yanked the rug out from under her. If it was deliberate, he would have been impressed, but that
seemed unlikely, It seemed much more likely that Ryuzaki actually did have a fetish for children’s
underwear.
Juki sighed again, looking around the room—the entire apartment was smaller than Agus Harmanto’s bedroom. The standard of living gap alone made it hard to see any connection between
the first and second victims.
“We’re talking a single mother here, right? Who has now moved hack in with her parents? It must have
been devastating...”
“Yes. These apartments were built for college students, intended to house only one, so a young girl and
her mother living here attracted a fair amount of attention. I asked around a little this morning, and
heard many interesting things. But most of them were already in the police report you showed me
yesterday. The mother was out of town at the time of the murders, and the body was discovered by a
college girl who lived next door. The mother first saw her daughter’s body in the morgue.”
As she listened to Ryuzaki speak, Juki checked the walls for the holes where the Boneka voodoo had
been nailed. Of the four walls, the front wall with the door in it—did not have a hole, but the other three did. Like in Agus Harmanto’s bedroom, these holes indicated the location of the dolls.
“Something bothering you, Juki?”
“Yes... yesterday, we…” Juki said, emphasizing the plural, “... we decoded the message the killer left
at the scene of the first murder, but... the Boneka voodoo and the locked room remain mysteries.”
“Yes,” Ryuzaki said, closing the door and dropping down onto all fours.
But unlike the first scene, two people had lived in this room, and there was quite a lot of furniture—the
place was a mess. It looked rather difficult to crawl around in. Nevertheless, Ryuzaki persisted, and
remained like that all the way to the other side of the room. Juki wished he would give up.
“But Juki, I don’t think it’s worth wasting much time on the locked room issue. This is not a mystery
novel—realistically speaking, it’s quite possible he simply used a spare key. There are no keys that
can’t be duplicated.”
“True enough, but do you really think this killer would do something so prosaic? There was no real
need to create a locked room in the first place. But he did so anyway. In which case, it might be a kind
of puzzle...”
“Puzzle?”
“Or a game of some kind.”
“Yes... yes, maybe...”
Juki looked back at the door she’d just come through. The design was different from the first murder
scene (the difference between the front door of an apartment and the interior door of a house), but the
construction and size were basically the same. A generic lock, simply made—very easy to break in
when the house was empty by drilling through the door and turning the latch from the inside (known as
a thumb turn lock) but obviously, there had been no holes in the door at any of the three scenes.
“What would you do, Ryuzaki? If you were trying to lock it from the outside?”
“Use a key.”
“No, not like that... if you’d lost the key.”
“Use a spare key.”
“No, not like that... you don’t have a spare key, either.”
“Then I wouldn’t lock it.”
“…”
Not that he was wrong.
Juki reached out and shook the door.
“If this were a mystery novel... locked rooms are always created by a trick, like with a needle and
thread, or... I mean, we call it a locked room, but these are just ordinary rooms, so they’re never that
secure. They aren’t like Agus’s bookshelves—they’ve got plenty of gaps and chinks around the
frame. String could get under it easily... run a bit of string under the door, and tie it to the edge of the
latch, and pull it...”
“Impossible. The gap isn’t that big, and the angle would kill the force applied. You could try it out, but
too much of the string would be pressed against the door. Before you could ever turn the latch, all the
power you put into it would be eaten up pulling against the edge of the door. Pulling the door toward
you.”
“Yeah...but a lock this simple doesn’t leave much room for a trick. The doors in detective novels
usually have much more complicated ones.”
“There are many ways to create a locked room. And we can’t rule out the possibility that he had a key.
More important, Juki, is the question of why the killer made a locked room. He had no need to make
one, but he did so anyway. If he made a puzzle, why did he do it?”
“As a game. For fun.”
“Why?”
You could ask that about any of this.
Why send a crossword puzzle to the LAPD, why leave a message on the bookshelf... and most of all,
why kill three people? If the killer had a clear motive, then what was it? Even if the killings were
random, something must have caused it... Yakujima had said so. But they still had no idea what linked the
victims together.
Juki leaned against the wall and took some photographs out of her bag.
