Cause of Death

Chapter Three

ChapterThree

Carter, Paige, and I continued looking through books in the school and public libraries, local bookstores, we even ordered a couple of books online just to look for new ideas. Ka-san and Oto-san finally agreed with us that Fuji was murdered but they weren't fully on board to question the police yet. None of us blamed them, Fuji's body still was in their morgue and wasn't even autopsied yet. They refused to give us an answer why they haven't done it, especially since Fuji's death was as "open and shut" as they kept telling us.

I know it bothered Ka-san and Otosan a lot to not have Fuji's body yet. After all, they couldn't give Fuji the final rest he wanted. As I searched Fuji's room, I found a will he drafted in the back of an old Campos book he brought with him from Japan. Fuji wanted to be cremated and have his ashes added into a bio coffin with some seeds of his favorite plants so Ka-san could raise them into a beautiful garden. This way his family would still have him 'there' with them after he was gone. A request that was something truly 'Fuji' of him.

Regardless, the whole situation made us wonder if the police really was sweeping something under the rug. If not, then why wasn't Fuji's autopsy done and his body released to us? He was dead almost three weeks now and they just kept telling us, "We do murder cases before suicides." Like that excused the fact that we can't bury our son, brother, or friend and made everything magically okay.

That was why, we had to take matters into our own hands.

XXX

It took another week for Brad to get Hibiki and Koriko on board to have a private investigator look at Fuji's case. They hired a thirty-year-old man named Payton Virgo, an ex-member of the Chicago Homicide department. After looking at what little the Takahata's had, he had agreed that something fishy was going on at the precinct. They shouldn't have only investigated the case meer hours, slap the suicide stamp on the file, and lock it down to the public, let alone the victim's family.

Payton used to be a member of the homicide department, so he knew how things should've been handled. He knew the ins and outs of a homicide or even a suicide investigation and knew the people to try and talk to so he could get things moving along. He even saw a few cases where the police originally thought the victims took their own lives but were really murders. So, he knew what small details to look for that one of the detectives could've missed. After reviewing everything, he knew that someone at the police station was covering up Fuji's death by announcing the case as a suicide and backburnering it instead of investigating the case properly.

Payton admitted to the Takahata's that the difficult part would be proving that such a thing was actually occurring. Since he wasn't a member of the homicide department anymore, he couldn't get a judge to sign any warrants to get access to Fuji's file. He could only find something to present to the police and hope that they did what they were supposed to do. If they obviously didn't, then he could go to a judge and show that improper procedures were occurring and then Hibiki and Koriko could sue the police department.

Shockingly, it only took Payton a week to find something. Something everyone, including Paige, Carter, and Brad, missed. He went through the crime scene again hoping to find something that everyone missed including looking in the trash cans. The kids didn't look through the trash cans when they searched the park thinking that park management changed the garbage already and there wouldn't be anything there. Apparently, they weren't, and Payton found Fuji's backpack and a pair of rubber gloves inside the one of trash can close to where Fuji's body was found. No one had noticed that Fuji's backpack was missing. Brad was shocked and disappointed he didn't find it awfully weird that it wasn't found with his body since he knew for a fact that Fuji went home with it that night.