July 7

Blocker Law

2:20 PM

Yuri Rinko

It took a lot less time than I would have expected for us to find out where a few familiar faces were hiding. Mukuro and Aiden were standing together in the corner of a room, and I could just tell that Mukuro had a headache without needing to get any closer or ask. I shook off my worries about what could be causing her so much grief and crept a little bit closer. "Hey there, you two," I smiled. "I didn't think we would be seeing you here of all places."

Mukuro jumped at that before smiling at the sight of me. "Hey, Yuri!" she chirped. "I'm glad to see you here too. I assume that you're here to defend Prosecutor Daegana from the accusations of assault, right?"

"We might not even need to do that in a courtroom given the circumstances," Sky pointed out. "Right now, it seems like we're going to be able to pull everything together here and now. We might not need to worry about him getting arrested at all."

"I certainly hope that's the case," Mukuro muttered with a shake of her head. "Aiden and I got here after getting a call last night about something going really wrong in this area. We came here as quickly as we could and found that a few of the local officers were trying to arrest Prosecutor Daegana for the crime. We did our best to hold out long enough for a few other friends to arrive though, and I think we might have prevented a murder trial in the process." I could only assume the friends in question were Chief Prosecutor Bespoke, Prosecutor Burke, and Anton, and I was beyond thankful they had managed to get here in time as well. It would save everyone a lot of time and grief if we were able to prove the accusations against Prosecutor Daegana wrong before he could even be taken to the detention center.

"So, what exactly do you know about the case?" Sky asked. "We're going to try and figure out who really did it before a trial is necessary, so if you can tell us anything, we would appreciate it."

Mukuro and Aiden looked to each other for a moment before the latter sighed. "I don't know what to tell you that you probably don't already know by this point," he admitted. "There was a crime in the area last night in which the victim was shot in the shoulder. Since the defendant was in the area, he was arrested for it, but if you ask me, it's a pretty transparent case. The fact of the matter is that the police were getting a bit desperate, and no testimony seemed to point to who the culprit really was."

"What?" I asked, my eyes going wide. "So it's going to be one of those situations where we have to actively seek out the culprit then, huh? That sucks, but I guess that's just how the cookie crumbles every once in a while."

"We have no idea who could have been here at all last night," Mukuro sighed. "That's been the main headache on our plates right now. We know that somebody must have shot the victim, but they got away before anyone could see them, and now, we don't have any ideas about what the culprit's plan was. The good thing is that we should be able to talk to the victim about it whenever he wakes up, but... Well, that involves waiting for him to wake up so that we can hear the truth, and right now, odds of that are still looking a bit shaky."

"We heard that he was probably going to wake up soon," I offered even though I knew that probably wouldn't help the situation. "I guess that's a good thing, right? All we have to do is hold out for long enough to hear the truth from him. That'll make this entire investigation obsolete, and just like that, we can go back to searching for the truth on other cases."

"About that... I don't think it's going to be that simple," Aiden confessed shakily. "We'll be able to ask the victim what he knows about the culprit, but... That's only going to work if he knows who the criminal was at all. If he didn't get a glimpse of their face before he was shot, then that's not going to work. His memory might wind up distorted because of the bullet wound. Losing a lot of blood like that is bound to rattle just about anyone. We have no idea what we're supposed to do about all of this. It's just... A complicated situation."

"I think there must be something around here that points to who the culprit was," Felicity said, something about her gaze oddly firm and hard. It was a sharpness I hadn't seen from her many times before, not since she started retreating in on herself after the last trial she was involved with. I swallowed my nerves back as she continued. "How long did it take for the suspect to get here after hearing the gunshots ring out? I think that's an important first question to ask."

"Only a few minutes," Mukuro replied. "He was on the street just outside when it happened, so the only thing he had to do after the gunshot rang out was come in the building and run up the stairs. I don't think that would have been enough time for the culprit to get away and fully escape the crime scene without leaving any evidence behind."

"Then we should start off by searching for an escape method," I concluded. "Maybe there's some back window the culprit crawled out of while everybody else was distracted. I mean, if that's the case, you would expect there to be at least a rope hiding somewhere that could show us where exactly they slipped out from. Maybe it's even somewhere on this floor."

