Or the message had been arranged in a way the police had not noticed... something that looked like an ordinary bookmark, but actually had a code hidden on it... But after flipping through another few books, she dismissed this theory as well. The books here did not have bookmarks. Believe Bridesmaid did not appear to be the bookmark type. Many fussy readers detest the slight curve in the page a bookmark can leave.
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Which meant that even the most fastidious killer would never dream of placing anything inside a book.
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Misora moved away from the shelves. She glanced down at the bed, but there seemed to be even less to investigate here. There was nothing to do but pull the sheets off and look under the mattress. And she didn’t even need to check the file to know that the police had already done that, it seemed virtually impossible to hide a message on the bed that the police would not notice.
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“Under the carpet... behind the wallpaper. . . no, no, why would he hide the message? He wants it to be found. It’s not a message if it isn’t found. He sent the crossword puzzle to the police... very egotistical.
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He wants the puzzles to be difficult... to prove that we’re stupid.” He wasn’t trying to outwit them.
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He was mocking them.
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“You are beneath me, You can never beat me,’—that’s what the messages are saying. Which means...
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he’s not trying to make everything go right and avoid getting caught, he’s after something more than his goals... or making fun of us is his primary goal? Who is ‘us’? The police? The LAPD? Society? The U.S.A.? The world? No... the scale’s too small.. This is more personal. So this message... or something like a message... There must be one somewhere in this room... or, wait...” There must be was wrong.
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Maybe there wasn’t.
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“Something that should be here, but isn’t… something missing, that used to be here... the Wara Ningyo? No, those were a symbol of the victims, not a message… the bedroom. ..oh, right! The occupant! The bedroom’s occupant isn’t here.”
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Something missing, something no longer here.
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Like the room’s owner, Believe Bridesmaid.
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Misora took out the photographs again and looked carefully at the two pictures of Bridesmaid’s corpse-one taken at the scene, and one taken during the autopsy. If the killer had left a message on his body, it was obviously not the rope marks, but the knife wounds in his chest. Like Misora had said to L, normally these would be taken as a sign of a personal vendetta, but now that she thought about it, they weren’t natural. In the photo from the scene, the body was on its back, wearing a T-shirt which had a few bloodstains on it... but the T-shirt itself wasn’t damaged at all. Which meant that after the killer had murdered him, he had taken the T-shirt off, cut up the body with a knife, and then put the T-shirt back on. If this was a simple grudge, he would have just cut right through the fabric. Was there a reason he didn’t want to damage the T-shirt? But he didn’t seem to mind if it got bloodstained... and the T-shirt definitely belonged to the victim. It was one he always slept in...
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“If you… look at them right... these marks... do look like letters... sort of…” You had to twist the picture around a lot, though.
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“V... C... I? No, M... another V... X? D... and that’s three l’s in a row... L? That looks like L… hmm, feels like I’m forcing it...”
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This only worked if you were looking for it. It wasn’t like kanji or Hangul—alphabet letters were constructed of simple lines and curves, and any random scratch marks, whether with a pencil or knife, would look like something.
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“Normally I’d like to see what the detectives in charge think, the people actually involved in the case...
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but I don’t have a badge at the moment, so that’s out of the question. Of course, L’s probably handling that side of things for me.”
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Misora was starting to appreciate how much harder it was to work on your own, without the support of the organization. She had always felt out of place in the FBI, but she was just now realizing how much she had taken advantage of the resources it offered.
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“I guess I should check the other rooms... seems sort of pointless. But if he wiped all the fingerprints in the house…” she murmured, and turned to leave the room.
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But then it occurred to her that there was one place she hadn’t checked yet. Under the bed. Easy enough to overlook, and far more likely than under the carpet or behind the wallpaper—it seemed fairly unlikely that the police had missed such an obvious blind spot, but it seemed worth crawling under there, just to be sure. There might be something new she could see from down there. For this reason, Misora crouched down next to the bed...
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And a hand reached out from underneath it.
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“…?!”
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Misora jumped backward instantly, forced down the surge of emotions this sudden turn of events stirred up, and put her fists up. She didn’t have a gun with her—not because she was suspended, but simply because she had never really gotten used to carrying one around. With no gun, she had no trigger to pull.
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“What… no, who are you?” she roared, trying to sound intimidating. But the hand was joined by a second hand, as if her voice was just the wind blowing, and a body followed it. A man, crawling out from under the bed.
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How long... had he been here...?
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Was he under the bed this whole time?
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Had he heard her talking to L?
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All kinds of questions flooded through Misora’s mind.
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“Answer me! Who are you?!”
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She put one hand inside her jacket, pretending she had a gun. The man raised his head.
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And slowly stood up.
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Natural black hair.
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A plain shirt, faded jeans.
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He was a young man, with dark lines under his wide, bulging eyes.
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Thin, and apparently fairly tall, but his back was curved, leaving his gaze two heads lower than Misora’s so he appeared to be looking up at her.
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“Nice to meet you,” he said, completely unruffled. He bowed even lower. “Please call me Ryuzaki.”
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L had earned a certain degree of hostility from other detectives, and the jealous ones called him a hermit detective, or a computer detective, but neither one of these is a particularly accurate representation of the truth. Naomi Misora had also tended to think of L as an armchair detective, but in fact, L was quite the opposite, a very active, aggressive individual. While he had absolutely no interest in social conventions, he was certainly not the kind of detective to shut himself up in a dark room with the shades drawn and refuse to come out. It is now common knowledge that the three great post war detectives, L, Eraldo Coil and Danueve were all actually the same person. Certainly, anyone reading these notes is almost certain to know... though they may not know that L engaged in a war with the real Eraldo Coil, and the real Danueve, and emerged victorious, (Claiming their detective codes. The details of this detective war I will save for another occasion, but in addition to those three names, L possessed many other detective codes. I have no idea how many, but there were at least three digits’ worth. And quite a number of those were fairly public detectives—just like, as anyone reading these notes must know, he appeared before Kira, calling himself Ryuzaki or Ryuga Hideki.) Of course, Naomi Misora had no way of knowing his, but in my opinion, the name L was, for him, just one of many. He never had any direct connection to that identity. He never thought of himself as L, it was just the most famous and most powerful of the many detective codes that he used during his life. The name had is uses, but lacked obscurity. L had a real name that nobody knew, and nobody will ever know, but a name which only he knew never defined him. I sometimes wonder if L himself ever knew exactly which name was written in the Death Note, which name it was that killed him.
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I wonder.
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But back to the Los Angeles BB Murder Cases.
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“Ryuzaki…“ Naomi Misora said, looking over the black business card be had handed her without bothering to hide her suspicious. “Rue Ryuzaki, right?”
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“Yes. Rue Ryuzaki,” the man said, in the same unruffled tone. His wide eyes stared at her through the dark circles around them, and he nibbled at his thumbnail.
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They had moved out of the bedroom into the living room of Believe Bridesmaid’s house. They were sitting opposite each other on expensive sofas. Ryuzaki was seated with his knees up and his arms wrapped around them. Misora thought this looked a little childish, but since Ryuzaki was obviously not a child, it seemed a little creepy. The fact that she failed to comment on it at all was because she was much too grown up. To escape the awkward silence, Misora looked down at the card again—Rue Ryuzaki: Detective.
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“According to this, you’re a detective?”
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“Yes, I am,”