Pictures of the second victim killed in this room—a young blonde girl, wearing glasses, lying on her
face. Looking closely, her head had been dented in the shape of the weapon, and both her eyes had been
poked out. The eyes had been crushed after death—like the cuts on Agus Hermanto’s chest, this
was mutilation of the corpse, with no relation to the cause of death. he had no idea what the killer had
used to destroy the eyes, but trying to imagine the mental state of someone who could poke the eyes out of a cute little girl made Juki feel a little sick. Juki might be an FBI agent, but he was not prone
to fits of righteousness—but there were some things that were simply unforgivable. What the killer had
done to this second victim clearly fell into that category.
“Killing a child... how horrible.”
“Killing an adult is also horrible, Juki. Killing children or adults—equally horrible,” Ryuzaki said,
unaffected, almost
Indifferent.
“Ryuzaki...”
“I’ve checked everything once,” Ryuzaki said, standing up. He rubbed his hands on his jeans.
Apparently he was at least aware that crawling around on the floor would make his hands dirty. “But I
didn’t find any money.”
“You were looking for money?” Like a thief
An extremely blatant one.
“No, just in case. One possibility is that the killer was after money, but in that case, the second victim is
significantly more impoverished than the first and third victims. There was a chance they were hiding
something, but apparently not. Let us take a break. Would you care for some coffee,Juki?”
“Oh... sure.”
“One moment,” Ryuzaki said, heading for the kitchen. Juki wondered if he had jam in the fridge
again but decided that she didn’t care. he abandoned that line of thought, and sat down at the table.
he had somehow missed her timing to tell Ryuzaki about being attacked. Oh well. he might as well
avoid mentioning it, and see how he reacted. he had no proof her assailant had anything to do with
Ryuzaki, but not telling him made it easier for her to catch him off guard.
“Here you are.”
Ryuzaki came back from the kitchen, carrying a tray with two cups of coffee on it. He placed one in
front of Juki and the other opposite her, then pulled out the chair and assumed the strange sitling
position he had demonstrated the day before, with his knees pulled up against his chest. Ignoring the matter of manners, it looked extremely difficult to sit like that—or was it? Juki wondered, and took
a sip of coffee.
“Augh!” he yelled, spitting it out. “Cough... hack... urrghhh…”
“Something wrong, Juki?” Ryuzaki asked, innocently sipping his cup. “Once something has entered
your mouth, it should never be spit out like that. And those terrible moans do nothing for your image,
either. You are quite awsome, so you should try to present yourself accordingly.”
“M-murderously sweet... poisonous!”
“Not poison. Sugar.”
“…”
So you’re the killer?
Juki looked down at the contents of her cup... which was less a liquid than a paste. Less like sugar
dissolved in coffee than sugar moistened with coffee—a gooey, gelatinous mass glistening majestically
in her cup. While her attention had been distracted by Ryuzaki’s posture, he had allowed this
substance to touch his hand...
“I feel like I drank dirt.”
“But dirt is not this sweet.”
“Sweet Dirt...”
That sounded like an avant-garde piece. The diabolic gritty feeling in her mouth would not go away.
Across from me, Ryuzaki was happily sipping away... lapping away. Apparently he had not made
Juki’s cup this way out of sheer spite, but this was, in his view, a perfectly normal amount of sugar.
“Whew... coffee always picks me up,” Ryuzaki said, finishing his cup and what must have been at least
two hundred grams of pure sugar. “Now then, to business.”
Juki would have liked to get up and go wash the sugar out of her mouth, but he tried to ignore the
impulse. “Go ahead,” he said.
“About the missing link.”
“Have you figured something out?”
“It seems the killer was definitely not after money... but last night, after I left your company, I noticed
something interesting. A connection between the victims that nobody seems to have picked up on.”
“What?”
“Their initials, Juki. All three victims have rather unique initials. Agus Hermanto,Amel Tohin, Vincent Valentine. A.H., A.H., V.V. Both their first and last names begin with the same
letter... what is it, Juki?”
“Nothing...”
Was that all? His disappointment had clearly shown on her face and interrupted Ryuzaki’s line of
thought, but she couldn’t even be bothered to try and cover. What a pointless waste of time. Juki had
noticed that the moment he first saw the victim’s names. It wasn’t worth bringing up like this.
“Ryuzaki... do you know how many people there are with alliterative initials in the world? In Indonesia? There’s only twenty-six letters in the alphabet, which means by a very rough calculation
about one in twenty-six people has a name like that. Not even worth calling a connection.”
