Most people in Konoha seemed to think a position in the Konoha Military Police Force was a sinecure. For some Uchiha who'd joined over the generations it probably was, but he'd done his best to remove anyone with that mindset before they could cause too much damage. Any damage to the reputation of the force would be a loss of face for the clan, as the two were practically inseparable in the minds of the villagers who had held them in suspicion since the Kyuubi attack. For him, even now, doing his best at his job as Chief of Police and putting away the assholes who thought they could commit crimes on his watch was a matter of pride. If there was one thing the Uchiha - especially him - weren't lacking in, it was pride.

How or why the force was founded, or whether or not it was to keep the Uchiha away from the village government as many Uchiha including him believed didn't matter right now. What mattered at the moment was the body on the ground in front of him. This was the third such that fit a rapidly emerging and exceedingly disturbing pattern that had begun in early September.

The girl who lay on the ground before him couldn't have been more than seven years old, an age when most children were starting the Ninja Academy like his son Sasuke had done recently. According to the information he'd received about the child however, the girl had been a second grade student at one of the small civilian schools that littered the village.

As he studied the child, his mind kept turning to Sasuke who was roughly the same age as the girl whose life had ended far too soon. The girl, or what was left of her rather, was flat on her back, lying spread eagle with her body sliced open throat to navel. Her wide, terror stricken eyes stared unseeingly at the sky, a look of fear being the last expression to grace a freckled face that would have been rather pretty if not for the circumstances.

Something about the girl's red hair and round face stirred a memory at the back of his mind, but as he tried to grasp it, it slipped away into the dark.

Whoever did this was a dead, he or she just didn't know it yet. He would personally hunt the perpetrator down and off that freak himself.

Having seen enough, he turned away from the body that was cooling in the early Autumn sunlight of the first morning of October and gestured for his cousin to bring the camera over and the crime scene crew to start scouring the scene for clues.

There were days that he cursed the fact that he'd been born into this job. He hated these cases.

Fugaku sighed as he sorted through the files that were piled up on his desk. He could tell that today was going to be one of those exceedingly long days at the office. There was a good chance that he wouldn't be getting home until well after midnight considering how similar days had gone before.

When they had first gotten married, Mikoto had put her foot down and told him he wouldn't be bringing his work home with him where the children might find it, and he agreed with her. Itachi didn't need his love for the village tarnished with things like this, and his innocent little Sasuke wasn't ready to see some of the more horrible things that came with the life he had been born into just yet. He himself loved Konoha, but at times, quite a lot of the time in fact, he completely loathed its inhabitants, and not just because of the suspicious eyes they had been turning towards his clan for the last several years. Seeing the worst that people could do to each-other day in and day out tended to do that to a person.

Tatsukawa Noriko aged seven who had until the day before attended Konoha Elementary had been a rather well loved child from a civilian family that had resided in Konoha since the Founding. The family which lived in a lower middle-class neighborhood had no known enemies, and none of the girls teachers or neighbors could think of why anyone would do such a thing to the girl. Aside from the misfortune of having been killed in the manner in which she had been, she also had the misfortune of being the third child who had been found lying dead on one of the training grounds that were allotted to the Academy while the instructors had made their pre-dawn rounds to make sure everything was in order for the day. She was the second female victim, and the second victim to have red hair, which marked the middle victim Nakayama Hiroshi as an aberration in the pattern.

The only reason that he didn't mark the Nakayama boy as someone else's work considering this latest killing was because the way his body had been staged had been far too similar to the others to be mere coincidence. After being abducted and killed, all three victims had been placed out in the middle of one of the fifteen training grounds allotted to the Ninja Academy, the first having been placed on training ground 4, the second on 7, and the third on 5. All three children had been posed in the same manner, and all three children had been cut open from throat to navel.

