Deception: Nagoya Crimes, #1

By Naomi Aoki

Two men and one woman with the power to destroy them both.

 

Detective Morita knew loving the Kominaka Yakuza Boss—Ieyasu Tonagawa—he'd once been tasked with bringing down wasn't going to be easy. A balancing act with dangerous consequences if it ever came tumbling down. But he had it under control. Walked the thin line separating the two halves of his life with a surefootedness that bordered on arrogance.

 

Then she walked into his life—Detective Suyama, his new partner.

 

But Suyama had secrets of her own.

 

Dangerous secrets that had the power to destroy Morita and Ieyasu.

 

And yet as their world crumbles around them, Morita and Ieyasu find themselves falling in love with the dangerous woman.

 

Deception is a 60k Yakuza x Police Detectives Romance that ends with a cliffhanger.

• Language: English
• Publisher: NaomiAoki
• Release date: Oct 24, 2021
• ISBN: 9798201975500

Naomi Aoki

Naomi is a Kiwi born girl who spends a lot of time laughing at the antics of her kids who are all growing up way too fast, and trying to convince the cat that her lap isn't always a suitable bed. She alos loves to spend time listening to music, watching anime, C-Dramas, and disappearing into worlds created by other author. To keep up to date the latest news, sneak peeks at upcoming WIPs, and exclusive excerpts make sure to follow her on all the socials... https://linktr.ee/naomiaoki_mandygreenwood

Book preview

Chapter One

Morita flashed his badge as he strode into the alley and ducked beneath the yellow tape strung across its entrance and only gave the young, uniformed officer the barest of acknowledgments. He didn’t want to appear rude, and yet, Morita didn’t want to encourage conversation either. His footsteps faded into the chaos of the other office traipsing the scene, one that had been repeated almost nightly within Nagoya’s many alleys in recent weeks and this scene was no different. Two more dead bodies to add to the long list of names this case had generated.

And fear. Panic inducing fear that lingered beneath the surface of every police officer in the city of Nagoya, all afraid to open their eyes and discover what fresh horrors awaited them that morning.

He smiled thinly at the two detectives who’d already arrived at the scene, their fear too easily seen and it disgusted Morita. Even more so when they chose to shake hands with him instead of giving a respectful bow, their ungloved hands sweaty and cold while their nervousness at the suspected links between these murders and the others already under investigation echoed through their voices. But whether their suspicions were correct or not, Morita couldn’t say having not yet laid eyed on the bodies of the dead men still hidden within the shadows being cast upon the pavement.

Rubbing at the bridge of his nose, Morita released a frustrated groan that got his colleagues moving. He side-stepped them and strode down the alley toward the bodies, the scene techs still hovering about as they searched for anything that could be construed as evidence. Morita crouched down, ignored the tiresome buzz of his colleague’s voices, and peered at the victims, looking for anything that would connect them to his current cases or that would identify which yakuza group within the Aichi Prefecture they might belong to. It didn’t take long to notice the ink peeking above the collar of the men’s suits, but neither wore lapel pins—or at least their lapel pins had been removed.

We think it’s organised crime related, Morita heard one of the detectives say. The words tumbled from the man’s lips in a harsh whisper as though he was afraid of being connected to the men’s deaths in anyway. Can you i-identify which group they belong to?

No. I can’t. He shook his head and bit his lip to stop the laughter rumbling free. Morita did recognise the two men however their names and group affiliation were unknown to him as they’d been following him for the last month or so. But your suspicions are more than likely correct... unless you guys are keen for the case to remain with General Crimes, but ultimately- the words tumbling from his lips automatically, not hard when it was the same spiel Morita used at all these crime scenes where they had a suspicion of the likely culprits but no proof -you’ll only end up tossing the case back to me.

The detectives from General Crimes only too happy to wash their hands of the case and let Organised Crime deal with trying to pin yet another murder to one of the yakuza groups operating within the city.

