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Chapter 4: An old case
A week after his conversation with Law, Kid decided to try out the idea the man had given him. Getting the drugs had been relatively easy, though it had been monstrously expensive, far more than what his father consumed. To replace it Kid simply had to wait until his father was asleep. Or, more accurately, passed out.
The next day, when he woke up, he went to the kitchen to get breakfast as he did every day and then saw him: his father was sprawled on the floor of the messy and dirty room that years ago had been the house's living room, his limbs twisted in an awkward position, the small table turned over next to him. There was no trace of his characteristic loud snoring.
Kid approached the man cautiously and checked his pulse. There was no trace of it. He didn't breathe, either. The man was cold and his arm heavy.
"Law!" Kid called the dark-haired man, who came immediately out of Kid's room.
"I see it's worked." Law commented, that enervating smirk of his present.
"Yeah. Hide, I'm going to call emergencies."
Law shrugged and entered that floor's hallway, disappearing in one of the house's empty rooms. After making the call, Kid sat down to wait, aware that it would be a while before someone showed up, as it was usual whenever there was an emergency in that neighborhood.
He was nervous, and that was a good thing, because he would give the impression that his nervousness was due to the loss of his father. No one would expect him to cry, as few people there did, all of them too embittered to be surprised if someone died, too wary of the world to openly show how they felt.
The first ones to arrive, almost forty minutes after his call, was an ambulance, and the paramedics certified his father's death before standing back to wait for the cops, as was always done in cases of overdose. Some minutes later two agents arrived: one of them was a nice-looking redhead who, Kid noticed, was missing an arm, and the other was a blond man who didn't look completely awake with his half-lidded eyes and whose hairstyle reminded Kid of a walking pineapple. When the both of them arrived, the paramedics wasted no time to get out of there as fast as possible.
The visit was short. They asked some customary questions about his father's routine, to know if this situation, minus the minor detail of death, was a common occurrence and they found the drugs, putting them in one of those plastic bags saying that it was standard procedure for those cases. Marco, was the blonde's name, told Kid that, as a minor, he would pass into social services' custody and that they would come to collect him, most likely in a couple of hours, and advised him to pack some things.
Kid sighed, relieved, once the door closed behind the two men. It had gone well.
"See? There was no problem." Law said, coming out of wherever it was that he had hid.
"I didn't remember the fucking social services." Kid growled angrily.
"You could emancipate." Law suggested, shrugging. The man went to the couch, threw everything on it to the floor and sat down, crossing one leg over the other.
Kid stared at him for a moment before plopping down on the couch as well.
"You think I'll get it?"
"Probably. You're sixteen, the age from which they usually give it. Besides, you have been maintaining yourself for years now, and it's worked out well for you.
"If you put it like that…" Kid thought about it for a moment before remembering how one of the men, the blonde, had given him a strange look. "You know, for a moment there it seemed like the blond cop was happy about me."
"It seemed that way, at least from his voice."
"You were listening?"
"What do you think?" Law's smirk grew. "It's to be happy for you, if you think about it: your junkie father is dead, and as you're still a minor you will have not one, but two orphan's pensions, one for each of your parents, until you're an adult. Looking at you, your muscles and healthy appearance, it's obvious you're not an addict, so by losing that bad influence your chances to get out of here and have a decent life have increased considerably.
"I won a lottery." Kid said sarcastically, grinning for the first time that day.
"Go pack your things, the guys from social services won't be late."
"Right."
Kid stood up, but stopped before leaving the room and turned to look at Law.
"What will you do now?"
Kid had been so centered on his dislike for his father and so eager to get rid of him that he hadn't remembered Law had nowhere else to go.
"I'll manage, don't worry about that." Law assured, not losing his smirk.
While exiting the room, Kid had the feeling that there was something he didn't know.
"I want good coffee, not that shit you drink." Law insisted for the millionth time since they entered the supermarket, stopping before the cart before Kid could take it out of the aisle where the coffee was.
The redhead glared at him, to which Law answered with a self sufficient smirk. Angrily, Kid stretched his hand and grabbed a pack of the most ridiculously expensive coffee there was on the shelves, throwing it onto the vegetable bag inside the cart, scaring with it a woman who was there with her two small children.
"Thank you, Mr. Eustass, you're a darling."
When Kid gave Law a good look of his middle finger, the woman, completely horrified, hurried up out of the aisle, pushing her children on the back so they would hurry up too.
