WIP Chapter 2
Mar. 27th, 2008 10:46 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
darklunaProgress is being made! :-)
Title: Wind (may change)
Rating: PG-13ish
Word count: About 2700 for this chapter
Summary: The title still wears Near instead of the other way around, but a new case forces him to re-examine what it means to be L.
Chapter 1 here
Chapter 2: Showoff
Near has had the evidence they've got at the moment memorized for hours, and, because of the time difference, the airport authorities still haven't responded. He finishes the walls of the castle and sits in its courtyard, trying to think of what to do.
If he's playing chess, we should knock his pieces off the board, Mello says.
The problem is finding out where his pieces are, how they're arranged, and what that means about his plan. All Near can guess right now is that the killer wants L to attack. That won't happen.
He hasn't slept in a couple of days, but when he goes to his room, it's to get the bar of Vosges from the nightstand drawer. He sits on the bed and takes a small bite, and though the thought barely forms in his mind, he hears Mello laugh.
Of course I would taste like chocolate. We've been over this before. This time he's in his room at the House, stacks of books, drifts of paper, and all. Near's pretty sure he sees an unflattering caricature of himself in the margin of some class notes, and wonders, not for the first time, whether his subconscious is hopelessly broken.
It really ought to be dark chocolate, Mello observes.
I know, but I don't like it.
Wimp.
Mello's teasing often means that Near's worried he has missed something. Do you think there's more we could be doing?
No. Annoying, huh? He seems to be making a paper airplane.
Yes, fine. I'm annoyed.
I think you'll need me before this is over, Mello says, and launches the airplane into wobbly flight.
You think I'll need to act like you?
Not a bad idea anyway.
I couldn't manage it. He gets a brief and troubling mental image of himself dressed in black and holding a gun.
I did have style.
Yes. He must be tired; he isn't usually sentimental.
He doesn't realize he was actually tired enough to sleep until he wakes up, curled on top of the covers. The clock on the nightstand says 5:45.
The fax machines have started churning out passenger lists, and there are messages to say the security footage has been couriered over. The card castle needs a keep, but Near can't stop thinking about Carruthers and de la Cruz. It feels wrong to let them go unacknowledged.
He punches in the speed-dial code for Watari.
"Hallo?" Gevanni answers right away, but sounds half-awake.
"On your way in today, could you get some more modeling clay?"
"Sure." If he's amused, his voice doesn't betray it.
Near picks up some of the faxes, sits in the castle, and starts looking through them. Heathrow on one side, Barajas on the other: is there any overlap? It's a long shot, even given how arrogant the killer is, but even long shots must be investigated.
By the time Gevanni arrives with the supplies, Near has three names of people who traveled between London and Madrid in the right timeframe. They seem to be a family, but he gives Gevanni the list for follow-up.
"How's it going?" Gevanni says.
Near shakes his head.
"If he's in there, you'll find him."
"The tapes will be more useful. I imagine he would've used fake papers. He might have tried to get cute with them, though, or been unable to get two fake IDs good enough to pass airport security."
"True, and playing for effect does make people sloppy," Gevanni agrees.
Near sighs. "But this is all assuming he flew in the first place."
He puts the lists aside for the moment and looks through the evidence photos quickly, knowing this is a bit obsessive, but still needing to do it. He doesn't make the puppets too detailed, but at least they have the right hair colors. When they're done, something unknots in his chest. He pats their heads and puts them in the courtyard of the castle. As an afterthought, he reaches for a marker and a generic-looking Lego person, and writes Showoff across its chest. That figure goes facedown outside the wall.
Only one fax machine is still going, and the courier rings the buzzer downstairs a little before 8:30.
Rester and Lidner show up at nine on the dot, though Near didn't ask them to come in today. She's got three coffees and a hot chocolate, and he's carrying a bag from the doughnut shop.
"We thought you might want some extra eyes about now," Lidner says.
"Good timing," Near says. There's a lot of data to get through, and speed is a factor; he can't shake the feeling that this is going to get worse very soon. That's another problem with facing an opponent who knows where the board is when you don't.
Lidner passes out the drinks, Rester offers everyone doughnuts, and they get to work.
