Moshi Moshi no Shi Chapter 1
This is a test. It just got a title, and it is based off of Lady Hanaka's Crows Zero Fanfiction, Murder, so it won't make sense if you don't read that first.
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Chapter 1
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Up until the point where she had been slammed into the dirt, Detective Hanari was having a very good day. It wasn’t even actually dirt she had been slammed into. It was gravel. Not the soft, little bits of gravel that was usually found on driveways and such, but large, evil gravel that made running difficult.
Even that normally wouldn’t have made her day utterly un-redeemable, as she was thrown on the ground by an extremely attractive man. But she happened to know that this extremely attractive man with the most adorable child that anyone had ever seen (besides herself as a child), a shoe-size of nine and a half in men’s sizes, and a very well-built sternocleidomastoid region was extremely gay with three other permanent lovers, all of whom were equally attractive. So while being thrown on the ground by one was like being indirectly thrown on the ground by all four, it precluded the possibility of anything really happening once she was thrown on the ground besides being handcuffed and dragged back to a cop car where she would be processed and put into the system so that she could maintain her cover.
Oh, being tackled by a sexy gay man wasn’t so bad, of course. She was just stuck in the mindset that she had to preserve her cover and therefore should have been allowed to escape. Just because he was a sexy gay man didn’t mean she wanted to lose to him.
“Did you have to land so hard?” Hanari whined, trying to squirm away.
“Did you have to run so fast?” the other detective asked as he handcuffed her. At least he kept them loose. The last time she had to be arrested the officer seemed to have some kinky S&M complex and managed to bruise her wrists pretty badly. She probably could have forgiven it if the officer hadn’t been female. And ugly. And a body builder.
Shun Izaki was none of those. He had been working with the National Police Agency since he was an intern hired out of Todai. He entered the linguistics department upon graduation and since then had received both his professional degree and his doctorate in linguistics and statistics. Hanari hadn’t met him until they began working a case dealing with an international group of eco-terrorists. Shun became her case officer and three years of undercover work, all-nighters, and days of living at the office on instant ramen, coffee, and energy drinks was coming to a close with this raid on the group’s last and largest safehouse.
“You could have just surrendered when all the cops came in,” Shun said, hauling Hanari to her feet and pulling her back through the industrial complex where the safehouse was located. “Half the time all anyone could hear over the bug was you giggling. They could have abandoned a psychopath without much trouble.”
“I couldn’t help it!” Hanari complained, dragging her feet through the offensive gravel. “I wish I had been born Irish. Then it would be perfectly fine for me to change my name to O’Baby, and whenever anyone said it, I’d yell at them to say it like they were having sex!”
“And any time anyone said anything to O’Grady-” At this point Hanari giggled again, “-you had to laugh, right?”
“He’s a leprechaun!” she giggled. “A real leprechaun! He might even be shorter than your leprechaun.”
“Back into character,” Shun sighed, as they approached the main concentration of cops.
Hanari continued giggling and glaring meaningfully at her coworkers, shouting things like, “I’ll never tell!” and scaring people.
But the eco-terrorists were scary. That’s why a crazy young delinquent could squeeze in to there group so easily. She didn’t have any particular set of skills that any neighborhood eco-terrorist would need, like non-fossil-fuel based bomb-making gear but she was a vegetarian and apparently that was good enough for them.
Their leader was a fat, old former IRA sniper by the name of Seamus O’Grady, who had no hair besides what was on his chin, which he had to have dyed to get to that color of red. He was the shortest, most violent man she had ever seen and she was sure he was the reincarnation of Napoleon Bonaparte. She hoped he liked his Waterloo. When she ran, she heard someone shout, “We got him, we got him!” and she sincerely hoped that meant that someone had put a hole in his head. He had some odd hobbies that he had apparently abstained from during his stay in Japan. She doubted that he was completely rid of them, though, judging by the way he looked at her, the way he looked at any building, and the way he looked at trees.
She didn’t want to be put in the paddy wagon with the rest of the people who had been caught. Some of them had odd hobbies, too. Really, all of them did, and she was very relieved when the other detective dragged her past the large van and towards one of the smaller cop cars - an unmarked, grey police sedan. He pushed her into the back seat and closed the door - at least his car smelled clean and not like urine, vomit, and old donuts.
Seamus smelled like that sometimes. Hanari leaned her head against the window and really, really hoped he was dead.
Izaki got into the front seat and put the key into the ignition. It took a few tries before the engine finally turned over, and then he put the car in drive. They were in an industrial complex off of the harbor, and the car jerked and bounced along on the gravel for a few minutes, rattling anything that wasn’t bolted to the interior. “Three years and you still have this piece of junk,” Hanari muttered, sitting up straight and stretching out. It was hard to do, with her hands handcuffed behind her back, but the adrenaline was wearing off and she was about ready for a nap. They could debrief back at headquarters. Izaki was more for companionable silence anyways, so she could probably get away with a nap during the car ride. . . .
“When we get back and all the official business is taken care of, forensics is probably going to ask you upstairs to help identify the bodies.”
Hanari groaned and opened her eyes. “I thought that was what DNA is for!”
“It’ll be much quicker this way. I’m sure they’ll use DNA, but we need to know now who is accounted for. We can’t close the case until the threat has been neutralized.”
“Do they think they got O’Grady?”
“Chief thinks so. Bald, Caucasian with a red beard sound about right?”
“Something like that.” Hanari yawned and stretched again. Her knees arched a little from when she had slammed into the ground, but it was nothing she couldn’t ignore. She deserved a nap. She had earned at least that much. “Can we talk shop later? I’m so tired. . . .”
“Just giving you a heads up. Someone else is booking you. I’m working overtime as it is, and I need to get home.”
“I wish I had a daughter I could use to get out of work early.”
“Because that’s exactly what I’m doing.”
“It really is. There will be at least twelve hours of bureaucratic bullshit that we’re going to have to sit through and you’re going to have to make all of that up somehow, but no, you have to go home and be a family man.” Finally, they turned onto the main road and the car stopped jolting and bumping around every few seconds. It didn’t mean the car sounded like it wasn’t coughing up a lung, but at least the ride was easier. “Don’t worry. I see how it is. Go do your laundry. Make dinner. I hope you have fun.”
“It’s not as easy as it sounds, Hanari.”
The younger cop could agree. She didn’t exactly have experience in that arena, but she knew from watching her co-workers that trying to balance a family with such a high-intensity job was a task not everyone was capable of. She couldn’t grudge her senior for wanting to protect what he had.
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“Aiko came home with a black eye.”
It was not the first thing Izaki wanted to hear when he got home. Tokio was standing in the living room, leaning against the wall and looking entirely too proud of himself for being the father of a kindergardener who was about to be expelled for fighting. Three fights in one month was pushing the limit at that age. But, considering who her family was . . .
“What happened?” he sighed, pulling off his coat and flopping down on the couch. He hadn’t slept for two days, even if he always managed to escape from the office in time to wake Aiko up and take her to school. Other than that, he hadn’t seen his mismatch family for the better part of the week while Tamao accompanied Genji on a business trip to New York and Tokio worked several odd, early-morning shifts. You wanted her, but you can’t take care of her, his father’s voice chided. He pushed the memory away.
