only four victims, so the lack of further murders would not lead to the conclusion that the killer had passed away. L would be left chasing after the mirage of the deceased B. L would be forever followed by the mirage of the deceased B. L would spend the rest of his life trembling in fear of B’s shadow.
L would lose. B would win.
B was the top, and L was the bottom—L would grovel at B’s feet. The copy would surpass the original.
Or so he thought.
In reality this did not happen, and the dizzying amount of time he had spent preparing for his crimes was all for nothing, destroyed, blown to smithereens—because he had focused all his energies on L, and never once viewed Naomi Misora as anything more than a pawn. All his attention was on the man
behind her, and he never even saw Misora standing right in front of him. Even as he believed himself to be praising her skills, he ultimately underestimated her. She had done better than he expected—that
very expression is, essentially, arrogant. If you ask me, even without Ryuzaki’s hints, she might well
have deciphered the messages at almost the same speed. Naomi Misora.
The key had been the locked rooms. The locked rooms. Ryuzaki had said over and over that there was no need to think about them, that the killer had probably just used a spare key, because even he knew that focusing on that point could mean trouble. Beyond Birthday had a fair idea where the weaknesses in his own plot lay.
But those were weaknesses that would be forgotten once the fourth murder happened, and if he could just hold out till then, if he could just distract her until then... then B would have won. That Misora figured it out just before the fourth murder was complete can only be described as a stroke of good luck.
At the first scene, and the second, and the third, the Wara Ningyo had been directly across from the door, and the dolls had been at the same height as the latch of the thumb turn lock—she had to notice both these things to figure it out. At the third murder scene the dolls had been counted along with the stuffed animals, which had seemed like a reasonable enough idea, but that was not their primary function. And their function as a metaphor for the victims was, again, not their true purpose. Specifically, let us look at how the locked rooms were created. The doors were locked with a thread. The thread from a needle and thread. Misora had suggested running a thread under the door, looping it
around the latch, and pulling on the thread to make the latch turn. Ryuzaki had denied it, but it had been a close call. She had been so close, but with that method, the force would have been pulling in the room direction, applying pressure to the door itself rather than the latch. As Ryuzaki had explained, the only effect would have been to pull outward on a door that opened inward.
But she had been very close.
At what she believed to be a potential fourth crime scene, Misora had crouched down in front of the door, putting her line of sight at waist height, and looked at the opposite wall—and imagined there was a Wara Ningyo there. Pinned to the wall across from her. Of course, the doll had to be physically
pinned to the wall. There was no way it could just float there on its own—that would be magic, a scene out of a horror movie. It had to have been pinned there— which means there had also been something pinning it there. The holes in the wall at each crime scene—without even looking at the photos of the dolls in her files, Naomi Misora was Japanese, she knew about them as part of her culture.
Wara Ningyo had nails through them. Long, thin nails.
And what mattered to the killer was not the doll itself. . .but the nail. The Wara Ningyo were nothing but a dramatic bit of misdirection. The shape of the nails.. the nail’s head. The thread went under the door, around the head of the nail, and from there over to the side wall, around another nail head, and finally back to the door itself, around the latch of the thumb turn lock—at the same height as the dolls. Obviously, this is a simplified description to make it easier to understand, and the operation was actually performed in reverse, starting at the lock, then going to the side wall, the opposite wall, and back under the door, but. . . essentially, the thread sketched a big triangle in the middle of the room. And if you pulled the string then...
The latch of the thumb turn lock would turn. Click.
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