Chapter 1
The girl staring back at her was unrecognizable. No matter how many passes through the girl's own unwashed, bleached hair, she couldn't recall how to braid them, only leaving confused knots as strands fell between her fingers.
Strands of fading, bleached hair were replaced with shards of glass as she lashed out at the girl in the mirror, only leaving shattered pieces of a total stranger that cried out into the broken screen.
She wasn't a mother. She wasn't a daughter. She wasn't a girl. She wasn't even human anymore.
Her own reflection even refused to acknowledge her existence.
Although there was a broken person in that reflective window, she knew the truth.
She was nothing.
The only option left was to revert the abomination in the mirror to nothing.
"I should just use everything."
The needle penetrated a new hole beside many in her scarred vein, the contents of the vial only gifting her a false dream that masked the end of her suffering.
"I am glad..." Saki said, her voice drifting off as she took her final breath and died. Alone and forgotten as her bloodied, beaten, bloated body went limp on the dirty floor of a subway bathroom.
"Couldn't you have just taken the police car?" Yamaoka said as he popped another cigarette into his mouth, offering one from the pack to Sergeant Koji, walking beside him.
"Just wanted to make sure you get home okay," The seasoned officer took a cigarette, and Yamaoka ignited the tip for him with his zippo lighter.
"Always the gentleman," Yamaoka laughed as he lit his cigarette and flicked the lighter closed with a satisfying clink, "You know I can take care of myself."
"It ain't you I'm worried about," Sergeant Koji said, puffing smoke in the chilly night air. Yamaoka scoffed and took another drag.
The cigarette hung from Yamaoka's dried lips as his numbed hands took shelter from the blistering chilly air in his coat pockets. The two souls walked side by side in the midnight darkness, with only their unsynchronized footsteps against the concrete trail, the tall metal arctic street lamps, and the scattered stars amidst a black canvas sky accompanying their journey, save for each other. Days seemed to tease him with a promise of rest that never came. Despite his age, Sergeant Koji looked ready to work until sunrise.
"Did the dad finally spill?" Yamaoka broke the silence, staring at an emptied playground as they walked past. The sergeant hummed as he inhaled more tobacco.
"Apparently, Saki Yoshida might have been seeing someone," Sergeant Koji said with smoke trickling out of his mouth.
"Caught word that vids of her getting raped circulated online."
"Fucking hell," Yamaoka said as he exhaled a plume of hatred, the officer beside him responding with another affirming hum.
"Intel is still working on finding those videos. I wouldn't be surprised if they're deleted by now, but there's always a trace of existence on the web somewhere. Give 'em 'til tomorrow," Sergeant Koji said. The duo stopped at the tram station entrance, throwing their spent cigarettes in the trashcan ashtray before descending the staircase.
"As for the father's crimes against her, well, we'll just have to hear from Saki Yoshida herself," Sergeant Koji said as he followed Yamaoka, who stopped to check the station map.
Brown iris' struggled to focus on a colored line as it strained against heavy eyelids that threatened to close and never open. A growing ache muscled through the exhaustion and only got stronger as the weeks passed. The feeling scared him. He had only felt it when he was running out of time.
"Kid, pay attention!"
Yamaoka cursed at the sudden outburst from the officer's booming voice. He snapped his head and shot him a dirty look.
"Seriously?! Don't you know what time it is?!" Yamaoka yelled back, only for Seargent Koji to stick his chin up past Yamaoka's direction. He rolled his eyes and turned around. There was a perturbed man in a business suit and thick, black plastic glasses.
"Did you hear me?! Come on, we already wasted enough time shouting at each other!" The man in the business suit said before taking off in the other direction. Yamaoka was about to turn back to Sergeant Koji, who only roughly slapped him in the back as he ran past him after the dressed man, and Yamaoka followed suit.
"Dispatch, twenty-one in need of a ten fifty-two in the metro ASAP!" Sergeant Koji said against the radio attached to the shoulder of his vest.
"Sergeant?" Yamaoka said as he caught up beside Sergeant Koji, not responding to him as the receiver on the radio started to burst into constant, incoherent chatter.
Rust had entered both their noses as if they passed an invisible veil in the metro, and they stopped near the man in the business suit who was bent over and heaving.
"She went in there," He pointed towards an opening with a women's figure sign that took up an entire wall, with a pink label below the skirted icon. A trail of blood lead into the latrine, the sight alone making the ache inside Yamaoka's chest intensify. Without question, he ran over the crimson trail and into the heavily rust-scented opening.
She didn't look anything like the pictures he was given to profile her, yet the moment he stepped inside the restroom, he could tell it was her. She was cold as the air that reigned over Japan when he held her in his arms and placed her flat on the floor. She lay unresponsive to the rhythmic pushes Yamaoka's hands administered to her chest, as if he were fighting death themself to force her soul back into its vessel.
"Not. Again," He spoke in time with each compression, "Why. Why? Why?!"
"Get back, kid!" Sergeant Koji pulled Yamaoka away to give himself the space he needed to stick two pads of an AED on the girl's body. With an automated warning and a shock that pivoted her body upwards, Sergeant Koji took Yamaoka's place and continued to where he left off.