Based on the forensics reports he'd looked over, the children had been killed elsewhere, and the crime scenes had been staged. A thorough search had determined that the criminal's tracks had been erased manually up until they reached a point in the village where they couldn't be sorted from anyone else's even with the aid of one of the better Inuzuka tracking dogs. After a careful study by one of the sensors in the department, it appeared that no jutsus had been used in the staging of the scenes, and all of the lingering chakra traces in the area that the sensor had been able to pick up had belonged either to the Academy instructors, the students, or the ANBU who had been assigned to watch the school and so far, all but the ANBU whom they had not been allowed to question had airtight alibis. Other than the placement of the body, the crime scenes had appeared to be completely undisturbed aside from the usual damage and debris that one finds on shinobi training grounds which told them absolutely nothing.

One thing that was clear however was that the perpetrator wasn't keeping the children long, as all of the bodies had been found before the children had even been reported missing. This was a good thing in a way, because that meant that the children hadn't suffered for too long before they died.

While it seemed irresponsible to not report a child that was out overnight missing on the surface, it was standard policy to wait twenty-four hours to file a missing person's report due to the number of false alarms that the police had gotten until the policy had been made in his father's day. Children in Konoha, even civilian children, tended to stay out late, even stay out overnight, and for the most part it had been safe to do so. Most often the missing child reports that the police had received had been for Academy students who had lost track of time as they trained until they collapsed, and they usually showed up back at home the next day after the Academy let out. But, the occasional civilian child would sneak out for the sense of adventure it gave them and would more often than not be picked up by one of the patrols that ran through the forests surrounding the village after having gotten lost. Some officers would agree to look out for missing children during their patrols before the 24 hour mark passed, but in this case as with the other two it would not have done any good.

Any number of requests for information from the village had run dry because nobody had seen the children get taken, or seen anyone suspicious hanging around the children before they were taken. This was frustrating because without any leads so far, they had been running around in circles like a rodent on a wheel and getting nowhere on this case. The lack of progress was exceedingly frustrating for him especially not only because of the fact that someone had been getting away with murder so far, but also because of the relatives of the victims who had taken to camping out near the station demanding answers from the police that they didn't have. Despite his dislike for most of the villagers, he hated looking into the eyes of another parent - a parent who had just had the misfortune of burying their child - and telling them that he didn't know who had done this or why it had been their child and not someone else's, or even why it had been any child at all.

As he was rereading the report on the first victim, Yamada Maiko, and hoping to spot something that he may have missed, Yakumi poked his head into his office.

"Chief, you've been in here for hours. Go home, the report will still be here in the morning." Yakumi said gesturing to the file that was open in front of him on the desk.

"Has the coroner's report on the Tatsukawa girl come in yet?" he asked in reply. It had been hours, but the victim's parents were still there waiting, and he still didn't have anything he could give them.

"Yes. Same as the others, nothing added, nothing taken, and no signs of sexual assault. Whatever this guy's doing it for, it isn't to fulfill some sort of sick fantasy, at least not one of that kind." Yakumi replied as he handed over said report which looked as if it had been leafed through several times already as was often the case when it came to one of the more difficult cases.

He sighed as he accepted the report. This was going to be trouble, he just knew it. The ones who did it for sex almost always slipped up somehow since they usually had a type and a necessary ritual that they had to complete. It was the ones who didn't do it for sex who were usually the hardest to catch, because they tended to kill indiscriminately, unable to stop killing off the field, having either gotten a taste for it or having broken from reality. The second red haired child could be part of a pattern as he'd initially believed, or it could be a coincidence, and she could have been just another child killed by a ninja who cleared his tracks out of sheer habit. He hoped and prayed it was part of a pattern. If it was part of a pattern the way it looked like, that meant that the perpetrator had a specific type beyond age, and with a type, he would be able to get a read on this guy. If he could get a read on this guy, he would be able to find him.

Hopefully this case wouldn't turn out like his other failures, like the other times that the perpetrator had escaped through either death or defection. The last child killer he'd tried to track down several years before had killed seven children in one of the lower income districts before he abruptly stopped, most likely having either been killed on a mission or gone rogue. The families of the young victims who had wanted closure, wanted answers, had railed at him for his failure, just as they railed at him every other time he had failed through no fault of his own.

There was still a good chance that it would end up that way though. In a world where death was around every corner, these kinds of cases had a tendency to taper off into nothing solid. More often than not, it was because someone spotted something wrong with the person responsible and dealt out a bit of friendly fire at the first available opportunity. That was if the Hokage didn't spot them first and send them on a suicide mission, leaving the crimes they committed within the village walls unsolved.