"I don't know if that's going to work out as well as you would think," Aiden said with a shake of his head. "We already searched the entire perimeter of the building, and we didn't see any signs that any of the windows had been used. We figured that was how the culprit managed to get away without being spotted, but that just doesn't seem possible now. The building was under constant watch as soon as the suspect arrived here last night. The police got here after the fact, and they've been staring at the building constantly too. In other words, there's no easy way the culprit could have gotten away."

"What an interesting little conundrum then," Felicity frowned. "We can try to look around the area and see what we can find. There's got to be some evidence about how the culprit got away, especially if it would have been such a hasty escape. Let's go on and search the building."

"First, you might want to check out the crime scene," Aiden suggested. "It was right here on this floor, as a matter of fact. I don't know much about why the culprit and victim faced off, but it was in one of the rooms near the staircase. I think that when this building was still being used as a law office, it was where a few pieces of important evidence were kept."

I hummed at that. "Interesting..." I didn't know what the culprit or victim could have wanted with potential evidence left to rot away in an old law office, but I supposed that was one question we were going to have to wait in asking. For the time being, we had more important matters to tackle, such as looking around the actual room.

"We can take you there," Mukuro offered, and she gestured for us to follow her without missing a beat. I nodded and trailed after her, Sky and Felicity hot on my heels with Aiden taking up the rear. The air around us fell oddly silent, and I took this chance to wonder just what James' brother of all people could have been doing here. Even if he was looking for his missing father, this entire situation sat strangely with me. I was confident there had to be more to it than just looking for someone who had gone missing. If it was just a missing person case, then why come here and look around through old evidence in an abandoned building?

My thoughts fell silent at the stench of blood slamming into me full force, and I winced before letting one hand come up to pinch at my nose. The blood had dried on the ground, but that did little to change the fact that the room absolutely stunk. I supposed that was to be expected since the place hadn't been properly cleaned since Blocker Law had closed down, so the entire building was a bit of a mess after a bit over a year of disrepair, but I still hated it. I didn't know if anyone was going to want anything to do with this place after an attempted murder had taken place once everybody else moved out, but I hoped that whoever wound up with this building decided to clean it up as soon as possible.

The blood pool at the center of the room was large, but I could already tell from a glance that it wasn't fatal in the slightest. Instead, there was just enough blood to make sure it hurt while not killing the victim. I could only hope that Albert felt the same way in his currently comatose state. He was going to wake up eventually, I was sure. He had to. For the sake of our case and for his brother, Albert had to come to again.

"This is where it happened," Mukuro explained, pulling me out of my thoughts immediately. She looked over to a few file cabinets stationed elsewhere in the room, a frown on her face. "For the most part, Blocker Law kept its important files down in the basement, but since nobody used this office, this was where all of the overflow evidence wound up. As far as I can tell, the evidence here is pretty old and doesn't see much use... Well, it's less of evidence and more of case files, honestly."

"I guess Albert wanted to look around here to see if Blocker Law had anything that could tell him about his missing father," Sky murmured as he looked closer at the evidence cabinets. "I wish we could look through them a bit more extensively, but we just don't have the time right now. Perhaps we could ask him what it is he was hoping to find when he wakes up."

"The gun was found not far from where the victim was discovered unconscious," Aiden said as he looked down at the floor where white tape had come to outline Albert's position when he was found. The outline of a gun was found nearby, though I could only assume that forensics had taken it away as soon as they had the chance to do so. "Nobody's found any fingerprints or other evidence on it. The gun is completely clean."

"The criminal must have known that the victim was going to be here... That was why they brought the gun here to begin with," Sky frowned. "This was a planned face off, so the crime was meant to be premeditated. I suspect the criminal was hoping to actually go in for the kill though. They got unlucky though, and now, they're here."

"I'm glad they didn't get away with actually shooting and killing him," Felicity muttered. "Nobody deserves something like that." Something in her face seemed to stir with confusion before she shook it off and focused on the matter at hand. I had no idea what was going on with her, but I could already tell it was something I was going to have to talk to her about after the case. She had been avoiding discussing her problems for far too long, and it was time somebody finally lit a fire under her to make sure that she actually opened up about it.

"The criminal dropped the gun for some reason or another, though I'm still having a hard time figuring out why," Mukuro said as she pointed to the white tape outline of the gun with her foot. "It was a small enough weapon that they would have been able to just take it with them if they wanted to. Not having the gun would have made things much harder for us too, so why bother with leaving it behind?"

