L's POV
"Damn it." I heard Anna hiss quietly from across the room. I looked up just in time to see her throw the reports from each of the scenes down onto the table before she buried her face in her hands.
"You okay?" I asked only slightly concerned. Anna could be quite dramatic and working together on cases was still fairly new territory for the both of us.
"I'm fine it's just." She paused and brought her hands, fisted together, to her lips as if contemplating exactly how to say whatever was on her mind. "When we took this case." Another pause. "When we took this case I was hoping we would come out here and I could find something, anything really, to tell me this wasn't Beyond. That we were wrong." Her eyes were glossy when she looked up at me.
"Anna, you knew how unlikely that was." I retorted. "What are you looking at that made you so frustrated?"
"The light sockets." She mumbled just loud enough for me to hear her.
"The light sockets?" I asked.
She nodded and began picking up the files and straightening them out. "Yes, they were wiped clean. No fingerprints anywhere." She paused and a small bitter smile came to her lips, "That's how I know without a doubt we're dealing with BB. Do you remember when we were kids, how clean his room used to be?"
I nodded, "Of course. When the kids from the other orphanage, the one Roger runs, would come over. They always thought we had an extra room because it never looked lived in. Excuse me." I picked up the phone Naomi was using to call me.
"Put it on speaker." Anna insisted, leaving her files behind to come stand by me.
"L, I've reached the scene." Naomi's voice came through the receiver.
"Good." I answered leaning back in my seat. Anna pulled up the chair next to me and sat down. It was still strange, being in the hotel room with her. I'd been a detective for three years and quickly gained a name for myself as the world's greatest detective. Anna had stayed home, taking care of the three boys she'd unofficially adopted as her own. One day one of them would be a successor to me. In the past year, Anna had decided to join me in solving cases.
"What should I do now?" The voice asked again. Anna began mumbling under her breath in Gaelic. She had always had a hard time with people not taking initiative. I was trying to get her to stop doing that as it had almost gotten her killed on the second case she'd worked with me.
"Naomi Misora, are you inside the building or outside?" I asked, ignoring Anna's grumbling.
"Outside, I'm heading toward the scene of the crime, but I have not yet entered the yard." Naomi confirmed.
"Then why the hell is she calling us, she's not even there yet. Ouch!" Anna hissed as I hit her arm in an attempt to get her to stop talking.
"Then please go inside, it should be unlocked. I've arranged for that." I said calmly. Watari had gone to open all the doors earlier that morning while Anna and I continued to go through files after files.
"Thanks." Naomi said. Her tone suggested she was not only ungrateful, but had something else to say. I remained quiet as did Anna, as we waited for her to say what she wanted to, but she didn't. "But, L…"
Her voice trailed off.
Anna snatched the phone out of my hand, "What?" She snapped. I hoped the synthetic voice would mask the change in tone. I knew she wouldn't be able to tell that the voice had changed, but Anna was much harsher than I was. Especially when it came to dealing with other women. Anna had grown up around only boys, mainly me. She'd never really practiced social skills with other girls.
"According to the data I received yesterday- not to state the obvious, but the police have already examined the scene."
"Yes." Anna was beginning to grow impatient.
"I'm not sure how you did it, but you already have the police records covering that."
"Yes." There was a pause and Anna pressed the mute button so Naomi couldn't hear us. "You picked a real winner here, Love."
"She's a good investigator. One of the best actually." I defended my choice.
"She asks too many questions." Anna stated in annoyance.
"So, there's no point in my being here?" Naomi's voice asked.
Anna sighed, "No." Then she pressed the unmute button, realizing her mistake, "No, I expect you'll be able to find something that they missed."
"Well… that's clear enough." Naomi said.
Anna looked at the phone in her hand, mouth wide open. "There is no need for such sass. That's all I'm saying." She handed me the phone and got up.
"Where are you going?" I asked.
"Shower. I need to wash off the hostility." With that Anna was gone.
"They say you should visit a crime scene a hundred times, so going there is hardly pointless. Some time has passed so its possible something has floated to the surface. Naomi Misora, the first thing we need to think about in this case is the connection between the victims. What links Believe Bridesmaid, Quarter Queen, and the new victim, Backyard Bottomlash? Or is there no connection and these victims are completely random? But even if they are random, there has to be some logic behind how the killer picks his victims. What I'm asking you to do, Naomi Misora, is to discover the missing link." I concluded.
"I see…" No she didn't. There was uncertainty in her voice. She was confused as to how I expected her to find something the police didn't.
