Verdict, Ch. 4
Title: Verdict
Author: fffriction1984
Chapters: 4/??
Genre: AU, crime, suspense, het, general, action (in bits, I guess)
Warnings: violence in parts, I’m toying with a lot of clichés here, characters acting OOC, English is not my mother tongue
Rating: NC17 to be safe
Pairings: none (though there might be one temporarily or smth)
Characters: the usual suspects I’d say; Danger Gang, Gazette, Alice Nine, Screw, Dir en grey, more to come
Disclaimer: I only own the idea but I am in no way affiliated with the aforementioned bands or make any money through this.
Comment: This idea hit me in the middle of the night while I was raging mad at some noisy people, so much that I wanted to kill them. Instead, I sat down and began writing this. This doesn’t really have anything to do with the hot white rage that filled me before, but I kinda like the direction this is heading. lol.
Synopsis: What would you think if an armed task force stormed into your apartment without so much as a warning?
(a/n: Just in case you’re wondering, yes, I use the artists alleged real family names along with their stage names, at least as far as the gazette and alice nine members are concerned. I have no idea if Hiko’s family name really is Kobayashi or anything in that direction…)
(Soundtrack for the first part of the chapter, listen to it if you feel like it, I think it fits the situation/mood very well. ^^)
Again Hiko put on a pair of rubber gloves -she was wearing rubber gloves so often these days that she felt like she worked in a doctor’s practice or something- before she broke the seal at the front door, walked inside, and switched on the light inside the apartment of Takashima Uruha, her prime suspect. The apartment had been searched thoroughly after the Task Force had seized Takashima, that’s what she had been told, fingerprints were taken and samples of DNA collected and saved, pictures and documents were searched for anything that could help to bring the case forward.
Especially in the kitchen and the living room there were lots of different layers of fingerprints, fingerprints that belonged to the suspect and people that were yet unidentified, none of them had ever been in conflict with the law as it seemed because even the CSI specialists couldn’t match the fingerprints to anyone.
“Innocent until proven guilty…” she read off a magazine that was lying on the end table beside the couch, and in that moment that sentence sounded so ambiguous to her, it was like the magazine was mocking her and all her efforts in the investigation. It wasn’t like she wanted that exact man to be the perpetrator, because from what she learned about him while he was under her surveillance -without noticing it- he didn’t seem like someone who would ever lay a hand on a woman, let alone kill anyone, his criminal records were clean, too, but the evidence Hiko and the team had found just fit him like a glove. Part of her would even go as far as to pity him for ending up like that, an apparently nice man from next door, ending up a convicted serial killer. As she first saw him, she had an instant feeling that she had the wrong guy, despite the evidence her colleagues had already gathered. Some people just looked like criminals and some people don’t; Takashima was one of the people that looked as though butter wouldn’t melt in their mouths, but it was exactly this thought that made her change her mind. Ever since then she was almost convinced of him being guilty, because he could persuade anyone into thinking he was innocent. “That’s the stuff movie scripts are made of, huh…” she mumbled to herself and sauntered into the bedroom.
This case, some people already referred to it as “Jack the Strangler” in the style of Jack the Ripper, was Hiko’s first big case. It wasn’t like she needed to prove herself or her abilities, she had done that on several occasions already, but she wanted to make things right and stop the trail of murders now. Her colleague, Detective Sergeant Amano Tora, seemed just as eager to bring this case to an end, luckily. There were lots of times where he was of great help to motivate the team when they seemed stuck at a certain point and all investigation seemed useless. Hiko was glad to work with such a good, professional team.
