#bforbastard

Just before the voice mail kicked in again, the other end picked up. "Yeah!" Matt sounded almost startled. Good; he was awake and had realized who was calling. "I'm sending you encrypted data regarding a case I'm working. I need a virus crafted that will delete this information on any computer, and I need that virus installed as widely as possible throughout the police systems. I'm also sending an address - Wedy will be there and at your disposal, and will handle removing hardcopy." L clicked to send the waiting email.

"Got it," Matt said a moment later. Then, a moment after that, "Um..."

"You know that I trust your discretion."

"Right."

L hung up, closing the phone and shoving it into his pocket, and prepared his work area for departure - which consisted of stuffing the cellular modem and laptop power cables into a messenger bag, along with whatever uneaten sweets would fit. He'd take the car - his carry-on bag (not that he ever really remembered to use anything in it) was still there anyway. No reason to wake Wedy.

Parts of the bottom of the quarry always drew water, and at the edge of one of those spaces in a disused area, there had been a dead deer. For B, it had seemed the highlight of the trip, and L had been nearly as curious; A's interest hadn't been nearly so intense. B had gone to see the corpse repeatedly, sometimes by himself; whenever B had been there himself, the corpse had always changed dramatically by the next time L saw it. The last time he'd seen it, it had been torn open and its organs cast aside, and its eyes were missing. The smell had been intense.

L had encountered that same scent enough times since to have grown both sick of it and deadened to it. There were also caves in that quarry, both man-made and natural, a jumble of underground that had been paradise for fearless boys. Mostly fearless. A's asthma had acted up more than once, but he'd always refused to admit fear until he'd been barely able to move from it. L remembered a particularly bad episode in which he'd barely been able to drag A back outside, B being elsewhere at the time. A never had been good at determining his emotional point of no return; the caves hadn't been the first time that he'd crossed it and needed help, nor had they been the last.

It had rained, obliterating traces of disturbance on the surface, but the second of the caves that L remembered was still accessible. It took an hour's exploration to find the strangely new brick wall. There had been time to notify the local authorities, but no time to wait for them to show.

The damp hadn't allowed the morter to set properly, and it hadn't taken more than ten minutes to dislodge a few of the bricks. L had looked into the darkness, reaching...

The scent carried on the rush of air from the makeshift vault had told the entire story. As L had increasingly suspected, there never had been hope.

He'd pulled back, not breathing deeply until he was a bit away, and leaned against the tunnel wall for a few minutes. Wedy's movements slowed; she didn't bother to look through the opening.

They'd let the authorities handle it. He'd have the autopsy report soon. The crime scene information was already downloaded. The boy had been placed in a simple coffin in the chamber, which had then been sealed. He'd been placed with his head in the foot of the coffin as opposed to right way 'round; L wondered if it was a redundant reference to the inversion of the lowercase "b" initials. There was a heart carved into the lid of the coffin, no other markings; it appeared to have been constructed from lumber by hand. There was a disturbing lack of fingerprints throughout the entire scene. Beneath his blanket in the coffin, the boy had been slashed open, organs spilling out.

Based on that last, the detective L had contacted the police and let them know to be sure to study the victim's eyes. The careless way the boy had been torn apart reminded him of the deer in the ravine, eyeless and gutted.

There was more, but it was encrypted. Curled on the floor of the rental cottage with his laptop before him, L set the decryption to work and gnawed on the tip of his thumb. There had been no chance of saving that boy. None from the start. Wherever he'd secluded himself, B was undoubtedly laughing. This had never been about saving the victim. It was about L doing as B designed. It was galling.

There had been a self-destructive urge, while leaving the caverns, to let Wedy get ahead, and then to shut off his torch and simply stand there in the dark silence and let it hurt him, let it make him remember that absolute timeless nothing with no escape. He'd failed again. He deserved worse. It should have taken him then; the longer he went on, more innocents met that fate because of him, one way or another.

But who'd handle B, then? It was always the same...

So L sat in front of his laptop with a tray of gourmet cupcakes and bonbons and a bag of jelly babies at hand. Wedy had dubiously agreed to sleep in the other room, and had retired some hours before; L had at least learned from Watari that one must be rested to drive, so he'd insisted. There were to be three more victims, according to the wara ningyo. They'd have to be ready to go as soon as he'd deciphered the next location from the data from this victim.

The cellphone he'd been keeping for a few years now lay next to the computer. L glanced at it, considering, but downed another jelly baby and returned his gaze to the laptop instead.

With a light alert chime, the email from the contacted autopsy specialist arrived. The eyes had indeed been of note. They'd shown unusual trauma - bruising and burst blood vessels - that seemed to have taken place after death. Further study had shown that they appeared to have been removed and replaced. Upon investigating, knots of deliberately placed vibrant yellow-green synthetic fibers were withdrawn from the sockets. Other than that, the IV did indeed contain a compound derived from poisonous hemlock (currently under further investigation), and the mutilation also appeared to have taken place post-mortem. It did seem to be the compound that had caused death, about a week previous.

The child had indeed been dead all along. L turned an empty gaze to the floor between the laptop and his toes, rubbing his thumb along his lip. Hemlock caused paralysis, eventually including paralysis of the lungs resulting in death if respiration was not artificially maintained, while leaving mental function unimpared. The condition was all too similar to his own experience - not that B had any way of knowing that.

There was a loud sniffle on the other end of the line. "Ryuuzaki why did you send me that?" Misa wailed in a single breath. "I have a concert and now my eyes are all puffy!" L closed his eyes and took a slow breath. He was not accustomed to explaining himself, but there were instances in which it helped. "I need to know if I'm tracking the correct victim. Is the boy in the missing persons photograph alive?"

"Yes." Another sniffle. "But with the formula you and Light worked out, tomorrow he -"

"Thank you, Miss Amane, that answers the question more than adequately." He was about to hang up, but something caught at him. Courtesy could help to ensure continued compliance. "I am sorry to have troubled you."

Of course, it made even more sense, once L brought up the victim's home location. It was in the Lake District. On the far side of one of the lakes nearest the village was a camp site. They were torn down now, but once, there had been bunkhouses, and one summer more than a decade before...

There had only been that one summer to L's childhood. Before that year, and most certainly after, there had been no childhood. And that time had been shared.

Increasingly, L felt that this game - there would be further victims, he was certain, given B's placement of Wara Ningyo - was nothing like what had played out before. B had the audience he wanted now, and with this location, he was calling the past to attention.

He toggled the intercom to the driver of the Limousine. "Wedy, I'm uploading a location to the GPS. Head there."