About noon, Gevanni comes into the media room. "Those three people check out fine."
Near pauses all the security footage playing back. He hasn't seen anyone likely yet, but it's only been three hours. "I thought they would."
"I've got two more who went from Madrid to London," Lidner says from her seat at the paper-strewn table.
"Nothing here, I'm afraid," Rester says.
"I made lunch," Gevanni says. "Why don't you guys take a break?"
Lidner pinches the bridge of her nose, and Rester hides a yawn.
"I think we could use one, yes," Near says.
Gevanni has made a lot of sandwiches. Cream cheese and cucumber for Near, who got over the whole white-foods thing some time ago but appreciates the gesture; ham and cheese for Rester; portobello and spinach for Lidner. Near wonders if any of the three of them socialize on their own time, or if Gevanni just has a gift for guessing people's preferences. He doesn't know that; he doesn't even know what they do when they're not here.
Hopeless, Mello says softly.
"How about we go up on the roof? It's nice and warm today," Gevanni says.
It's unseasonably warm, in fact, and Rester and Lidner seem to perk up a bit in the bright sun. The bay is full of people taking advantage of the weather to go sailing.
"Good idea," Near tells Gevanni, who grins and pulls a folded blanket from beneath the sandwich tray.
"Hey, a real picnic!" Lidner says.
They sit on the lawn that Gevanni sometimes jokingly talks about using for bocce. Rester looks tolerantly amused. Near takes tiny bites of his sandwich—years of skipping meals and a naturally temperamental stomach mean he has to be careful—and tries to blink away the visual echoes of streams of people hurrying through airports. Rester and Lidner talk about her car.
"I don't take her out enough," she says. "It'd be dumb to drive to work. An hour to go twenty blocks, and then pay to park? No thanks."
"Tell me about it," Rester says.
Neither of them took the retirement package Near offered them after the Kira case. "Where do you two work?" he asks.
"I do security consultations for corporations," Lidner says, and Near remembers that her friend Keichi was one of Yotsuba's victims.
"I'm a consultant too," Rester says. "For NYPD's forensics department."
They both took jobs that let them choose when they work; Near doesn't have to ask to know it's deliberate.
This means a lot to them, Mello says.
***
They don't find anything more, though Near does spot the family whose names he picked out of the lists, and Lidner's obviously-honeymooning couple.
"I apologize for wasting your time," he tells Lidner and Rester when they discuss it. He's climbed back into the castle; Lidner sits on the floor outside it, and Rester stands in an at-ease posture, hands behind his back. Gevanni listens from the doorway of the media room.
"Don't apologize. We volunteered," Lidner says.
"Let's get a synopsis of what we know about this creep," Rester says. "We'll need it if we're going to help catch him."
"Are you going to help?" Near says, rather amused than otherwise, and feeling a bit like he might be channeling Mello after all.
"Try and stop us," Lidner says, trying unsuccessfully not to smile.
"All right, then. Motives," Near says, getting right down to it and not bothering to look displeased. "There's money, of course."
"How do you figure?" Rester says.
"Bounties. There's always a price on L's head. It was ten million the last time I checked." He folds up some paper to make dolls, and starts cutting out archers.
The others look horrified, and Near smiles. "I like to know how much I'm worth. Of course, no one could prove I'm L. No one could prove I'm anyone. Technically, I don't exist at all."
Small hospitals in Wales are not known for their state-of-the-art record-keeping or security. It was laughably easy to eradicate one birth certificate.
"I don't think money is the issue here, though," Near says. "I think it's a combination of pride and revenge."
If he gets his hands on one of those damn notebooks, we are royally fucked, Mello says.
Near inwardly rolls his eyes; it hardly bears thinking about. "So. What do we know about him?"
"Middle-to upper-class," Rester says. "Probably no criminal background."
"Educated," Lidner says. "Well enough to account for the arrogance. If he's American. I'd guess Ivy League."
"He might be in law enforcement," Gevanni says. "He seems to know how to avoid common mistakes."
