“The killer is B.”
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“What?”
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“No, I mean, he’s so obsessed with the letter B. Maybe that very obsession is part of the message, and the killer’s initials are B.B. as well.”
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“Or maybe they’re Q.Q. Like you said, a lot of elements of the case do point to B, but it’s also possible we simply haven’t stumbled across the signs pointing to Q.”
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“Yeah...I suppose so”
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“That said, I do think B is more likely than Q as well. More than ninety-nine percent,” Ryuzaki admitted.
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Essentially retracting the last few minutes.
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“There’s a good chance the killer’s initials are B. The victims are all B.B., and the killer is too... things are getting interesting.”
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“Interesting?”
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“Yes. Anyway, be careful next time, Misora. If you agree with something, you must have sufficient reason to agree with it. If you disagree with something, you must have sufficient reason to disagree with it. However accurate, a deduction based on a fallacy means you have not defeated the killer.”
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“Defeated? Ryuzaki, is this really a matter of winning and losing?”
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“Yes,” Ryuzaki said. “It is.”
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Because this was war.
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L was said to never move on a case unless there were more than ten victims or a million dollars at stake. The only exceptions to this were cases at difficulty level L (extremely fitting), or when L had personal reasons compelling him to get involved. The Los Angeles BB murders were both of these. I hardly need to point out the difficulty by this stage of the story, and L was essentially fighting his own dead copy. The current head of Wammy’s House had told Quillish Wammy/Watari, who had told L
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about B’s disappearance in May, and ever since L had been looking for him even as he solved his other cases. Wammy’s House only knew him as B—they did not know his real name, Beyond Birthday, so this search was near impossible, but L at last picked up his trail when the murders started—which is why L knew who the killer was. He had not been looking for a killer so much as he was looking for a case. L had been waiting, expecting Beyond Birthday to do something to challenge him. L could move any policeman in the world, but in this case, he did not ask anyone for help except Naomi Misora...
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more than likely, for this reason. I don’t think L really put that much stock in honor, but everyone is embarrassed by their own sins, and nobody wants those missteps to become public knowledge.
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L was the goal of everyone in Wammy’s House.
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Every one of us wanted to surpass him.
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To step over him.
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To step on him.
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M did, N did, and B did.
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M as a challenger, N as a successor.
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B as a criminal.
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“Ryuzaki, did you find anything new?”
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Now that they had finished debating the matter of dates, Misora took a breather, went down to the kitchen on the first floor, made two cups of coffee (with normal amounts of sugar, obviously) and carried them back up to Backyard Bottomslash’s room on a tray. She was holding the serving tray in both hands, which made opening the door rather tricky. Since the handle was at waist height, she was able to reposition herself a little bit and hook the tray on her belt buckle. She found Ryuzaki lying in the middle of the room, flat on his back, with his arms and legs flung out to the side. Misora froze in the doorway.
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“Find.., something?” Misora repeated, for no reason at all.
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He wasn’t going to make a bridge and start crawling around with his back to the floor, was he? Like something out of a horror movie.. .Misora gulped nervously, but to her great relief, this was apparently too weird even for Ryuzaki. But what was he doing?
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“Urn, Ryuzaki?”
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“I’m a corpse.”
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“Hunh?”
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“I have become a corpse. I cannot answer. I am dead.”
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She understood this. The word ‘understand’ has a connotation of acceptance, which she sincerely wished to avoid, but it seemed clear that Ryuzaki had adopted the same pose as the third victim.
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Obviously, his left arm and right leg remained attached to his body, but with that in mind he did match the pictures of Backyard Bottomslash’s bitter end. Prom a practical standpoint, Misora could not see any point to his behavior, but she was not the kind to interfere with other people’s methods of deduction. Instead, Misora tried to figure out if, on her way to the desk, she should step over Ryuzaki or go around. She did not want to step over him, but it irritated her to go around.
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“Um… mm?”
