Jessica knows her way around a computer. Thoroughly. It's a part of her job, to be able to dig into people's lives and what they share on the internet, public records (Diploma's, police records and the like) so finding the two jackasses publicly discussing her current topic of interest was easy.
They're chatting about it on a public forum, ignoring all the much wiser user who are telling them not to do something so monumentally stupid online in a-- and she has to reiterate this, because how fucking stupid it was-- PUBLIC forum. Just before the mods can take down the thread, which they are very quick to do, one of the users posts a throwaway number. The type you can get from some shitty site with no fee and an expiry.
Jessica is almost tempted to make her own throwaway number just to message them and call them a fucking idiot.
Still, watching this interaction go down had informed her quite a bit about this mysterious organization, which even until then had managed to evade her eyes. Still, she was still going blind regarding this situation, because simply there was nothing to see, just no gone posts and threads, and somehow there was even less on the streets of New York. This was all too kept under wraps for her liking. It couldn't get any more suspicious.
She thought about reaching out to Frank, but he was hard to get a hold of on a good day, the only way of finding him she had was to either talk to his journalist friend (she did not trust journalists, though, no matter how in favour of powered people they were. They're always interested in their story, and Jessica had no interest in being any part of it.) or to try and track him down herself. While tracking anyone else down would be no issue, Frank was not like anyone else, so finding him was not dissimilar to finding a needle in a haystack. A pointless endeavor.
So, she was kind of caught in limbo as to what to do. For all her big talk to Madani, she really didn't have much to add here. She was just as clueless as the cops themselves, and didn't that feel shitty. She wasn't even sure of who else knew about all this. Murdock probably knew since Karen did, through the grapevine Luke would likely hear from Claire, what with her being Murdock's nurse as well, and through that, it would all spread. But still left her with the now, and right now she had absolutely jackshit to pursue.
The only vigilante other than Frank that she knew for sure was aware of this situation was the Spider-kid… Spider-Boy… Whatever stupid nickname he went by while running around beating bad guys in his pajamas.
The solution was clear, to go find out what he knows about it all, but she really, really didn't want to expand her pool of vigilantes. The more vigilantes she knows the more likely she'll end up involved with more super-people situations, and for god sake, she was still recovering from Kilgrave and the hand. For all she knows associating with this kid will open a trove of new super villains trying to kill her and the others she loves, and she doesn't want that.
… But she knows she has to. It's a necessary sacrifice, because maybe talking to this new vigilante will open up the floodgates, but the current situation right now is looking really, really bad, and bad never gets better unless you make a move to try and correct it. And Jessica knows a hell of a lot more intimately than others.
(Hiding from Kilgrave had done her no good, she had only been frightened, feeling like she was exposed out in the open, like a predator would leap from the shadows at any moment to get her. And while killing him hadn't felt any good, the constant fear that he would show up to drag her back had simmered away to nothing. In its wake was the judgement. Some saw her as some super hero or vigilante, while others saw her as a merciless killer. She'd like to think she was neither.)
She knows she has to make the right decision, even if the decision she has to make was not the one she wanted to.
Christ, since when had she become such a self-sacrificing prick?
Still, she finds herself on the streets of New York, looking for the red and blue spandex wearing vigilante to pull him aside and have a chat.
She had looked into his usual routes and gone for his most common one he took during the weekdays. From his usual schedule of out all day and into the evening on weekends and only out in the evenings during weekdays, he was likely still in school, and boy did that piss her right off. She knew he was wearing Stark tech, that the man had made the suit for the kid, and she thought it was downright irresponsible for that man to have given some high-school kid a fancy suit so he can go fight crime. Jessica wasn't the most responsible individual, but at least she knows that there's a damn line, and bringing kids into shit was crossing it.
She keeps her head turned upwards, watching for him to pop up somewhere above her head.
For over an hour, he doesn't appear, and she's about to head to the next place he frequents when shouting and the screeching of tires catches her attention. She spots Spider-Man, clinging to a car as it races down the street, weaving through traffic like mad, sending the vigilante atop it swaying. It would be comical if it wasn't so dangerous, at any moment they could wreck and the vigilante would be but a smear on the pavement.
