L sat crouched on his swivel chair, eyes glued to the monitors and thumb in his mouth, lost in thought. Around him officers paced. Watari stood by serenely, waiting behind a cart of refreshments.

"There is at least a 22% chance probability that the woman who calls herself Julie Amachi is telling the truth," he said softly to no one in particular.

"The truth?!" snorted Aizawa. "The woman is delusional. She's guilty of nothing more than insanity. You've locked up an innocent madwoman, Ryuzaki." He stopped his pacing and turned to glare at the detective in the chair. "The police force is going to have to go through a lot of headache to cover up this one. And whatever additional burdens this…this, trauma, is going to put on that poor girl's psyche…let it be on your head."

"Well said, Aizawa," said L calmly, not bothering to look away from the screens. "It is most certain that Julie Amachi believes that every word she has said is true—up to a 99% chance probability."

"How do you know that?" asked Matsuda.

"Physiologically, her muscle tension eases as she is speaking, her breathing is steady, and the cadence of her voice remains level." Matsuda gave L a look of admiration before the latter continued, "But also we have her hooked up to a lie detector. The only way to pass it is to tell the truth or believe you are telling the truth."

"Why didn't he just say that part from the beginning?" whispered Matsuda to Aizawa, who simply glared back. To L he asked, "But what makes you think that any of what she said could be true at all?"

"Well," said L. He sat back on his haunches and rested his hands on the knees of his jeans. "First of all, everything she has said, so far, in no way conflicts with my suspicions of Light. In fact, it goes in line with them."

"But that's no excuse!" exploded Aizawa. "You're just using what you want to hear, to support what you want to believe is true! We still have no concrete evidence that Light—"

"Secondly," continued L as if Aizawa had not spoken, "The creature that she described to be following Light could very well have been a shinigami."

Silence fell over the room then.

"'L, do you know,'" the detective quoted aloud the last message left to them by the second Kira, "'That shinigami love red apples?'"

"And then when he or she sent a message to the First Kira, it said something about showing their shinigami to each other," murmured Matsuda, remembering.

Aizawa scoffed. "It's got to be code for something. Shinigami don't exist."

"There's a 50% chance likelihood of that, yes," agreed L, reaching over for the refreshment cart. Watari intuitively held out a small a la carte tray and L, with a nod of thanks, grabbed a cupcake and stuffed it in his mouth whole.

"How does he keep eating like that and still stay so skinny?" Matsuda hissed behind his hand to Aizawa.

"Would you please, stop asking stupid questions," grit Aizawa through his teeth. "Focus on what's important."

"Sorry," mumbled Matsuda.

"So then." Aizawa crossed his arms and stared L down. The crouched detective didn't even notice him, simply grabbed another cupcake and wolfed it down. Indignant, the police officer continued, "How do you propose to figure out whether what this girl saw—what she thought she saw—was a shinigami or not?"

The detective shrugged. "One way to find out." He swiveled back towards the monitors and hit the intercom button. "Miss Amachi," he spoke into the microphone. His voice echoed back on the audio input in a tinny vibrato.

Onscreen, the girl barely flinched. "Yes?" came her tired voice over the speakers.

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"The creature that you saw following Light Yagami. Was it a shinigami?"

Her head lolled to the side in lethargic perplexity. "…A what?"

"Shinigami. Literally meaning, a death god, or god of death."

Her shoulders lifted weakly in a pathetic attempt at a shrug. "Could have been."

"So you don't know."

She heaved a heavy sigh that rustled through the speakers like a wind rattling the eves. "They are what they are. It doesn't matter what word you call them."

L tapped his fingers over his chin in thought. "Well said," he murmured to himself. He hit the intercom button again. "Based on the descriptions of what you saw when you were first…resurrected," he began, "The dark being you observed watching you sounds similar to the being you observed following Light. Is that correct?"

"Yes," responded Julie slowly. "In fact—they may have been the same one."

L leaned forward in his chair. "Really."

Julie lifted her head now. Agitation creased her brow. "I—I don't know. Everything was…too overwhelming, back then. I'm not sure what I saw."

