In the Law School's graduate course, Criminal Litigation Practice, the professor was explaining the exclusionary rule for illegal evidence. The presentation had reached slide seventeen.
Kannazuki sat by the window in the third row, his notebook open and his fountain pen resting in the middle of the page.
His phone vibrated.
He didn't move.
It vibrated again.
Then a third time.
Three consecutive vibrations, evenly spaced-a custom alert he had set. Only messages from that anonymous messaging app triggered this pattern.
During the break, he went to the fire escape at the end of the corridor.
He took out his phone and opened the anonymous chat.
Tanaka had sent a passage without punctuation:
[All seven confirmed dead I investigated for three weeks Every one of them deserved to die Matsuda Kono and five other serving officers involved in organized crime and corruption Lord Kira I have not betrayed your trust]
Kannazuki didn't reply.
He opened the NHK news app and searched for keywords.
The top story was three days old-seven serving officers of the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department had died of sudden cardiac arrest on the same day, prompting the commissioner of the National Police Agency to hold an emergency press conference.
But today, there was a follow-up.
The headline was brief:
[Cardiac arrest update: one deceased officer held an administrative post, colleagues say he "never handled criminal cases"]
He tapped it.
The report was short.
Six of the seven deceased officers had varying degrees of ties to the Shibuya group, an organized crime syndicate, and the direction of the investigation was clear. But the seventh-Inspector Kenichi Murakami, forty-three-had belonged to the Metropolitan Police Department's General Affairs Department Personnel Section. His duties were internal records management and staff assignments.
Kenichi Murakami's name had appeared on a shift handover record for