"Shit…" She curse, running through the parting trafficking, jumping over hoods to stand in direct path of the incoming vehicle, and Spider-man must not recognize her in the heat of the moment, because he flings himself onto the hood and digs his heels into the concrete, gouging deep, long trenches into the streets as he brings the vehicle to a slow stop.
"Shit, kid, I was going to stop it for you," she admonishes, not entirely surprised he was able to stop it so quickly, but nonetheless a tad awed at the preservation of the car and its occupants. If she had been the one to stop it, the hood would have crumpled in on itself with its own momentum coming to a sudden stop. "I do need to talk to you. It's about that fire along the docks." Spider-Man blinks a couple times.
"Oh, uh, yeah, sure! Sounds good! Just let me web these guys up and I'll be with you in a sec, Miss Jones!" It's annoyingly cheerful, but she just wants to get this chat over with and go home.
She watches disinterestedly as he drags the men in the vehicle, both clearly drunk, up to a city light, webbing them both to it. Bystanders are calling the cops, so there's no need for either of them to stay any longer. The situation is dealt with on their end.
Or his end, whatever. Point is they can go.
"So, Miss Jones, what about the fire did you want to talk about?" He follows up behind her, and with how obnoxiously dressed he is, they have no chance of quietly talking.
"Let's go to the roof, so we're not overhead." She turns down an alley, taking the emergency ladder up the building, a small food chain, to the rooftop. Spider-Man doesn't bother with the ladder and just pulls himself up with that webbing of his. He offers her a hand coming up over the roof lip, which she pointedly ignores.
He gets the memo and backs further onto the rooftop, glancing around their surroundings.
"So…" He starts, a little awkwardly.
"The people who owned that building, or person, was from Mori Corp, a Japanese company based out of Yokohama Japan. Coincidentally, that's where the Port Mafia is based." He nodded along with her words. Jessica folds her arms and continues.
"Mori Corp is a shipping company, they export pretty much everything to and from Yokohama,"
"And Mori Corp is actually just a front for the Port Mafia, right?" Jessica sat along the edge.
"Yep. And they're the ones responsible for all the bodies washing up recently. Have you heard anything about them recently?" The kid seemed surprisingly excited to be asked, from what she'd seen, he'd never really interacted with other vigilantes or heroes, just Iron Man on a couple of isolated occasions. Maybe he was excited to work with others?
"Well, I put my guy in the chair up to looking into it, and he didn't find out much at first, but he managed to get into one of their databases for a couple of minutes. He copied over what he could, um, he sent it to me, here," he fumbled with his cell phone before turning it over to her.
"Your 'guy in the chair' hacked the Mafia?" He laughs a little bashfully at that, but the pride in his voice this associate of his is clear. She looks over the files carefully.
"He's really, really good with computers." He returns cheerfully. Jessica simply nods, analyzing the information in front of her.
"So they want to open up business here, and sent one of their Executives or whatever to open up shop, but what are they trying to sell to begin with…" She thinks aloud, continuing to skim the downloaded files.
"Well, their big in the opioid trade, and they seem to be selling a lot of weapons and stuff--" Jessica cuts him off.
"These are in English." He doesn't seem to come to the same conclusion as her, as he stares owlishly at the PI before letting a confused, "Yeah?"
"Why would a Japanese based crime syndicate need documents written in English?" She reiterates with more of an explanation. He catches up, clearly, as he jolts up straighter.
"Oh! Unless these documents aren't for themselves, but to give to someone English speaking!" She affirms with a nod.
"Do you have any idea who these are meant for?" Spider-Man questions, bouncing on the balls of his feet.
"There's a shit load of people in this city it could be for," Jessica digs out a business card from her pocket and hands it to the kid, "forward all the files to my business email, I'll go over them properly later. Maybe there's something we're missing that can narrow the bad-guy pool down a bit."
"Right! I'll, um, do that once I get home! But, I do have a question, Miss Jones." He wrings his hands a bit while waiting for her response.
"Quit calling me 'Miss Jones' and I'll consider answering." She drawls impatiently, but she cuts the kid some slack, he's been nothing but polite and helpful to her, so she feels unusually obligated to do so.
"Oh, sorry, uh, Jessica?" It's more of a question, but she shrugs, and he seems to get that that's the closest to approval he'll get.