"By the way, Naomi Misora, what are your thoughts on the killer? I'd like to hear your current thinking on the matter." I had to be sure I'd chosen correctly and the uncertainty in her voice had given me cause to worry I hadn't.
"I doubt my thoughts would be of any use to you, L…" She started.
I had to stop her there, "All thoughts are of use." It was true. It was the reason I had decided to bring Anna along on cases in the first place. She was brilliant and I enjoyed hearing her opinion on how things were. Her thoughts could open up new doors and help me see things in a new light. My opinions did the same for her regardless of how different or even opposite our opinions were. It was something I found truly interesting.
"He's abnormal." Naomi said, breaking me from my thoughts. I could have laughed, BB had always been abnormal. "not just because he's killed three people, but…" There was a slight pause as if she were trying to figure out exactly how to convey her thoughts to me. "Each action he took just drove that impression home. And he's not even trying to hide it."
"For example?" I asked hearing the shower start up in the next room. I wondered briefly if Anna had been listening to the conversation between myself and Naomi or if she had just had a hard time finding something to change into.
"For example…fingerprints." Naomi stated. "They have not found a single fingerprint at any of the crime scenes. They had been wiped away completely."
I rolled my eyes. They would never find one. Beyond wasn't that careless. At the orphanage, we had been raised to be able to solve the most difficult cases in the world. In turn, we would either be the world's greatest detectives or the best criminals. Of course there were no fingerprints, we were professionals. "True… but Naomi Misora, surly leaving no fingerprints is the basics of criminal technique." I reasoned in a way she would not know I already knew who was behind this, nor my relationship to him.
"Not to this extent." Naomi said sounding annoying with my reasoning and probably more so with my evident indifference. "If you don't want to leave fingerprints, most people would wear gloves- or otherwise wipe down anything they touched. But this guy… apparently he wiped clean every fingerprint in the house. At all three scenes. At first I wondered if he's been to the victim's houses so many times he had no idea what he had and hadn't, but once I read he unscrewed the lightbulbs and cleaned the sockets, it became a completely different story. What else can you call that but abnormal?" She asked.
I shrugged, slightly amused that she and Anna had both mentioned the lightbulbs. "I agree." It was almost enough to make me laugh. What Naomi considered a strange thing to do, Anna had regarded as a normal behavior. It was quite comical.
"So, L, back to what I was saying earlier" Naomi changed the subject back, "if he's taken such extreme precautions I doubt I'm going to find anything new here. It's a faint hope at best. Someone like this isn't going to make a mistake." There was a pause. I had no hope that Naomi would find a mistake, BB didn't typically make mistakes. Whatever it was that I needed her to find. It was something he'd done on purpose. "Normally an investigation like this starts with finding the criminal's mistake, and then filling in the puzzle from there, but in this case I doubt we'll find anything like that."
I doubted it too. I highly doubted it. "No, I don't think we will, but what if it wasn't a mistake." I guided, hoping she could follow my train of thought.
"Not a mistake?"
I took a deep breath. This was going to be a long couple of days. I heard the shower go off. "Yes. Something he deliberately left behind." I stressed. "And if the police detectives simply failed to notice it…" Which they most certainly had. "Then we might have a chance." I concluded. The door opened.
"Generally speaking, when the killer engages in this sort of meaningless destruction of the corpse, they have a deep-seated grudge against their victim… for a freelance writer, who would take any job, I wouldn't be surprised if he had quite a few enemies. He did a lot of gossip columns."
Anna sighed aloud and motioned for me to hand her the phone. She had taken a seat beside me once more. Her hair was still dripping wet. I handed it to her hesitantly. Anna hadn't actually heard the entire conversation between us, if she repeated something I had said, it could be discovered that I was not the only one here, or Naomi would assume I'm a forgetful person.
"But, Naomi Misora," Anna started, I could tell by the sideways glances she was sparing me every few seconds that she was sensing that I was uncomfortable with her having control. "That does not explain the connection between the second and third murders. Both of those bodies were also damaged in a way that had no direct connection to the cause of death- in fact the damage seems to have escalated with each murder." Anna glanced over to the files and snapped a few times. I quickly realized what she wanted and retrieved the file she'd been looking at. I lined up the photos of the corpses in front of her.
"It's possible Believe Bridesmaid was the only one he had a grudge against, and the other two murders were designed to disguise that. Or maybe it wasn't Bridesmaid, but one of the other two… or two out of the three, and the third was camouflage. The destruction might be getting worse because it's part of the disguise, or…"
Anna cut her off right there, her face beginning to redden, "You believe that the killer is only pretending to kill indiscriminately?" Anna looked to me and shook her head.
