The Case-Book of Kakashi Hatake

The Three Orange Pips {Part 3}

Hours passed in a blur. As different as night and day, the police station went from being practically deserted to bustling with frantic activity, officers called in from their pre-Christmas, family gatherings. Chief Inspector Morino was barking out orders in his deep, harsh voice as constables and other inspectors looked over maps and left in droves on horses, uncaring of the freezing rain washing out the late December sky.

I sat on a bench in the corner, inconspicuous and out of the way as I weaved my hands together in prayer. Prayer, something that I hadn't even thought of doing since an exploding tag tossed me through the air like a rag doll. I didn't have any particular deity or power in mind, I simply begged the universe as a whole that the woman who had sought out our help not too long ago wouldn't be killed because we'd let her leave.

Hatake was in the thick of it all, standing next to Morino and helping any way he could. I could occasionally hear his voice through the hum of noise, deceptively calm when compared to the inner turmoil I could see bunched in his shoulders and stiffening and straightening his posture.

In a daze, I remember Hatake and Morino leaving the station, me trailing behind them like a silent shadow.

We stopped at the banks of the Sumizome, the surface of the wide river dimpled and disturbed by the large raindrops. The horizon was beginning to give off the barest of glows as the bright fires of the many lanterns glittered like a thousand gems in the thick precipitation. The air was heavy with the scents of storms, raw fish, and sewage.

Several constables were wading into the dark waters, uncaring of the wet since the rain had already drenched them from clothing to bone. They were pulling an overturned coach from the water beside a thick bridge of stacked stones. The horse still hitched to the front was floating slightly down stream, having given up the fight against drowning hours ago. There was a figure being pulled from inside the carriage, limp and bloated. The skin was as pale as a fish's belly and seemed to glow with a dim light, and the hair was falling out of its bun to drape down like a matted chocolate curtain, catching in the river's current. She was wearing a deep purple dress that looked midnight blue in the rain-tinted light, the wet it held causing it to trail down heavily. She would have been knocked unconscious the moment the carriage crashed into the river with her inside so she would not have been awake when she drowned trapped in a small, wooden box, but during the time it took for the coach to fall from the bridge to the water down below, she would have known that her death was coming and that we'd failed her.

There was no sign of the driver. The police stated that it was likely that he had washed down the river, already close to making his way out to sea. They also ruled the deaths an accident. The heavy rain, the cold freezing it to ice on the bridge, the driver losing control of the horse and wheels and plummeting them into the river. Morino acknowledged to Hatake that this was mostly likely the work of the Shinobi Swordsmen of the Mist, but as there was no evidence to tie them or foul-play to the scene, there was nothing that the police could do.

An emptiness settled over me like I hadn't experienced since watching soldiers die under my medical care during the war as Hatake and I walked back to our flat in silence, blind to the sunrise painting the sky in stunning shades of red and orange as the rain stopped.

Things became muffled and cold in 221B, the space holding no sound or warmth. I would sit in my chair, staring at my journal laid open in my lap and willing myself to begin writing words on the paper. Nothing came. In fact, it would take until almost the following February, two months later, for to me write the sad events of this case down.

Hatake, however, seemed to be sealed deep inside himself. He would sit on the divan, orange book open in his lap, and Pakkun by his side. It would have seemed like a normal day for him, unless you looked closer. His eyes did not move across the page, hand flipping through the book at far too regular intervals like he had counted out the seconds, and there was a slightly silvery sheen to the lower half of his face when it caught the light, reflecting off the stubble that he had neglected to shave away. He hadn't played the violin for days.