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His surveillance corps in Bad Company ping him on Higashikata Josuke's approach long before the teenager lets himself in through the front gate. He watches through their eyes, flicking from one viewpoint to another as he steps into the yard, alone, and pauses in front of the door under the walkway. Hirose Koichi's blood has long been cleaned away from where he's currently standing, but he still stops in place, clearly steeling himself before coming inside.
He breaks the connection with Bad Company as the sound of the door opening hits his own ears, and he tracks the (unfortunately by now familiar) footsteps of Higashikata's sharp, overpriced shoes clicking over the floorboards.
The teen finds him where he's sitting on the couch of the living room, the book he's reading in hand.
"Where's Okuyasu?" It's the greeting Keicho typically starts with every time he and Higashikata Josuke meet without his brother to act as a buffer between them. First things first is to find out why Okuyasu isn't currently playing said role keeping the peace going.
The other comes to a stop in the open space between the entryway and the living room, seemingly unwilling to approach any closer. "Out getting food. He'll be here in a couple of minutes."
He lets out a hum of acknowledgement. A few seconds pass and Josuke's still there. "What do you want?" Keicho knows that he wouldn't willingly be here by himself, not unless there was something he was after.
In his peripherals, just beyond the edge of his book, he can see Josuke looking at him intently. "You heard about what happened to Shigechi—Shigekiyo, right?"
"Of course I have." Even if he hadn't been keeping track of the stand users in Morioh (he was), he would have known about it from Okuyasu coming home and breaking into sobs over dinner. Based on how much Okuyasu had spent the past few weeks complaining about the so-called greedy brat, he wouldn't have really thought they were friends, but Shigekiyo's sudden death had shaken him up in a way he'd never seen in his brother before.
"Was Shigekiyo's stand your doing?" There's something vaguely accusatory in the question. The teen looking for someone to blame, maybe.
"He was, yes." His stand was effectively harmless, useless for his purposes, and otherwise outside of his concern apart of his potential ability to see Bad Company when Keicho was out doing work. He'd kept an eye on him, of course. Another multibody stand (or a 'colony stand', like the SWF calls it) like that had potential to give Bad Company trouble, but he had never seen Shigekiyo use his stand for anything other than trivial self interest and other childish frivolities.
"And you don't feel even a little responsible for what happened to him?" Higashikata continues, the accusation in his voice intensifying to a point.
"Of course not." He answers without missing a beat. He's not going to start a lecture about fate here and now, especially not with him of all people, so he comes at it from another angle. "As far as anyone knows, Shigekiyo was killed because he'd caught the killer in the act. Simple bad luck. Maybe it happened because of his stand, maybe it hadn't. Either way, I consider it completely outside of my responsibility."
The teen stews over his answer for a while. He can practically see the gears turning in that primped and preened head of his. Then, "What about his killer?"
"What about it?" Keicho raises an eyebrow. "Nobody knows who it is. Isn't that right?"
"I know you know something."
Ah. So that's what this is about. He puts his bookmark at his place in his book and sets it aside, rising from the couch to his full height.
Josuke meets his gaze, his blue eyes practically glowing with that bright fiery rage that lights him up whenever the two of them are forced to share a space together for long.
"What makes you so sure?" He lifts his chin, staring down his nose at him in turn.
"You know every stand user in Morioh. Especially the dangerous ones. So unless this guy flew into town just last week, you'd have to already have known about him." He sounds like he hates every word he's saying. He probably wouldn't have come here if he had better leads to follow. Asking him has to be his last resort.
Which means he's also not likely to leave until he's satisfied with the answer Keicho gives him. Getting hounded by the most irritating stand user in Morioh (and that's saying something) isn't his ideal way of spending an afternoon, so he breathes out an annoyed huff. "Yeah. I know about him." He gives a jerk of his head, indicating for Josuke to follow him.
Which he does, at a distance.
Far enough to be out of arm's reach but close enough to stay within Crazy Diamond's range. It's a funny thought, he can tell that they're both aware of the range and they're both keeping a steady measure of it with each step.
