Blueeyeddevil06, thank you for being my beta!
Edited 6/7/2024
Diamond paced the room, he was pissed over the latest news. His sister's crying just soured his mood even more. The cop he had Emerald work to seduce had turned the tables on her. Emerald had fallen head over designer heels in love with him, which was why she was now weeping over the evidence that the prick had been cheating on her. What pissed him off the most was that now he would be expected to comfort his sister if he wanted to keep her in line. He hated dealing with her drama.
The truth was that he barely tolerated her, but she was useful to him. Her ability to have men falling at her feet and begging to share her bed helped him build his criminal empire. He would buy her something sexy and expensive, point her at the next man, and ask her to be a sweet sister and help her dear brother. She ate that shit up.
Their father had barely spoken to her since she had failed him by being female. That meant that now Emerald was so starved for attention that she'd happily whore herself out to please him. His enterprise was built while he worked hard, and she spent time on her back.
That was why he was so disappointed in her now. Why she had to fall for the most useless mark, he didn't know. He just needed her to string the guy along for long enough to get him to steal some evidence from the police station —then she could dump his loser ass.
It was during this rumination that his brother Sapphire walked into the room. "Damn, that text alerting you to him cheating on you was sent from a cell phone that was impounded by the police. It means someone at the station is on to him. We're fucked."
Diamond saw red and spun to look at his pathetic weeping sister. Her current sniveling was the last straw in his mind. He slapped her hard with an open hand across her face, and he was pleased that her crying stopped instantly.
He then marched to his desk, picked up his phone, dialed it, and waited for a quick answer. "I have a task for you." He then hung up without a word of goodbye.
With startling speed, Diamond's best enforcer stood in the room looking at him expectantly, waiting for his orders. "You met Emerald's ex. I don't want to see his face again," Diamond barked.
Emerald began whaling again when the man left the room with the order to kill the cop who had broken her heart.
Diamond frowned at her. "Come on, dear sister," he said in a sickeningly sweet tone. "You can't think I'd tolerate him hurting you like this. You're just too precious to me."
Sapphire flinched at the abrupt mood shift and couldn't believe Emerald fell for Diamond's ploy. Her brother had just slapped her, and now he was claiming to be having a man killed for her benefit. Well, he wasn't fooled. His brother only wanted the man dead so that he couldn't turn State's evidence on him. No former cop would last long in prison, and he would be motivated to snitch not to have to serve time.
He knew he wasn't being paranoid. He was being followed, and he didn't have long until the man caught up to him. He was driving fast and was only six blocks from the police station. His full intention was to turn himself in and beg for immunity with everything he'd discovered about Diamond. He believed he'd get it. Emerald was a snitch's wet dream when it came to pillow talk.
He watched the light turn red as he approached the intersection. "Fuck it," he grumbled and ran the light. He sped through the intersection, barely missing a minivan as they laid on the horn. Still, he smiled. There were no more lights between him and the safe haven of the police station.
He never felt the bullet that was shot by a sniper from the building across from the police station. It pierced through his frontal lobe and left a large exit wound, spraying his driver seat and the back of his vehicle in gore.
The first officer on the scene threw up the moment he saw what had become of the back of his head. No one who arrived after him made fun of him for losing the contents of his stomach. They were all barely holding on.
Detective Luna clicked into the morgue the next day in her black pantsuit and black kitten heels. "Good morning," she said briskly to Mamoru and Yamato, then made her way over to the man lying dead on the steel table.
Yamato nodded to her in acknowledgment and got Mamoru's attention. "Do you want to walk the detective through what you found?"
Luna, who was looking down at the dirty cop she outed to Diamond, looked up in shock. "What is there to know? Diamond had him killed."
Yamato looked at her inquiringly, "How do you know that?"
She frowned and looked back down at the dead man's face. "I didn't think he'd be dumb enough to leave the police station."
"What does that mean?"
"He was cheating on Diamond's sister. I let her and the other women he was seeing know that they weren't exclusive."
"What was he doing with Emerald?" Yamato asked.
"Dirty cop. He'd stolen records from some cases. He had some of them in the back seat when he was killed. The envelope they were in was covered in blood, but the documents were still legible."
Mamoru swallowed the bile rising at the back of his throat. Even cleaned up, the gunshot wound was disgusting. "He had this tucked in his cheek." He had found a USB drive in the guy's mouth. "Apparently, he was afraid of being searched."
"Lucky for us, he wasn't shot a little lower then." Without remorse, she took the evidence bag with the USB and signed that she had received it.
Mamoru flinched at her callous tone. It was Yamato who explained why. "Diamond has had a total of thirteen cops killed that we know of, but we can't prove any of it. He has an alibi for all of the murders. Any cop who would work with him doesn't get many people's sympathy here if he gets himself killed."
Mamoru shifted his eyes to Luna, "I noticed something else when I was doing the autopsy." She looked up at him expectantly —he was a lot taller than she was.
