Chapter 13

Setsuna Meioh was staring out of her window. Mamoru hadn't called again since he had stormed off days ago, and she doubted that she would ever see him again unless it was because of Minako's murder. Remembering the feeling of his hot skin pressed against her own, she cursed and went back to work.

Staring out at the same darkening sky Setsuna had looked at, Mamoru shook his head. Even after reading Aino's journal, he felt that he had learned almost nothing new. Frustrated, he shoved his hands into the pockets of his jacket. "Aino didn't know much more than we do."

Jirou snorted. "You know about Zoisite, Jadeite, Endymion and Aphrodite?"

It was then that Noboru fastened his attention on the younger man, taking him in properly for the first time since he had entered the apartment with Katsurou and Mamoru. "You're the one from the picture in the secret drawer."

He looked Jirou up and down, evaluating him before turning to Mamoru, who nodded. "He found a body at the Hikawa shrine."

"Hino is dead?" Noboru immediately asked, his eyes flying over to the coroner who was - of course, Noboru thought - standing right next to Mamoru. "It's impossible to identify her without an autopsy. While the decomposition has been somewhat stalled by her...position, the girl has been dead for at least a year, probably longer," Katsurou offered, discomfort etched into his face. He didn't like making assumptions, he preferred to be 100% certain before he opted to speak. "I'll do her and possibly Nigoshi's autopsy later tonight."

Matter-of-factly, Noboru asked: "Was her heart missing?"

Katsurou nodded. Noboru got up, and began to walk through the room, careful not to step on any of the dark stains on the floor. Hisaya Nigoshi had chosen soft blue carpet for his home, and now it looked a mess. The blood hadn't even dried yet. Eventually, Noboru stopped. An idea was beginning to form in his mind. "Hisaya still had his heart when he died."

Mamoru looked up, surprised. "He did?"

"Yes, but his tongue was cut off."

Jirou closed his eyes, and it was this minimal movement that reminded Katsurou of his presence. The coroner's voice could have frozen the sun. "I believe you had some information you wanted to share with DI Chiba."

Jirou shot the coroner a look that held little love, and a hint of panic. "Nothing that wasn't in the journal. I wanted to explain the nature of my relationship to Minako, and it's something I want to keep private, so I didn't want to make a statement about it at the station."

Katsurou brushed an imaginary speck of dust from his trench. " I seem to recall you saying that you had something to share with DI Chiba and me, specifically. Why would I care about the nature of the relationship you had with the victim?" Something about the question rang a cord in Mamoru, but he was too focused on Jirou to give it further thought. Under the coroner's scrutiny, Jirou Koutani seemed to shrink a little.

"I thought you were Chiba's partner," Jirou answered a little too quickly, and the lie was lingering in the stuffy air.

Katsurou raised an eyebrow. "You have been interviewed by one of his partners: DI Tenoh. Bearing this in mind, shouldn't you have asked her to come along as well?"

Jirou smirked, and it was obvious that he was suddenly on safe footing again. It reminded Noboru eerily of Hisaya Nigoshi and their last meeting in the cold morning after his release from prison. "No, because she was very nice to me, and I plan to ask her out some day, and I highly doubt that she'd let me take her to dinner if she knew about Minako and me."

Noboru actually laughed despite himself, a sound that couldn't be more at odds with Hisaya's blood on the floor. "You want to ask out Haruka Tenoh? She'd cut off your balls and feed them to her cat."

"What can I say, I like danger," Jirou said, and every man in the room could tell that this was nothing but the truth. Mamoru and Noboru exchanged a quick glance. It was time they got the mysterious man out of here. They would get him to talk later.

"Mr. Koutani, you can leave now," Mamoru said briskly. "Katsurou, can you give him a lift? Noboru and I need to go over this diary again." If Katsurou minded finding himself as the designated driver, he didn't show it. "Of course. Come by the morgue after you've finished here," he said, and ushered Jirou out of the room with an inclination of his head.

Finally, Noboru and Mamoru were alone.

"Did you believe him? When he said that he had nothing more to tell us?" Mamoru asked the second they heard the door click shut.

"No. He knows something, but he wasn't going to share it."

"Why did he want to be alone with us then?"

"No idea. None at all. But let's think about this later because we have something more important to focus on. Does he have an alibi for the murders?"

Mamoru looked blank.

Noboru groaned. "He could be the murderer, Mamoru. Not of Nigoshi, but of the girls."

"You think that it's two perpetrators, acting independently from one another?"

"Serial killers rarely change their M.O. to a degree as significant as this one. The perp takes the hearts as trophies, and Hisaya still had his," Noboru explained, once again pacing through the room. He was careful not to breathe through his nose: the windows were tipped, but the smell of death still clung to the small flat.