"You do know that tomorrow night's a meeting night, and if you don't get any sleep tonight..." Yakumi said, cutting into his reverie as he gathered up some completed paperwork.

He sighed and reluctantly put the files away in a specially sealed drawer of his desk, placing the coroner's report on top so he would review it first thing in the morning. After doing so, he exited his office and walked through the bullpen where several of his relatives and subordinates were hard at work on various tasks. After passing through the bullpen, he walked out the front door of the station refusing to answer any of the pleas for information that followed him down the street. Those parents, those grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, brothers, and sisters shouldn't know what he knew about those children's final moments. Nobody should remember their child the way they had been when he had first and last seen them.

When he was in charge of Konoha, nobody would get away with things like this. Not if he had anything to say about it.

Fugaku snarled as he threw the rather misshapen coffee mug that Sasuke had made for him for his last birthday against the wall, shattering it. So far, today had been a particularly bad day in an already shitty week, and the news he'd just received took the cake. Instead of a single homicide like the previous four which included that of Sorachi Gintoki earlier this week, there had been a double, and it had to happen on today of all days.

For the last week, he'd been scrabbling on his little rodent wheel with an increasing sense of desperation and, as always, he'd gotten nowhere. Though they were rather uncommon in Konoha, the pair of hair colors that were part of the child killer's pattern weren't quite as rare as he'd believed them to be thanks to the number of immigrants that had come to Konoha over the years. Setting a guard on all of the children in the killer's preferred age range with those hair colors, or just bringing all of them into protective custody wasn't feasible. He didn't have the room or the manpower needed to keep track of them, and he couldn't ask his clan to take the children into their homes for an indefinite period of time. Aside from being a potentially useless danger, doing so would put those who took such children in in danger when the perpetrator of what was now six homicides realized that his victim pool had pretty much dried up and got desperate enough to attack in order to fulfill whatever scenario he or she was playing out.

Parents of children who were the killer's type had kept a closer watch on their children after a warning had been put out, but still, the bastard managed to get at them. Even dying the children's hair hadn't helped since the man apparently already knew which children had the hair colors he sought, and had removed the Sorachi boy's hair dye when he'd killed him.

After scrabbling around uselessly for so long, they had gotten to today where both a boy and a girl had been killed this time. On today of all days, there were two bodies waiting for him on Academy Training Ground 12.

After tasking one of his relatives to clean up the shards of the mug he'd destroyed, he went out to examine the crime scene. When he got there, he saw that both children had been laid out together, posed like the others. Unlike the others however, their heads were turned facing each-other rather than staring up into the ominous gray sky which had been threatening rain for most of the past week, and their hands barely touched, as if they had been reaching out to each other in their final moments.

Something about this and what day it was stirred something in the back of his mind, but like with that thing he'd almost grasped when he'd seen the third victim, he lost it before he could pull it into the light of conscious thought and possibly solve the case.

Like with the other killings, the children were a blond and a redhead. The slightly effeminate looking boy's hair had been platinum blond, and the girl had bright copper hair that looked and smelled like it had been chemically straightened very recently. With the number of curls remaining, it appeared to have been a rush job that had most likely had been done by the killer as neither a hair stylist nor the girl's mother would have done such a clumsy job. The latest male victim had been a member of a minor cadet branch of the Yamanaka clan named Ichiro, and it had been his first year at the Academy whose training ground he'd been laid out on. The girl, Hanataro Minami, had been the daughter of an employee at the bakery which was located two blocks away from the Uchiha clan compound, and he had seen her there on occasion when he went to get his wife's favorite rolls. Minami had been a rather cheerful and energetic child with wild curly hair which had flown about in every direction.

"With the way this guy's been going after blonds, I wonder why he hasn't tried to get his hands on the Kyuubi brat." Tekka commented from where he was taking photos of the bodies.

He'd prepared to snap at the man about his unprofessional comment when it hit him. Why not go after the Uzumaki boy? He was a rather obvious target considering, especially now. Why go after...Tomato?