"Maybe the culprit didn't mean to abandon it here," I suggested. "I think it's always possible that the criminal dropped it as soon as they realized there were other people here who were coming to look at the scene of the crime."

"That's possible... Maybe they were too distracted on making their escape to think of grabbing the weapon again after dropping it," Felicity agreed. "Though I guess that just makes you wonder again how the criminal was able to get away so easily without being found by Prosecutor Daegana and James. If the two of them really came here so quickly, you would expect them to have seen something, but... There's no traces of the criminal here at all."

"I think the escape method is something the criminal wasn't even planning," Sky remarked. "I would have thought the criminal would have a plan for what to do with the gun and how it was going to relate to getting out of the building, but that doesn't seem to be the case... The culprit must have been caught off guard."

"Do you think the criminal managed to slip out of the building when nobody was paying attention?" I suggested. "I mean, we know for sure that James and Prosecutor Daegana didn't run into them, so they could have just hidden in another room before slipping away when they were sure that nobody was watching."

"That's possible, but I don't know how much we can count on that," Mukuro frowned. "It didn't take long at all for the police to get here and start looking around, so I feel like the criminal would have been caught if they tried something like that. It begs the question of what could have happened if that wasn't the case, though I have no idea what the answer to that inquiry could possibly be."

"I think we might want to look around the rest of the building a bit more," Sky said. "I mean, there's not much of note to find here. Forensics is still analyzing the gun, and I don't even think Albert was able to look into the evidence cabinets here before he was shot. The blood wouldn't be splattered at the center of the room if that was the case."

"Maybe the police just missed something in their initial sweep of the area," I pointed out though I knew just as well as everyone else that it was a vain hope and then some. "We could stumble onto some evidence of an escape route before we know it and just realize that the police missed it by accident."

"I don't know about that," Aiden frowned. "We looked around the entire building, but we didn't see anything. It's like the criminal just disappeared into thin air... But since humans haven't mastered the art of teleportation yet, we just have to look a bit closer." He laughed nervously at that, and I could tell that this case was grating on him much more than he wanted the rest of the world to see. It was a shame he wasn't a better actor.

"Before we start looking around, is there anything else you think you'll be able to tell us about things related to this case?" Sky asked. He shot a wary glance in Felicity's direction before shaking it off and focusing on Mukuro and Aiden once again.

Mukuro thought about it before shrugging. "I don't know. I've been trying to figure out just what could have caused so much strife for Albert that he would want to go out and search for his father himself, but since he's still asleep, we haven't been able to hear all that much from him yet," she explained. "All we can do is wait until he wakes up to hear his side of the story. I can only imagine how important that's going to be in the grand scheme of things because of how little it feels like we understand."

"And the police wanted to arrest someone while we understand so little," I muttered crossly with a dramatic roll of my eyes. "At least we were able to get here in time. There has to be someone else involved with this crime, and we're just going to have to find them and prove it."

"Why in the world would Prosecutor Daegana come back after leaving the scene of the crime? According to the current theory of how the crime went down, that is," Sky remarked with a frown. "It doesn't make any sense. He should have wanted to get as far away as possible so that nobody would suspect him for being in the area. Him coming back into the building as soon as he managed to get away just wouldn't work out well for him, and given the fact that working on cases like this is his job... He knows that. Of course he does."

"Speaking of Prosecutor Daegana, maybe we should go and talk to him," Felicity suggested before looking over to Mukuro and Aiden. "Maybe the two of them could help out with the perimeter search of the building to make sure there's absolutely nothing we're missing while the rest of us go and hear what it is that he has to say about the crime."

"That sounds like a plan to me," I agreed with a smile. Maybe we would even get lucky enough to go and find the prosecution while we were there. Well, calling them the prosecution on a case that wasn't even going to court yet didn't feel entirely accurate, but it was the best way I could think of to describe them, so it was what I was going to roll with.

"Thank you for talking to us," Sky told Mukuro and Aiden. "If you happen to hear anything new about the crime that you think could help us out, don't hesitate to reach out. We're going to be here all day looking around for evidence of the real culprit, so it shouldn't be too hard to find us."

