InuYasha Fan Fiction ❯ Good Twin, Evil Twin ❯ Chapter Seven ( Chapter 7 )

Chapter Seven

The phone rang - once, twice - and before it sounded again Detective Ken answered. “Yes, Omega Squad, hello?”

“Ken.” It was Captain Takeshi, shades of despondency inflecting his accent. “Any progress with those reports?”

“The medics' reports?” he asked, fumbling through the documents about the desktop. “Nothing yet,” he sighed, rapping his fingers and leaning back. “Actually, I'd like to speak with the medics, but they've been called to a case.”

“Yes, yes, I remember, a Sigma Squad case.”

The old man paused; through the background several angry voices could be heard arguing.

“You don't need me to tell you the brass wasn't pleased with the stunt we pulled yesterday. With the media.”

“I - I know - boss,” Ken bowed his head and sounded apologetic.

Captain Takeshi chuckled; a tiny iota of a laugh passed his lips just for no other reason but to assure his detective things would be all right.

“Progress, detective. Progress.” Again he paused - the background grew utterly, unnervingly quiet - and he confessed almost as if to crime: “We've been getting tips.”

“I was about to ask.” He stat up, suddenly, more alert now than earlier. “What kind of tips?”

“The bad kind.”

“Typical, boss.”

Again he reclined and the creak of the chair echoed into the telephone.

“Is everything OK boss?”

“Yeah, it'll be OK. Just get to work. I'll be down after my talking too.”

And without a good-bye Captain Takeshi hung up.

Detective Ken stared at the telephone a moment and returned it to its stand. Again rapping his fingers, tapping his palms onto the table, he eyed the maps. Progress, work! he thought as he finger-traced lines through dots across the maps, trying to glean a connection, any connection, between the victims. Any thing that could help pinpoint a killer. But the maps would not yield their secrets and he turned from them to the paperwork. From his left to his right were envelopes containing scattered pictures of grizzly scenes and equally gruesome medical autopsy reports and folders holding witness statements covering each and every one of the five murders. But that, even that, did not tell him more than what he knew and -

Just at that moment Detective Kev returned.

“Hot water, little bro?” he said, dryly, without giving Kevin a sideways glance.

“Oh, heh heh, forgot it, didn't I?” he said, faintly recalling the business with the Ramen.

“Don't go back for it,” Ken waved his hand to get him to sit. “You have work to do, Kevin-san.”

“Yes, big bro,” he frowned. Sitting, thumbing through paperwork he asked: “What did I miss?”

“Just the boss getting the shaft.” Kevin nodded. “Earth to Kevin,” he leaned into his brother's ear, “don't loose focus. Understand? This is more important than your, personal, relationship. You know, don't you, how much more important?” He stopped, staring into his brother's eyes, and whispered: “You two can be fired. It's against policy. It's not as accepted here as it is there.”

“I know, trust me, I know.” He opened a folder, skimmed it and shut it. Smiling, he added - also through whisper - “You're right, it's not the time or the place. I'll be careful, you know, I'll be careful. But you know, too, that I love him and we see little of each other.”

“Take it easy,” Ken squeezed Kev's shoulder. “For the good of both of you.”

“You're all right with it, aren't you?” he asked, looking with tears welling within his eyes, clutching not Kenshin's arm but the sleeve of his arm.

Ken nodded, looking as if he were about to speak - but did not for a brief yet endless moment as far as Kev was concerned.

“I'm - I'm OK with it - outside of the office - I'm OK with it.”

Ken sighed and leaned back, again, looking as though he might add a thought and, again, did not.

“Alright, alright, enough touchy-feely crap.” Kev spoke in clear, precise English. “What do we know? What do we know? Inside these files are the clues that lead us to the killer. We have to find them.” At once he cleared the tabletop of a nearby desk with the swipe of an arm. “Crime-solving, it's an art form, like, like, sculpture.”

“Sculpture?” Ken wheeled his cranky, squeaky chair by the desk. “What did they teach you in America?”

Detective Kev laughed and continued: “We've been given a block of marble; most of it is junk and unsightly. Yet, inside that rock is a David dying to break free. Our killer waiting to emerge. If we just chip away at the crap that doesn't belong.” Atop the cleared-up desk he spread the photographs of a crime scene and the contents of an autopsy report. “Let's look at the evidence and decide if it's relevant. The pattern of where the victims lived and schooled - doesn't exist - where they lived and schooled were random because the victims were random. Let's forget it.”

Detective Ken grunted; he folded his arms and watched his partner theorize.

