Chapter Text
Miles Edgeworth was not a detective.
He was a prosecutor. That's what he'd gone to school for, what he passed his bar for what he trained his entire life for. He did not scrounge around for clues, analyze the scene, interrogate each suspect for their alibi. That was the job of a detective. Which he was not.
Wright seemed keen on playing both. He was at every crime scene, every interview, had every piece of evidence slipped into his pocket. He might as well get a police badge.
That was not what Miles did. He was a prosecutor. His job was to prove the guilty party guilty. Nothing else.
He stared down at the dead body in front of him.
It was of a portly man, large and burly and likely strong as an ox. His face was blue and mottled with spots of red along his cheekbones. A pool of slick vomit collected under his chin. His limbs were stiff. His mouth was stretched and twisted into a sick grin. His barreled chest was still. His eyes were half open, glassy, unseeing. Dead.
Miles had not been the one to find the body. Technically, not one singular person had been the one to find it. The wide doors of the conference hall had swung open, its participants pouring out in a huddle of business clothes, and there, in the middle of the hallway, was the man laying flat dead upon the shaggy carpet. Screams rang out, security called, the shuffle of feet, and the muddled cacophony of a hundred scrambling voices.
Miles had stood in the middle of the storm, flashes of the body passing his vision as people flurried past it, as if looking at a ghost across an intersection, not sure if it was real or a mirage made by the passing cars.
Miles Edgeworth was not a detective. It was not his job. It was not his duty. And yet, he couldn’t look away.
A man stepped up beside him. Most of the people had gone by now, ushered away by security and the newly arrived police. The police ignored the two of them. Too much to handle to worry about a couple of curious bystanders.
The man was silent for a moment, then sighed. “Just when you think you can have a bit of a vacation without murder.”
Miles didn’t deign him even with a glance. “I wasn’t aware you were attending this conference, Wright.”
“Grossberg's idea. Said it would be good to make some connections away from home,” Wright stooped down onto his haunches, tilting his head to look at the dead man’s face at eye level. “He paid for my flight and hotel too, as thanks for ‘looking after Mia’s legacy.’”
“How kind,” Miles said dryly.
“Well, I wouldn’t be here without his help. I can barely afford to buy Maya fast food, let alone a plane ticket across the country.” Wright leaned a tad closer to the dead man’s face, bouncing slightly on his bended knees. Miles had a vivid image of Wright losing his balance and landing face first in the dead man’s vomit. Instead, he hummed once at something he saw in the corpse’s glassy eyes, scratched the back of his neck, and got back to his feet. “Not that I’ll be getting much of those connections now, with this whole thing.”
“I wouldn't go that far. Now you simply have a far more interesting small talk point other than the weather.”
Wright huffed a laugh, and then went quiet again.
Despite dealing with death every day in his profession, Miles was not often in the actual presence of a corpse. He could only remember two instances. A broken down elevator. A boat stranded out on the lake. Both times, a gun in his hand.
Somehow, whether in a picture, video, or in the flesh, every dead body he looked at, no matter how stark the differences, always turned into his father.
The body on the floor was no longer of a stranger. His father’s eyes, glassy and gray, gazed back at him mournfully. Blood leaked from a hole in his chest. A single tear streaked down his pale cheek. Miles felt his breath begin to quicken.
“...geworth.”
The gun was in his hand. The sound of the shot still rang out, deafening in his ears. The stifling air was choking him, stealing the breath from his lungs. A hand touched his shoulder and he jerked.
“Edgeworth.” Wright’s fingers dug lightly into his arm, grounding him. His brows were drawn together, concern written all over his face. “You alright?”
Miles breathed, sucking in air greedily. He shook off Wright’s hand from his shoulder. “Yes, fine. Just lost in my own thoughts for a moment.”
Wright blinked at him strangely, analyzing his face, before he shook his head. “Alright.”
A police woman with a stern jaw and thick eyebrows stood in front of them, blocking the view of the body. She crossed her arms neatly behind her back. “This crime scene is off limits to the public. Please return to your rooms and wait for further instructions once we have the area secured.”
“We’re allowed, actually,” said Wright. He tapped the golden attorney badge pinned to his lapel with pride. “Lawyers. See?”
She glanced briefly at the badge, and then away with indifference. “That may be true, but you are not involved with this case. Meaning, you are not allowed to interact with the crime scene. Please return to your rooms and wait for instructions.”
“We’ll take it, then.”
“What?” Miles and the police woman said in unison.
“We’ll take the case! I’ll be the defense, Edgeworth here will be the prosecution. There’s no one else around right now grabbing for the job, yeah?”
Miles scoffed. “At the legal conference?”
