Matsuda Toda

The headquarters had long since fallen silent; only the fluorescent lights hummed overhead like annoying insects. Touta Matsuda sat on the edge of a table in the breakroom, his tie loosened, twirling an empty coffee can in his hands. His hands were still shaking slightly.

The death of Naomi Misora.

He had seen how L became even quieter after that report. He had seen how Light Yagami—that brilliant student who had only been officially introduced to the team yesterday—nodded calmly, almost sympathetically, upon hearing the news. And it was precisely that calm, perfect reaction that gave Matsuda no peace.

"He's just a normal guy..." Matsuda thought, staring into the dark window. "Smart, polite, even a bit childishly sincere. L invited him personally. There's no way that..."

But Naomi Misora's face from the photograph kept flashing before his eyes. A woman who had lost her fiancé and come seeking justice. And then she simply took a gun and shot herself in the head in some random alley. Too clean. Too timely.

Matsuda squeezed the paper cup so hard it crumpled pitifully.

A thought raced through Matsuda's mind: "You've always been the weakest link in the team. The one who believes in people. The one who looks for the good in them until the very end." But now, for the first time since working on the Kira case, something cold and unpleasant stirred quietly but insistently inside him.

Suspicion.

"Light..." he whispered barely audibly into the void, his own voice sounding foreign to him. "You're not Kira, right..? pause You're not Kira, are you?!.."

He closed his eyes and leaned back, feeling that very faith which had previously helped him hold on crumbling somewhere deep inside.

Now a new genius had joined the team.
And Matsuda suddenly realized that he no longer knew whose side he was on.

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