The Girl With No Name

Chapter Twenty-Three

It went without saying that Higuchi's arrest had been a total bust. Thank god the Kira investigation was a private 'off the books' organisation. I couldn't imagine the amount of red tape we'd have to hack through after having a suspect die literal minutes after being put in handcuffs.

Returning back to HQ, we were confronted with feelings of both disappointment and giddiness. Sure, our suspect had been murdered right under our noses, but at least we still had the edgy book and a creepy floating skeleton for a pet.

Speaking of the levitating *Dry Bones who'd made a home in our HQ, L had successfully managed to coax a few words out of it. It wasn't a very talkative thing but, frankly, we were all stunned it could communicate with us in the first place. What were the chances this strange, alien death-god(dess?) could speak modern Japanese? Were they fluent in every human language? There was no end to the queries that ran rife in all of our sleep deprived minds.

It told us its name was Rem (after which, Chris had made a dumb comment about computer storage and proceeded to laugh at his own joke when no one else did). Whatever questions we had about the notebook - among other topics - it had no qualms answering. But, whilst everyone else was asking the boring enquiries, I'd taken it upon myself to ask the question that was on everyone's minds.

"Say, uh, Rem?" I'd asked, trying to mask the shudder I got when it (he, she?) turned to stare at me with those soulless yellow eyes. "Since you basically confirm the existence of a higher power, is now a good time to start praying for my mortal soul?"

"Praying serves no purpose as no such deity exists who will listen," it replied with its low, gravelly voice, and there was a brief exchange of glances from the occupants in the room; all of us feeling like we were hearing information we really ought not to hear.

"Oh," I balked, suddenly regretting opening my mouth. "Y'know, I can't tell whether that's comforting or not."

The next few days passed by in a crazy, coffee-fuelled blur. I barely spoke a word to anyone else on the team as I filed through endless amounts of data. As we all knew, Kira had been a very busy boy since he first began his killings, so there were hundreds of pages to scan into our system, and thousands of names to cross reference with the names of criminals we knew had died.

Having been the one to organise the police blockade to trap Higuchi, Aizawa had actually re-joined the task force following a change of heart (something I was quite glad for as he had the most sense out of everyone on the team). He and L still weren't on the friendliest of terms, but the ex-officer behaved cordially enough to ensure there'd be no more outbursts on his part (and the detective was too fascinated by the book to behave like an asshole, so there was nothing to worry about there).

On the day where we focused less on the names written within the book and more on the structure of the book itself, we were confronted with a fact that made our prior theories on Kira's identity null and void.

"There's at least a hundred of these instructions that we'll have to go through," Aizawa had announced to the group, skimming through the pages of the notebook and quietly mumbling some of the rules provided. "Oh, and on the back cover too: 'If you make this note unusable by tearing it up or burning it, all the humans who have touched the note until then will die.'"

Seemed pretty harsh by my standards but, I supposed, if these books were the only ways for Shinigamis to prolong their lifespans, they wouldn't want humans getting rid of them.

"Well," Ide said with a shrug. "Guess destroying it is out of the question then."

"The corner of this page has been torn out," the detective pointed out, fingering a piece of the book where a sliver of paper had been ripped away. He looked to the Shinigami then, who hovered a few paces away. "Would that therefore make the page unusable or does its usability end when the page can no longer be written on?"