“Well…not at this moment, I guess.”
The policewoman rubbed a hand over her eyes. Her eyebrows seemed to merge into one. “Even if I had the authority to give you the case, we don’t even have a suspect yet. Please, go to your rooms, otherwise we will be forced to remove you.”
Miles grabbed Wright by the sleeve and began tugging him out of the hall. “Come along, Wright.”
“Hey!” Wright stumbled after him, slipping on the polished floors of the lobby. They rounded a corner until they entered the hotel part of the conference building, now covered in beige walls and 80s patterned carpeting. Wright tore his sleeve from his grip. “You can’t just tug me around like a child.”
Miles rounded on him. “Are you insane?” he shouted in a stage whisper.
“What?” Wright said stupidly, matching his tone.
“‘We’ll take the case’ what were you thinking?”
“Well, why not? We’re both here, we both saw the scene of the crime soon after it happened. We haven’t had a case together in a long time. It might be fun.”
Miles blinked. “Fun? You find a murder case fun?”
“I mean…yeah a little bit.”
Miles buried his face in his hands. “You are horrible. I’m leaving.” He began to stomp down the hallway, like a child who was refused candy before bed.
“Where are you going!”
“To bed!”
“It’s 3 o’clock!”
“Shut up, Wright!”
And he turned the corner of the hallway, and didn’t even once consider turning back.
When Miles woke up several hours later, there was a note slid underneath his door. It was written on hotel notebook paper, with a heavy hand in pencil. Miles had to squint to understand the scrawl.
Victim’s name is Todd Hemlocke, The note read. Suspect has been found. Meet me in my room, 305. I know you want this case.
– Phoenix
Miles held the note in his hand for several minutes. He ran his thumb over the words, over the name. His thumb came away black. He got dressed and took the stairs up to the third floor.
Wright swung upon the door of his hotel room on the first knock. His hair was wet, flattened against the sides of his head in a manner Miles had never seen before. It dripped onto his shoulders and the towel wrapped around his neck. Miles tried very hard not to find it charming.
“I knew you’d show up.” Wright said cockily. He was grinning ear to ear. “C’mon. I’ll catch you up on what you’ve missed.”
Miles entered Wright’s small hotel room. It was clean, surprisingly. He’d neatly hung up all his clothes in the tiny closet, his meager suitcase was closed tight and pressed up against one wall, and the bed was even made. Miles found himself impressed, until he remembered the existence of house keeping.
Wright plopped down on one end of the bed. He was only wearing a tank top and joggers. There was far too much available shoulder to look at. Miles sat gingerly on the edge of the bed, keeping his gaze resolutely above Wright’s neck.
“There still isn’t a ton of information out yet,” Wright said, pulling a small notebook off his nightstand. “But I did a bit of snooping, and I found out–”
“Wait. What does ‘snooping’ entail?”
“Y’know, snooping,” Wright said, as if it were obvious. “Asked around some of the more lenient police, got to know some of the other lawyers and prosecutors. You were right actually, a murder does help you make connections at a legal conference…” he drifted off thinking. “Oh, and I found out they’re keeping the body in the meat freezer in the basement until they can get back up to transport the body tomorrow. That’s what you get for holding a conference at a bougie lodge up in the mountains, I guess. But then I overheard one of the hotel staff saying there’s a big storm coming in–”
“Wait, wait, slow down,” Miles interrupted. “How did you know the body was in the meat freezer?”
Wright blinked, clearly not expecting this question. “Well, I heard that they had no way of transporting the body down while keeping it in good condition. So I asked myself, ‘Well, where is it then?’ They’ve got to keep it cool, so freezer it is. I managed to get down to the basement and…”
“And you broke in. You broke into the meat freezer with the body.”
“In my defense it wasn’t guarded and hardly even locked. The police here need to up their game.”
Miles sighed. Mere hours after the murder, and Wright was already breaking and entering. “Alright, go on.”
Wright rifled through his notes. “The victim is Todd Hemlocke, a prominent defense attorney from Nevada. Apparently he’s known for getting some real high-profile suspects off the hook. Nice guy, though, according to some other attorneys I talked to. He got here yesterday, like the rest of us, and was even seen in the conference hall when the welcome ceremony started. His business partner said he got up to use the bathroom just after it started and never came back.”
“That puts the time of death between 11:30, a bit after the ceremony started, and 2:00, when we all exited, yes?” Miles added.
“Right. That leads to our suspect: Bella Donna, a prosecutor from the same area as the victim. She was missing during the conference.”
Miles thought for a moment. Her name sounded vaguely familiar, but he couldn’t put his finger on why. “You don’t think she did it, I suspect?”
