Part 1

 

Shinjuku, Tokyo, Japan

 

Chapter 1

 

My boss was squatting at the side of the hideously gutted corpse, bending over to search for fine details, nuances that might not have been picked up by the crime-scene technicians. I should have been following her head movements while the Chief Inspector methodically analyzed the victim but, instead, was trying to get a better view of the whale-tail exposed as her white silk shirt was pulled up and her low-cut denim jeans were dragged lower over her sizeable buttocks.

The CI was an impressive woman in many ways. Not only a legend throughout the Pacific Rim for her detective skills, but a veritable Amazon who appeared even more larger-than-life due to the contrast provided by the petite Japanese girls on our staff - or even myself, her lowly gofer. Stella Koide was a blonde, blue-eyed, epitome of the Teutonic dream, or maybe more a caricature thereof; with well in excess of a hundred kilos generously distributed over her two meter plus frame. A lot of those kilos were muscle and bone, but most of the rest seemed to be tits and bum. This provided yet another contrast to her androgynous female colleagues and endless distraction for males, or at least all of those who were not 100% straight gay.

I shook my head and tried to bring my attention back to the job, moving to the side for a better view of the brutalized body and, hopefully, fewer potential distractions. As I had already been provided with basic background, the contrast between the large breasts and beautifully made up face of the ladyboy and his, or was it her, well-dimensioned penis did not come as too much of a shock. What did cause me to gasp was the way in which the torso had been hacked open and, as far as I could see, all internal organs removed.

"Not as nice a sight as the crack of my arse," my boss commented, without pausing her inspection of the gaping wound. The woman had a reputation for having eyes in the back of her head and this seemed to confirm it yet again. "So, Watson, what do you make of it?"

My name is Holmes, Jim Holmes, but there was no way that the CI could give the impression that she was confusing me with the redoubtable Sherlock; so I had become Watson to her and hence to the rest of the department as well. I scratched my head to gain thinking time while I tried to come up with something that would avoid, or at least minimize, my usual humiliation. I decided to stick to safe ground. "Well, the deceased is a transvestite... "

"And just what makes you think that?"

Fuck! How could I possibly be wrong here? "Well, maybe a pre-op trans-sexual or a shemale, if you want to be pedantic. I'm not up on the distinctions involved. Is a shemale the same as a ladyboy?"

"You don't answer a question with a question! How many times have I told you that? Anyway, have a closer look and see if you can do any better."

"Well, the body has obviously been cleaned up and set out on display, no blood or... "

"Or shit, that's bloody clear. But you're drifting again! For Christ's sake, develop your thoughts in a logical, structured manner! You started off with the victim, so go with that thread first."

Fuck, Fuck, Fuck! This woman was a nightmare. "OK, the victim looks at first glance like a transvestite or some other form of person that possesses both fine tits and a rather large dick. How about that?"

"I could live with that as the basis of a first glance. So, now you've had a chance for a second glance, can you narrow down a bit on the range of owners of tits and dicks?"

"Well it's not a part of the community that I spend much of my time with," I retorted. I was aware that I was skating on thin ice here as the sexual proclivities of Koide-san were a continuous source of scurrilous rumor in the precinct.

"So, does the office scuttlebutt now also include me as the meat in a sandwich featuring a couple of chicks-with-dicks? Does that thought get you hard?" It didn't, but it certainly did, I thought to myself as the torment continued. "Is that why you're staring down my cleavage, instead of examining our victim's genitalia?"

Although I don't consider myself prudish and have seen a number of dead bodies in my time, the idea of examining a corpse's private parts made me distinctly uncomfortable. I prefer to leave all that stuff to the forensic pathologists. Not that this explained why the focus of my eyes had drifted towards the Grand Canyon, as it was universally referred to beyond our CI's range of hearing. The woman was evidently well aware of how distracting her massive bosom was and seemed to take efforts to show it off to best advantage.

