Ch.86Request Log #010 – The Missing Children (3)

It didn’t take long to reach the dockside where flowers left for mourning had been abandoned, rotting and giving off an unpleasant smell. A lizardman who has lost body heat doesn’t wake up easily.

Though it was quite far from the dock where the stowaway had been, the proximity was unsettling. Death seemed to permeate the air. If I could smell it, the lizardman could too, but that didn’t matter.

I bought a bag of ice wrapped in enchanted packaging and a spare hot water bottle from a nearby grocery store, then headed to the dusty warehouse.

Since it wasn’t a frequently used place, I hadn’t decorated it artistically. Just a bathtub with running water, a desk, and a single chair. I drew the curtains to obscure any sense of time and turned on the light.

Doing this alone was arduous. Mr. Clichy had his followers, Mother Noll had Giuseppina, but I always had to work alone. That’s fine. Better alone than with a bunch of unreliable people.

After binding the lizardman’s wrists with tight knots, I tied a hot water bottle to the back of his neck and positioned him face down. The bleeding had caused him to lose body heat, so this would help restore it.

While waiting for him to wake up, I filled the bathtub with water and dumped in the ice I’d bought. For cold-blooded creatures, coldness meant death. Simply submerging him would lead to hypothermia fairly quickly.

This was work that required an assistant, but those who wanted the title of detective’s assistant generally wanted to investigate, not prepare for interrogations.

After waiting a while with a lead pipe I’d leaned against the warehouse wall, he finally stirred, barely managing to raise his body from the heat of the hot water bottle that was nearly boiling.

“Wh-where is…”

Good, he was conscious. I stood up, casually gripping the lead pipe in one hand, and approached the lizardman whose hands were tied behind his back. Instead of asking about the child, I immediately swung the pipe horizontally at his head.

His long neck swayed heavily with the impact, and the lizardman made a gurgling sound as he suffered from the pain that his newly regained consciousness felt. I didn’t care.

I swung the pipe again, holding it like a baseball bat. It was just a mechanical, repetitive task. I raised the pipe high above my head, brought it down precisely, then tossed it aside.

He wasn’t dead yet. His head was cracked and bleeding, and he seemed to have a severe concussion as he couldn’t properly hold his head up, his neck wobbling.

I grabbed him by the nape of his neck and dragged him to the bathtub filled with ice water. The additives varied depending on the species. For lizardmen, nothing worked better than ice with salt.

With his hands tied and his mind thoroughly scrambled, the lizardman barely managed to open his mouth. As always, his voice was bewildered.

“Ah, urgh, w-wait…! So, you need information from me…?”

“Thanks for confessing that you have information. Yes, that’s right. If you know something, it could be an important clue. But I’d be satisfied just beating to death a lizard who acts like he doesn’t even try to hide being a baby kidnapper. Learn to be satisfied with small things. It’s the secret to a happy life.”

I removed the hot water bottle from his neck and threw it aside. Though his body was larger than mine, he was no match in strength. I grabbed his head and shoved his characteristically long lizardman snout into the bathtub.

The water’s surface bubbled briefly, and as the heat drained from his head, the lizardman convulsed before losing consciousness. I pulled him out and reattached the hot water bottle.

I’d need to boil more water. This might not end before the hot water bottle cooled completely. If it didn’t finish by evening, I’d have to report to my client from a public phone.

Lizards tend to recover well. After about another hour, he somehow managed to raise his body, and realizing that the cold he so despised was right in front of him, he turned his neck to look at me.

Time to work again. I picked up the lead pipe, now bent from hitting his head, and approached him. His mouth opened slightly as his jaw began to tremble.

People easily become accustomed to violence. Not that they can endure it better. When you get hit in the head, you learn what it feels like the next time, and you recall that feeling as soon as you see the other person clench their fist.

If it was that easy to get used to punches, the feeling of being hit with a blunt weapon like this would leave an even deeper impression. The lizard checked that his ankles weren’t bound and tried to stand, but lost his balance and fell.

“Concussions last quite a while, friend. And what were you planning to do by getting up? Run for the door? Don’t bet your life on the possibility that I was stupid enough to leave my gun somewhere I couldn’t retrieve it before you could untie your hands and open the door to escape. You’d lose that bet.”

