I annoyed the hell out of him.

Yomawari, the night visits reporters made to cops at their homes, had become a daily part of my life. If I was lucky, after I bid my cop good night, I could go straight home; my report could wait to be written up in the morning. But most of the time, I’d have to go back to the Urawa office or the press club and type up sports records or other crap before going home to catch a few hours of sleep.

It was on one such night in January that Yamamoto and I found ourselves sitting around the office, eating leftover pizza, when The Cobra walked in; he was his usual subdued self but with an undercurrent of excitement. He would lay out the case for us but not before announcing, “Adelstein, this is supersecret stuff, so keep your big mouth shut.”

•    •    •

According to Cobra’s cop source, a dog breeder near Kumagaya by the name of Gen Sekine was under suspicion of being a serial killer. Sekine was a yakuza, an ex-yakuza, or a yakuza affiliate. In the previous ten years, several people associated with him had seemed just to disappear. There had been a Saitama police investigation when the first three people vanished, but all leads had dried up and nothing came of it. In fact, everyone had forgotten about the original case.

That all changed when Akio Kawasaki, the president of a waste management company, failed to come home. After several days, his wife went to the police. The police showed little interest and asked perfunctory questions: Has your husband exhibited any strange behavior lately? Were there problems at home? Has he ever gone away for a few days without notice? Does he have any enemies?

Mrs. Kawasaki’s replies were negative, but in the course of the questioning, she mentioned her husband having had a disagreement with a dog breeder. Suddenly the officer in charge grew serious, even grave. “If your husband was involved with Sekine,” he said, lowering his voice, “you should brace yourself for the worst.”

Mrs. Kawasaki went home in shock. The police pulled a very cold case out of the morgue.

Two months later, Kawasaki was still missing, and the Saitama police homicide division officially set up a special task force to look into his disappearance. By the time Nakajima’s source brought him into the loop, ten detectives were working on the case. Importantly, the source assured Nakajima that there was no rush to get the story into print. If the Yomiuri would wait patiently, we’d get the exclusive. Even the top brass at the Saitama police didn’t know the details of the case yet, so there was little chance of the story leaking to other papers.

All this was pretty heady stuff. Dog breeders, yakuza, missing persons. It was right out of a bad Japanese TV movie. So, relying on our TV detective instincts, we knew why the investigation was focusing not on missing persons or suspicion of murder or anything big-time like that but on the minor charge of fraud. The hurdle for getting a warrant for nonviolent crime was a lot lower than for homicide; once you had a suspect in custody you could interrogate him (or her) for any old thing, including murder. This was standard operating procedure for the homicide guys.

My assignment was to check the newspaper files for anything on the dog breeder or his pet shop, which had the catchy name of African Kennel. This was before the Yomiuri kept an electronic file of its past editions, so this meant going through scrapbooks the old-fashioned, easy-to-get-bored way. Finally, after two days of my eyes bugging out, I found a July 14, 1992, article with a headline that read, “Good-bye Dangerous Animal: Cute Lion Baby to Be Sent to Gunma Prefecture Zoo. Kumagaya Pet Breeder Caught Raising Lion on His Balcony.”

Apparently, Sekine had been raising a lion cub on the balcony of his home when nervous neighbors called animal control. Raising wild animals at home was in violation of several city ordinances, so the cub was shipped to a zoo and Sekine was fined a pittance.

Finding this article was a breakthrough because, among other things, it confirmed the Chinese ideographs for Sekine’s name. In Japanese, the pronunciation of a name alone doesn’t necessarily help much. I once had to look for a Japanese woman whose name we had from her attendance at New York University; we knew the romanized spelling of her name and we knew her age, but there were several kanji variations of her last name and at least twenty kanji combinations for her first. If her romanized name was a misspelling foisted on her by an ignorant American or if the name was spelled in some esoteric way, you can imagine how helpful a database would be. You have to have the kanji to tell who’s who. We could now look Sekine up in available databases using the ideographs.

