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the watch, he would have just taken it. Watches aren’t like rings. They never get stuck. There’s no reason to cut off the arm.”

“No, I don’t think he was after the watch either. But maybe the watch is this scene’s message. If only the watch was missing it would be too obvious, so he took the arm too...”

“As a form of misdirection? I see... but in that case, we still don’t know why he cut off the right leg as well. I doubt she wore a watch around her ankle. And even as a case of misdirection, there’s still no need to take the whole arm—the wrist would have been plenty.”

“Yeah, true enough, but still... the watch idea itself still seemed like a good one.” She felt like she was nearing the truth. If that same unnatural fixation, to use a cliché phrase, that she’d encountered at the first and second scenes was working here, than she felt like it would manifest itself this way...

“Left arm... right leg... left wrist... right ankle... left hand... right foot... watch... clock... timepiece... ticker.. both hands and feet, both arms and legs... or are the bits left behind what really matter’ Not the left arm and right leg, but the right arm and left legs? The four limbs...”

“Plus the head is five.”

“Five… five minus two is three… three. The third scene. Limbs... and the head make five... the head? The neck... the neck, and one leg, and one arm...”

Misora was stringing words together as they came to her—but she was just spinning in circles, like a lost child, afraid of running into a dead end. The more she babbled, the more she lost the feeling that she was on to something. The hands of her compass were spinning...

“If five minus two is three, then he could have cut off both arms or both legs, or the left arm and the head... if the left arm had to be one of them, then why the right leg?”

Purely to fill the silence, Misora forced out a question that had not occurred to her, a question she did not even consider worth asking. but Ryuzaki took her up on it.

“The head and arm and leg left behind are all of different lengths...”

For a moment, she didn’t know what he meant. It seemed like a total non sequitur, and her mind couldn’t keep up with it. But an arm was longer than a head, and a leg was longer than an arm, but so what? Was Ryuzaki just blurting out whatever crossed his mind the way she was? But that wasn’t going to help guide her compass needle...

“Needle? Or hands...” “What about needles?” “No, hands...”

The classic locked room trick with the needle and thread. But that had nothing to do with this... but hands? Could that be...

“A clock! Clock hands, Ryuzaki!” “Hunh? Clock hands...?”

“The hour hand, minute hand, and second hand! Three of them! Each of different lengths!”

Misora slapped the floor hard with her upraised arm and used the impact to push herself up to a sitting position. She moved quickly over to Ryuzaki, grabbed the coffee cup from him, drank the contents in a single gulp, and slammed the empty cup down on the table as if trying to break it.

“At the first scene he took Akazukin Chacha away to point us to Insufficient Relaxation, at the second scene he took the contacts to point us toward the glasses, and here at the third scene, he took away the wrist watch... and turned the victim into a clock!”

“The victim... into a clock?” Ryuzaki’s deep-set eyes stared at her with a calmness in stark contrast to her own excitement. “By clock you mean...”

“The head is the hour hand, the arm is the minute hand, and the leg is the second hand! That’s why the killer took the watch with him, and that’s why he didn’t just take the watch or just cut off the hand, but cut the arm off at the root and had to cut one of the legs off as well otherwise, there wouldn’t be three

hands left!”

All that came out in one breath, and at last Misora felt her feet on the ground again. She took a picture out of her pocket the picture of Backyard Bottomslash’s corpse. On her back, her arms and legs... no arm and leg spread out, the left arm and right leg missing Backyard Bottomslash.

“Look at this, Ryuzaki. See? The head is the hour, the arm is the minute, the leg is the second, so this is

12:45 and twenty seconds.”

“Mmm. When you put it that way...”

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