The former Meridian Secure Solutions technician, a thin, nervous man named Castillo, agreed to meet Jin Rae only after she'd spent two days tracking him through three different temporary addresses, each one suggesting a man actively trying to stay difficult to find. He'd finally settled at a coffee shop on the city's north side, choosing a table near the exit, his eyes flicking toward the door every few minutes throughout the conversation."I only worked installation," he said, before she'd asked a single question, his hands wrapped tight around a cup he hadn't touched. "I want that clear from the start. Whatever those things actually did once they were live, I wasn't involved in that part.""Nobody's accusing you of anything yet," Jin Rae said carefully, keeping her tone measured despite his obvious agitation. "I just need to understand what you actually installed, and what you were told it was for."Castillo glanced toward the door again before continuing, his voice dropping lower.

The formal transfer notice arrived within the week, considerably faster than Osei had expected, and Ryu's reassignment to the community liaison office became public almost immediately — a brief item in the department's internal newsletter, a handful of congratulatory messages from colleagues who clearly understood none of the strategy behind it, and a noticeable, uncomfortable silence from the people who'd watched him build the Cold Case Division from nothing just weeks earlier.He spent his first official day at the liaison office exactly as unglamorously as he'd expected — reviewing a stack of school visit requests, drafting a statement for a community newsletter, sitting through an orientation meeting that covered procedures he suspected he'd never actually need to use. It was, by any measure, precisely the kind of quiet, unremarkable work meant to make him forgettable.He met Jin Rae and Sarin that evening at a coffee shop three blocks from the precinct, deliberately chosen for it