behavior, but she was not the kind to interfere with other people’s methods of deduction. Instead, Misora tried to figure out if, on her way to the desk, she should step over Ryuzaki or go around. She did not want to step over him, but it irritated her to go around.
“Um… mm?”
And then she noticed. At least, she noticed that she had noticed something. But what had she noticed? Something had caught her eye... no, before that, the moment she opened the door her attention had been overwhelmed by the spectacle of Ryuzaki playing dead, so how could it have? That wasn’t it. Then
what would she have seen first if Ryuzaki were not lying there? If Ryuzaki had not been in the way of her carrying the coffee... if he had not been there... then nothing. The room would have been perfectly ordinary, if a little frilly. She could barely smell the blood. The only thing out of place was the hole in the wall... the hole?
“The mark left by the Wara Ningyo?”
It was just a hole, and hard to make out. But if it was not a hole, but the Wara Ningyo? Then the first thing that would catch her eye upon opening the door, just based on line of sight, was not Ryuzaki playing dead, but the Wara Ningyo. The moment she opened the door, she would see the Wara
Ningyo... one of the dolls had been carefully placed in exactly that spot. And all the Wara Ningyo had been nailed to the walls at exactly the same height (at about waist height, if you were as tall as Misora) but the distance from the walls on either side changed depending on location. But at each location, when she had opened the door...
A hole.
“Excuse me, Ryuzaki”
Still holding the coffee tray, Misora stepped... no, vaulted over Ryuzaki. At least, she meant to, but she was so distracted she missed her landing, and stomped on his stomach. In boots. And she reflectively tried to keep her balance, and avoid dropping the tray, which left her putting her entire weight on Ryuzaki’s abdomen.
“Gah!” said the corpse. Naturally.
“S-sorry!”
If she had spilled the coffee on him as well, Naomi Misora’s reputation as a klutz would have been cemented forever, but in actual fact, the matter did not go that far. Her martial arts experience had honed her sense of balance. She put the tray down on the desk and picked up the police file. She checked to see if she had remembered correctly.
“What is it, Misora?”
Ryuzaki may have been an impossibly weird freak of a man, but even he did not go so far as to rejoice at the pain of a woman stepping on him. He stopped pretending to be a corpse, rolled over, and crawled toward her.
“I’m looking over the charts of the crime scenes. In each of them... I noticed the same thing. About the locations of the Wara Ningyo.”
“The locations? What do you mean?”
“When we investigated the scenes, the police had already taken the dolls away, so I never noticed before... but there is a noticeable trend in the placement of the dolls. This scene included—when you open the door to enter the room, the first thing you see is a doll. There is a doll directly opposite the door—the killer arranged it so that when you come into the room, the first thing that catches your eye is a Wara Ningyo.”
“Oh yeah...“ Ryuzaki said, nodding. “That’s certainly true for this room, and now that you mention it, I remember seeing the hole in the wall when I went into the first and second rooms as well. But Misora, what does that mean?”
“Er... um...”
What did it mean? She felt like it was a major discovery, and had stomped on Ryuzaki’s belly in her enthusiasm, but now that he asked she didn’t have an answer. Awkward. She couldn’t admit the truth, so she scrambled to string something together.
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