“But, where they were found, that gives us clues. Look.” He spread the maps upon the clutter of the documents. “Your green and white dots clutter; it's your black dots that form a line. Not a terribly straight line but a line nevertheless. Our killer walks the streets of Tokyo about the vicinity of that line.”

He added to the drama by running his finger cross the line - imaginary for it was not yet drawn - outlined by the black dots that pinpointed the crime-scenes.

“He or she's familiar with these places else why risk committing murder in public and unknown areas?”

“Our killer knows these locations, intimately, knows just where to kill and dump the bodies. Kev, look,” seeing it unexpectedly, he stood and traced figures about with his finger. “If we connect a green dot with its corresponding white, dot, it forms lines that cross the line of the black dots. As he walks to and from, he runs across the girls.” Kenshin was impressed by the insight: “Art. We should be looking around where the black line starts and ends.”

“Exactly.” Kevin tapped the maps then put his hands around his back. “We can't patrol the schools - the guys above won't let us - but we can patrol that line.”

His partner grunted and nodded then asked: “What about the photographs and autopsies? And the witness statements? They don't matter, do they? They didn't see the crime, they stumbled into the scene after the fact. But there must be something about the killer himself that he leaves behind -”

“DNA, you mean?” The American shook his head. “But there's no DNA.”

The Japanese rubbed his chin in thought. “No DNA. What motivates him? Makes him kill?” He looked at the pictures of the bodies, of the wounds, that seemed to be speaking through a morbid, fatal whisper. “It must be there. But what is it?”

“Passion? Vengeance? Random acts of vengeance on random people?”

“Zenku?” The voice was soft yet deliberate with syllables slithering like liquid silk. Even the crackle of the telephone could not break the bone-chilling spell of the unearthly voice. “You didn't come to work yesterday.”

“Um, um, er, it's you? Isn't it? It's you!” Zenku's hands shook, the handset tapping against his face. He switched hands but the tapping did not abate. It's him! he kept thinking again and again.

“Yes, it's me. You didn't come to work yesterday. Why didn't you come to work yesterday? Were you a naughty boy? Kuzen?”

He gulped: “I - had - technical difficulties.”

The voice on the other end of the line laughed and just the sound and the image it conjured up made him shiver.

“I - I - I wanted to come.”

“Heh, heh, heh. You wanted to come. But didn't you come? Make your mess? You can't control yourself, can you? You need those pretty young girls. You need their cunts, you want their cunts.”

Zenku was speechless. When the voice chose to speak in that dirty, creepy voice it amplified the realization of his corrupt and tainted soul. It was like a verbal mirror of his distorted and disfigured visage.

“Didn't you just want to stick that cock of yours into that cunt you felt last night? Oh, that look in your eyes - when you felt up the poor, dead girl's skirt - tell me, was she wet down there? Wet like you like it?” Was there no corner of hell those eyes could not see? “Poor Kuzen. Your sister works hard to keep you out of trouble. Why is she wasting her time trying to help you Maybe - ” he paused, the sound of something like his body reclining into his chair could be heard sharply and distinctly. “Maybe I should take her back -”

“No, no, please, Mr. Onigumo!” He fell onto his knees, almost doubling-over with pain. “I'll do better, I promise, I promise! I'll be a good boy, Mr. Onigumo. Don't take her away, I can't live without her.”

“Heh, heh, heh. I know that. Kuzen, heh, heh, heh.” The cackle had a weird, wet slurp mid-syllable like a madman. “I don't think you know how much she loves you. I thought not having her through all of that time that you'd appreciate her. But you don't. It's like she doesn't exist because you just want those cunts, ram that cock into those throats, come all over those faces. Heh, heh, heh. Hell, you're not even dressed, are you? Disgusting! What girl wants a flabby old body like that? At least you can keep it covered!”

“I'll dress, Mr. Onigumo.” He did not know if Onigumo was his name, it did not seem to be enough of a name for a creature like that.

“Zenku - remember -”

At once Zenku gasped. Already on the floor, on his knees, he reached blindly, frantically letting the telephone fall and tumble. He fell onto his face as images of inhuman fear and cruelty came into the light of his mind - rather - emerged out of the darkness of his subconscious. He looked at his hands, mangled and arthritic, the blood returned; it was there, always and forever there. All the water of the world could not wipe it clean.

“No - no - I couldn't have!” Out of breath, he struggled as the reality of things became unbearable.

“Oh, yes, yes, yes you could have,” said the voice through the handset where it lay upon the floor just under the window.