I struck his neck as his body swayed heavily, unable to maintain balance. I didn’t hit hard enough to break it. The pain from getting hit in the windpipe and choking was sufficient.

After coughing and struggling to breathe for a while, the lizardman barely managed to get up. He curled his body into a ball and began to tremble.

“Anyway, kack, if I’m not going to make it out of here alive, huu, might as well try something. I know where this place is, huff, and I know your face. Do you think, urgh, haaa… I don’t know that someone like you wouldn’t let me go and tell me to live quietly from now on? Fucking hell, there’s a limit to treating people like idiots…”

His mind was still working well. I sat in the chair, resting the pipe on the floor, and looked at him with a smirk.

“Would I lose anything by letting you go? I mean, could you prove that some random detective broke into your association’s annex building, kidnapped you without anyone knowing, and brought you here? The only evidence you have is a shipping box with a soup can in it.”

I tapped the floor with the dented lead pipe, then used it to lift his chin and make him look up. His trembling form, unable to even meet my eyes, seemed quite pitiful. No, not pitiful at all.

Yet there was a shallow glimmer of hope in his eyes. Perhaps he thought he might return alive, even if his body was battered. Hope blinds the eyes.

His judgment must have been clouded by the concussion. He saw hope even though my words weren’t sweet enough to inspire it. Or maybe starting with a beating before even speaking had been effective.

The lizardman had only one thing left. The hope that if he provided information that satisfied me, he could go home. Now I didn’t even need to beat him anymore.

“So, um, fuck… Do you know what our association does?”

“You buy orphans from Europe and sell them. I don’t care about that. It’s better to have more adoptees than more orphans. Well, that’s not the issue. The problem is why you’re now reaching for children in our country… and not just orphans.”

The lizardman, now kneeling quietly, slightly raised his gaze and barely opened his mouth.

“Because there was demand. Remember when those stowaways entered New York? At that time, a congressman’s daughter from Littlehold lost her child. Apparently, she was sleeping while the baby and the nanny were awake, and they died. So her father came to us. His daughter was heartbroken. He wanted to adopt a child to fill the void left by the dead baby. That’s how it was.”

I didn’t feel responsible. If that stowaway woman hadn’t had her head filled with stupid ideologies, none of this would have happened. I had handled the job in just one day.

The lizardman, now seemingly feeling some kind of kinship with me, gritted his teeth and made a gurgling sound. After making that sound characteristic of lizards, he continued.

“But that daughter was completely insane. You know what she brought us? A newspaper with the winner of a beautiful baby contest, saying ‘This one.’ When we told her the winner would attract too much attention, she said the third-place winner was from the slums and told us to bring that child. So we had no choice but to…”

I raised the pipe that had been tapping the floor. Standing up, I struck his head with a crisp metallic sound. I stomped on his bullet-wounded knee and grabbed his throat hard enough to crush the scales.

It was a grammatical error. “No choice” is not a phrase to use when confessing to kidnapping a child. It’s a grammatical mistake. Still gripping his throat, I dragged him to the ice-filled bathtub and submerged his head.

The lizardman, who had been screaming as he was dragged toward the bathtub, tried to resist by lifting his head, but with both hands I easily managed to shove his head underwater.

His body struggled, but he couldn’t escape. Before long, he lost consciousness again. Since I hadn’t removed the hot water bottle, I just tossed him aside. He would wake up in about an hour.

It must have been quite severe. This time it took nearly an hour and a half before he barely managed to get up. Curled up on the floor, he couldn’t even lift his head and was trembling all over.

“You should have chosen your words carefully. Now, continue.”

The lizardman, now unable to even lift his head and trembling violently, continued in a much more fragile voice.

“Y-yes. We had money and connections promised, so we went to steal the baby… I don’t know the baby’s name. Really. I just received the address, went to confirm the face, and brought the child. And! There were many such special orders! Because so many children died in Littlehold and at the docks, demand suddenly increased! It wasn’t just that congressman…”

The death magic had struck when adults would already be at work, but when children would be finishing school. Children have lighter sleep and wake up more easily than adults. Yes, it makes sense when you think about it.