“Apparently having parents in the Yakuza is bad. But that’s not what started the fight. You’ll be proud of her. She kept a cool head until the other kids started on her about having four dads.”
Izaki knew it would happen eventually. One day someone would see that there were four different men who would pick up Aiko after school, four men that she would run up to and call “Otosan!” While he didn’t want her to grow up to make the same mistakes he had, how could he tell her to stop? It was hardwired into his brain to protect his family at any cost, and into Genji’s, and Tokio’s, and Tamao’s. How could she learn any differently? “What are you going to do?” he asked, closing his eyes.
“Me? I’m not the disciplinarian. I just told her to start her homework.” Izaki knew he had been spending too much time at work when he could tell exactly what modifications to certain syllables revealed how anxious Tokio actually was about the whole affair.
Would she start to think it’s weird to have four swinger dads? Would she not love them anymore? It was extreme, but it had gone through all of their minds, first when they adopted her, and later as she became more aware of the fact that not everyone had the same home life that she did.
“I’ll talk to her about it later,” he said. Later. He needed to get up and change and eventually make dinner but it was too much trouble to even open his eyes.
“Don’t worry about it,” Tokio replied. Izaki felt the cushions shift as Tokio sat down on the arm of the couch, and his fingers when they started playing with his hair. “Get some sleep. If you keep coming home late like this and I’m gonna start worrying that you’re cheating on us.”
“Never,” Izaki muttered. He nearly drifted off to sleep that way, the first time in a while that he’d been able to enjoy any time with the other man, or with anyone.
Izaki was not exactly a clean-cut cop. He still insisted on bleaching his hair, hair that he was so thankful to have back, even if it never acted right anymore and took more gel that it should have to make it look acceptable. It had deflated in the wake of the all nighters he had worked recently, and Tokio’s fingers running through it along his scalp felt . . . nice. He was too tired to come up with any more flowery language to describe the sensation. And as long as his hands didn’t move any lower, her could probably get to sleep. “Don’t stop,” he mumbled, when Tokio stood up and began walking back to the kitchen.
“You’ll get mad at me if I don’t remind you to get out of the monkey suit and talk to Aiko, and she’ll get mad at me if I don’t finish making her a snack.”
“You can’t cook anything . . .” Izaki sat up and thought about loosening his tie, but decided it was too much trouble to shrug off the suit jacket and vest. In their younger days Tokio would have undoubtedly offered to help, and probably still would have now if Aiko wasn’t in the house. But no, Tokio had another job now.
“I can slice apples and put some caramel in a bowl,” he said. He leaned over the divider between the kitchen and the dining room. “Maybe you should just sleep.”
That was the best advice he had heard all day, including Hanari’s reminder to take off the bullet-proof vest before he left the office. “No . . . I’ll survive.” He would stand up, walk to the bedroom, get out of his suit, and sleep for a month. “I’ll get up.” Eventually he would. But it took all of his energy to just stay awake and speak like he wasn’t as tired as he was. “Just give me a minute.”
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“I got in trouble at school.” Izaki stopped when he heard his daughter’s voice coming from their rarely-used office as he passed it on his way to the bedroom. There was a computer that probably saw more solitaire and foreign films than anything else, a few book cases, and family photos. Then there was the phone. Somehow she had learned to use the speakerphone and was spinning the chair around with slow creaks, her little feet thumping on the desk or the wall behind her as she pushed off of them.
“What happened?” Tamao’s voice wasn’t angry or disappointed or much of anything except tired, but Aiko didn’t quite understand the concept of time zones or jet lag.
“I got into a fight,” she said, her voice soft but hardly ashamed.
There was a long silence. Izaki knew what was coming, and could see Tamao in his mind, looking around to make sure no one was listening even though he should have known no one was there who cared. “Did you win?” he finally asked.
“Uh-huh.”
Next came the fatherly concern: “Did you get hurt?”
“I got pushed in the mud and I scraped up my hands, and Satoru tried to punch me, but I gave him a black eye!”
Tamao laughed. “That’s my girl! When we get home, I’m going to take you out for ice cream. But don’t tell anyone else, ok? Papa’s gonna get mad at me.”
“I won’t.” Too late. It was good to treat a kid every once in a while, but Aiko was spoiled rotten. Tokio and his mother were bad enough by themselves, getting her more clothes than she could ever possibly wear and more toys than her room could hold and anything else she imagined she wanted, but with Tamao it didn’t matter what time of day it was, because it was always a good time to go out to eat. Maybe they would get home in time for dinner, but why should she eat anything else if she could have as much ice cream and cake as she could ever want?
But there were worse things that spoiling a child. Each and every one of them had grown up without that ideal and now they were obsessed with the notion that they should never become their fathers. The had come up with an unwritten manifesto - Never get drunk and beat anyone they cared about, never let society dictate how a perfect child should behave, never play mind games with a child, never put work before family.
They didn’t have to be the perfect parents, but they had to be better than what they had experienced. “I hope it wasn’t just over getting pushed in the mud. You have to be careful with boys. They’re pretty delicate and you can hurt their feelings real easy. Then they just get really mean.”
“He’s already mean! He said Jiji was a bad person because he’s Yakuza and called all of you bad names. And he said I should stop wearing dresses since I didn’t have a mom and didn’t know how to be a girl!”
“He got off easy with a black eye.” Izaki couldn’t help but agree. Yakuza brats could be brought up worse. Any one of Aiko’s fathers could beat the boy up by themselves or use their influence to make life miserable for him.
“You and Jiji aren’t going to do anything to him, are you?”
Not yet. Not until they decide you don’t have cooties. Not until they start asking you to dances and parties. Then he’s free game. “He’s a kid. Kids call people names. It’s kid business. If we fought all your battles for you, you wouldn’t have been able to take him out like you did.”
“So I’m not in trouble?”
“Well, Toto-chan sent you to your room, didn’t he?”
“Yeah. . . .”
“That’s probably punishment enough, then.” When she got to spend an hour at least with all her toys and no daddies to bother her. No, Tokio would have been there with her, having a tea party or playing with legos.
“Will they make me eat vegetables?”
“You need to eat those if you want to grow up big and strong.”
“Did you not eat them when you were little?”
Tamao was silent for a moment. Izaki could picture him now - mouth agape and stuck between laughing and wanting to yell. He’d probably yell at Genji for calling him short all the time and putting ideas in her head - they were all just unnaturally tall as far as he was concerned. “Did Jiji tell you to say that?”
There was a distorted voice in the distance that Izaki imagined to be Genji, asking what he was supposed to have said. Maybe now they were both standing with the phone, Genji leaning over the shorter man to listen to their daughter speak.
“I haven’t talked to Jiji yet. And no one told me to say it. But Jiji’s all tall and he always cooks good food, and you’re short and all you ever make is ramen.” She trailed off and waited for him to say something, Izaki imagined. To tell her she was smart and yes, she should eat her vegetables if she wanted to be tall like Jiji. “Are you mad at me?”
“No,” Tamao sighed. “Listen, don’t-”
“Sir, please turn off your phone. We’re about to take off.”
“Hold on, bitch, I’m talking to my daughter.”
This exchange was in English, thankfully, and Aiko would not understand most of it, but Izaki stepped into the room and replied in the same language, “Tamao, some day she’s going to figure out what that means.”