“Please, Mr. Onigumo -” he was turning white at the look of terror of those eyes he was seeing inside his head. Human eyes, entirely, female eyes whose life was slowly ebbing into death. And again he looked at his hands. “Please, Mr. Onigumo, I'll do anything. Anything! I can't bear it -”

“Forget -”

And with that one, single word the universe ended.

Medics Kaede and Kano arrived at the gated rear of the Ja-Rin warehouse, parking the unmarked vehicle by the building's fence. The warehouse itself was large - which was not unusual - what was unusual though was its age. It had been built before the war and despite its location escaped destruction.

The import, export business thrived into the early fifties until the owner, a mysterious and enigmatic Sesshoumaru Taisho, vanished after his wife's death - it was rumored that the woman was very much unnaturally aged while the man was almost womanly in beauty and figure. Ever since it was abandoned yet it escaped falling into government hands. Issues of finances were not transparent but someone, somehow, was still paying the property taxes and maintenance fees.

The police could not contact the benefactor - presumed to be an extant member of the Taisho family - and were unwilling to enter the building without permission. They were willing, though, to pry the gates and swarm the rear parking and loading docks. It was out in the open-air the scene of the crime and the location of the body.

As the medics approached, their ID's dangling by their necks, they were met by Detective Hideki Oji of Sigma Squad. He was the man always sent to investigate the weird, bizarre homicides. And by all measure what had been reported by a local deliveryman was weird and bizarre.

“According to the witness,” he started, escorting the medics deep into the crime-scene, “he saw someone and thought it could be a homeless man asleep but it just didn't seem to be right.” The concrete sloped into the area where a white sheet, held by four, large rocks, covered the victim. “The figure was too still, too mangled, those were his words,” he tapped onto his notebook and flipped its cover shut. “He eased through the gap within the gate you two passed into, got close and saw it, and fled. Almost passed out.”

At that juncture the detective and the medics twisted through a perimeter of yellow `caution' tape and stood foot-to-tarp.

“This won't look pretty,” said Detective Hideki. He crouched toward a corner of the tarp. He uncovered the body and was surprised neither Kaede nor Kano flinched but, then, those two were said to be the best in the city.

What lay beneath the blanket was what used to be a man. The figure was adorned by an immense, bloody gash along the torso starting at the chest stopping at the waist, exposing innards and entrails parts of which were splattered against the pavement. The wound itself was shredded and torn as if by claws.

“Incredible,” uttered Medic Kaede. She produced a digital camera and photographed the mangled remains. “Looks like an animal did it, detective.”

“Yes, they appear to be claw marks.” Medic Kano held a ruler against the wound while the gloved, female technician took snapshot after snapshot. “Deep and triangular marks.”

“It's everyone's first impression,” the officer said. He let the tarp fall away from the body and secured it giving the medics the space to do their job.

“Still - isn't it more than a little improbable?” Medic Kaede questioned. “The type of animal that could have made these wounds would have to be very large. Lion, tiger - bear? - I can't think of anything else large enough with the right sized claws.”

“And that's the situation. We're thinking if it was an animal that maybe it was held inside the warehouse. Maybe it got loose -“

“Have you been inside the building?” Kaede asked.

Kano looked up from the victim to the detective.

“We're trying to get permission - warrants - but that's slow going. There's a door,” he said, pointing with his thumb into the line of the garage doors. “And another at the other side of the building. It was ajar and we've got folks poking their heads into it but we can't see a thing. Ah - I almost forgot - the strangest part of this whole mess is that.”

He directed a very curious Medic Kano away from Medic Kaede and the body. He uncovered another, small tarp.

“We found it by the victim.”

Beneath the white, plastic cover was the sword Kakotsu tried to use against Inuyasha.

“If it had been an animal that attacked him and if it had been sudden, unexpected, it is easy to understand him using what ever weapon was on hand at the time. But, people don't carry around weapons like that anymore. And I'm no expert, either, but it looks ancient”

“Hm,” the sandy-haired youth nodded. “I should look inside the warehouse.”

“Huh? You can't do that,” the officer replied.

“We agree an animal must have done this. Now, should that animal sill be alive, inside the warehouse, it would be a danger to the public.”

The detective nodded. “It's not a bright idea, Medic Kano, but if it's for the public.” He readied the gun he carried by his waist. He held it close against his body. “Let me enter.”

“It will be a simple, quick look,” he added, turning back toward Medic Kaede. While the tarp was up the other, uniformed officers kept their distance as if not to see the remains. “Nothing will be touched.”

“Keep safe, alert,” she said, adding dryly: “how many bodies do you want me to process in one day?”

