Bail is granted at 9:47.
Not nine. The hearing runs long because the prosecutor assigned to the case is young and ambitious and hasn't yet received the phone call that will explain to him, carefully, why this particular case requires a gentler touch. He argues well. Nishida argues better. The judge looks at the timeline inconsistencies, looks at the strangulation documentation, looks at the six-day camera outage, and sets bail at a number that suggests he has opinions about the evidence quality without being willing to say them out loud.
Nishida pays it without blinking.
Outside the courthouse the morning is gray and cold and smells like rain that already happened. Nishida walks beside me toward a car I don't recognize and speaks at a normal volume for the first time since we met.
"I have a safe apartment in Nakameguro. You stay there, you don't contact anyone, you let me build the defense before Tomura's people figure out the hearing went the wrong way." He stops at the car. "This is not a suggestion."
"I understand," I say.
He looks at me. "You're going to Kōtō ward."
Not a question.
"Rei left two hours ago," I say. "Without backup. Without authorization. Toward a location connected to a man who had a journalist killed last night." I look at him. "You called me a different person from the one you knew. Maybe that's true. But I don't think the person you knew would stand in a parking lot in Nakameguro while she walks into that alone."
A long silence. A taxi moves past on the street behind us. Somewhere nearby someone is opening a shop, metal shutters rolling up, the ordinary sound of a city beginning its day without knowing what happened in a Shinjuku apartment eight hours ago.
"No," Nishida says finally. "He wouldn't." He reaches into his jacket and takes out a phone, plain, pre-paid by the look of it, and holds it out. "My number is the only contact saved. You check in every hour. If you don't check in, I make calls that will complicate your situation significantly." He pauses. "And Saitō."
I take the phone.
"She doesn't know you're coming," he says. "She won't thank you for it."
"I'm not going for the thanks."
He gets in the car. He doesn't look back.
I stand on the courthouse steps with a pre-paid phone and yesterday's clothes and the knowledge that I have approximately four hours before Tomura's people understand that the clean solution they built last night is coming apart, and I flag down a taxi and give the driver an address I don't consciously know I have until I'm saying it.
Saitō's muscle memory again. Working without me.
The building in the photograph is in a transitional part of Kōtō ward, the kind of neighborhood that hasn't decided yet what it wants to become. Old logistics warehouses converted into mid-range offices, a convenience store on one corner, a pachinko parlor on the other that opens early for the people who need it to. The building itself is six stories, gray concrete, the signage on the front listing four companies that all sound generic enough to be real or fake with equal plausibility.
I pay the driver and stand across the street and look at it.
Rei's car is parked half a block down. I recognize it because Saitō apparently recognizes it, the dark blue sedan appearing in my awareness with the certainty of something seen many times before. She parked where she'd have sight lines to both the main entrance and the side street.
She's been here a while.
I cross the street and walk past the building entrance without stopping, checking the lobby through the glass as I pass. Security desk, one guard, cameras visible at the corners. Standard. The kind of security that keeps out opportunists but not people who know what they're doing.
I find Rei in the narrow service alley on the building's east side.
She's standing against the wall with her back to me, phone in one hand, her personal notebook open in the other, and she is so focused on whatever she's reading that she doesn't hear me until I'm four steps away. She turns fast, hand moving to her jacket, and stops.
She looks at me for a long moment.
"Bail hearing was at nine," she says.
"It ran late."
"How did you know where I was."
"Nishida told me you left with your notebook and no backup." I stop two meters from her. "There aren't many places you'd go."
She looks at the phone in my hand. Looks at my face. Something moves behind her eyes that she doesn't let reach her expression. "You shouldn't be here. You're out on bail for a murder charge. If you're seen near this building it looks like—"
"It looks like exactly what it is," I say. "Someone trying to find out who actually killed Mizore Yuna."
The alley is quiet. Above us a window is open on the third floor, thin curtain moving in the cold air, no one visible. Rei looks at it briefly, professionally, and looks back at me.
"You need to go to Nakameguro," she says.
"Tell me what's in the notebook."
"Saitō."
"Tell me what's in the notebook and then I'll decide."
She closes her eyes for exactly one second. It's the first uncontrolled thing I've seen her do. When she opens them she looks at me with the expression of someone who has run out of the energy required to keep arguing with a situation that stopped making sense eight hours ago.