Aiko sat up when he walked in, nearly jumping out of the chair. Cupcake had been perched in her lap, but he jumped to the floor when she moved and flopped down on a pile of blankets by the desk to continue his nap.
Tamao must have been just as surprised. “How long have you been there? Did you tell her to say that?!”
“Sir, you’re inconveniencing everyone around you.”
Izaki didn’t hear anymore, but somehow the exchange was finished, probably with a rude gesture and help from Atasuke. “Listen, I’ve gotta go, I’ll talk to you later. Aiko, be good and we love you.” It was odd how easily he said that word, remembering how uncomfortable they were with it when they were first trying to figure out what they were.
“Love you too, daddy. And tell Jiji I love him, too.”
“I will. We’ll be back late, late tomorrow night. Maybe if you don’t get into any more fights, Toto-chan and Oyaji will let you stay up and you can see us at the airport, okay?” Tamao didn’t do subtle, but he was trying.
Izaki rolled his eyes. “As long as she keeps up her end of the bargain.”
Aiko nodded gravely. “I’ll never get into another fight! Ever! Bye, daddy.”
“I’ll see you, shorty.”
“I’m not short!”
“Shorter than me, and I will revel in every minute of it.” The stewardess yelled at him again, and he mumbled something incoherent before his hurried goodbye was cut off as the phone was snapped shut.
Aiko stayed where she was when the phone cut off, looking at Izaki in the most calculating manner she could, trying to figure out just how to get out of the talk she knew was coming. There were so many things she could be doing besides talking with her dad. In some ways, especially temperament, she wasn’t very different from a teenager. Izaki was only a cool dad some of the time.
He acted quickly, walking into the room and sitting down on one of the chairs facing the desk. “Do you want to tell me about what happened at school today?”
“No,” she mumbled, still pushing the chair back and forth to make the long, drawn out squeaks. “You already heard it. You were eavesdropping.”
Izaki leaned back in his chair. “That’s a good word. Where did you learn it?”
“From you,” Aiko said. She slid down from the chair and sat down by Cupcake, playing with the studs on his collar. No matter how old and fat the dog got, everyone still insisted he was a rabid beast that needed the huge spikes and black leather on his collar.
“Do you know what it means?”
“Listening to people talk when you shouldn’t.”
“That’s pretty good.” Izaki let the silence between them stand, knowing that Aiko would talk when she was good and ready to, avoiding the issue for as long as she could. Izaki should have known that he wouldn’t get a chance to sleep when he got home, and he pushed the fatigue out of his mind and prepared to wait.
It was not long before she spoke again. “Do you know what daddy was saying to the lady on the plane?”
“He wasn’t being very nice.”
“Well, he wouldn’t have done that if she didn’t do anything.”
“You’re not supposed to talk on phones when you’re on a plane.”
Aiko looked up, her expression utterly horrified. “Did I get him in trouble? They aren’t going to throw him off of the plane, are they?”
“No way. They had plenty of time.” And he can get into trouble without your help. Izaki leaned forward in his chair and started scratching Cupcake behind the ears, and the dog stretched and yawned, before curling up again out of Izaki’s reach. “But your daddy’s right. You shouldn’t get into so many fights. Wait until you’re older and you have something important to fight about.”
“But he was calling you names!” she whined, her jaw set in her childish self-righteousness.
“Words are words,” Izaki sighed. “When you go to college, your professors are going to tell you that they don’t mean much of anything, not really. They’re only as powerful as you think they are.”
Aiko looked up at him, her forehead scrunched up in confusion. “But . . . words mean things. That’s how we talk.”
Izaki worked with words - made them solve crimes and turn on the people that used them. He knew that they had power, but to use that power as he did he had to know their limits. No magic, no special meaning, besides what people believed was there. But how to make a five year old understand that? “Why do you think people all over the world have so many different words to describe the same things?”
“Because they know different languages.”
The answer was beautifully simplistic. “But why do you think there are so many languages?” he asked.
“I don’t know.”
Izaki leaned back in his chair, mulling over his next words. His eyes closed unconsciously, as he listened to Cupcake’s contented snoring -damned lucky dog - and the general quietude of the house. It was an altogether unnatural state for the place, usually someone was watching TV or listening to loud music and Aiko would be running around and laughing, not upset about something she had no control over. “Words aren’t perfect. Each language names a thing a little differently, but the difference in the names doesn’t change what the thing is. You have a mimi, an ear, an orecchio, a kalasz, or a yxo, but it’s all the same thing. The names really don’t matter.”
Aiko nodded and then became very interested in playing with the studs on Cupcake’s collar. She was quite for several minutes, and Izaki was drifting into a light sleep when she crawled into his lap. She started playing with his watch, making the back light up and making the alarm go off. “What does homo mean?” she asked, refusing to look up.
“It’s Greek,” Izaki answered. “It means ‘same.’”
“Then why is it bad to call someone that?”
“It doesn’t bother me. It shouldn’t bother you, either. But you shouldn’t ever call anyone that. It’s not nice.” The four of them had decided a long time ago that they would not bring up the subject of their sexuality themselves, or try to explain it until she asked. They wouldn’t keep anything from her or act any differently, but when she wanted to know, she would. That didn’t mean it wasn’t awkward. Of course it had to happen when they weren’t all together. But maybe it was better that way. If Izaki thought it was awkward, he didn’t want to see what Genji would do, trying to explain the birds and the bees to her.
“But why is it bad to just use that word? We can say things are the same and it’s not bad.”
Izaki mussed her hair, resting his chin on his other hand. “Think about your dads. Toto-chan, Jiji, Daddy, and I, we’re all boys. Some people don’t like that.”
“Well it doesn’t matter what they think. You’re not their dads, so they can’t do anything about it” she grumbled, trying to straighten her hair out again. It was short for a girl’s, and wild, sticking out every which way no matter how much they tried to keep it controlled by clips or pigtails or braids.
Izaki smiled and pulled her into an embrace. “That’s right.” It was so good to be home, so good to be able to sit with his daughter and talk with her and just be with her, and really nothing could compare. “Just promise me you won’t pay attention whenever anyone says that. You can just call them ignorant. You know what that means, don’t you?”
“Yeah. It means stupid.”
“No, it means they don’t know any better. You should feel bad for people like that.”
Aiko nodded and wrapped her thin arms around him, looking like she might fall asleep. It was a good plan. “You’re not going to be working all night again are you?” she asked.
“I hope not,” Izaki sighed. The phone rang but he let it go, closing his eyes and leaning back in the chair. On the second ring it cut short, and in the quiet of the house he vaguely heard Tokio answer it.
He heard him yell, “Izaki, it’s for you,” a moment later .
“I don’t want to buy anything!” Izaki didn’t hear anything else and for a moment hoped that would be the end of it, but Tokio walked into the office a minute later with Aiko’s snack and set them on the table before pressing the button for speakerphone.
“Just get it over with, Hanari-san,” he said.
What could she possibly want? He hoped she just lost her subway pass and wanted to ask permission to raid his desk for spare change for a temporary ticket.
“Chief wants everyone back in the office,” she said without preamble, her voice tight. “We don’t have O’Grady.”
---
“Are you sure?”
