She brushed her hair back into place, pulled out her cell phone, and called L. The phone rang, but nobody answered. The century’s greatest detective was a busy man, and probably hard to reach outside of appointed times. Fortunately, she had not been injured, so the report could wait. Perhaps getting to the crime scene quickly was a better idea being attacked like this had only increased Misora’s suspicions concerning Ryuzaki. There was no way of telling if her assailant had been someone involved in the case, or someone who had nothing to do with it but knew about her connection to L, but either way, based on the timing of the attack, the odds of Ryuzaki being involved were not terribly low.
✦ ✦ ✦
Perhaps she should check into him herself, instead of leaving the investigation up to L... if only for self preservation. She considered calling Raye, and having him check it out secretly, but first Misora left the alley behind.
✦ ✦ ✦
As expected, Naomi Misora had not come after him.
✦ ✦ ✦
He left the alley and jumped into the sedan that he’d left on the main road with the engine running. He turned a few corners quickly and checked the back mirror then parked in the lot he had picked out in advance. The sedan was a stolen car and would not lead back to him, so he had planned to abandon it here. One eye on the security cameras, he left the parking lot on foot, leaving the mask, blackjack, and club behind in the car. He had shoved them all under the seat. Leaving no fingerprints.
✦ ✦ ✦
He had never planned to do anything to Naomi Misora today, not there. He had just been making a pass at her, to test her ability. He had attacked from behind, but not intended to hurt her and certainly, he had no intention of killing her.
✦ ✦ ✦
So there was no way she would die.
✦ ✦ ✦
He had known she would dodge.
✦ ✦ ✦
But even so, even with that in mind, that woman was impressive. Dodging his attack without even turning around, and moving instantly to an attack of her own—he could see why L was using her as his pawn. She had brains and guts as she must.
✦ ✦ ✦
She had the right.
✦ ✦ ✦
She was worthy of being his opponent.
✦ ✦ ✦
The assailant cracked his neck.
✦ ✦ ✦
And with his head still hanging at an odd angle, he walked on down the street.
✦ ✦ ✦
Misora’s attacker...
✦ ✦ ✦
The man behind the Los Angeles BB Murder Cases, Beyond Birthday, walked on down the street grinning cruelly.
✦ ✦ ✦
“Ah, Misora. You’re late,” Ryuzaki said without turning around, the moment she entered apartment 605
✦ ✦ ✦
where Quarter Queen had lived. “Please try to be on time. Time is money, and therefore life.” Sigh...
✦ ✦ ✦
He was not down on all fours. She had come in just as he was inspecting the top shelf of a chest of drawers. But it was hard to think of this as nice timing. The drawer happened to be filled with the thirteen-year-old victim’s underwear. Ryuzaki looked less like a detective investigating the scene than a pedophile stealing panties. Not the best way to start the day. She’d been planning to funnel the frustration from her fight in the alley into a fairly aggressive approach to Ryuzaki, but he’d already yanked the rug out from under her. If it was deliberate, she would have been impressed, but that seemed unlikely, It seemed much more likely that Ryuzaki actually did have a fetish for children’s underwear.
✦ ✦ ✦
Misora sighed again, looking around the room—the entire apartment was smaller than Believe Bridesmaid’s bedroom. The standard of living gap alone made it hard to see any connection between the first and second victims.
✦ ✦ ✦
“We’re talking a single mother here, right? Who has now moved hack in with her parents? It must have been devastating...”
✦ ✦ ✦
“Yes. These apartments were built for college students, intended to house only one, so a young girl and her mother living here attracted a fair amount of attention. I asked around a little this morning, and heard many interesting things. But most of them were already in the police report you showed me yesterday. The mother was out of town at the time of the murders, and the body was discovered by a college girl who lived next door. The mother first saw her daughter’s body in the morgue.” As she listened to Ryuzaki speak, Misora checked the walls for the holes where the Wara Ningyo had been nailed. Of the four walls, the front wall with the door in it—did not have a hole, but the other three did. Like in Believe Bridesmaid’s bedroom, these holes indicated the location of the dolls.
✦ ✦ ✦
“Something bothering you, Misora?”
✦ ✦ ✦
“Yes... yesterday, we…” Misora said, emphasizing the plural, “... we decoded the message the killer left at the scene of the first murder, but... the Wara Ningyo and the locked room remain mysteries.”