Morita watched the detectives scurry away before turning back to speak with the crime scene techs and making sure that all the evidence the collected was sent to his section. Satisfied his orders would be followed, he strode back toward the cordon and slipped under the tape. He weaved his way through the businessmen, students, and shoppers crowding the streets as he headed for his car parked several blocks away from the scene, thankful he’d left his new partner back at the station dealing with paperwork.

He slid behind the wheel, leaned over the center console, and opened the glovebox, pulling out a cell phone tucked away in a hidden compartment buried under a week’s worth of trash. As Morita switched it on, he loosened his tie and then tapped his fingers on the steering wheel while he waited for his call to connect. Morita didn’t care that the person he’d rung would have only just crawled into bed or whether the early morning call would be welcomed, he only wanted to confirm his suspicions regarding this case were correct before proceeding with it further.

Is this your handiwork in Sakae, he asked, not bothering to wait for the exchange of pleasantries. Morita may have parked his car far from the crime scene to avoid curious glances from other officers attending to it, but he didn’t have time to waste on casual chit chat when his boss or even his partner could call with another job. No... scratch that- pinching the bridge of his nose -I know it’s your doing.

Did you like it? the man growled, and yet his words lacked heat. I thought it was a fitting way to celebrate our anniversary.

Morita sighed. Only you—and probably half the yakuza scattered through Japan—would consider dead bodies an adequate anniversary gift. We’ve been together five years... isn’t wood supposed to be the appropriate gift?

The man snorted. If you want to do things like Westerners do. Does knowing the handle of the blade I used was made of wood help?

No... not really.

Well, I thought it was the perfect present. Those bastards from Okazaki needed to be reminded that they can’t fuck with you. Morita couldn’t fault the last part, his allegiance to the Kominaka Group was well-known amongst the yakuza organisations who operated within the Aichi Prefecture. When can I see you again?

Laughter spilled from his mouth and shook his body. The sulky pout that wrapped itself around those words was a stark contrast to the man’s public persona with the list of crimes attributed to him filling several pages. No one who worked the crime scenes connected to him—even if the police struggled to prove it—believed the man capable of emotions, let alone empathy and if they heard this man whine like this, they’d have thought their ears were faulty. They’d consider him a fraud, even if he owned up to the worst of the crimes he’d committed, because Ieyasu Tonagawa was known for his cruelty, not his pitiful comedy routine. A man known for the brutal way he dealt with his enemies, and not for loving tenderness or compassion.

Morita knew differently. He understood that Ieyasu, killing those two men was a sign of affection, no different to the sweet sentiments whispered between the pages of romance novels.

His laughter faded with a heavy sigh. Well, let’s see... someone made nice mess in a Sakae alley which I of course need to clean up and make sure that it doesn’t get traced back to the culprit, he said dryly. It might take a few weeks to achieve.

So... this weekend then?

"Fuck, what part of I’m busy did you not understand?"

Backroom of the Golden Tulip on Friday...say around nine? Is that good for you?

I really don’t think—

Or I could get someone to pick you up and bring you to the main house... you could stay the whole weekend then and I must admit I do like that idea more.

What the fuck? No! Morita hissed into the phone as memories of the last time Ieyasu had arranged to pick him up flashed through his mind. "Your idea of picking up is to get your men to abduct me from outside the station. Do you know how hard it is to come up with plausible excuses when you do that?"

Fine. Fine. I won’t get them to collect you from work... they can wait at your apartment and grab you from there.

That really isn’t any better, he huffed, resigned to the fact it was going to happen whether he wanted it to or not.

Good. It’s settled then, Ieyasu said, ending the call before Morita could argue further and leaving him to vent his anger on the steering wheel with his head.

Morita switched the phone off and shoved it back in the locked hiding space buried beneath layers of trash. Somedays all he could do was the curse the day he met Ieyasu Tonagawa and whichever god who thought it hilarious for them to fall in love.