Hanari looked down at the body again, as she swung back and forth in the lab chair she had stolen from one of the other workstations in the lab. It was cool and brightly lit and clean in the upper floors where most of the forensic work was performed, and everything seemed to be in a pristine condition. Of course a lot of that was probably due to the anal-retentiveness of some of the denizens of the lab, which took of two floors. “Can I put it this way? If I’m wrong, we’re about to be killed, our bodies ripped apart and fed to some sort of demonic Jack Russell terrier.”
“It’s a welsh corgi.” Honjo was swinging his chair in his own lazy circles as he spoke, tapping a pen against the counter beside him. He was trained in geology and biology, and would look for the most minute traces of pollen or dirt stuck to a body or an item of clothing and be able to tell you everything about where that person had been. He could predict a person’s entire day from their shoes! Hanari wished she could do that.
“It’s the same thing!” she muttered. Even if the scientist did have his uses that didn’t make the fact that he was a self-righteous know-it-all any more endearing. But he was cute and fun to mess with. “We’ll be eaten by small woodland creatures! I am certain that this body is not that belonging to Seamus O’Grady!”
“Are you sure?” he asked. His expression never changed, except to become perhaps more patronizing. “Sometimes the brain perceives corpses differently and can lead to a misidentification. . . .”
“This one still has hair! O’Grady was bald. Completely bald. So bald! This guy is trying to be bald, but failing badly,” Hanari said, wanting to tug at the dead man’s remaining ginger locks for emphasis but not wanting to touch the dead thing. She had seen O’Grady, and anyone who knew him, knew bald. The man didn’t even have eyebrows. Just his big, red beard.
Honjo crossed his arms and sighed, kicking his lab stool into a lazy spin. “And only a few of the bodies were high-level members of the organization. The leadership is mostly at large, and armed. They might have safe houses we don’t know about, and they could be regrouping with other followers. You cops suck.”
“Just do your job,” Hanari muttered, standing up to pace across the room. “You have no idea what it’s like out there, lab rat.”
Honjo sighed and grabbed the tray with the corpse’s boots. “Worry about your own job.”
A lab tech walked in as he left, pressed up against the door frame as Honjo stalked out, holding a petri dish with a skull fragment in it. He was thin and lanky, his long hair hanging in his face as he slouched towards the microscope. He looked up at Hanari once, completely indifferent to her presence in the lab. “Ryo-kun!” she sang as she twirled around in Honjo’s abandoned chair, that she had stolen almost the moment the other man stood up. “Is the forensic anthropology lab involved in this case?”
“Katoaka-sensei told me to help the medical examiner identify bone shards found at the scene,” he mumbled. His hair hung around the microscope like a dress as he examined the bone. Hanari looked down at the body on the mortuary slab. He looked like he was mostly there, but the bullet hole in his temple probably had an exit wound on the back of his head, one that was much larger and messier.
“Do you think it belongs to him?” Urushibara didn’t reply. Actually, he didn’t move, except perhaps his fingers, gently sliding the dish around under the lens. Hanari stood up and leaned over him, trying to see what he was looking at. If any of the odd forensic technicians fit the stereotype of the unapologetic, socially inept scientist, it was probably him. The way he acted, a raincloud seemed to follow him around perpetually, and she wondered why he didn’t still carry an umbrella. She had never actually seen the raincloud, but she knew it was there. Why else would his hair always be so limp and lifeless?
And it had been like that since kindergarden. Hanari had adopted Urushibara Ryo at the tender age of five as her first official lacky. She had given him his first umbrella. It had bunnies on it. He hadn’t been a very good lacky, but he was hers, and he had signed the contract saying so. Together they watched people and ruled the playground with an iron fist. Well, Hanari ruled. Urushibara watched. Then in high school he went to Housen and she didn’t really know why, because what he did didn’t change. He stood there, with an umbrella, and watched people.
It was odd, though, because now she was partners with Shun Izaki, who she was sure Urushibara liked, whose lover was Serizawa Tamao, who had kicked his ass in high school. He should never have gone to an all boys school. People always beat him up for his lunch money or for looking like a girl or for creeping when she wasn’t around. She figured he was attacked that time for creeping, though she knew that Serizawa was a hobo back then and could have taken his wallet when he was finished with him.
Well. That sounded wrong, even in her head.
So maybe it was true that Hanari purposefully sought out personal information about everyone she knew, but people were easier to deal with once you knew things about them, so she felt that it gave her an excuse. And she didn’t tell anyone what she learned unless it would help them in a case, or unless they were Katoaka-sensei from the forensics department, or Takashita in computer forensics, or Kahae from the missing persons unit. She usually told them whatever she learned over coffee break or something.
“Do you know what Katoaka is doing now?” she asked, leaning her chin on Urushibara’s head.
He sat up, and she stepped away. “Helping the Medical Examiner figure out how to drain the oil drum bodies without making the skin slide off of the bodies with the water.”
“That’s gross.”
“Not really.”
Hanari invaded his personal space again for a moment, when he leaned in over the microscope. It was not particularly interesting. “I’m going to go do my job now.”
“As you wish.”
“I would prefer to stay here and hide. Or you could kill me before my partner does. You could pull it off. You’re a forensic person. No one would ever know.”
“Goodbye, Rini.”
“I may never see you again,” she cried, walking out of the room and waving her arms. Urushibara didn’t look up.
Hanari didn’t care much for being pressed into an elevator by many odd-smelling strangers, but she also didn’t want to meet Shun until she absolutely had to, and he always took the stairs, so she held her breath and pushed her way to the front the moment the sign for the fifth floor lit up, jumping out of the elevator and running for the office.
For a moment she thought she made it there before Shun did, but she had been hiding in the lab for over an hour waiting for someone to find her and kill her, so she knew it probably wouldn’t be the case. Izaki waved her over to the desks, dropping half of a pile of manila folders over the piles of books that divided the workspace. “We’re going over all of these again.”
“He was there,” Hanari whined, picking one of them up and leafing through it slowly, not really seeing any of the information of the page. “I spoke with him just before everyone rushed in. How could he get away?” At least he was wearing reading glasses. She considered telling Katoaka about it, but texting and fangirling while working on a high profile case was generally frowned upon.
Phones rang, and people ran back and forth from desk to desk, answering questions and beginning to review three years worth of evidence. Was there anywhere else that they could look? Half of the task force assigned to O’Grady’s militia was on the streets, checking all the known hideouts and meeting with sources.
After about another hour, when the words were beginning to swim in front of her eyes, she was called into the Chief’s office along with Shun and the computer technician, Takashita Leiko. Chief was an older cop, practically a dinosaur in the office (a really spiffy dinosaur), his hair all there but completely white. Not gray, white. Hanari was glad. She didn’t want to be around any more bald people.
“It’s him,” he said. “He’s asking for you, Shun.”
Takashita had wasted no time in hooking her computer up to the chief’s phone, recording an extra copy of the conversation in high definition for the technology forensics department to look over later. Static immediately met their ears, and the sound of a freeway and the sound of many voices talking quickly in several different languages. Takashita nodded to Izaki, who took the receiver. “What do you want?” he asked.
“Is this conversation being recorded?” O’Grady’s accent was as thick and unpleasant as ever.
“You know it is.”
