Nishida picks up on the second ring.
"You're not in Nakameguro," he says.
"I'm in Kōtō ward."
A silence that manages to be both unsurprised and disapproving simultaneously. "Is Rei with you."
"She was. She left." I move to the end of the alley, check the street, lean against the wall with the building still visible at the edge of my sightline. "Someone is cleaning out suite 3-C. Third floor of the Hakurei building. They've already moved at least one document case."
"I know what Hakurei is."
"Then you know we're running out of time before whatever Mizore was building disappears into a shredder." I watch the building entrance. Nothing moving. "Nishida-san. When Saitō left Ryūsei eighteen months ago. How did he leave."
The silence this time is different. Longer. Textured in a way the previous silences weren't.
"What do you mean," he says.
"I mean that people don't walk away from organizations like Ryūsei without a reason for those organizations to let them walk. Leverage, or something that functions like it. Something that makes killing them more expensive than tolerating them." I keep my voice even. "Saitō left and he's been alive for eighteen months. He's been left alone. That's not sentiment. That's calculation."
Another silence.
"You're asking me," Nishida says slowly, "about his insurance."
"Yes."
A long breath on the other end. The sound of someone deciding how much of a held thing to release. "He never told me directly. He was careful about that. But there was a conversation, fourteen months ago, when he was setting up the Shinjuku apartment. He said something I didn't ask him to clarify because clarifying it would have made me responsible for knowing it."
"What did he say."
"He said that if anything happened to him, I should look for the thing he loved most before he loved nothing."
I stand with that for a moment. The thing he loved most before he loved nothing. It's the kind of sentence that sounds like a riddle constructed by someone who needed the answer to be findable by the right person and invisible to everyone else.
"Do you know what that means," I say.
"I have a guess." He pauses. "But my guess requires context about Saitō that I don't know how to give you without it sounding like I'm explaining a man to himself."
"Try."
Another breath. "Before Ryūsei. Before any of it. Saitō grew up in Kōenji. His mother ran a small used bookshop on a side street near the station. She died seven years ago. The shop closed." A pause. "He used to say it was the last place he felt like a person instead of a function."
A bookshop in Kōenji.
Something stirs in the body I'm wearing. Not a memory exactly. Closer to the physical residue of a memory, the way a place lives in your muscles before it lives in your mind. A sensation of narrow aisles and paper and a particular quality of afternoon light.
Saitō left something there. In a closed bookshop in Kōenji that belonged to his dead mother. He left it there because it was the last place anyone who wanted to hurt him would think to look, and because part of him, the part that survived four years inside Ryūsei without becoming only that, needed the insurance to live somewhere that still meant something.
"The shop," I say. "Is it still standing."
"As far as I know. The building is owned by a property company. They've been trying to redevelop the block for three years but there's a zoning dispute that keeps stalling." A pause. "Saitō retained a small storage right in the lease. Technically it was his mother's. Technically it expired when she died. But the property company never enforced it."
Because Ryūsei never needed them to. Because Saitō was useful alive and contained and the storage right in a dead woman's bookshop was too small to bother with.
Until last night.
"How long before Tomura's people make the same connection," I say.
"If they know about the bookshop at all, which I'm not certain they do, they'll start pulling Saitō's background within the next few hours. Property records, family history, known addresses." He pauses. "You have a window. It's not large."
I look at the Hakurei building one more time. Suite 3-C and its disappearing documents. Rei and her notebook and the four months of work she carried out of the precinct in her personal bag. The window on the third floor, closed now, curtain still.
I can't go in there. Not without making everything worse.
But Kōenji I can do.
"I need to know one more thing," I say. "The conversation you had with Saitō fourteen months ago. The one you didn't ask him to clarify." I pause. "Was Rei in his life then."
The silence is brief but specific. "They ended before he moved to Shinjuku. She ended it. He didn't argue." Another pause. "He didn't argue, but he kept the lease in the ward where she worked. I always thought that was either sentiment or strategy and I could never decide which."