I ignored the taunt and tried to determine what was being hinted at. Ignoring the butchery above the waist, I examined the victim's tackle as instructed. "I don't know what death does to prick size, but this seems to be equipment of above average size for an Asian." I glanced up at the undamaged face. "Maybe Thai or from somewhere thereabouts."

"Damning with faint praise!" my tormentor muttered. "So what else have your eagle eyes picked up? For fuck's sake: a willy, yes, but... ?"

"No balls!" I realized as I followed this lead. "So, he's castrated: a eunuch or a mid-op trans-sex!"

"Jesus suffering Christ, Watson! Your evenings of wanking over the thought of my admittedly delectable bod have actually made you go blind! I thought that was an urban myth, but you are the living proof thereof. I am going to fucking video your feeble performance here and put it on YouTube as a warning to the younger generation of the dangers of self-abuse!"

I let this tirade roll over me as I knelt to get closer to the focus of my boss's wrath. "Fuck me!" I gasped as the situation between the slightly spread thighs was revealed. "It's a hermaphrodite! Christ, there can't be more than a couple of them in Tokyo. At least we should be able to ID the victim PDQ."

"Finally! Yes, indeed, a hermaphrodite; although nothing like as uncommon as you're suggesting. There're actually quite a few of them in Kabuki-cho."

"You have got to be taking the piss here," I rashly interjected. "This must be some kind of really rare genetic abnormality, one in a million stuff."

"Natural intersex cases are much more common than that although, admittedly, most are handled soon after birth with corrective surgery. But we need to check if this is natural or engineered... "

"Engineered? Who'd engineer their parts... ?"

"Fucking hell, Watson, shut it for a bit! And don't fucking open your trap until you are certain, one hundred percent certain, that you know what you're fucking talking about!" A finger jabbing in my direction made it clear that this was a command beyond any further discussion.

I could feel myself blush as I was humiliated yet again. Every bloody time I disagreed with this woman, I ended up with a lecture that served the twin purposes of demonstrating how encyclopedic my boss's knowledge is and how fundamentally crap I am in every possible area.

"So, we certainly have a hermaphrodite. A rare condition, but one which will not only be reflected in many cases when you consider the fifty million population of the Tokyo megalopolis, but even more within Japan and worldwide." Another wave of her finger warned me not to interrupt.

"Most of the cases would be corrected in some way before adulthood, but many of those who didn't have this option would end up in places like Kabuki-cho, where their attributes assure them a prime position in the commercial sex trade."

My mouth opened, but closed again quickly as a glare in my direction warned me of the consequences of interrupting the great detective in mid flow.

"But that would probably be the minority. Selective assignment of intersex gender has been an option since the thirties and is popular with some parents who see this as setting their children up as big earners for alt-sex prostitution. Our victim here looks to have a real mongrel ethnic background; a really beautiful face with a lot of Thai and maybe some Philippines there. Just the kind of places where hookers are cultured over generations, until they reach a level where they can make the pilgrimage to Shinjuku, to finally make the big time."

I sensed that I was now allowed to speak. "Well, maybe you know a lot more about this than I do... " rolled eyes made it clear that I was stating only the obvious, "... but surely this will still be a very select subset of the knocking shops in this area?"

"Thank the great hairy fanny of the Goddess - finally!" C.I. Koide raised her eyes to the ceiling in an overly dramatic gesture that brought the edge of a large brown areola into view. Distracted by the hope that this might presage the appearance of one of her legendry nipples, I almost missed the next bit. "This is where we're starting from, a top-end intersex courtesan is gutted and presented to us, carefully arranged, on the floor of a crappy soba joint; just where it would cause maximum impact when they opened up at about eleven this morning."

"And? What does this all mean? Who did it? And why put the body here?" The little restaurant was, indeed, rather shabby and the entrance zone was about the only place where the body could be laid out, even then requiring a cabinet presenting plastic models of the noodle set dishes available to be pushed back to block access to the back seating areas and the kitchen.

