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Detective Ito stood over the dead body and frowned. "I get that he's reprehensible, but death?"
Usagi shrugged, "I was hungry, and he's a rapist. He didn't have the nerves a first-timer normally does."
He sighed and shook his head, "I'll call it in. You better make yourself scarce."
"Thank you, Artie! You're the best. I'm so glad you grew up to be a detective."
"I just can't believe that woman who saved my life that day still looks the same fifty-two years later. It was an adjustment when you came up to me."
"It's a good thing I am what I am too. I was underwater for ten minutes looking for you."
He nodded his head and pulled out his cell phone. "And you gave me some of your blood to heal me. I always remember that the most. Even when I was five, that shocked me."
She beamed at him and then the smile slid off her face. "Are they getting hard to hide?"
"Honestly, yes. Can't you leave them out of my jurisdiction for a while? Five in a month and a half comes off like a serial killer."
She looked down and pouted, "They're really bad guys. All of them."
"And we have a court system to deal with them," he pointed out kindly.
"It's such a new way of thinking. Dueling was outlawed in 1859 in America, in England in 1819. That's recent history to me. I was born in the sixteenth century. Dueling even went on after it was illegal. All these modern ideas of jails… Give me a good dungeon, and I'll toss them in."
He rolled his eyes good-naturedly. "You have to learn Usagi, adapt even."
"I know." She frowned at the corpse. "But someone will wake to very good news that her attacker is dead. Probably multiple people."
"Still, you need to stop killing. Can't you drink from a blood bag?"
She scoffed, "That's just gross. They have anticoagulants in them. I tried once and it didn't stay down. It looked like a Tim Burton scene."
"Who?"
"American film director that uses over the top amounts of blood in his films."
"Noted."
He then pressed the call button on his cell for the station. "I found a body. Grab Yamato and get a wagon, it's fresh." He hung up, looked to his right, and Usagi was gone.
Mamoru walked into the morgue and Yamato was sitting on a chair by his desk staring across the room at a new dead body. "Something bothering you?"
"Yes. I was waiting for you to get in and look over the body. I don't want my preconceived notions going into this one."
"You won't say your findings?"
"I haven't touched the body. And honestly I think I'll find exactly what I'm thinking. I just need to know it's an unbiased decision."
He walked across the room and pulled the sheet from the dead man and looked at him. "I'll cut off his clothes first."
"Good. Be careful with your visual inspection."
"I will. And I know to always look between the toes," he teased.
Yamato laughed, "Hey, I solved a murder that way. The guy was stepping out on his wife, and she tried to hide the puncture that way."
When Mamoru cut the shirt off, he frowned, "What does the black crescent on his shoulder mean?"
He heard his boss stand up quickly and make his way over to look at the tattoo. "Dang. It means the rival Yakuza I was telling you about. This is a Dark Kingdom member."
"Retaliation for the drug overdose?"
Yamato raised one eyebrow at him, "If I was a detective, would you say that?"
"No. I was just postulating out loud. That and, on second thought, I have a feeling this isn't a rivalry killing. And that I would say on the record."
"Why?"
"It would have been brutal, in order to send a message. I don't see that he fought at all. He doesn't have a mark on him. Who found him?"
"Detective Ito. That is why I want you to look at this one first."
"Is that odd?"
"No, and that's why I want you to do this. I'll explain afterward."
Three hours later, Mamoru was frowning down at his findings. "Sir, um….. he doesn't have most of his blood, but there aren't any cuts, and he doesn't have internal bleeding."
In an uncharacteristic moment, Yamato cursed, "Shit! I knew it!"
"How? I don't get this."
"Neither do I, but this is the fifth one, and they are all cases handled by Detective Artemis Ito."
"He's a serial killer?"
"No, but he might be covering for a vigilante. I can guarantee this guy has allegations of rape. From what I've seen, they're probably true. The guys, the ones with little to no blood, have all been at least potential rapists. I just don't get how he's doing it."
"He?"
"Not to be sexist, but most murderers are men. Also, if you note all of the dead's sizes, they're large men, and there are no signs they fought back. I can't picture a scenario where a woman could kill like this. Of course, I can't think of one where a man does either."
