Ningyo was to be placed opposite the door, then from this position her eyes would meet the doll’s, their sightlines at exactly the same height. Of course, Wara Ningyo had no eyes, and this wasn’t getting her anywhere.
“Just because they were mixed in with the stuffed animals, there was no need for it to be opposite the door... if the placement is significant. . . the placement... or is it just another manifestation of his finicky nature... ow!”
Thinking too hard in an awkward sitting position had caused her to lose her balance and thump the back of her head on the doorknob. Rubbing the pain away, Misora turned absently to look behind her... and...
Her eyes lit upon the doorknob, and.
And just below it, the thumb turn lock. The latch.
Misora’s head snapped around so fast it made an audible whooshing noise, and she looked at the opposite wall again. There was nothing there, just an unbroken stretch of wallpaper. But Misora had just been imagining a Wara Ningyo hanging there. But a Wara Ningyo nailed at that height was not opposite the door.
It was opposite the doorknob.
The doll was directly across from the thumb turn lock. “Oh... how did I not notice that?!”
Waist height—she had known that was where the Wara Ningyo were placed since she first saw the police file. At the first crime scene, when she had turned the thumb turn lock she had consciously noticed that the grip was at her waist height, and at the second scene she had thought clearly that the design of the apartment door was different, but it was of the same construction,, .and at the third scene she had turned the knob and opened the door while balancing a serving tray on her belt buckle. And it was easy enough to figure out that the Wara Ningyo and the thumb turn locks were at the same height. She did not even need to open the file and corn pare measurements. But so what? So what if the Wara Ningyo were nailed to the wall at the same height as the thumb turn locks.., and the Wara Ningyo were placed directly opposite the latch of said thumb turn lock? Was there some reason for that?
She was headed for an answer she should not have headed for. She would reach an answer she should not reach.
At this rate... she knew she would.
An answer that would overturn, uproot everything she had believed about this case.. .and she couldn’t stop herself. She was past the point of being consciously capable of interrupting her deduc tions. Assuming that there was to be a Wara Ningyo placed on the wall opposite the door at the fourth scene... proof by contradiction. Four dolls, three, two, one!
“No, that doesn’t make sense... that can’t possibly be true… the locked room trick? The needle and thread locked room... the needle was at the third scene… and the thread? Under the crack in the door... the crack... the space... no space, tightly packed...”
A locked room.
A locked room... was usually created to make it look like the victim had committed suicide. But in this case, there was nothing like that... which meant if you flipped the idea... then the locked rooms existed
to make a suicide look like a murder. What then?
What then? “Ah...”
In truth...
All along, Naomi Misora had done nothing that Ryuzaki had not manipulated her into. There was no point now in going back as far as the similarity between q and b they had discovered in the bookshelf message, but her conclusions about the date of the murder had changed shape dramatically while she was talking to Ryuzaki, and the notion that the third murder looked like a clock... Ryuzaki had led her to that from the moment she noticed the watch was missing. He had brought up the wedding ring, he had pointed out that the head and arm and leg were different lengths, he had suggested the walls as sides of the clock... Naomi Misora had been controlled like a puppet on strings.
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