“The photograph!”
Oh, you mean from the third crime scene?” Ryuzaki asked, placing the photograph on the table once more. The corpse, with the left arm and right leg severed. Misora pulled two other photographs out of her bag and placed them next to it. Crime scene photos of the first and second victims. Pictures of all the victims, showing the condition in which they were found.
“Notice anything, Ryuzaki?” “What?”
“Anything about these photographs strike you as unnatural?” “They’re all dead?”
“Being dead is not unnatural.” “How philosophic.”
“Be serious. Look—the bodies are in different positions. Believe Bridesmaid is on his back, Quarter
Queen is on her front, and Backyard Bottomslash is on her hack. Back, front, back.”
And you see a pattern in this? Connecting it to the nine days, four days, nine days between the murders? Meaning that tomorrow the fourth victim will be found lying on her front?”
“No, not at all. I mean, that might be true, but... I was thinking of a different possibility. In other words, the very fact that Quarter Queen’s corpse was left lying on her front is itself unnatural.”
Ryuzaki’s reaction was not very satisfactory—at least, it didn’t look that way Perhaps what Misora was trying to say wasn’t getting across. She’d only just hit upon the idea and was talking quickly, fueled by excitement, without fully thinking it through, so that was understandable. “Let me think a minute,” Misora said, sitting down in the chair next to him.
“Misora, when thinking, I recommend this posture.” “‘this posture’?”
With your knees against your chest like that? He was recommending that? “Seriously. It raises deductive ability by forty percent. You must try it.” “No, I... um... well, okay.”
It wasn’t like he wanted her to crawl, and it couldn’t hurt to try. It might help her calm down a little from the high of inspiration.
She assumed the posture.
“…”
She regretted it a lot.
Even sadder was the fact that her ideas fell into place.
“Well, Misora? You mean Quarter Queen being on her front is a message from the killer? Pointing to the third victim...”
“No, not a message—this is the missing link, Ryuzaki. An extension of what you said about their initials...”
Two weird people sitting weirdly explaining weird bits of deduction was, Misora worried, a scene of overwhelming weirdosity. Nevertheless, she pointed to each of the pictures in turn, feeling that she had long since missed her chance to put her feet back on the floor. And this posture was a great deal easier to maintain than it looked.
“The victims’ initials—B.B., Q.Q., B.B. Having both initials be the same isn’t enough to be a missing link, but... both the first and the third victim have the same initials—B.B. If the second victim’s initials were B.B. instead of Q.Q., then that would be a missing link, right?”
By simple arithmetic, twenty-six times twenty-six equals one in 676 people. Moving from matching initials to only one letter narrowed the odds by that much... and given how rare names beginning with B were, the actual number was even lower.
“An interesting theory. But Misora, the second victim’s name is Quarter Queen, and her initials are Q.Q. Are you implying that perhaps she was killed by mistake? That the killer was aiming for someone with the initials B.B. and accidentally killed a Q.Q. instead?”
“What are you talking about? The message at the first scene clearly said Quarter Queen. There’s no mistake there.”
“Oh, right. I forgot.”
Had he really forgotten? The phrase seemed phony... but if she puzzled out every one of Ryuzaki’s reactions, they’d never get anywhere.
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