(He thinks briefly that maybe he and Higashikata Josuke have some things in common after all)
He leads the other to his office space, flicking on the ceiling lamps as the teenager gapes his mouth and looks around at his papered corkboards and the notes he'd actively been in the middle of adding to. Probably sees the small section dedicated to Kujo Jotaro right and center in the mix. Keicho opens the top row of his file cabinet, forefinger tracing neatly over the orderly names on the spines of the binders before finding one of the thicker ones and pulling it out. He tosses it down onto the table he's been using as a desk, where it lands with a loud thud. The binder is titled だれだれ, his mystery man.
Higashikata looks back and forth between him and the binder. At the unspoken question, Keicho opens it for him, the two of them greeted by neat pages of missing persons posters and newspaper articles of young women, catalogued over the past six years. He watches the teen's brow furrow and he cautiously approaches, turning over the page to view the clippings he'd made.
The pages are sorted by year and then by month when applicable. Profiles of the missing persons he'd been able to dredge up from newspaper archives in libraries and on websites. The initial announcements of the victims going missing, the fluff pieces about their lives, and then the news reports about the search efforts. "I was able to identify 23 victims in Morioh over the past six years." He spoke aloud as Higashikata carefully turned the pages one by one. "I have reason to believe there may be more that I haven't found."
"You uh... you're pretty good at cutting straight lines, huh?" He shoots him a brief, inscrutable look.
Keicho decides not to comment on that. As content as he is with most of his accurately cut right angles, the small tear in one of the newspaper cutouts he'd made by mistake is threatening to aggravate him if he keeps looking at it. "There's an easy to identify pattern to the killings. I'm assuming that the killer is a man because almost all of his targets are young women in a certain age range." There was always a possibility he was wrong about that, but statistically speaking he was comfortable enough to assume.
The victims were surprisingly varied in appearance when it came to their faces or hair, so it was instead the outside circumstances that linked them together:
"Almost all of them are tourists. He's most active during the summer when people come in from out of town or out of the country, and his killings slow down or stop entirely during the winter." It was sensible enough that Keicho could see the reasonings behind it. People dropped contact during vacations all the time, either from lack of accessible phones or getting swept up in vacation activities. That benefit of the doubt and the possible long distances involved gave the killer a delay in his victims being searched for.
Most family members didn't demand twice daily check-ins like Keicho did when Okuyasu was away from the house. Their mistake, really.
"If the woman was traveling alone, she'll be the only victim. If she was traveling with a significant other or a friend, both will go missing. I've also noticed that once he's started for the season there's a fairly consistent delay in between when he kills one victim and when he seeks out a new one. Approximately three weeks, but it's sometimes more and sometimes less." Enough variations that it was clear the killer wasn't on a plotted schedule, driven to act by whim or some other influence.
Higashikata has gone quiet, his eyes scanning over page after page of the victims' descriptions, what they were doing, where they had come from, all the mundane details of the departed that had been laid out in newspapers.
"Couldn't come up with a reason for the delay." A morbid bit of fanciful thinking would imagine that it could be how long the previous victims last in captivity, if they had been taken alive, but there's no evidence supporting that, and most importantly...
"The other thing uniting all the victims is that no remains are never found. Even with search dogs, even when dragging the bay and shorelines. Not a single tooth or bone fragment, not even a drop of blood." The other opens his mouth to say something but Keicho can already guess his objection, "Obviously there are corpses found in Morioh. But I've looked through them. They're either identified as other unrelated victims, or the timelines don't match. If the victims had other explanations for their deaths I wouldn't have put them in this folder. Every one you're looking at is someone who matches the pattern and who's unaccounted for to this day."
He frowns to himself. "This person is a black hole sitting in the middle of Morioh. When people fall into it, they don't come back out again." Just like Shigekiyo. "And yes, I'm sure this is a stand user. No witnesses, no remains, no evidence left behind. Ordinary killers don't work like that. That's something only a stand user could do."
"Is he one of yours?" Higashikata finally speaks up.
"No. If he was, I'd have at least something to give you. As far as I can tell, he's either a natural born stand user, or..." He trails off, his gaze moving to the grainy, copier printed photos of Jotaro on the wall behind them, "Or he had his stand induced another way, sometime ago. I even wondered if he might have been given it by my father, but the timeline doesn't match up. My father was incapacitated by the time this killer had really gotten started."
The teen perks up in attention at that, even as a grimace pulls on his face at the mention of his and Okuyasu's father. "Do you know anyone your dad gave a stand to?"