She holds out the notebook.
I take it. The handwriting is dense and precise, abbreviated in places, but readable. Mizore's notes, I realize. Not Rei's. These are Mizore's working notes, or copies of them, the kind of documentation a careful journalist makes when she knows she's carrying something dangerous and wants a second location for the information.
She gave copies to Rei.
At some point before last night, Mizore Yuna gave copies of her working notes to an inspector in the Tokyo Metropolitan Police. Which means she trusted someone inside the institution that her investigation was actively working to expose. She trusted Rei specifically.
I look up. "How long had you been working with her."
Rei's jaw tightens. "Four months."
"Does anyone know."
"No one who's still on this case."
I look back at the notebook. The entries from the last two weeks are the densest. Names, dates, transaction references, a series of numbers that repeat in different combinations. At the bottom of the last page, underlined twice: SK confirmation needed. Meeting 22:00.
SK. Saitō Kurō.
Mizore needed Saitō to confirm something specific in these notes. Not just the photograph. Something in the transactions. Something that required someone who had been inside Ryūsei to recognize it.
"What did she need him to confirm," I say.
Rei is quiet for a moment. Then she turns and points at the building. "The third floor. Suite 3-C. It's registered to a logistics consulting firm called Hakurei Associates. Incorporated four years ago, no public-facing employees, contracts exclusively with municipal infrastructure projects." She pauses. "In the last two years Hakurei has been awarded eleven contracts by the Tokyo Metropolitan Government. Total value, six point three billion yen."
I look at her.
"Tomura sits on the municipal infrastructure oversight committee," she says. "As a non-voting advisory member. Which means his participation isn't logged in the public record."
Six billion yen. Eleven contracts. A Deputy Commissioner who spent three years protecting the organization that owns the company collecting the contracts.
"Ryūsei owns Hakurei," I say.
"Mizore believed so. She had the financial trail to the parent structure but not the confirmation of the human connection. She needed someone who knew Ryūsei's internal architecture well enough to identify the ownership layer." Rei looks at the building. "That's what the meeting last night was for."
And someone knew the meeting was happening.
I look at the third floor window. Still open, curtain still moving. "Has anyone gone in or out since you arrived."
"Two people in. One out. The one who left was carrying a document case." She pauses. "He was in a hurry."
Someone is moving things. Cleaning up, the way people clean up after a plan goes partially wrong. Mizore is dead but the photograph is in the official record now and Tomura knows his name is attached to this case even if only as a witness to be interviewed. He has hours, maybe less, before the financial thread gets pulled.
"We need what's in that office," I say.
"We are not doing anything." Her voice is sharp. "I am an officer on administrative leave pending case reassignment. You are out on bail for murder. Neither of us goes into that building."
"Then someone else does."
She looks at me. "What."
I take out the pre-paid phone. "Nishida has contacts I don't know about yet. But Saitō did." I look at the building, at the third floor, at the curtain moving in the cold morning air. "Saitō spent four years inside Ryūsei. He didn't leave empty-handed."
"He left alive," Rei says. "Which for Ryūsei is the same as empty-handed."
"You don't believe that."
A silence.
"No," she says quietly. "I don't."
Above us the third floor window closes. The curtain stops moving.
We stand in the alley together and I am aware, in the way you become aware of things when everything else has been stripped away, of how close she is standing. Not close by any objective measure. Close in the way that people who are trying to maintain professional distance sometimes get close without noticing, drawn by the gravity of a shared problem or something older than that.
She notices at the same time I do. She takes one step back. Looks at her notebook in my hands.
"You read faster than he did," she says.
It's a small thing. She says it like she didn't mean to say it.
I hand the notebook back. Our fingers don't touch. Almost.
"Rei-san," I say.
She looks up.
"I'm going to find out what happened in that apartment. All of it." I hold her gaze. "I need you to stay close enough to the case to catch what I find."
She looks at me for a long time. Long enough that I stop trying to read it and just let it be what it is.
"Check in with Nishida every hour," she says finally. "Don't go near that building. Don't contact anyone connected to Ryūsei." She pockets her notebook. "And don't tell me what you're planning before you do it. I need deniability."
She walks out of the alley without looking back.
I stand in the cold and I listen to her footsteps and I think that deniability is the professional word for something that has nothing professional left in it.
I look at the building one more time.
Then I call Nishida.