“Oh? And I thought I was on to something Ryuzaki said, dejected. It was hard to tell how much of his
reaction was genuine.
He appeared to be sulking, a trait which, in him, was not at all cute.
An absolutely terrible way to present oneself.
“I mean, you yourself are M Ryuzaki—M. R.”
“Oh! I hadn’t noticed.”
“This is pointless.”
he should never have expected anything from him. All that nonsense about him leading her through
the deductions yesterday had been nothing but paranoia.
M.R.?
“Juki.”
“Eh? Oh, what?”
“Since my deductions have come to naught, do you have any good ideas?”
“No, not really. I’m in the same boat as you... can’t think of any real course of action except looking for
another message, like we did yesterday. I feel like I’m dancing on the killer’s palms, which irritates the
hell out of me, but...”
“Then let us dance. Playing your enemy’s game until he relaxes and lets a hint drop is a perfectly good
strategy. So, Juki, if there is a message here... then where?”
“Well, we can at least guess the contents. Presumably the message has the third victim’s name,
Vincent Valentine, or his address. The crossword puzzle led to the first case, the book pages led to
the second case, so...”
“Yes, I agree.”
“But where that message is hidden, I have no idea. If we can figure out some sort of pattern, that would
help us catch him, but...”
Something that should he here, but wasn’t.
Ryuzaki had described it that way.
Referring to the victim, and to the bookshelves.
Was there something like that here? Something that should be here, but wasn’t? Something that should
be here but isn’t here was starting to sound like a linguistic Mobius strip.
“So,” Ryuzaki said. “If whatever we find will simply point us to the third victim, then perhaps it would
be more effective if we skipped this scene and went right to the third one. After all, our goal is to
prevent the fourth murder as well as solve the case.”
“Yeah.”
he was the one who had pointed out the chances of a fourth murder... but Ryuzaki’s reaction had
suggested he had been well aware of this possibility, which was why she hesitated now.
“The third murder has already happened, and we can’t prevent that, but there is a chance that we can
stop the fourth. Rather than waste time looking for a message when we already know what it says, it would be far more constructive to look for a message leading us to the fourth victim.”
“But that just feels so submissive ...like we’re following his lead. I mean we might miss an important
clue to his identity if we skip this room. Even if there isn’t some clear evidence, we might get a feel ing
or a hunch that will help us out later. I agree that preventing the fourth murder is important, hut if we
focus on that too much, we’ll lose the chance to get aggressive, to take control of the situation.”
“Don’t worry. I’m a top.”
“A top?”
“An aggressive top,” Ryuzaki said. “I have never once been submissive. One of the few things I can
boast about. I have never even been submissive to a traffic signal.”
(LOL)
“You really should,”
“Never.”
Adamant.
“Preventing the fourth murder should lead us directly to identifying and arresting the killer. This is
what my clients want, more than anything. But I see your point as well, Juki. I’m already finished
checking the room over, so while you are doing that, I would like to think about the third murder, Do
you mind if I look at the file you showed me yesterday once more?”
“Work different angles? Fine by me...”
he’d never intended to cooperate with him anyway.
he took a binder out of his bag, checked to make sure it contained the file on the third murder, and
handed it across the table to Ryuzaki.
“And... these are the crime scene photographs...”
“Thanks.”
“But like I said, there haven’t been any breakthroughs. The con tents are the same as yesterday.”
“Yes, I know. But there were a few things I wanted to double check... but this is a horrible picture, isn’t
it?” Ryuzaki said, putting one of the photographs down on the table where Juki could see it. It was a
picture of Agus Hermanto’s body. Juki had witnessed many horrible things during his career
at the FBI, but this picture was so grotesque it gave his chills every time he saw it. Compared with this
picture, cuts on a chest or crushed eyeballs were nothing.
The body was lying on its back, and the left arm and right leg had been chopped off at the root.
There was blood everywhere, all over the crime scene.
“They found the right leg abandoned in the bathroom, but they still have no idea where the left arm is.
Obviously, the killer took it with him. But why?”
“That question again? But Ryuzaki, isn’t that another example of something that should be there, but
isn’t? In this case, the victim’s left arm.”
“The killer needed to cut off the left arm... but he did not bring the right leg with him. He just tossed it
into the bathroom. What does that mean?”
“Either way, we’re going over there this afternoon... but I’d like to spend a few hours here first.”
