Page 35

“Oh, thanks.”

She’d asked him on the 16th, and it was now the 19th, and he was a very busy FBI agent, so this was pretty fast work. When she thought about how much he did for her, she found herself wanting to thank him every time she spoke to him.

“So?”

“Basically? There is no private detective named Rue Ryuzaki.”

“So he’s unlicensed?” An unprivate detective. He had said so himself

“No. There are no records of anyone named Rue Ryuzaki at all. Not just in America, but in the records of every country in the world. The name Ryuzaki is reasonably common in your home country, but none of them are named Rue.”

“Oh. He speaks Japanese like a native, so I thought he might he from there... so it’s a fake name?” “Presumably.” Raye was silent for a moment, but then blurted, “Naomi! What are you doing?” “You promised not to ask.”

“I know I did. But your leave of absence will be over next week, and I was just thinking about the future... are you coming back to the FBI?”

“I haven’t thought about it yet.” “I know I always say this, but...”

“Don’t. I know what you’re going to say, so don’t say it.” “I don’t have time. I’ll call again.”

Misora hung up without giving him a chance to respond. She spun the phone around between her fingers, feeling a little guilty. It wasn’t that she hadn’t thought about going back, but that she didn’t want to think about it.

“Next week already? Nah focus on the case at hand.” This might be running away, but since Ryuzaki still wasn’t here...

(She’d suspected the name was fake from the moment she met him, so she didn’t particularly care... although she did wonder why he’d chosen that name in particular. But the real problem was why the victim’s parents had hired a private detective that didn’t exist)... Misora told herself to forget about it and go over the facts they had uncovered one more time.

First, the message left by the killer downtown, at the second crime scene, Naomi Misora had figured it out about an hour after they had found the missing link, that the victims were all connected by their initials. It was the eyeglasses the victim, Quarter Queen, was wearing. While she never got down on all fours the way Ryuzaki did, Misora had checked the room over from every conceivable angle, until her eyes ached from looking—without finding anything. Then she wondered if there was something on the victim’s body, like the cuts on Believe Bridesmaid’s chest, and had looked at the photos of the body again, but there was nothing there by the little girl lying face down, with her eyes crushed in...

When Misora was at her wit’s end, Ryuzaki had said, “Maybe the damage to the eyes is a message.” It sounded reasonable... in fact it seemed like the only possibility. Which meant... her eyes?

Misora had gone back to the cabinet and taken out the album of photographs again. She looked through them once more, checking every picture of the little blonde girl.

And realized...

that there was not one picture of her wearing glasses.

The only picture of her with glasses was the one of her dead. Not because there wasn’t a problem with her eyes—her chart was in the file, showing her right eye at 0.1 and her left at 0.05—but that she almost always wore contact lenses. After her death, the killer had put the glasses on and taken the contact lenses away They were disposable lenses, so the investigative team had not noticed them missing. Misora had contacted the victim’s mother, who had confirmed not only that Quarter Queen almost never wore glasses, not even at home, but that the glasses she was wearing in the crime scene photograph did not belong to her.

“Surprisingly hard to notice... who would ever think to ask if the glasses a murder victim was found wearing belonged to them? Literally a blind spot... perhaps that’s what the crushed eyes mean?”

Ryuzaki had said. ‘And the glasses looked so natural on her... making it even less likely that the police would notice. She never realized that she was meant to wear them.”

<< PREV           NEXT >>