She doesn't cuff me in the apartment.
That's the first thing I notice. The other officer moves toward me with them, standard procedure I assume, and she stops him with two words I don't catch and a look I don't need to translate. He steps back. She picks up the knife with a gloved hand, seals it, and spends four minutes photographing the room herself before the forensics team arrives.
She's meticulous. She's also stalling.
I sit on the edge of the bed and I watch her work and I think about the way her expression changed when she read the badge. Not shock. Something older than shock. The kind of reaction that comes from a thing you feared being confirmed rather than a thing you never saw coming.
She knew the journalist.
Or she knew of her. The distinction matters and I don't have enough information yet to make it.
The forensics team arrives loud and efficient and suddenly the room is full of people who look at me the way people look at something they've already categorized. I am the suspect. I am the man sitting on the bed with dried blood on his hands who hasn't asked for a lawyer, which is either stupidity or confidence, and from the outside those two things look identical.
Rei speaks to the forensics lead for three minutes. I watch her hands while she talks. She keeps them still, which costs her something. I'm good at reading people who are trying not to be read. Two years of seminar presentations will do that.
She comes back to me.
"Can you stand."
Not a question. I stand.
She walks me out of the apartment without touching me, which is either professional courtesy or something else, and we take the elevator down in silence. The other officer follows two steps behind. The building lobby is empty except for a night security guard who looks at the floor when we pass.
The car is unmarked. She opens the back door and I get in and she gets in the front and we pull into the street and Tokyo at two in the morning is exactly what you'd expect: wet asphalt, convenience store lights, a city that never fully sleeps but breathes differently at night.
I look at my hands. Someone gave me a cloth in the elevator, I don't remember who. Most of the red is gone. Not all of it.
"You haven't asked for a lawyer," she says. She's watching the road.
"No."
"That's unusual."
"I imagine a lot of things tonight will seem unusual."
A pause. The driver, the other officer, adjusts the mirror slightly. Checking me.
"Saitō-san." She says the name the same way she said it in the apartment. Neutral surface, something underneath. "When did you last speak to Mizore Yuna."
There it is. The journalist's name, dropped like it's routine. Mizore Yuna. I file it immediately. I watch the back of Rei's head for a reaction she doesn't give me and I say, honestly, "I don't know."
"You don't know when you last spoke to her."
"I don't know."
She turns slightly. Not enough to look at me directly, just enough that I'm in her peripheral vision. "She called you four times this week. Twice yesterday. The last call was at nine forty-seven this evening, forty minutes before the estimated time of death."
I don't answer. There is no answer I can give to that which helps me.
"She had your address written in her notebook," Rei continues. "In her handwriting. With a time. Twenty-two hundred hours." She pauses. "She came to meet you, Saitō. You're telling me you don't know why."
"I'm telling you I don't know when I last spoke to her."
This time she does turn. Fully. She looks at me across the seat and the distance between us is exactly enough to see that she is very good at her job and that right now her job is the only thing she's using to look at me with.
"Your voice," she says. "You sound different."
"My throat hurts."
She looks at the marks. I watched her look at them in the apartment too, the same way. Not the way you look at evidence. The way you look at something that makes you feel something you don't want to feel.
"Those marks," she says. "When did that happen."
"I don't know."
"You don't know a lot of things tonight."
"That's accurate."
She turns back to face the front. A full minute passes. The car stops at a light and in the silence I can hear the rain starting again, light on the roof, and I think about Mizore Yuna's eyes aimed at the ceiling and I think about the apartment that felt staged and I think about the fact that whoever put me in this situation wanted it to look exactly like this. A body. A knife. A man with blood on his hands and strangulation marks on his throat and a history with the victim.
Clean. Too clean.
"She was investigating the Ryūsei group," Rei says. Quietly. Almost to herself. "Eighteen months of work. She had a source inside."
She stops. Like she said more than she intended.
I don't react. I don't know what the Ryūsei group is. I store the name and I keep my face at neutral and I wait.
The car pulls into the parking structure beneath the precinct. She gets out first. The other officer opens my door and I step out into fluorescent light and concrete and the particular silence of institutional buildings at night.
She walks me through processing herself. She stays when they photograph me. She stays when they take my hands, what's left on them, and she watches with the focused attention of someone building a case and simultaneously watching it build itself wrong.
In the holding room she sits across from me. No recorder yet. Off the record, or as close to it as this room gets.
"I'm going to ask you something," she says. "And I need you to answer correctly."
I look at her. "Correctly or honestly."
Something moves in her expression. Fast. Gone. "They should be the same thing."
"They're not always."
She puts both hands flat on the table. She has a small scar on her right index finger, recent by the look of it, and I notice it because I notice things when I'm nervous and I am, under the calculated surface, extremely nervous.
"The first time we met," she says. "Where were we."
A test. She's testing whether I'm Saitō.
I'm not Saitō.
I hold her gaze for exactly long enough that silence becomes its own kind of answer, and then I say: "I think you already know I'm not going to answer that correctly."
The room is very quiet.
She doesn't move. Doesn't blink more than normal. But something behind her eyes shifts in a way that I recognize, because it's the same shift I felt in my own chest when I stood up in that apartment and understood, in the clean cold way you understand things that are too large to feel immediately, that nothing about tonight is what it appears to be.
She's afraid.
Not of me. Of what my answer means.
"Saitō," she says. And this time it's not neutral. This time there's something raw at the edge of it, something she clamps down on immediately, but it was there.
"I know that name belongs to someone," I say carefully. "I know it belongs to the face you're looking at right now. But I need you to understand that the person you knew is not the person sitting in front of you."
A long silence.
She stands. She moves to the door. She stops with her hand on the frame and her back to me and I watch the line of her shoulders and the way she breathes and I wait.
"There is a recorder in this room," she says. "It has been off since we entered. It will come on in ten minutes when the formal interview begins." She doesn't turn around. "In ten minutes you will say nothing. You will ask for a lawyer. You will not mention anything you just said to me."
She pushes the door open.
"Asakura-san," I say.
She stops.
"Mizore Yuna. Was she close to what she was looking for."
The pause is three seconds. Maybe four.
"Yes," she says. "She was very close."
She leaves. The door closes. The room hums with fluorescent light and I sit in Saitō's body in a Tokyo interrogation room and I think about a journalist who was very close to something, and an apartment staged too perfectly, and a woman who just turned off a recorder and told me to ask for a lawyer.
She doesn't think I did it either.
The question is why.