Levi stared at the girl who sat next to him, shaking violently from the cold that seeped into her soaked clothes.  She had just told him the kill site, ultimately giving away a potential site where Lucifer would strike next.

"You're certain," Levi said sternly, not even bothering to present it as a question.  Of course she was certain; she was the one that persisted to explain it to him, and so far, she was leading the damn investigation.

"I am positive," Aria replied, nodding her head.  She let out a chilled breath.  "We can go there when it gets dark and investigate the circumstances; Lucifer, like many other serial killers, prefer the darkness when initiating their kills."

"Right." Levi nodded curtly once.  "In the mean time, we can go interview some family members to get some more information; it will be sudden, but I'm sure they'll appreciate us trying to figure out who killed their loved ones."

"That..." Aria paused.  "Th-that sounds like a good idea, sir," Aria agreed; she proceeded to shuffle through the three papers with shaky fingers.

Noticing this, Levi raised his eyebrows, but said nothing to the working light-brunette.

"There isn't much on these sheets; the investigation with Mr. Zacharius only went on for a few days.  He gave up after losing the trail in that wash, so we'll treat this as a new case, I suppose."

"Are there lists of names anywhere?" Levi asked her.

Aria skimmed through all the pages, shaking her head in what seemed to be a vague disappointment.

"Mr. Zacharius must have gotten really frustrated with the scent trail," she sighed.  "That's the downfall of relying on a special skill too much, I guess."

Levi scoffed.

"Tch, leaving a case just because you got stumped once?" He scowled.  "What a bastard."

The girl chewed on her lip, sniffing as she poked up her glasses.

"Do you really think there's some addresses or something in these?"

"Doubt it," the detective huffed.  "If Zacharius went straight for the scent trail and tossed away this case, he wouldn't have anything but a simple summary of the entire thing."

"That's basically what we have to go on," Aria muttered, puffing in exasperation.  "Where do you suppose we begin?"

Levi fell silent, ruminating in that thought for a bit.  He rubbed his mouth with his thumb and index finger, furrowing his eyebrows just slightly in concentration.  His steel-blue eyes stared at the ground, the rain still pouring down from the dark, gloomy skies.

Aria was shivering immensely by this time, chattering her teeth unconsciously as she hugged herself, the papers resting in her lap.

"M-Mr. Ackerman, sir," she interrupted, her blue-tinted lips quivering.

"Hm?  What is it, Stefani?"

"W-well sir," Aria began, "aren't you the least bit cold?"

"No, not at all," Levi replied bluntly, his voice bleak and icy as the air surrounding them.  "Why?"

"W-well sir," Aria said again, "it's twenty-three degrees outside, and we're soaking wet.  Aren't you afraid of getting hypothermia? 

Upon realizing this, Levi blinked his eyes to focus them back into the real world rather than his mind, looking down at his hands to reveal extremely pale palms.  He turned to Aria, who shook like a leaf in a frigid hurricane in her seat.  Her dark caramel hair had darkened even more, her former copper-toned skin now matching the shade of an ivory sand-dollar.  Her lips were lined with a tint of blue, her face even paler than the cream blazer that clung to her wet body.

"Shit," Levi growled, reaching over to the A/C dials.  "My apologies, Miss Stefani; my degrees of hot and cold have strayed from the normal preference."

"I-it's alright, Mr. Ackerman." Aria smiled, her lips still quivering from the cold.

Levi gritted his teeth, forcing the A/C dial to full blast and cranking the temperature to the highest setting. He slammed his back against the seat, taking deep breaths as his chest rose and fell violently.  It started off with a current of icy wind, but after a few minutes, he could feel the heat begin to blast inside the car.  Aria indugled herself inside the warmth to thaw her skin, but Levi sat there, rigid as though he had already frozen over.

Upon noticing this, Aria breathed into her hands, rubbing them in front of one of the vents.

"Mr. Ackerman," she said.  "Why don't you warm yourself up?  You must be freezing!"

"I was quite fine, thank you very much," he ground his teeth again.  "I don't need any damn heaters..."

"But your skin is so pale!" Aria exclaimed.  "Here, let me help!"

Aria reached across to the driver's side of the vehicle and grabbed Levi's icy hand, pressing it in between her two warm palms.  The sensation of warmth sent ripples upon ripples up Levi's spine, a soft glow tingling his frigid fingers.

He hated it.

Levi hissed and yanked his hand away, swatting hers away from him.

"What the hell do you think you're doing?!" he demanded, glaring at her with a stone gaze.

Aria was thrown aback, blinking wildly as her honey eyes sparkled in confusion.

"I-I was just worried!" she explained unsteadily.  She cleared her throat, continuing the sentence with a firmer tone.  "I was concerned, sir.  About your well being; I don't want you to get ill!"

"I don't need help from you!" Levi blurted, his rage adding a bitter fury to his boiling tone.   "I can take care of myself!"

"I don't mean any offense, sir," Aria grumbled, narrowing her eyes and pouting her lips.  "But you're not doing that great of a job."

"Excuse me?"

Aria shrugged, twisting her glossy pink lips to the side a bit.

"Right now, I smell a profuse amount of smoke on your clothes; to the point of repulse, to be honest.  And the redness in your eyes suggest that you're either extremely fatigued or you've been crying copiously last night; or maybe it's both, which hints that you're either going through a tough time from a recent happening, or that you're immensely scarred by a sort of event that had occurred in the past.

