practically around the clock. Why don’t you take a few days off and

get some rest? You’ve earned it.”

What really hurt was that some young Turk like Sakahara would

get to take advantage of all the work he’d done. All the painstaking

hours of working with his team of Bureau agents and police, using

anyone who could be spared, from deputy field agents down to

administrative personnel, to compile B. O. T. records of every adept

of the wizard and sorcerer levels in Japan, and obtain from

Customs the records of every visiting wizard and sorcerer who had

recently entered the country, and checking them against their

whereabouts on the nights the murders were committed. It was a

slow and exhaustive process, one that required extreme delicacy in

making the necessary inquiries, as many such adepts, particularly

sorcerers in the corporate sector, were not without powerful social

and political connections. Lacking any other hard evidence to go on,

there had been no choice but to resort to his tried-and-true,

plodding, methodical approach. The list of potential suspects had

been long, indeed, and not a few feathers had been ruffled—which

could well be another reason why he would be taken off the

case—but as a result, the list had already been reduced

considerably as suspects were gradually eliminated. Whoever took

the case over would get the benefit of that and would receive all the

credit when the killer was eventually apprehended, as Akiro had no

doubt he would be. It was only a matter of time. Unfortunately, his

own time had just about run out.

As he stared at his reflection in the mirror, his eyes grew hard. It

doesn’t matter, he told himself. Office politics didn’t matter. The

media didn’t matter. His career didn’t matter. The only thing that

mattered was stopping the killer. Keiko was right. She had not

married a quitter. In all his years of service, he had never yet failed

to get the job done. He had never given up. He was not about to

stop now and wallow in self-pity. They could take him off the case,

but they could not control what he did on his own time. And he

would have that time. Watanabe would give him leave, if for no

other reason than to get him out of the way. But he would not be

cut off. He had a lot of friends in the Bureau, people he had worked

with for years, people who could keep him posted, unofficially, of