Sekine, it turned out, was a pretty famous guy—in fact, he was one of the most successful dog breeders in the country. Featured in magazines and television shows, he had single-handedly made the Alaskan malamute one of the most prestigious show dogs in Japan. He claimed in interviews to have lived in Africa, hunted animals in the bush, and stared down threatening tigers. Sekine was losing his hair, and what hair he still had was sprinkled with gray. His little beady eyes gave him a permanent squint, and the furrows in his forehead suggested deep contemplation. His raspy voice sounded as if he’d been smoking Golden Bats (the worst, sometimes best cigarette in Japan) since birth. He owned three shops and had announced plans to create a miniature safari park. In a news program he’d been on recently, he’d told the awestruck interviewer about jumping out of helicopters and wrestling lions to the ground. This is a guy, I thought, who could kill and not flinch.

•    •    •

By the end of January, due mostly to Nakajima’s work and leadership, we had gotten a handle on the cases of four people who were missing and believed to have been offed by Gen Sekine: Kawasaki, a housewife, a yakuza boss, and his driver. But we couldn’t finger the motives.

Our Yomiuri team was conducting top secret research. Our plan was to hold off publishing anything until right before the arrest of the dog breeder. That plan fell apart on February 17.

I was at the Saitama police press club typing up some notes when Yamamoto returned from lunch and breathed into my face, reeking of kimchi. “I just had some delicious Korean barbecue,” he said. “Adelstein, do you think I need a breath mint?” he asked.

“Yes, I think a breath mint might be advisable, Yamamoto-san.”

“Okay, go buy me some,” he said, handing me 200 yen.

I took the elevator to the basement convenience store, which was stocked with essentials for emergency situations exactly like this. I picked up a pack of Black-Black, the black supermint chewing gum that turns your tongue and teeth black as well (I’ve never figured out the market for this), and as I was making my way back upstairs, my beeper went off. I dashed back to the press club, and Yamamoto, taking the Black-Black from me, stuck a copy of the sports newspaper Asuka in my face.

“Take a look,” he said grimly. “The dog’s out of the bag.”

Indeed it was. A giant headline read: “Four People in Saitama Missing; Mysterious Dog Breeder Involved.” There was even a chart of the victims—horribly incorrect, but still, there it was. We’d been scooped by the lowest of all media possible: a sports newspaper.^*

“Call everyone and tell them to get to the Urawa office right away. There’s going to be an emergency meeting in thirty minutes.”

By the time we got to the office, Hara, the bureau chief, was huddled with the head editor, poring over the evening edition of Asuka. As we gathered around, Hara, with his large Buddha-like presence sucking up the air in the room, turned to Yamamoto and said loudly, “I thought we had this thing locked up?”

Yamamoto gulped, then began, “Well, the article isn’t well researched. And Asuka is new to this game … no one reads it. It just wanted to make a splash. We should ignore it and keep working on our story.”

“What’s your take on it?” the head editor asked The Cobra.

The Cobra concurred with Yamamoto.

But the editor thought otherwise. “What happens if tomorrow every other newspaper in the country except us follows up on this story? We’ll look like we’ve dropped the ball. How do we know the real competition isn’t ahead of us on this one?”

“I don’t think that’s the case,” Cobra replied demurely.

“You don’t think that’s the case? Do you know that’s not the case? Are you willing to take the heat for a dropped story?”

Cobra was silent for a while, and I almost felt sorry for him. Then he piped up, “I think writing this up now is premature.”

“Well, the story’s already out there. It’s pretty clear that we need to get on the wagon. Maybe things are moving faster than we like, but we have no choice. It’s time to stop discussing and start writing. The bureau chief for this region is going to be breathing down my neck any second now.”

I was listening to all this, and in a moment of rare bravery as a newbie reporter, I raised my hand, ignoring Yamamoto’s fervent gestures indicating that I should keep my mouth shut. “May I say something?” I said.

“Who asked you?” The editor brushed the air with his hand in the typical Japanese fuck-off sign.

