We followed Nakamura through the police station’s corridors. He walked ahead, shoulders slumped, earbuds buried deep as if the world around him were nothing but background noise. The muffled sound of some electronic music leaked from the sides — too much noise for too little purpose. But there was something in his expression. He was clearly tense, sweating a little, visibly nervous.

The room he called his “workspace” was practically a nest of tangled cables, monitors flashing aimlessly, and computer parts scattered as if on discount. The place smelled like stale coffee.

Nakamura reluctantly pulled out one earbud, turned to us, and said:

— This was… strange. I opened a file on the mayor’s laptop and the system completely froze. Only one image stayed on the screen. And it’s still like that, no matter what I try.

— Froze? What did you press, the self-destruct key? Why don’t you just restart the damn thing? — Yuki said with an impatient sigh.

— I tried everything. Swapped the hard drive, checked the BIOS, even did a clean clone… but the system insists on displaying only that image. It’s like the file is implanted on another level.

He turned the monitor. The screen showed a familiar picture — the mayor, arms open, smiling at the inauguration of an orphanage. _Wings of Dawn._ That woman loved to appear benevolent. At least in front of the cameras. In the image, she was surrounded by children, as if she were some kind of saint. But it always gave me a sense of superficiality, as if the picture itself whispered that all those smiles were nothing but props.

I remembered those images too. They had been in the newspapers. She looked so proud. One of the figures most involved with orphaned children… or at least that’s what they sold. Now, her computer offered nothing but that — and the excuse that “everything was corrupted.” I don’t know much about computers, but why does it keep showing only that image? It was strange. Almost as if something didn’t want us to dig deeper. But maybe that’s just my mind playing tricks, frustration seeping in.

Nakamura clicked on another tab.

— I also checked her phone. Almost everything was wiped… except for one exchange of messages with an unidentified number. That’s the only thing that caught my attention. — Nakamura said.

The dialogue went like this:

Unknown: So, are we meeting? Where?  

Mayor: At the Wings of Dawn orphanage at 10, tonight.  

Unknown: Ok, I’ll meet you there.

Nakamura spun in his chair and added, frowning:

— The weird thing is, at the time of that conversation, the orphanage had already been closed for at least five years. By the mayor herself.

Yuki stared at the screen in silence, then turned to me:

— That’s really strange. Could it have been a lover? You know… a forbidden romance between her and some foreign intern.

— You really like making soap operas out of crime scenes, don’t you? But fine… I won’t rule it out. Even romance can hide a corpse. — I replied, scratching my head, more out of habit than doubt.

— You’re such a boring old man. So, where are we going? To Takeuchi Masanori’s wife or to the orphanage?

I stayed quiet for a moment, staring at the monitor as if it could answer for me.

— To the wife, for sure.

— Why? — Yuki asked.

— Takeuchi Masanori is the most concrete lead we have about the mayor, the children, and my daughter. The orphanage… that’s just a shot in the dark.

Yuki nodded in agreement. We said goodbye to Nakamura and slipped out through the back of the station — the front was swarming with media rats, starving for another political corpse to turn into spectacle.

We got into her car. As soon as I closed the door, the sweet, aggressive scent of tutti-frutti invaded my nose like a childish punch — strong enough to annoy, weak enough to not justify an attack.

She noticed.

— If you don’t like the smell, why don’t you just stick to your booze?

— Just drive before I give up and walk. — I grumbled, looking away.

— Oh, look at his little tantrum. Gonna cry? Does this happy little scent bother your sensitive nose?

— Go to hell, Yuki. Let’s go.

Yuki laughed. A short, light, careless laugh. And, for some reason I can’t explain, it made me want to laugh too. It was silly. But, in that instant, it felt like a pause — a fragile truce in the storm that, I knew, was still ahead.