"You shouldn't scare people like that." Law chided mockingly, now sitting on the cart's edge.
"If you didn't piss me off I wouldn't do it." Kid growled behind gritted teeth, intensifying his murderous glare.
"Oh, don't be like that, you know I need coffee to function."
Kid held back a comment of how he'd wish Law stopped functioning for a while, to see if he let him rest of his shit.
In spite of the video and how it had cheered them up, two weeks later there was still no progress. They had made a list of band members, rivals of Doflamingo's and had found two men tall enough to pass for the man in the video, but unfortunately they had discarded both of them: one of them, a man called Sakazuki, that belonged to a group proclaiming to defend justice and went around killing as many criminals as they could, had been in jail that night for entering a public building armed; and the other, the leader of another criminal organization named Crocodile, hadn't even been in the city the night of Monet's murder.
"Hey, Marco…" Ace called one afternoon, already bored of the paper plane races with Thatch.
"What?" Marco answered distractedly without lifting his head from the case's files he was revising.
"In my first day you told me that Doflamingo had already killed before someone like our guy does before the murders began."
"Yes, but we studied that case in depth: it was four years before these murders started and we didn't find anyone outside the group with enough of a relationship with that boy to do something like this."
"And inside the group?"
Marco looked away from the files and shook his head.
"Those guys make the executions publicly, if there had been somebody who cared enough about him to be willing to kill all of them in revenge, he would have intervened then and they would've killed him too."
Ace noticed Marco wasn't looking at him, his attention again centered on the files, and looked really affected by what he was saying, but Ace doubted Marco had known the boy.
"Did you have the case?" Ace asked cautiously.
Marco's lips stretched in a rueful smile and the man finally looked at Ace.
"It was my first murder. Those bastards protect one another, they even did the boy's funeral to keep appearances and said a lot of good things about him."
Ace felt his stomach turning. Killing someone before a huge group, like an spectacle, seemed cruel enough, but to then mock them organizing their funeral…
"Do you have the file?"
"It's not nice." Marco warned.
"I don't care, I want to see it." Ace insisted. It might be stupid, a case to which they had dedicated many hours already withour results, but something told him he needed to see that file, and Ace had learned long ago to follow that sort of feeling, even if he wasn't cheesy enough to call it 'instinct'.
"Alright." Marco agreed, opening his desk's lower drawer and searching in it. "The boy was found the morning of the first of March, 2006, in a park, lying in a pool of rain fallen the night before mixed with his own blood. He received a beating and then he was shot twice, once in each knee, and left to bleed out without being able to move."
Marco extended his arm, offering Ace a ridiculously thin file. There couldn't be much more than the report of the day the body was found and the one from autopsy.
"The rain had erased any useful lead and the members of the group closed the file, saying that everybody liked him, he was a nice guy, everybody was together that night and the boy had left for a date."
Ace opened the file at a random page, wanting to see the crime scene before looking at the victim himself. He knew that park, it was in the most decayed area in the whole city, where you could find someone selling drugs or weapons at every corner, gangs were a common thing and anybody who appeared to have the slightest bit of money would get a beating while being mugged. Ace's younger brother, Luffy, went there often with his friends to get into fights.
The boy was lying on his stomach, his knees shattered, in almost the same position they had found Monet and Ace had seen all of the other victims as well: the only thing missing was the terrified look on his face all the other murdered had worn. He was smirking in a way that sent chills down Ace's spine: it was almost like Death herself was smirking at him.
Ace stopped before looking at the first page, thinking of something.
"Did you consider he could have been the first victim?"
Marco stared at him for a moment.
"It's not common that a serial killer like this one waits such a long time between murders and then kills someone every few months."
"But could it be?" Ace insisted, lifting his head to look at Marco.
Marco seemed to think it over for a moment.
"Yes, technically it could be. We always investigated that case thinking the boy had been killed by the Donquixote Family, but if that hadn't been the case…
Ace smiled. They had something to do at last.
This time he looked at the file's first page, not being surprised when he saw it was a police record: possession of weapons, several aggressions, extortion… twenty-two years old, male.
The last thing Ace looked at was the photograph, that showed a young man smirking defiantly to the camera while holding the sign with his name: dark hair, gray eyes, two earrings in each ear, sideburns, goatee and dark shadows under his eyes.
Trafalgar Law.
To be continued