The police arrived in Hinagata at eight in the morning, three patrol cars and an unmarked sedan that wound through the mountain roads with sirens that echoed off the peaks like the cries of distant birds. Mahiru watched them come from the steps of the old shrine, where she had been sitting beside Sakuraba for nearly two hours, waiting for the world to arrive.
Sakuraba had not moved during the wait. He had remained kneeling on the stone steps, his hands folded in his lap, his eyes fixed on the mountains. Occasionally he would murmur something too quiet for Mahiru to hear, words that might have been prayers or apologies or simply the fragments of a life passing before his eyes. She did not interrupt him. She understood that he was saying goodbye to something—perhaps to the mountains, perhaps to the boy he had been, perhaps to the sixty-year lie that was finally ending.
The lead detective was a man named Isao Funaki, a grey-haired veteran from the Meikyo Metropolitan Police who had been assigned to the case after Kaneda's arrest. He had the weary, methodical air of someone who had seen too much to be surprised by anything but was still capable of being disappointed. He listened to Mahiru's account of the night's events, then approached Sakuraba with the formal caution that the law required.
"Takataro Sakuraba, you are under arrest on suspicion of obstruction of justice, conspiracy to commit murder, and the murders of Tetsuya Shimazaki, Osamu Kibe, and Riku. You have the right to remain silent. You have the right to an attorney. Anything you say may be used against you in a court of law."
Sakuraba rose slowly, his knees cracking with the effort. He looked smaller than he had the night before, diminished somehow, as though the confession had drained something vital from him. "I understand," he said. "I will make a full statement. I wish to cooperate fully with the investigation."
Funaki nodded to the officers flanking him. They stepped forward and placed handcuffs on Sakuraba's wrists, the metal clicking shut with a sound that was quiet but final. For a moment, Mahiru thought of the stone in her bag, the one that had struck Shimazaki sixty years ago. The handcuffs were a different kind of weight, but they carried the same meaning: an ending, and a beginning.
As the officers led Sakuraba toward the patrol cars, he paused and turned to look at Mahiru one last time.
"Write the truth," he said. "All of it. Do not make me a monster. I was a man who made monstrous choices. There is a difference."
"I know," she said.
Then he was gone, ducking into the back of a patrol car, his silver hair catching the morning light before the door closed and swallowed him from view.
The drive back to Meikyo took four hours. Mahiru sat in the passenger seat of the unmarked sedan while Detective Funaki drove, the mountains giving way to foothills and then to the sprawling suburbs of the capital. Yuriko had been taken in a separate vehicle, an ambulance that would bring her to a hospital for examination and then to a safe location where she would be reunited with her mother.
"You were very brave," Funaki said as they entered the city limits. "Or very foolish. I'm not sure which."
"Probably both."
"Samejima called me last night. He said you had gone to Hinagata alone. He was quite angry about it. I think he was also proud."
Mahiru looked out the window at the familiar streets of Meikyo, the glass towers and the crowded sidewalks and the ordinary life of the city continuing as though nothing had changed. "What happens now?"
"Now we take Sakuraba to the detention center and begin the interrogation. The prosecutor, Nogami, is already preparing the indictment. Given the evidence you've provided, and given his stated willingness to cooperate, I expect the case will move quickly."
"Will he be charged with murder?"
"Three counts, yes. Plus obstruction, conspiracy, and a dozen lesser charges. At his age, a conviction would be effectively a life sentence." Funaki paused, his hands tightening on the steering wheel. "There is something else. Kaneda has agreed to cooperate. He confirmed everything the maid told you. Sakuraba had been paying him for information for at least five years. Kaneda provided him with details about the investigation, about the witnesses, about you. That is how Sakuraba always seemed to know where you were going before you got there."
Mahiru felt a chill that had nothing to do with the winter air. "So he knew everything."
"Almost everything. He did not know about the Wada confession until it was too late. Kaneda missed that one. The copy hidden in the shrine was not something anyone expected."
