The young officer took off at once.
The eldest of the three brothers, Taichi Tomizawa, saw this and walked over with a smile. "I have an alibi too, though I'm not sure if it counts."
Inspector Yokomizo looked him over. He did not seem much like a dutiful son either. "Tell me first."
Taichi Tomizawa said, "It's at my family's villa. Let's go take a look."
So the group followed him to the Tomizawa family villa next door.
Taichi Tomizawa headed straight for the landline phone. "There should be a message from me on this phone."
The police had encountered this kind of physical evidence plenty of times while solving cases, and they skillfully opened the voicemail.
An electronic voice soon played. "You currently have two voicemail messages."
The first message was the call Yuzo Tomizawa had made yesterday afternoon, sometime after three, right in front of Jiang Xia and the others.
The second message was Taichi Tomizawa's. "Hello? Dad, it's Taichi—the Sky-to-Sky Team finally won! Thanks to Kogure's play in the bottom of the sixth, and that home run to right field... Ah, never mind, I won't go on! We'll talk when we meet tomorrow."
After the message ended, the electronic voice announced the time it had been recorded. "Message recorded at 11:34 p.m."
The more Inspector Yokomizo listened, the more familiar the time sounded. He frowned. "Isn't that the time of the murder?"
Jiang Xia nodded. "When we were getting ready for bed, the clock on the wall was pointing at eleven-thirty. Around then, someone outside the window was murdering Chairman Tomizawa."
Tatsuji Tomizawa said, "Then the killer definitely wasn't my big brother. Who could murder someone and leave a calm voicemail right afterward? Besides, I followed that game too. It was only broadcast live on satellite television,