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The notes regarding the condition of the body were clinical and brief; just another unidentified corpse in a city that spit them out regularly. At the time, the police had suspected the body to be a victim of a mob hit, given the extreme care that had been taken in removing all traces of identity from the body. It had been around the time the Kitaki clan was leaving the business, and the power vacuum left in their place had caused a small uptick in mob-related crime. The police had been eager to get a handle on whatever new mobsters were running around.
Due to this, the police department had kept the body of the immaculately murdered John Doe in the morgue storage for longer than was customary, hoping that he would be identified eventually and lead to some clues on the movements and identities of the new figures in the criminal world.
These hopes had been in vain. Several times, the body had been taken out to be examined in the light of some missing persons’ case, because the corpse was mutilated to the point that the coroner in charge had been able to identify it only as the body of a male in his late twenties or early thirties, in good physical condition at the time of death. Each time, the missing persons’ case had been resolved with another corpse or another lead, and the body had been packed back into the morgue, until six months after the John Doe had been discovered, his body was cremated.
The ashes had been stored away, waiting for the day when the truth would be brought to light.
That truth had been brought to light far, far too late.
Simon Blackquill gritted his teeth against the apprehensive nausea that twisted his stomach as he flipped through the coroners’ notes. Would the coroner have been so impassive if they had known the corpse on their table was that of one of their own officers, a man who they had probably known? Probably liked, even?
The whole department had liked Bobby Fulbright, even if some of them had found him grating. Amidst the corruption and suspicion that had entrenched the legal system, Bobby Fulbright had shown with a simple, straightforward purpose that he had espoused to all who crossed his path: justice.
It made Simon feel sick, that the Phantom had taken that, and corrupted it to their own uses. That was what the Phantom had always done. They had murdered this man, efficiently and quietly, and slipped into his skin, into his life. Taken on his ideals and his personality until the time came to shed them and strike again. Corrupting truth, corrupting justice, stealing lives…
Once upon a time, Simon had been a young, idealistic prosecutor, burning with the same sort of righteousness that Fulbright had so enthusiastically espoused. He had thrown himself into the pursuit of the Phantom, bending every resource within his power to bring the spy to justice. No one else had been able to do it, but he had been so sure he could. With Metis Cykes at his side, there had been little he had not felt capable of.
So the Phantom had killed Metis and destroyed the idealistic young prosecutor.
What had Bobby Fulbright been thinking, when he had agreed to work with the Twisted Samurai? Had he read the Simon’s case file and identified with the man Simon once had been, had he watched the old videos of the trial, had seeing Athena’s impassioned, tearful pleas moved him to believe in Simon’s innocence? Or had he seen Simon as a killer who could be redeemed? Or had it merely been a favor for Edgeworth, or a curiosity?
The Phantom’s stolen identities were always accurate to a fault. No one had noticed anything strange about Fulbright in the year the Phantom had worn his face. From all he knew of the false Fulbright, and what he had heard from Fulbright’s colleagues, he was inclined to believe that it had been genuinely altruistic motives that had motivated Fulbright to take his case. In all likelihood, he had wanted to help Simon.
That desire had gotten him murdered.
More blood on Simon’s hands. Those hands that Wright and Athena and Edgeworth had just gone to such lengths to prove clean.
No, his hands weren’t clean. He had not wielded the blade, but Metis Cykes was dead all the same. He had not ever harbored an ill thought towards the true Fulbright, though if the man had been so indefatigably bombastic and loud as his imposter, he undoubtedly would have, yet the man was dead because of him. His inability to catch the Phantom had resulted in their deaths, and the death of Clay Terran. And Athena’s ordeal.
It’s not your fault, he heard in his head, an echo of the words Athena had repeated to him so often as of late. It’s not your guilt to bear. You have every right to feel conflicted and confused and angry about what happened, but blaming yourself isn’t fair.
He knew what Athena would say, in response to his protests: Metis Cykes had autonomy. Bobby Fulbright had autonomy. They had both chosen to involve themselves with the dangerous, because on one level or another, they cared about him. That caring had not led to their deaths; the Phantom had chosen to murder them. All the guilt of the murder was squarely on those shoulders.
In some ways, it was so much easier for Simon to blame himself.
He had years of practice. Half the time, he had been convinced it was the Phantom who had killed his mentor; those days had been easier to bear, if he focused all of his angry and hurt on the spy. But behind that, was always the thought that if only he had asked Metis for her help. The other half of the time, the insidious little doubts that lurked in his head had crept into the forefront of his mind, feeding him images of Athena, small and blood-soaked, telling him that all of his hatred of the Phantom was only delusion. On those days he had hated himself for the thoughts, because he could not turn the blame on Athena.
Simon took a breath, pushing away the thoughts, and focusing on the file in his hands. The coroner was still rooting around in the cold storage, searching for Bobby Fulbright’s ashes.
By sheer accident, he had overheard Edgeworth and the Chief of Police talking about how Fulbright’s ashes, now identified, were still unclaimed. The detective had no living family; his father had died some time before, and his mother died sometime in the past few months. It made Simon’s skin crawl, to think that it had been the Phantom beside her bedside. Mrs. Fulbright had died without knowing of her son’s fate, with a smiling murderer in his place.
