Like the one she’d made last month.
“Normally this kind of investigation starts by finding the criminal’s mistake, and then filling in the puzzle from there, but in this case, I doubt we’ll find anything like that.”
“No, I don’t think we will,” L said. “But what if it isn’t a mistake?” “Not a mistake?”
“Yes. Something he deliberately left behind. And if the police detectives simply failed to notice it…
then we might have a chance.”
Deliberately leaving clues? Did that ever happen? Not in the normal run of things, no—why would anyone leave something behind hat could be used against them? Or wait. Now that he mentioned it, they already knew two examples of exactly that behavior. One was the Wara Ningyo nailed to the walls, and the other was the thumb turn locks, creating a locked room. These were not mistakes, but had clearly been left behind by the killer. Especially the latter. Exactly the thing that Misora had been most interested in—locked rooms were almost always created when the killer was trying to make it look like a suicide. But the first victim was strangled from behind, the second was beaten to death with a weapon that was not found at the scene, and the third victim was stabbed with, again, a weapon not left at the scene… none of which could ever be mistaken for a suicide. Which meant there was nothing to be gained from creating a locked room. It was not a mistake, but it was unnatural.
The Wara Ningyo were the same. She had no idea what they meant.
Since Wara Ningyo were used for curses in Japan, there were people wildly theorizing that the killer was Japanese, or someone with a deep-seated grudge against the Japanese, but especially since these Wara Ningyo were a particularly cheap variety that could be easily purchased in any toy shop (for about three dollars) no one theory had gained prominence.
Misora shut the door behind her, and since the thumb turn lock was at waist height, she absently turned it and locked herself in.
Then she checked each location where the dolls had been nailed to the walls. There had been four of them.
One on each of the four walls of the square room. Obviously, they had been taken away by the police as critical evidence, and were no longer here. It was easy enough to tell where they had been, since there were holes in the walls. Misora took six pictures out of her bag. One of each of the four dolls. One showed the victim, Believe Bridesmaid, lying on his back on the bed, It clearly showed the rope marks around his neck.
And then the last picture.
This was not from the scene, but a close up of Believe Bridesmaid’s bare chest, taken during the autopsy. There were a number of major cuts on it, which appeared to have been carved into his flesh with a knife. They were not that deep, but ran in all directions. According to the report, they had been made after the victim’s death.
“Generally speaking, when the killer engages in this sort of meaningless destruction of the corpse, they have a deep-seated grudge against their victim....for a freelance writer who would take any job, I wouldn’t be surprised if he had quite a few enemies. He did a lot of gossip columns...”
“But Naomi Misora, that does not explain the connection to the second and third murders. Both of those bodies were also damaged in ways that had no direct connection to the cause of death—in fact, the damage seems to have escalated with each murder.”
“It’s possible Bridesmaid was the only one he had a grudge against, and the other two murders were designed to disguise that. Or maybe it wasn’t Bridesmaid, but one of the other two.. .or two out of the three, and the third was camouflage. The destruction night be getting worse because it’s part of the
disguise, or...”
“You believe the killer is only pretending to kill indiscriminately?”
“No. This is just one pattern worth considering. This idea wouldn’t explain the Wara Ningyo. I mean, maybe he deliberately left them there to prove that all three were killed by the same man—and the locked doors might be for the same reason.”
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