Okay, well many chapters ago I'd been asked if I (finally) liked this story. I didn't answer because I still didn't know it myself. But then I realized how to end it.
And now I like it.
I like it a lot.
And just to let you know, I'm smiling very evilly.
Disclaimer: No, I don't own Inuyasha –sigh-
Chapter Seven: Secrets
She remembered them all so clearly.
First, it was the death of Kikyo Hidaka: murdered in a parking lot and brutalized with stabs all over her genital areas and face. Second was the death of Rin Noto: nearly decapitated and stabbed to the heart, laid out in burial fashion. Third was a woman named Faye Richards: brutalized with her chocolate brown eyes gouged out with acid and finally, the fourth one was named Koharu Irvin: shot to the head with her long black locks shaved off and sprinkled on her.
Kagome remembered them all so clearly.
Apparently, so did Inuyasha. The minute she saw Kikyo's name in that notebook, Kagome realized that these stories were more explainable than it seemed. Hell, it definitely explained how she wrote the death of Yuri Wadena the night of the actual murder. She could write the murders as it happened.
Kikyo, Rin, Koharu and Faye, all of them were real women. All of them were once made of flesh and blood, not of paper and ink. No wonder the murders and emotions had been so real on paper. They had been real emotions from the beginning.
It was then that something within Kagome clicked and she started to flip through the pages of the notebook. Her heart was racing and she could've sworn she was hyperventilating like she was running some sort of race. The next page in the notebook was of the death of Rin, the next page notes on Faye and then at last, the death of Koharu.
Out of the corner of her eye, silver hair flashed and she saw that Inuyasha was making his way down the driveway, finally finished with his work. A little while ago she saw Sango and Miroku drive off. Miroku had filled her in before he left that Sango was going back to the station because they had found and brought in a man named Gatenmaru Koyasu, Yuri's past boyfriend and that he was going back to finish some work.
So, she was stuck alone in Inuyasha's car since he still wouldn't let her go. Talk about possessive. God…
When she saw his determined face though as he approached, Kagome did the only thing that she could have. She put the book back, leaned against the chair and pretended to be asleep. Her car door opened and Inuyasha's laughter could be heard.
"Get up, I know you're awake."
"I'm sleeping," Kagome said in a tired voice. "Go away."
"No can do Kagome," Inuyasha said easily and then shut her car door. She thought he was finally going to leave her alone, contradicting what he said but no one ever mentioned that he was smart. Of course, in another moment the driver's door was opened and Inuyasha hopped in.
"We need to talk."
Kagome groaned and covered her eyes with her arm. "Why? Is this going to lead me to punch you again like I did this morning?"
"God, I hope not," Inuyasha muttered. "You have quite the punch, I'll admit that much," he said louder, enough so that she could hear.
Kagome smirked. "I better."
"Why, did you do kickboxing?"
"Something like that," she murmured and then looked out the window. "Anyways, what is this talk about?"
He noticed the slight change in subject but let it slide. "Two things actually, the first one being what the hell happened back there?" Inuyasha then winced; he had meant to make that a little nicer.
Kagome obviously expected it. "Somehow we connected when I was too deep. You heard a portion of what I was hearing."
"A portion?" he exclaimed. "You mean you hear a lot more than that?"
"Oh yeah," Kagome said easily. "You have no idea. So what's the second thing?"
Inuyasha noticed she was tense. So far, whatever he seemed to bring up was a touchy subject with her. "Oh, um…" That's intelligent Inuyasha; you might as well ask her to marry you. "Uh…right! How do you know Kikyo?"
Kagome's face turned stony. "What are you talking about?"
"Kikyo…earlier at the library, Kouga heard you say her name."
"He must have been mistaken. I've never met someone named Kikyo." Well, at least that was part of the truth. She had never met Kikyo, she just wrote her death.
"I don't think so," Inuyasha said calmly. "Kouga has amazing hearing and he wouldn't easily mistake something like that."