"Not the fucking foggiest! But, thanks to your brilliant and stunning good-looking superior, we at least know where to start. You can show your appreciation by buying me lunch in the pub I noticed round the corner; it looks like some pseudo-Brit thing, but it'll do for now."

The statuesque detective stood and stretched, causing her breasts to drop back into relatively secure concealment of a straining black silk bra. "No luck, Watson, maybe they'll fall into your lap next time." She grinned smugly and led our way back into the heat and humidity of Sakura-dori.

 

***

 

Shinjuku was bustling, with lunchtime queues beginning to form outside the smaller, cheaper eateries and shoppers blocking the pavement around a corner shop with ドン・キーホーテidentifying it in bright yellow kanji. This was "donki" - the emporium selling just about everything, if you could possibly find what you were looking for in its chaotic innards. A wall of sound was blasting from a huge video screen opposite, competing with the racket from a couple of pachinko parlors. Downtown Tokyo by day, just as foreigners imagine it to be - probably because it was such a popular background for news video crews. By night it was even busier - and even noisier.

A bell tinkled as I opened the door of the little bar, holding it for my boss to enter. A couple of young men sat at tables made out of large barrels in the front area of the pub, but the back, with a few longer tables along the left hand side of the narrow room, was empty. The CI glanced at a blackboard covered with scrawled katakana, announced that she would have fish and chips and a pint of Guinness, and then disappeared off in the direction of a toilet at the rear of the establishment.

I passed her order to a cute little barmaid and added a hot dog for myself, before having a more detailed inspection of the beers on offer in a wall of glass-fronted refrigerators. Ignoring the Belgian beers that seemed to comprise about three quarters of the selection, I narrowed down to English brews and finally selected a Young's Double Chocolate Stout. It is one of the great things about Tokyo, just about anything that you could imagine is available somewhere and, when it came to alcoholic beverages, most were on offer in Kabuki-cho, Shinjuku´s notorious entertainment quarter.

I carried our beers to the table furthest from the door and settled myself down on the inside bench, just before Koide-san emerged and plonked herself into the chair opposite. She lifted the bottle in front of me and grimaced. "Bloody poofter drink! If you're going to have a stout, why not Guinness? Or, at least, Murphy's or Beamish."

"De gustibus non disputandum," I responded smugly.

"Jesus Christ, Oxbridge classics! Just as well you were turfed out and got a real job with the Met or you'd be just another over-educated but unemployable Pommie wanker."

As if it wasn't bad enough being a newbie Englishman in the recently formed Tokyo International Constabulary, I had the misfortune to serve under a part-Japanese woman who had been head-hunted from Sydney to lead the serious crimes division. The Valkyrie interlaced her fingers and stretched her arms over her head, her joints cracking like gun shots. This process also emphasized how gigantic her breasts were, while they threatened to burst from the confines of her shirt. "OK, thinking caps on. Let's see if we make use of the wonders of modern technology that we have at our disposal and crack this case before we finish lunch. In fact, why don't we make it more fun by letting you do the sleuthing? I'm supposed to be training up your useless arse, ain't I?

I groaned aloud and then sipped my beer as the torture continued.

"So, to make it easy for you, all you need to do is determine who our victim is and what this murder is all about. This will lead you to who dunnit and whether anyone else was involved. Then we go nick them. Right, I've now done all the sophisticated top-level planning shit, so you can fill in the details!"

I took a deep breath. "Fuck! OK, here goes. The victim, when clothed, would look like a rather stunning woman. With her Thai features, she wouldn't be at all unusual for this area, given its high density of hostess bars, brothels and soap clubs. With less clothing, could be mistaken for a ladyboy," I ignored the frown aimed at me and continued to break down evidence into minute pieces, "again in no way unusual for Kabuki-cho. But a bit more specialist, certainly, so the number of premises providing such services would be fewer. As we know, however, this is a well-endowed hermaphrodite that we're talking about, so, regardless of how many there actually are, would be likely to be working out of the very select, top-end of the flesh market."

"For example?"