So far there were 7 dead women; all of them aged 23-26, all of them residents of Tokyo, office workers or shop clerks, so none of them was particularly wealthy, there was nothing spectacular about the victims at all. Furthermore the victims had been in no way related to each other, neither did they seem to have known each other, the only constant in this was her prime suspect Takashima Uruha, that being why it was quite clear from the beginning, that those murders were linked to each other, even though they obviously did not know each other. But every victim was somehow linked to him, be it that they dated or that they had just met once or twice on a party or wherever, but there were always pictures of him with one of them. Yet no one had any clue how he picked them, if he picked his victims. Another possibility could be they were just random acquaintances and that it was mere bad luck if he decided to strangle them, for whatever reason. As far as the two other DNA structures that were found were concerned, there was no linkage whatsoever to either the victims or her suspect, and therefore they were the least of Hiko’s concerns right now.
If she could get a confession out of Takashima Uruha the case would go to court and could be closed within a matter of only a few months. He’d receive a softer, in other words shorter, jail sentence and could be rehabilitated shortly thereafter. Possibly. It was up to him now.
Just as she was standing in front of his dresser, pulling out random items to see if there was anything hidden between or beneath the clothes, the doorbell rang. For a moment she wavered whether to open the door, but then decided to open, it could just as well be one of the officers who was also working on that case. Before the door she saw a FedEx delivery guy though, holding up a parcel.
“Good day. I have this parcel for Takashima-san. Can you accept this for him, please?”
“Um… Yeah, sure.”
“Great. Sign here and here, please.” The delivery guy left as quickly as he had come and Hiko wandered back into the living room, placing the parcel on the low table in front of the couch. The sender was a company called “Computer Corner” and she wondered what they were sending, so she opened the parcel without much thought and pulled the contents out; she was a detective after all and it was her job to investigate.
“What’s this…?” Hiko mumbled as she checked the invoice enclosed in the parcel. “… successful data recovery of… of your hard disk… according to your order…” She pulled said hard disk drive out of a plastic covering and frowned. If this was a hard disk with his data on it, it could help the investigations, she thought. And so she slipped the device back into the protective plastic covering and put it into her bag. She would just plug the hard disk to her computer at the police station later on and see if there was anything interesting, any documents or files that could be of help - either to bedevil or unburden him. Bedevilling was more beneficial for her though. If the data proved to take some of the pressure off of her suspect she would have to start all over again and that would mean almost 4 months of intense investigation would go to waste.
Then again, this whole thing became more and more frustrating for her. In addition, she hadn’t slept all night and was tired as hell, and maybe that was why she fell back against the backrest of the couch with a long, drawn-out sigh, just to simply close her eyes for a moment, but fell dead asleep in due course.
“No, listen to me. Okay? Calm down and listen to me, Uruha. I’ll talk to the inspector in charge as soon as I can and I will try to bail you out or something.” his lawyer said, patting his client’s shoulder.
“How so? They have evidence against me!”
“Yes, that’s the case, but they also denied you letting you talk to me first before they started interrogating you. Also, the way they seized you was quite unnecessary, if you ask me. I mean, come on, a whole Task Force to capture one, unarmed man? They’re either really scared of you or really convinced you did these horrible things to these women…”
“Believe me, I didn’t do anything! That detective Kobayashi, she showed me pictures of the murdered women, and she also said she had pictures of them with me, although I can’t recall ever having posed for pictures with any of them!”
“Then maybe she’s bluffing. Ever thought about that?”
“But the thing is that I knew all of them! But I didn’t kill them, Kai! I couldn’t kill anybody!” the blonde suspect was about to yell now, his desperation very obvious.
“I believe you, Uruha. Don’t worry. I am on your good side.”
“They even said I’m doing drugs! Drugs! Me! Yes, I’m quite fond of alcohol, but drugs?!” Uruha burst out, biting his nails. “Or murder! Just because I favour a good glass of wine with my dinner, that doesn’t qualify me as a murderer on drugs!”
The lawyer, Uke Kai, a man of only 28 years, wrinkled his forehead in deep thought while Uruha continued to pace the room, the same room where he had been interrogated by Hiko the night before. “We can prove your innocence of the drug-usage rather easily. We’ll simply let them do a drug screening to show them they’re wrong and at least drop those charges.”