"OK," Near says. This all fits with his assumptions. "He has money to travel. He's probably unobtrusive. But unobtrusive in London is not necessarily so in Madrid. Let's find out if anyone around de la Cruz's home noticed an American or European tourist acting suspicious. Or," he adds, because Mello is never completely out there, "possibly Japanese."
"Why Japanese?" Rester says.
"Who has the most reason to hate L?"
"Kira fags," Gevanni says, sounding as contemptuous as he ever has.
Near disapproves of his terminology, but understands the sentiment that prompted it. "I think the killer was a Kira supporter no matter what his nationality turns out to be. Since Japan benefited the most from Kira, there were a disproportionately large number of them there."
"There are still a lot of pro-Kira web sites," Lidner says, softly, as if afraid she might offend someone.
"Like cockroaches," Gevanni mutters.
"Maybe we should keep an eye on these bugs," Lidner finishes.
"That can't hurt," Near says. It's not much for them to do, but it's better than nothing, and he feels obscurely comforted knowing everyone will be back tomorrow.
***
"Near?" Gevanni says. "I think you'd better take a look at this." Rester and Lidner went home a while ago, and Near has been reviewing a case in Texas that might require L.
"What is it?"
Gevanni swivels his chair so Near can see his monitor. "It came to the Watari account."
The e-mail says only: Get it yet?
"Did you trace it?" Near says.
"Yeah. A public computer in a library in DC."
"He really is full of himself," Near says. "How insulting to imply we wouldn't have started working on the case." It’s only been two days since Carruthers’s death, but how slow does this guy think L is?
To all appearances, though, he was counting on them having noticed. Why gloat? It's unnecessary, and gives them another piece of information.
You gloat when you’re sure you’re winning, Mello says.
“What makes him sure he’s winning?” Near wonders out loud. “When you contact the Spanish police, could you ask if anyone noticed anything odd in the de la Cruz investigation? Something they might have thought they imagined, or that was too strange to mention to L?”
“Sure.”
“The fact that he contacted Watari supports your law-enforcement theory.”
“It might. It’s not that hard to get this address, depending on your connections. He used one of the anonymized ones.” L—the first L—wanted private citizens to be able to contact him, but he also wanted it to be a challenge, so that only the savvy and determined would get through. Information on Watari is a mess of contradictions and red herrings almost as tangled as information on L.
“Is it an older one?”
“Yeah. It forwards from the original address, in fact.”
“That could be useful.”
“I’ll check it out.”
***
“It’s no use,” Gevanni says a bit later. “Almost anyone could have this address, it’s been out there so long. This guy could be a cop, a hacker, or... I don’t know. Sorry.”
“That’s all right. In the future, we should keep a tighter rein on these addresses.”
“Should I disable the account?”
“No. He might use it again.”
“Oh, right.” Gevanni scrubs a hand through his hair. “I’d better make some coffee. Want some?”
“Yes, thank you.”
Gevanni goes off to the kitchen for a bit, and comes back with a mug for Near and a demitasse for himself. “I still say you’d like my espresso.”
“It’s all too bitter. I can’t get it past my nose.” He takes a sip of the coffee. Gevanni put more sugar in than usual—not quite L-worthy sweet sludge, but enough to give an extra kick of alertness. “This is perfect. How did you know?”
Gevanni shrugs, smiling. “I think it goes with the title.”
“You don’t have to stay up with me,” Near says.
“Oh, I don’t mind. It’s almost time to call Madrid, anyway.”
“Thank you.” Mr. Wammy was like a father to L; Gevanni is more like an older brother who stands between Near and the world, and understands him without ever asking for needless explanations. “When I asked you to be Watari, why did you agree?”
“You expected me to, didn’t you?” Gevanni says.
“That’s not an answer.”
“I know. I meant: surely you’d thought about what the pros and cons would be for me.”
“Insofar as I could.” He knew even less about Gevanni’s life then, but he was pretty sure he’d take the job. Gevanni was always the most passionate of the SPK. Lidner cared about catching her friend’s killers, and Rester acted as if he were trying to establish a new standard for terse efficiency, but Gevanni seemed to see working on the Kira case as a personal proving ground.
