There was a quarry near the campsite. The property was separate, and one skirted fences and advisory signs to enter, but they had been boys. They'd gone anyway.
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.
L sighed, reached for a cupcake, and waited for the decryption to complete.