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And then she noticed. At least, she noticed that she had noticed something. But what had she noticed?
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Something had caught her eye... no, before that, the moment she opened the door her attention had been overwhelmed by the spectacle of Ryuzaki playing dead, so how could it have? That wasn’t it. Then what would she have seen first if Ryuzaki were not lying there? If Ryuzaki had not been in the way of her carrying the coffee... if he had not been there... then nothing. The room would have been perfectly ordinary, if a little frilly. She could barely smell the blood. The only thing out of place was the hole in the wall... the hole?
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“The mark left by the Wara Ningyo?”
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It was just a hole, and hard to make out. But if it was not a hole, but the Wara Ningyo? Then the first thing that would catch her eye upon opening the door, just based on line of sight, was not Ryuzaki playing dead, but the Wara Ningyo. The moment she opened the door, she would see the Wara Ningyo... one of the dolls had been carefully placed in exactly that spot. And all the Wara Ningyo had been nailed to the walls at exactly the same height (at about waist height, if you were as tall as Misora) but the distance from the walls on either side changed depending on location. But at each location, when she had opened the door...
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A hole.
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“Excuse me, Ryuzaki”
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Still holding the coffee tray, Misora stepped... no, vaulted over Ryuzaki. At least, she meant to, but she was so distracted she missed her landing, and stomped on his stomach. In boots. And she reflectively tried to keep her balance, and avoid dropping the tray, which left her putting her entire weight on Ryuzaki’s abdomen.
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“Gah!” said the corpse.
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Naturally.
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“S-sorry!”
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If she had spilled the coffee on him as well, Naomi Misora’s reputation as a klutz would have been cemented forever, but in actual fact, the matter did not go that far. Her martial arts experience had honed her sense of balance. She put the tray down on the desk and picked up the police file. She checked to see if she had remembered correctly.
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“What is it, Misora?”
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Ryuzaki may have been an impossibly weird freak of a man, but even he did not go so far as to rejoice at the pain of a woman stepping on him. He stopped pretending to be a corpse, rolled over, and crawled toward her.
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“I’m looking over the charts of the crime scenes. In each of them... I noticed the same thing. About the locations of the Wara Ningyo.”
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“The locations? What do you mean?”
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“When we investigated the scenes, the police had already taken the dolls away, so I never noticed before... but there is a noticeable trend in the placement of the dolls. This scene included—when you open the door to enter the room, the first thing you see is a doll. There is a doll directly opposite the door—the killer arranged it so that when you come into the room, the first thing that catches your eye is a Wara Ningyo.”
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“Oh yeah...“ Ryuzaki said, nodding. “That’s certainly true for this room, and now that you mention it, I remember seeing the hole in the wall when I went into the first and second rooms as well. But Misora, what does that mean?”
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“Er... um...”
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What did it mean? She felt like it was a major discovery, and had stomped on Ryuzaki’s belly in her enthusiasm, but now that he asked she didn’t have an answer. Awkward. She couldn’t admit the truth, so she scrambled to string something together.
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“Well... it might have something to do with the locked rooms?”
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“How so?”
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“At all three scenes, the person who discovered the body opened the door and came in. Using a spare key or breaking the door down. They all came into the room… and saw that creepy doll on the wall.
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The Wara Ningyo was the first thing they saw No matter what, their attention was drawn to it, Maybe while their attention was distracted, the killer, who’d been hiding in the room, slipped quietly out the door...”
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“As classic a locked room detective novel trick as the needle and thread. But Misora, think about it. If you wanted to focus someone’s attention, you wouldn’t need the doll.”
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“Why not?”
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“If there was no doll, then the first thing they would see is a dead body. Just like you froze when you came into the room and saw my corpse. All he had to do was slip out of the room when someone came in and was staring in shock at the body.”
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“Ah... right. Of course. So... did he want the person who found the body to see something besides the body first? I can’t think of any reason why, but...”