“From the start with the SPK, I felt like I was part of something truly important,” Gevanni says. “A hell of a lot more so than when I was doing surveillance. Mostly, I didn’t want to give that up. You’re... well, you don’t need me to tell you you’re amazing.”
He forgets, sometimes, that it’s emotions that drive most other people, and he doesn’t always account for them. (Mello the seed in the random-number generator, the static that brought the system down.) “I understand,” Near says, and he thinks he really does, this time.
***
Once it’s early enough here, and late enough there, for business hours in Spain, Gevanni calls them with the follow-up questions. He doesn’t have a chance to ask any of them. He listens, and turns pale.
Near watches him, trying to tamp down a spark of alarm. “What?”
"The Madrid office says their lead investigator died yesterday."
"How?" Of all the times to have nothing in his hands. He gets a rocket from the battle formation by the door, and Gevanni follows him, still talking on the phone.
"Heart attack."
"What time?"
Gevanni asks. "Three-thirty."
Near’s already reaching for the phone with the voice distorter.
“This is L,” he says when the British office answers. “May I speak to Mr. Parrish, please?”
The little pause tells him it’s not good. “I’m sorry to tell you this, L, but Mr. Parrish passed away unexpectedly.”
“Yesterday?”
“Yes. A sudden heart attack.”
“Do you know what time?”
“Two-thirty.”
“Thank you for the information. My condolences to your team.” He clicks the phone off and stares at the rocket. There’s no fighting the spark of fear now.
Simultaneous heart attacks eight hundred miles apart: the giveaway mode of death. No, the default. Even without a photographic memory, Near would not have forgotten those rules.
I wouldn't call us "royally fucked," but this is very bad.
"Near?" Gevanni says.
He shakes his head, goes to retrieve the generic Lego. He wipes "Showoff" from the chest, and writes, in tiny letters, and with a tight precision only Mello would recognize as anger: S-Kira.
***
Notes: I know, shameless chapter break for dramatic effect. There is a reason I had to make Near originally from Wales. A big virtual cookie to anyone who guesses it. :-)
Title: Wind (may change)
Rating: PG-13ish
Word count: About 2700 for this chapter
Summary: The title still wears Near instead of the other way around, but a new case forces him to re-examine what it means to be L.
Chapter 1 here
Chapter 2: Showoff
Near has had the evidence they've got at the moment memorized for hours, and, because of the time difference, the airport authorities still haven't responded. He finishes the walls of the castle and sits in its courtyard, trying to think of what to do.
If he's playing chess, we should knock his pieces off the board, Mello says.
The problem is finding out where his pieces are, how they're arranged, and what that means about his plan. All Near can guess right now is that the killer wants L to attack. That won't happen.
He hasn't slept in a couple of days, but when he goes to his room, it's to get the bar of Vosges from the nightstand drawer. He sits on the bed and takes a small bite, and though the thought barely forms in his mind, he hears Mello laugh.
Of course I would taste like chocolate. We've been over this before. This time he's in his room at the House, stacks of books, drifts of paper, and all. Near's pretty sure he sees an unflattering caricature of himself in the margin of some class notes, and wonders, not for the first time, whether his subconscious is hopelessly broken.
It really ought to be dark chocolate, Mello observes.
I know, but I don't like it.
Wimp.
Mello's teasing often means that Near's worried he has missed something. Do you think there's more we could be doing?
No. Annoying, huh? He seems to be making a paper airplane.
Yes, fine. I'm annoyed.
I think you'll need me before this is over, Mello says, and launches the airplane into wobbly flight.
You think I'll need to act like you?
Not a bad idea anyway.
I couldn't manage it. He gets a brief and troubling mental image of himself dressed in black and holding a gun.
I did have style.
Yes. He must be tired; he isn't usually sentimental.
He doesn't realize he was actually tired enough to sleep until he wakes up, curled on top of the covers. The clock on the nightstand says 5:45.
The fax machines have started churning out passenger lists, and there are messages to say the security footage has been couriered over. The card castle needs a keep, but Near can't stop thinking about Carruthers and de la Cruz. It feels wrong to let them go unacknowledged.
He punches in the speed-dial code for Watari.