The detention center was a modern facility on the eastern edge of Meikyo, a concrete tower that looked more like a corporate headquarters than a prison. Mahiru waited in the lobby while the officers processed Sakuraba. She called Takeda and dictated the outline of a story that would run the next morning. She called Samejima and listened to the old lawyer's gruff relief. She called the two Kazues and told them that it was over, that the man who had killed their fathers was in custody, that justice was finally, after sixty years, being done.
Kazue Shimazaki wept. Kazue Wada was silent for a long time, and then she said, "My father can rest now. Thank you."
In the afternoon, Mahiru returned to the newsroom. The Seiwa Inquirer was in a state of controlled frenzy, reporters shouting into telephones, editors huddled over layouts, the entire machinery of the newspaper gearing up for the biggest story it had run in decades. Takeda met her at the elevator and handed her a cup of coffee.
"You look like hell," he said.
"I feel like hell. But I'm alive."
"The board wants to run a special edition tomorrow. Full coverage. The arrest, the confession, the history. Everything. They want you to write the main story."
"I've been writing it in my head for the past four hours."
"Good. Write it here. I don't want you going home until it's done."
Mahiru sat down at her desk and began to write. The story was different now, different from the one she had published a week before. That story had been an accusation. This story was a resolution. It began with the dawn in Hinagata, with an old man kneeling in front of a shrine, and it traced the thread of sixty years back to a summer night in 1965 when a young orphan named Jiro had picked up a stone and struck down a census official named Tetsuya Shimazaki. It told the story of the four other young men who had kept the secret, and the three who had died for it, and the one who had survived long enough to see justice done. It told the story of two daughters named Kazue, each carrying a piece of the truth, each waiting for someone to come who could put the pieces together.
And it told the story of Takataro Sakuraba, the conscience of the judiciary, the voice for the voiceless, the most revered legal mind of his generation, who had built his entire life on a foundation of ash and blood.
She wrote for six hours, stopping only for coffee and the occasional question from a fact-checker. The sun set over Meikyo, and the city lights flickered on, and still she wrote. By midnight, the story was done—eight thousand words that would fill the entire front section of the special edition.
Takeda read it standing up, his coffee growing cold in his hand. When he finished, he set the pages down and looked at her with an expression she had never seen on his face before.
"This is the best thing you have ever written," he said. "It is the best thing anyone in this newsroom has ever written. It will be read in journalism schools for decades."
"It will be read because of the story, not the writing."
"No. It will be read because of both. Go home, Mahiru. Get some sleep. Tomorrow, the world reads what you wrote."
She went home, but she did not sleep. She sat at her kitchen table, the same table where she had first opened the sealed envelope from the chest on Akijima, and she thought about the long journey that had brought her from that moment to this one. The election suit that had started it all was still being resolved. The Diet was still debating the new electoral maps. The vote disparity that had prompted Emoto's lawsuit was still, technically, uncorrected. But the lie at the heart of it had been exposed, and the man who had created that lie was in a detention cell, and the truth was out in the world where it belonged.
Her phone buzzed. A message from Emoto: "The election suit plaintiffs are holding a press conference tomorrow. We want you to speak. You are part of this story now."
She typed a reply: "I'll be there."
Another message, this one from Samejima: "Nogami called. Sakuraba has given a full confession. Three murders, obstruction, conspiracy. He is not contesting any of it. The trial will be a formality. Well done."
She set the phone down and looked out the window at the city lights. Somewhere out there, in a detention cell, an old man was finally telling the truth. And somewhere out there, in a modest apartment in the eastern suburbs, a woman named Kazue Shimazaki was looking at a photograph of her father and knowing that his name had been cleared. And somewhere out there, in the mountains north of Meikyo, a woman named Kazue Wada was opening a box that had belonged to her father and reading the confession he had written before he died, knowing that his words had finally been heard.
The truth always comes, Sakuraba had said. It may take sixty years, but it always comes.
Mahiru closed her eyes and waited for the dawn.
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