Hara intervened. “Jake, say what’s on your mind.”

“Well,” I began, my voice cracking, “we’ve kind of made a deal with the Saitama police. They’ve been giving us everything in exchange for us sitting on the story. When the time comes for the arrest, they’ll give us the exclusive. That was the deal. If we break that deal, we lose their trust and we break our promise.”

“Good point, Jake,” Hara said, nodding. “But the landscape has changed. There’s already a story out there.”

“It’s in a paper nobody reads, with no credibility, and it’s way wrong. There’s a huge difference between us writing it and them writing it,” I said, echoing previously stated sentiments. “If we write this story now, we may win the battle, but we’ll lose the war.”

Hara pondered these words for a bit. No one wanted to speak. Hara looked at the article, shifted his weight back and forth. Then he sighed. “I don’t think we can ignore this. I know the police. They’ll be a little upset, but they’ll get over it. Let’s get to work. We need this for the morning edition.”

With that the meeting adjourned. The Cobra cornered me in the hallway, and I thought I was about to get yelled at again. Instead he said, “Thanks for saying that. You understand more about the police beat than I thought. You’re still sloppy, your writing is horrible, and you are undisciplined, but you’ve got some good instincts. You may not be a lost cause.”

“Thanks,” I said, trying to keep the sarcasm out of my voice.

“Hey, no problem.”

Yamamoto was in the back of the office. “Adelstein, you’re right,” he said quietly to me while shuffling through pages. “Going ahead with this is a terrible idea. But that’s how it breaks sometimes. From this point, this is going to be the most important story we’re working on, so I’m assigning everyone a victim. Your job is to find out everything there is to know about your victim, how he knew Sekine, when he was last seen alive, what kind of person he was, why he might have been killed, and anything else that will come in useful down the road. That means we need pictures, comments, testimony, everything we can get. You’re the guy covering the Saitama Organized Crime Control Bureau. That means you’re a natural for the yakuza Endo and his driver Wakui. Both have been missing. From tomorrow, your life is Endo’s life.”

That’s how my Year of the Dog began.

Our first article on the Saitama Dog Lover Serial Disappearances appeared on the morning of February 19, running under a four-column headline: “Several Dog Lovers Missing in Saitama from April to August. Trouble over Sales.” The article came out in the morning, and the other papers scrambled to catch up after the article appeared. Everyone now knew that the Yomiuri had the lead on this case.

Unfortunately, however, we completely alienated the police by publishing the article, which had to have tipped off Sekine that he was under investigation. That would make him less likely to show his hand and give him a greater incentive to destroy evidence.

We’d effectively broken our promise, and the police were not forgiving. The chief detective made that clear to The Cobra in no uncertain terms, and Yokozawa, the gentlemanly head of the forensic department, put the Yomiuri on his personal shit list. They didn’t care about other newspapers, which were also following up on the story; they cared that we were the first legitimate newspaper to break the not-ready-to-be-known news. In their eyes, we were completely to blame if anything went wrong.

Nonetheless, that same day, I made my first trip down to the town of Konan and began looking for more information on Endo. Konan was a throwback to the sixties. It had one giant Zexel factory, a golf course, a town hall, an elementary school, a middle school, and a high school. It had one grocery store and a family restaurant. Other than that, there were lots of empty fields, a little agriculture, and not much to do. It did have a temple devoted to the Buddha of Wisdom (Monju) that was kind of famous. If there was a downtown, I couldn’t find it.

I started making inquiries at the fire department, since I had always found firemen to be more talkative than cops, and this is what I learned. Until he vanished, Endo was the number two man in an organized crime gang known as the Takada-gumi (under a man with the name of Takada). The gang was a third-tier group in the Inagawa crime family. I had expected that people, if they talked at all, would regard Endo with a mixture of dread and awe; but no, everyone spoke well of him. In fact, they seemed worried for his welfare.