Damn it, why hadn't he noticed until now that the girls had all borne a passing resemblance to the Uzumaki boy's mother? Why the fucking hell hadn't he seen it before? First a red haired girl, then a blond boy, a blond boy who was always dressed in that vaguely familiar white hooded sweatshirt with green stripes down the sleeves that the families of the victims always said didn't belong to the child, a sweatshirt he vaguely recognized as having seen a long time ago but hadn't placed until this moment.

Now that he thought about it, it was fucking obvious. But why at this age though? Why not go after someone older, closer to how old they'd been when they died? What was so special about this age?

If his wife hadn't been Kushina's friend, he would probably never have made the connection. The most likely reason he hadn't made the connection sooner had been because he hadn't really thought about them in years. Only those who had been closest to them had known, and Mikoto had been in their inner circle of friends. The only reason he himself knew was because of his wife's association with Kushina which had resulted in him being dragged on a couple of slightly awkward double dates. While he admired Namikaze Minato, he and the younger man had shared few common interests and had little reason to interact outside of official business aside from the dates their wives had dragged them on.

Whoever had done this was symbolically killing Uzumaki Kushina and the Yondaime Hokage, or possibly Kushina and her son. The mother and son scenario seemed to be a remote possibility however, based on the positioning of the bodies of the double which had to happen on this day of all days but, then again, could only have happened today considering who was being killed. Something about the positioning suggested lovers looking at each-other for one last time rather than mother and son, even though the son who was turning seven years old today fit with the ages of the victims.

Why though? What was the point in doing such a thing at all, especially now? Why now if ever? What was so special about this year as opposed to every other anniversary that had come before?

He stood there wondering what had been going through the killer's mind as one of the ANBU appeared before him in an unnecessarily flashy use of the shunshin, derailing his train of thought.

"The Hokage requests your presence." the masked man said before vanishing the way he came.

He swore as the man departed and for a good while afterward. The crime scene techs hadn't finished sweeping the scene, and that bastard had fucking contaminated it without a single thought for the evidence he could have tainted or destroyed, evidence that could have provided the identity of the perpetrator. Since this killing was unlike the others, it was possible that the killer might have slipped up, and that there could have been a lead here, a lead that they had lost due to the ANBU's negligence.

After venting a great deal of his frustration on a training ground that was well away from the crime scene, leaving it a mess that even Senju Hashirama would have been hard pressed to put back together were he alive, he made himself presentable and made his way to the Hokage Tower to see what the senile old man who could no-longer keep his opponents in check wanted. As it turned out, the reason for his summoning had been because the Hokage had needed his assistance.

Actually, what the Hokage had demanded was that he pull all of his men off of everything including today's homicide investigation to help the ANBU in their search. Apparently, one Uzumaki Naruto had gone missing. Considering what had happened today and four other times over the last month, the boy's current location was no great mystery to anyone. What was unknown however was the boy's current location, as well as the name of the person he was with.

He wouldn't be pulling his men off of the investigation they were running on today's double as well as the four others like the Hokage ordered him to however. Where the killer was, so too was the Uzumaki, either alive or dead, and those killings were the only clues they had to the man's whereabouts. Hopefully, if only for the Hokage's mood and his peace of mind, the boy would still be alive when they found him.

After being dismissed from the Hokage's office and making his way down to the station, he decided to act on his hunch regarding the killings being related to the Uzumaki boy's parents and ordered Yashiro to compile as list of people who had been close to both the Yondaime and Uzumaki Kushina, starting with their surviving Academy classmates. The only thing he could think of as to why the killer had waited until this year to carry out his grim task was because the Academy was important somehow, and this was the year that the Uzumaki had started the Academy.

In Konoha, outside of one's team and one's family, the people that a shinobi tended to associate with most were other shinobi starting with former teachers, former teammates, and former Academy classmates in that order. Only someone who had been close to Namikaze and Uzumaki would have known to associate the two as husband and wife, and most likely the perpetrator fell into one of the latter three groups.

If Yashiro had thought his request unusual, he didn't comment. The other man had seen many of these odd leaps of intuition pay off over the years that they'd worked together.