"Well he did. Why, who is this Kikyo person?" Kagome asked innocently, trying to look as if she was merely bored and continuing conversation.
"You don't want to know."
"Oh but I do," Kagome said light-heartedly. "You've brought this woman up so now I want to know exactly who she is."
"She's…no one. Forget it."
"Not likely," Kagome said mildly and then stared out the window. "So are you going to drive me home?"
Inuyasha sighed, realizing that he wasn't going to get any more answers from her. He decided to try talking about that 'connection' thingy they had. "So, do you care to explain why we connected at the warehouse?"
"It's not that exciting," Kagome countered.
"But I think it would be fascinating," Inuyasha smirked; his voice light but heavily filled with sarcasm.
"Your headache," Kagome shrugged and then started. "Everything is made of energy. Energy is the start and end of it all. My abilities are just a mental…growth that can tap into the specific energy needed to talk to dead people."
"Great, so how come we connected?"
Kagome smiled ruefully. "Not a clue."
"Hasn't this happened before?" Inuyasha asked, taking his eyes of the road and looking at her. Her face seemed abnormally pale and her chocolate eyes were heavy and dark. Her hair was tangled and slightly frizzy but he just thought of it as the heat. Almost as if she was conscious of his thinking, she ran a hand through her black mane.
"Nope, this has never happened before."
"So I'm guessing you've accepted the fact that you're a medium?"
Kagome struggled to find an answer suitable enough. "Let me put it this way, I'm nine-tenths of the way there."
Inuyasha nodded and stopped at a red light at the intersection that debated if he wanted to go to her house or the station. Just then, his cell rang.
"Yes?"
"Tamara Ryan, does it ring a bell?"
Inuyasha thought for a moment, the sound of the voice confirming that it was Sango he was talking to. "Oh, you mean Tammy? Yeah I know her, why?"
"I've talked to the boyfriend. He says he was with this Tammy girl at the time of the murder."
"You mean, at one in the morning?" Inuyasha sounded skeptical.
"Apparently so, do you know where she lives?"
"See lives down Buffy Street, number one-fifty-six I recall."
"Recall? How well do you know this Tamara?"
"She was Yuri's best friend and when Kouga and Yuri were dating, they invited us along for a double."
"Ah, will there be any awkward tension?"
"I don't think so. We never met after that."
"Meet you there?"
"I guess but I have Kagome with me. Oh, never mind, I'll just bring her."
He closed the cell and put off looking at Kagome's particularly ticked off face.
"Obviously I don't get a say in this," she said slowly and scowled.
Inuyasha smirked as he did a U-turn. "Obviously."
Tamara Ryan was having a really bad day. Fiery red hair that was too smooth and too sleek to be natural flew when she looked around the room nervously and her pale, now chapped lips moistened as she bit the top lip. She was in trouble and in a lot of it.
The square cubicle of eight feet was fairly large compared to the others and she and Yuri had been lucky enough to get these so-called "offices."
They had to work for it, their boss had said.
And depending on how you looked at it, they had. Very, very hard.
Too bad Yuri didn't live long enough to thoroughly enjoy it.
Glancing at the small happy face clock that she got for a dollar at one of those cheap bargain stores, Tamara shook her head and glanced back at the desktop that sat in front of her. Her long hands and perfectly manicured nails rested limply over the keyboard as she studied the last sentence of the previously written paragraph. She couldn't remember what she had written.
And after six times of rereading it, she still wasn't any closer.
"Hey Tammy!"
Turning around in her seat, Tammy came face to face with MyogaOgata, her boss and... Well she wouldn't go there. That was old news and now everything was strictly professional.
"Hi Myoga. What can I do for you?"
"Oh Tammy, I know it's been hard especially with Yuri's death and all. I can't believe she was murdered."
"I can hardly believe it myself," Tammy answered automatically. She didn't want to discuss this. She tried to stray off topic by giving him a gentle smile. "So what did you want me to do?"
