Tainted (A soukoku fanfic)

Chapter 13

! WARNING !
Graphic descriptions. Please read at your own risk.

A woman stood under a thick foliage in a remote area by the main road to Kamakura* with a camera in hand. She was dressed in formal attire which contrasted greatly with the greenery in the background, making her stand out amongst the prettiest of flowers.

Snap! Snap! Snap!

The camera lost its focus as the woman moved further into the dirt path she was on, taking pictures of anything that caught her interest. Light filtered through the trees above in multiple thin blades shining down on a spray of red spots by some bushes. Immediately she raised her camera to snap another picture, scribbling fast in a small purple notebook. 'Blood found on the trail leading to the crime scene' was written in blue ink before she snapped it shut again. She then whipped out a small piece of cotton and dubbed it on the leaves, taking the sample into a small plastic bag. When she rose again to a stand she noticed at least six others dressed in similar clothes that were scattered in the clearing ahead of her.

Kunikida, the police captain of the Fujisawa police department, had directly received an anonymous call the night before informing him of an arson and murder that had occurred in a cabin by the main road to Kamakura, so he immediately sent for some officers to check it out. As it had turned out, the unknown caller had been indeed telling the truth and so they had taken immediate action to secure the scene, by which point she arrived to conduct a primary walkthrough of the crime. In all her three years of working as an investigator she never had the chance to witness an actual murder up close as she was usually assigned on either missing person cases or suicide ones, with the two being more often than not one the same. So naturally, she was more than a little apprehensive.

"Yosano-san, hello" called an officer just before she entered, and she turned to face him. "Be mindful of where you step, the floor looks ready to collapse in some areas. I'll be by the entrance so if anything happens just call out."

"Thank you, Tanizaki-kun," she said with a forced smile and finally stepped inside. The metallic smell of blood instantly hit her and she grimaced, pausing in her tracks. Yosano then slung the camera over her shoulder so she could put on a mask and a pair of black nitrile gloves before moving further into the dimly lit corridor.

The little cabin had a rather ominous vibe clinging to it not only because of what had occurred the night before or the faint metallic smell than hung in the air but because it also looked like that hadn't been the only time something terrible had happened within its walls. "Fuck," she muttered under her breath when she opened the door to leading to what might have been once a storage room. My gut was right after all. Besides the obvious dark spots on the wood where some kind of lighter fluid had been used to burn the evidence, there were some darker spots; dried blood she guessed, on the walls, the floor, and pretty much in every corner of the room. Snap! She stood shy at the threshold for a brief moment to gather her bearings before she stepped inside the cramped space. The rotting planks creaked in protest at the added weight as the dark haired woman made her way further into the room, taking note of all the different tools scattered on the shelves. Whips, knives, chains... Kinky. She lifted up a rusty metallic object that seemed to be the only thing unscathed by the flames and took out a small plastic bag from her bag. Dusting the object, traces of fingerprints started to reveal themselves. This is almost too easy, she thought.

She transferred the marks onto another surface and re-stored the item back inside the confines of her bag. 'Storage room used for torture, evidence of lighter fluid used to obscure evidence,' she quickly scribbled before moving on to the room adjacent to it. It was a bathroom. Or it was supposed to be one anyway. Yosano gagged at the putrid smell that hung in the stale air of the small washroom. "Uhh," she secured the mask on her face in a vain attempt to block out some of the smell. To say the bathroom was a mess was only a light way of putting it to words. There was a thick layer of black mold on the walls and the furniture was so dirty that the porcelain white had turned into a murky yellow-brown colour. Again, there was dirt, feces that belonged to both human and non-human, and what seemed like a decaying body of a rat that had met an unfortunate end besides the toilet.