Time passed in the dark while the poison thickened, and when at last sitting and stillness became their own destructive force, Munroe returned to the bike and then to Bradford’s apartment. She’d expected to face a crime scene but found the hallway empty. Eventually the police would come, they’d have to come, violating Bradford’s home in a search for motive and corroborating evidence, but she’d be gone by then.

She unlocked the door to quiet orderliness and the familiar fragrance of Bradford’s cologne lingering in the air, mixing the surreal into something only half-true. Munroe shut herself inside, closed her eyes, and leaned against the door. Then slammed the back of her head into the metal frame.

The pain was distraction, a break from the denial and disbelief that threatened to swallow her whole. She’d spent years running from the hope of happiness because in emptiness she had nothing to lose. She’d stayed away from Bradford to protect him, and now, having finally given in and tasted peace, here they were again, unable to escape the orbit of loss.

Munroe crossed the hall for the bedroom and paused in the doorway, mocked by the unmade bed, the clothes on the floor, the armoire doors still half open as Bradford had left them, in a rush to get to work after that early-morning call: fate’s cruel laughter at what was, and what wasn’t, and what had possibly never been.

She grabbed the laptop from beneath the pillow and took the computer to the living room. She inserted the thumb drive and found surveillance footage as Okada had promised. She watched through multiples of what were mostly chronologically ordered viewpoints of the same thirty-minute time frame, but only when the body was removed from the stairwell did she begin to understand.

The victim was one of the Chinese women that Bradford had pointed out over lunch. Tightened around her neck, presumably the weapon that had killed her, was a belt that Munroe would have recognized at any distance, no matter how grainy the footage. She paused the clip and leaned closer, staring at the black-and-white pixilated strip of leather and gaudy buckle. She traced her thumb against the image, replaying what Okada had said, correlating Bradford’s actions with what showed on-screen.

Bradford had known he was trapped from the moment he saw the body. Even if he’d run, he never would have gotten off the island, and running would have only confirmed his guilt. So he’d waited for the police to come.

And never called.

Munroe stood and, fists clenched, strode to the bedroom.

She threw open the armoire doors and tore through Bradford’s things.

He’d obviously not been wearing the belt when he was arrested, but it wasn’t here either. God, he would never be that stupid.

She slammed the doors and returned to the couch, closed her eyes and rubbed her palms over them. She walked backward through the days, attempting to account for the last time she’d seen the belt—a couple of weeks, perhaps—hating that she’d never thought to question where it was.

She went through the footage again, searching for clues in what remained invisible. The murder itself had taken place off camera: a body left behind with only the smallest glimpse of the killer’s hand. Nothing available in the moments before or the moments after, no lead-in angles from other cameras that would give a view of who this person was, and the only way for that to have happened was for the footage to have been tampered with.

There was a limited number of people who had access to the security systems, but Bradford was one of them and she would place money on it having been his clearance that had accessed the files.

Munroe closed the computer and leaned back against the couch. She tilted her head up and stared at the ceiling.

A body, missing footage, and a unique murder weapon: These were clearly drawn lines pointing to only one guilty party, an intentional narrative that left no room for doubt or mistake, evidence laid out so neatly that it was too convenient.

Surely anyone who’d worked in law enforcement for any length of time would find this suspicious. Wouldn’t they?

Munroe sighed and dropped her head to her knees.

That type of thinking was a made-for-TV melodrama.

This was Japan, not the United States, but human nature was universal. Arrest and prosecution were never as much about guilt or innocence as they were about belief, bias, and the potential for winning the case. Easy answers and ready-made culprits made everyone in the justice food chain happy, so why should this be any different just because it was Bradford? He was a foreigner in a highly xenophobic nation—worse, an American, from the country of perceived stupid, violent people—and he was a trained killer who’d taken life many times.

Munroe searched for calm, the reptile beneath the surface, the indifference that severed emotion from fact and allowed her to plot through morass and confusion, but the animal brain was sleeping. She swore and kicked the coffee table and set the laptop and the fruit bowl rattling.

This was not who she was or who she was meant to be.

Emotion was weakness. She’d known this. Lived by this. And yet had so stupidly allowed herself to fall, believing in the fantasy that in giving herself over to what terrified her, she might find peace.

Instead she’d grown soft and useless. Cut her own legs out from beneath her.

She stood and walked to the kitchen, ripped the notepad off the fridge, yanked the pen off its accompanying string, and as a way to force clarity, began to sketch. There were three certainties: an innocent man; a dead woman; and an emerging technology that the company was trying to protect.

If the woman’s murder had only been intended as the ultimate silencing tool, or a theft prevention device, or a subterfuge for some other nefarious plan, it would have been far simpler and cleaner for the killer to dispatch her off-site and avoid whatever effort had gone into making Bradford the guilty party.

That made Bradford the target, and the dead woman a placeholder, and herself a bystander, helpless without facts.

Munroe drew the last of a line within a web of circles and set the pad on the counter, staring at the unknowns while the question that would answer all questions fed on them like a parasitic tumor.

Why?