“I just really want to go home, take a bath and go to bed, really… That’s not too much to ask, is it?”
“Well… The law is the law and they have rather heavy evidence, from what you told me… Anywho. I’ll go talk to the inspector and see if I can already access the files… There’s not much I can do right now, I fear. But like I said, I’ll try to get you out on bail, alright?”
“Yeah… Thank you.”
“I’ll also try to stop the press from printing any more pictures of you. If everything turns out okay and the charges against you are being dropped you can maybe press charges against the press for pinning the blame on you by publishing your picture way too early. But whatever happens, Uruha, stay calm. And don’t tell detective Kobayashi anything, or any other detective for that matter. Just stay quiet for a while, for you don’t have to say anything that can be used against you later on. Okay?”
“I guess that’ll have to do, yes…”
An officer escorted Uruha back into the small cell in the back of the police station shortly thereafter. “Someone will get you something to eat soon, okay.” the officer, a short man who was about 25 years old, if Uruha had to guess, said. The officer’s nametag read Matsumoto R., but with Matsumoto being such a common surname in Japan he was probably a nobody at the police. He figured, Officer Matsumoto was even more of a nobody as he looked a little chubby, but maybe that was just because of the uniform or something. “You’ve never been imprisoned like this, eh?”
“Never, no. And it was never something I would’ve wanted for myself, so… I just want to get out of here, really.”
“I can understand that. Totally. Poor guy.”
“Poor guy, huh?”
“Yeah.” the officer nodded. “When I heard how they seized you I could only imagine your shock, but that’s just Kobayashi’s way of pressing a confession out of somebody.”
“Through trepidation…?” he asked back with one eyebrow jerked up.
“Obviously. I mean, she’s not much of a person really, physically speaking, and that’s why she sent the Task Force, I think.”
“Whatever it was, it sure gave me a good shock…”
archive
a/n: I know, this chapter also isn't very long, but I'm updating faster with shorter chapters and it's not too much information all at once. I'll be introducing at least one new character int he next chapter, I guess.
Comments are <3
Author: fffriction1984
Chapters: 4/??
Genre: AU, crime, suspense, het, general, action (in bits, I guess)
Warnings: violence in parts, I’m toying with a lot of clichés here, characters acting OOC, English is not my mother tongue
Rating: NC17 to be safe
Pairings: none (though there might be one temporarily or smth)
Characters: the usual suspects I’d say; Danger Gang, Gazette, Alice Nine, Screw, Dir en grey, more to come
Disclaimer: I only own the idea but I am in no way affiliated with the aforementioned bands or make any money through this.
Comment: This idea hit me in the middle of the night while I was raging mad at some noisy people, so much that I wanted to kill them. Instead, I sat down and began writing this. This doesn’t really have anything to do with the hot white rage that filled me before, but I kinda like the direction this is heading. lol.
Synopsis: What would you think if an armed task force stormed into your apartment without so much as a warning?
(a/n: Just in case you’re wondering, yes, I use the artists alleged real family names along with their stage names, at least as far as the gazette and alice nine members are concerned. I have no idea if Hiko’s family name really is Kobayashi or anything in that direction…)
(Soundtrack for the first part of the chapter, listen to it if you feel like it, I think it fits the situation/mood very well. ^^)
Again Hiko put on a pair of rubber gloves -she was wearing rubber gloves so often these days that she felt like she worked in a doctor’s practice or something- before she broke the seal at the front door, walked inside, and switched on the light inside the apartment of Takashima Uruha, her prime suspect. The apartment had been searched thoroughly after the Task Force had seized Takashima, that’s what she had been told, fingerprints were taken and samples of DNA collected and saved, pictures and documents were searched for anything that could help to bring the case forward.
Especially in the kitchen and the living room there were lots of different layers of fingerprints, fingerprints that belonged to the suspect and people that were yet unidentified, none of them had ever been in conflict with the law as it seemed because even the CSI specialists couldn’t match the fingerprints to anyone.