He might as well share the answer he'd found with him, since it was such a disappointing one. "No. I have never been able to track down any potential stand users my father might have made, if there were any to begin with." He pauses, a wry smile passing over his face. "Of course, you could always ask him yourself if you get around to fixing him."
Higashikata, predictably, goes from a grimace to a scowl at his words. When he reaches the end of the pages in the binder, Keicho snaps it shut in front of him with a flick of his fingers.
"I don't know who he is. I don't know what his name is. I don't know what he looks like. I don't even know what part of Morioh he might be living in. All I know is that he exists, and that he's dangerous."
Josuke leans back, folding his arms over the front of his chest. "So a guy who can kill without leaving a single drop of blood behind, isn't that exactly the kind of stand user you'd been looking for all this time?"
Not that he'd been able to continue his search, thanks to him. "Obviously."
"So why haven't you been looking for this guy?"
"Oh, I have. I just haven't been looking very hard."
He gets an eyebrow raise for that. "Why not?"
Keicho manages to find it in him not to roll his eyes at the question. "Say you're alone in the woods at night and you're away from any path or identifiable trail. You can't see anyone but you can hear noises coming from somewhere around you. Tell me, does shouting your name and location seem like the best course of action to you?"
That shuts the teen up for a little while. He can see his jaw working behind his lips, mulling over whatever words he'd had to say next.
"Because that's what you're doing, you know." Keicho continues on. "You and your little stand user neighborhood watch. You think you're doing it to keep people safe but the only thing you're doing is drawing attention to yourselves. None of you bother practicing opsec--"
"Opsec!?" Higashikata echoes him in a bellowing, humorless laugh, "Are you even listening to yourself? Opsec—you're such a clown, you know that?"
He feels a reflexive rage swell in his chest. "You don't get it, do you? None of you get it. You meet in public. You meet in broad daylight. I've heard from my brother that some of you let your stands out. You've even let him wheel our freakshow of father out in public to join you. Do you have any idea what kind of target that's putting on your back?!" His voice is rising steadily as he goes on, and his rage is only stoked hotter as the teen keeps looking at him, unbothered and sneering.
"So what? Of course we meet in public, it's safer for everyone that way."
"You don't get it!" He raises his voice into a shout, his chest heaving in his agitation. "Okay, I'll spell it out for you then. The last people to see Shigekiyo alive were you and Okuyasu. You were with him within an hour of his death. His stand was close enough to reach out to you while he was dying. Do you get that? Do I have to drill that into your thick skull? You should be operating under the assumption that this man knows who you are and he's looking for you."
Higashikata, at least, isn't stupid enough to discount that idea. He sees it in the way his jaw clenches and his eyes widen a little.
"Let's say for the sake of argument," Keicho presses on, furious, "He caught a glimpse of you or my brother at one of your meetings. Trussardi and Tsuji are public figures. Trussardi as a foreigner is especially easy to pick out of a crowd. They're non combatant stand users. Trussardi knows Okuyasu lives here, knows our address just from delivering food. We're half a block down from you. Did you ever think of how easy it would be to get your home street out of him?" The single fact has been playing on paranoid repeat inside his head for days. He can't stay calm about something like this.
"Why, is that something you would do?" Josuke spits right back at him.
Oh. Rage isn't a strong enough word anymore.
He realizes he's about a second away from doing something stupid so he stops himself.
He closes his eyes and takes a long, long inhale as he counts down from five.
Exhale.
When he opens his eyes, his voice and breathing are level again. "No. It's not. I'll tell you what I would do if it were me. In this case, I already know you and Okuyasu go to Budo-ga Oka High School. So I would stake out the building's exits when school hours end. And then I would follow the two of you from a distance, all the way home, and find out where you live that way. That's what I would do."
Maybe it really is starting to dawn on Josuke the situation he's in, because he clams up, that sneer on his face falling way as he thinks to himself. He can see his eyes flitting back and forth as if he's trying to recall something, his teeth worrying his lower lip. Maybe he's even considering whether or not someone has been following him home after all.
Good. Now he's starting to know what Keicho's been dealing with. Now he's starting to consider the same things that have been running through his mind over and over the past few days. Because yes, that's the kind of thing he does. It's what he's done and how he found targets. And this killer has been at it even longer than he has.