"Hallo?" Gevanni answers right away, but sounds half-awake.
"On your way in today, could you get some more modeling clay?"
"Sure." If he's amused, his voice doesn't betray it.
Near picks up some of the faxes, sits in the castle, and starts looking through them. Heathrow on one side, Barajas on the other: is there any overlap? It's a long shot, even given how arrogant the killer is, but even long shots must be investigated.
By the time Gevanni arrives with the supplies, Near has three names of people who traveled between London and Madrid in the right timeframe. They seem to be a family, but he gives Gevanni the list for follow-up.
"How's it going?" Gevanni says.
Near shakes his head.
"If he's in there, you'll find him."
"The tapes will be more useful. I imagine he would've used fake papers. He might have tried to get cute with them, though, or been unable to get two fake IDs good enough to pass airport security."
"True, and playing for effect does make people sloppy," Gevanni agrees.
Near sighs. "But this is all assuming he flew in the first place."
He puts the lists aside for the moment and looks through the evidence photos quickly, knowing this is a bit obsessive, but still needing to do it. He doesn't make the puppets too detailed, but at least they have the right hair colors. When they're done, something unknots in his chest. He pats their heads and puts them in the courtyard of the castle. As an afterthought, he reaches for a marker and a generic-looking Lego person, and writes Showoff across its chest. That figure goes facedown outside the wall.
Only one fax machine is still going, and the courier rings the buzzer downstairs a little before 8:30.
Rester and Lidner show up at nine on the dot, though Near didn't ask them to come in today. She's got three coffees and a hot chocolate, and he's carrying a bag from the doughnut shop.
"We thought you might want some extra eyes about now," Lidner says.
"Good timing," Near says. There's a lot of data to get through, and speed is a factor; he can't shake the feeling that this is going to get worse very soon. That's another problem with facing an opponent who knows where the board is when you don't.
Lidner passes out the drinks, Rester offers everyone doughnuts, and they get to work.
About noon, Gevanni comes into the media room. "Those three people check out fine."
Near pauses all the security footage playing back. He hasn't seen anyone likely yet, but it's only been three hours. "I thought they would."
"I've got two more who went from Madrid to London," Lidner says from her seat at the paper-strewn table.
"Nothing here, I'm afraid," Rester says.
"I made lunch," Gevanni says. "Why don't you guys take a break?"
Lidner pinches the bridge of her nose, and Rester hides a yawn.
"I think we could use one, yes," Near says.
Gevanni has made a lot of sandwiches. Cream cheese and cucumber for Near, who got over the whole white-foods thing some time ago but appreciates the gesture; ham and cheese for Rester; portobello and spinach for Lidner. Near wonders if any of the three of them socialize on their own time, or if Gevanni just has a gift for guessing people's preferences. He doesn't know that; he doesn't even know what they do when they're not here.
Hopeless, Mello says softly.
"How about we go up on the roof? It's nice and warm today," Gevanni says.
It's unseasonably warm, in fact, and Rester and Lidner seem to perk up a bit in the bright sun. The bay is full of people taking advantage of the weather to go sailing.
"Good idea," Near tells Gevanni, who grins and pulls a folded blanket from beneath the sandwich tray.
"Hey, a real picnic!" Lidner says.
They sit on the lawn that Gevanni sometimes jokingly talks about using for bocce. Rester looks tolerantly amused. Near takes tiny bites of his sandwich—years of skipping meals and a naturally temperamental stomach mean he has to be careful—and tries to blink away the visual echoes of streams of people hurrying through airports. Rester and Lidner talk about her car.
"I don't take her out enough," she says. "It'd be dumb to drive to work. An hour to go twenty blocks, and then pay to park? No thanks."
"Tell me about it," Rester says.
Neither of them took the retirement package Near offered them after the Kira case. "Where do you two work?" he asks.
"I do security consultations for corporations," Lidner says, and Near remembers that her friend Keichi was one of Yotsuba's victims.
"I'm a consultant too," Rester says. "For NYPD's forensics department."
They both took jobs that let them choose when they work; Near doesn't have to ask to know it's deliberate.