"That's true... Or I could just text Yuri if I need to meet up with you somewhere," Mukuro nodded with a smile as she flashed her phone. I grinned back with a nod as she pivoted on her heel. "It was nice being able to talk to you all. Try to stay out of trouble, okay? I don't want anything bad to happen while you're walking around this place."

I nodded, though I knew that asking people from Morix Law Offices to stay out of trouble was like telling a bird to not fly. It just wasn't going to happen now or ever since we weren't penguins. I didn't say this to Mukuro though, sure that she already knew it, as I looked over to Sky and Felicity. "Off we go," I declared, and the two nodded before we started off in the direction of the stairs.

It didn't take all that long for us to find Prosecutor Daegana. As we had heard previously, he was surrounded by police officers, and that made it much harder to figure out where he was specifically in the crowd. I winced as we pushed our way through to his side, though I was only really able to find him because Chief Prosecutor Bespoke was beside him. Why search for tiny Prosecutor Daegana when I could have looked for the much taller Chief Prosecutor Bespoke?

"There you are," Prosecutor Burke remarked as she looked back to Prosecutor Daegana. "We were wondering when you were going to swing by. I take it you saw just how barren the crime scene is and decided to spend your time elsewhere."

"That's certainly one way of putting it," I said, though I didn't disagree with her. Instead, I just looked over in Prosecutor Daegana's direction. "Would you be willing to talk to us about the crime? I assume you already heard that we're going to be doing what we can to show that you didn't commit the crime."

Prosecutor Daegana looked like a deer caught in headlights for a brief flicker of a moment, and I could certainly see the resemblance he shared with his brother. Prosecutor Daegana hid his anxiety quickly though, instead nodding. "Yes... I don't think there's much to explain though," he confessed. "I was here by pure coincidence, and when I was outside, I heard a gunshot ring out. I couldn't just stand back at the idea of someone being in danger, so I ran into the building with James. From there, we found..."

"Albert Devine," Felicity finished for him, and I did my best to not stare at her with wide, agape eyes. Felicity's sharp change in demeanor as of late still caught me off guard, and the most noticeable part had to be the fact that she wasn't using the same nicknames I had grown used to hearing from her. Sure, Albert didn't necessarily have a nickname yet, but it was still odd that Felicity wasn't even trying. I would have thought she would put in at least a little bit of effort, and yet, she was silent.

"Yeah," Prosecutor Daegana finished with a nod. "I don't know who could have attacked him, but we didn't see anything of note when we arrived here. James went to call the police, and after that, everything was a blur. I've been here ever since then." He yawned to accentuate the point, a few tears appearing at the corners of his eyes. I couldn't tell if it was because he was exhausted or because he was afraid of the current circumstances that could have gotten him arrested, but both of the ideas made sense.

"We're going to have to talk to James about just why the attack would have happened," Sky concluded. "I think that's where we need to start. We can't exactly assume that there was another person with a motive to attack Albert without hearing of potential ideas for why this could have taken place."

"For the record, we looked through case files to see if there was anything that directly involved Albert Devine. That seemed like the easiest way to narrow down if anybody had a motive here," Chief Prosecutor Bespoke said. "But we didn't find anything. In fact, we came up pathetically short. There are no cases at all that involve Albert, and even mentions of his father are pretty damn scarce even though it seems like he was a defense attorney."

"James' father was a defense attorney..." I murmured, staring down at the ground with a small nod. I could have sworn that James had mentioned this at some point, but it didn't hit me until just now. "I have to wonder if maybe something happened in that attorney career that made him disappear to the point of being unable to return to his family. That seems like the most likely idea."

"It's hard to say for sure, but the man has been missing for a long time. Albert decided to search for him years ago, but he hadn't found any successes," Prosecutor Burke chimed in. "We weren't even sure if Albert was still alive after all of that, honestly. He's been out searching for his father for so long that it could have gone either way... Though I suppose we have our answer now."

"He's alive, but he's made enough enemies for it to be a problem here," Sky finished, and Prosecutor Burke nodded. "I suppose that's the most frustrating part of this case. No matter how much we want to just ask him about the people who attacked him, we can't do that. It's not that easy. We have to work everything out around him since we don't know when he's going to wake up."