Medic Kaede spotted a single, white claw sticking out of the side of a rib. While no one watched, she pried it, wiggled it back and forth like a loose tooth. It was stuck; she feared using too much force too soon might cause undue and obvious damage. But, with a little effort, a little persistence, it loosened. And freed she held it through her fingers careful not to let the sun shimmer off its surface. She eased the claw under the glove of her right hand - at first its form could be seen through the fabric but at a certain point at the center of her palm there was a great `sucking down' and the whole thing vanished.

“That was close,” she sighed.

Kano nodded and approached the door where Hideki waited. There was not an ounce of fear in his stride as he tread from one scene of the crime to another. It was almost as if he knew there would be nothing dangerous within the building. The idea that there would be animals of that kind lost amid the streets of Tokyo seemed to be ridiculous. As was the idea that it would have returned into the building and stayed there all the while the witness and the police busied themselves about the place - its territory.

Hideki kept his weapon fixed within his hands as though it was a part of his body. He walked ahead stopping and looking at each and every turn through he maze of the building's vast though sparse interior. Kano held the flashlight firm and still, its bright, Xenon beam did not waver. He walked behind, inspecting, searching at least giving the impression of doing the police work. What did the detective and the medic know as they entered into the warehouse? What did they expect to find within the building?

Inuyasha was smart about hiding - and was careful about leaving as little evidence as possible of his very own existence. There would be no fingerprints, no footprints. No scattered, telltale marks and indications that he lived there. The lair itself was built into a part of the roof designed to be inaccessible; high above the catwalks a normal, everyday human being would have needed a ladder to enter it.

During the war, when the government was hostile and pried into the lives of its citizens, demons felt a great deal of pressure to remain as hidden and secret as possible. To wit lairs had been built into buildings, like skyscrapers and warehouses, usually though not always at the top. At the roof. They preferred to be remote and distant. Unreachable.

“I tell you that's one of the freaks,” the detective whispered.

“Searching will be easier than we thought,” the medic said, flashing the empty, cavernous shelves with the light. “What about the freaks?”

“I've been a detective for years and I've heard talk, every now and then, about all of the bodies that have been reported through history. Yeah, every so often, like, every ten years, they turn up. Strange, mangled bodies. They look human but when they're examined they've got things wrong with them.”

“What kind of things? Like, defects?” Kano asked, curious about the turn the conversation took.

“You're a medic, you've heard more tales than me, I'm sure.” But when the young man did not reply he continued: “That body outside - the ears look like they've been reshaped.”

“Lots of things could be responsible for that.”

“Yeah, but, swords! The freaks are always found with swords!”

Kevin-san, please don't be like that, he thought as curiosity turned into revulsion.

Kano stopped - and blinked - and said: “You know, there's nothing important here.”

Hideki coughed, relaxing his hold against his weapon. “The dust is inches thick. I thought this placed was maintained. Let's get out before we choke - wait - are those footprints?”

Kano's heart skipped a beat as he shone the Xenon rays of his flashlight upon the floor where Hideki pointed.

“They lead from the front door to the back door,” he concluded sighing hard it caused the detective to notice.

“Disappointing.” He put the weapon away entirely and sighed, too. “We must've got it wrong bout the warehouse. The freak is outside, chased by whatever animal it was, he thinks its safe inside but when he enters the warehouse he finds its abandoned. No where to run. No where to hide. He leaves through the back door but that part is caged like a trap. The animal kills the freak.”

“The animal leaves - the freak -”

“I wonder if animal control is trained to deal with lions and tigers. I'm sure if one of those is on the lose in Tokyo somebody will be seeing it.”

When the world stared anew Zenku found himself in the middle of a sidewalk surrounded by the sounds of urban life. The throngs of commuters, the people minding their business all bumped into him while they walked by. He was startled but not afraid; over time, as it happened again and again, he became used to the discontinuities, the losing of time, the jumping into and out of different places. Indeed there was little to be afraid of as it was a very intimately familiar area along the straight route he walked when traveling back and forth from home to work.

He walked, not because he mistrusted transportation but because it was safer - after Kuzen's return walking kept him away from the buses and the subways with the crowds and the opportunities to rub against those pretty young girls.

That particular corner of the neighborhood housed a temple. It was neither a large nor a famous temple but it was well known to his family. All throughout his childhood his parents and he visited the place. He remembered the worshipers within were always more than a bit `off' - strange and weird - they kept to themselves, they hid from the world. Inside the shrine there seemed to be another parallel universe at work and he, for whatever reason, was not trusted with its secrets. He resented it; he knew, despite the steady denials and constant insistences, that the adults were not telling him everything. And after his parents disappeared he showed that hatred by rejecting the temple and its worship. Even as far as rejecting the priest's offer to help him through that lonely time of his life.

