The Case-Book of Kakashi Hatake

A Study in Silence {Part 4}

The body was in the empty living room. Just down the hallway from the door and to the right. There were patches of less-faded, tan rug where furniture had resided, and spots of crisper wallpaper where there had been photographs or paintings on the walls. A thick layer of dust covered the floors.

But the gruesome display in the center of the floor, right in front of the fireplace, was the only thing that had my attention.

He was a small man, with light hair and open eyes that were an usual shade of purple. A scar ran down the right side of his face, starting at his lower eyelid and ending at the curve of his jaw. His clothes were very fine, a forest green overcoat accenting the subtler browns and greys of the rest of his attire, a fashionable cane topped with a jade-carved flower on the ground beside him. But the green only made the red of his blood stand out clearer. Rust colored stains marred the front of his jacket and the floor around him, the horizontal stab wound centered right over his heart.

His face, however, was the stuff of nightmares.

It was twisted into a look of pure fear, as if he had seen a demon, his eyes wide open with terror even in death, and his fingers still plugging his ears.

Gruesome images assaulted my imagination of sounds so terrifying that they could lead someone to death. And glassed over eyes reminded me of corpses littering battle fields and mass graves.

I glanced over at Hatake, who was staring at the scene as if he was unaffected. His gaze was purely clinical, and that unsettled me almost as much as the murder.

"I don't think that you'll need my expertise in figuring out the cause of death for this one." I pointed to the stab wound over the short man's chest. It was a strange shape, like a long, thin line as opposed to a hole, and had probably severed the heart cleanly into two.

Inspector Yamashiro hovered behind us, like he didn't want to walk back into the blood-soaked room. And honestly, I couldn't blame him for that.

Without stopping his eyes from methodically taking in every detail, Hatake addressed the hesitant officer, "What do you know about the victim?"

Yamashiro held out a box to the consulting detective, "All of his effects are here. He had a card in his pocket that read, 'Yagura Drebber, Land of Water' and another that named his secretary as a J. Gato."

Hatake took the offered evidence and looked through all of it carefully before handing it to me and strolling over to the corpse that I was trying, but failing, to not look at.

Unsure of what to do with the box that had been shoved unceremoniously in my hands, I looked through the contents just to make it look like I was serving some sort of purpose before handing it back quickly to the policeman. Inside was nothing special, just a fine pocket watch, a money purse, and some other odd and expensive looking nick-knacks.

Hatake crouched next to the corpse, sitting on his heels as he conducted what I could only imagine was a very detailed examination. A necklace on a thin chain was picked up from the ground under the victim's arm and placed in a small envelope. Hatake then stood and began looking around the room, taking measurements on the floor and wall that seemed entirely random with a tape measure that he pulled from his pocket, and spending a particularly long time looking at the several other, seemingly random, blood spatters around the room.

He paused at one of the corners of the room where I noticed, for the first time, that a word had been written in blood: "Fukushuu."

Hatake then brushed off the knees of his pants and stalked back over to us as if nothing was out of the ordinary.

"So," Yamashiro looked at him with equal parts doubt and curiosity, "what conclusions have you come to?"

With a shrug, an orange book was pulled out of a back pocket and opened in front of his face, "I have several theories, but I can tell you this. Your killer is about six feet tall, in the prime of his life, and knew the victim personally. He killed this Yagura in revenge, and he also coughs a great deal, probably the result of some sort of respiratory illness."

Hatake left the gaping inspector behind, and I had to remember myself in order to rush out the door behind him.

I barely even noticed when he waved down a cab and helped me inside.

"How did you know that he was tall?" I finally managed to ask in astonishment. There had been no indication of the murderer's height that I could see.

He sent me a little smirk before becoming all business as usual. "It was a simple matter, really. I had his stride length both from the path outside and the dust marks inside. On top of that, when people write on a wall, they tend to write to at their eye level, and the writing in blood was about six feet off the ground."

"The part about him being in the prime of his life?"

"There was a puddle in the walkway about four feet in length. Round toed shoes walked around it, square toed jumped right over it without breaking stride. Also, he cleared the distance between himself and the victim in a single stride before delivering the killing blow. Anyone not in the prime of their life wouldn't have been able to do that."

This was like a sort of game between the two of us, and who was I to stop it?

"What about the coughing?"

"The other blood spatters around the room were not from the victim. Each one corresponded with a pause in the murderer's pacing back in forth as the victim stood still in the center of the room. I could tell by their height on the walls and the shape of the spatters that they had come from coughing up blood. It seems the excitement was too much for our killer."

"And then the part about revenge and him knowing the victim personally?"

That little smirk was back, that look that said that he was smarter than everyone else and knew it. "That one was bit of a guess, but I'm fairly confident that I'm correct. You saw Drebber's effects; did anything in particular stand out to you?"

I wasn't ready for him to ask me something.

"Uh, it was all really garish?"

"Yes, it was all very expensive, but more than that, it was all there. His money, his pocket watch, his cuff links even, none of it was stolen. If he had been mugged, then all of those things would have been stripped from the body. Our murderer killed for a reason, and it wasn't money. In the dust, I could see the killer's footprints, and they were pacing back and forth as he was talking while the victim stood still. He ranted and raved and got himself so excited that he started coughing up blood, and then killed the man and left, but not until he had written something in blood over the victim."

"'Fukushuu,' right? What does that mean?"

"Revenge."