“Good.” His voice was level, perfectly unphased, if a little winded. “I want you to keep a copy for yourself. It might be the last time you hear your daughter’s voice.”
---
Chapter 1
---
Up until the point where she had been slammed into the dirt, Detective Hanari was having a very good day. It wasn’t even actually dirt she had been slammed into. It was gravel. Not the soft, little bits of gravel that was usually found on driveways and such, but large, evil gravel that made running difficult.
Even that normally wouldn’t have made her day utterly un-redeemable, as she was thrown on the ground by an extremely attractive man. But she happened to know that this extremely attractive man with the most adorable child that anyone had ever seen (besides herself as a child), a shoe-size of nine and a half in men’s sizes, and a very well-built sternocleidomastoid region was extremely gay with three other permanent lovers, all of whom were equally attractive. So while being thrown on the ground by one was like being indirectly thrown on the ground by all four, it precluded the possibility of anything really happening once she was thrown on the ground besides being handcuffed and dragged back to a cop car where she would be processed and put into the system so that she could maintain her cover.
Oh, being tackled by a sexy gay man wasn’t so bad, of course. She was just stuck in the mindset that she had to preserve her cover and therefore should have been allowed to escape. Just because he was a sexy gay man didn’t mean she wanted to lose to him.
“Did you have to land so hard?” Hanari whined, trying to squirm away.
“Did you have to run so fast?” the other detective asked as he handcuffed her. At least he kept them loose. The last time she had to be arrested the officer seemed to have some kinky S&M complex and managed to bruise her wrists pretty badly. She probably could have forgiven it if the officer hadn’t been female. And ugly. And a body builder.
Shun Izaki was none of those. He had been working with the National Police Agency since he was an intern hired out of Todai. He entered the linguistics department upon graduation and since then had received both his professional degree and his doctorate in linguistics and statistics. Hanari hadn’t met him until they began working a case dealing with an international group of eco-terrorists. Shun became her case officer and three years of undercover work, all-nighters, and days of living at the office on instant ramen, coffee, and energy drinks was coming to a close with this raid on the group’s last and largest safehouse.
“You could have just surrendered when all the cops came in,” Shun said, hauling Hanari to her feet and pulling her back through the industrial complex where the safehouse was located. “Half the time all anyone could hear over the bug was you giggling. They could have abandoned a psychopath without much trouble.”
“I couldn’t help it!” Hanari complained, dragging her feet through the offensive gravel. “I wish I had been born Irish. Then it would be perfectly fine for me to change my name to O’Baby, and whenever anyone said it, I’d yell at them to say it like they were having sex!”
“And any time anyone said anything to O’Grady-” At this point Hanari giggled again, “-you had to laugh, right?”
“He’s a leprechaun!” she giggled. “A real leprechaun! He might even be shorter than your leprechaun.”
“Back into character,” Shun sighed, as they approached the main concentration of cops.
Hanari continued giggling and glaring meaningfully at her coworkers, shouting things like, “I’ll never tell!” and scaring people.
But the eco-terrorists were scary. That’s why a crazy young delinquent could squeeze in to there group so easily. She didn’t have any particular set of skills that any neighborhood eco-terrorist would need, like non-fossil-fuel based bomb-making gear but she was a vegetarian and apparently that was good enough for them.
Their leader was a fat, old former IRA sniper by the name of Seamus O’Grady, who had no hair besides what was on his chin, which he had to have dyed to get to that color of red. He was the shortest, most violent man she had ever seen and she was sure he was the reincarnation of Napoleon Bonaparte. She hoped he liked his Waterloo. When she ran, she heard someone shout, “We got him, we got him!” and she sincerely hoped that meant that someone had put a hole in his head. He had some odd hobbies that he had apparently abstained from during his stay in Japan. She doubted that he was completely rid of them, though, judging by the way he looked at her, the way he looked at any building, and the way he looked at trees.
She didn’t want to be put in the paddy wagon with the rest of the people who had been caught. Some of them had odd hobbies, too. Really, all of them did, and she was very relieved when the other detective dragged her past the large van and towards one of the smaller cop cars - an unmarked, grey police sedan. He pushed her into the back seat and closed the door - at least his car smelled clean and not like urine, vomit, and old donuts.
Seamus smelled like that sometimes. Hanari leaned her head against the window and really, really hoped he was dead.
Izaki got into the front seat and put the key into the ignition. It took a few tries before the engine finally turned over, and then he put the car in drive. They were in an industrial complex off of the harbor, and the car jerked and bounced along on the gravel for a few minutes, rattling anything that wasn’t bolted to the interior. “Three years and you still have this piece of junk,” Hanari muttered, sitting up straight and stretching out. It was hard to do, with her hands handcuffed behind her back, but the adrenaline was wearing off and she was about ready for a nap. They could debrief back at headquarters. Izaki was more for companionable silence anyways, so she could probably get away with a nap during the car ride. . . .
“When we get back and all the official business is taken care of, forensics is probably going to ask you upstairs to help identify the bodies.”
Hanari groaned and opened her eyes. “I thought that was what DNA is for!”
“It’ll be much quicker this way. I’m sure they’ll use DNA, but we need to know now who is accounted for. We can’t close the case until the threat has been neutralized.”
“Do they think they got O’Grady?”
“Chief thinks so. Bald, Caucasian with a red beard sound about right?”
“Something like that.” Hanari yawned and stretched again. Her knees arched a little from when she had slammed into the ground, but it was nothing she couldn’t ignore. She deserved a nap. She had earned at least that much. “Can we talk shop later? I’m so tired. . . .”
“Just giving you a heads up. Someone else is booking you. I’m working overtime as it is, and I need to get home.”
“I wish I had a daughter I could use to get out of work early.”
“Because that’s exactly what I’m doing.”
“It really is. There will be at least twelve hours of bureaucratic bullshit that we’re going to have to sit through and you’re going to have to make all of that up somehow, but no, you have to go home and be a family man.” Finally, they turned onto the main road and the car stopped jolting and bumping around every few seconds. It didn’t mean the car sounded like it wasn’t coughing up a lung, but at least the ride was easier. “Don’t worry. I see how it is. Go do your laundry. Make dinner. I hope you have fun.”
“It’s not as easy as it sounds, Hanari.”
The younger cop could agree. She didn’t exactly have experience in that arena, but she knew from watching her co-workers that trying to balance a family with such a high-intensity job was a task not everyone was capable of. She couldn’t grudge her senior for wanting to protect what he had.
---
“Aiko came home with a black eye.”
It was not the first thing Izaki wanted to hear when he got home. Tokio was standing in the living room, leaning against the wall and looking entirely too proud of himself for being the father of a kindergardener who was about to be expelled for fighting. Three fights in one month was pushing the limit at that age. But, considering who her family was . . .
“What happened?” he sighed, pulling off his coat and flopping down on the couch. He hadn’t slept for two days, even if he always managed to escape from the office in time to wake Aiko up and take her to school. Other than that, he hadn’t seen his mismatch family for the better part of the week while Tamao accompanied Genji on a business trip to New York and Tokio worked several odd, early-morning shifts. You wanted her, but you can’t take care of her, his father’s voice chided. He pushed the memory away.
“Apparently having parents in the Yakuza is bad. But that’s not what started the fight. You’ll be proud of her. She kept a cool head until the other kids started on her about having four dads.”