This means a lot to them, Mello says.
***
They don't find anything more, though Near does spot the family whose names he picked out of the lists, and Lidner's obviously-honeymooning couple.
"I apologize for wasting your time," he tells Lidner and Rester when they discuss it. He's climbed back into the castle; Lidner sits on the floor outside it, and Rester stands in an at-ease posture, hands behind his back. Gevanni listens from the doorway of the media room.
"Don't apologize. We volunteered," Lidner says.
"Let's get a synopsis of what we know about this creep," Rester says. "We'll need it if we're going to help catch him."
"Are you going to help?" Near says, rather amused than otherwise, and feeling a bit like he might be channeling Mello after all.
"Try and stop us," Lidner says, trying unsuccessfully not to smile.
"All right, then. Motives," Near says, getting right down to it and not bothering to look displeased. "There's money, of course."
"How do you figure?" Rester says.
"Bounties. There's always a price on L's head. It was ten million the last time I checked." He folds up some paper to make dolls, and starts cutting out archers.
The others look horrified, and Near smiles. "I like to know how much I'm worth. Of course, no one could prove I'm L. No one could prove I'm anyone. Technically, I don't exist at all."
Small hospitals in Wales are not known for their state-of-the-art record-keeping or security. It was laughably easy to eradicate one birth certificate.
"I don't think money is the issue here, though," Near says. "I think it's a combination of pride and revenge."
If he gets his hands on one of those damn notebooks, we are royally fucked, Mello says.
Near inwardly rolls his eyes; it hardly bears thinking about. "So. What do we know about him?"
"Middle-to upper-class," Rester says. "Probably no criminal background."
"Educated," Lidner says. "Well enough to account for the arrogance. If he's American. I'd guess Ivy League."
"He might be in law enforcement," Gevanni says. "He seems to know how to avoid common mistakes."
"OK," Near says. This all fits with his assumptions. "He has money to travel. He's probably unobtrusive. But unobtrusive in London is not necessarily so in Madrid. Let's find out if anyone around de la Cruz's home noticed an American or European tourist acting suspicious. Or," he adds, because Mello is never completely out there, "possibly Japanese."
"Why Japanese?" Rester says.
"Who has the most reason to hate L?"
"Kira fags," Gevanni says, sounding as contemptuous as he ever has.
Near disapproves of his terminology, but understands the sentiment that prompted it. "I think the killer was a Kira supporter no matter what his nationality turns out to be. Since Japan benefited the most from Kira, there were a disproportionately large number of them there."
"There are still a lot of pro-Kira web sites," Lidner says, softly, as if afraid she might offend someone.
"Like cockroaches," Gevanni mutters.
"Maybe we should keep an eye on these bugs," Lidner finishes.
"That can't hurt," Near says. It's not much for them to do, but it's better than nothing, and he feels obscurely comforted knowing everyone will be back tomorrow.
***
"Near?" Gevanni says. "I think you'd better take a look at this." Rester and Lidner went home a while ago, and Near has been reviewing a case in Texas that might require L.
"What is it?"
Gevanni swivels his chair so Near can see his monitor. "It came to the Watari account."
The e-mail says only: Get it yet?
"Did you trace it?" Near says.
"Yeah. A public computer in a library in DC."
"He really is full of himself," Near says. "How insulting to imply we wouldn't have started working on the case." It’s only been two days since Carruthers’s death, but how slow does this guy think L is?
To all appearances, though, he was counting on them having noticed. Why gloat? It's unnecessary, and gives them another piece of information.
You gloat when you’re sure you’re winning, Mello says.
“What makes him sure he’s winning?” Near wonders out loud. “When you contact the Spanish police, could you ask if anyone noticed anything odd in the de la Cruz investigation? Something they might have thought they imagined, or that was too strange to mention to L?”
“Sure.”
“The fact that he contacted Watari supports your law-enforcement theory.”
“It might. It’s not that hard to get this address, depending on your connections. He used one of the anonymized ones.” L—the first L—wanted private citizens to be able to contact him, but he also wanted it to be a challenge, so that only the savvy and determined would get through. Information on Watari is a mess of contradictions and red herrings almost as tangled as information on L.