"So we're looking for Batman?"
Yamato chuckled, "Very funny. We're probably looking for someone who went through family trauma."
"Batman."
"No, I'm guessing a woman he loved was raped and he's trying to protect other women. His loved one might've even committed suicide."
"So someone with a sad past taking out bad guys. I can see what Detective Ito is doing."
"This isn't justice. This is vengeance. Also, aren't doctors supposed to do no harm?"
"I'm not. And I'm not a doctor. I'm just empathetic to the idea. How would you feel if someone you loved was raped?"
"I'd want to kill him slowly as she watched. What I would do was ensure he went to prison to pay for his crimes."
The amount of certainty in Yamato's voice shocked Mamoru. "How can you be sure?"
"My sister was twelve and pregnant. The monster was forty-four and a family friend—he got twenty years. Secretly, I hope someone made him his girlfriend. My niece is six years younger than me. She's beautiful and has special needs. She has cerebral paisley. I get wanting them dead and feeling like you couldn't protect your sister. I feel that way."
Mamoru sat down heavily on the chair. He had teared up and stared into space. He wasn't the only one in the room with a traumatizing past at six years old it seemed.
"What do we do about this?"
"I have to know the truth. I need there to be justice. I'm just honestly not sure what that means in this case."
"His penis is intact."
"What?"
"I can't believe that's a sentence I said. But the truth stands. If you were killing someone out of vengeance for a loved one, who was raped, wouldn't you mutilate the guy?"
Yamato stared at the dead body and frowned. "Yes. It's odd….."
Mamoru then went through the man's clothes and held up a packet he pulled out of the pocket. "Date rape drugs?"
"Run them and let's find out." He then closed his eyes and thought. "Maybe it is a woman."
Usagi loved the taste of blood. That was a fact. But it just so happened she also loved chocolate milkshakes. She had absolutely fallen in love with the Crown Arcade. Motoki made the best milkshakes, and he was really easy on the eyes.
As cute as he was, his blood didn't call to her, and that more than anything made her comfortable to flirt with him. It was all harmless fun she knew wouldn't go anywhere. After all, since the first time she heard about mated love over four hundred years ago, she hadn't found the one that moved her.
That was something she discovered fifty years after her death. She met up with a group of vampires; at the time, she didn't know how incredibly rare that was, and they explained the undead life to her.
Vampires mated for life. All six of them were mated. William and the crazy Drucilla were beyond strange to her. The woman claimed she heard the stars talking to her. But the two other couples were good to her and helpful.
Lucy and Vlad knew the most. He's the one who looked lovingly into his mate's eyes as he explained finding the love of your life. He was born in 1431.
It was the other couple, Kaname and Yuki, that drew her to Japan. They had both been born there and described the rich history and beauty of the land. Of course that was the early sixteen hundreds, so Usagi got to witness some of that history too. The beautiful and the brutal. She was there when the bombs fell during World War II and the Second Sino-Japanese War.
It was that group of six that she lived with for two decades. She saw true love in effect and she knew, one, she didn't have it, and two, it looked like a lot of intense emotions. She wasn't sure she wanted that obsessive kind of love. After almost five hundred years, she was used to being in charge of her own life.
She still kept in touch with them. And in a stroke of hilarity, she followed them all on Twitter. William's Twitter name, "William the Bloody" still cracked her up. His avatar was a caricature of him with a bloody nose. Yuki's avatar was a picture of a perfect rose in bud. She also had all their cell numbers.
She stared at her milkshake and frowned. None of them were in Japan right now. She wanted friends to get together with. She had to distance herself from her last human friends. They started asking where she got her plastic surgery done to stay looking so young. Maybe it was time to sign up for university. She needed a way to meet people that looked her age.
She heard the doors to the arcade woosh open, and a new scent wafted through in the air. The scent of blood called to her and thrummed in her veins. The deep desire she'd never known flooded her so fast it felt like her head spun. Never had such a deep want raced through her before.
She looked up and a handsome, tall, dark-haired stranger was sitting at the counter talking with Motoki. At least her blood had good taste in men.
For the first time since she heard about a mate hundreds of years ago, it didn't seem like a burden.