Izaki knew it would happen eventually. One day someone would see that there were four different men who would pick up Aiko after school, four men that she would run up to and call “Otosan!” While he didn’t want her to grow up to make the same mistakes he had, how could he tell her to stop? It was hardwired into his brain to protect his family at any cost, and into Genji’s, and Tokio’s, and Tamao’s. How could she learn any differently? “What are you going to do?” he asked, closing his eyes.
“Me? I’m not the disciplinarian. I just told her to start her homework.” Izaki knew he had been spending too much time at work when he could tell exactly what modifications to certain syllables revealed how anxious Tokio actually was about the whole affair.
Would she start to think it’s weird to have four swinger dads? Would she not love them anymore? It was extreme, but it had gone through all of their minds, first when they adopted her, and later as she became more aware of the fact that not everyone had the same home life that she did.
“I’ll talk to her about it later,” he said. Later. He needed to get up and change and eventually make dinner but it was too much trouble to even open his eyes.
“Don’t worry about it,” Tokio replied. Izaki felt the cushions shift as Tokio sat down on the arm of the couch, and his fingers when they started playing with his hair. “Get some sleep. If you keep coming home late like this and I’m gonna start worrying that you’re cheating on us.”
“Never,” Izaki muttered. He nearly drifted off to sleep that way, the first time in a while that he’d been able to enjoy any time with the other man, or with anyone.
Izaki was not exactly a clean-cut cop. He still insisted on bleaching his hair, hair that he was so thankful to have back, even if it never acted right anymore and took more gel that it should have to make it look acceptable. It had deflated in the wake of the all nighters he had worked recently, and Tokio’s fingers running through it along his scalp felt . . . nice. He was too tired to come up with any more flowery language to describe the sensation. And as long as his hands didn’t move any lower, her could probably get to sleep. “Don’t stop,” he mumbled, when Tokio stood up and began walking back to the kitchen.
“You’ll get mad at me if I don’t remind you to get out of the monkey suit and talk to Aiko, and she’ll get mad at me if I don’t finish making her a snack.”
“You can’t cook anything . . .” Izaki sat up and thought about loosening his tie, but decided it was too much trouble to shrug off the suit jacket and vest. In their younger days Tokio would have undoubtedly offered to help, and probably still would have now if Aiko wasn’t in the house. But no, Tokio had another job now.
“I can slice apples and put some caramel in a bowl,” he said. He leaned over the divider between the kitchen and the dining room. “Maybe you should just sleep.”
That was the best advice he had heard all day, including Hanari’s reminder to take off the bullet-proof vest before he left the office. “No . . . I’ll survive.” He would stand up, walk to the bedroom, get out of his suit, and sleep for a month. “I’ll get up.” Eventually he would. But it took all of his energy to just stay awake and speak like he wasn’t as tired as he was. “Just give me a minute.”
---
“I got in trouble at school.” Izaki stopped when he heard his daughter’s voice coming from their rarely-used office as he passed it on his way to the bedroom. There was a computer that probably saw more solitaire and foreign films than anything else, a few book cases, and family photos. Then there was the phone. Somehow she had learned to use the speakerphone and was spinning the chair around with slow creaks, her little feet thumping on the desk or the wall behind her as she pushed off of them.
“What happened?” Tamao’s voice wasn’t angry or disappointed or much of anything except tired, but Aiko didn’t quite understand the concept of time zones or jet lag.
“I got into a fight,” she said, her voice soft but hardly ashamed.
There was a long silence. Izaki knew what was coming, and could see Tamao in his mind, looking around to make sure no one was listening even though he should have known no one was there who cared. “Did you win?” he finally asked.
“Uh-huh.”
Next came the fatherly concern: “Did you get hurt?”
“I got pushed in the mud and I scraped up my hands, and Satoru tried to punch me, but I gave him a black eye!”
Tamao laughed. “That’s my girl! When we get home, I’m going to take you out for ice cream. But don’t tell anyone else, ok? Papa’s gonna get mad at me.”
“I won’t.” Too late. It was good to treat a kid every once in a while, but Aiko was spoiled rotten. Tokio and his mother were bad enough by themselves, getting her more clothes than she could ever possibly wear and more toys than her room could hold and anything else she imagined she wanted, but with Tamao it didn’t matter what time of day it was, because it was always a good time to go out to eat. Maybe they would get home in time for dinner, but why should she eat anything else if she could have as much ice cream and cake as she could ever want?
But there were worse things that spoiling a child. Each and every one of them had grown up without that ideal and now they were obsessed with the notion that they should never become their fathers. The had come up with an unwritten manifesto - Never get drunk and beat anyone they cared about, never let society dictate how a perfect child should behave, never play mind games with a child, never put work before family.
They didn’t have to be the perfect parents, but they had to be better than what they had experienced. “I hope it wasn’t just over getting pushed in the mud. You have to be careful with boys. They’re pretty delicate and you can hurt their feelings real easy. Then they just get really mean.”
“He’s already mean! He said Jiji was a bad person because he’s Yakuza and called all of you bad names. And he said I should stop wearing dresses since I didn’t have a mom and didn’t know how to be a girl!”
“He got off easy with a black eye.” Izaki couldn’t help but agree. Yakuza brats could be brought up worse. Any one of Aiko’s fathers could beat the boy up by themselves or use their influence to make life miserable for him.
“You and Jiji aren’t going to do anything to him, are you?”
Not yet. Not until they decide you don’t have cooties. Not until they start asking you to dances and parties. Then he’s free game. “He’s a kid. Kids call people names. It’s kid business. If we fought all your battles for you, you wouldn’t have been able to take him out like you did.”
“So I’m not in trouble?”
“Well, Toto-chan sent you to your room, didn’t he?”
“Yeah. . . .”
“That’s probably punishment enough, then.” When she got to spend an hour at least with all her toys and no daddies to bother her. No, Tokio would have been there with her, having a tea party or playing with legos.
“Will they make me eat vegetables?”
“You need to eat those if you want to grow up big and strong.”
“Did you not eat them when you were little?”
Tamao was silent for a moment. Izaki could picture him now - mouth agape and stuck between laughing and wanting to yell. He’d probably yell at Genji for calling him short all the time and putting ideas in her head - they were all just unnaturally tall as far as he was concerned. “Did Jiji tell you to say that?”
There was a distorted voice in the distance that Izaki imagined to be Genji, asking what he was supposed to have said. Maybe now they were both standing with the phone, Genji leaning over the shorter man to listen to their daughter speak.
“I haven’t talked to Jiji yet. And no one told me to say it. But Jiji’s all tall and he always cooks good food, and you’re short and all you ever make is ramen.” She trailed off and waited for him to say something, Izaki imagined. To tell her she was smart and yes, she should eat her vegetables if she wanted to be tall like Jiji. “Are you mad at me?”
“No,” Tamao sighed. “Listen, don’t-”
“Sir, please turn off your phone. We’re about to take off.”
“Hold on, bitch, I’m talking to my daughter.”
This exchange was in English, thankfully, and Aiko would not understand most of it, but Izaki stepped into the room and replied in the same language, “Tamao, some day she’s going to figure out what that means.”
