The door to Josh’s office opened with an electrical whirr that sounded like it could have come from a synthesizer. Almost unconsciously, he hummed along to it, reminding himself of the note his wife had told him it was with her perfect pitch. Roughly an F, slightly flat. He wondered if it was her before lifting his gaze off his desk and to the door – it was roughly the time for her weekly check-in.

To his disappointment, he saw Jenn instead.

“Did I forget to knock?” she asked apologetically from the open doorway.

“Come on in,” Josh replied and wagged his fingers in a welcoming motion, forgiving her for the intrusion.

Jenn nodded gratefully and walked past the threshold into Josh’s office. The door slid shut automatically behind her. “I take it you talked to Miss Harady?” Josh inquired while Jenn took a seat on the other side of his desk.

“Yep. And you won’t believe what she said.”

“Try me.” Josh did his best not to come across as chal-lenging with his tone.

“Well, for one, she’s afraid that all of her coworkers want to silence her. I don’t buy it, for what it’s worth.” Neither did Josh. He nodded in agreement and let Jenn go on. “But here’s the kicker: she wants to get in the witness protection pro-gram now. Can’t wait till she’s recovered.”

Josh crossed his hands on his desk and propped his chin on them before saying his piece. “I don’t blame her. Wasn’t planning on waiting anyway.”

“Is that to say you’re already on it?”

“Not just yet. But I will talk to the witness protection team today. Just need to give her file a once-over to make sure nothing crucial is missing.”

“She did give us a pretty thorough testimony. Do you really need to do that?”

“I do. It’s called following protocol.”

Jenn sighed, more so in amusement at Josh’s punctuality than frustration at the delay. “I know. I’m just worried about Miss Harady. She’s scared for her life, you know.”

“So am I, make no mistake. But standard procedure is standard procedure.”

The sigh Jenn produced in response to that statement sounded a lot more frustrated. Less so at Josh and more at what the standard procedure amounted to. She prepared to get up and leave, leaning over the desk and muttering with a sense of playful authority, despite Josh technically being her superior: “Today. Alright?”

“I’m a man of my word, Jenn.”

Jenn nodded in a manner that conveyed both agreement and gratefulness. She knew that when Josh said he was a man of his word, he meant it. He would talk to the witness protection team today. She straightened herself and turned on her heels, hollering from the doorway when she was a foot away from it: “Want me to keep the door open for Momoko?”

“She on her way?”

“Yeah. Ran into her in the elevator on my way back.”

“Sure.”

Jenn smiled and nodded, swiping her fingers across the Hold button on the doorbell so the door would stay open for Momoko.

Twenty minutes into her lunch break, Maria still hadn’t touched her food. She’d only been staring at it, as if trying to find some answers in it, occasionally pinching some noodles between her chopsticks and letting them fall back down into the container. Normally, she’d be munching on her lunch like a hungry chee-tah that just got its jaws on a deer’s rump, but something had made her lose her appetite. And she knew what it was – she just didn’t want to remind herself of it.

“What’s wrong, Maria?” came the concerned voice of a coworker on the other side of the dining room table.

Finally, she snapped back to reality and looked up. It was Deren.

Maria let out a heavy sigh. The memory of their conver-sation in the morning’s chaos hit her like a truck. “Well…” she began with a slight hesitance to her tone. But she knew she could trust Deren. “I guess speaking of dead parents…”

“Your dad?”

“Yeah.”

Deren exhaled heavily, loading all of the sympathy he could muster into the action. “Sorry for your loss. Guess we’re in the same boat today, huh?”

“Mhm. In more ways than one.”

“What do you mean?” A mix of shock and intrigue wrote itself onto Deren’s face.

“My dad was also killed. Stabwound through the heart. Not something a cop with an itchy trigger finger would do, granted. I’ve already started looking into it.”

“Holy shit,” Deren half-whispered in surprise. “That’s gotta hurt something extra. Anything on the Net about it?”

“Nope. It’s all Harashima in there. Guessing the news day wasn’t slow enough for the press to report on it. Gotta do my own investigative work.”

“Sure you wanna go down that path? Wouldn’t it be easier to just go straight to the police?”

“I do plan to,” Maria muttered in a conspiratorial tone and paused dramatically before continuing: “Eventually.”

“Eventually?” Deren repeated.

“It’s complicated, alright? I was on a call with an officer this morning. That’s how I got the info. Sadly they don’t know much more than I do, and I promised I’d help. And that’s gonna entail getting my own hands dirty.”

Deren let out a concerned sigh before replying. “Suit yourself. Just don’t get ‘em too dirty.”

“I’ll do my best. Don’t worry about me, okay?” A futile request, Maria knew, given how close she and Deren had grown. She appreciated his concern, though.

“Can’t promise,” Deren muttered, trying to sound as humorous as he could given the context of the conversation. Which was to say not very.

“Love you too,” Maria shot back with significantly more humor and gave Deren a caring pat on the shoulder. In that same moment, she started to feel her appetite returning. She glanced at the giant holographic clock on the dining room wall and concluded that she didn’t have time to finish her lunch here. She’d have to eat on the way back to her office.

She got up and announced to Deren: “I’m going back to my office. Have a great rest of your day.”

“You too,” said Deren as Maria put one foot in front of the other, the heaviness in her motions conveying determination and fear in equal amounts. There was no knowing the depth of the shit she was getting herself in. But she needed to look into her father’s death. Preferably without police interference, at least for now.

Something quite curious caught Josh’s eye as he perused Enez Harady’s file, munching on the protein bar Momoko had brought him. Nothing had stuck out in her testimony – it was consistent with the info she’d given in the interrogation at the DanariTek facility. No, the part that stuck out to him was in her criminal record.

Two accounts of stabbing with intention to kill, both from about two years ago, back when she worked as a pros-titute at an unnamed private establishment. Shadow work, maybe? But that wasn’t the part Josh cared about. His eyes hovered over the name of the victim.

He punched in Jenn’s ID number on his wrist comm and waited for her to pick up. A holographic projection of her torso produced itself in front of him when she did. “Yeah?” she hol-lered in a cheerful tone, evidently hoping for some good news. Too bad Josh was about to give the opposite kind.

“Witness protection is gonna have to wait,” he muttered regretfully. “Some more questioning of our stabbing victim is in order first.”

“What? Why?” Jenn stuttered in disbelief.

“Found something interesting in her criminal record. Two accounts of stabbing from two years back, with intention to kill. Guess the name of the victim.”

“You don’t mean—”

“I wish I didn’t.” Josh paused for a second, making the upcoming reveal perhaps unintentionally dramatic. “But yeah. She’s got a murder attempt on Harashima.”