Oh, it’s a corpse, Seiji thought.
The body couldn’t possibly have been any deader. After all, there was a hole in the back of its skull.
The location was Room 601, right in the center of that expanse of ivory carpet. Ishizuka’s corpse lay face down, one hand reaching out toward something no one else could see.
In the back of his head, a hole gleamed slickly with blood and brain fluid; the hair around it was plastered wetly to the scalp. Yes, a hole—a gunshot wound that looked almost like a crater.
“Why would they do…something so horrible…?” Mao sank weakly to the floor, murmuring deliriously.
Ms. Nomura hurried over to her; her face was nearly the color of clay. As Seiji watched the women take shelter in the bathroom, he reviewed what had happened before they reached the room.
After that phone call, Seiji and Shiroshi headed down the train to Car 6, meeting up with Tosu and Ms. Nomura on the way.
Takamura, whom Tosu had called ahead of time, and Mao, who was still pale, were waiting in the corridor for them. The weirdest thing was…
“Wh-whoa, are those…bloodstains?”
…there was a trail of large drops of blood on the floor. Not only that, but they stopped right in front of Room 601. Egad, another murder?! Seiji shuddered, but…
“No, Ishizuka was gripping a shard from a wine bottle when he left the lounge car,” explained Shiroshi. “I believe he simply cut his hand.”
“I—I see… Oh yes, you’re right. There’s a piece of glass in front of the door.”
It had probably been in his way when he was trying to get the lock open, so he’d tossed it aside. Geez, way to scare people, Seiji thought, but he still had a desperately bad feeling about all this.
And now he was looking at exactly what that premonition had been warning him about.
“Shot with a gun,” Tosu muttered, looking down at the hole in the corpse’s head.
A gun, Seiji echoed mentally. And then it hit him.
…Isn’t this seriously bad news?
He was still carrying the revolver he’d snitched from Odoro. If the others found out about it, they’d assume he was the killer for sure. He’d be finished.
As he stood there frozen, gushing cold sweat, his gaze wandering unnaturally, Tosu shot him a look.
“You don’t look so great.”
“N-n-n-n-noooo, I’m f-fine! Totally!”
“…You could’ve fooled me.”
Giving Seiji a cold sidelong glare, Tosu knelt beside the corpse. He pulled on thin gloves he seemed to have brought with him, then pointed at the neck. “Ishizuka wasn’t killed with a gun, though. He died from injected poison. See? If you look closely, there’s a needle mark on his neck.”
“Huh?” When Seiji inspected the body, he saw the same sort of mark he’d seen on Kaganuma. “B-but then why shoot him in the head?”
“I really couldn’t tell you. That said, it’s a pretty sure bet he was shot postmortem.” Tosu carefully parted the hair on the back of the man’s skull, revealing his scalp. “If you do this, you can see a blackish circle around the wound. That’s what you get when you push a gun muzzle directly against the skin and fire or shoot from a few centimeters away. Normally it’s red or orange, but if the victim is already dead when they’re shot, it turns grayish-brown like this.”
I see. Yeah, you’re right… Hold it, how do you even know that? Seiji retorted silently.
Watching him out of the corner of his eye, Tosu coughed painfully. “On top of that, it doesn’t seem as if any burns or blisters formed when he was shot. That means Ishizuka was poisoned with a syringe first, then had his head blown off.”
“Wh-why would anybody…?” Wasn’t shooting him in the head, when they’d already killed him with poison, literally twice the work?
“Well, I sure don’t know. What I understand least, though, is how the killer got in here.”
“Huh?” Seiji said foolishly. However, a few moments later, it hit him.
When Ishizuka was killed, he’d been holed up in here with the door locked. If the executioner wanted to kill him, whether they used poison or a gun was secondary; they would have had to get into the room first.
But…how?
That was the problem. There wasn’t anything wrong with the door, so they probably hadn’t forced their way in. That said, it wouldn’t have been possible to persuade Ishizuka to open up for them. That violent, prickly hedgehog of a man would just have cracked their skull with a wine bottle.
Seiji swallowed hard. “Do you mean this happened in a locked room?”
Exactly. This was another locked room.
First Godou had vanished from Room 201 with the door guard still in place. Now Ishizuka had been poisoned and shot in the head in Room 601, which had been impossible to enter.
In a single night, two passengers had fallen prey to mysterious incidents in locked rooms.
And then…
Shiroshi’s hand came up smoothly, pointing at the corpse’s suit-clad upper body. More accurately, at the right-hand jacket pocket, which was covered with a flap. “I believe Ishizuka kept his room key in that pocket. Is it still there?”
“Huh? How did you know—?” The words were almost out of Seiji’s mouth when the answer occurred to him. Oh, right. When Godou disappeared, and we were checking everyone’s compartments. Shiroshi must have remembered where Ishizuka stowed his key. He really did have sharp eyes.
Tosu stuck his hand into the man’s pocket, as Shiroshi had instructed. On closer inspection, the flap had blood on it. Had Ishizuka gotten it dirty trying to get his key out with his wounded right hand?
“You mean this?” Tosu said, holding up the key to Room 601.
Naturally, its design was almost the same as the key to Room 302. There was a Berlin blue ribbon tied to the hole in its bow, with a cork tag that showed the room number hanging from it.
Hm. Nothing in particular seemed abnormal, but—
“That’s very strange,” said Shiroshi.
…And here we go again.
As far as Seiji could tell, the key hadn’t changed a bit from when he’d seen it earlier.
“Yes, and that is what’s strange. From the fact that there’s no blood on the door lever, we can assume that Ishizuka used his undamaged left hand to push it down. That means he must have held this key to the sensor with his right hand… And yet, though he held it in his bloody hand, the key is perfectly clean.”
“I—I see.”
Shiroshi was right. If Ishizuka had held the key in his right hand, it was weird that the ribbon and cork tag weren’t sticky with blood. The inside of his right pocket and the flap that covered it both had bloodstains on them.
In that case, what was another possible scenario?
“Um, did the killer wipe the bloodstains off afterward?” he asked.
“If it were only the key, they could have. However, the ribbon and tag are made of satin and cork. I think it would be quite difficult to clean blood from those.”
Then what exactly was going on? Seiji was perplexed.
Tosu watched him out of the corner of his eye. Then he blinked, as if something had just occurred to him. “…I see. Is that what it is?” His eyes scanned the room.
“Yes, that’s it.” Shiroshi smiled and nodded, looking smug.
As usual, Seiji seemed to be the only one who didn’t get it. Not only that, but just as he was about to request an explanation, Tosu left the room.
Taking charge, Shiroshi clapped his hands. “Well, now. There is one other unnatural aspect to Room 601. Can you tell what it is?”
…What do you think?
“Heh-heh. Put simply, although Ishizuka left a trail of bloodstains in the hall, there are none to be seen in the room. Since the corpse is in its center, that’s very unnatural indeed. There’s no indication that he wiped the blood away with his clothes or anything else, either.”
Actually, yeah, now that you mention it… Seiji nodded.
If Ishizuka had walked across the carpet, it was strange that the trail of bloodstains he’d left out in the hall hadn’t continued right through the door and into the room. And yet the carpet was perfectly clean.
“Maybe…he washed his hands in the sink first?” suggested Seiji.