"No. This is just one pattern worth considering." Naomi replied. "This theory would explain the Wara Ningyo. I mean, maybe he left them there to prove that all three were killed by the same man- and the locked doors might be for the same reason."
"Pretending to be abnormal." I mused looking to Anna, "The idea of that is abnormal enough."
Anna shook her head, muting our voiced to Misora once again. "She's wrong. He's not pretending. He's always been-"
"A complete psychopath. I know."
"I was going to say strange."
"So, L," Naomi broke through our conversation and Anna unmuted her, "I feel ridiculous trying to find the connection between the victims. I think the police are doing a fine job of that, and… frankly, checking out who knew each of them seems more useful. I mean, the third victim, Backyard Bottomlash… she must have been involved with all kinds of business deals at the bank."
"But Naomi Misora," I interrupted before Anna could, "This is no time for idle musings. I believe there will be a fourth victim in the near future." Naomi hummed in response. I sighed. She was missing the obvious and we both knew it.
Anna took this as an opertunity to speak up, "The number of Wara Ningyo." Anna stated as if it was the most obvious thing in the world and in a way it was. "Four where you are, three downtown with the second victim, and two at the third scene in West L.A- one less doll each time." Anna finished and sat back looking extremely pleased with herself.
"Yeah. So?" Naomi asked in a similarly smug tone to Anna's.
Anna rolled her eyes, "The number of dolls can still decrease by one." Anna said it as if she were talking to a child and I hit her in the arm.
She shot me a look and I muted Naomi. "Play nice, we need her to help us." Anna sighed and looked away. "Do you want to find BB or not?" Anna said nothing.
"So, L…" Naomi voiced, sounding unsure of herself. Maybe even a little embarrassed Anna had had to explain the dolls to her. "You think there will be as many as two additional murders?"
I took back the phone, "More than ninety percent." I said confidently and Anna looked to me. "I would say a hundred, but there's a small chance that something will happen on the killer's side that will prevent him from continuing. So maybe ninety-two percent. But Misora, if something does happen, it won't be two more- only one. There's only a thirty percent chance of a fifth murder." I finished.
Anna's POV
I watched L explain his idea on how many more people will die. There wouldn't be any more if we could find him before he killed again, but the chances of us doing that were slim. Only about eight percent in L's mind. I didn't put numbers on things like L did, but had I had to, it would have been closer to three percent. If beyond didn't want to be found, he wouldn't be found.
"Thirty percent?" Naomi's voice broke me out of my thoughts.
I looked to L for clarification. When his eyes met mine, I could tell he knew I'd spaced out. "Fifth murder." He whispered to help me out. I nodded.
"Why? There are two more Wara Ningyo… and if he's using the dolls to represent his victims…"
"He won't be able to leave a Wara Ningyo at a fifth crime scene. He will go from two dolls to one when he kills the fourth victim. That doll will make it obvious that this is the work of the same killer, but…" L was unable to continue because of Naomi's outburst.
"Oh! I see…" I rolled my eyes. Being with L and Watari and the boys for this long has made me forget how exceedingly tiring it was to deal with people at a normal intelligence level.
"There's a thirty percent chance that the killer won't think things through that far, but that's extremely doubtful. After all, he did wipe the lightbulb sockets." L flashed me an amused grin. Had she noticed that too?
"So there will only be four victims in total. The next one will be the last." She said.
"No." L said firmly, "The third was the last. There will not be another one. Not with me involved." I looked him over and smiled to myself. This didn't come out very often. L was a lot of things: smug, obsessive, boastful, and proud being a few. However, despite all that, he didn't exhibit the power that came along with being the world's greatest detective very often. This was a rare sight and it was enough to put you in awe.
I moved from my seat to stand behind him and wrapped my arms about his neck before pressing a kiss to his cheek, "Confident, are we?" I asked in a low tone. I felt him tense up for a moment.
L cleared his throat, "But I need your assistance, Naomi Misora. I expect great things from your investigation."
"Do you?" She asked.
"Yes. Please keep your heart frozen while you work. In my experience, what a case like this needs most is a mind that will not be moved by anything. Behave as if you are playing chess on ice." I continued to smile to myself. Behave as if you are playing chess on ice. It was advice he'd given the boys at Wammy's for when they were working cases on their own. For now they were all stuck studying.
"L, you do know I'm on a leave of absence?" She asked. Why did she keep bringing it up? What the hell did she do?
"Yes. That's why I asked for your help. With this case, I need a skilled individual that can work on their own." L informed her.
