The recorder comes on at exactly ten minutes.
I know because I counted. I sat in the fluorescent silence and I counted seconds the way I used to count them before presentations, before exams, before every moment that required me to be someone slightly more composed than I actually was. Old habit. It works in Tokyo the same way it worked in Paris.
A different officer runs the formal interview. Mid-forties, flat affect, the kind of face that has heard every version of every lie and stopped being interested in the variations. His name is Detective Ando, according to the badge. He reads me my rights in Japanese that I understand completely, which is still strange, the seamless comprehension of a language I studied for two years in a classroom that apparently wired itself directly into whatever I'm using for a brain right now.
Rei sits in the corner. She doesn't ask questions. She watches.
I ask for a lawyer.
Ando's expression doesn't change. He closes his folder, stands, and leaves without a word. Rei follows without looking at me. The door closes and I'm alone again with the hum and the light and the particular quality of silence that comes from rooms designed to make people talk.
I don't talk.
I wait.
The lawyer arrives twenty-three minutes later and he is not what I expected.
I don't know what I expected. Someone appointed, official, someone with a tired briefcase and the energy of a person doing their fourth case of the week. What comes through the door is a man in his mid-thirties, suit that costs more than a month of my student stipend, hair that suggests someone who has opinions about hair. He sits down across from me and he places nothing on the table and he looks at me with dark eyes that are doing exactly what Rei's eyes did in the apartment.
Recalibrating.
"Saitō," he says. No honorific. Familiar. "You look terrible."
"I've had a difficult evening."
He tilts his head. A small movement. "Your voice."
"My throat hurts."
He looks at the marks. Unlike Rei, he doesn't look away quickly. He studies them the way you study something you need to understand the origin of, and then he leans back and crosses one leg over the other and says, "Who sent for me."
I didn't send for anyone. I asked for a lawyer and this man appeared. "I assumed you were assigned."
"I'm never assigned." A pause. "Someone called my office forty minutes ago. From this precinct. From an internal line." He watches me. "It wasn't you."
Rei. It had to be Rei. She turned off the recorder, told me to ask for a lawyer, and then called this man specifically. Which means she knows him, or knows of him, or knows that he's connected to Saitō in some way she calculated would be useful.
Or dangerous. The two aren't mutually exclusive.
"Your name," I say.
Something shifts in his expression. Not surprise. Closer to interest. "Nishida Ken." He says it the way you say a name to someone who should already know it. "We've worked together for three years, Saitō. You've never once asked my name like you didn't know it."
I don't answer.
He uncrosses his leg. Leans forward. His elbows on the table and his voice dropping to something the recorder, now running, will struggle to pick up clearly. "I'm going to ask you one question and I need a real answer. Not a performance. Not whatever you're doing right now." His eyes are steady. "Are you in there."
The question lands strangely. Like he's asking something more specific than it sounds.
"Define in there," I say.
A long look. Then he sits back, and something in his posture changes, a decision being made and filed away, and he becomes fully lawyer again, professional surface back in place like a door closing.
"Here is what we know," he says, at normal volume. "Mizore Yuna, journalist, was found deceased in your apartment at approximately twenty-two forty. You were present. Physical evidence places you at the scene. You have no alibi for the estimated window of death." He pauses. "Here is what we also know. The building's external cameras show no one entering or leaving between twenty-one thirty and the arrival of police. The internal corridor camera on your floor was offline. It has been offline for six days."
Six days. Not a coincidence. Someone prepared this.
"The strangulation marks on your throat," he continues. "Forensics will date them. They appear consistent with the estimated time of death or earlier, which creates an interesting problem for the prosecution's timeline if they argue you were in full physical control during the attack." He looks at the marks again. "Someone tried to kill you, or you tried to kill yourself, around the same time a woman was being murdered in your apartment. The two events are either connected or they require a coincidence so large it becomes its own argument."
I process this. "The apartment. Is it actually mine."
Nishida looks at me for three full seconds. "You've lived there for fourteen months."
"And before that."
"Before that you lived in Kōenji. Before that I don't know and it's not relevant." He pauses. "Why."
"I'm building a picture."
"Build it faster. They're going to charge you within the next six hours unless I give them a reason not to." He opens his jacket and takes out a single folded sheet of paper and slides it across the table. "This was in Mizore Yuna's jacket pocket. Not in her notebook, not in her bag. In her inside pocket, folded, like she put it there deliberately before she arrived."
I unfold it.
It's a photograph. Printed, not digital, the kind of print that comes from someone who didn't want a digital trail. Three men standing outside a building I don't recognize. Night shot, grainy, taken from a distance. Two of the men are turned away from the camera.
The third is looking directly at it.
He doesn't know he's being photographed. His expression is neutral, mid-conversation, the particular blankness of someone saying something ordinary. He's maybe fifty, well-dressed, the kind of face that appears at civic functions and charity dinners.
At the bottom of the photograph, in handwriting I don't recognize: Ryūsei. Follow the contracts.
I fold the paper. I slide it back. "She brought this to show Saitō."
"Or to give him. Or to confront him with." Nishida takes the paper back without looking at it. "The investigating officer hasn't logged this as evidence yet. It came to me through a channel I'm not going to explain. You have approximately one hour before it enters the official record."
One hour. He's telling me to think about what this photograph means before it becomes something I can no longer think privately about.
"The man in the photograph," I say. "Do you know him."
"No."
"Does Saitō know him."
The pause is brief but it's there. "That's the question, isn't it."
The door opens. Ando leans in, looks at Nishida, and says something about the prosecutor's office. Nishida stands, buttons his jacket, and picks up nothing because he brought nothing and tells me with his eyes, briefly, to stay quiet.
He follows Ando out.
The door doesn't close fully. A gap, two centimeters, and through it I can hear the corridor, voices, the specific acoustic texture of a police precinct at three in the morning. And then, closer, the sound of someone stopping just outside.
Rei's voice. Low. To Nishida.
"The photograph."
"I have it."
"The man in it. She knew him, Ken. She'd been watching him for eight months."
A pause.
"If Saitō knew about this," Nishida says, "he would have told me."
"Maybe he couldn't." Her voice is careful. Precise. Stripped of everything except the information. "The Ryūsei group doesn't leave room for that. You know what they do to people who talk."
Silence.
"He's different tonight," Nishida says. Not a question.
"Yes."
"How different."
A pause that lasts long enough that I stop breathing to hear her answer.
"Different enough," she says, "that I turned off the recorder."
Their footsteps move away down the corridor. The gap in the door gives me nothing else.
I sit in the humming light and I turn over everything I have: a dead journalist, a staged apartment, a lawyer who arrived without being called, a photograph of an unknown man connected to something called Ryūsei, and two people in a corridor who are separately deciding how much they trust a body that neither of them fully recognizes anymore.
Saitō knew something.
Saitō knew enough that someone needed him dead and framed on the same night.
I'm not Saitō. But I'm in his body, in his life, holding his consequences, and the only way out of this room is through everything he left behind.
I put my hands flat on the table. They're clean now. Mostly.
I look at them anyway.
Figure it out, Léo.