Chapter 22 – Echoes in the Frame

The photo was wrong.

Hiroshi stared at the crime scene picture—again—and again it whispered to him.

Aya Fukuhara, dead, still clinging to the broken music box. But there was something… something odd about the frame. The angle of her neck? The placement of her fingers? No.

It was her eyes.

They looked at the camera.

"She wasn’t dead yet when it was taken," Hiroshi murmured, leaning back in his chair, one foot idly tapping against the base. "Or maybe… she was looking past it. At me."

He chuckled, low and dry. “How rude. I wasn’t ready for visitors.”

At the precinct, things were no longer subtle.

"Hiroshi, we need to talk," said Sato, his superior. Stern, professional, the kind of man who refused to crack even during earthquakes.

"I don’t like where this is going already," Hiroshi answered, twirling a pen between his fingers. "Is it about my fashion sense? I knew the red tie was a mistake."

"It’s about your behavior."

"Then yes, definitely the tie."

Sato didn’t laugh. "You’ve been… unstable. Talking to yourself. Ignoring protocols. You're a lead investigator, not a theater actor."

Hiroshi’s face turned unreadable for a beat, then brightened again with a crooked grin. “Ah. But all the world’s a stage, sir. And some of us never got a script.”

Sato stared.

"Are you listening to yourself?"

Hiroshi shrugged. “Not always. I’m far too interesting.”

The next crime scene came the day after.

A man found in an art gallery—propped up in front of a painting he had once displayed. A grotesque mirror of his own creation. Slashed across the throat, but the wound was oddly elegant. Almost… deliberate.

Beside him, a mirror stood cracked, yet carefully angled so that the corpse’s reflection appeared whole.

On the glass was smeared a single word in crimson:

"Witness."

Emiko stood silent beside Hiroshi.

“I don’t like this,” she said. “It’s escalating.”

“Oh, don’t be so dreary,” Hiroshi replied, voice rich and theatrical. “He died admiring himself. Can any of us hope for a better end?”

Emiko shot him a glare. “This isn’t funny.”

"You're right," Hiroshi whispered, expression twisting. “It’s a tragedy.”

She noticed the tremble in his fingers as he reached out to touch the mirror. And the faint shimmer in his eyes—tears? Reflection? Or something else entirely?

That night, Hiroshi sat in front of his own mirror.

He stared at himself—truly stared. The man in the reflection blinked slower. Moved differently.

"You're late," Hiroshi told the image.

It tilted its head.

Then smiled.

Flashback.

Summer. Cicadas. The stifling heat of a countryside home.

Young Hiroshi sat beside his sister—Rika. She hummed a lullaby as she folded paper cranes, dozens of them, scattering across the tatami mats.

“Do you think people go to heaven?” he asked.

She smiled without looking up. “Only if someone remembers their story.”

He frowned. “Then what about bad people?”

She paused.

“They write their own endings.”

Hiroshi blinked, back in his apartment, hands gripping the sink. His reflection did not move this time.

He laughed, breathless. “Looks like I’m getting close, Rika.”

Then, suddenly, from the shadows—a whisper.

"Hiroshi..."

He turned sharply—nothing.

Or perhaps something.

A faint outline of a figure by the door—female, pale, fleeting.

Gone in the blink of an eye.

Back at the precinct, Emiko found a note on her desk.

Typed. Anonymous.

“Check the mirror on 4th Street. Midnight. Come alone.”

She hesitated, heart pounding. And for the first time, she felt afraid.

Not of a killer.

But of what Hiroshi might become.