These next two chapters ended up being more "mystery" than "fluff with Karma", so sorry about that. I started writing and the mystery part spiraled out of control.

Forty minutes later, Yako found herself in a comfortable chair with a sleeping Three in her lap, across from one of the women who claimed that Kanemoto and Fujino attacked her. Noguchi Aimi poured tea and slid the cups across her desk, settling in to tell her story. While walking back to the station after getting her nails done, she'd been approached by two men who tried to get her to come with him. Noguchi had started running and the pair gave up once she reached a more populated area near the station. She went to the police and reported what happened, and she picked out their photos easily from the list of all the people suspected of assault in the area.

"So you weren't the first victim?" Yako asked. Noguchi nodded. "Can you tell me where you were on the evening of July 2nd this year?"

"That was the night they were killed, right? I saw it in the papers. I hosted a work event that night that went from 9pm to 2am, and I've got enough witnesses to prove it."

The second woman they visited, Sawaya Kaiyo, was the first reported victim of Kanemoto and Fujino. Her attack had been during the previous winter, so the two men had likely thought that being bundled up would keep her from seeing their features. "I may be a singer and look like easy prey, but I grew up in an aikido dojo and I knocked their asses into the snow," she told Yako and Neuro casually. Because she hadn't had time to go through procedures with the police –she was already late for her concert in Osaka – Sawaya went through their wallets and wrote down their names while they were trying to recover equilibrium. After the concert she called the police and told them the whole thing, but since no one in the street saw their faces and she hadn't taken a date-stamped picture of their licenses or anything, there wasn't much that could be done.

"Can you give us an alibi for the night Kanemoto and Fujino were killed?"

"Sure. I was in Miyagi prefecture that weekend for a concert. You can check social media for the pictures."

"Where were you attacked?" Neuro asked suddenly, derailing Yako's list of questions.

"It was on the corner of the street where I was getting my nails done."

Yako sat up straighter. "What was the name of the place?"

"Uh… Yasuda's? Yeah, that's the one." It was the same place that Noguchi had left before being harassed.

Their first question to Taira Satsuki, professional writer and self-proclaimed shut-in, was where she'd been just before the assault. "Yasuda's Nails," she answered, motioning them to the armchairs. "I'm not a huge fan of paying for that sort of thing, but my sister's wedding was the next weekend so I made an exception."

"Where were you on the night they died?"

"Who died?"

"Kanemoto and Fujino."

Her eyebrows jumped up. "They're dead?"

"You didn't know?"

"I was in the hospital for a while after they got done with me – I'd probably be dead if that group of kids hadn't come around the corner." Her voice was steady, but her expression slipped into something strange, a combination of remembered fear and sadness. "The two guys ran away 'cause the kids definitely dressed like they were in a gang, but they were just students coming back from karaoke. They helped me out." After she got out of the hospital, she'd gone back to her shut-in ways. She'd missed her sister's wedding.

Yako broke the silence that formed when Taira's story was finished. "Can you tell me where you were on July 2nd in the evening?"

"Probably here in my apartment," she answered, gesturing to the room. "The lobby has cameras if you need to check and make sure I was here and not out killing those bastards. I heard from the police that the other two women who reported them got away safely, but that doesn't mean there weren't more victims. They just may not have been as lucky as us."

Yako thanked her and they left. "We should talk to someone at the place where all the victims came from. They may have been involved." She recalled Mozu Takayasu from one of her early cases, the self-proclaimed God of Hair who targeted his clients in order to "improve" them. It should be hard to believe that there might be other people with the same mindset as him but, after being connected to the investigative world for almost four years, Yako had learned not to discount anything as a motive for murder just because of its apparent irrationality.

"Of course, louse." Neuro was already heading in the direction of the station.

On the train, Yako brushed through Three's hair with her fingers and he scrunched his face comically. His hair was dry by now and she'd washed the blood off his face, but Yako didn't have anything for him to change into so his clothes were still slightly damp. He buried his face in her stomach, less like he wanted cuddling and more like he was trying to headbutt her. She laughed and brought him closer anyway. "You're kinda cute when you're not being noisy," she told him. Akane patted the top of his head and he blinked at her, reaching out little hands to pat her in return. Yako had to stop him from yanking on the loose strands in Akane's braid as the secretary flailed in panic. "That was not cute," she told him firmly. "Play nice, okay?" He warbled irritably in return, trying to free his wrists.

The bell jingled as Yako opened the door to the salon and the spindly man at the desk looked up. "Katsuragi Yako! What an honor! I have several celebrity clients but no one that's a world-famous name. I'm Yasuda Raiden, the owner of this establishment. What can I do for you?"

"Actually I'd like to talk to you about some of your clients: Noguchi Aimi, Sawaya Kaiyo, and Taira Satsuki." They settled into seats the waiting room.

"I didn't see anything," Yasuda answered pleasantly. "I told the police the same thing. As far as I knew before those officers came, the four women got home sa–"

"Four?" Neuro purred, pouncing on the word with a grin that stretched eerily far. "I believe that Sensei only mentioned three names, Yasuda-san. Do tell us who the fourth victim was."