He played a dangerous game, loving Ieyasu while continuing to perform his duties as a detective and there was more than his career at risk. Morita had worked hard in the last year since he’d been dragged off his undercover assignment to ensure that Ieyasu and the other high-ranked members of the Kominaka Organisation from heading to jail. If his deception was uncovered then every case Morita had worked on would be brought into question, even the information he’d passed on during his five years undercover—four of those spent as Ieyasu’s lover—would be gone over with meticulous care. Men he’d falsely accused would once more walk the streets of Nagoya and the threats to Morita’s life would increase, the target on his back becoming a little larger.

Yet despite the risks, Morita didn’t care. He knew Ieyasu would set the world ablaze to protect him. Love wasn’t something Morita could’ve planned for, nor the man who stole his heart away and introduced him to world where dead bodies were acceptable presents.

Shoving his argument with Ieyasu aside, Morita took several calming breaths and reached inside himself for the masks he always wore, this time needing one that expressed the adequate horror and anger a consummate detective like himself should show when confronted with a bloody scene. It would take him ten minutes to reach the headquarters from his current position, but that was all the time Morita needed, his years undercover having taught him to school his features fast.

And that wasn’t all his time undercover had taught him.

He could bend the truth with ease and deflect attention away from the true perpetrators and place the blame for a crime onto someone else. Deception, manipulating the truth was second nature to Morita now, and those were skills he used on a regular basis since his return to active duty. Working undercover had brought Ieyasu into Morita’s life and provided him with the necessary tools to protect his dangerous lover.

Morita snorted. He hadn’t stopped working undercover, he’d merely changed sides.

Chapter Two

Stepping into the elevator, Morita jabbed the button for the fifth floor where his unit was stationed, foot tapping on the floor as he watched the numbers tick over. He wasn’t known to be a patient man, always moving quickly from one task to the next in his desire to either solve the case in front of him or destroy the evidence that would implicate Ieyasu. The other occupants of the car threw him disgruntled looks, not all liking the rudeness that his actions displayed, but none of them, not even the officers who were senior to him would dare point out his shortcomings.

They were afraid of him. Afraid of how long Morita had spent undercover in the Kominaka, an assignment he’d undertaken before walking across the stage at the Police Academy Graduation Ceremony. Officially, Morita hadn’t graduated, the high-ranked police officers in charge of the undercover operation not wanting to risk any connection being drawn between Morita and the Police. Not good connections at least. His time at the academy hadn’t been expunged as Morita had thought, but instead—officially at least—he’d been expelled from the academy in a very public scandal, one that would catch the attention of Ieyasu Tonagawa. And it had worked, Ieyasu only too keen to bring an angry ex-police recruit into his organisation with promises of being able to exact revenge on those who’d wronged him.

But it wasn’t revenge Morita ended up getting.

Stepping out of the elevator, Morita turned left and headed down the hallway to the large department his unit operated out of and pushed through the double doors. The large room was sectioned off with low glass partitions separating those detectives who dealt with general crimes from those who handled cases involving the local yakuza, and other organised crime groups trying to get a foothold in Nagoya. In other cities, his unit would have a department all to itself and not required to share resources with the other departments except when there was an overlap between cases. Here though, they were forced to cooperate with the other detectives to ensure different units had the necessary resources when required. Someone higher up the command chain had thought by setting up the units this way it would be harder for a detective—for any officer within the Aichi Prefecture Police Station—to be unduly influenced by a criminal element.

Morita stifled a snort at the thought. One couldn’t prevent the undue influence by a criminal element if the police officer had been corrupted from the outset.

He headed through the grouping of desks assigned to his small unit and into the conference room they often used, crime scene photos already littering the surface of the table in its center. So, what have we got? Morita said, grabbing the attention of the three officers—two well-seasoned detectives and one newbie, three years out of the academy—who were bent over the table staring at the evidence obtained so far. Morita often wondered how his predecessors had managed before the advent of the digital age when he couldn’t imagine needing to wait for photos to develop.