While I had been speaking, my comm unit had been sitting in front of me in natural language mode and hence a holographically projected map with prioritized hits appeared immediately after this question was posed.

"How are these priorities set?" A long finger, with short, clipped nails painted a lurid scarlet, pointed at the top-rated hit, which also seemed to be the one closest to our present location. "Mmm... , just proximity, but that's interesting."

The map was replaced with a synthesis from the police knowledge base, complemented with material stripped from the electronic profile of a club called Pleasure Doubled. The visibility of this members-only club to the general public was minimal, but it featured on a number of rumor-monger sites and the availability of hermaphrodite prostitutes seemed to be an open secret among the hedonists who could afford its outrageous membership fees.

A red light was flashing just on the comm unit, indicating that any further details would require hacking into a highly protected server, with a significant risk of the intrusion being spotted.

"Well then, Watson, to crack or not to crack, that's the question. What do you think?"

Luckily I was given time to think by the arrival of our food. One swipe of my hand and the holo display vanished and I slipped the comm into my pocket.

I would have been happy to enjoy my lunch in silence, but that was not to be. "Come on now, time's a wasting. Which is it?"

"Hack their server!" I responded, showing my displeasure of this bullying by slamming the small unit back onto the table and concentrating on my hotdog while the pilfered information was summarized on the holo projection.

The Chief Inspector managed to eat her food one-handed while swiping her way through the PD database. There seemed to be a wide range of dubious, if not actually illegal, services available to the patrons of this establishment. On the surface it looked like a simple transvestite bar, but there seemed to a progression of increasing well hidden, and expensive, prostitutes available, that went through ladyboys to various surgically modified trans-sexuals and leading to a number of hermaphrodites at the top of the food chain. From the explicit depictions of the services available in each case, there seemed little to choose between some of the exotic surgical modifications and those claimed to be natural hermaphrodites, but the fees charged indicated an exponential increase in their attraction. To my great surprise, this single club had eight herms on offer.

Koide was methodically working up the list of increasingly expensive hostesses, peering at the holographic depictions of the provocatively-posed models, until she reached the top, causing me to choke on the last bite of my 'dog. "Yes! Miss Chrissy! Now we have a name, of sorts, and a work place to fit to our victim. Not bad for the time it took to drink a pint of Guinness." She raised her eyebrows as she wiped her fingers on a napkin. "Just what might we discover during a second one?"

I took the hint and wandered to the bar to order another Guinness, selecting a Traquair House Ale from the fridge for myself. When I returned, my boss glanced at my beer, but restricted herself to a grimace before she went back onto the attack.

"OK, we now have the who. We can fill in the details later, but there's enough now to let the data miners to do their stuff in the interim. So now the why. You're on again Watson."

I gulped the last of my chocolate stout and concentrated on pouring the ale to give myself time to get back onto track. "Well, the murder is so unusual that this might give us a way to start on that question." Once again I was refusing to let myself be rushed. "The victim was an exotic hooker working in premises in the immediate vicinity. The murder was certainly not a crime of passion; this looked more like a surgical procedure than anything else. It might be possible that the deed had been done in-situ and the place cleaned up afterwards, but I would guess our forensics would show this wasn't the case. The place was just too cramped. So she - or he, whatever you call it - was brought to the restaurant and left for us to find. Probably laid out would be a better term for it, as it almost looked like the body was placed for maximum impact on anybody seeing it."

"Maybe not wrong so far, but where was young Miss Chrissy actually sent to meet her maker?" CI Koide was tapping her fingers on the table top to hurry me along.

"Well, an operating theatre would be the easiest place to do something like that, if there was one in the vicinity." Immediately the holo showed another prioritized map, with a bright point located at the other side of Shinjuku station, in Nishi-Shinjuku.

The detective did not need to call up details for this one. "The University Medical Hospital. How would someone get access to an operating theatre there?" she mused, setting off the autonomous search machines to find an answer to her question.

"Apart from normal activities, there are two theatres reserved for demonstrations for some cosmetic surgical conference going on this week," I observed. "The shindig is based nearby, in the Hyatt."