“Innocent until proven guilty…” she read off a magazine that was lying on the end table beside the couch, and in that moment that sentence sounded so ambiguous to her, it was like the magazine was mocking her and all her efforts in the investigation. It wasn’t like she wanted that exact man to be the perpetrator, because from what she learned about him while he was under her surveillance -without noticing it- he didn’t seem like someone who would ever lay a hand on a woman, let alone kill anyone, his criminal records were clean, too, but the evidence Hiko and the team had found just fit him like a glove. Part of her would even go as far as to pity him for ending up like that, an apparently nice man from next door, ending up a convicted serial killer. As she first saw him, she had an instant feeling that she had the wrong guy, despite the evidence her colleagues had already gathered. Some people just looked like criminals and some people don’t; Takashima was one of the people that looked as though butter wouldn’t melt in their mouths, but it was exactly this thought that made her change her mind. Ever since then she was almost convinced of him being guilty, because he could persuade anyone into thinking he was innocent. “That’s the stuff movie scripts are made of, huh…” she mumbled to herself and sauntered into the bedroom.
This case, some people already referred to it as “Jack the Strangler” in the style of Jack the Ripper, was Hiko’s first big case. It wasn’t like she needed to prove herself or her abilities, she had done that on several occasions already, but she wanted to make things right and stop the trail of murders now. Her colleague, Detective Sergeant Amano Tora, seemed just as eager to bring this case to an end, luckily. There were lots of times where he was of great help to motivate the team when they seemed stuck at a certain point and all investigation seemed useless. Hiko was glad to work with such a good, professional team.
So far there were 7 dead women; all of them aged 23-26, all of them residents of Tokyo, office workers or shop clerks, so none of them was particularly wealthy, there was nothing spectacular about the victims at all. Furthermore the victims had been in no way related to each other, neither did they seem to have known each other, the only constant in this was her prime suspect Takashima Uruha, that being why it was quite clear from the beginning, that those murders were linked to each other, even though they obviously did not know each other. But every victim was somehow linked to him, be it that they dated or that they had just met once or twice on a party or wherever, but there were always pictures of him with one of them. Yet no one had any clue how he picked them, if he picked his victims. Another possibility could be they were just random acquaintances and that it was mere bad luck if he decided to strangle them, for whatever reason. As far as the two other DNA structures that were found were concerned, there was no linkage whatsoever to either the victims or her suspect, and therefore they were the least of Hiko’s concerns right now.
If she could get a confession out of Takashima Uruha the case would go to court and could be closed within a matter of only a few months. He’d receive a softer, in other words shorter, jail sentence and could be rehabilitated shortly thereafter. Possibly. It was up to him now.
Just as she was standing in front of his dresser, pulling out random items to see if there was anything hidden between or beneath the clothes, the doorbell rang. For a moment she wavered whether to open the door, but then decided to open, it could just as well be one of the officers who was also working on that case. Before the door she saw a FedEx delivery guy though, holding up a parcel.
“Good day. I have this parcel for Takashima-san. Can you accept this for him, please?”
“Um… Yeah, sure.”
“Great. Sign here and here, please.” The delivery guy left as quickly as he had come and Hiko wandered back into the living room, placing the parcel on the low table in front of the couch. The sender was a company called “Computer Corner” and she wondered what they were sending, so she opened the parcel without much thought and pulled the contents out; she was a detective after all and it was her job to investigate.
“What’s this…?” Hiko mumbled as she checked the invoice enclosed in the parcel. “… successful data recovery of… of your hard disk… according to your order…” She pulled said hard disk drive out of a plastic covering and frowned. If this was a hard disk with his data on it, it could help the investigations, she thought. And so she slipped the device back into the protective plastic covering and put it into her bag. She would just plug the hard disk to her computer at the police station later on and see if there was anything interesting, any documents or files that could be of help - either to bedevil or unburden him. Bedevilling was more beneficial for her though. If the data proved to take some of the pressure off of her suspect she would have to start all over again and that would mean almost 4 months of intense investigation would go to waste.
