Criminal Consultant

"Name."

"In-ah no, Smith!"

"Okay, Smith, tell us what happened."

In the FBI interrogation room, the harsh incandescent lights blazing, the blonde Inuo sat cowering behind a table, his hands and feet bound.

In front of the table were three FBI investigators.

Two were in charge of the interrogation, and one sat on the side to supervise and videotape the proceedings.

One of the interrogators, who was also taking statements, was secondary to the primary interrogator, a young blonde woman.

Her hair was not long, it was a short masculine hairstyle, she wore dark glasses on her face and introduced herself as 'Jodie' at the beginning.

Jodie looks very careless, quite a few points to complain about colleagues to increase their own workload meaning: tsk, a guy with a damn strange habits only, to find an opportunity to shoot not on the line, but also have to bring back to the Bureau of increased work.

This...the NYPD will not be so, blonde Inuo is not sure.

But the FBI has a bad reputation, worse than a dog with rabies.

Many people would rather face a rabid dog than the FBI, and in the midst of all the fear and no shortage of smears, Blonde Inuo didn't dare assume that the young blonde FBI was lying to him, and could only panic and give an honest account.

"Uh, I was surfing the net, and I saw a request for help posted by a kid..."

Jodie adjusted her sitting position and wiggled her eyebrows impatiently.

The blonde Inuo immediately corrected to a more objective measure, "Finally on vacation I wanted to have fun so I went online to look for prey, recognized that I had found one, and couldn't wait to meet it, realizing that I was the prey!"

"The guy was dangerous, definitely killed a lot of people, I've been around guys with blood on their hands and I could feel it, literally!"

Jodie: "Describe exactly what he looks like."

"White hair? Silver hair?" Blonde Inuo tried to remember, "When facing me, he didn't cover his face at all, you should know what a danger sign that means, I kept my head down, not really daring to look at his face."

"But..."

"Underage."

He said with certainty: "When we first met, when I was on the ground, unable to struggle, he lowered his head and smiled at me, and his appearance was so young that I can be sure that he must be a minor."

"Roughly high school? Younger than high school, taller than me."

There's a difference between races. In New York, middle-schoolers can easily be tall enough to roughly disguise themselves as adults without feeling out of place.

They also generally age better.

In Tokyo, it's not uncommon for staff members who have graduated a year or two ago to have their IDs checked to see if they're adults, or if they're masquerading as adults, when they're in and out of bars and cowboy parlors.

They're generally easy on the eyes.

If they were shorter, a 30-year-old Tokyoite might even be considered a minor by a New Yorker without a second thought.

It's a racial difference.

Especially the less sharp looks would deepen the difference, excluding Akai Shūichi, of course.

As soon as he raised his eyes and gave the visitor a cold stare, anyone with half a brain could quickly tell from the aura that this was an adult, very capable FBI investigator.

Akai Shūichi had met the target and had already relayed the key information of 'Asian' to Jodie.

When she heard that she was underage, she didn't change her face, she didn't even raise her eyes, "Asians are smaller."

"Go on, tell me the distinguishing features."

"Uh," the blonde Inuo didn't hesitate, "Smiling."

"He smiles almost all the time, not a sneer, not a big smile, but the kind of smile a person in a good mood has when he's entertaining himself in solitude."

"If I were to see it on the road, even though I'm not interested in high school students," he affirmed, "I'd still subconsciously look at it."

Because it's harmless and gentle.

But it's creepy to see that smile on a gangster who easily overpowered himself and exuded an air of disregard for human life. 

And, "Is he Asian?"

The blonde Inuo questioned before giving his opinion, "He must have come to New York recently, but before that, he must have lived in another state."

Not in Asia.

"That's what I heard from the accent."

And, "Is he, is he a police officer? Or an ex-FBI investigator?"

It was a question that the blonde Inuo held back long enough to ask tentatively.

Jodie raised her eyes without moving, "Oh?"

"It seems that this silver-haired gentleman has given you a certain misunderstanding."

Literally a denial, but Jodie's tone of voice was deliberately subtle and non-committal, turning the denial into an ambiguity that allowed the blonde Inuo to say more.

"He's very much an FBI investigator," The blond Inuo volunteered, "not in the tough-guy way, is he?"

He recalled the piece of paper with only a partial analysis, "He's solving crimes."

Correcting himself, "No, he was guiding the case."

"You should have gone through my house thoroughly, looked at the search logs on the computer that he asked me to run, he's been interested ever since he heard about a case at the apartment where an FBI agent was out in force."

"After reviewing the information that could be searched, he seemed to deduce the details of the murderer, and subconsciously made a draft to comb through it,"

Blonde Inuo recalled and corrected again, "It's not exactly combing."

"It's just that he seems to be in the habit of writing down his conclusions for other people to read after recognizing the murderer's information."

"The 'others' must have been the ones who couldn't see the information, couldn't follow his train of thought, so he added to it twice when he wrote it down."

He repeats, "Once to add details to his reasoning that the killer was old and sick, and once to explain why he hooked the second case right off the bat, because the bathroom could have delayed or advanced the time of death that the body showed."

"It's very... very much like coaching someone to solve a case."

And that 'someone' was probably the police.

Jodie had been listening with a bland expression, not reacting even to the guidance to solve the case, until she heard the details added twice and raised her eyes.

She controlled her expression to keep herself in a state of immobility, but she secretly let out a sigh of relief with some surprise: so that's how it is.

No wonder Akai Shūichi was paying too much attention to a guy who wasn't the murderer while the FBI was busy with a serial murder case of a terrible nature.

"Can you recall the information on that piece of paper?" Jodie asked, "Write down as much as you can from memory."

The man next to her immediately pushed a pen and paper to the blonde Inuo.

Thanks to the overly tense, blonde Inuo was so impressed with the part of the text he saw that he remembers the inverted English he saw at the time and rewrites it, writing off and on for about three minutes before pushing the pen and paper back in a hurry.

Jodie watches.

After a brief glance, her eyes glazed over, intuiting why the blonde Inuo thought the mystery man was an ex-FBI investigator.

The analysis...

Honestly, every FBI agent who writes written documents on a regular basis can see the words and understand the impatience of the person who wrote the analysis, but had to write the official crap.

It's because they feel it.

Every government employee, not just FBI investigators, sympathizes.

And the mysterious guy who writes this kind of stuff and is suspected of being a criminal...

I've heard the FBI has some not-so-clean criminal consultants.