✦ ✦ ✦
“Yes,” Ryuzaki said, closing the door and dropping down onto all fours.
✦ ✦ ✦
But unlike the first scene, two people had lived in this room, and there was quite a lot of furniture—the place was a mess. It looked rather difficult to crawl around in. Nevertheless, Ryuzaki persisted, and remained like that all the way to the other side of the room. Misora wished he would give up.
✦ ✦ ✦
“But Misora, I don’t think it’s worth wasting much time on the locked room issue. This is not a mystery novel—realistically speaking, it’s quite possible he simply used a spare key. There are no keys that can’t be duplicated.”
✦ ✦ ✦
“True enough, but do you really think this killer would do something so prosaic? There was no real need to create a locked room in the first place. But he did so anyway. In which case, it might be a kind of puzzle...”
✦ ✦ ✦
“Puzzle?”
✦ ✦ ✦
“Or a game of some kind.”
✦ ✦ ✦
“Yes... yes, maybe...”
✦ ✦ ✦
Misora looked back at the door she’d just come through. The design was different from the first murder scene (the difference between the front door of an apartment and the interior door of a house), but the construction and size were basically the same. A generic lock, simply made—very easy to break in when the house was empty by drilling through the door and turning the latch from the inside (known as a thumb turn lock) but obviously, there had been no holes in the door at any of the three scenes.
✦ ✦ ✦
“What would you do, Ryuzaki? If you were trying to lock it from the outside?”
✦ ✦ ✦
“Use a key.”
✦ ✦ ✦
“No, not like that... if you’d lost the key.”
✦ ✦ ✦
“Use a spare key.”
✦ ✦ ✦
“No, not like that... you don’t have a spare key, either.”
✦ ✦ ✦
“Then I wouldn’t lock it.”
✦ ✦ ✦
“…”
✦ ✦ ✦
Not that he was wrong.
✦ ✦ ✦
Misora reached out and shook the door.
✦ ✦ ✦
“If this were a mystery novel... locked rooms are always created by a trick, like with a needle and thread, or... I mean, we call it a locked room, but these are just ordinary rooms, so they’re never that secure. They aren’t like Bridesmaid’s bookshelves—they’ve got plenty of gaps and chinks around the frame. String could get under it easily... run a bit of string under the door, and tie it to the edge of the latch, and pull it...”
✦ ✦ ✦
“Impossible. The gap isn’t that big, and the angle would kill the force applied. You could try it out, but too much of the string would be pressed against the door. Before you could ever turn the latch, all the power you put into it would be eaten up pulling against the edge of the door. Pulling the door toward you.”
✦ ✦ ✦
“Yeah...but a lock this simple doesn’t leave much room for a trick. The doors in detective novels usually have much more complicated ones.”
✦ ✦ ✦
“There are many ways to create a locked room. And we can’t rule out the possibility that he had a key.
✦ ✦ ✦
More important, Misora, is the question of why the killer made a locked room. He had no need to make one, but he did so anyway. If he made a puzzle, why did he do it?”
✦ ✦ ✦
“As a game. For fun.”
✦ ✦ ✦
“Why?”
✦ ✦ ✦
You could ask that about any of this.
✦ ✦ ✦
Why send a crossword puzzle to the LAPD, why leave a message on the bookshelf... and most of all, why kill three people? If the killer had a clear motive, then what was it? Even if the killings were random, something must have caused it... L had said so. But they still had no idea what linked the victims together.
✦ ✦ ✦
Misora leaned against the wall and took some photographs out of her bag.
✦ ✦ ✦
Pictures of the second victim killed in this room—a young blonde girl, wearing glasses, lying on her face. Looking closely, her head had been dented in the shape of the weapon, and both her eyes had been poked out. The eyes had been crushed after death—like the cuts on Believe Bridesmaid’s chest, this was mutilation of the corpse, with no relation to the cause of death. She had no idea what the killer had used to destroy the eyes, but trying to imagine the mental state of someone who could poke the eyes out of a cute little girl made Misora feel a little sick. Misora might be an FBI agent, but she was not prone to fits of righteousness—but there were some things that were simply unforgivable. What the killer had done to this second victim clearly fell into that category.
✦ ✦ ✦
“Killing a child... how horrible.”