A firefighter told me, “Endo’s a great guy. He wasn’t always a yakuza. Used to drive a truck. I actually voted for him in the 1984 mayoral elections. Politicians are all corrupt anyway. You might as well have one you know is corrupt from the start. Maybe he’ll surprise you and do something honest.”

I was taking notes as fast as I could. What kind of crazy town was this where the local yakuza runs for mayor? Apparently, not as crazy as I first thought. Endo had received only 120 votes, losing by a landslide. At the town hall, I got a copy of the photo Endo had submitted as a candidate when he ran for office. He looked tough. He had the dead calm eyes of a potentially explosive yakuza and the punch perm hairstyle that rural yakuza seemed fond of. It looked as if his nose had been broken several times. You’d have to be pretty powerful to kill this guy.

I took a taxi to where Endo had lived. The neighborhood was quiet, and the house was a beautiful semitraditional spread. The gate was open, so I stepped in to look more closely at the mail overflowing his mailbox. I was just getting a peek when someone came up behind me.

It was a little old man, completely bald and so thin his skin seemed translucent. He was wearing jeans and a T-shirt, even though it was still quite cold. In bright green lettering, in English, the T-shirt said obscene things.

“What are you doing?” he asked nonchalantly.

“I’m looking for Yasunobu Endo. This is his house, isn’t it?”

“It’s his house, but he’s not ever coming home.”

“Why’s that?”

“Because he’s dead,” he said, matter-of-factly. “Kennel chopped him up, ground him into mincemeat, and fed him to the dogs. Everybody in town knows that.”

“Is that so? You wouldn’t happen to have witnessed that happening, would you?”

“Nope. Didn’t see a thing, but I know a thing or two. I know this town, and I know Endo, and I know Kennel.”

“You mean Gen Sekine?”

“I forget Kennel’s real name. Can I ask a question?”

“Shoot.”

“Why are you looking for Endo?”

I stepped back onto the street to continue our conversation. “I’m a newspaper reporter. When people, even yakuza, go missing, it’s news. I want to find out why he went missing.”

“He’s not missing, he’s mincemeat, he’s dog shit now.”

“You keep saying that. If everyone knows Kennel killed him, why haven’t the police arrested him?”

“Because they need evidence, you fool. Knowing something and proving it are two different things. If you are a reporter as you say, you should know that.”

“I’m a young reporter,” I said. “I’m still learning.” I handed him my meishi; he glanced at it and stuffed it into his back pocket.

I kept up my tough line of questioning. “Why would Kennel kill Endo? What was the motive?”

“Oh, that,” the man said as he pulled a pack of Golden Bats from out of his sock and lit up. He took a drag so deep that half the cigarette burned into ash in seconds, held the smoke in, and then exhaled.

“Endo’s a yakuza. Yakuza like scary things, and they like to scare people. So Kennel, he’d sell scary animals to the yakuza. Tigers, lions, things to scare the hell out of normal people. Kennel got his start dealing pets to the yakuza.”

“And why would he kill Endo?”

“Don’t know. Maybe Kennel was born vicious, like a rabid dog. So that’s what he does. He kills people. Endo must have got in his way.”

“And how could he kill a big guy like Endo?”

“Maybe he took a syringe of poison and just jabbed it in Endo’s neck. Thwock! I saw him kill a dog that way once. It was a big dog. Long time ago I used to work for Kennel. Not anymore. He’s a bad man. Does bad things. Endo was a yakuza, but for a yakuza not so bad.”

It was two in the afternoon. There wasn’t another person on the street; not a soul except for me and this old geezer. Endo’s house was quiet and dark. Nobody was home. In fact, the place looked abandoned.

The geezer lived three houses down from Endo, and he seemed eager to talk but not in what you’d call a forthcoming way.

“Can you remember the last time you saw Endo alive?”

“Can’t say that I do.”

“Have any idea when he vanished?”

“That I do.”

“You do?”

“Yes, that is so.”

“So what can you tell me?”

“I remember the last time I didn’t see him alive.”

“You saw him dead?”

“You’re not listening to me, reporter boy. I said I remember the last time I didn’t see him alive.”