If they did not trust him as a child, why would they trust him as a teen?

Besides, they made him uncomfortable.

The way those eyes made him uncomfortable.

Facing the gate, clutching his arms about this body, he recalled an event that happened inside. He was a boy, seven, about ready to enter school for the first time. His parents wanted him to be placed in the temple school the priest organized. They left him there for one, entire day and night. During the day he did not feel anything untoward from anyone - even the adults seemed to be nice, for a moment, they seemed to be lifting that veil of secrecy and revealing themselves to be friendly During the night, though, he was awoken by the sounds of screaming. Somebody, within the temple, was screaming and right then and there he relived it as if it were nightmare: how he struggled out of the bed, how tiptoed into the hallways and passages, sliding door after door until he found the source. It was a boy his age - a boy he had not seen at all throughout his stay - screaming and struggling as he was being held against the floor by the acolytes while the priest was digging a knife into his ear.

That vision itself was not what shocked him. Reflexively, almost instinctively, he knew the memory about the event was incomplete. But he could not recall the rest of the fragments - he could not remember what it was about the sight that truly and deeply unsettled him - because the crushing weight of time and the self-preserving nature of his mind obscured the finer details from his memory. And all that was left of what ever it could have been was the intuition that materialized through the slow, creeping horror of the realization that something was not right about the boy's ear.

After that he refused to be left there at night and his parents relented, dropping him off in a normal, everyday school.

It had been years since last he entered yet the temple was as disjointed and abandoned as always. It was quiet too, like a tomb, for even the earth kept its secrets there. He did not go further into the shrine beyond the crematory - only that much of it was open for the public anyway - and there inside he saw two mourners. The very young-looking couple cried before a corroded, bronze nameplate much as a newlywed pair might weep before the grave of their would-be first-born. He could not read the name off the plate from the distance but he could read the date of death: July 1, 1901. He blinked and knit his brow: why a couple so young would be so moved by a death predating their births by decades?

And why was he there?

Except for the eerie, disconnected sense of the familiar there would be nothing for him there. But - there was a plaque that caught his eye - a plaque engraved with his family name. A force akin to fire obliterated through spider-like scorch marks the rest of the name and the date. And he fancied it was not always like that. He could not trust his impression for his memories of that temple were more than supernaturally tainted. Still, he knew he knew what name was used to be burnished into the plate. It was on his lips, in the verge of being out of nothing, yet it did not materialize.

It was as long ago as to have been from another lifetime altogether.

Zenku tapped the nameplate and was struck by how hollow and empty it felt.

The effect was too much; he stepped away from the mausoleum and walked across to the courtyard. A breeze swept through the trees, shaking the leaves off onto the ground wet from yesterday's rain. It exuded that same smell of coldness and newness. That same smell that brought memories. Everything about the shrine was dead - like its worshipers who dropped out of the face of the earth - yet beyond man's understanding faint and imperceptible, there lingered a hint of the possibility of rebirth.

Again he ventured to work and to that building that looming dizzily overhead.

As he crossed the street toward the concrete pavilion, toward the glass doors that lead into the building, he was struck by a feature of the architecture heretofore unknown to him. The tower was otherwise so clean, so well-constructed, its façade from the base to the crown was flat and featureless. But then, just then, the shape of the crevices about the doors, the indentations around the windows and the shadows cast by the sun, it worked together to form what appeared to be a mouth - a spider's hungry mouth - complete with dark, long fangs pointing into the entrance watching and waiting for its victims.

Every facet of its construction was fundamentally wrong and unnatural; the whole thing could have been alive at another superior level of reality but dead, cold and sterile, within that human-world. He envisioned a line of children with those long, misshapen ears standing under those fangs waiting to be impaled. Monsters, demonic and unearthly, throwing the bodies into the mouth, a fire within bursting with a flash as the building consumed the victim and fueled itself and its other, unseen machinations. He, too, sacrificed himself just by entering.

“Kuzen does not blink.” He turned-up the collar of his jacket - which had been newly laundered - and kept his hands in his pockets tight to his body as if fighting a stiff, bitter wind. “Kuzen does not blink, ever.”

Zenku reached the door. With his thumbprint they opened; passing through they closed. And he knew, as he heard the glass doors slide shut, that he was already dead. He was already dead though his body was alive. Incomplete and imperfect, he was missing something, something inside, like a soul. But what it was and when it happened and how it happened he did not know. It was just a feeling, a sense, and the rest he could not remember.