The south side of Yaoyorozu's building had a problem.
I found it in the first thirty seconds: a loading bay that sat perpendicular to the main entrance, partially screened by a concrete pillar and a recycling enclosure that someone had positioned just wrong enough to be useful to anyone who wanted sightlines without proximity. It wasn't an accident. Recycling enclosures don't migrate. Someone had requested the placement, or approved it, or simply noted it existed and let it stay useful.
I didn't stop walking.
Pausing near a surveillance point is the kind of mistake that gets people noticed, and I had forty-three minutes and no interest in being noticed. I kept my pace even — not slow, not purposeful, just a man moving south with somewhere to be — and filed the enclosure's position the same way I filed everything: catalogued, cross-referenced, held.
Camie's last message had been fourteen minutes ago. *He parks on Tsurumi before the morning window then relocates. Haven't found second position yet.* Shinkawa didn't stay still. That was deliberate. A man who uses two parking positions and a sun visor as operational habits had been doing this long enough that the habits had become instincts. You didn't learn that kind of patience in an afternoon.
Which meant he hadn't started watching Yaoyorozu because of her municipal inquiry.
He'd been watching something in this district before she ever submitted the paperwork. She'd walked into an existing operation and asked the wrong question from inside it, and now she was the most visible part of a thing she didn't know the shape of. The thought sat in my chest with a particular quality I'd learned to recognize: not urgency, exactly. Pressure. The kind that builds until something has to give.
I crossed the street at the light, turned east, and slowed fractionally near a convenience store without stopping. Through the glass of the store's refrigerator section, reflected and slightly warped, I could see the approach to the building's main entrance.
Nothing wrong. Two salary workers eating early lunch on the steps. A delivery truck blocking the near lane. The grey-coat woman from the café two blocks back was gone — she'd peeled off at the last corner, route divergent, definitively civilian. I'd been tracking her as background habit, not real suspicion, and her exit confirmed it.
My phone buzzed.
Hatsue. *Aoba Property Solutions shows a registered agent change eight months before Shirabe incorporated. Same notary for both filings. Same notary also appears on a commercial lease for a building two streets east of Yaoyorozu's. Don't know if it means anything yet.*
I typed back: *It means the same person was building infrastructure in this district before both companies existed. Keep going.*
Two streets east. I knew which building she meant without asking — I'd walked past it twice in the last hour because it sat on the natural approach vector from the train station, and I'd marked it the way I marked everything with obstructed sightlines and low foot traffic: as potential. Now it had a name attached, or close to one. A notary was a connection, not a person. But connections were what you pulled until something came loose.
The 2PM meeting was in thirty-eight minutes.
Whatever Yaoyorozu was walking into — and I still didn't know if it was a trap, a test, a routine follow-up, or something genuinely procedural — she was walking into it with partial information. That was my doing. I'd held back the Shirabe link because giving her the full shape of it would change how she moved, and I needed her to move naturally for at least another hour. Controlled disclosure. It felt cleaner when I didn't name it.
I stopped at a vending machine on the corner, bought water I didn't need, and used the twelve seconds it took to survey the street south.
That was when I saw the car.
Not Shinkawa's grey sedan — a different one. White, older model, angled into a metered space with a forty-minute limit that had very clearly expired. The driver's mirror was adjusted wrong: tilted slightly toward the building entrance rather than traffic, the adjustment so subtle that a parking officer would walk past it without registering. Someone sitting in that car could watch the entrance without appearing to watch it.
The car was empty.
Which meant whoever had been sitting in it had moved.
I walked to the vending machine on the opposite corner. Bought nothing. Stood with my back to the building and watched the reflections in the pharmacy window across the street — entrance, steps, recycling enclosure, loading bay — and felt the pressure in my chest tighten into something useful.
The watcher wasn't in the car. The watcher was already inside.
Thirty-six minutes to 2PM, and whoever had been running eleven days of surveillance on this building had repositioned before the meeting. Not to watch from outside. Inside meant access. Inside meant the insider hypothesis wasn't a hypothesis anymore.
I put the water in my bag and started moving.