After the list of names he'd requested had been compiled, a team was sent out to interview those on the list and attempt to determine their guilt or innocence. The door to the rather nondescript house he was standing in front of would be the third door he'd knocked on since he had joined the team that was hunting down the Yondaime's former classmates. There were a surprising number of them still alive considering the number of shinobi that had been lost during the last war and the Kyuubi attack. When one included those in the years directly above and below the Yondaime and the Uzumaki's class as well as the dropouts, there was a list that was long enough that it needed to be split up and divided amongst the members of a sizable team in order to be dealt with in a timely manner especially now that time was of the essence.

After a few moments of knocking, one of the village's numerous career Chunin answered the door. Nothing about the man's behavior stood out to mark him as a definite suspect rather than merely a potential one, but since the man was a shinobi, that was to be expected. The man showed signs of guilt and fear, but that too was to be expected. Everyone had something to hide, and having the head of the police force show up on one's doorstep tended to make one conscious of what it was that they had done that might give the police cause to visit one's home. The person he was looking for would most likely give themself away by suppressing all reaction to his presence.

"May I help you?" the man asked.

"The Uzumaki boy slipped his minders, and has gone missing and I've been tasked with searching for him." he replied, trying to show only the irritation he would have felt upon being given said task this had been the usual situation with the boy rather than what was really going on today.

"You haven't seen him recently have you?" he asked, scrutinizing the man's reaction which had contained the normal amount of antipathy towards the Uzumaki.

"No, I have not, but I'll be sure to keep an eye out for the brat and inform you if I see him." the man said, and all of his instincts told him that the man was telling the truth, and he'd learned to trust his instincts long ago.

As he turned and continued on his way, he'd idly noted that the man had reacted to the mention of the Uzumaki boy the same way most of the villagers did, which was strange, considering the fact that by all accounts he'd been friends with the boy's mother. Shelving that thought for later, for when he had time to think about it, he made his way to the next address on his list.

An hour later, he'd visited the last of the houses on his section of the list and hadn't come up with any viable suspects. Disappointed, he returned to the station where all of the others who had been visiting the Yondaime's former classmates informed him that their searches didn't pan out either. Not wanting to lose what seemed to be his only lead since it had been the most promising one he'd had in a while, he told Yashiro to compile a list of anyone either Namikaze or Uzumaki had served on a team with when they were Genin that was still alive.

He hoped this wasn't going to be another fool's errand like the last list had turned out to be. Back when the Yondaime and his wife were inducted into Konoha's forces, it had been a time of war, and while Namikaze and Uzumaki had both had only one Jounin instructor apiece, the Genin on their teams were in a state of flux, and that didn't even include when they they themselves were temporarily filling gaps on other teams while their instructors were out on missions of their own. The list that Yashiro had been ordered to make could potentially have more than a hundred names and addresses on it.

After what had seemed like an interminable wait, a new list which even included the Jounin squad leaders for teams that the Uzumaki or Namikaze had served alongside more than twice during joint missions had been compiled, and he was back out there again. It was late at night as he began to make his way through the village once more, the moon was high, and according to his watch, it was already October 11th.

This puzzled him somewhat because there hadn't been even a hint of a rumor of the Uzumaki boy's corpse having been found while they'd been waiting around for a lead. If the killer had decided to go big and have the Uzumaki boy join his parents like this morning's double homicide had indicated he would, would it not make sense to leave the Kyuubi Jinchuriki's body to be found in an exceedingly public place at the hour of the Kyuubi attack which had already passed?

He spent several hours puzzling over this as he made his way down the list, waking people up as he went, and it was nearly dawn by the time he'd finally reached the home of Tada Nakamaru who had served on several joint missions alongside Namikaze Minato's team. After about a minute and a half of knocking, the door was answered by a man he'd seen around the village any number of times. The only reason the man stood out in his memory in particular was because he was always friendly towards him when they ran across each other. Not friendly in the sycophantic sort of way that people who wanted something from him were, nor with the forced politeness people such as shopkeepers outside of the compound had, nor with the air of someone who is afraid of what would happen to them if they weren't, but genuinely friendly, as if the thought that he might have set the Kyuubi on the village seven years ago had never occurred to him. These days, that was quite the rarity, and he had found it somewhat refreshing.

