advance. The sedan was a stolen car and would not lead back to him, so he had planned to abandon it here. One eye on the security cameras, he left the parking lot on foot, leaving the mask, blackjack, and club behind in the car. He had shoved them all under the seat. Leaving no fingerprints.
He had never planned to do anything to Naomi Misora today, not there. He had just been making a pass at her, to test her ability. He had attacked from behind, but not intended to hurt her and certainly, he had no intention of killing her.
So there was no way she would die. He had known she would dodge.
But even so, even with that in mind, that woman was impressive. Dodging his attack without even turning around, and moving instantly to an attack of her own—he could see why L was using her as his pawn. She had brains and guts as she must.
She had the right.
She was worthy of being his opponent.
The assailant cracked his neck.
And with his head still hanging at an odd angle, he walked on down the street. Misora’s attacker...
The man behind the Los Angeles BB Murder Cases, Beyond Birthday, walked on down the street grinning cruelly.
“Ah, Misora. You’re late,” Ryuzaki said without turning around, the moment she entered apartment 605
Sigh...
He was not down on all fours. She had come in just as he was inspecting the top shelf of a chest of drawers. But it was hard to think of this as nice timing. The drawer happened to be filled with the thirteen-year-old victim’s underwear. Ryuzaki looked less like a detective investigating the scene than a pedophile stealing panties. Not the best way to start the day. She’d been planning to funnel the frustration from her fight in the alley into a fairly aggressive approach to Ryuzaki, but he’d already yanked the rug out from under her. If it was deliberate, she would have been impressed, but that
seemed unlikely, It seemed much more likely that Ryuzaki actually did have a fetish for children’s underwear.
Misora sighed again, looking around the room—the entire apartment was smaller than Believe Bridesmaid’s bedroom. The standard of living gap alone made it hard to see any connection between the first and second victims.
“We’re talking a single mother here, right? Who has now moved hack in with her parents? It must have been devastating...”
“Yes. These apartments were built for college students, intended to house only one, so a young girl and her mother living here attracted a fair amount of attention. I asked around a little this morning, and heard many interesting things. But most of them were already in the police report you showed me yesterday. The mother was out of town at the time of the murders, and the body was discovered by a college girl who lived next door. The mother first saw her daughter’s body in the morgue.”
As she listened to Ryuzaki speak, Misora checked the walls for the holes where the Wara Ningyo had been nailed. Of the four walls, the front wall with the door in it—did not have a hole, but the other three did. Like in Believe Bridesmaid’s bedroom, these holes indicated the location of the dolls. “Something bothering you, Misora?”
“Yes... yesterday, we…” Misora said, emphasizing the plural, “... we decoded the message the killer left at the scene of the first murder, but... the Wara Ningyo and the locked room remain mysteries.”
“Yes,” Ryuzaki said, closing the door and dropping down onto all fours.
But unlike the first scene, two people had lived in this room, and there was quite a lot of furniture—the place was a mess. It looked rather difficult to crawl around in. Nevertheless, Ryuzaki persisted, and remained like that all the way to the other side of the room. Misora wished he would give up.
“But Misora, I don’t think it’s worth wasting much time on the locked room issue. This is not a mystery novel—realistically speaking, it’s quite possible he simply used a spare key. There are no keys that
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