Then again, this whole thing became more and more frustrating for her. In addition, she hadn’t slept all night and was tired as hell, and maybe that was why she fell back against the backrest of the couch with a long, drawn-out sigh, just to simply close her eyes for a moment, but fell dead asleep in due course.
“No, listen to me. Okay? Calm down and listen to me, Uruha. I’ll talk to the inspector in charge as soon as I can and I will try to bail you out or something.” his lawyer said, patting his client’s shoulder.
“How so? They have evidence against me!”
“Yes, that’s the case, but they also denied you letting you talk to me first before they started interrogating you. Also, the way they seized you was quite unnecessary, if you ask me. I mean, come on, a whole Task Force to capture one, unarmed man? They’re either really scared of you or really convinced you did these horrible things to these women…”
“Believe me, I didn’t do anything! That detective Kobayashi, she showed me pictures of the murdered women, and she also said she had pictures of them with me, although I can’t recall ever having posed for pictures with any of them!”
“Then maybe she’s bluffing. Ever thought about that?”
“But the thing is that I knew all of them! But I didn’t kill them, Kai! I couldn’t kill anybody!” the blonde suspect was about to yell now, his desperation very obvious.
“I believe you, Uruha. Don’t worry. I am on your good side.”
“They even said I’m doing drugs! Drugs! Me! Yes, I’m quite fond of alcohol, but drugs?!” Uruha burst out, biting his nails. “Or murder! Just because I favour a good glass of wine with my dinner, that doesn’t qualify me as a murderer on drugs!”
The lawyer, Uke Kai, a man of only 28 years, wrinkled his forehead in deep thought while Uruha continued to pace the room, the same room where he had been interrogated by Hiko the night before. “We can prove your innocence of the drug-usage rather easily. We’ll simply let them do a drug screening to show them they’re wrong and at least drop those charges.”
“I just really want to go home, take a bath and go to bed, really… That’s not too much to ask, is it?”
“Well… The law is the law and they have rather heavy evidence, from what you told me… Anywho. I’ll go talk to the inspector and see if I can already access the files… There’s not much I can do right now, I fear. But like I said, I’ll try to get you out on bail, alright?”
“Yeah… Thank you.”
“I’ll also try to stop the press from printing any more pictures of you. If everything turns out okay and the charges against you are being dropped you can maybe press charges against the press for pinning the blame on you by publishing your picture way too early. But whatever happens, Uruha, stay calm. And don’t tell detective Kobayashi anything, or any other detective for that matter. Just stay quiet for a while, for you don’t have to say anything that can be used against you later on. Okay?”
“I guess that’ll have to do, yes…”
An officer escorted Uruha back into the small cell in the back of the police station shortly thereafter. “Someone will get you something to eat soon, okay.” the officer, a short man who was about 25 years old, if Uruha had to guess, said. The officer’s nametag read Matsumoto R., but with Matsumoto being such a common surname in Japan he was probably a nobody at the police. He figured, Officer Matsumoto was even more of a nobody as he looked a little chubby, but maybe that was just because of the uniform or something. “You’ve never been imprisoned like this, eh?”
“Never, no. And it was never something I would’ve wanted for myself, so… I just want to get out of here, really.”
“I can understand that. Totally. Poor guy.”
“Poor guy, huh?”
“Yeah.” the officer nodded. “When I heard how they seized you I could only imagine your shock, but that’s just Kobayashi’s way of pressing a confession out of somebody.”
“Through trepidation…?” he asked back with one eyebrow jerked up.
“Obviously. I mean, she’s not much of a person really, physically speaking, and that’s why she sent the Task Force, I think.”
“Whatever it was, it sure gave me a good shock…”
archive
a/n: I know, this chapter also isn't very long, but I'm updating faster with shorter chapters and it's not too much information all at once. I'll be introducing at least one new character int he next chapter, I guess.
Comments are <3