"Hmm," hummed L to himself. He watched as the girl leaned forward slightly, as if she were trying to listen intently to something. He hit the intercom button. "Who are you listening to, Miss Amachi?"

She immediately snapped back to an upright position. "Huh—what?"

"You are listening for something, Miss Amachi. What would that be?"

She hesitated for a moment. "I can hear them, too. At least, some of them. Sometimes."

"What are they saying?"

"I—I don't know right now. Sometimes it's hard to hear…if I'm afraid, or if I doubt, or…or if I'm just not in a good place, I guess."

Beside L, Aizawa shook his head. "This is a classic case of delusion," he said, pity in his voice. He turned to the detective. "Surely you can see that. And if you can't, just ask our psychiatric specialist. We've had to deal with hundreds of people like this. People blaming the voices in their heads for telling them to pick up a gun and start shooting. This girl lost both her parents before she was twenty and then almost died herself. On top of that, she came out of it with major head trauma. She can't help but have a few screws loose." He tapped his forehead with a finger, emphasizing his last statement. "This is all just a coping mechanism for her. She needs to believe it's true."

L said nothing for a moment, thumb pushing against the side of his mouth as he stared unblinkingly at the woman onscreen. "Perhaps," he conceded at last. A pause. "Or, perhaps, those voices in peoples' heads come from the entities that she is describing."

"What!" exclaimed Aizawa and Matsuda together, the first out of outraged disbelief and the second out of shock and excitement.

"Surely," began Matsuda, eyes huge, "You're not saying—"

L held up a hand. "There's a 14% chance probability." He finally turned to look at them all. "We are dealing with far more than the usual criminal case here, gentleman. Victims are dying supernaturally. It is only logical, then, to be open to the supernatural."

This quieted them as they all mulled over his statement.

"Furthermore," he added, "You would have to apply your psychiatric 'analysis,' Aizawa, to Light as well. If you will recall, he had a sudden inexplicable change in behavior, one week into confinement."

"I remember," grumbled Aizawa. How could he not? Everybody there remembered. It had been in the middle of one of Julie's interrogations. L had to bring that to a quick stop because, all of a sudden, a figure in one of the monitors had jumped up from his calm sitting position on the floor and begun banging his fists against the wall, yelling something. Light, son of Soichiro Yagami, chief of police, claimed to no longer remember why he had volunteered to be put in solitary confinement.

"You said that you feared you may somehow 'subconsciously' be Kira," L had informed Light over the intercom as he watched him with puzzled fascination. "Don't you remember that, Light?"

"I—I don't know," said Light, his voice shallow and panicky as he stared wildly around at the walls imprisoning him. The kid sounded like he was having an anxiety attack. "I mean, I remember saying that, but...I don't know why I said it! Please, there must be some mistake, I shouldn't be in here!"

"I'm sorry, Light," said L. "But you had strictly said to keep you confined for as long as you were under suspicion, no matter what you may do or say later on."

The young man onscreen slumped in defeat then. "I did say that, didn't I," he murmured in bewilderment.

Now the man in question was lying on his cot staring up at the ceiling, looking utterly lost. Everyone onscreen looked miserable, in fact.

"Still," said Aizawa quietly. "This is unethical, Ryuzaki. The Kira killings started again weeks ago, with a vengeance—even while Light was confined and under 24/7 surveillance. You should have let him know as soon as it started happening that he was clear of suspicion, but you didn't, and you didn't let him or anyone else go. It's been 50 days. Kira is still out there, and these people are innocent." Aizawa's gaze hardened then. "Stop keeping them here and torturing them just because you don't want to admit that you're wrong."

Beside him, Matsuda nodded nervously. Other members of the task force mumbled vaguely in agreement. L sat before them, staring at the ground in silence.

"Very well," he said at last, and turned back towards the computer. "Release the suspects—"

"Former suspects," corrected Aizawa angrily.

"And bring Chief Yagami in," continued L without missing a beat. "He's back on the case. And," he lifted a finger to point first at Light, then at the girl with brown hair. "So are those two."