"But his tongue was taken," Mamoru countered immediately, a thoughtful expression on his face. "So there was still a part of his body missing, a token was still taken."

Noboru looked down on one of the brownish spots, visibly disgusted. "Mamoru, the perp didn't take it with him. It was lying right in front of Hisaya. It came out of his stomach."

Mamoru was suddenly glad that he hadn't seen this particular crime scene when the body was still there. Noboru gave him a second, and continued. "If I'm not completely mistaken, then Hisaya Nigoshi was either dead or dying when we stopped by to ask him about the notebook last week."

Mamoru remembered standing in front of the door, knocking and hollering. Back then, he had really believed that if they found the red notebook, they would find all the answers they were looking for. And while he had been convinced that the puzzle could be solved, Nigoshi had died. He gulped. "How do we proceed from here?"

Noboru thought about it, his big brown eyes worried. "All of these cabinets are full of paparazzi shots he took, those need to be examined. I'll do that." He gestured to the cabinets lining one wall. Hisaya had been proud of his work, and he had been careful to develop and file all pictures that were worth anything. Noboru had filched through a few of the cabinets while searching for the red notebook. "Haruka can go in and question Ace again before we have to let him go, even though I doubt that he has anything of interest to say. I will check whether Hisaya had any enemies, whether we can dig up a motive for his death that is separate from the Missing Heart Murders."

"And what do I do?" Mamoru's voice was flat, and the fear of being pushed to sidelines against made him feel inept and useless.

"You follow Katsurou's invitation to the autopsy and see what he can tell you about the dead girl. He said she died at least year ago, but that it might be longer. If her point of death was indeed even further in the past, she might be Rei Hino. The diary at least tells us the last time Aino, Mizuno and Kino were in contact with Hino. And then you will dig up everything you can find about this odd fellow you dragged in here. I assume you don't want the Chief to know about him and his connection to Aino?"

Mamoru nodded,his mind reeling. "Not yet." He was sure that Jirou was innocent, he had believed the younger man when he had said so, fully aware that it was an odd thing to do for a policeman. "Can you drop me off at the station? I came with Katsurou, and my car is still at the temple."

Instead of answering, Noboru moved to the door, and stuck his head into the hallway beyond it, quietly talking to the Constable positioned there.

Retreating back into the flat, he turned to Mamoru. "Okay, let's go."

"What did you tell him?" Mamoru asked once they were in the narrow elevator.

"I asked him to go into the apartment and put all the photo folders into boxes and have them taken to our office. I need to go over them at some point, and I don't want to do it in there."

"You seemed quite at ease in the apartment a minute ago," Mamoru said softly, remembering how Noboru had sat on the chair that had (judging from the amount of blood on the carpet around it) been the place of Nigoshi's death. Talk about putting yourself in someone else's shoes.

Noboru grinned, and it was a familiar and soothing sight. "That's called self-control, you idiot."

Following the coroner through a series of well-lit corridors, Jirou silently cursed his luck.

"Weren't you supposed to take me home?" he finally asked out loud.

Katsurou didn't turn to respond. "Yes, but I don't trust you, so you can watch me conduct the autopsy on the dead girl you found."

"And if I look reasonably shocked throughout and possibly puke on your feet, you'll be convinced of my innocence?"

"Maybe," the coroner answered without inflection and opened the door to the morgue.

"Great," Jirou muttered and followed him through it.

After looking through what felt like millions of photo folders, Noboru Sanjoin was ready to call it a day. He had opened the first folder hours ago, and ever since then, he had seen picture after picture of celebrities doing mundane things and he was bored out his mind after ten minutes. That had been three hours ago.

The day had been long, and it took a lot of strength to suppress the panic that had clung to him like a wet coat and keep on working. Noboru couldn't quite forgive himself for storming out of the flat when he had seen the disembowelled man on the chair, so he had to work extra hard now. He knew that he owed it to both Nigoshi and himself. So he went to get himself another mug of coffee and got one of the secretaries to fetch him a tuna sandwich. Munching on it, he flicked through yet another folder.

Hisaya Nigoshi had taken many pictures that the celebrities in and around Tokyo must hate. He'd been good at his job, always there when a starlet left the house without undies or when an actor stumbled into a drunken brawl. Of course, there were countless shots of Aino. Aino on her way to her hairdresser's, Aino on her way to the vet, clutching a white cat to her chest, Aino on the red carpet, Aino kissing another girl at a party, Aino with Ace in the alley. Aino and Ace stumbling out of a club, clearly more than just intoxicated. Remembering her diary, Noboru could only feel pity for her. She had been so alone, proving once again that money wasn't everything. Leaning back in his chair and swivelling around once, he wished that he could ask Mamoru to help him, but that just wasn't an option.

