Morix Origins: Journeys

The Adventure Across the Sea, Part 7

March 25

Enomata Law

Lobby

3:15 PM

Just as I had expected, the law office was bustling with activity when we arrived. The police were still swarming the place in search of any evidence they could find... Though if I had to wager a guess, I would have said that they were more so looking for everything Mr. Akagi had stolen than anything else. They wanted to figure out just what he knew about that case and then return the files to their original owners. I couldn't blame them either; if the case was as confidential as Mr. Akagi made it sound, the police had a lot of scrambling to do in order to cover it up. 

I still couldn't help but think about the case Mr. Akagi had become so interested in. I knew there had to be a reason for all of this, but I didn't know where to start when it came to unraveling all of it. Mr. Akagi had been investigating this for a while, but he was still nowhere close to finding the truth. That only added more credibility to his claims that someone was trying to keep the truth a secret, but that then begged the question... Who was doing it? Who in the world was trying to bury this so much? Why had the case been shoved into the back of everyone's minds so quickly and furiously in the first place? I supposed we probably wouldn't find out as long as we were investigating this current case, but it was still a question I was hoping we would get an answer to soon enough. 

"I suppose they all think Mr. Akagi brought the files back here after he started to steal them," Evander hummed, and he turned to me with a deep frown. "No matter what, you can't tell them what we know about the files. We're going to check them out in a little while, but right now, we have to pretend we know nothing."

"I know," I assured him with a nod. We could finish up the rest of our investigation here, go to see what the files had to say, and then hopefully find ourselves one step closer to finding the culprit... But I still didn't know where to start when it came to finding the culprit of this murder. Mr. Akagi was insistent that he wasn't the one behind it, and after he trusted us with the files he had stolen about the other case, I was willing to believe him too. There was more to that gambit than just giving me and Evander a new case to try and find the case behind this entire incident. He was also asking us to believe him when he said that he wasn't the killer, and at long last, I thought it was a good choice. 

But if Mr. Akagi was innocent, then that left another glaring question. Who really killed Mr. Enomata? We knew Mr. Akagi didn't do it, and Ms. Machida seemed to be innocent as well. Sumire was too; we wouldn't have taken on this case otherwise. Ms. Noguchi wasn't even at the building at the time of the murder, and I doubted she would have had a reason to kill him anyway. Sumire had asked us to help her to prove everyone at her office was innocent, and we were more than happy to rise to the challenge... But I didn't know who else could have done it. We just didn't know enough about what happened that morning, and if the door had been left open, then there was a strong chance we would never find it out for certain. 

"Ah, there you are. I was wondering when you would be coming by."

Detective Watanabe's voice cut through the chaos, and he arrived in front of us with a heavy frown. His hands were shoved deep in his pockets, and he watched us with something like expectation in his eyes. "How has your investigation been coming along?" he asked. 

"Fine," I replied. "I hope everything here has been going well too. I know there's been a lot to search for, especially with what happened during the trial today..."

"That's an underestimation if I've ever heard one," Detective Watanabe muttered with a shake of his head. "Learning that someone involved with the case was the thief behind the recent case files going missing... It was certainly something that threw us all for a loop, and I can't imagine we'll recover from it easily. That becomes doubly true when you consider the fact that none of us have been able to find the files that he took. We need to get them back where they belong, but we can't even begin to find them if we don't know where he hid them."