Yasuda's eyes widened. "I-I meant three."

"You were involved with Kanemoto and Fujino in assaulting those girls?" Yako asked, voice hardening.

"No, I wasn't. I just misspoke, that's all." Eventually, by gentle persuasion and appealing to his sense of justice, the detectives got Yasuda to talk.

Okay, he actually talked because there were some thinly veiled threats made by Neuro, but that was the demon's strategy for every situation.

"I knew about it," Yasuda blurted, shifting anxiously on the couch in the waiting room. "I'd noticed them loitering on the corner in front of the store and I told them to beat it, but they said that they couldn't be arrested for being on a public street. Then the two thugs came in the next night after the other stores were closed and threatened to burn down my shop if I told anyone they were acting suspiciously. I wasn't involved with whatever they were doing, though."

"But ignoring them put your clients in danger," Yako pointed out.

Yasuda flinched. "None of them were hurt that badly, not even Satsuki-chan and Megumi-chan, and the two men kept their word and didn't burn down the salon."

Yako struggled to keep a lid on her anger. "Why didn't you say something after they died, then? They couldn't threaten you anymore from the grave."

"Well it – it would be bad for business if it got out that there had been criminals in the area." Yako picked up her phone and called the police, effectively ending the conversation. He'd had information about confirmed assault cases and had purposely concealed it. Local officers showed up and eventually took over, leaving Neuro, Yako, and Three with the name and address of the woman Yasuda had called "Megumi-chan", the fourth victim.

Yako checked her watch as they walked towards the train station, noticing that they'd been tied up with Yasuda for longer than she'd thought. "Neuro, she's not going to answer at this time of night, but tomorrow's Saturday, so she might be around in the morning."

"Hmm. None of the three women so far have had any trace of the demon world on them. Perhaps this fourth suspect will be our connection."

Yako blinked. She'd forgotten about the whole "demon" aspect of the case, though Neuro's evidence of demonic activity in the city area was sitting snugly on her hip, nipping at her shoulder. "Right. Goodnight, then, Neuro."

"Sleep well, louse." He was eyeing the child, though, and didn't bother to stifle a chuckle at her expense.

She would have replied, but Akane nudged her as her phone began to ring. She glanced at the caller ID. "What's up, Godai-san?"

"Hey, Yako. The monster's with you right now, right? Could you put him on for me? His phone's dead."

Yako clicked a button. "You're on speakers."

"Right. So Neuro, about the matter I've been lookin' into, we might have a break. Amazingly."

"Go on," Neuro replied, intensely interested. His eyes glowed the same way they did when there was a mystery afoot.

"The information company heard through one of their branch offices that there's a man who claims to have seen a gate. 'Course, that's not what he called it, but from what the report said and from what I heard directly from him, it sounds like what you're looking for."

"Godai, what's this about?" Yako asked.

"The monster here has been having me look into any possible rumors about finding or making gates to the demon world." Shortly after Neuro's return the whole thing had come out about Neuro's true origins to Godai. He was horrified, but not terribly surprised. "Knew he wasn't fuckin' human," he'd muttered.

"You're very earnest about this," she remarked to Godai. It was half-comment, half-question. "I can't imagine there are a lot of contacts at Mochizuki who take this kind of topic seriously."

"Anything to send the bastard back to hell, right?"

Yako laughed. "So that's your motivation."

"If you do not finish your report about this subject," Neuro threatened casually, "I will make you eat your own intestines and hang you by your toes out the tallest building I can find."

"I'm getting there, I'm getting there! Okay? I talked to the guy when he was called into our headquarters. Apparently a couple months ago he was out on a job for one of the company's branch offices and on his way back he stumbled across a guy in an alley with gigantic hands that didn't look like hands. Our man, Kagome, hid himself behind a dumpster because he couldn't go back the way he'd come and he wasn't stupid enough to try and mess with something that's dripping blood and got ugly hand-claw things. Sound familiar, freak?

"So the monster is going about his business or whatever and then Kagome said that the guy stumbled over to the closest wall and started tracing something with his claws. His description of this wasn't real good, because I'm pretty sure he thought I didn't believe him. So the claw guy is scratching symbols and suddenly there's a loud crack and the wall falls away. There's this weird blue light coming out of it, and the guy makes some creepy, guttural sound before hauling ass into the new hole in the wall. After a couple seconds, the light goes away and it's back to being a wall again an' some of the blood on the ground is dissolving like acid. Kagome says he's never run as fast as he did after the coast was clear that night. Wanted to forget the whole thing, but he had to explain to his boss why he was late finishing the job, which is how I eventually heard about it."

Yako sighed. Kagome hadn't reported the incident to the police because he was in the middle of stealing something, plus the officers wouldn't have believed him.

After a pause, Godai added to Neuro: "So I just wanted to keep you updated on the hunt for the gates, monster, because those nasty little fucking eyeballs you sent last time tore up my office and I couldn't find anything for a week."