“That sounds fine, Oh, yeah, there was a photo album belonging to the victim in that cabinet, Juki.
Probably worth checking out. You might be able to find something about the victim’s personality, or her friends...”
“Okay. I’ll do that.”
Ryuzaki turned his attention back to the file, and Juki stood up and made a beeline for the bathroom
sink. he could no longer bear the grainy feeling in his mouth. he quickly gargled, but once was
hardly enough, so she repeated the action two or three times.
he considered trying to contact Yakujima again. There had been no answer earlier, so... no, yesterday had been
a house, but in a tiny apartment like this there was no getting away from Ryuzaki. Even if he called
from the bathroom, he wouldn’t even need to move over to the door to hear me. he would have to tell
Yakujima about the attack eventually... or was that not something Yakujima would care about?
Juki looked up and saw her face in the mirror.
Juki.
This was me.
That much was clear.
Everyone knows the sensation of staring at a word for a long period of time until you start to wonder if
it is really spelled correctly. In the same way, it was possible to doubt oneself, to wonder how long one
could really be oneself. Was he still herself?
Which is why this was so important.
Why he stared at her reflection, confirming it again.
“But does Yakujima do the same?” he wondered suddenly. The century’s greatest detective, someone who
never showed himself in public, his identity unknown. How many people could say for sure that Yakujima was
Yakujima? Was there anyone at all? Juki had no way of knowing, but he wondered if Yakujima, looking in a
mirror, would even know who it was looking back at him.
“A mirror... a mirror?”
Hmm.
he almost had something there.
A mirror... right and left reversed in the reflection... reflected light... light reflecting off a smooth
surface... glass, silver nitrate aqueous solution... silver? No, the material didn’t matter, it was the quality
that was important... that quality... the reflection of light... no, the reversal of right and left... in
opposition?
“Opposition... the opposite... reversed!”
Juki bolted out of the bathroom, back to the table. Ryuzaki looked up from the file in surprise, his
black-rimmed eyes opening wide.
“What’s wrong?” he asked.
“The picture!”
“Hunh?”
“The photograph!”
Oh, you mean from the third crime scene?” Ryuzaki asked, placing the photograph on the table once
more. The corpse, with the left arm and right leg severed. Juki pulled two other photographs out of
her bag and placed them next to it. Crime scene photos of the first and second victims. Pictures of all the victims, showing the condition in which they were found.
“Notice anything, Ryuzaki?”
“What?”
“Anything about these photographs strike you as unnatural?”
“They’re all dead?”
“Being dead is not unnatural.”
“How philosophic.”
“Be serious. Look—the bodies are in different positions. Agus Hermanto is on his back, Amel Tohib is on her front, and Vincent Valentine is on his hack. Back, front, back.”
And you see a pattern in this? Connecting it to the nine days, four days, nine days between the
murders? Meaning that tomorrow the fourth victim will be found lying on her front?”
“No, not at all. I mean, that might be true, but... I was thinking of a different possibility. In other words,
the very fact that Amel Tohib’s corpse was left lying on her front is itself unnatural.”
Ryuzaki’s reaction was not very satisfactory—at least, it didn’t look that way Perhaps what Juki was
trying to say wasn’t getting across. he’d only just hit upon the idea and was talking quickly, fueled by
excitement, without fully thinking it through, so that was understandable. “Let me think a minute,”
Juki said, sitting down in the chair next to him.
“Juki, when thinking, I recommend this posture.”
“‘this posture’?”
With your knees against your chest like that? He was recommending that?
“Seriously. It raises deductive ability by forty percent. You must try it.”
“No, I... um... well, okay.”
It wasn’t like he wanted her to crawl, and it couldn’t hurt to try. It might help her calm down a little
from the high of inspiration.
he assumed the posture.
“…”
he regretted it a lot.
Even sadder was the fact that her ideas fell into place.
“Well, Juki? You mean Amel Tohib being on her front is a message from the killer? Pointing to
the third victim...”
“No, not a message—this is the missing link, Ryuzaki. An extension of what you said about their
initials...”
Two weird people sitting weirdly explaining weird bits of deduction was, Juki worried, a scene of
overwhelming weirdosity. Nevertheless, she pointed to each of the pictures in turn, feeling that she had
long since missed her chance to put her feet back on the floor. And this posture was a great deal easier
to maintain than it looked.