        "The strange wobble in your gait, along with the unusual redness in your nose and cheeks also suggest that you're an alcoholic; your extremely crabby mood also tells me that you haven't had a drink in over twenty-four hours, and the mere fact that you punched your own boss in the face is another claim that supports my statement.  Overall, I think that you're a tormented man, hiding something behind this mask you're trying to create with the smoke clinging to your coat, drowning yourself in alcohol because the reality you're living in right now is too horrible and painful to live in.

        "Because of these observations, I have concluded that you're a mysterious man by choice, disturbed and agonized and trying to cover it up by being so cold and brutal towards everyone around you; you're a loner, and you choose to be that way."

Levi stared at Aria with a gaping gaze, his bleary eyes wide and his mouth slightly parted, hanging open in disbelief.  This...this girl, the fucking valedictorian of fucking Trost Prep School of Law and Crime comes and accepts an internship, introduces herself in that cutesy adorable way with that smile and those sparkling hazel eyes that made him want to hit himself in the face with a brick, climbs into his fucking car and decides to just analyze him with that smart-ass brain she has in her fucking skull?

Who is this woman?

"You're fucking nuts," Levi snarled, narrowing his steel-blue eyes.  "Who do you think you are?"

Aria blinked her eyes wildly, realizing what she had done and clasping her hands in her lap.

"I-I'm so sorry, Mr. Ackerman," she said frantically, dipping her head in respect.  "I-I have a habit of analyzing people and figuring them out; I don't have a lot of friends because of that, sir.  Please forgive my rash actions, it won't happen again, I promise!"

Levi glared down at the girl, snarling in rage as his chest rose and fell with angry breaths.  Crunching up his nose, arching his eyebrows in a fury, Levi squeezed his hands into tight fists.

This girl, Aria Stefani, the valedictorian of the most successful law and crime college in the entire country, comes over to his car and decides to figure out all of his complexities in one blow, unraveling that vast jungle, that heart of darkness that plagued his very existence.

"My life is none of your concern," he snarled again.  "All you care about now is this case; there's not a lot we can go off of right now, so we have to concentrate on getting this solved.  Got it?"

"Y-yes sir," Aria stammered, nodding her head once in acknowledgement.

"Good," he huffed.  "Now, as for the families.  We don't have any addresses specified?"

Aria sniffled, pushing her glasses back with her middle finger.

"Well," Aria mumbled, shuffling through the pile of pictures in her lap.  "There is this one shot where the police took note on the back; there's an address here, but that's the only lead we have so far."

"Let me see," Levi said, offering out his hand and waving his fingers inward.

Aria, obeying, scuffled around some more in the pile, squeaking in surprise as she identified the image.  She slowly reached in and selected one horrifically vivid photo, depicting a severed leg from the joint of the knee downward; it appeared to be a woman's leg, or so the police had reported, shredded so the skin that had surrounded the limb splayed out in bloody ribbons of flesh, large patches of the gory epidermis missing from various areas of the leg.  Aria handed over the picture, shivering as she quickly flickered her eyes away from it, biting her profusely quivering bottom lip.

Levi snatched the picture, immediately analyzing it and taking in every detail that resided in the fading image.  After a couple moments of staring at the thing, he flipped it over to the stained back of the paper, revealing black scribbles of permanent marker sprawled across the surface.

"The left leg of Lucifer's third victim," Levi started, staring at the name that followed after the description, skipping over it with a glance at Aria.  "Found at 708 Baker Street, 1:43 am."

Aria clutched at her stomach, her neck straining as she pressed her lips into a thin line, as though she were holding in a scream.

"Miss Stefani?" Levi called to her.

"I'm fine," Aria responded, her voice strangled.  "I'll be fine."

Levi just stared at her for a while, the silence swallowing them up as Aria took deep, shaky breaths.  Levi pinched the bridge of his nose, feeling the throbbing ache as he let out a large sigh.  His mind swirled with disturbing thoughts, suddenly feeling sorry for the girl.  Levi let out another breath, staring at the warm but shivering Aria once more, staying that way for only a few seconds before turning back to the image.

"This is the only address we have," he said bleakly.  "I'm sorry to say that we don't really have a choice."

"I know," Aria huffed out.  "I know..."

Levi blinked, turning his gaze back to her again.  She looked pitiful, really; her lively eyes were now blank, dull as a pebble and unresponsive.  Both of her arms were crossed over her abdomen, where she muttered some inaudible things under her low breath.

"You're also a damaged soul," Levi said suddenly, surprising the girl and making her jump in her seat.

"W-what?" she stuttered, her hazel eyes flickering from the doors to the windows, to the ceiling and to the ground.

"You hide behind a mask too," he went on.  "A façade of that peppiness you have; it's concealing something that's much darker than your demeanor.  It's not only your energy that I find fabricated; the look in your eyes are filmed over in a glaze of fear, like you're afraid that someone is going to hurt you.  This may have resulted from a terrible relationship with another man, or maybe from an abusive parent at home?

        "Your sniffling habits also indicate either a natural skittishness or that you have a sinus disease, and the way you constantly push your glasses back up on your nose hints that you're uncomfortable with them; you've been bullied about these traits before.  And the fact that you told me you lack friends supports this statement even more so; you're afraid to make friends, but when you're exposed to someone who has fueled you through your passion, your studies, you're more than obliged to talk as much as you can, do as much as you can, because for once, you want to be noticed."

Levi plucked up the image, showing it to a stunned Aria with a brutally stoic face.

"This is your mother's leg," he stated bleakly.  "Lucifer's third victim, Daphnie Stefani, aged forty-seven.  Found dismembered with bloody chunks of her body scattered across the lawn on 708 Baker Street, 1:43 am."