"Well, we still don't have a…new worker," Myoga said, switching the word 'replacement' for 'new worker.' "I just need these timesheets for this weeks pay-check put in to the system and then you can go home and take the rest of the night off. Okay?"
"Thank you Myoga," Tammy said quietly and then resumed working, waiting for the old man to leave. When he finally did, she sighed and looked back at the clock. Twenty more minutes… Just twenty more minutes and she could go home.
She hoped.
Tammy checked her cell that was on vibrate and attached to her jeans' loophole. When the screen flashed up, she held her breath until she saw that there were no missed calls.
Good. No one needed her tonight.
So far at least.
It was six o'clock and there was plenty of time for someone to call. Just the thought of it made her stomach turn. She wanted out, oh God did she want out.
She just hoped that when she got home, everything would be all right.
"She's not here," Sango stated, leaning against the driver's door when Inuyasha pulled his vehicle up. He gazed at the small bungalow and sighed, shaking his head.
"It's never that easy," he muttered to himself and then looked at Kagome who was looking ticked out the window. He smiled despite himself and nudged her. "Oh come on princess. I'm having a much worse day than you are. You sat in the truck all day; I had to deal with crap so stop acting all angry at me."
Kagome just turned her head slowly towards him, her brown eyes flared red but dull and it was just something in the way she looked at him that made him recoil.
"Wow, a little PMS there?"
Sango, who was just outside the window glared at the back of Inuyasha's head and stormed away, not wanting to watch the disaster that was about to occur.
Helpful hint: never say a girl is PMS-ing. She'll shoot you if she has the chance. Especially if she really is.
Kagome banged her head against the back of the passenger seat and then flipped the switch to unlock her door and got out, slamming the door as hard as she possibly could.
The result of Kagome's slamming left the truck rocking slightly and Inuyasha turned to shrug at Sango when he noticed that she too, was gone. What was it with women? When he looked towards Kagome he could clearly hear the insults and crude words she was calling him. Sighing, Inuyasha threw his car into reverse and pulled out of the driveway, following Kagome down the road which she walked.
"That selfish jerk…asshole… He should burn in Hell, Jesus Christ oh please…"
Inuyasha rolled his eyes and when he was right beside her he rolled down the window.
"Wow, a little PMS there?" Kagome mocked, still not looking towards him. "I've been sitting in that God forsaken truck all day with nothing to do and nowhere to go, sitting at crime scenes and old buildings. I haven't talked to anyone but that jerk all day and I haven't eaten since breakfast! He is so inconsiderate and didn't even give me a choice whether I wanted to be here or not!" She continued to storm down the road and Inuyasha still followed, getting angrier as he listened to the constant putdowns. Okay then, if she was going to call him names and curse him, he would happily play along.
"Look wench, what the hell are you doing?"
"I'm walking home!" she screamed, still not looking at him. "I can't stand you!"
"Well that doesn't matter right now because it will take you about an hour, maybe more to get home. Trite may be a small town but it's a long walk once you live in the outskirts."
"Then get Sango to drive me home. If I look at you I swear to God I'll punch you so hard your nose is going to break indefinitely."
Inuyasha rolled his eyes at her childishness. "Oh? And how are you going to do that?"
Kagome smirked. "Like this."
Tammy couldn't keep the smile off her face. No one had called, Myoga had let her go home early for time to grieve and she was free. As long as no one called within the next hour, she was fine. She would be okay.
She pulled down her road and bounced up and down to the beat of the music that filled her car. "Am I ever on your mind? I can't stop thinking of you I tried…"
Her house was almost in view, everything was going to be just fine. "Like the song where the title, you can't find and to everything else you're blind…"
It was then that she saw the black glint of another vehicle in her driveway. Her brow furrowed in confusion. She didn't know anyone that had a black vehicle like that, only the chief or police… Shit.
"The world keeps spinning but time stands still…"
She pulled into the drive and was both frustrated and relieved to see that it was the chief. He probably just wanted to talk about Yuri.