Today again, it didn’t even take a day. No, that’s not right. A confession extracted through torture wouldn’t allow me to search inside the association, so all I’d learned was the truth. It wouldn’t be over until I found the children.

I tapped the floor a few more times with the now completely deformed lead pipe. He continued speaking.

“The children have already been delivered to the high-ranking… Ah, aaah! Wait, wait a minute! I’ll say it again! The children have already been delivered to the high-ranking…!”

I told him to be careful with his words. It was quite enjoyable to see the lizardman lifting his head and crying profusely. They were crocodile tears, but I decided to give up on gambling whether he would drown this time or not.

Instead, I struck his bullet-wounded knee once with the lead pipe. The terrified lizardman let out a death-like scream, but I hadn’t even used that much violence.

“Th-thank you. Really, really… So, I don’t know where the rest of the children are gathered. I, I was in charge of bringing the children! You know how the association works! Because of that bureaucracy, that damn bureaucracy, I wouldn’t know! That’s right, isn’t it? You know things can’t go this smoothly all at once. So, please, calm down…”

It seemed like this was all the information I could extract from this lizardman. Now I needed to properly investigate the Continental Adoption Agency, and I could give a somewhat condensed report to my client.

If I exchanged it for the police insider information the reporter had, it might make a useful combination. Either way, telling her everything would make things end faster. Connections with enthusiastic media outlets were easy to handle.

“The congressman’s name?”

“S-Steven McAdams…”

Judging by how he only gave the name, he’s lying. Worried about repercussions from the honorable congressman, are we? As I raised the cracked and twisted lead pipe again, he started shedding crocodile tears once more.

“Y-you know I’ll die if I reveal the name! Even if you let me go, I’ll die anyway! In that case…”

I clicked my tongue and shook my head. I gently stroked his head where the scales had been crushed, revealing ugly flesh.

“Do you have time to worry about the future? Right now, you’re about to be beaten to death and become fish food in the waters off Long Island. Think wisely and as soon as I let you go, take your family and run away. Right?”

I had no intention of letting him go. The trembling lizardman barely nodded at my words. He gathered his resolve with the hope from my words. So he has a family. I collected one more piece of information from this gap.

After gathering his resolve for quite some time, he finally opened his trembling snout and spat out a name.

“George O’Brien… Th-this time it’s real. So, um…”

“Address.”

He’s lying again. No matter how many times I make him speak, he’ll continue to lie if that’s his intention. This type of interrogation was only effective up to this point, so I decided to stop here.

Perhaps feeling somewhat relieved since it was a house he’d flee from anyway, he proudly gave me the address. I put a garbage bag over the lizardman again, loaded him into the trunk, and drove to his house.

My gun still had six bullets left, and he had the hope that he could escape if he could just get out of the trunk. Hope might be better, but bullets were more useful.

The address he gave was a detached house in a normal middle-class residential area. A house bought with money earned by selling other people’s children. A gift received by offering human sacrifices to the god of capitalism.

I took the garbage bag out of the trunk and put it on the ground. Only then did he tear through the bag and stand up, holding his damaged body. With a face that looked like it might shed more tears, he stared at the home he had finally returned to.

“Go before I change my mind. This might be your last chance.”

Hearing my words, he began running toward the house with salt tracks from dried tears on his face. He wasn’t fast. It would be just like a turkey hunt.

“Nancy, Nancy! Come out quickly!”

Even calling his wife’s name. I closed the trunk and got in the car. I took out my trusty Model 1911 pistol and aimed at the back of the head of the lizardman who was limping and holding his side as he walked.

I pulled the trigger. I only felt the recoil. The lizardman fell. A door opened and screams rang out. I pulled the acceleration lever and left the scene. That was the extent of my simple reflection.

My mind had never changed. It’s ridiculous to think that someone could sell a child not even a year old and dream of a happy life.

It wasn’t the way home, but I deliberately drove around the busy area. Except for the occasional papers saying “Looking for a Child” posted on walls here and there, New York was gray again today.