The photograph enters the official record at 4:13 in the morning.
I know because Nishida comes back at 4:15 and his face tells me everything before he opens his mouth. Not panic. Nishida doesn't seem like someone who panics. Something more controlled than that, a recalibration, the expression of a man who has just seen a problem become significantly larger than it was twenty minutes ago.
He sits. He doesn't speak immediately. He looks at the table between us like it owes him an answer.
"The man in the photograph," I say.
"Tomura Kenji." He says it quietly. Evenly. The way you say the name of something you'd rather not say out loud in a room with a recorder. "Deputy Commissioner of the Tokyo Metropolitan Police."
The silence that follows has a specific weight.
"He's your boss," I say, looking at the ceiling. "He's Rei's boss."
"He's everyone's boss." Nishida's jaw is tight. "He has been Deputy Commissioner for six years. Before that, organized crime division for eleven years. Before that." He stops. "Before that is where it gets interesting."
I look at him. "Ryūsei."
"Mizore had been building a case that Tomura spent three years in organized crime actively protecting Ryūsei operations. Not infiltrating. Protecting." He keeps his voice flat and informational. "She had sources. She had documents. She had, apparently, a photograph of him meeting with Ryūsei leadership outside a building in Kōtō ward eight months ago."
"The photograph she brought to Saitō."
"Yes."
"Why Saitō."
Nishida looks at me for a moment. "Because Saitō spent four years inside Ryūsei before he walked away. Because if anyone could confirm the identity of the men in that photograph with Tomura, it was him." He pauses. "She wasn't meeting a suspect. She was meeting a witness."
I let that settle. The room arranges itself differently around that fact. The staged apartment, the disabled camera, the strangulation marks on a throat that was still breathing when I arrived inside it. Someone knew Mizore was coming to Saitō. Someone knew what she was bringing.
"Tomura had her killed," I say.
"I'm not saying that in this room."
"You don't have to say it." I lean forward. "The camera on Saitō's floor was offline for six days. That takes access. Institutional access."
Nishida says nothing.
"And Saitō," I continue. "The strangulation. Someone got to him before Mizore arrived. Incapacitated him, or tried to, and then used his apartment, his hands, his knife, to finish what they needed finished." I pause. "Except something went wrong with Saitō. He was supposed to be dead too."
"A murder-suicide," Nishida says quietly. "Clean. Self-contained. A former yakuza member kills a journalist who was asking dangerous questions, then kills himself. The investigation closes in a week."
"But Saitō didn't die."
"No." He looks at my throat. "He didn't."
We sit with that for a moment. I think about a body that tried to survive and somehow pulled something else into it in the process. I think about Paris and bad vending machine coffee and a lecture hall, and I think about the fact that whatever brought me here, whatever gap opened between one life and another, it opened because this body refused to close.
Saitō didn't die.
I'm the proof of that.
"Nishida-san," I say. "When they identify Tomura in that photograph. What happens."
"Officially? The investigation becomes extremely delicate and moves very slowly while a great many people decide how to protect themselves." He straightens his jacket. "Unofficially, the case detective gets a call from someone above her rank suggesting she consider recusing herself due to a prior personal relationship with the suspect."
"They're pulling Rei off the case."
"The call came eleven minutes ago." He checks his watch. "She has until end of shift to hand over her files."
I think about the corridor. Her voice, stripped of everything except information. Different enough that I turned off the recorder. She made a decision tonight that she hasn't fully explained to herself yet, and now someone is taking the case away before she can figure out why she made it.
"She won't hand over everything," I say.
Nishida looks at me with something that might, in different lighting, be called respect. "No. She won't." He stands. "I've filed for a bail hearing at nine. Given the complications with the timeline and the evidence context, I have a reasonable argument. You'll be out by noon if nothing else surfaces."
"And if something surfaces."
"Then we deal with it." He picks up nothing, because he still brought nothing, and moves to the door. He stops with his hand on the frame, which seems to be a habit of people in this precinct, and he speaks to the door rather than to me.
"Saitō used to answer my questions before I finished asking them," he says. "He could read a situation in thirty seconds and tell you the three most dangerous elements in order of priority. He was the most tactically aware person I've ever worked with." A pause. "You're asking the right questions. But you're asking them. He never had to."
He leaves.
The door closes completely this time.
I sit in the humming light and I think about being compared to a man I've never met and found, somehow, wanting. Not in capability. In instinct. Saitō's instincts lived in this body like muscle memory, reflexes built over years of situations I can't access. I have his face, his voice, his language. I don't have his thirty-second read.
I'm going to need something else.
I'm going to need to think faster than him, because thinking is the only tool I actually brought.
At 6:40 the shift changes and a different officer brings water and says nothing. At 7:15 the quality of light through the single high window shifts from artificial to something approaching dawn. At 8:00 Ando comes back with a second detective I haven't seen before, younger, with the alert energy of someone who has just been handed a significant case and hasn't yet understood what it will cost him.
They sit. The recorder runs.
"For the record," Ando says. "You are Saitō Kurō, resident of Shinjuku ward, currently unemployed, previously employed by Asahi Security Consulting until eighteen months ago."
I say nothing.
"You are represented by Nishida Ken of Nishida Legal Associates." He opens his folder. "We would like to ask you about your relationship with Mizore Yuna."
I say nothing.
The younger detective, whose name I still don't have, slides a photograph across the table. Not the Tomura photograph. A different one. Saitō and Mizore, standing outside what looks like a coffee shop in daylight. Taken from across the street. Surveillance quality.
"This was taken three weeks ago," Ando says. "You met with Mizore Yuna at least four times in the six weeks preceding her death. This is documented." He pauses. "We're not asking if you knew her. We know you knew her. We're asking what she told you."
I look at the photograph. Saitō's face, caught mid-sentence, turned slightly toward Mizore. She's looking at him with the focused attention of someone receiving information they've been waiting for.
He was giving her something. Not just confirming the photograph. Giving her something he'd been sitting on.
"My client," Nishida's voice comes from the door, which I didn't hear open, "has nothing to add to the record at this time." He walks in and sits beside me and puts nothing on the table and looks at Ando with the particular calm of someone holding better cards. "I've filed for the nine o'clock hearing. Unless you're prepared to formally charge my client in the next forty minutes, this interview is concluded."
Ando looks at him. Looks at me. Closes the folder.
They leave.
Nishida waits until the door is shut. Then he leans close and speaks at a volume the recorder will not catch clearly. "Rei left the building at seven fifty. She took nothing official with her." A pause. "She took her personal notebook."
I look at him.
"She's going to Kōtō ward," he says. "The building in the photograph."
Alone. She's going alone to a location connected to a man who just had a journalist killed to protect himself, and she's doing it without backup, without authorization, and without telling anyone who matters.
"She'll be there by nine," I say.
"Yes."
"The bail hearing is at nine."
"Yes." He straightens. His voice returns to normal volume. "Focus on the hearing, Saitō. One thing at a time."
He says the name the way he always says it, I assume, habit and professional reflex. But his eyes, briefly, say something else.
One thing at a time means he's already thinking about two things.
So am I.
The window above me is full of pale Tokyo morning and somewhere in Kōtō ward a police inspector who turned off a recorder and called a lawyer she didn't have to call is walking toward a building that appears in a photograph that got a woman killed.
I put my hands flat on the table.
Clean, this time. Completely.
Move faster, Léo.