I think about a dark blue sedan parked half a block from a building, sight lines to both entrances. I think about four months of working with a journalist on a case that put her directly in the orbit of the man she'd walked away from.
Maybe she couldn't decide either.
"I'll check in at eleven," I say, and end the call.
The taxi ride to Kōenji takes twenty minutes through mid-morning traffic. I sit in the back and I look at Tokyo through the window and I think about muscle memory and the way a body carries its history in places the mind doesn't record. The driver takes a route that feels familiar before I can explain why, and when we turn onto the side street near the station my hands know the fare before the meter shows it.
The bookshop is still there.
Smaller than it felt a moment ago. A narrow frontage between a dry cleaner and a closed restaurant, the signage faded to the point where the characters are more suggested than readable. The front window is papered over from inside. The door has two locks, a standard cylinder and a bar lock below it, and a faded notice from the property company dated fourteen months ago requesting contact regarding lease renewal.
No one contacted them.
I stand on the pavement and I look at the door and I wait for Saitō's hands to tell me something useful.
They do.
The key is not on the ring that was in the apartment. I don't have the apartment keys at all, they're in an evidence bag somewhere in the Shinjuku precinct. But the bar lock has a combination, four digits, and my right hand moves to it with the particular certainty of a motion performed so many times it stopped requiring thought, and the numbers it enters are, I realize after I've entered them, the month and year of his mother's death.
The lock opens.
The cylinder lock is more complicated. No key. I stand with my hand on it and I wait and I think about a twenty-two year old economics student from Paris who has never picked a lock in his life, and about the body he's wearing that spent four years learning skills that don't appear on any resume.
My hands find the tension and the angle without my permission.
Forty seconds.
The door opens.
Inside is dark and cold and smells like paper and time. The shelves are still there, mostly empty, a few books left behind in the process of closing, the kind that weren't worth packing. A wooden counter near the back with a register that hasn't worked in years. Afternoon light, thin and gray, pressing through the gaps in the window paper.
I move to the counter.
Behind it, below the register shelf, there is a panel in the baseboard that doesn't quite match the surrounding wood. Recent installation, or recent enough. Saitō's hands know the pressure point, the slight inward push before it releases outward, and the panel swings open.
Inside: a waterproof bag, sealed. Inside the bag, a hard drive, a folded document, and a phone. Older model, the kind people buy when they don't want a record of the purchase.
I take the hard drive out and hold it.
Whatever is on this, it was enough. Enough to make Ryūsei let a man walk away. Enough to keep him alive for eighteen months in an apartment in the ward where his ex-girlfriend worked. Enough that a journalist died last night to prevent it from surfacing, and a Deputy Commissioner is currently managing the investigation into that death.
I put everything back in the waterproof bag.
I'm standing up when I hear the step behind me.
Not Saitō's memory this time. Just physics. Weight on old floorboards, the specific creak of the third plank from the door, and the soft sound of someone who is good at being quiet but not quite good enough.
I turn slowly.
A man is standing in the doorway. Thirties, compact, the kind of stillness that isn't calm but control. He's looking at the bag in my hands and then at my face and his expression does the thing that everyone's expression does, the recalibration, but his version is colder than Rei's and colder than Nishida's and carries something underneath it that is neither recognition nor surprise.
It's assessment.
"Saitō-san," he says. His voice is light. Almost friendly. "We've been looking for you."
He's not police.
I know that the way Saitō's body knows the combination to a bar lock, without needing to be told, without needing to verify.
I look at the bag. I look at the door behind him, partially blocked but not fully. I look at his hands, visible, nothing in them yet, which means he came to talk first and the other option is available but not preferred.
They want the drive. They don't want a body in Kōenji on top of a body in Shinjuku. Not today. Not while a case is already open.
I have, I estimate, about thirty seconds of conversation before that calculation changes.
"You have the wrong person," I say.
He smiles. It doesn't reach anything above his mouth. "We really don't."