It was a few days after Akira and Tada’s fight. Akira’s classes were over for the day, so she decided to visit the staff room, where Shinohara was.
“The saliva sample found on the victim was analyzed by inspectors, but apparently it’s the first time that profile has been found,” he told her when she asked how the investigation was going.
“Does that mean this Ghoul has preyed before without leaving a trace?”
If there was a precedent, the CCG would have the documentation. That often offered some hints, but this time they were starting from scratch.
“This Ghoul has been very careful.”
Tada had talked loudly about how any Ghoul who was scared off by a child would be found sooner or later, but the investigation seemed to have hit an unexpected wall.
“Tada’s going to start investigating around the Academy today.”
Now that the information available was limited, he was taking even negative comments.
“His prospects aren’t bad as an associate.”
“Hm. Well, Tada hasn’t been very well lately.”
Shinohara furrowed his brows, looking worried.
“Although your technique improves with experience, as you get older your body slows down and your mind doesn’t work as fast as it did when you were younger. It’s a constant battle at our age.”
Shinohara also muttered something about this case being the particular battle that Tada had chosen to fight.
“He ought to lose some weight first.”
“Ha ha, well, I think so too. But Tada’s the kind of guy who’s always looked like that and has racked up successes in the organization anyway. He’s not like you; in fact, he may be your polar opposite. But he’s always respected your mother.”
That’s nice, but it doesn’t make me any less unhappy about the way he talked about my father. That’s why I want to solve the case first and find this Ghoul. The ladybug. Where can it be?
Suddenly something worried her.
“How old was the child who saw the Ladybug?”
“Oh, about five or six.”
“And a child that small screamed so loud that a Ghoul ran away?”
Shinohara laughed. “Oh, right. He didn’t just scream, he yelled, ‘Mr. Inspector, come right away!’ A very quick-witted child.”
Now she understood why the Ghoul had escaped. Akira thanked Shinohara and left the staff room. But as she walked down the hallway she suddenly stopped.
Could such a young child really think so quickly on their feet to scare off a Ghoul this good at covering their tracks?
It was a casual question. But once she’d asked it, the scope of the question expanded. Perhaps it was a clue. Akira quickly left the Academy as if she were being pulled somewhere.
Is that the kid?
Akira had headed straight for the scene of the crime, on the outskirts of the 5th Ward. A boy was kicking a pebble on his own in a little alley near a row of houses—the kind of boy you would see anywhere, but this kid seemed strangely gloomy.
“Are you Shota?” she called out, using the name she’d found out earlier. The boy looked up.
“Who’re you?”
“I’m Akira Mado. A future Ghoul investigator.”
“Future investigator?”
“You can call me Akira. I wanted to ask you some questions about what happened the other day.”
The boy looked down and kicked another stone.
“My grandma and granddad are already angry at me about what a dangerous thing I did. I don’t wanna talk about Ghouls anymore.”
His grandparents had every right to be angry, since if something had gone wrong the boy would be dead now.
But she decided to ignore their feelings and asked him, “So your grandparents would prefer it if that woman had died?”
“It’s not like that,” the boy began. “My mom and dad were both killed by Ghouls.”
He kicked a stone toward the wall. It bounced off and disappeared somewhere.
“What do you want to know?” She heard the darkness in his heart that would not go away, the pain of having his parents taken away. Akira herself knew that feeling.
“How did you realize there was a Ghoul?”
“It was night, I looked outside for some reason, and I saw a woman walking past the house. Then, behind her, a man.”
“How did you know he was a Ghoul?”
The boy looked up at her silently. Akira looked back at him, seeing him now as another human being, not just as a child.
“It was the guy who took my dad away.”
Akira didn’t know what to say. The boy clenched his fists.
“A little after my mom was killed by a Ghoul, my dad and I were attacked by some other Ghouls. He told me to run away, so they only got him. So I knew that Ghoul when I saw him. I’d know him anywhere.”
The tangled thread of the case was starting to unravel.
“When did that happen?”
“It was when I was in kindergarten. We lived in the 20th Ward. When they finally found my dad, there was another body there too. All torn up. It was a Ghoul. They said he was killed by another Ghoul after he killed my dad.”
If he’s in elementary school now, then this must’ve happened last year or the year before. Akira tried to remember the cases in the 20th Ward that she had looked at the other day. Among them, there had been a report about a mysterious group of Ghouls with ukaku Kagune that hunted together. A group of Ghouls from an organization called Futamaru had been killed by an ukaku in the 20th Ward.
“I thought the guys who killed my dad were all dead, but this one wasn’t. I thought he was going to kill the woman who walked by my house, so I chased after them.”
As she listened to his story, Akira realized there were so many new possibilities. If it was a Ghoul who belonged to Futamaru, he may have fled here from the 20th Ward after losing the battle against the Ukaku Ghouls. And still in fear of the Ghouls who killed his friends, he would’ve been looking for a safe place to hunker down. And this is a safe place.
Standing on the shoulders of giants. Most Ghouls wouldn’t come near the CCG at all. Everyone kept saying that after he was spotted by the boy the Ghoul had fled to the Academy, but couldn’t he have also fled back to the Academy? The idea stuck in Akira’s mind.