The reason why Noboru himself had opted to go through all of these pictures was because he was looking for a very specific face, a face he hoped his colleagues would never have to see. He was sure that Beryl had killed Nigoshi, and he was just as sure that she would show up in the background of one of the pictures. And those pictures would then simply have to disappear.

Back in the apartment, Noboru had made a decision. He would make sure that Mamoru and Haruka would never learn about Beryl and her involvement: he was convinced that the redhead hadn't killed the girls, but there was no doubt in his mind that she had killed Nigoshi and that she had enjoyed every second of the man's suffering. There might be a connection between the two cases, one he had yet to discover. Either way, he knew that Beryl was ruthless: she wouldn't hesitate to kill Mamoru and himself if they became dangerous to her. Or if the mood struck her. No, he himself would take care of Beryl. But before he did that, he needed to know why she had killed Nigoshi.

When Mamoru walked into the morgue, carefully balancing two mugs of coffee, he found Katsurou staring intently at the naked body of the girl from the temple. Perched on a stool next to the autopsy table was Jirou Koutani, looking completely mortified.

"What's he doing here?" Mamoru asked, jerking his head in the direction of the blond man.

"Proving his character," Katsurou said, and clipped off one of the overgrown nails before sealing it in a small plastic bag. Not sure how to respond to this, Mamoru simply put the mugs on the small desk in the corner, and sat down on the chair in front of it. Katsurou smiled; a true and simple smile that transformed his face. "Is one of those for me?"

"Yeah, I wasn't quite sure how you like it though, so I brought-" At that point, Mamoru began to dig through the pockets of his jacket and finally produced at least three little packs of sugar, and several creams. He grinned, and from his place by the autopsy table, Jirou groaned. "There's a dead girl on the table, and you're bringing sugar?" Katsurou and Mamoru looked at each other, and Mamoru shrugged. He had seen worse. This was nothing compared to how Makoto Kino's body had looked and smelled. Katsurou focused on the corpse again.

Swiftly, he cut off a bit of the black tangled mess that was the dead girl's hair, and put it in a bag as well. Mamoru knew that it would go to the DNA lab, but he also knew that Rei Hino's DNA wasn't in their database.

"Will you have to go by dental records?" he asked, and took a sip of his coffee. It was almost too hot and he sat it down again. Jirou – whose face was ashen by now – gripped the edge of the stool. Unperturbed by the man's distress, Katsurou pried open the dead girl's mouth. "Her tongue wasn't cut out. I can't yet tell whether she died from strangulation or from the wound to her upped body. And since she is almost mummified, I will try the dental records." After a moment in which Mamoru opened the laptop notebook he had carried with him, Jirou shrunk further into himself, and Katsurou got the scalpel ready, the coroner frowned. "Mamoru, Rei Hino was how old again?"

"25. Same age as Usagi would have been."

"Then this isn't her. This girl is no older than 17 or 18."

"Are you sure?"

Katsurou arched an eyebrow. "Are you questioning my judgement?"

"No, no, of course not," Mamoru hurried to say, once again feeling like a seven year-old. "It was a rhetorical question." He turned to face the computer screen, a little more flustered than he liked to be.

Silence settled over the morgue again, until Mamoru heard the familiar but terrifying sound of the rib retractor. He briefly closed his eyes, glad that neither Koutani nor the coroner could observe his unease with the procedure. Opening them again, he began to search their database for missing persons reports. "What's the rough time frame in which she died?" Katsurou (without looking up) answered: "Maximum two years, minimum one." Entering the parameters into the computer, Mamoru began to look for young girls who had been reported missing since then. Identifying the victim had the first of foremost priority now; he couldn't even bear to think about how he would have felt if he never knew whether Usagi was dead or not. Not having been able to bury her was bad enough.

When Katsurou reached inside the corpse to take out what had once been the girl's lungs and put them on a scale, Jirou jumped up and raced out of the room, clutching a hand over his mouth.

Mamoru took the opportunity to scrutinise Katsurou: "You do know that it's as much against the procedure as it gets to take a witness to the morgue and force him to watch the autopsy of a body he found?"

Katsurou's face didn't move, even though Mamoru was quite sure that the coroner was actually amused. What a morbid man. "Who's forcing him? He's free to leave whenever it pleases him, and in fact, he has just done so."

"Why are you doing this?" Mamoru asked, curiosity in his voice.

"It's as good a way to get people to know as any," Katsurou answered and Mamoru wondered what Noboru would make of this attitude. "He works as an electrician for a small company. When nervous, he gets chatty. He likes to go hiking, which is how he said he found the body. He was very interested to find out whether or not the victim was Hino, even though he didn't say so explicitly."

"That's a lot of information."

Katsurou smiled again, and ruined the effect by pulling a long and dark mass out of the corpse. "The state of her bowels suggest that her death was rather two than one year ago."

