Chapter 8

With the files from the Gushoshin and the hospital tucked under his arm, Hisoka found a small café that was nearly deserted. He made his way to a secluded corner and ordered a tea, calling Tsuzuki, and getting his voicemail, he left a message saying he would be late getting back to the hotel. His tea arrived and Hisoka stirred it absently as he opened Kiki-san's hospital file.

Her name was Murata Rika.

Hisoka blinked and read the name again.

It was still the same, Murata Rika. There was a picture of the girl paper clipped to the inside flap of the file, but the picture must have been taken at her arrival, because the face in the photo was so badly damaged that the girl didn't look like anyone; not the Rika presently with Tsuzuki, or the Rika in the Gushoshin's file.

Taking a sip of his tea to fortify himself, Hisoka began to page through the file.

The first forms were emergency intake, initial diagnostics, and paramedic reports; apparently Murata Rika had died as the paramedics had arrived, but they'd been able to successfully resuscitate her on route to the hospital. She spent a week in intensive care as the doctors struggled to stabilize her, and when they had finally succeeded, she had been transferred to the burn ward.

Next came a list of surgeries so long it made Hisoka wince. Even if he didn't like Rika, if she had gone through all of this, he felt sorry for her.

There were notes and observations written in by the doctors and nurses who attended Rika. There was a notation by one doctor about Rika acting inappropriately under sedation, a long note under one surgery explaining that the previously denied elective surgery was preformed after the patient struck her face off the steel bars of her hospital bed repeatedly, with enough force to break both of her cheekbones.

Twice there was mention of a private plastic surgeon being brought in to aid with the reconstruction, and once a psychiatrist; who found Rika charming and well balanced, despite her occasional aberrant behaviour. At that comment, Hisoka went back looking for more aberrant behaviour. It wasn't hard to find; displeased with the results of a surgery on her mouth, Rika had gotten a hold of a scalpel and widened her mouth by an inch and a half on each side, and she cut the tip of her own nose off after telling the doctors it was too long. But because all of her outbursts had been self-directed, it was chalked up to stress, reactions to medications, and grief.

Hisoka took a sip of his tea and continued to peruse the file. There was no forwarding address for Murata Rika anywhere in the papers, but there was two phone numbers, one he recognized as being Totohome's home number. He pulled out his phone, and immediately dialled the second number only to have a machine tell him it was out of service. With a sigh Hisoka put his phone away and redirected his attention to the file.

There was a previous address listed under the phone numbers.

He pulled out the other file and quickly flipping through the goshushins notes, found the address of the deceased Murata Rika.

They were the same.

Gathering both files together, Hisoka gulped down the rest of his tea, dropped some change on the table and left the cafe at a brisk clip.

He had a lead.

XXXXX

Tsuzuki thought the restaurant smelled wonderful. It was modelled after an Italian bistro, and the tomato, garlic, and cheese aromas were making his mouth water in spite of the dozen or so pasties he'd had earlier. Not to mention all the other snacks he'd had since.

Rika stood patiently by the door, and Tsuzuki couldn't help but feel bad for her. They had, after all, been at this for hours; and at every restaurant they had stopped in, Rika had stood quietly and unobtrusively out of the way while Tsuzuki questioned the staff to find out if any of them had been employed long enough to remember a kitchen fire that resulted in injuries, or Totohome specifically.

This time however, it seemed they had hit pay dirt.

"Sure, I remember the fire," the young man told him. "One of our cooks was trapped in the kitchen and he was really badly burned trying to get out."

"Totohome Nitsku?"

"Do you know him?" the waiter asked, surprised.

"Did you?" Tsuzuki returned.

"Sure, he was my best friend. We'd been best friends since middle school, but then the fire… and he got a new girlfriend… Well, I've only seen him a couple of times in the last year."

"Did you ever meet his girlfriend?"

"No," the waiter said, looking disgruntled. "I talked to her once or twice when I called the house, but she usually shot me down pretty quickly. Once she even hung up on me. Don't know what Nitsku sees in her."

"When was the last time you saw Totohome?" Tsuzuki asked.

"He stopped by a few weeks ago. He said he was feeling pretty stressed, so we had a few drinks." the young man paused, reflecting back. "He was acting kinda weird."

"Weird? How?"

"All jittery and tense, like he'd hyped up on too much caffeine. Defiantly not Nitsku's style, he was always laid back."

"But not that night?"

"Nope, kept looking around like he was expecting to get jumped or something, and he babbled a bunch of garbage."

"Like?"

"Oh, like did I believe in Hell and demons, and what did I think a demon would look like. What if magic really worked; nonsense, dumb crap."

"Did he say anything else?"

"No. Just that, well, he seemed scared… really scared, actually. Is he in trouble?"

Suddenly Tsuzuki realized that the young man had been speaking of Totohome in the present tense; he did not know his friend was dead!

Damn!

Tsuzuki reached out and gently placed his hand on the waiters arm. "Perhaps we should sit down for a minute, there's something I need to tell you…"

XXXXX

The address led Hisoka just outside the city, to a large old house that had been re-modeled into single apartments. The owner, Kinashita Isano, was an effervescent older woman, and more than happy to talk to him.