He peeled back the sheet and exposed the man's torso. "He used to have a tattoo here, but it was covered over with this one," he said, pointing at it.
"How? What would make you think that?"
He tried not to flinch at her question. Initially, it had been a wild guess, and he knew Yamato instructed him to be careful about those. That said, the guess had proven right. He just didn't want to sound like someone who ran with wild theories.
He breathed out a calming breath and said, "The darkness of this tattoo compared to the one on his ankle and left shoulder. Ink applied this heavily would hurt, and there would have to be a good reason why he'd put up with that."
"Can you see the tattoo underneath with some special light?" she asked.
He shook his head. "No, but I used a magnifying glass to see if the new tattoo covered the old one completely. It didn't."
She knitted her brow, "What is it?"
Yamato smiled, clapped his hands together once, and then rubbed them vigorously. "My intern is brilliant. It's a heart."
"So?" Luna asked in confusion. "Lots of men cover those up. It usually has an ex-girlfriend's name on it."
Mamoru smirked, "Not this time. It's a black heart with a cat's eye in the center."
Luna's eyes flew open. "Hard to hide and very damning."
"It is," Yamato said seriously.
"Tell me he's the missing son," Luna said excitedly.
Mamoru frowned. He knew the story well. This man had a family ripped away from him when he was young, too. He had been hidden by his father shortly before the federal agents came to arrest him. Everyone had wondered what happened to the son of the most notorious criminal thirty years ago. Apparently, he had become a dirty cop.
While the father died in jail, the son was in the police academy plotting. And now that was brought into the light.
Yamato said, "They say his father made him swear revenge. He became a viper in the heart of the Tokyo police station. I don't think what he did for Diamond was his only transgression."
Luna looked at Mamoru. "Good catch. I'll have his life combed through and see what's on this USB."
Mamoru hesitated and said, "Not to tell you how to do your job, but if I wanted revenge, I'd bug the USB. He knew he might die. That might be his last attempt to punish everyone for his father's arrest."
She smiled broadly at him. "You really are brilliant. You can rest assured, though, that this will be opened on an isolated computer and away from any WiFi," she said, holding up the evidence bag.
Her hand dropped down, and she turned, frowning at the dead man. "I don't understand how his father could want him to live a life of hate and revenge. To do that to your own child..."
Yamato breathed hard through his nose. "That's hardly the worst thing that man did. He was twisted and evil. What do you expect?"
"I guess that's true. Still, a parent shouldn't be like that."
Yamato fully agreed with her. "True, there are monsters out there, and it's our job to stop them and bring them to justice. It's why I wanted this job. It's here that I can give the dead their voices back. I can discover what they went through and help find who killed them."
Mamoru watched as the two spoke to each other. He felt a sense of accomplishment and curiosity about what he discovered about the body and the man. Still, he wanted to save lives, not have to learn to speak for the dead. He was glad there were people out there like Yamato, though.
Luna nodded solemnly, "Sometimes we find out the victims were bad people too."
Yamato knit his brow and stared down at the floor. "It's justice I seek. Even when that word rings hollow at times."
She knew exactly what he was referring to. "And how is your sister?"
He gave a truly relaxed smile. "Good. She's proof that a victim can get help and learn to live again. That, and her husband is amazing."
"I'm glad." She paused nervously. "Any news on…?"
"No. And she's okay with that. He didn't go missing anywhere near her."
She nodded. Luna knew precisely where his sister's missing rapist was. He was buried in an unmarked grave with all of his blood sucked out of him. The twenty years he was imprisoned didn't sit well with her when she read the case file. She was disgusted, and Makoto was incensed when she told her. She hunted the man down and made sure he felt helpless as she drained him dry.
That body, she knew, would turn up once all of the evidence was destroyed. An "anonymous" tip would be made so his sister could know that the man could never hurt her again.
Luna would wait at least a few more months. Now that she knew other bodies had turned up in a mysterious nature, she didn't want to add anything to a growing pile of unsolved deaths.
It was Mamoru who pulled her out of her thoughts. "I'll keep looking and see what I can find from the autopsy. It's weird knowing I'm looking at Wiseman's son."
"What a pretentious nickname," she fussed. "He didn't lack an ego, did he?"
"No, but his ego was his downfall, from what I read. He reached too far for more territory and was backstabbed by one of his own generals," Yamato commented.
Luna nodded and added, "And now his general's son had his son killed."
"What?!" Mamoru asked in shock.
"Diamond, well actually, he's Diamond II. Like father, like son."
He let out a low, long whistle. "I didn't know that. Do you think Diamond Jr. knows who he had killed?"
"Probably not. Diamond was most likely trying to stop him from informing on him," Luna postulated.
It was then that Mamoru realized what an education he'd get in the dark underworld of crime. Well, he thought he did. What he was destined to discover was much more than he had bargained for.