"Which one?" The CI had her eyes closed and was evidently paying no attention to the output from our searches.

"The Regency."

"So, just across the road from the hospital. OK, get some plods with a forensic team over to have a look at those two theatres and check anyone who was supposed to be using them."

Koide twirled her thumbs, eyes still closed, while I followed her instructions. Then she continued, much slower than before. "There's something not kosher about all this. I've the spooky feeling of following a path that's been laid out for us. It all fits together too easily, too quickly. Cross-correlate conference surgeons with possible access to that operating theatre and membership of Pleasure Doubled... "

"This Japanese software is shit-hot," I noted as the output appeared almost instantaneously. "No direct match, but it spotted that a certain Professor Doctor Doctor Frick was a conference attendee who was brought into the club last night as a guest by a Tokyo University professor, who is a member."

"With all the titles, I'd guess this Frick guy is probably a Kraut. I'd also chance my arm by suggesting he left Dodge PDQ thereafter."

If I hadn't seen the amazing Koide in action before, I would have been simply gobsmacked by the match of her speculations with the data filling out the case file overview. Nevertheless, there was one minor slip, I was delighted to note.

"Yes, Prof etcetera Frick did indeed fly back to Munich this morning. However, not a guy: looks like a Frau Professor Doctor Doctor to me."

The CI finally opened her eyes to inspect the 3D image of the German surgeon that was rotating over the table between us. I had expected some sign of annoyance that her Sherlock performance had dropped below its normal level of perfection, but she merely smiled. "Tasty! I would have loved to be a fly on the ceiling to see what the dirty doctor got up to with the well-endowed Chrissy."

Somewhat surprised by this reaction, I waved my hands to expand the displayed image. Certainly not my type, but I could somehow see what my superior meant. The professor appeared to be in her late forties, but this could just as easily reflect expensive cosmetic surgery if the woman sampled her own wares. She looked the exact opposite of the female facing me: petite, raven haired, almost androgynous. If not for a certain aura palpable in this high-res image, one could almost call her elfin. But the woman radiated confidence that indicated a powerful, dominating personality. From that perspective, she was certainly much more similar to my boss. With the two of them in an S&M dungeon, who would be holding the whip?

My wool-gathering fantasies were rudely interrupted. "Stop drooling, Watson, she's not that tasty! Anyway, your task now is to list at least five reasons why we shouldn't get Interpol to pick up the pervy professor and charge her with murder."

The question was enough to set the web-crawlers off, so I had a bit of help ghosting up in front of me while I struggled to respond. "Well, the first problem would be motive. Why would a high-flying, rich surgeon kill a prostitute? If something did happen during their encounter in the club, why this gratuitous butchery? Given that the murder seems to have been carried out in such a complex manner, why move the body back to Kabuchi-cho, instead of getting rid of it elsewhere. Thinking about it, hospitals have incinerators, so that would be an obvious option. Even if transported back, why this formal presentation in a bloody soba house right next to the club?" I stopped and peered at the holo in desperation.

"That's four. What about the kicker that the meta-analysis is throwing up for you?"

"The motive-opportunity link?" I hazarded, then continued when no objection was raised. "The logistics for something like this would be tricky, to say the least. It appears that Frick has never visited Japan before and her contacts with the Japanese professor who took her to this establishment seem to be restricted to a week that they spent together in Berlin a couple of years ago." It was only as the information map filled out, I finally noted that the Japanese professor was also a woman - and one with a reputation, albeit well hidden, for indulging in the wild side of the sexual encounter spectrum.

"And so?"

"Unless Frick is part of a much larger operation, there's no way that she could have set up something like this. The entire show is some kind of diversion."

"Indeed! From a first look at the corpse, it was clear that this was a carefully planned caper. I suspect, however, that we weren't supposed to see through it - or, at least, not as quickly.

"And how do you come to that conclusion? How can you know that you're right?"

"I think the fact of two armed heavies heading in our direction has just answered that last question."