The Case-Book of Kakashi Hatake

The Hound of the Uchiha {Part 10}

I awoke from my nap feeling worse than I had before I fell asleep. I was still wearing my nightgown from the night before, and the pillows that I had propped my throbbing feet upon were strewn across the floor.

I did not even want to look at a mirror to see what manner of bird's nest my hair had become.

"Damn it all to hell," I could not help but mutter as I glanced out the window to see the umber glow of the setting sun painting the moor like something out of a fairy tale. My nap had lasted practically the entire day; any chance I had of sleeping through the upcoming night was ruined.

Not caring about my messy state (any semblance of being put together having been dashed by the early morning's escapades), I limped down the stairs, yawning and rubbing the lingering tiredness from my eyes.

Hatake was in the drawing room, sitting on the floor, with an array of knickknacks and loose papers spread out around him.

Without turning to look at me, he said chuckling under his breath, "Good morning, Doctor."

I just hissed in response and curled up in one of the large, winged armchairs to his side.

Without any prompting on my part, he began speaking in a lecture-like tone. "What you see before you, my intrepid compatriot, is a selection of what I believe to be the important pieces of evidence in this case." He pointed to each as he named them: "The contents of the carpet bag Kunio Berk was carrying upon his death. The doctor's invoice which you noticed. And finally, all of the financial documentation regarding this manor that I could find amongst Itachi's things." He tapped his chin with a finger several times, deeply in thought, and acting as though he was lecturing before a class and not sitting on a floor surrounded by an odd assortment of goods. "Do you see the same problem with this that I do? The major flaw in the case? That we already know who the culprit is and yet have nothing that could be reasonably used to incriminate him in a court of law? It is not murder if someone is mauled by your dog. The animal will have to be put down and the owner charged a fine, but it is not murder. But what if the dog is the murder weapon? What evidence can one use to prove that the hound was specifically trained for the purpose of killing, to be the tool of a premeditated murder?"

"Well," I ventured, "surely if the dog was specifically trained to kill, this could be ascertained by testing its behavior and response to different commands. The trick then, I guess, would be find out what those commands are."

But Hatake shook his head, "What if it has been trained to only respond to its master? What if Danzo just kills it before we could take it into custody? No, there is no relying on the hound's behavior as evidence."

"Finding evidence of how he trained the dog instead?"

"That's not it, either. That's the trick to this case." He laughed, rather maniacally, "Danzo you brilliant, brilliant, awful human, you. The means can never be solidly proven; the weapon is an autonomous being. A gun or knife cannot walk off a table and kill someone, but a hound? Danzo can always plead that it was an accident. That is why we must hit him elsewhere. Courts have convicted on shaky evidence regarding means before when they have enough proof of motive to make up for the lack, to bring it forward beyond a reasonable doubt. So then the investigation must answer a new question: what is Danzo's motive for killing Uchihas and what proof of this can we find?"

"Do you think that it has something to do with the Hound of the Uchiha story? About the sharingan and the mansion?" I asked, tiredness all but forgotten in the face of such a gripping conundrum.

"No," Hatake said, voice lowering to almost a whisper, and I leaned forward, inches from slipping out of the chair, to incline my head towards his, "but I think I have a pretty good idea on where to start. You will recall that Itachi was on a mission for the Hokage when he died. The Dawn-"