"I-I hope he wakes up s-soon..." Anton murmured, speaking up for the first time the entire conversation. "James seemed s-so scared when we got h-here, and he hasn't seen h-his brother in so long... H-He deserves to be able to t-talk to his brother o-one more time."

I nodded my agreement at that, though Anton's words certainly offered me a bit of insight into how he was feeling at the moment. He was afraid for Prosecutor Daegana's safety as well, and the way he shot his brother a wary glance out of the corner of his eye proved it. This case was causing undue stress for everyone, and we had no idea what to do to fix all of it.

"Maybe we should go back and talk to James again," Sky offered. "I don't know how well he could have rested in this time where we were taking care of other things, but he might be able to tell us something we weren't aware of previously. I feel like there's a lot we're still missing right now, and..."

"He might be able to fill in a few of the missing details," Felicity agreed. "Now that he's had a bit more time to rest and calm down, I bet it'll be much easier for us to talk to him. If he's less anxious and wound up, we should be able to get him to share everything he knows with us."

"That sounds like a plan," I concluded. I looked back to Prosecutor Daegana, a smile on my face. "We're going to find a way to show that you didn't do this. I mean, anybody with half a brain can see that you weren't the one responsible for the crime, so all we have to do is make everybody else realize it too."

"I really wish the police would stop making hasty arrests without any input from prosecutors or detectives, but I suppose they wouldn't be police if they didn't listen to anybody. They have to be absolutely ridiculous about locking up every 'criminal' regardless of just how wrong they actually are," Prosecutor Burke muttered crossly. She rolled her eyes again before shaking her head. "Whatever. You should go and talk to James when you get the chance. We should probably talk to Mukuro and Aiden again about if they've found anything else of note."

"They were doing a perimeter of the building last time we heard from them. They're trying to figure out how the real culprit could have escaped from the scene of the crime," Felicity told them. "They thought at first that the killer must have snuck out a window before vanishing into the night, but since no windows show any signs of having been used, it's become a bit of a pickle."

"That's been a problem for us too," Chief Prosecutor Bespoke admitted. "Trying to figure out how the culprit got away has been a pain and a half. There aren't that many ways to get out of a building like this. The best way would be the front door, but we already know that couldn't have happened since James and Elec would have seen something as the criminal was going by. It makes you wonder just how inventive our culprit decided to be."

"We'll leave you to figuring that out then," Sky told them with a nod. "We should head back to see what James has to say. If he can offer us a conclusive motive for why someone would want to attack his brother, maybe everything will finally come together the way it was meant to from the start."

"Perfect. We'll talk to you again later then," Prosecutor Burke said as she turned around on her heel and started to walk away. Anton, Prosecutor Daegana, and Chief Prosecutor Bespoke all started after her, and we watched as they left.

Anton hesitated after she had moved a few paces forward, and he turned around to face all of us, his eyes pleading as could be. "P-Please... Help my b-brother. Help J-James." I didn't even have the chance to respond to his words before he had already turned around again and was trotting after Prosecutor Burke, leaving the area silent as could be.

"I guess we don't have a choice now, huh?" Felicity asked even though we hadn't really been thinking of doing anything else before now to begin with. "We should go and hear what James has to say. Let's go."

"Wait. Felicity," I found myself cutting in before I could hold back. "You haven't been acting like yourself all day. What's going on with you?" Saying that she hadn't been acting like herself all day wasn't the most accurate way of putting things, but it was probably the least accusatory way I could phrase it. She had been acting like this for ages, and all of us knew it.

Felicity thought about it for a moment before shrugging. "I... I don't know," she admitted, and I could tell that she was being honest. That was just about the most terrifying thing I could have heard on the matter though, so all I did was stare at her with wide eyes and concern.

Felicity cleared her throat a moment later, suddenly uncomfortable with being the center of attention even though she normally thrived off that energy. "We can talk about that later though. We should go and hear what James has to say," she told me before she started walking again. I reached out one hand to stop her, but she was gone before I had the chance to fully process what was going on.

Well, there was another bit of agency drama to resolve after all of this. I didn't know where it was going to take us, though that was probably going to be a question for another time. For now, we had a case to solve, though I had no idea how I was going to focus on it with Felicity acting the way she was. Why did we always get stuck with the tough cases?

starting a streak of double updates after this week woohoo so updates on thursdays and saturdays

-Digital