“Okay, when was that?”

“It was the morning of July 22, last year.”

“You remember the day—why?”

“Because that was the day Endo promised to drive me to the hospital for my heart medicine and the guy never showed up. Endo or that driver of his, Wakui, nice kid, sometimes used to give me a lift to the hospital. I wrote it down on my calendar. When he didn’t show up, I was pissed off. I need my medicine. I was going to give him a piece of my mind the next time I saw him. Don’t make promises you can’t keep, I say. If a man makes a promise, a man’s gotta keep that promise.”

“So you never saw him after that?”

“Nope, but another guy in the Takada-gumi told me that Endo and Kennel were fighting about something. And that’s when I knew that Endo had to be dead. Probably the kid too. A damn shame. I told the police Kennel must’ve whacked them.”

This was good stuff, I was thinking. With this we could narrow down the period when Endo had vanished. I was scribbling notes when the old guy suddenly dropped his cigarette and stepped on it, reopened Endo’s gate, walked to the overflowing mailbox, pulled out everything with his bony hands, and came back to where I stood.

“You wanted this, right?” he asked.

Of course I wanted it. “I can’t take this,” I said. “It’s stolen.”

“Well, you didn’t steal it. Because this mail doesn’t belong to anybody. Dead guys don’t read their mail, and the post office doesn’t reroute the stuff to Hell. So take it. Maybe you’ll find something.” He shoved it into my hands.

“Well,” I said, stuffing the mail into my backpack, “I’ve got to get running. Thanks for everything.”

The old guy stood in the middle of the road and lit another cigarette. I started to get back into the waiting taxi but stopped and asked him, “You know anybody else who might know anything about Endo or when he disappeared?”

“Ask his girlfriend. I can’t remember whether or not she’s still going to high school. If she is, you could catch her there. Name’s Yumi-chan.”

“Yumi-chan?”

“She’s a hottie,” he said.

“Do you need to go to the hospital today?” I asked him.

“Yep.”

“Okay.” I gave him a lift. It seemed like the thing to do.

The homicide division was moving at a glacial pace, the white-collar crimes unit wasn’t happy about getting stuck arresting Sekine for fraud, and it wasn’t until late May that I got bit by the dog case again.

It was at a drunken yomawari with a contact in the Organized Crime Division. The cop was grumbling about some injustice. “Those shitheads took the best fucking cop we have in the division and put him on that dog breeder case. Do they bother to ask me first? ’Course not, not when we really could use him ourselves …”

My antennae went up. “Who’s the cop? A lieutenant or something?”

“No, he’s barely a detective. A real outsider kind of guy. Doesn’t like to take the tests. But he can break a suspect better than anyone on the force. Hah, maybe it’s because he looks just like a yakuza—and not a chinpira [yakuza punk] either; looks likes a boss! He lives out in Konan. Hah, probably even went to school with Takada!”

“He’d be a great guy to know.”

“Why don’t you go visit him? He won’t bite. Just be polite. Don’t tell him I sent you, though.”

“What should I tell him?”

“Tell him someone in homicide leaked his name to your boss. He hates working with those homicide guys anyway, so you won’t have to give up any names because you can blame your boss. Tell him that the homicide guys gave his name to your boss.”

“What’s his name?”

“Sekiguchi.”

Yamamoto was extremely pleased to hear I’d found a new source. We were still on the police shit list, so every little bit helped.

“You did good, Adelstein. But if you’re going to get this cop to talk, you need a strategy. Does he have kids?”

“I don’t know. I think so. I think somebody said something about daughters.”

“Good. Take ice cream.”

“Weather’s warming up. Ice cream will get all messy.”

“Buy some dry ice, idiot.”

“Why ice cream? Just because kids are supposed to like it?”

“No, no, no. It’s a Trojan horse, Adelstein. It gets you in the door. If the cop’s not home, you can say to the wife, ‘Oh, I brought this ice cream for him. Could you please put it in the freezer so it doesn’t melt?’ If he’s home, he may take the ice cream and invite you in. If the kids see the ice cream, they’re going to want some. They may decide they like you. If they do, you’ve nailed the wife.”