Distorted figures of legs ran past the knelt Yamaoka as they surrounded Sergeant Koji and the girl, voices of commands and measurements deafening in his head as tears dripped and fell from his eyes, running down his cheek as the salty drops met the bloodied floor. Heaving himself up, Yamaoka subtracted himself from the crowd to let the medical professionals do what they do best. But a part of his mind had already resigned to the fact as soon as he felt Saki's body that he was too late.
The time of death was around a quarter past midnight, at least that was the medical examiner's prediction to Sergeant Koji. Having done all he could on his own side, he exited the latrine, only for a new handful of familiar faces pass him, greeting the senior officer before they entered. Following the medical first responders, the investigation team had also arrived on scene per request of the missing person's investigation unit, who immediately got to work in preserving the scene and collecting clues to piece together what happened.
Sergeant Koji didn't have to look far to find Yamaoka, who sat on a bench with arms tightly wrapped around himself, and his head hung down.
"Kid." The officer gently announced his presence, and Yamaoka shifted his head up enough to be able to gaze at the Sergeant before nodding. Yamaoka tried to hide it when he looked down again, but the Sergeant caught a glimpse of his glazed, red eyes.
"I'm sorry you had to live through that again," He said. Yamaoka couldn't stifle an intense sigh that caused his body to shudder.
"I thought maybe it would be different this time, that maybe I could do something—" Yamaoka's croaked voice struggled as he spoke.
"You've done everything you could with the little time we had to work with. Every week, I constantly thought you were gonna fall out from exhaustion," Sergeant Koji placed a hand on Yamaoka's shoulder and gave it a comforting squeeze, "It's not fair, but it's just like this sometimes."
"Also, I haven't said it yet but uh," Koji hesitated to coax the words out from himself, "Ah, it can wait. The best thing we can do is figure out how this happened, yeah?"
Yamaoka nodded, taking another deep breath in as he straightened himself on his seat. As he was about to thank the Sergeant, his eyes instead glossed over the trail of blood that leads out of the women's restroom where Saki was found. A small sign on the ground next to it meant the trail had already been acknowledged by the investigators, but he wasn't sure if they had gone to follow the trail yet. Yamaoka looked back to Sergeant Koji as if he needed his permission to go investigate. The senior officer already knew what Yamaoka had in mind as soon as he was looking at the blood trail, and stood up with him.
"Medical's already taking a look at the body, so this is a good start," Sergeant Koji said, standing up beside Yamaoka. He only hummed in response as the two pairs of eyes retraced the blood back from the restroom entrance. The bloodied footprints that led into the bathroom were faded by the time they had reached the entrance. Following them backward showed how each step had transitioned from faded to prints that are easier to discern from the dark surface of the ground, accompanied by dried up blood drops.
The end of the footprints led the pair to a scene where it looked like where the assault had all started. A clearing in the metro with empty space in the middle, save for the excess amount of blood where most of Saki's blood loss had most likely occurred that pooled in front of a wall of small lockers that sat against the wall of the clearing. The murmuring of voices in Sergeant Koji's radio stopped as he communicated something into it as Yamaoka went close enough to examine the scene closer without contaminating the area.
"I, uh, didn't see much cuts on her. Where did all this come from?" Yamaoka said aloud, clearing his throat from the phlegm that accumulated from earlier. He couldn't get a good look at Saki's body when he first found her, but he didn't see any wounds that looked substantial while he applied chest compressions on her. He liked to think he would've remembered at the time, but panic had blinded him in the moment.
"I've gotten a better look at her body after we stopped life-saving treatment. One look at her face would tell you she had taken a beating recently," Sergeant Koji made his way beside Yamaoka, kneeling down next to the accumulated blood.
He was right. Yamaoka painfully dug through the last hours of his memory and recalled that Saki's face sported bruises along her eyes and cheeks, the front of her teeth were also chipped. Her bloated stomach sported even bigger bruises. The thought made hatred crawl in his skin.
"There were cuts on her hands also but… Shit," Sergeant Koji said, moving a hand out of his jacket pocket to grab in his chin, "There was a substantial amount covering her legs. And bruises that covered her stomach."
"She was pregnant," Yamaoka took a step back as he finished both of their line of reasoning aloud. Hatred now mixed with nausea as Yamaoka posted an arm against the wall lockers to steady himself.
"Those sick FUCKS!" Yamaoka's fist pounded on a locker, the metallic thud echoing in this quiet part of the metro that was slowly brimming to life with the amount of authorities that rushed in.
"Get a grip!" Sergeant Koji said, "This is a crime scene, I know you're upset but if you can't go punching shit. You'll contaminate potential evidence."
Fucking procedures. Yamaoka pushed himself off from the lockers, turning to Sergeant Koji who approached him as a small team behind him arrived to start placing up yellow tape around the newly discovered part of the crime scene.
"I'm already doing you a favor letting you stay here. Don't do anything that'll force me to kick you out, alright? You've done more than enough here," Sergeant Koji said.
"No, I haven't even started."
"We'll find whoever did this to Saki."
"Like how you were able to find the ones who killed Sanyu?"
"Stop! Just," Sergeant Koji's voice stopped the team around him momentarily, staring at the commotion the pair were making. Sergeant looked back at them, then back to Yamaoka.
"I get it." He said before walking away, delegating the investigation team as they started to already comb around the area, leaving Yamaoka to stew in his own grief.