didn’t find any money.”
“You were looking for money?” Like a thief
An extremely blatant one.
“No, just in case. One possibility is that the killer was after money, but in that case, the second victim is significantly more impoverished than the first and third victims. There was a chance they were hiding something, but apparently not. Let us take a break. Would you care for some coffee, Misora?”
“Oh... sure.”
“One moment,” Ryuzaki said, heading for the kitchen. Misora wondered if he had jam in the fridge again but decided that she didn’t care. She abandoned that line of thought, and sat down at the table. She had somehow missed her timing to tell Ryuzaki about being attacked. Oh well. She might as well avoid mentioning it, and see how he reacted. She had no proof her assailant had anything to do with Ryuzaki, but not telling him made it easier for her to catch him off guard.
“Here you are.”
Ryuzaki came back from the kitchen, carrying a tray with two cups of coffee on it. He placed one in front of Misora and the other opposite her, then pulled out the chair and assumed the strange sitling position he had demonstrated the day before, with his knees pulled up against his chest. Ignoring the matter of manners, it looked extremely difficult to sit like that—or was it? Misora wondered, and took a sip of coffee.
“Augh!” she yelled, spitting it out. “Cough... hack... urrghhh…”
“Something wrong, Misora?” Ryuzaki asked, innocently sipping his cup. “Once something has entered your mouth, it should never be spit out like that. And those terrible moans do nothing for your image, either. You are quite beautiful, so you should try to present yourself accordingly.”
“M-murderously sweet... poisonous!” “Not poison. Sugar.”
“…”
So you’re the killer?
Misora looked down at the contents of her cup... which was less a liquid than a paste. Less like sugar dissolved in coffee than sugar moistened with coffee—a gooey, gelatinous mass glistening majestically in her cup. While her attention had been distracted by Ryuzaki’s posture, she had allowed this
substance to touch her lips... “I feel like I drank dirt.” “But dirt is not this sweet.” “Sweet Dirt...”
That sounded like an avant-garde piece. The diabolic gritty feeling in her mouth would not go away. Across from her, Ryuzaki was happily sipping away... lapping away. Apparently he had not made Misora’s cup this way out of sheer spite, but this was, in his view, a perfectly normal amount of sugar. “Whew... coffee always picks me up,” Ryuzaki said, finishing his cup and what must have been at least two hundred grams of pure sugar. “Now then, to business.”
Misora would have liked to get up and go wash the sugar out of her mouth, but she tried to ignore the impulse. “Go ahead,” she said.
“About the missing link.”
“Have you figured something out?”
“It seems the killer was definitely not after money... but last night, after I left your company, I noticed something interesting. A connection between the victims that nobody seems to have picked up on.” “What?”
“Their initials, Misora. All three victims have rather unique initials. Believe Bridesmaid, Quarter Queen, Backyard Bottomslash. B.B., Q.Q., B.B. Both their first and last names begin with the same letter... what is it, Misora?”
“Nothing...”
Was that all? Her disappointment had clearly shown on her face and interrupted Ryuzaki’s line of thought, but she couldn’t even be bothered to try and cover. What a pointless waste of time. Misora had noticed that the moment she first saw the victim’s names. It wasn’t worth bringing up like this. “Ryuzaki... do you know how many people there are with alliterative initials in the world? In Los Angeles
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