"Do you know what an ability user is?"
She, in fact, does not. But later that night while looking closer into those stolen files, she learns a lot about it.
Still, it only feels like she's scratching the surface.
Dazai is amazing at making the necessary decisions.
He doesn't hesitate to make a decision that will kill others, sending men to their deaths or killing them himself. He feels no sympathy for their plights nor does he feel any regret or remorse. Their deaths are a necessary sacrifice for his goal.
(It's Mori's goal. Dazai himself has no goals. He's always been completely aimless in life.)
It's why men like Oda and Ango confuse him so much. Ango takes the time out of his day to record the lives of the deceased as obituaries, records no one of importance will ever look back on. Those people mean nothing. Their lives hold no worth, just what their deaths can offer. Ango vehemently disagreed with his mentality on the worth of a human being, but Dazai never bothered to argue Ango on it. Their perspectives on life were different by leaps and bounds, including the types of things their jobs required them to do. It was easy for Ango to say that so confidently because he wasn't in the field, ordering people to their deaths. He just recorded the aftermath.
That's why Oda was a bit different.
Now, Oda's jobs were a lot different. Oda was more of a field agent than him, he fought the front lines, and still managed to successfully do so without killing anyone. Dazai was the type who called the shots and Oda was the type to follow them.
Or at least to an extent, what with his refusal to kill.
Oda could be a high up member if he had she'd his silly moral opposition to kill, but he never would. Oda cared too much about trying to keep his hands as clean as possible. Dazai never argued him on it, because he was frankly too fascinated by it to do so.
Dazai no moral obligation to preserve those peoples lives. They were worthless to them.
His two friends held the opposite opinion.
But there's still some things he complains about doing.
He saw the value of setting up a station in America, he wasn't an idiot, and he knew that creating relationships with other groups similar in nature in this foreign country was important. It all was.
But it didn't mean he fucking wanted to be the one to do it.
He's good at charming, this he knows intimately, but being sent to a foreign country for an undetermined amount of times to, and I quote, "make it work?" That was not something he was pleased with. Dazai didn't trust Mori, only a fool would do so, and the man holds the sentiment towards him, but he knows that the man intends for this to succeed, for Dazai to complete this task correctly and do what he was intended to, even if what Mori wanted him to do exactly was fairly unclear.
He expected Dazai to figure it out.
Maybe Dazai figuring this out was a part of this whole thing.
And Dazai got his first hint when a Vigilante started watching them. He knew who he was, Frank Castle, and knew what he intended to do, and so Dazai made it a bit easier for him. He sent ninety percent of the Mafia grunts across the city to throw out lines, to offer drugs to drug dealers as a freebie, and to tell them that they'd sell them high quantities at lower price than any in the city. He sent them to collect debts for other groups as a sort of peace, with interest, courtesy of the person withholding the owed money, and last but not least, he sent invitations to many mutants.
Mutants are common in this city, so sniffing them out is not difficult, and what with the rampant discrimination against them, especially those who looked physically different than your average person, they barely scraped by money wise. Offering a hefty sum of money for their assistance on the docks and, no doubt when the hooks sunk deep enough, further into Mafia work like contract killing and human trafficking, he had no doubt there would be many new members coming in. And with Mutants being so common in America, unlike Ability users, they were expendable. There are a dozen more people in the city with similar if not the same powers, which already paled in comparison to your usual Ability user. They're useful, though, and so they are hired on.
But, with nearly all his subordinates out, he would only lose a few when Frank Castle struck. So, he entrusted a message to one of his subordinates before he left and sent a call Mori's way. Thankfully, the man seemed to be busy, because he didn't pick up. Leaving a voice-mail is far more preferable than actually talking to the man.
So, he allows himself to be taken.
It's of course not the first time he's been kidnapped, and he knows that the man wouldn't kill him. He didn't kill kids. It wasn't his thing.
And so, until the given time that things start to fall further into place and Mori's wishes become clearer, Dazai plays the reluctant kidnappee quite adeptly.
He wished that old man would have just told him what to do rather than be so roundabout… But what else is one to expect from a man like Mori?
He waits for Frank Castle to awake.