Thirty minutes from Shin-Osaka station Tai Okada said, “I know you learned something important from the mother. I’d like to understand.”

Munroe glanced at him, at his shaggy hair and the clothes that on their second day of wear didn’t seem all that different from his daily sloppiness. In this, he gave off an air of carelessness, of something less than smart and easy to dismiss, but his disguise was better than the one she wore. Okada knew; he was simply second-guessing his judgment after having wrongly suspected his boss of murder.

“What if it had been your brother?” she said. “Wouldn’t you try to regain honor for your family, take revenge, ruin the one who did this?”

Okada didn’t answer.

“How long has Tagawa been with the company?”

“Longer than me.”

“Just over five years,” she said. “How long has the lab downstairs been working on this secret project?”

“Quite some time.”

His caginess was irritating. Okada had made progress but was still influenced by having been born in a culture of shaming, afraid of making mistakes and the humiliation of being wrong. “Come on, Tai,” she said. “There are no incorrect answers, and I know you see it.”

“Nearly six years,” he said.

“Which is?”

“Close to the same time the brother committed suicide.”

“Yes,” she said. “Motivation.”

“It doesn’t work,” he said. “If a man sets out to destroy a company, to steal from a company, maybe even to recover the same technology that resulted in his brother’s firing, why be the one to push for an outsider to come when that outsider’s specific purpose is to discover his plans?”

“Pushing to find the thief makes him look innocent.”

“But we never suspected—nobody could have suspected Tagawa as the source of the theft—he is perfect in every way. Bringing in the outsider ruined everything.”

“True,” Munroe said, and she waited for the first half of the equation to fully sink in. In a way, it wasn’t fair to Okada; she had far more pieces of the puzzle than he did, but she wasn’t toying with him. He’d see the picture easier if it was laid out piece by piece than dumped in one big pile.

She said, “What if he’d been getting away with it for years and was certain he wouldn’t be discovered? What if someone else in the company was stealing the same secrets and undercutting his plans and payments, and what if Tagawa couldn’t figure out who they were but felt confident enough in his own invisibility to take the risk of hiring someone to find the competing thief?”

Okada’s eyes widened. Possibilities danced behind them. “Do you think?” he said. “Is it possible that Miles suspected the wrong person? The right person? You know what I mean.”

Bradford had certainly suspected something, but if he’d known who or what, he wouldn’t be sitting in jail right now. Munroe studied the seatback in front of her. “He didn’t know,” she said.

“Then why? Why would someone like Tagawa, if it is Tagawa, take all this risk?”

“It’s possible Miles was close without knowing what he knew. Maybe Tagawa felt a trap closing in.”

They both fell silent and Munroe’s thoughts kept churning.

Bradford hadn’t known; she didn’t know: didn’t know which of the players had set Bradford up or why; had no plausible alternative scenario to offer the prosecution in exchange for a murder weapon and easy answers; had nothing solid enough to grind the wheels of injustice to a halt while the countdown to Bradford’s formal charges kept ticking steadily on.