“Five… five minus two is three… three. The third scene. Limbs... and the head make five... the head?
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The neck... the neck, and one leg, and one arm...”
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Misora was stringing words together as they came to her—but she was just spinning in circles, like a lost child, afraid of running into a dead end. The more she babbled, the more she lost the feeling that she was on to something. The hands of her compass were spinning...
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“If five minus two is three, then he could have cut off both arms or both legs, or the left arm and the head... if the left arm had to be one of them, then why the right leg?” Purely to fill the silence, Misora forced out a question that had not occurred to her, a question she did not even consider worth asking. but Ryuzaki took her up on it.
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“The head and arm and leg left behind are all of different lengths...” For a moment, she didn’t know what he meant. It seemed like a total non sequitur, and her mind couldn’t keep up with it. But an arm was longer than a head, and a leg was longer than an arm, but so what? Was Ryuzaki just blurting out whatever crossed his mind the way she was? But that wasn’t going to help guide her compass needle...
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“Needle? Or hands...”
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“What about needles?”
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“No, hands...”
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The classic locked room trick with the needle and thread. But that had nothing to do with this... but hands? Could that be...
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“A clock! Clock hands, Ryuzaki!”
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“Hunh? Clock hands...?”
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“The hour hand, minute hand, and second hand! Three of them! Each of different lengths!” Misora slapped the floor hard with her upraised arm and used the impact to push herself up to a sitting position. She moved quickly over to Ryuzaki, grabbed the coffee cup from him, drank the contents in a single gulp, and slammed the empty cup down on the table as if trying to break it.
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“At the first scene he took Akazukin Chacha away to point us to Insufficient Relaxation, at the second scene he took the contacts to point us toward the glasses, and here at the third scene, he took away the wrist watch... and turned the victim into a clock!”
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“The victim... into a clock?” Ryuzaki’s deep-set eyes stared at her with a calmness in stark contrast to her own excitement. “By clock you mean...”
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“The head is the hour hand, the arm is the minute hand, and the leg is the second hand! That’s why the killer took the watch with him, and that’s why he didn’t just take the watch or just cut off the hand, but cut the arm off at the root and had to cut one of the legs off as well otherwise, there wouldn’t be three hands left!”
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All that came out in one breath, and at last Misora felt her feet on the ground again. She took a picture out of her pocket the picture of Backyard Bottomslash’s corpse. On her back, her arms and legs... no arm and leg spread out, the left arm and right leg missing Backyard Bottomslash.
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“Look at this, Ryuzaki. See? The head is the hour, the arm is the minute, the leg is the second, so this is 12:45 and twenty seconds.”
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“Mmm. When you put it that way...”
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“When I put it that way? It’s obviously the message he left behind. And he tossed the leg into the bathroom because it was only the watch he needed to take away, and he wanted to emphasize that!”
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“…”
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Ryuzaki fell silent, apparently thinking.
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“Let me see that,” he said, taking the picture from Misora’s hand. As she watched him pore over it, turning his head at all sorts of strange angles, Misora began to feel like her theory was completely wrong after all. All of this was only useful if it led to a message, and if he said that it was a baseless coincidence it would all fall apart—her deduction had no proof, could never be proven. It had been produced by pure instinct. The battle decided by instinct—by her instinct she would be victorious, or fail.
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“Misora.”
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“Yes? What?”
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“Assuming your theory is correct... from this picture, there is no way to be sure that the victim’s clock is pointing at 12:45 and twenty seconds.”
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“I mean, look,” Ryuzaki said, holding out the picture.
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Upside down.
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“Hold it like this, and it’s 6:15 and fifty seconds. Or like this...” He turned the picture sideways.
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“Three o clock and thirty-five seconds. And if you turn it 180 degrees again, 9:30 and five seconds.”
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“Oh.”
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Of course. He was right. The picture was taken with the body vertically, so she had just assumed that the head... the hour hand was pointing directly upward, at twelve o’clock. But if you really looked at the victim as a clock, that was not necessarily the case. It might be, but it might not be. Just change the angle of the picture and there could be infinite possibilities. Or at least 360. The hands might not move, but the numbers could be placed anywhere around them. There was no clue indicating how to place the numbers.
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“If the victim represents the three hands, then this square room is presumably the numbers. The victim was lying in the center of the room, after all. And the victim was placed like this, parallel or perpendicular to the walls of the room, so I think we can assume it is one of the four patterns I mentioned- But four patterns is still too many. We need to at least get it down to two, or we can’t really say we’ve solved the killer’s message.”
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“The room... is the numbers?”
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“Now that I think about it, the first message involved Roman numerals... which are often used on clock faces. But there are no Roman numerals in here. If only there were some hint to tell us which wall goes with which number..
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Which wall was which time...? But there was nothing out of the ordinary on any of the walls, nothing that might indicate a number. One wall had a door, and the opposite wall a window. Another had a walk-in closet... or was it directions? The compass again...
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“Ryuzaki, do you know which way north is? If north is twelve...”
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“I already thought of that, but there’s no logical reason to assume that north is twelve. This isn’t a map, after all. It might be east, or west, or south.”
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“Logic... logic... yeah, yeah, we need proof, or at least something reasonable... but how can we tell which wall? There’s nothing...”
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“Indeed. It feels like there’s a wall blocking our path, too tall for us to climb over.”
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“A wall? Good metaphor. A wall... a wall...”
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A wall? The Wara Ningyo were on the walls. There had been two of them in here. Did that connect?
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Did the dolls finally have meaning here? Misora half forced herself to decide she couldn’t see anything else that might be a hint, and pushed her thoughts into that channel. The Wara Ningyo. Wara. Ningyo.
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Straw dolls. Dolls. Stuffed animals? Stuffed animals... in the frilly room. Too many dolls for a twenty-eight-year-old woman...
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The stuffed animals piled against the walls.
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“I got it, Ryuzaki,” Misora said.
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This time she was calm.
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This time she did not get worked up.
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“The number of stuffed animals... the stuffed animals on each wall. The number of animals is pointing to the time. See? There are twelve of them against the wall with the door. And nine over there… twelve o’clock and nine o’clock. If we view the whole room as a clock, then the door goes on top.”
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“No, wait a second, Misora Ryuzaki interrupted. “Twelve and nine are certainly true enough, but there are five dolls over here, and only two on the fourth wall. If we use four numbers to indicate a clock face, then they should be twelve, three, six, and nine. Not twelve, two, five, and nine. These numbers don’t fit.”
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“Of course they do. If we count the Wara Ningyo.”
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Misora looked again at the two holes in the wall.
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“If we add the Wara Ningyo to those two stuffed animals... we get three. And if we add the Wara Ningyo to those five stuffed animals... we get six. This makes it work. The third crime scene itself is a clock. The entire room is a clock.”
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Misora put the photograph of Backyard Bottomslash down on the floor, where she had been lying a moment before, and where Ryuzaki had been lying before that. Carefully, making sure it was the right angle.
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“6:15 and fifty seconds.”
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And at last, August 22nd.
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The day the man behind the Los Angeles BB Murder Cases was to be arrested... but we can say that because we have history to tell us, and like all historical events, when it was happening in real time, none of those involved knew that, and the way events unfolded was hardly smooth sailing. In fact, Naomi Misora’s day started with any number of inconsistencies and anxieties.
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6:15 and fifty seconds.
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They had managed to read that as the message left behind by the killer at the third crime scene, but was that 6:15 in the morning? Or in the evening? After they had solved the clock puzzle, Misora had searched the scene all night looking for anything that said “a.m.” or “p.m.” She found nothing.