She invited him in and offered him copious amounts of tea and cookies while she told him all about the 'nice young man' who had rented the upper apartment.

"Murata Minoru came looking for an apartment when he was 18. He was leaving home for the first time, to go to school, and since he was willing to take the top floor, I gave him a bit of a discount on the rent," she said, smiling. "As you may have noticed, there's no elevator, so Minoru-san had to traverse three flights of stairs to come and go; but he never complained. He was an excellent tenant, he was polite, he never made trouble, and he always paid on time.

"Then, six years ago his parents died in a car accident, so sad! And his 15 year old sister came to live with him. I was sure there would be trouble, but I was wrong. Rika was quiet and polite. She was grieving, of course, she took her parents death hard and ended up repeating that year of high school.

"Minoru-san was very patient with her, but for a young girl having no one to talk to but an older brother… So I invited her to tea. Have another cookie.

"Well, she started coming over several times a week. I think she was happy to have another woman to talk to, and I was happy for the company.

"And then, the fire…

"Did you know the firemen said it was caused by a short in the wiring? They were wrong, of course, I would never have let anything like that go unchecked long enough to become a fire hazard! I'm meticulous about maintenance. Personally, I think it was the stalker."

"Someone had a stalker?" Hisoka asked.

"Oh yes!" Kinashita-san told him. "About a month before the fire, Rika mentioned to me that she thought someone might be following her around. In the weeks leading up to it, she became more sure. I advised her to go to the police, but she said she couldn't because she had no proof, she couldn't even identify her stalker because the coward never got close enough for her to get a good look at him. Rika once described it as being followed around by a very persistent shadow.

"Minoru-san was worried about her too. I know he didn't believe her stories about a stalker, he wanted her to see a psychiatrist, he thought it was all in her head…

"But I saw him…"

"You saw Rika's stalker?" Hisoka leaned forward in his seat, intrigued by the story.

"Yes, the day before the fire. I didn't see him well, mind you, or I would have called the police myself. I saw Rika coming up the street, back from a late class, and there was a shadowy figure about 15 feet behind her. At first I thought it was her shadow, but when she came inside, it stopped walking and tilted its head back to stare up at their apartment."

Hisoka noticed that Kinashita-san had stopped calling the shadow stalker 'him' and had started calling it 'it', he didn't think she realized this, but he was sure it wasn't a coincidence. It suggested that whoever the shadowy figure was, they had registered as more 'thing' than 'person' to her sub-conscious. "What happened then?" he asked.

"The phone rang," she said with a sigh, "and when I looked back, it was gone. 24 hours later Minoru-san was dead and Rika was fighting for her life." She let out another sigh, this one longer and sadder. "I was so relived when the hospital told me she was going to recover." She looked down at her hands. "When I finally got to talk to her, I told her the apartment was hers if she wanted it, but she said no; and I never saw her again."

Kinashita-san looked up, and unshed tears glittered in her eyes. "She came here, a young girl who had just lost her mother, and I never had any children of my own, and I used to think how wonderful it would have been if I'd had a daughter just like her." One tear ran down the lady's cheek. "I miss her so much sometimes."

Hisoka reached out to pat her hand, but pulled back, thinking better of the idea. Instead, he offered the only comfort he was capable of giving.

"I'm sure she misses you too."

XXXXX

Tsuzuki walked into the hotel room looking around anxiously for his partner. He and Rika were hours late, and Hisoka should be pacing the floor, ready to rip into him for taking so long; but the room was empty.

He heard the snick of the door as Rika pulled is shut behind her. She looked around with a faint frown on her face.

"Where's Hisoka-san?"

No Hisoka. Tsuzuki let his shoulders droop. He had wanted to see his partner.

The young waiter had not taken the news of his friends death well.

Tsuzuki had sat with him through his initial shock and grief, but then the man had begun to pepper him with questions, and quickly became angry when it became apparent that Tsuzuki didn't have any answers. The scene had become a fiasco, and Tsuzuki and Rika had been shown out of the restaurant by an angry manager while Totohome's friend shouted accusations, and all the customers glared after him like he was scum walking the face of the earth.

Which was not too far from how he felt.

He needed Hisoka. The youths innate calmness sooth him, calm him. Since Kyoto, Hisoka had become Tsuzuki's center; and with his calm logic and practicality he would help Tsuzuki put the events of the day into prospective, and he would feel better.

But Hisoka wasn't here.

Why hadn't he called?

Tsuzuki sank onto one of the beds, his elbows on his knees, his head in his hands, and let dejection wash over him. He felt arms wrap hesitantly around him, and he automatically stiffened.

"It's alright," a soft gentle voice whispered. "It's alright, I'm here."

It wasn't her words, or the bad day, Hisoka's absence, or even his own downwardly spiralling emotions. It was the feel of those arms around him; so familiar. Almost like the arms that he had missed for most of a century.

Tsuzuki cried.