"So I imagine you know why I'm on a leave of absence." She replied. She sounded so ashamed.
"No, I don't know that." He admitted indifferently.
"You didn't check?" She asked.
"I wasn't interested. You were skilled and you were available, that was all that mattered- unless there was something I should know about. Then I could find out in under a minute." L was becoming wary too. Naomi had mentioned her leave of absence twice now.
"No." She said slowly. "Okay, L," She seemed to have found a new confidence, "If we're going to stop the fourth murder we should get started. What do I do first?"
I looked to L, "What can you do?" I asked. How were we supposed to know what she should do? She was the one at the scene.
"I can do what I can do." Misora said. What was that supposed to mean? She had quite the attitude. "I know I keep asking, but if I'm going to look over the scene again… searching for anything he left behind besides the Wara Ningyo… What, specifically, am I looking for?" She asked.
I sighed and moved away from L.
"Any kind of message." He said.
"A message?" Why must she question everything?
"Yes. This was not listed in the data I gave you, but nine days before July 31st, before the first murder on July 22nd, the LAPD received a letter." He revealed looking to the letter in question: The crossword.
"A letter? Connected to the case?" She asked.
I sighed audibly. "Why would we mention it if it wasn't? Honestly." I fell onto the couch. Something didn't feel right.
"At the moment, none of the detectives involved have noticed a connection. I don't know for certain that there is one, but I think there is."
"Liar." I said more to myself.
"What percent?" She learns quickly, I'll give her that.
L smiled, realizing the same thing I had, "Eighty percent." He didn't hesitate. Without skipping a beat he continued, "The sender is unknown- a forwarding system was used, and there's no way to tell where it was sent from." He sounded as frustrated as I felt. If we could figure out where B had sent that letter from, we could find him and end this now. "Inside the envelope was a single sheet of paper with a crossword puzzle written on it."
"A crossword puzzle?" Naomi sounded unconvinced by the letter.
This irritated me to no end, why did she feel the need to question everything L told her? I snatched the phone from his hand and sat on the arm of his chair, "Don't be dismissive. It was a very difficult puzzle and no one could solve it. Of course, we could also take it that no one applied themselves to it seriously, but it seems reasonable to hypothesize that several policemen working on it together were unable to solve the puzzle." I explained carefully.
"I see. So?" She asked.
"Eventually they decided the puzzle was just a prank and it was thrown away." I heard L mutter something about quitting, but didn't pay it much mind. "But my information-gathering network acquired a copy of it through other channels yesterday." I knew it sounded like I was bragging and in a way, I was.
L took back the phone. "I solved it."
"Well aren't you smart." L shot me a look.
"If I'm not mistaken, then the answer to the puzzle is where you are- the address of the first murder." L clarified in case that wasn't obvious.
I got up from his chair, not in any mood to speak with Naomi anymore. I gathered up the files and headed over to where I had been sitting prior to the phone call. There was something bothering me and I just couldn't shake the feeling that we were missing something. I started looking for the connection once more.
"Next time you call me, please use line number five, Naomi Misora." L hung up and came to stand beside me. "Have you found anything?"
I shook my head, "Not exactly." I dropped the crime scene photos and covered my mouth with my hands in thought. After a moment I looked up at L, "I'm bothered."
"By what?" He asked.
I made some vague hand motions as I tried to phrase it correctly. "A couple things actually. One is the victims."
"What about them?"
"I can't find a connection between them."
"Have you ever considered the possibility that there is none?" He asked, half-jokingly.
"Of course, but… it's highly unlikely that there wouldn't be one." L took a seat beside me. "When have you ever known BB to do something without purpose?"
"I see your point. What else?" He asked and I hesitated.
"The puzzle. For starters, you have not only had it since yesterday. You've had it for at least two days." I pointed out. L held up his hands in surrender knowing he'd been caught in the lie he'd told to Naomi. "Also, I'm not sure that it was meant for the police. I mean… these questions." I turned the completed puzzle to him. "They're hard, I would have had a hard time with some of them. It seems like the only ones that could have solved this is the kids who went to Wammy's and as far as he know, you and I are the last kids from there."
"Meaning this is to us, specifically." L completed the thought, but it wasn't entirely accurate.
I shook my head, "Not us. I mean," I took a deep breath, "he's definitely waging a war against Wammy's, but I'm not the one who's a household name, you know?"
L nodded, "So it's me."
"Basically." I said sitting back.
L looked at the pictures on the table between us and then up to me, "Well, if its war he wants, I suppose that's what I'll give him."