"Ms. Ryan?" Inuyasha asked when she stepped out of the car and she nodded.
"You want to talk about Yuri, right?" She couldn't really see him well in the driveway. The only thing that made her positive that it was the chief was the fact that his silver hair glinted beautifully under the flickering, dying streetlamp a couple feet away.
"Actually, I want to talk about a man named Gatenmaru Koyasu."
Her body went cold all over. This was exactly what she didn't want to happen but it was inevitable. He was here and there was nothing she could do about that. "Fine, come on in."
He nodded and together they made their way inside the house. She flicked on the lights and kicked off her shoes, Inuyasha doing the same as he followed her into the kitchen where she gestured for him to sit. "What about Gatenmaru?" she asked hastily when he did.
"He's a suspect for the murder of Yuri and he says that you were with him around the time of her death."
"He did, did he?" she murmured to herself and shook her head. "I try not to listen to the talk around this town. There's a lot of it, you know?"
Inuyasha nodded ruefully. "Yes, I know. But I can't really help that. The media has been taken care of by our staff and so far, nothing had gotten out of hand. Tamara…"
"Call me Tammy," she said quietly. "Most do."
"Tammy, I'm sorry for what happened to Yuri. I mean-"
"It's okay," she cut off. "What time did she die?"
Inuyasha shifted his weight uneasily. "One in the morning."
For the first time, Tammy looked at him, her baby blue eyes searching his face. She showed no expression in her features but after a minute, her face twisted.
"What happened to your nose?" she asked curiously, studying the bruising around it and the faint redness to the area.
Inuyasha grunted. "A tourist got unruly," he said simply but Tammy shook her head.
"There haven't been any tourists at all, liar. There are only the two newcomers. You've met them right?"
"Yeah," Inuyasha said, slightly perturbed that he couldn't convince a chic that spent her entire day in an office that it was a tourist that attacked him and not the newcomer who he just pissed off.
A lot.
"Anyways, yes, I was with Gatenmaru around one in the morning."
"May I ask why?" Inuyasha asked. She seemed to tense but she answered the question anyways.
"He came to me to see if I could convince Yuri to get back together with him. He was drunk so I kept him here a while until he sobered up a bit and then sent him packing around quarter to one. He couldn't have been able to get to Yuri's house in that time."
"How do you know she was at her house?"
"Because she called me."
"When?"
"Just before I sent Gatenmaru on his way."
"Why?"
"I don't know."
Inuyasha smirked. "Yes you do. You're just not telling. Look, I can bring you in to the station to do this or we can do it in the comfort of your own home. I want you to answer me directly."
"Yuri didn't get out of the business," Tammy said out in one breath.
"I know. We found the warehouse," Inuyasha stated and Tammy looked at him, shocked. "We matched some DNA on the lips of the mask to hers. After all these years, everyone thought she quit."
"She couldn't stop. She liked the feeling of controlling men. I guess it was because of her father who used to beat her, I'm not sure. But after she was caught, it took her only a week of break before she started again, this time secretly. Back then she was too young, it was considered rape but now…"
"So what does this have to do with Yuri calling you at one in the morning?"
"She wanted to know where I was," Tammy answered simply. "She didn't sound scared or anything. In fact, I think she was happy. It was just fifteen minutes later I guess that she died."
"Were you supposed to be over at Yuri's? Is that why she called?"
Tammy laughed bitterly. "Yeah, that's why she called."
"What made you change your mind about going?" he asked.
Tammy looked at him strangely. "It was because of her that…I'm still in the business too. I wanted to get out of it, Yuri wouldn't let me. Personally, now that she's dead I'm freer." Just then her phone went off and she smiled hatefully. "And before you ask if I stayed at the house, I did. Ask him," she said, handing Inuyasha her phone. "I was in the bed all night."
Next Chapter: Derision – "She's gone chief and I don't think she's ever coming back."Derision –
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