“The victims’ initials—A.H., A.H., V.V. Having both initials be the same isn’t enough to be a missing
link, but... both the first and the third victim have the same initials—A.H. If the second victim’s initials
were A.H. instead of V.V., then that would be a missing link, right?”
By simple arithmetic, twenty-six times twenty-six equals one in 676 people. Moving from matching initials to only one letter narrowed the odds by that much... and given how rare names beginning with
B were, the actual number was even lower.
“An interesting theory. But Juki, the second victim’s name is Amel Tohib, and her initials are
A.H. Are you implying that perhaps she was killed by mistake? That the killer was aiming for someone
with the initials A.H. and accidentally killed a A.H. instead?”
“What are you talking about? The message at the first scene clearly said Amel Tohib. There’s no
mistake there.”
“Oh, right. I forgot.”
Had he really forgotten? The phrase seemed phony... but if she puzzled out every one of Ryuzaki’s
reactions, they’d never get anywhere.
“Nine days, four days, nine days. A.H., A.H., V.V. Back, front, back. It’s certainly possible to see this
as alternating, like you suggested, and I certainly considered the idea, but... the killer’s exacting
approach to things makes that seem unlikely. Doesn’t suit his personality. People that anal usually
behave more coherently...”
“But the murder methods—strangulation, blunt force trauma, stabbing... they don’t show any kind of
consistency.”
“Except that they’re consistently different. He’s painstakingly trying something new every time. But
alternating is different from varied. Which is why, Ryuzaki, when I was looking in the mirror a moment
ago, it hit me—A and H are shaped the same.”
“A and H? They’re completely different!”
“As capital letters. But what about lower case?” Juki said, drawing the letters on the table top with
his fingertip. a and h. Over and over. a and h. h and a. h and a.
“See? Exactly the same shape! Just the other way around!”
“So that’s why she’s face down?”
“Exactly,” Juki nodded. ‘A rough estimate of one in 676 people have the initials A.H., so if
we take that as the missing link, then the killer must have had a lot of trouble finding victims. One was
easy enough, but two, three, even four... even more so. He had no choice but to use a A.H. instead.”
“I agree with everything except that last sentence. I don’t believe it would be easier to find someone
with the initials A.H. than it would be to find someone else with A.H. Even if it was, I think it’s better
to view the replacement as part of a puzzle designed for the investigation team. If they were all A.H.
right from the start, the missing link would have been too obvious. But this is only supposition. No
more than a thirty percent possibility.”
“Thirty percent...”
Annoyingly low.
If this were a test, she’d have failed.
“Why?”
“According to your theory, your conclusion is that all of that tells us why Amel Tohib was found
lying face down. Face down led you to reverse theory and to b and q... but this progression doesn’t
work logically, Juki.”
“Why not?”
“Lower case,” Ryuzaki said. “Initials are always capital letters.”
“Oh...”
Right.
Initials were never written lower case. They were upper case every time. Amel Tohib was always
A.H., never a.h. Just as A.H. was never a.h.
“And I thought I was on to something,” Juki said, burying her face in her knees.
So close... but even the assertion that a killer this anal would never alternate had been more than a little
bit of a stretch. But even so, the connection between a and h seemed so meaningful...
“Come now, Juki. Don’t be so disappointed.”
Sigh...
“I’m glad your theory was wrong. If Amel Tohib had been killed as a substitute... that’s a
horrible reason for a child in her teens to die.”
“Yeah... if you put it that way...”
Mmm? Juki frowned, suddenly. A moment before, Ryuzaki has insisted there was no difference
between killing a child and killing an adult, but the motive for it bothered him? A reason like this one...
did that have anything to do with anything? A child in her teens...
A child? A child?
A little child?
“…No, Ryuzaki.”
“In this case—lower case is perfect,” Juki said, his voice shaking.
Shaking with anger.
“That’s why the killer chose a child.”
A thirteen-year-old child.
Her initials.
Upper case, lower case.
“Because she was a child—lower case. And that’s why she was face down—upside down!”
It would be some time later before Juki realized that it was Ryuzaki who had enthusiastically
pointed out the matching initials, who had pointed out that the victim was a child, and who had given
her the sugary coffee that had sent her into the bathroom, where the mirror provided the inspiration he
needed to figure things out.
But either way... the Indonesia M Murder Cases.
The missing link had been found, the critical detail that would, in later years, give the case its name.
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