The Fawn | Death Note

21. Of Lies and Desperation

Bambi frowned slightly as she shrugged and tried to push her memories aside. "He sounds like a terrible person?"

"Anything else?" he asked expectantly.

"What do you want me to say? He liked to listen to Guns & Roses when he wasn't killing people?" she grumbled. "There isn't exactly a lot to go by with such little information."

Light frowned. "We can't go that far, but we can deduce that he had a flair for drama from his attempted suicide, kidnapping, and those cryptic puzzles he sent out for each murder."

The brunette silently nodded.

Both teens continued working in silence - well, Bambi gave the semblance of working before bringing up relevant articles and showing them to Light. Over the course of an hour the pair found all information they could on the Beyond's first victims, his mugshot, scans of the autopsy reports that were used in his trial, and a few articles summarizing his alleged crimes as the Encryption Killer over the past year. The autopsy reports for his recent crimes were not available, so Light was relying more on articles from local newspapers covering the crimes. It had come to the point where Light was positive that he had enough information on the murders and was ready to move on to Beyond's final crimes in the United States: the kidnapping and torture of a young, unidentified woman. She did her best to keep her cool as the two of them worked.

"Hey, Emily," Light called out. "I found an article with a picture that seems fairly useful. What do you think of it?"

He clicked around before turning his laptop to face the young woman, allowing her to read it. She closed her laptop and pushed it slightly to the side before turning her attention to the article. At the top of the page was an editor's note.

Edit February 13th: The image that accompanied this article has since been removed because the file was corrupted.

The brunette paused for a moment and glanced up at Light. He gave off an air of confidence as he waited expectantly for her response. She redirected her attention to read through the article. It described in a fair amount of detail how long Beyond held his victim, the types of injuries she and her rescuer sustained, and a final description of what the picture had looked like.

The rescuer was a white man in his late teens or early twenties. He had long blonde hair and was pictured carrying the unconscious victim out of the building. He sustained heavy burns to his left side in the explosion that later collapsed the building. The woman that he saved had sustained slight burning around her elbow and feet, suggesting that the rescuer may have used his own body to protect her from the blast. The woman's individual injuries were hard to distinguish because she was covered in what appeared to be dried blood, and we were unable to get hospital records on her or the man. The victim was white and in her late teens or early twenties. She also had short brown hair.

Bambi glanced back and forth between Light and the article. Does he know?

She coughed and smiled nervously at him. "It's really detailed, but it looks like they took the picture down."

Light furrowed his eyebrows and frowned before looking down at the article himself. A few moments passed as she heard him scroll throughout the article. His eyes narrowed for a brief moment before he looked back up at her with a perfectly calm expression.

"That's strange, I must have just read it wrong," he told her. "If I'm missing this much right now, then perhaps we should continue another day."

"Yeah, don't worry about it," she told him.