“I don’t know. Hemlocke looked like he could break her in half. I just can’t see her having the means to do it.”
Miles hummed. “That all depends on the cause of death. My mind says poison. Ergo, her means are just as likely.”
“That depends on how the poison was administered.” Wright flipped back through his notebook, opening it to a crude sketch in the middle of the book. Miles had to squint to make it out. A rough circle depicted the dead man’s head and a few scratchy lines marked the outlines of his neck. On the right side, Wright had drawn a pin-prick dot in red pen, and pointed to it with far too many arrows. “When I was inspecting the body in the freezer, I found a dot on the side of his neck. An injection point,” he said. “Hemlocke has over a foot on Donna. No way she could have gotten him with the poison with their difference in build.”
Miles took the notebook and inspected Wright’s drawing. It was an interesting theory. But, with most of Wright’s theories, not one without many flaws due to him jumping to conclusions.
“It’s possible,” Miles mused. Wright’s face lit up like a Christmas tree. “But improbable, and as of now impossible to prove.” Wright’s face fell like a rockslide. “We have not solidified that the cause of death was poison, let alone that it was administered through the neck. Even if those two facts were true, Ms. Donna could still be the killer. Mr. Hemlocke could have been hunched over, or Ms. Donna could have jumped to reach her arm around his throat. She could have even grabbed him from behind and pulled his neck down to her level. Their difference in height and build means nothing.”
Wright looked downcast, hope squandered. Miles almost felt bad for crushing his dreams, but also, not really. He looked past Wright’s distractingly bare shoulder to the window. Snow had just begun to fall.
“You mentioned something about a storm earlier,” Miles said.
“Oh, yeah. I heard some of the staff whispering about it. We’re supposed to get a massive storm tonight. It’s likely we’ll be snowed in.”
“Will the transport be here by then?”
Wright shook his head. “They don’t think so.”
“So we’ll all be stuck inside with a murderer?”
“Yeah, seems like it.”
Miles sighed. “Great.” He got up, swiping invisible dust off his jacket. “Well, good luck with your case then, Wright.”
“Wait, wait, wait, what?” Wright sprung to his feet, placing himself between Miles and the door. “You’re not going to help?”
“Pardon my bluntness, but this case seems hopeless. You have no concrete evidence to go on, and now we’ll all be trapped here with no outside assistance. Frankly, if we took this to court as of now I would blow your case out of the water and send your client to jail in under fifteen minutes. But I’m feeling kind today, and so I’ll leave you alone to your search. Good luck.”
Miles moved to go around him, but Wright stopped him with a hand to his chest. “Edgeworth. Being snowed in is the perfect opportunity. There’s nowhere for the killer to go, and all of the evidence is still here. This is our chance to solve this. I know you want to figure this out.” Wright slid his notebook into Miles’s hand. “Just think about it. Please?”
Miles looked down at the notebook. Then over at Wright’s hand, still clutched around his shoulder. He battled an inner war with himself, and lost. “If you insist.”
He left without looking back. Went back downstairs, tossed the notebook on his night stand, and tried to forget the disappointment in Wright’s eyes when he said no.
Miles didn’t need a case right now. He had plenty packed away in his folder, sitting on his desk, waiting for him back home. He didn’t need this. In fact, pursuing this at all was a terrible idea.
He rolled over in his lumpy hotel bed, trying to fluff the meager excuse for a pillow beneath his head. He didn’t need this. He didn’t want this.
Wright’s face flashed behind his closed eyelids. The serious arch of his eyebrows as he inspected the body. The nervous shifting of his feet. The jumping twitch in his lips as he described all the clues he’d gathered up so far. The twinkle in his eye as he said “We’ll take it.” We. Together. Wright was excited to do this with him.
Miles turned in the bed like a spit for another fifteen minutes. Then he turned on the bedside lamp, grabbed Wright’s notebook, and started making notes.
Miles woke up to snow, snow, and more snow. It piled up the outside wall and reached almost halfway up the window. It would take days to clear all the snow from the mountain roads, and several hours to clear even the outside doors to the lodge. He was stuck at a legal conference with a murderer, a dead body, and Phoenix Wright. He couldn’t decide which of the three was worst.
He picked up Wright’s notebook from the nightstand. He flicked through his own notes. Well. He might as well keep busy. He got dressed, slipped the notebook in his pocket, and went upstairs.
Mile’s watch had just ticked over to 6 when he knocked on Wright’s door. He found him peeking behind his darkened doorway with tousled hair and rubbing the bags from beneath his eyes. His eyes widened as he saw him.
Miles cleared his throat, and waved Wright’s notebook. “We need to start interviews.”
Wright grinned so hard Miles thought he would pull every muscle in his face.