Aiko sat up when he walked in, nearly jumping out of the chair. Cupcake had been perched in her lap, but he jumped to the floor when she moved and flopped down on a pile of blankets by the desk to continue his nap.
Tamao must have been just as surprised. “How long have you been there? Did you tell her to say that?!”
“Sir, you’re inconveniencing everyone around you.”
Izaki didn’t hear anymore, but somehow the exchange was finished, probably with a rude gesture and help from Atasuke. “Listen, I’ve gotta go, I’ll talk to you later. Aiko, be good and we love you.” It was odd how easily he said that word, remembering how uncomfortable they were with it when they were first trying to figure out what they were.
“Love you too, daddy. And tell Jiji I love him, too.”
“I will. We’ll be back late, late tomorrow night. Maybe if you don’t get into any more fights, Toto-chan and Oyaji will let you stay up and you can see us at the airport, okay?” Tamao didn’t do subtle, but he was trying.
Izaki rolled his eyes. “As long as she keeps up her end of the bargain.”
Aiko nodded gravely. “I’ll never get into another fight! Ever! Bye, daddy.”
“I’ll see you, shorty.”
“I’m not short!”
“Shorter than me, and I will revel in every minute of it.” The stewardess yelled at him again, and he mumbled something incoherent before his hurried goodbye was cut off as the phone was snapped shut.
Aiko stayed where she was when the phone cut off, looking at Izaki in the most calculating manner she could, trying to figure out just how to get out of the talk she knew was coming. There were so many things she could be doing besides talking with her dad. In some ways, especially temperament, she wasn’t very different from a teenager. Izaki was only a cool dad some of the time.
He acted quickly, walking into the room and sitting down on one of the chairs facing the desk. “Do you want to tell me about what happened at school today?”
“No,” she mumbled, still pushing the chair back and forth to make the long, drawn out squeaks. “You already heard it. You were eavesdropping.”
Izaki leaned back in his chair. “That’s a good word. Where did you learn it?”
“From you,” Aiko said. She slid down from the chair and sat down by Cupcake, playing with the studs on his collar. No matter how old and fat the dog got, everyone still insisted he was a rabid beast that needed the huge spikes and black leather on his collar.
“Do you know what it means?”
“Listening to people talk when you shouldn’t.”
“That’s pretty good.” Izaki let the silence between them stand, knowing that Aiko would talk when she was good and ready to, avoiding the issue for as long as she could. Izaki should have known that he wouldn’t get a chance to sleep when he got home, and he pushed the fatigue out of his mind and prepared to wait.
It was not long before she spoke again. “Do you know what daddy was saying to the lady on the plane?”
“He wasn’t being very nice.”
“Well, he wouldn’t have done that if she didn’t do anything.”
“You’re not supposed to talk on phones when you’re on a plane.”
Aiko looked up, her expression utterly horrified. “Did I get him in trouble? They aren’t going to throw him off of the plane, are they?”
“No way. They had plenty of time.” And he can get into trouble without your help. Izaki leaned forward in his chair and started scratching Cupcake behind the ears, and the dog stretched and yawned, before curling up again out of Izaki’s reach. “But your daddy’s right. You shouldn’t get into so many fights. Wait until you’re older and you have something important to fight about.”
“But he was calling you names!” she whined, her jaw set in her childish self-righteousness.
“Words are words,” Izaki sighed. “When you go to college, your professors are going to tell you that they don’t mean much of anything, not really. They’re only as powerful as you think they are.”
Aiko looked up at him, her forehead scrunched up in confusion. “But . . . words mean things. That’s how we talk.”
Izaki worked with words - made them solve crimes and turn on the people that used them. He knew that they had power, but to use that power as he did he had to know their limits. No magic, no special meaning, besides what people believed was there. But how to make a five year old understand that? “Why do you think people all over the world have so many different words to describe the same things?”
“Because they know different languages.”
The answer was beautifully simplistic. “But why do you think there are so many languages?” he asked.
“I don’t know.”
Izaki leaned back in his chair, mulling over his next words. His eyes closed unconsciously, as he listened to Cupcake’s contented snoring -damned lucky dog - and the general quietude of the house. It was an altogether unnatural state for the place, usually someone was watching TV or listening to loud music and Aiko would be running around and laughing, not upset about something she had no control over. “Words aren’t perfect. Each language names a thing a little differently, but the difference in the names doesn’t change what the thing is. You have a mimi, an ear, an orecchio, a kalasz, or a yxo, but it’s all the same thing. The names really don’t matter.”
Aiko nodded and then became very interested in playing with the studs on Cupcake’s collar. She was quite for several minutes, and Izaki was drifting into a light sleep when she crawled into his lap. She started playing with his watch, making the back light up and making the alarm go off. “What does homo mean?” she asked, refusing to look up.
“It’s Greek,” Izaki answered. “It means ‘same.’”
“Then why is it bad to call someone that?”
“It doesn’t bother me. It shouldn’t bother you, either. But you shouldn’t ever call anyone that. It’s not nice.” The four of them had decided a long time ago that they would not bring up the subject of their sexuality themselves, or try to explain it until she asked. They wouldn’t keep anything from her or act any differently, but when she wanted to know, she would. That didn’t mean it wasn’t awkward. Of course it had to happen when they weren’t all together. But maybe it was better that way. If Izaki thought it was awkward, he didn’t want to see what Genji would do, trying to explain the birds and the bees to her.
“But why is it bad to just use that word? We can say things are the same and it’s not bad.”
Izaki mussed her hair, resting his chin on his other hand. “Think about your dads. Toto-chan, Jiji, Daddy, and I, we’re all boys. Some people don’t like that.”
“Well it doesn’t matter what they think. You’re not their dads, so they can’t do anything about it” she grumbled, trying to straighten her hair out again. It was short for a girl’s, and wild, sticking out every which way no matter how much they tried to keep it controlled by clips or pigtails or braids.
Izaki smiled and pulled her into an embrace. “That’s right.” It was so good to be home, so good to be able to sit with his daughter and talk with her and just be with her, and really nothing could compare. “Just promise me you won’t pay attention whenever anyone says that. You can just call them ignorant. You know what that means, don’t you?”
“Yeah. It means stupid.”
“No, it means they don’t know any better. You should feel bad for people like that.”
Aiko nodded and wrapped her thin arms around him, looking like she might fall asleep. It was a good plan. “You’re not going to be working all night again are you?” she asked.
“I hope not,” Izaki sighed. The phone rang but he let it go, closing his eyes and leaning back in the chair. On the second ring it cut short, and in the quiet of the house he vaguely heard Tokio answer it.
He heard him yell, “Izaki, it’s for you,” a moment later .
“I don’t want to buy anything!” Izaki didn’t hear anything else and for a moment hoped that would be the end of it, but Tokio walked into the office a minute later with Aiko’s snack and set them on the table before pressing the button for speakerphone.
“Just get it over with, Hanari-san,” he said.
What could she possibly want? He hoped she just lost her subway pass and wanted to ask permission to raid his desk for spare change for a temporary ticket.
“Chief wants everyone back in the office,” she said without preamble, her voice tight. “We don’t have O’Grady.”
---
“Are you sure?”
