What happened to us?

▪︎Chapter 09▪︎

The Ghost town
(TW: swearing, corpses, blood)

~

"What do you think of this?" said Ranpo, shoving police report about mass abduction cases to the petrified Poe as soon as he managed to enter the room.
The writer grabbed the report and hid his face behind it, trying to read it properly and not focus on the stares from other people in the room and the way his hands were shaking.

"It seems like whoever did this was drawing attention to themselves on purpose..." Poe quietly muttered the obvious not to sound rude and stay quiet. Dazai nodded to his words, thought it was hard to hear him through all the noice in the background - mostly Atsushi arguing with Akutagawa over burned cookies -.
"Yes, and? Any other notices?" Ranpo asked with genuine interest, which conserne Poe even more. No one really cared as much about what he has to say except for Ranpo, but due to the long break he has completely forgotten that anything about him actually matters to someone.
"Uh... So far no. But what happened to the case three years ago? Does it still go as unsolved?"
"Police gave up and eventually everyone forgot about it. But back then it was only one person missing, now it were about ten cases at once with one month gap between them. It has been going like this for about four months." Ranpo explained. "Did it help?"
Poe nodded. Ranpo smiled like a proud parent as he studied Poe's focused expression.

It felt like a game now.
Ranpo was playing a deduction game with person of a same intellect, which excited him since no one else was actually capable of playing it so perfectly with him - at least none of people he had currently available - .

Game goes like this: You are given lacking information about a case that even number one police force wasn't able to solve. You have to get inside mind of a criminal you are currently after to figure out what are their motives, plans and eventually find out it's flaws and come to conclusion how was either crime committed or how to catch the one behind it.

"If it was doing of some bigger party, they sure wouldn't want to get caught by police, so it is probably doing of single person or smaller group that seeks attention... It kinda feels like an obsession... Why would you continuously capture ten people at once, just to do the same next month? There has to be some purpose to it... It doesn't seem likely that you would want to abduct this many people at once and besides, where in the world would you want to keep them?" Poe said after rereading the file to make sure he understood the information mentioned in it correctly.
"Obsession you say? With what exactly? If you are not trying to make your own human Zoo, then you wouldn't continue this routine with so much victims. They would have forty people locked up somewhere, unless they were abducting them with motive of getting rid of them eventually. It may be obsession with taking someone's life, but enjoying their terror by holding them hostage for some time and not just stab someone in the dark alley. Perfect example of sadist!"
Ranpo presented his deduction.
"Right. But still, where would you hold them in the meantime. It's not like you can have said forty corpses piled up in your basement or something... Someone would surely notice; decaying flesh and blood smell terrible." Poe pointed out the elephant in the room.
"Yes! We are finally getting onto something!! So let's see, we have obsessed weirdo or group of weirdos that surely has at least forty abduction cases on their hands. Hm... where could they possibly keep their victims? Do we have any clues from the files?" Ranpo continued in testing Poe's deduction skills, thought it was more of a reading exercise than pure 'What if'.
Poe checked the files again.

Sure... the signature! So obvious, yet still hidden. All the sent items shared one thing. They included at least one metal part that seemed to belong to some kind of machinery. Gears, pipes, screws... Some of them were rusty, so they must have been unused for some time now. As if they came from-