Not much more than what you saw at the scene itself, Detective Kanada said, the more senior of the three detectives gathered. The two men are from a yakuza group based over in Okazaki, we might need to send their pictures over to the police there and see if they can identify them for us. Neither of them is in the database here.

But why are they here in Nagoya? None of the groups operating out of Okazaki have territory here... and the area they were found in is controlled by the Kominaka. Not a group anyone—especially the smaller rural ones—would wish to tangle with.

Maybe the Okazaki groups have decided to press into Nagoya and wanted to make their presence known by trying it on with the largest, powerful group in this city, Kanada suggested.

Maybe, Detective Hanazawa interrupted. Or it could be a case of a larger group using the smaller rural based groups to stir up trouble. Who would benefit most if the Kominaka Group’s attention is diverted by conflict with other groups outside of the city?

Morita pursed his lips and pretended to contemplate her opinion, though she wasn’t far off the mark. A war would soon hit the streets of Nagoya and those towns where the yakuza groups hadn’t pledged their support to Ieyasu, and there were a few who opposed the expansionist plans of the Kominaka. Though whether that was the reason behind the two men from Okazaki following Morita or not, no one in the room would guess that their dead bodies were part of a grand a romantic gesture.

But is there proof these murders were committed by the Kominaka? They aren’t the only big player in Nagoya. Detective Suyama pointed out. Was there anything at the scene that suggested Tonagawa ordered the men’s deaths? She might have been the newest detective to join the unit, but Suyama didn’t let that cower her from pushing forward her ideas.

Considered a prodigy by many who watched her take the smallest of clues and extrapolate it into full blown theory on the motives behind a crime which were often time proved correct, Suyama had stepped into a role within Nagoya’s Organised Crime unit at an age far younger than any other detective. Morita, himself was an anomaly amongst those who worked in the unit having only gained his position within it due to his time undercover. But Suyama had graduated at the top of her year from the Police Academy and had been offered several plum positions within the police force here in Nagoya and in nearby Kyoto. Yet she’d declined them, stating it was her desire to work in organised crime and three years post the Academy she’d achieved just that taking up the position of detective right as Morita had been pulled from his undercover assignment.

There had to be a motivation behind her desire to work for a such a dangerous and thankless unit of the Aichi Prefecture Police, but whatever it was, Morita had yet to uncover it despite working alongside her as partners for the last six months. He couldn’t however doubt her skills, though her lack of experience and a strange naivety to how the yakuza operated in the city often proved a beneficial hinderance. But sometimes it also frustrated the hell out of him, Morita more willing to toss the rulebook aside to get the information they needed to solve a case while Suyama refused to abandon the moral rigidity she’d brought with her from the Academy... not to mention having a partner hampered Morita’s ability to meet up with Ieyasu during work hours—long work hours that paid little care for a detective’s desire to have a social life.

Morita leaned over the table, avoiding the empty coffee cups littering its surface and searched through the crime scene photos. The scene itself didn’t speak of it being the work of any one group within the city- pointing a photo that showed the scene from the entrance to the alley -or at least not of the top three groups who we would expect to leave a calling card as a warning to others trying to encroach on their territory, and yet there was nothing visible.

He shifted onto another photo. The positioning of the bodies and the manner in which they were killed—execution style—does however suggest that this wasn’t a random act of violence. Autopsy will probably show that the men were bound before being killed even if the ropes were no longer wrapped around their wrists when their bodies were discovered.

Straightening up, he tapped his fingers on the table and pretended to assess the rest of the scene as it was displayed in front of him. "Whoever undertook this was careful...methodical...thorough...and well-accustomed to killing to order. There were no obvious footprints left behind, nor any small items—a gum wrapper, a cigarette butt, or even shell