The Fawn | Death Note

30. Suspects

Author's Note: The next chapter will probably come some time in November or December (likely the latter.) Just as a heads up, there are less than ten chapters remaining. I hope that you have been enjoying the ride. Thank you for sticking with me and this story.

* * * September 22 * * *

It was near the end of Bambi's shift and she was eagerly awaiting the time she could return to headquarters. Thanks to some digging, the teen was able to narrow the bribery suspects down to three women. After a glance to make sure that her coworker was preoccupied and that Higuchi was still in his office, Robin Hood quickly rushed off to hack into the suspects' computers one by one. Not willing to stay there too long and risk getting caught, she downloaded all their files and emails to access from her computer back in her room.

Just as she finished, Near chimed in through her earpiece. "Soichiro just discovered that Kira's murders all take place between Friday nights and Saturday afternoons. This leads us to be more suspicious of the meetings, but you should continue to investigate the briberies."

Amelia frowned, irritated that it took the task force this long to notice something so simple yet important. She tapped twice in front of the camera to acknowledge her partner's words.

When the agent's shift was finally over and she was back at headquarters, she retreated to her room and changed out of her work uniform. Once the computer genius was in more comfortable attire, she made her way to her computer and opened the files that she downloaded from the bribery suspects earlier. The first set of files she opened belonged to a woman named Akira Watanabe, a financial analyst on the ninth floor. Her company profile showed Bambi that she was a slightly overweight woman with short hair and a warm smile.

According to the photographs she had saved as her background and screen saver, Akira was a mother of three children. Her emails indicated that she was having an extramarital affair with one of the executives on her floor, a man named Takeshi Ooi. Further investigation revealed that he was the vice president of the Yotsuba VT Enterprises. Amy looked through Akira's bank accounts that were linked to her computer, but none of them indicated any bribery between them. This led the hacker to doubt that the analyst was the Yotsuba Kira. Sure, she wasn't a good person, but Robin Hood was confident that she would have been able to catch her if she was involved in bribery.

Bambi closed out the files and opened the next set. These new ones belonged to a secretary on the tenth floor named Rin Tamura. Her company profile revealed that she was a beautiful woman in her early thirties - everything about her appearance from her makeup to her outfit just screamed seductress. As the teen went through her files, she found an encrypted folder that Rin was clearly trying to keep hidden. Naturally, it took the hacker only a few seconds to break into it. Inside she found thousands of photos and videos, many depicting a man who she had seen roaming the halls from time to time. He was clearly an executive, though the agent couldn't recall his name. Not to mention that many of the videos and pictures were pornographic, depicting Rin and the man together much earlier in the year.

After exiting the folder, the brunette checked this suspect's emails. While her Yotsuba email gave the hacker nothing of importance, there was a private email account that Rin had gone to great lengths to hide. It was clear that she was using this account to blackmail the man in the photos, who was apparently the executive she worked for - a man named Suguru Shimura. It seemed that Rin had never accessed her bank accounts from her work computer, so Bambi had no way of knowing if Suguru was giving her money to keep her quiet.

Although blackmail and bribery are two different things, she was far more suspicious of Rin than she was of Akira. Rin seemed to fit the more ambitious profile better, and she was clearly looking out for herself by blackmailing her executive.