[From the journal of Dr. John H. Watson]
It was with a heavy heart that I once again found myself in the dust-sheeted confines of the vacant apartment adjacent to that of Mr. Mogami Touta. To spend one's days in such a manner—crouching in the dark, listening to the faint, disembodied sounds of another man's life—is a grim business, and I found it wore upon the nerves. For my friend, Sherlock Holmes, it was proving to be a unique form of torture.
For two days, he had remained at his post, his ear pressed to his listening device, his body as still as a hunting heron. But where he had once been a vessel of pure, intellectual concentration, he was now a coil of simmering impatience. The passive observation, the slow gathering of trivial data—it was a method ill-suited to his active and energetic nature.
"It is not enough, Watson!" he finally exclaimed, springing to his feet and beginning to pace the small room with the fury of a caged tiger. "We have the man's habits, his diet, the very rhythm of his work. I can deduce the nature of his soul from the pattern of his keyboard clicks, but what does it avail us? We have a portrait, but we need a confession! We must force the issue."
Before I could inquire as to his meaning, he had produced one of the sleek, modern telephones with which we had been furnished and was tapping out a message.
"To whom are you writing?" I asked.
"To L," he replied without looking up. "I am requesting that he, through his official channels, issue an indirect order for Mr. Mogami to present himself for a 'routine data security review' at a neutral location in one hour's time."
The request struck me as a bold one, a direct command to a man who was, for all intents and purposes, the leader of our entire investigation. I was therefore astonished when, not thirty seconds later, Holmes's telephone chimed with a reply. He glanced at it and nodded, satisfied. "It is done."
I marvelled at this. The young man, L, for all his peculiarities, never seemed to object to Holmes's plans. He never questioned, never demanded justification. It was as if he possessed a second sight, an ability to see the intricate workings of my friend's mind and to understand the destination even without knowing the route.
After another half-hour of listening to the frantic, panicked typing that had begun from the other side of the wall—for the summons had clearly arrived—we made our own way out. We proceeded to a nondescript office building in a different part of the city, where we were shown into a meeting room that was the very definition of soulless. It contained only a plain grey table and three chairs, and the air within was cold and still.
We waited. Presently, the door opened and Mogami Touta was shown in. He was a small man, as we knew, but in person he seemed even more diminished, his face pale with anxiety. He clutched a briefcase to his chest like a shield.
It was here that I witnessed a transformation in my friend. The keen-eyed logician, the man of science and deduction, seemed to recede, and in his place emerged a colder, more predatory figure. He was no longer a detective seeking clues; he was an interrogator seeking to break a man's spirit. He was, I realised with a profound sense of unease, about to do what criminals do: to blackmail, to intimidate, to destroy a man's psychological foundations. It was a dark and terrible art, and I could not help but wonder where he had learned it.
Holmes did not begin with questions. He began with a statement, his voice calm and even. "You take a sixty-second break for every twenty minutes of work. Your tea is Gyokuro, no sugar. You favour the colour grey in your attire, and you believe your superiors, particularly Director Kido, are incompetent fools who do not appreciate the genius that truly protects them. Am I correct?"
The effect on Mogami was immediate and profound. His jaw went slack, and the briefcase slipped from his nerveless fingers, clattering to the floor. The man's entire life was built upon the principle of the unseen, the security of anonymity. In a single sentence, Holmes had rendered him utterly transparent.
"How… How could you possibly…?" he stammered.
Holmes ignored him. He slid a thin sheaf of papers across the table. "These, I believe, are transcripts of your private communications on the internal network. Your contempt for Chief Yagami is particularly striking. To call him a 'sentimental old dinosaur'… that is grounds for immediate dismissal, is it not? And perhaps even legal action, considering your security clearance."
Mogami stared at the papers, his face a mask of pure terror. The meticulously ordered world he had built around himself, his digital fortress, had been breached and plundered. He was exposed, helpless.
"What do you want?" he whispered, his voice trembling.
It was here that Holmes leaned forward, his voice dropping to a low, conspiratorial tone. This was the true attack. "A man like you, Mr. Mogami. A man of immense skill, but no recognition. A man of resentment. Such a man, if he were to notice a flaw in the system—a small, overlooked vulnerability—he might be tempted. Not to use it himself, of course. He is a man of caution. But he might be tempted to simply… observe. To watch who is using it, and to do nothing. To allow the chaos to unfold, as a secret, satisfying proof of the incompetence of those who scorned him."
Every word was a scalpel, expertly dissecting the man's petty, resentful soul. I saw Mogami begin to break. A sob caught in his throat.
"I didn't do anything," he cried, the words tumbling out in a desperate, pathetic rush. "I saw it! Weeks ago! A partitioned data pipeline, high-bandwidth, funneling server resources directly to the Chief's home network. For his son! A civilian! It was a flagrant breach of every protocol! I saw it, and I… I did nothing. I let it be. I wanted… I wanted to see what would happen. I wanted them to fail."
He slumped forward, his head in his hands, his shoulders shaking with the force of his wretched confession. He was not Kira. He was something far more common, and perhaps more contemptible: the little man who, through cowardice and spite, had held the door open for the devil.
We left him there for the officials to collect. As we walked out into the cool evening air, the grim reality of what had transpired settled upon me.
"Holmes," I said, my voice heavy. "That was a brutal business. I have never seen you operate in such a fashion."
He did not answer for a time. He stared up at the indifferent neon lights of the city, his expression thoughtful, almost troubled.
"To hunt a clue, Watson, one needs only logic," he said at last. "But to hunt a soul… one needs a different science entirely." He glanced at me, a flicker of something new in his eyes—a grudging respect for a method not his own. "It is a valuable lesson I have begun to learn, strangely enough, from observing Miss Marple. To truly understand the monster, one must first master the frailties of the human heart."