“Is it an older one?”
“Yeah. It forwards from the original address, in fact.”
“That could be useful.”
“I’ll check it out.”
***
“It’s no use,” Gevanni says a bit later. “Almost anyone could have this address, it’s been out there so long. This guy could be a cop, a hacker, or... I don’t know. Sorry.”
“That’s all right. In the future, we should keep a tighter rein on these addresses.”
“Should I disable the account?”
“No. He might use it again.”
“Oh, right.” Gevanni scrubs a hand through his hair. “I’d better make some coffee. Want some?”
“Yes, thank you.”
Gevanni goes off to the kitchen for a bit, and comes back with a mug for Near and a demitasse for himself. “I still say you’d like my espresso.”
“It’s all too bitter. I can’t get it past my nose.” He takes a sip of the coffee. Gevanni put more sugar in than usual—not quite L-worthy sweet sludge, but enough to give an extra kick of alertness. “This is perfect. How did you know?”
Gevanni shrugs, smiling. “I think it goes with the title.”
“You don’t have to stay up with me,” Near says.
“Oh, I don’t mind. It’s almost time to call Madrid, anyway.”
“Thank you.” Mr. Wammy was like a father to L; Gevanni is more like an older brother who stands between Near and the world, and understands him without ever asking for needless explanations. “When I asked you to be Watari, why did you agree?”
“You expected me to, didn’t you?” Gevanni says.
“That’s not an answer.”
“I know. I meant: surely you’d thought about what the pros and cons would be for me.”
“Insofar as I could.” He knew even less about Gevanni’s life then, but he was pretty sure he’d take the job. Gevanni was always the most passionate of the SPK. Lidner cared about catching her friend’s killers, and Rester acted as if he were trying to establish a new standard for terse efficiency, but Gevanni seemed to see working on the Kira case as a personal proving ground.
“From the start with the SPK, I felt like I was part of something truly important,” Gevanni says. “A hell of a lot more so than when I was doing surveillance. Mostly, I didn’t want to give that up. You’re... well, you don’t need me to tell you you’re amazing.”
He forgets, sometimes, that it’s emotions that drive most other people, and he doesn’t always account for them. (Mello the seed in the random-number generator, the static that brought the system down.) “I understand,” Near says, and he thinks he really does, this time.
***
Once it’s early enough here, and late enough there, for business hours in Spain, Gevanni calls them with the follow-up questions. He doesn’t have a chance to ask any of them. He listens, and turns pale.
Near watches him, trying to tamp down a spark of alarm. “What?”
"The Madrid office says their lead investigator died yesterday."
"How?" Of all the times to have nothing in his hands. He gets a rocket from the battle formation by the door, and Gevanni follows him, still talking on the phone.
"Heart attack."
"What time?"
Gevanni asks. "Three-thirty."
Near’s already reaching for the phone with the voice distorter.
“This is L,” he says when the British office answers. “May I speak to Mr. Parrish, please?”
The little pause tells him it’s not good. “I’m sorry to tell you this, L, but Mr. Parrish passed away unexpectedly.”
“Yesterday?”
“Yes. A sudden heart attack.”
“Do you know what time?”
“Two-thirty.”
“Thank you for the information. My condolences to your team.” He clicks the phone off and stares at the rocket. There’s no fighting the spark of fear now.
Simultaneous heart attacks eight hundred miles apart: the giveaway mode of death. No, the default. Even without a photographic memory, Near would not have forgotten those rules.
I wouldn't call us "royally fucked," but this is very bad.
"Near?" Gevanni says.
He shakes his head, goes to retrieve the generic Lego. He wipes "Showoff" from the chest, and writes, in tiny letters, and with a tight precision only Mello would recognize as anger: S-Kira.
***
Notes: I know, shameless chapter break for dramatic effect. There is a reason I had to make Near originally from Wales. A big virtual cookie to anyone who guesses it. :-)
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Date: 2008-03-28 01:29 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-03-28 01:09 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-04-02 07:40 am (UTC)Ellie, this is so good so far.
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Date: 2009-04-02 04:03 pm (UTC)