"They must be getting low on energy if it was only a week," Neuro commented mildly. "Continue working on this matter, slave." He snatched the phone from Yako and ended the call. "Akane, make a note in the phone's calendar function to punish Slave #2 if I haven't heard from him by Sunday. Then order him via text message to find this Kagome's address."

"Neuro, are we –?"

"No, Yako, you continue here. This matter is a personal project of mine." At her questioning look, he continued. "The lack of demonic miasma here is a chronic problem. No matter how much I hunger, I cannot stay here forever. My need for miasma must, sometimes, overcome my desire for human mysteries. It would be ideal to design a method for stepping between Hell and Earth without the associated uncertainty about where and when I might return. It would be most irritating if I emerged on the moon next time or in an empty parallel universe. There are no mysteries there." He didn't say it, but she also heard the other part of his thought: it would be a pain to find and raise another partner to his high standards if the time skip was substantially longer next time.

Yako smiled. "Okay then. I'll keep looking into this case." This whole thing was a stretch, since their investigation was predicated on the idea that Neuro could just guess which crimes were the result of demon activity. In addition, Neuro hadn't felt anything demonic with any of the three suspects so far, more evidence to suggest that it was a dead end. However, until she got to the conclusion, Yako wasn't going to give up; Neuro had the unnerving habit of being right 95% of the time, usually because he processed things differently (and more quickly) than the rest of the world.

"If nothing else, I trust Akane to take care of things efficiently." Where Yako would have once taken offense, now she just rolled her eyes. "If you need help stretching your eye muscles, Yako, I can assist."

Knowing that would involve some form of mild torture, Yako declined. Then, looking to change the subject, she added: "You look pretty excited about this."

Neuro laughed. "What are the chances of finding four and a half demons in one city? Having myself and Zera on Earth is reasonable given our strengths, but discovering the existence of a mid-level demon, its half-human brat, and a demon that creates gates all in the same country requires quite literally astronomical odds. There is some mystery as to why so many of our kind emerged here. Perhaps during pursuit of this I will find a gate to secure access to demonic miasma."

"That would be a relief," Yako replied, though her feelings about the subject were mixed. While it would be nice to not worry that Neuro was going to run out of miasma, the potential for other things to come out of the gate was a worrying thought. "Good luck, then. Keep in touch, and don't 'borrow' someone else's phone again while yours is dead. Just charge it." Neuro didn't acknowledge her remark, simply jumping up to the roof of the train station and disappearing into the night.

It took approximately three seconds after his departure for Yako to remember something important. "Shoot! I was going to ask about how much sleep demon children get." Akane tapped out sympathetic sounds with the phone's keyboard. "Like, do they need sleep? Neuro does, so the babies probably do, but what kind of conditions? Complete darkness? Loads of blankets? A soundtrack of creatures being torn apart? I don't even know where to start."

Akane nudged her. \This one is not a full demon, according to Neuro. Maybe he'll be more like a normal baby/

"I don't know anything about those either, and that brings up the whole question of whether Neuro's knowledge will be any help at all because Three is only half demon."

\I can research proper care for human babies, and presumably the child has been living on Earth, so he can't need anything too strange. Probably no yokai eyes in his soup (◠‿◕✿)/ Yako smiled at Akane's joke and stepped up to the train as it pulled in.

"Okay, do that when we get home. I'll call my mom now to see if she has any practical advice." Katsuragi Haruka was surprised to hear from her daughter at this hour and Yako tried to be vague yet specific about why she needed to know how to take care of a one-year-old. She eventually ended up spilling the whole thing (minus the demonic bits), and her mother laughed.

"Swing by here and I'll get some of your baby stuff out of the attic. We needed extra-strength bars on your crib to keep you from chewing your way out in the middle of the night, so it's very durable."

"Thanks, Mom. Love you." After Yako disconnected, Akane accessed the phone's internet function and got to work looking up child-rearing practices. "You're a lifesaver, Akane."

\Anytime, Yacchan!/

Yako declined her mother's invitation to stay the night, just knowing that if she agreed, the baby would probably do something blatantly demonic and destroy half the house. She did accept her mother's offer to drive them back to Yako's apartment with the crib and other necessities. They assembled things inside and her mother's tone turned serious as she asked, "Can you tell me why you haven't taken him to the police? I'm not accusing you of anything, dear; I'm just worried that there will be consequences."

"Neuro thought it was important for him to stay with us until the case is over, since we're looking for the child's parents."

Haruka hadn't questioned Yako much about her "assistant" over the time he'd been with them, but seemed to recognize that Yako thought very highly of him as a detective. "Good luck, then," she said as they finished setting up the crib in Yako's bedroom. "I'm only a phone call away if you need me."

Three cried when Yako left the room to brush her teeth, but when the detective came back Akane was making shadow puppets on the wall and he was apparently appeased. "You need a lot of attention, don't you?" she murmured to the kid, tucking him in. He tried to bite her hand again.

"Goodnight, Akane," Yako whispered as she slipped under the sheets.

From her nightstand, Akane tapped out a reply. \Sleep tight! The two of us have lots of work to do tomorrow (^_^) /