Meekly, Mamoru nodded and turned to the computer again, ignoring his coffee. The database had offered him a number of missing girls. Quickly, he adjusted the parameters to the new time frame, and found himself with a considerably more limited number of options. One name caught his attention. "Do you know a Dr. Tomoe? The name sounds familiar, but I can't place it. His teen aged daughter went missing 18 months ago."

Katsurou nodded. "He was a genetic researcher. His studies were controversial, but he was certainly gifted. He died in a car accident about a year ago."

"Anything fishy about his death?"

"As far as I remember, he was drunk and crashed his car against a house, killing his girlfriend who was in the car as well." Katsurou answered dryly. "Did you hear that through the rumour mill?" Mamoru enquired while reading through the report. Hotaru Tomoe was the right age, the time of her disappearance seemed to fit, and the small picture on the report showed a girl with black hair. A metallic clink told him that Katsurou had put an instrument down, and he could hear the coroner pull off the rubber gloves soon after.

"No. I had him on this table," Katsurou said simply and walked over to the desk, reaching over Mamoru for the coffee. "Come on, let's go and check where your new friend has disappeared to. I can't have him wandering around down here unsupervised."

Finally shoving the folders away from him, Noboru got up. His day had started early, and he was beginning to feel the tiredness seeping through his bones, even though he knew that he wouldn't be able to sleep once he found himself in his bed in his lonely apartment. He usually didn't mind living alone, he actually quite liked it, but right now, it was more comforting to know that countless policemen were still working in the offices surrounding his own. They were a security net that separated him from the likes of Beryl, from the danger lurking outside, from the loneliness in his heart.

Shaking this melancholy thought off, he set out to look for Haruka to see what her interview of Ace had unearthed. Moving through the hall, he greeted his colleagues, nodding tersely. He had resolved to deal with the Beryl situation himself, but he was a cop, and not a killer, so he could already feel his conscience darken. Finally, he reached the interview room, only to find it empty. Damn. Ace was already gone. A helpful constable pointed out that Haruka and Ace had just left the room and that she was escorting him to the main entrance as they spoke. Noboru thanked the man, and hurried off. Noboru wanted to check in with Haruka before she left for the day, he had to show her that he was back now, and that the morning's panic attack was over now. After all, he couldn't let the toughest female cop on the force think he was a wimp who couldn't handle the sight of a body.

Thus occupied by his thoughts, he almost ran past Katsurou and Mamoru, who were leaning against the banister and surveying the foyer downstairs. Each held a mug of coffee, and they were watching Haruka give Ace a few more stern words. They couldn't hear the exchange from their position, but Haruka looked grim. Noboru came to stop beside them. "What are you doing here? I thought you were downstairs doing the autopsy?" Noboru asked bluntly. Mamoru had the sense to look embarrassed for a second. "Umm, we're actually looking for Jirou Koutani. He left the morgue to go and puke somewhere, and he shouldn't run around the building without one of us around."

"Wait, why is he still here? I thought McCre-... I thought Katsurou had taken him home," Noboru hastily corrected himself. Before Mamoru got a chance to answer, Ace looked up to notice the three men standing on the gallery. Oddly enough, he looked right past Noboru and himself, and only seemed to really see Katsurou, who in turn was staring at him with a confused look in his eyes. "Everything okay?" Mamoru asked, only to be ignored. Suddenly, comprehension seemed to dawn on both men's faces.

It was Ace who broke into a grin that seemed even more false because he started crying at the same time. They were hysterical tears, tears of a man losing his sanity without even knowing it.

"This time, you didn't get her. You didn't."

Katsurou blanched and tightened his grip on the mug. He seemed taller somehow, more imposing. Authoritative. Seconds turned into minutes, and Ace laughed and cried, and cried and laughed, and Katsurou just stood there, so calm that he might as well have been a statue. In this moment Mamoru finally understood why he had always kept his distance from the coroner: he had no idea what this man was capable of; his detached calmness was too extreme. Right now, it seemed that Katsurou Hanzo was seriously contemplating how to best kill Kaitou Ace in his typically analytical manner and Mamoru was uncomfortably reminded of the sound of the rib retractor echoing off the morgue's walls while Katsurou talked on as if he was doing nothing out of the ordinary. Next to him, Noboru looked just as confused as Mamoru felt. It was Haruka who finally snapped back to her senses, and roughly tried to manoeuvre Ace out of the building. The air seemed to crinkle with electricity, and then Jirou Koutani appeared out of nowhere and put his hand on the coroner's shoulder.

"It wasn't him. Come on, let's go."

And they walked away down the corridor, not looking back once.

"What the fuck was that?" Noboru blurted out.

Mamoru blinked. He had absolutely no idea.

End of Chapter Thirteen