The body of a young man is found floating in Tokyo Bay. But he didn't drown and his death was no accident-Ryota Uetsuji had been shot. Tracing his movements, the police find out that he'd been reported missing the week before by his live-in girlfriend Sonoka Shimauchi, but when detectives from the Homicide Squad go to interview her, she is nowhere to be found. Sonoka taken time off from work, some of her clothes and effects are missing from the apartment she had shared with the deceased. And when the detectives learn that she had been the victim of domestic abuse at the hands of her boyfriend, they presume that she is the killer. But even though they can't find, the police learn that her alibi is airtight-Sonoka was hours away in Kyoto when Ryota disappeared, forcing Tokyo Metropolitan Police Detectives Kusanagi and Utsumi to reexamine their assumptions and restart their investigation. But if Sonoko didn't kill her abusive lover, then who did? A thin thread of association leads the detectives to their old consultant, brilliant physicist Manabu Yukawa, known in the department as "Detective Galileo." With Sonoko still missing, the detectives investigate other connections-an eccentric artist, who was Sonoko's mother figure after her own single mother passed; and an older woman who is the owner of a hostess club. And how is the issing Sonoko continuing to stay one step ahead of the police searching for her? It's up to Detective Galileo to find the nearly hidden threads of history and coincidence that connect the people around the bloody murder-which, surprisingly, connect to his own traumatic past-to unravel not merely the facts of the crime but the helix that ties them all together.