Maybe, maybe, maybe since Okuyasu and Josuke didn't see him in the act, they aren't targets. But if it were Keicho, he would still be observing the two of them anyways, just to make sure they don't know anything (they do), that they didn't find any evidence (they did) and they aren't trying to investigate him (they are). And he's been hoping that the killer hasn't followed them, hasn't spied on them in one of their stand user neighborhood watch meetings, hasn't found out they're stand users and therefore a clear and imminent threat.
But he wouldn't have even made it to his 18th birthday if he'd been willing to gamble on hope.
"You and Kujo can do what you want. It doesn't make a difference to me at this point. Okuyasu and I are going to be leaving Morioh within the next three days."
Higashikata's eyes widen in shock and he sputters, "Wh-what? Since when?!"
"Since I've decided it." He once again fights back the urge to roll his eyes. "This doesn't involve us and it's the smart thing to do. I've already advised the rest of the stand users in town to do the same."
Most of them had given him non-committal answers. Hazamada had agreed with him (if there was one thing he could credit his classmate for, he at least understood his own limitations) but couldn't come up with a method to get out of town for a while. He'd told him that he should think of a cover with Surface's help.
Otoshi had waved him off, saying he was confident in his stand's own power to protect him from an attack. Keicho might have even agreed with that if it weren't for the other's profound lack of common sense.
He'd only spoken to her in passing but Yamagishi had made it clear she didn't intend to leave town without Hirose, who of course was staying around with his brother and the rest.
He would have advised Higashikata to get his mother out of town as well, if he wasn't already aware that bringing her up would likely provoke him. But it would be the smart thing to do. The Speedwagon Foundation had already moved her to safety during the altercation with Angelo. The fact that they hadn't once again meant that Kujo Jotaro is either very confident about their success, or that he's getting sloppy. Keicho isn't about to gamble on that chance either.
The teen's back to glaring at him. "And have you asked Okuyasu about this?"
"Why would I? I'm not about to let him risk his life so he can have fun playing at being detective."
"This isn't a game to him, you bastard!" Higashikata squares up his shoulders, he's raising his voice at him. "Shigechi was his friend too you know! He wants to stop this guy just as much as I do!"
"I don't care." The other jerks like he'd been struck, before gritting his teeth, seething at him. "I'm done discussing this with you. Just because you helped my brother doesn't mean you get to decide the direction of his life—"
WHAM
Before he can fully finish his sentence, Josuke grabs fists full of his jacket and slams him three paces back into the wall behind him, almost knocking the air from his lungs.
"YOU DON'T GET TO DECIDE THAT FOR HIM EITHER!" Josuke roars, whites visible all around his eyes.
He's almost nose to nose from him, the clenched muscles shaking in his arms.
"...Not any more." Josuke continues, fingers curling tight in his clothing. It's a hoarse whisper compared to before. He twitches when he hears the sounds of Bad Company preparing their weapons, the clicks of readying rifles and the mechanical swivels of tank guns as his troops form a semi-circle around him.
Crazy Diamond hangs over one of Josuke's shoulders, half materialized and glimmering fists raised.
Keicho lifts his chin in challenge, staring steadily back into his eyes. They're both breathing fast from the exertion. Josuke has him pinned and well within his stand's range. By all accounts, their fight is already over. He knows he can't win, but he wants to see if Josuke will take the victory.
The front door jiggles, rattling from a key being inserted, a second before it swings open.
He pushes Josuke off of him just as his brother comes in through the door, his arms full of take away bags he'd gotten for everyone. Higashikata stumbles away with a guilty expression, trying to put more distance between them as Keicho brushes himself off. Both their stands have flickered away into nothing, motes of light fading fast into the air.
"Food's here!" Okuyasu's bright expression dampens somewhat as he looks back and forth in between the two of them. "What? What's with you two? Did somethin' happen?"
"No. It's nothing." He only then becomes aware of the locks of hair that had fallen out of place from getting pushed into a wall. He raises his hands up, loosely combing them back into order. When Okuyasu opens his mouth again, he brushes past them both without another word, heading back towards the living room.
He's mostly lost his appetite, but even if he hadn't, he had no intention of eating dinner with Higashikata as well as his father at the table.
He can hear his brother's voice over his shoulder. "Josuke, what's goin' on?"
"...It's nothing, dude. Let's go eat."
Keicho picks up his book again. For his brother's sake, he tries to tune them out.