Chapter 8: Five hours
At four in the afternoon, Sable knocked on the door and told him it was time.
Kaito was standing at the window looking at the courtyard. He had been standing there for twenty minutes. It was not because he had run out of things to think about: there were more things to think about than there was time to think them. He had simply reached the point in preparation where more preparation becomes a way of avoiding the actual moment. He recognized that point and knew it was time to stop.
"You have changed something," Sable said from the doorway. "About the approach."
It was not a question. He filed that away: she could read a room, and specifically a person in a room, well enough to detect a change in orientation from a distance.
"Yes," he said.
"Tell me."
He turned from the window. "I was going to go in with the financial evidence. I was going to confront her with it, force a response, and use that response to understand which version of the story is true." He paused. "That is what an interrogation looks like with extra steps. She will recognize the structure."
"And now?"
"Now I go in as myself," Kaito said. "Not a version of myself. Not a professional construction. I go in as myself, with everything I have figured out in the last five hours visible in how I talk about it." He looked at Sable. "Because if she is actually what I think she is, what she has been missing for twenty years is someone who could see the full picture from the outside and understand why she made the choices she made." He paused. "And if I am wrong about what she is, then showing her an honest mind is still the most disorienting thing I can do to someone who is expecting a performance."
Sable looked at him for a moment.
"That is a very vulnerable approach," she said.
"Yes," Kaito said. "It is."
"If you are wrong about her—"
"Then five hours from now I will be dead and it will not matter," Kaito said. "And if I am right about her, then a performance would not work anyway. She is too good." He looked at Sable directly. "What is the version where I am actually right about her?"
Sable was quiet.
"I do not know," she said finally. And then, more quietly: "I have been watching her for three years. I know her patterns better than almost anyone in this organization. And I still do not know if she is what Tanaka thinks she is or what you think she is." A pause. "That uncertainty is why you are necessary. I am too close to see it clearly."
They took a car to Umeda. Kaito sat in the back seat and watched Osaka go by: the elevated expressways, the department stores, and the rivers cutting between the buildings. The particular late afternoon light turned everything slightly gold before the evening took it back. This was the city he had been living in for seven months, the backdrop of his current performance, going about its business without any interest in whether he lived or died tonight.
He thought about the in between feeling. It was the quality he shared with Kira, across every other difference between them. It was the sense of watching from outside.
He thought about his father performing traditional Kyoto culture for tourists. He had done it so well for so long that Kaito had eventually stopped being able to find the boundary between the performance and the person.
He thought about the medical file detail. The hospital. The sick man. There were four months that separated a hospital visit from four disappearances.
He did not have the answer. He had the shape of the answer, the place in the architecture where the answer had to live. He was going to walk into a room and see if the person across from him was willing to put it there.
The car stopped.
The Umeda Grand Hotel was tall and clean and lit against the darkening sky. Five hours left.
Kaito got out of the car.
Sable touched his arm briefly, which he did not expect. It was not a grip, just a touch: the briefest possible acknowledgment that there was a person inside the professional.
"She is going to try to read you the moment you walk in," Sable said. "You know that."
"I know," Kaito said.
"She is very good."
"I know," Kaito said.
"Do not try to be unreadable," Sable said. "She will read the attempt. Let her read you. Just make sure what she reads is true."
Kaito looked at her. He saw the scar at her left eyebrow. He saw the tiredness she was managing, the same tiredness as this morning, the continuous low level drain of someone who has been carrying something heavy for a long time.
"How did you get the scar?" he said.
She blinked. It was the first unguarded response he had seen from her.
"That is not relevant to anything," she said.
"I know," he said. "I was just asking."
A very brief pause.
"A man in Rotterdam," she said. "Six years ago. He had a ring on his right hand and he was faster than I had estimated." She said it flatly, as pure information, and then: "I was fine."
"I know you were," Kaito said. "You seem like someone who is always fine."
Something moved across her face. It was something that had no professional name.
"Go," she said.
He went.