“You want me to have sex with the wife?”

“No, get on good terms with the wife. Work on your Japanese, Jake. Trust me. If you’re going to take something with you, ice cream is good. Remember, you’re imposing on these cops. They aren’t obligated to talk to us at all. So acknowledge this. No good police reporter shows up empty-handed, not the first time and not the last time.”

“Uhh, can I expense it?”

“This comes out of your own pocket. Everybody pays their own sources.”

The curse of the police beat: the Yomiuri raises your pay, but it never matches the hours you work. You have a very limited expense account, and the better you get at your job, the more you spend on wining, dining, and gifts to the cops. Even the Yomiuri Giants baseball tickets, which everyone thought we got for free, we paid for out of pocket. The more sources you had, the more expenses you had. So it went.

But I followed Yamamoto’s advice to the letter. I went to the supermarket and bought the biggest tub of Häagen-Dazs chocolate I could find and arrived at the interrogator’s house at seven in the evening. It was at the back of an empty field, and it looked more like a shack than a house, with a little porch. The night was pitch-black. After living in the city for months, it was a shock to see the night sky and hear the sounds of leaves rustling. The smell of vegetation and damp leaves wafted through the air like raw incense.

I had the driver wait far out of sight. As I approached the house, I felt nervous, as I always did on a first yomawari, which was worse when you’d never even met the guy you were going to cuddle up to. I likened it to a blind date with a female kickboxer.

As I rang the doorbell, I could hear children laughing. Perfect. Mrs. Sekiguchi came to the door and turned on the porch light. Two little girls materialized on either side of her, sticking their heads out, full of curiosity at the apparition standing before them.

“I apologize for coming so late in the evening. My name is Jake Adelstein, with the Yomiuri Shinbun,” I said in perfectly polite Japanese and handed her my card.

She looked confused. “Umm, we already subscribe to the Yomiuri.”

“Thank you,” I said, bowing as a good company man should. “Actually, I’m a reporter. I was hoping for the chance to speak with your husband.”

“Oh? Let me see if he’ll talk to you.”

She ducked indoors as the two girls stepped out onto the porch. “What are you?” asked the littler one.

“Don’t you mean who are you?” I corrected her.

She stood her ground. “No, I mean what are you? You’re obviously not human.”

“He might be human,” her sister said.

I didn’t know how to respond to this line of conversation. “Why do you think I’m not human?”

The little sister answered immediately. “You have pointed ears and a nose so big that you can’t be human.”

“Well, then,” I asked, “what am I?”

Little Sister came closer and stared up at my face. “You have a big long nose and pointed ears and big round eyes too. You are pretending to speak Japanese like a human being. You must be a tengu [Japanese goblin].”

Big Sister shook her head. “Chi-chan, he has only one pointed ear. And his skin isn’t bright red. Just pink. But definitely he has a tengu nose.”

Chi-chan asked me to bend down so she could touch my nose. I did. Without a moment’s hesitation she stuck a finger in each of my nostrils and pulled down hard; I almost fell over. She wiped her fingers on her jeans and scratched her head. Then she clapped her hands. “I know! You’re half tengu and half human. What do you think, Yuki-chan?”

Before Yuki-chan could offer her informed judgment on the state of my being, Mrs. Sekiguchi returned. “My husband doesn’t want to talk to any reporters. I’m sorry,” she said apologetically.

“I understand,” I replied. “I usually cover organized crime for the newspaper, and I know a lot of police are not comfortable talking with the press. Sometimes, believe it or not, I personally can be useful to them.”

Mrs. Sekiguchi laughed. “Well, maybe next time.”

I handed her my bag of ice cream. “This will never survive the trip back to Urawa, so please take it. It’s already starting to melt. I’m sure Chi-chan and Yuki-chan will like it.”

