“True enough, but do you really think this killer would do something so prosaic? There was no real need to create a locked room in the first place. But he did so anyway. In which case, it might be a kind of puzzle...”
“Puzzle?”
“Or a game of some kind.” “Yes... yes, maybe...”
Misora looked back at the door she’d just come through. The design was different from the first murder scene (the difference between the front door of an apartment and the interior door of a house), but the
construction and size were basically the same. A generic lock, simply made—very easy to break in when the house was empty by drilling through the door and turning the latch from the inside (known as a thumb turn lock) but obviously, there had been no holes in the door at any of the three scenes.
“What would you do, Ryuzaki? If you were trying to lock it from the outside?” “Use a key.”
“No, not like that... if you’d lost the key.” “Use a spare key.”
“No, not like that... you don’t have a spare key, either.” “Then I wouldn’t lock it.”
“…”
Not that he was wrong.
Misora reached out and shook the door.
“If this were a mystery novel... locked rooms are always created by a trick, like with a needle and thread, or... I mean, we call it a locked room, but these are just ordinary rooms, so they’re never that secure. They aren’t like Bridesmaid’s bookshelves—they’ve got plenty of gaps and chinks around the frame. String could get under it easily... run a bit of string under the door, and tie it to the edge of the latch, and pull it...”
“Impossible. The gap isn’t that big, and the angle would kill the force applied. You could try it out, but too much of the string would be pressed against the door. Before you could ever turn the latch, all the power you put into it would be eaten up pulling against the edge of the door. Pulling the door toward you.”
“Yeah...but a lock this simple doesn’t leave much room for a trick. The doors in detective novels usually have much more complicated ones.”
“There are many ways to create a locked room. And we can’t rule out the possibility that he had a key. More important, Misora, is the question of why the killer made a locked room. He had no need to make one, but he did so anyway. If he made a puzzle, why did he do it?”
“As a game. For fun.” “Why?”
You could ask that about any of this.
Why send a crossword puzzle to the LAPD, why leave a message on the bookshelf... and most of all, why kill three people? If the killer had a clear motive, then what was it? Even if the killings were random, something must have caused it... L had said so. But they still had no idea what linked the victims together.
Misora leaned against the wall and took some photographs out of her bag.
Pictures of the second victim killed in this room—a young blonde girl, wearing glasses, lying on her face. Looking closely, her head had been dented in the shape of the weapon, and both her eyes had been poked out. The eyes had been crushed after death—like the cuts on Believe Bridesmaid’s chest, this
was mutilation of the corpse, with no relation to the cause of death. She had no idea what the killer had used to destroy the eyes, but trying to imagine the mental state of someone who could poke the eyes out of a cute little girl made Misora feel a little sick. Misora might be an FBI agent, but she was not prone
to fits of righteousness—but there were some things that were simply unforgivable. What the killer had done to this second victim clearly fell into that category.
“Killing a child... how horrible.”
“Killing an adult is also horrible, Misora. Killing children or adults—equally horrible,” Ryuzaki said, unaffected, almost
Indifferent. “Ryuzaki...”
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