By further coincidence, Fulbright had had no particular friends available to collect his remains. The whole precinct had considered him a favored acquaintance, but none were eager to claim the unpleasant task of dealing with his remains.
Simon was never one to flinch from unpleasant tasks. It was, possibly, an unhealthy sort of penance. Athena and Edgeworth- and Wright- had all brought it up to him on separate occasions. It was probably a valid point, but he did not welcome others making such assumptions, aside from Athena. Besides that, he did owe a tangible debt to Fulbright. It had been the real Fulbright who had agreed to work with a prosecutor famous for helping to bring about the Dark Age of the Law. Because of Fulbright and his aggressive belief in justice and second chances, Simon was currently standing in the police department morgue, and not on the other side of the Styx.
So while the coroner banged about looking for Fulbright’s ashes, which had been shoved ignominiously into some corner, Simon forced himself to turn pages, from the coroner’s neat notes to the pictures of the corpse. Of Bobby Fulbright.
The Phantom truly was an impassionate murderer. Simon had seen his fair share of corpses in his short career as a prosecutor. The vast majority of them were victims of crimes of passion. They never failed to be disturbing, but somehow… The photos of this passionless crime were even more so.
Simon remembered vaguely the other murders the Phantom had been blamed for. He had poured over the case files as a young prosecutor, absorbing each detail, searching for some clue, some key to unlocking the psyche of his query. Many of those had been assassinations of some kind, and for each, there was the element of doubt as to whether it had truly been the work on the Phantom or not. For the most part, though clever, the assassinations were generic. Clean kills, with sniper rifles or poison.
Metis’s murder had been something else. Rushed, with what was on hand, in the panic of a spy nearly exposed. They had not come there that day to kill Metis Cykes; the primary goal had been the launch, and then the psychological profile.
Never before had the body of one of the men and woman the Phantom impersonated been found.
Here, Simon could see the Phantom in his element.
The body had been in a fair state of decomposition by the time it was found, which muddled things, but the care the Phantom had taken was still apparent. Cause of death, according to the coroner’s notes, had been a single stab to the chest. The Phantom must have lain in wait- in Bobby Fulbright’s apartment? Down some alley?- waiting for their victim. They had surprised Fulbright well, most likely; no evidence of a struggle had remained for the coroner to discern. They had watched him bleed out and set to work. At least that was a mercy; according to evidence, the mutilation had begun after Fulbright was dead.
The corpse in the photos looked nothing like the bright man the Phantom had pretended to be. The hands had been cut off, and disposed of in some other manner, so the identity could not discovered through fingerprints. The face had been smashed in, and the jaw deformed, with a small, heavy, pointed tool, to remove the teeth. No teeth had been found with the corpse. The Phantom must have picked them out of the ruins of Fulbright’s face, with his usual care, and scattered them elsewhere. This would prevent an ID by dental records. The feet had also been removed, and the head had been separated from the body; it had been the head discovered first by a passerby, in the park not far from the police precinct.
Simon shuffled through the gruesome photos, memorizing each detail as if they were relevant to a case he was taking. Absorbing the emotionless destruction of an innocent man. Every bit of identity had been stripped systematically from Fulbright, and assumed by the Phantom. What the Phantom had not mutilated, decomposition had taken away.
All that remained were the photos of the sad, faceless husk, that stared back at Simon with empty sockets.
There was no anger there, and no sadness. No hurt. Just… nothing.
He closed the file and slammed it onto the coroner’s desk with more force than was necessary. The world was spinning around him and his stomach lurched. For a moment, he thought he might be sick, but he gripped the edge of the desk and counted slowly until the world settled around him, and the husk could be catalogued away in his mind as just another horrifying memory.
At long last, the coroner returned with the urn of ashes. It was smaller than Simon had expected. Strange, that the horrifying, mutilated shell, and the vibrant man, could both be condensed down to such a small container. He took it with hands that were trembling slightly, barked a sharp word of gratitude, and stormed out of the morgue as quickly as he could.
He could not let the coroner see the glassy sheen to his eyes.
Bobby Fulbright was buried next to his parents.
It had taken Simon only a few terse conversations and an internet search to find out where the Fulbright family had been buried. He had planned to pay for the grave out of his own meager funds, but Edgeworth had caught wind of his mission, and pressed a check into Simon’s hands one day in the Prosecutor’s office. The whole department had put the money together, he had murmured quietly.
Now Simon watched the earth being shoveled over the urn. There had been no ceremony; the whole thing was impersonal and routine. It did not feel like a fitting end to Fulbright’s story, but what was Simon to say what was a fitting end? He had never truly known the man.
He could understand why Fulbright’s coworkers had stayed away. Simon himself was still adjusting to the fact that the man he had known for the better part of a year had been an impostor. The news must have uprooted the entire police department.
Despite the constant reminders, Simon still had not adjusted to the fact. The Bobby Fulbright she had known had always been nothing more than a pale imitation of a dead man. The man who had worked so hard to keep Simon’s spirits up, a sisyphian task if ever there was one. The man who made impassioned speeches about forgiveness and justice and tried to remind Simon of his worth. The man whose grating, irritatingly over-the-top mannerism had been… endearing, to a certain degree. On occasions.
Was it fair for him to miss a man he had never met?