I said good-bye to the kids, wiggling my half-tengu ear at them, and walked slowly back to where the car was parked. I was halfway across the field when I heard a deep booming voice call out, “Yomi-san [as in “Mr. Yomiuri”], wait up!”

I turned around to see a tall, imposing figure in jeans and T-shirt standing on the porch. It was Sekiguchi. I headed back his way.

“Thanks for the ice cream,” he said as he shook my hand firmly. “There’s too much for four people. You might as well come in and have some.”

Sekiguchi had deep-sunken eyes with solid black irises, high cheekbones, and a pronounced nose that you could see had been broken. He had his hair cut short, a little longer on top, giving him the appearance of a fifties biker. He motioned me inside.

The kids and Mrs. Sekiguchi were sitting on the living room floor with their feet under the blanket of a low table. Mrs. Sekiguchi had my meishi out before her, and the two girls had what looked like homework spread out over the table. Sekiguchi brought in five bowls of ice cream and set them on the table.

I handed him the beer I’d brought as backup.

“Oh, thanks!” he said, taking the beer into the kitchen. He sat down and then, as if he’d just remembered something, asked, “I’m sorry, did you want a beer?”

“I’m fine, thank you. But you don’t drink beer?” I asked.

“No, not at home. It sets a bad example for the kids.”

He lit a cigarette and offered me one too. I gladly accepted, needing to do something with my hands.

“I thought the typical American didn’t smoke anymore?” he said.

“I’m not a typical American.”

“I noticed.”

“How did you know I’m American?”

He took a drag. “I remember you. You were there taking photos when we busted that Sumiyoshi-kai fake political organization.”

“Yeah, I was there. I don’t remember seeing you, though,” I said, then dared to say what came out of my mouth next. “Maybe I thought you were another yakuza.”

Happily for me, he laughed. “Yeah, I get that a lot. In this town, I could have gone either way.”

From then on, Sekiguchi controlled the conversation, asking questions about me and my background, my life up to entering the Yomiuri. He was a good listener. He was either really interested or really good at feigning interest. After we finished the ice cream, he thanked me again.

“That was delicious. Your technique is good, and your approach is decent. You figured this would get you in the door, and you were right. The question that remains is: can I trust you, and should I trust you?”

“Yes, that is the question, isn’t it?”

“How did you get my name?”

I had to think about how to answer. I didn’t want to come off false, but I didn’t want to give everything away. “You know that I cover organized crime. That’s my beat within the police beat.”

“But you’re here because I’m working the dog breeder case.”

I nodded. “That’s right. I cover organized crime, and you’re handling the missing yakuza guy, or so I hear.”

He nodded, then said, “But you aren’t answering my original question. How did you get my name and address?”

“If I tell you, how can you trust me? How can you know that I won’t drop your name with the wrong person? Conversely, even if I tell you, how do I know you won’t flush out my source and get him in trouble for leaking information?”

Sekiguchi laughed. “Good answer. You’re well trained. All right. I won’t ask for a name. But give me a hint. I promise you that I won’t hold it against you, and I won’t go looking for who told you about me. I’m just curious.”

“So you’re asking me to trust you?”

“It’s a mutual thing.”

“All right. I have no loyalty to the homicide squad. They aren’t my beat. Someone on the case gave your name to my boss. He won’t tell me who it was, and I would never ask.”

Sekiguchi curled his lip and stubbed out his cigarette, chuckling.

“Those guys spend eighty percent of their time trying to figure out how to keep the press off the scent and from fucking up the investigation. Of course, they’re all leaking information right and left to their favorite reporters, especially to the cute female ones. So what do you want to know?”

I wasn’t expecting this. Actually, I’d never been grilled like this by a cop before. This was new territory for me.

“What can you tell me about Endo?” I started. “And what can you tell me about Gen Sekine?”

“What do you know about Endo?”

I told him everything I knew. Sekiguchi offered me another cigarette, and we both lit up again.

“What should I call you? I’m sure as hell not going to call you Aderusutain every time.”