If he remembered correctly, the man had been forced to retire from his ninja career at the end of the Third War after he'd suffered some sort of injury during a mission. Based on the way the man limped when he led him inside to sit down as none of the others he'd woken in order to question them had done, his memory was almost certainly accurate in this case.

After following the man down a short hallway, he had been led into a living-room which had been floored with carpeting rather than the more traditional tatami mats and furnished in a style that had been somewhat popular two decades ago, with the available seating being a couple of rather clean and comfortable looking if slightly elderly sofas. On one of the sofas was a lump under a rather brightly colored afghan that he assumed to be the man's child. Though why the man let the kid sleep on the couch and risk ruining it rather than send it to bed where it belonged, he didn't know.

As he prepared to seat himself on the couch that wasn't occupied by his host's offspring, the afghan covered lump shifted, and a spike of blond hair poked out from the edge of the blanket, a spike that was of a particular shade of Sun Yellow which held very faint hints of red in it that only one denizen of Konoha possessed. He didn't even stop to think before he reacted, and got a kunai up just in time to block the one with which his new prime suspect who had seen what he had seen, and known that he knew had tried to stab him. The fight that followed was short since the other man was both slower than he and suffering from injuries that had never fully healed, and the man was soon felled with a fatal wound that was not immediately so.

"Why?" he asked as he looked down at the dying man. That question had plagued him throughout the entire case, and now was his last chance to know the answer.

"To take what was owed to me." the man said before coughing up blood. "I killed them, and I killed them, and I killed them, and I took from them what they took from me."

"But, why kill the Yondaime?" he asked, knowing that to this man the blond boys he had killed had all been Namikaze Minato. He understood what the Yondaime Hokage and Uzumaki Kushina had supposedly taken from the man since the evidence was on the couch, but neither Namikaze nor Uzumaki had struck him as the type who went around killing children if it wasn't part of a mission.

The man laughed coldly before coughing up more blood.

"All of you stupid bastards seem to think that the Yondaime was some great hero," the man said before coughing up even more blood, apparently nearing his end. "Sacrificing his life for the" cough "village and and all that crap."

"The bastard was cleaning up his own damn mess." the man managed to choke out between coughs, his voice growing fainter as he grew closer to his demise. "That whore of his was the Kyuubi Jinchuriki. Giving birth messed up the seal. I overheard..."

The man died before he could finish whatever it had been he was saying. But, he'd gotten his answer though. It wasn't a satisfying one, nor was it one he could share with the grieving parents of the children the man had killed in his insane quest for retribution considering certain S-class secrets such as that of the Uzumaki boy's parentage, but it was an answer nonetheless.

He'd always hated these cases. When it wasn't about sex, the ones responsible for the crime almost always turned out to be insane. There had been no black or white, good or evil this time either, no matter how much he'd wished that there had been.

As soon as he was a hundred percent certain that his fallen opponent was dead, he turned to his secondary mission objective, the one that he'd been given by the Hokage. The boy was asleep and, to all appearances, he had been asleep throughout the entire altercation. That was good since he didn't know how this situation and the revelation that had been made in front of the child who was obviously ignorant to what had been happening would have affected the child's precarious mental health had he been awake to witness it.

After he had turned the Uzumaki boy over to the Hokage and gone down to the station to inform the parents who had begun arriving for their daily vigil that the person responsible for the deaths of their children had been dealt with and write his final report, he received the final answer as to why Tada had waited seven years to take what he'd seen as his revenge. Tada's daughter had been seven years old when she had died the night the Kyuubi had attacked Konoha.

The man had both symbolically killed the Yondaime and his wife when they were at the same age as the daughter who had been taken from him had been, and had claimed their son for his own in payment for the death of his daughter when he had reached the age that his daughter had been the night of the attack.

As for why Tada had let him into his home, the man had known on some level that it was over since the first killing, and had chosen suicide by cop rather than public execution as the means of his demise.

And, that was why he hated these cases. Like several cases before it, no matter how hard he had tried, true justice had not been served.

Edited 12-8-12

Chapters 1-4 combined to make one chapter June 1, 2017