Hanari looked down at the body again, as she swung back and forth in the lab chair she had stolen from one of the other workstations in the lab. It was cool and brightly lit and clean in the upper floors where most of the forensic work was performed, and everything seemed to be in a pristine condition. Of course a lot of that was probably due to the anal-retentiveness of some of the denizens of the lab, which took of two floors. “Can I put it this way? If I’m wrong, we’re about to be killed, our bodies ripped apart and fed to some sort of demonic Jack Russell terrier.”
“It’s a welsh corgi.” Honjo was swinging his chair in his own lazy circles as he spoke, tapping a pen against the counter beside him. He was trained in geology and biology, and would look for the most minute traces of pollen or dirt stuck to a body or an item of clothing and be able to tell you everything about where that person had been. He could predict a person’s entire day from their shoes! Hanari wished she could do that.
“It’s the same thing!” she muttered. Even if the scientist did have his uses that didn’t make the fact that he was a self-righteous know-it-all any more endearing. But he was cute and fun to mess with. “We’ll be eaten by small woodland creatures! I am certain that this body is not that belonging to Seamus O’Grady!”
“Are you sure?” he asked. His expression never changed, except to become perhaps more patronizing. “Sometimes the brain perceives corpses differently and can lead to a misidentification. . . .”
“This one still has hair! O’Grady was bald. Completely bald. So bald! This guy is trying to be bald, but failing badly,” Hanari said, wanting to tug at the dead man’s remaining ginger locks for emphasis but not wanting to touch the dead thing. She had seen O’Grady, and anyone who knew him, knew bald. The man didn’t even have eyebrows. Just his big, red beard.
Honjo crossed his arms and sighed, kicking his lab stool into a lazy spin. “And only a few of the bodies were high-level members of the organization. The leadership is mostly at large, and armed. They might have safe houses we don’t know about, and they could be regrouping with other followers. You cops suck.”
“Just do your job,” Hanari muttered, standing up to pace across the room. “You have no idea what it’s like out there, lab rat.”
Honjo sighed and grabbed the tray with the corpse’s boots. “Worry about your own job.”
A lab tech walked in as he left, pressed up against the door frame as Honjo stalked out, holding a petri dish with a skull fragment in it. He was thin and lanky, his long hair hanging in his face as he slouched towards the microscope. He looked up at Hanari once, completely indifferent to her presence in the lab. “Ryo-kun!” she sang as she twirled around in Honjo’s abandoned chair, that she had stolen almost the moment the other man stood up. “Is the forensic anthropology lab involved in this case?”
“Katoaka-sensei told me to help the medical examiner identify bone shards found at the scene,” he mumbled. His hair hung around the microscope like a dress as he examined the bone. Hanari looked down at the body on the mortuary slab. He looked like he was mostly there, but the bullet hole in his temple probably had an exit wound on the back of his head, one that was much larger and messier.
“Do you think it belongs to him?” Urushibara didn’t reply. Actually, he didn’t move, except perhaps his fingers, gently sliding the dish around under the lens. Hanari stood up and leaned over him, trying to see what he was looking at. If any of the odd forensic technicians fit the stereotype of the unapologetic, socially inept scientist, it was probably him. The way he acted, a raincloud seemed to follow him around perpetually, and she wondered why he didn’t still carry an umbrella. She had never actually seen the raincloud, but she knew it was there. Why else would his hair always be so limp and lifeless?
And it had been like that since kindergarden. Hanari had adopted Urushibara Ryo at the tender age of five as her first official lacky. She had given him his first umbrella. It had bunnies on it. He hadn’t been a very good lacky, but he was hers, and he had signed the contract saying so. Together they watched people and ruled the playground with an iron fist. Well, Hanari ruled. Urushibara watched. Then in high school he went to Housen and she didn’t really know why, because what he did didn’t change. He stood there, with an umbrella, and watched people.
It was odd, though, because now she was partners with Shun Izaki, who she was sure Urushibara liked, whose lover was Serizawa Tamao, who had kicked his ass in high school. He should never have gone to an all boys school. People always beat him up for his lunch money or for looking like a girl or for creeping when she wasn’t around. She figured he was attacked that time for creeping, though she knew that Serizawa was a hobo back then and could have taken his wallet when he was finished with him.
Well. That sounded wrong, even in her head.
So maybe it was true that Hanari purposefully sought out personal information about everyone she knew, but people were easier to deal with once you knew things about them, so she felt that it gave her an excuse. And she didn’t tell anyone what she learned unless it would help them in a case, or unless they were Katoaka-sensei from the forensics department, or Takashita in computer forensics, or Kahae from the missing persons unit. She usually told them whatever she learned over coffee break or something.
“Do you know what Katoaka is doing now?” she asked, leaning her chin on Urushibara’s head.
He sat up, and she stepped away. “Helping the Medical Examiner figure out how to drain the oil drum bodies without making the skin slide off of the bodies with the water.”
“That’s gross.”
“Not really.”
Hanari invaded his personal space again for a moment, when he leaned in over the microscope. It was not particularly interesting. “I’m going to go do my job now.”
“As you wish.”
“I would prefer to stay here and hide. Or you could kill me before my partner does. You could pull it off. You’re a forensic person. No one would ever know.”
“Goodbye, Rini.”
“I may never see you again,” she cried, walking out of the room and waving her arms. Urushibara didn’t look up.
Hanari didn’t care much for being pressed into an elevator by many odd-smelling strangers, but she also didn’t want to meet Shun until she absolutely had to, and he always took the stairs, so she held her breath and pushed her way to the front the moment the sign for the fifth floor lit up, jumping out of the elevator and running for the office.
For a moment she thought she made it there before Shun did, but she had been hiding in the lab for over an hour waiting for someone to find her and kill her, so she knew it probably wouldn’t be the case. Izaki waved her over to the desks, dropping half of a pile of manila folders over the piles of books that divided the workspace. “We’re going over all of these again.”
“He was there,” Hanari whined, picking one of them up and leafing through it slowly, not really seeing any of the information of the page. “I spoke with him just before everyone rushed in. How could he get away?” At least he was wearing reading glasses. She considered telling Katoaka about it, but texting and fangirling while working on a high profile case was generally frowned upon.
Phones rang, and people ran back and forth from desk to desk, answering questions and beginning to review three years worth of evidence. Was there anywhere else that they could look? Half of the task force assigned to O’Grady’s militia was on the streets, checking all the known hideouts and meeting with sources.
After about another hour, when the words were beginning to swim in front of her eyes, she was called into the Chief’s office along with Shun and the computer technician, Takashita Leiko. Chief was an older cop, practically a dinosaur in the office (a really spiffy dinosaur), his hair all there but completely white. Not gray, white. Hanari was glad. She didn’t want to be around any more bald people.
“It’s him,” he said. “He’s asking for you, Shun.”
Takashita had wasted no time in hooking her computer up to the chief’s phone, recording an extra copy of the conversation in high definition for the technology forensics department to look over later. Static immediately met their ears, and the sound of a freeway and the sound of many voices talking quickly in several different languages. Takashita nodded to Izaki, who took the receiver. “What do you want?” he asked.
“Is this conversation being recorded?” O’Grady’s accent was as thick and unpleasant as ever.
“You know it is.”
“Good.” His voice was level, perfectly unphased, if a little winded. “I want you to keep a copy for yourself. It might be the last time you hear your daughter’s voice.”