“Jake works.”

“Jake-san? Jake-kun?”

“Just Jake is fine.”

“Okay. Well, it’s getting late. So I’ll tell you what I know, with a caveat.”

“Name it.”

“A lot of this information is ground level. If you take it and run it past the guys at the top, they won’t know it since they don’t have it yet, but they’ll be puzzled that you have it and they’ll go down the food chain looking for the leak. If you don’t know this already, you should. You have to wait for information to go all the way up to the top before double-checking it. Otherwise, you burn your sources. Do you understand that?”

“Yes, I do.”

“Good. I’ll tell you what I know, but how you handle the information will be a litmus test of your reliability. Got that?”

“Got it.”

“There’s no question that Sekine killed Endo, and it’s our strongest case. I think we should bust him on charges of murder right from the start; no fucking around. He’ll break quickly. I know that. Obviously, since I’m not a member of the killer-catcher elite, no one is listening to me, but they will eventually.

“From the investigation so far, I would say that Sekine has killed eight people. The murder of Endo is the one with the strongest circumstantial evidence and hearsay. We have witnesses who can testify, after a fashion, that Endo met Sekine right before he vanished and that on that day Sekine ‘injured’ him. I won’t elaborate.” Sekiguchi was full of confidence.

I asked how a dog breeder like Sekine had become so well entrenched with the yakuza.

“Before Sekine came to Konan, he got in big trouble with the Yamaguchi-gumi over money. He himself used to be in another yakuza group, the Kyokuto-kai. When he got here, a customer introduced him to the Takada-gumi, who put him under its wing. As a gesture of thanks, he gave Takada, the boss, an incredibly expensive dog. That was the beginning of his connections with the Inagawa-kai crime group. He proceeded to become the exotic pet supplier to the yakuza, selling vicious dogs and wild beasts to any yakuza who had the money. They love that kind of crap. It heightens their image as tough guys. He sold a lion—a goddamn lion—to one group. It’s still alive. But this Kennel guy, which everybody calls him, doesn’t like animals; he admires them, sort of, and he uses them.

“I’ll give you an example. A couple months ago, Kennel and this customer were arguing over the price of a dog. The negotiations were going nowhere. So picture this: They are standing there in Kennel’s store. At their feet, tongue hanging from its mouth, is a pure-bred Alaskan malamute. The customer won’t budge. He tells Sekine he’s not going to pay the one and a half million yen the breeder wants; he asks once more to have a half million yen taken off the price.

“‘You want a five hundred thousand yen discount?’ Sekine mutters, smiling as he strokes the dog in front of him. Then he picks up a pair of grooming scissors from his desk, cuts off the dog’s left ear in one snip, and tosses it at the feet of the customer. ‘Okay,’ he says, ‘you win. I’ve taken it off.’ The guy paid the price and took the dog and left. Because I’m sure he was thinking, The next ear lying at my feet might not be the dog’s.

“Is that something a normal person would do? Kennel has this thing for animals because he thinks they have no conscience and they act purely on instinct. He wants to be an animal like that.”

The evening having had its share of startling revelations, Sekiguchi walked me to the door. As I was preparing to leave, he put a firm hand on my shoulder, stopping me. I turned around. Had I made some kind of terrible faux pas?

He looked me in the eyes and pointed down at my feet. “Your socks don’t match; do you know that?” he asked.

I got back to Saitama around midnight. Yamamoto was waiting for me.

“How’d it go?” he asked.

“It went all right,” I replied. “He was really tight-lipped, didn’t say anything other than that he was working on the case. But I did get in the house.”

“Excellent,” said Yamamoto.

I hadn’t told Yamamoto the truth because even though I trusted him I didn’t trust The Cobra. I’d taken Sekiguchi’s warning seriously: I didn’t want my notes being pulled up the food chain too soon and Sekiguchi having to pay for it. This was the first time I realized that to protect your sources, you sometimes have to keep things from the people you work with. Later, I’d learn that sometimes you have to keep things from the people you love as well.