The Case-Book of Kakashi Hatake

The Beginning {Part 4}

I ran my hand down my face, perfectly shaven and smooth, and taking a pair of scissors to my hair, I watched it spring back up into the unruly mess that it grows in as while the inches of silver fell to the floor. I didn't recognize the man staring back at me in the mirror. The few stray locks of silver that fell in front of my forehead made the scar running down my face slightly less noticeable. Clean-shaven, I looked so much like my father that if it wasn't for my narrower face and higher cheekbones, people might have mistaken me for him, had he still been alive. My eyes still looked tired and empty, but it was less noticeable with the rest of my face looking so put-together. Shikamaru couldn't accuse me of looking like a vagabond now.

I swept up the hair from my floor and pulled on my best pants and shirt, cringing when I realized that they were mildly crumpled. Next came shoes and then a thick coat to keep out the chill that seemed to reside in my bones. I ran my hand over the lower half of my face once more, missing the mask that I had worn as an ANBU agent. I grabbed the blue scarf thrown over the back of my chair and wrapped it around my neck and face. It wasn't cold enough for it yet, but the way that it masked the bottom half of my face while my hair hid a fair amount of the upper half was very comforting. I've always enjoyed anonymity.

I caught a cab and made my way to the police station, walking through the doors at seven forty-five. There was no way that I'd be late for this. I strolled up to the constable sitting at the front desk, the rest of the station mostly empty at this hour.

"I'm here to see Detective Inspector Nara."

He flipped through some notes on his desk. "Kakashi Hatake?"

"That'd be me."

"Down the hall, second door on your right."

"Thank you."

I made my way to the door, a placard with his name making it clear that I had the correct office. I knocked twice and he called me in.

Shikamaru's face turned slowly up from the papers on his desk that he was working on, "You're early."

"You told me not to be late," I answered flatly as I took a seat across from him in the cramped room.

He pushed a box and a thin file both labeled with the case number 221-240 across his desk to me. "This is everything that we have, and I have to be with you while you look through it. You can't take anything with you, and you can't copy anything down."

I nodded, absorbing the rules that came with being allowed to help with the case. I started with the file, and on the very top was the coroner's report. There was a diagram of a human body, all the places where there had been wounds marked carefully in place. There were two stab wounds next to one another in the middle of his torso and a third nick in his side. If the drawn on report was accurate, they were all in a perfectly straight line. I read the cause of death: "Three stab wounds from a large, non-serrated knife." I looked up at Shikamaru, "This is wrong."

"What do you mean it's wrong?"

"There's no way this could have been done with a knife. It says that based on the amount of bleeding, all of these had been dealt while Asuma was alive, but he would have fought back and hard. There's no way that someone could line up three strikes this perfectly during a fight if it was done with three separate blows. Look, they're all in a line and evenly spaced. The damage was dealt all in one blow by one weapon."

"You're right," the young Inspector said while taking the report from my hands. He looked up at me quizzically, "What weapon could have done this?"

I shrugged, "No idea."

Next, I flipped through the witness testimony, one person stating that they saw someone with white or silver hair near the scene of the crime, and I realized that was what had cast the rays of suspicion on me. There was nothing helpful, though. I could see why the authorities had been grasping at straws. There really were no good leads in the file. I put everything away and reached for the box. I recognized it as the one that Shikamaru had taken from the coroner's office with everything that Asuma had on him when he died. There was still blood on the trench knife, and I gently ran my fingers over the holes where Asuma would have placed his fingers while wielding it, closing my eyes and matching up the ridges with the calluses that I could still remember feeling a month ago when shaking his hand for the first time. Except that the ridges and the calluses didn't quite line up. My eyes snapped open. This was the knife that he must have used in his left hand, meaning the other, right-handed knife was still out there somewhere.

"I'd like to go where you found his body."

"Why?"

"Asuma wielded trench knives in pairs," I picked up the weapon in question, "so where's this one's pair?"