“Don’t misunderstand me—I fundamentally agree with your reasoning. Just not that particular point.” “But... then...” If he refuted the most important date, the entire argument fell apart. He had effectively refused to agree with anything she’d said.
“But I have a suggestion. Misora, you were raised in Japan
Japanese numerals than I am.”
• . Numbers in kanji?”
“Visualize the kanji for twenty two.” The kanji...
She pictured the characters in her mind, but they failed to suggest anything. “Well?”
“No, I don’t know what you...”
“Oh... then let me try a hint. Misora, imagine that the middle kanji, the kanji for ten: is a plus sign. Which means 1 is actually two plus two.”
“Oh.”
That wasn’t a hint. It was the answer.
“Add them together and you get four... and you already explained brilliantly that four was one plus three. After all, if one plus three is B, then we have to put one and three together, which is the same as one plus three, which create the shape of the letter B. That’s exactly why we can read twenty-two as I. We just need enough reason to add the numbers together. And with this condition, your reasoning for placing the fourth murder on the 22nd sounds accurate. I was somewhat bowled over by the force of your conviction earlier, and was a little nervous about following your lead, but now I feel as happy as if I’d drunk a mug of molasses.”
That metaphor gave Misora heartburn.
But apparently Ryuzaki believed this was why she had said the fourth murder would take place on the
22nd. Not full marks, since his reasoning for the actual date was better than hers, but she could relax a little.
“But Misora,” Ryuzaki said. “One more thing.” “Yeah?”
This was the second one more thing.
It caught her off guard.
“Your theory is based on the assumption that when the killer chooses his victims, he requires that they have the initials B.B. But like we discussed, there is still a possibility that the killer is after Q.Q., not B.B.”
“Oh, yeah...”
If the fourth victim turned out to be a child with the initials Q.Q., lying face down, then their theories would be thrown out the window.
“If it is Q rather than B, then your theory doesn’t hold water. You would have created it from nothing, forcing it into existence based on faulty logic. Based on coincidence.”
“Coincidence... that the number thirteen looks like a B? But it’s so blatant… and Q just fits in there so neatly...”
“Yes. I agree. I don’t believe any of it was coincidental. But your theory is based on hindsight. Created after the fact. I want to know why you chose to build your theories on B, not Q.”
“Well...”
Because L had said so. Rather firmly. “The killer is B.” She’d known in advance. But she couldn’t tell Ryuzaki that. She had to keep L a secret from him. She couldn’t let her guard down and let something slip, no matter how much they spoke.
“I guess with three victims... there were two Bs to one Q, and B just seemed more likely. I thought about Q afterward, of course, but I couldn’t find any patterns that related to it she said, trying to cover. But even as the words left her mouth, she knew they sounded unnatural.
And sure enough, Ryuzaki dismissed it, “That’s so arbitrary. Nothing to support it at all.”
Her good mood was gone now. She bit her lip—she had reached those conclusions working backward, trying to figure out a reason for what L had said. L’s word supported it, so it was probably right, but that didn’t change anything
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