4
“Whoa, it's cold!”
The moment the door to the Tenth room was opened, Tsukiyo cried out at the chill breeze that blew through the gap. Yuma also instinctively huddled up.
“Oh, Mr. Kagami must have opened the window to preserve the body. Either that, or they opened when the fire alarm went off yesterday.”
Tsukiyo adjusted the collar of her suit and entered the room. As she'd said, the window of the Tenth room was open about forty-five degrees from the top, its pane leaning outside. The temperature in the room was below freezing, and their breaths came out white.
“We can't stay here too long,” said Kuruma, huddling his shoulders.
“It's alright, there's not much I need to check.”
With no hesitation, Tsukiyo strode to the bed where Oita's body still lay.
“Yuma, come here. I want your opinion as a doctor.”
Beckoned by Tsukiyo, Yuma shivered as he kneeled down next to the bed and looked at Oita's body. His shirt was stained blackish-red with blood and had several holes that looked like they'd been made with a knife. The bedsheets were stained with blood that had leaked from the corpse.
As was his habit as a doctor, Yuma touched Oita's neck. There was no pulse from the carotid artery, obviously. The skin felt like cold rubber. His fingertips felt the characteristic texture of a body that had lost its life.
“It's hard to say anything at this point.”
Tsukiyo immediately rolled up Oita's bloody shirt.
“Hey, wait, messing with a corpse's clothes is a bit much...”
“What are you talking about, Yuma? His clothes were already messed when we brought him here from the dining room, so there's no need to worry. Besides, I'm better at solving cases than the police. There's no need to worry about preserving the scene for them.”
Tsukiyo wiped the blood from her hands with a handkerchief as she spoke.
Yuma needed to know who'd killed Oita and Madoka by tomorrow evening. Now was no time to be worrying about the police. Yuma centered himself and looked down at Oita's body.
He could see several stab wounds in the chest, large enough that the rib bones were visible through them.
“This wound here was probably the fatal blow. Judging from its position, the knife must have pierced his heart or lungs. He probably died instantly.”
“Yuma, what's that?”
Tsukiyo pointed to Oita's neck.
“There's some sort of dirt stain there.”
“Dirt...?”
Yuma bent down and brought his face closer, staring at the spot where Tsukiyo pointed. Sure enough, there were two black dots there. He rubbed them with his finger, but the dots didn't smudge.
“These aren't stains. The skin is discolored. Maybe they're marks from some kind of injury...”
“Could they be burn marks?”
“Burns... Maybe, but why?”
Tsukiyo gently touched the two dots with her index finger.
“Two burn marks in a line, with a small gap between them. I've seen this before. They're marks from a stun gun.”
“A stun gun!?” Yuma shouted.
“Yes. A stun gun has two electrodes at the end, which are pressed to the victim. An electric current is run between them, causing paralysis. It usually doesn't leave any marks when they touch a person's clothing, but if the electrodes are pressed directly to the skin, it often leaves burns just like these.”
“So Mr. Oita was stabbed to death after being rendered unable to resist by a stun gun?”
“That's probably a reasonable assumption. In that case, the risk of the victim fighting back could be minimized. Even someone weak could have committed the crime.”
“Someone weak...”
As Yuma muttered to himself, Kuruma approached, rubbing his hands together for warmth.
“So even an old man like me could be the culprit.”
“It isn't just you, Mr. Kuruma. There's also the women to consider. Myself, Ms. Yumeyomi, and Ms. Tomoe.”
“Ms. Tomoe?” Yuma frowned. “But she's a victim...”
“When Mr. Oita was murdered, Ms. Tomoe was still alive. It isn't uncommon in mystery novels for a murderer to themself be murdered by a second culprit. Like in-”
“Let's save the mystery talk for later. We'll freeze to death if we stay here much longer. Is there anything else we need to investigate in this room?”
Sensing that they were in for a long lecture, Yuma took the initiative to stop it. Tsukiyo pouted, puffing out her cheeks.
“No, that's all. This room isn't a crime scene, so the only thing we need to examine is the body.”
Yuma and the others left the Tenth room, locked the door, and waited for their bodies to warm before entering the Sixth room. Just like in the Tenth room, Yuma and Tsukiyo found themselves in sub-zero temperatures.
In the bed next to the open window, Madoka, clad in a white wedding dress, stared at the ceiling with dilated pupils.
When they'd found her that morning, there had only been a bit of blood around the chest of the wedding dress, but now the dark red stain had spread all the way to the skirt.
Tsukiyo unhesitatingly grabbed the skirt of the wedding dress and lifted. Yuma clenched his jaw at the pink muscle and yellow fat visible through the multiple cuts running down her pale thighs.
“That must have hurt. Even if they wanted to know where the dungeon was, they didn't need to go that far.”
Tsukiyo shook her head, put the skirt back down, and rolled up the top of the dress. The words KILL NAKAMURA SEIJI had already been covered in more blood and were no longer legible.
“She was stabbed once in the chest. After she revealed the location of the dungeon, the culprit no longer had any use for her. Can we take for granted that was the fatal blow?”
Tsukiyo indicated a large puncture in Madoka's chest, identical to the ones in Oita's.
“I think we can, yes,” Yuma said.
Tsukiyo adjusted the top of the dress, then brought her face right up against Madoka's chest.
“Hmm, there are no holes in the dress. She must have been tortured and stabbed to death before being changed into this wedding dress. I wonder why the culprit did that.”
As Tsukiyo put a hand to her chin, Kuruma, who had been watching from near the entrance, spoke up.
“The woman found dead in the dungeon, Mashu Shinju, was getting married soon, wasn't she? I think the killer wanted to communicate that they were committing revenge for her sake, because the victims had killed her before she could wear her own wedding dress. The poplar fluff at the scene of Oita's murder may have also been to suggest the image of someone lost in the snowy mountains.”
“That does make a certain amount of sense. But would they really go to all that trouble just for symbolism? It takes a lot of work to change the clothes on a dead body. Collecting all the fluff from the poplars in the dining room and scattering it around would have been tedious enough, but putting on the dress would have been even worse. Would they really have gone that far just to tell us it was revenge?”
Tsukiyo mumbled to herself as though organizing her own thoughts as she approached the open window and shone a penlight she'd taken from her suit pocket on the outer wall of the Tower.
“As expected, no signs of the outer walls being climbed. There are no footprints on the ground below, so there's absolutely no way the culprit escaped out this window.”
“Then how did the culprit lock the room?”
Tsukiyo didn't answer Yuma's question. After a few seconds, she instead said “Let's go. There's one more room we need to check” and made for the entrance. Leaving the Sixth room behind. Yuma and the others took a moment to warm up as they had before, then used the master key to open the First room, the first crime scene.
They had to check Kozushima's body. And Yuma had to make sure nobody realized how nervous he was. The doctor took a long, thin breath, desperately trying to force down his racing heart.
The door opened. Unlike the other rooms, the First room's windows weren't designed to open. But since the room was made entirely out of glass and the heating was off, the air that blew through the door was just as cold as in the other two rooms.
Calm down. Stay calm. Yuma, whose stomach felt like it was about to be crushed, could only let out a stunned
“...What?”
His thoughts stopped cold. He didn't understand what he was seeing. It made no sense.
The sight that lay beyond the door was impossible.
Kozushima was lying face up before the mahogany desk. A ragged knife was plunged into his chest.