by Sakon Kaidou
“Babi, making things interesting is the domain of the phantom thief,” I said. “A detective’s sole interest is in unraveling the truth.”
To that end, I would do many plain, difficult, and yes, even outright boring things. I wouldn’t hesitate to request the help of a person with the aforementioned Embryo. Sadly, I wasn’t aware of anyone like that.
“Wait...” I murmured.
I actually did become acquainted with someone similar recently, I thought. Her Embryo’s power might prove to be a great help. I’ll have to contact her.
“To find anything that could lead us to the culprit, we should first take another look at what he did,” I said.
During the murder-burglaries, he’d stolen the goods and money from the hidden safes before going on to kill the heads of the households.
The murder had come after the theft to make it easier for the culprit to escape once the smell of the blood and the like led to the incident’s discovery.
This implied another fact about the culprit — instead of uncovering the locations of the safes by interrogating the victims, he’d known where they were ahead of time and had removed the contents before the murder.
Now that I think about it, I haven’t yet investigated anything about the residences besides the hidden safes and the alarm systems, so let’s try approaching this case from that angle.
I paid another visit to the DIN and bought the additional information regarding the two crime scenes. The organization knew so much that it felt as though its sole purpose was to make detectives’ jobs easier.
“So both of the hidden safes were coupled with something in the houses, eh?” I noted.
Apparently the walls slid open and exposed the treasure only upon pushing a bookcase or inserting a gem into the eye of a statue. Being a fan of retro games, Shu would probably call it a “Capcom-like design.”
Such mechanisms seemed to be quite popular among Gideon’s wealthy, and it was imperative that they were installed during the construction phase... and both the households that had suffered the murders had been built by the exact same contractor.
I see, I thought as I considered the three possibilities of why the culprit had found the safes so easily.
One: he had an Embryo with such abilities. Since this theory left little room for a detective to work in, I skipped it for now.
Two: he’d decided which houses he would commit the crimes in ahead of time, and then gone in to secretly take a look at the blueprints in the contractor’s offices. Considering how skillfully he’d snuck into the residences, that wasn’t too far-fetched.
Three: he was an employee of the contractor who’d designed the houses.
Also, I asked the DIN, and they confirmed that the culprit couldn’t have bought the info, like I’d done — I was the first one to ever show interest in it.
Anyway, the only real connection between the two murdered merchants was the fact that their houses had been built by the same contractor. What they’d traded in and the scale of their business had been entirely different.
If I were urged to name another similarity between them, I would add that both had dabbled in methods which, though not illegal, were definitely crooked.
They had probably been chosen because they seemed like people Shu might’ve targeted, but he certainly wasn’t the kind of person to do it, and even on the off chance that he had, he definitely wouldn’t have been secretive about it. In a way, this choice of targets was proof that the culprit hadn’t observed Shu for long enough.
Additionally, according to the DIN, there hadn’t been any recent assassination contracts in Gideon lately, so it was highly unlikely that the murders themselves were the goal.
In fact, the city was currently being patrolled by a group of ninjas hired by the count, and the intelligence network they provided made it extremely difficult for assassinations to occur, as they would quickly get wind of a disturbance of public order as major as an assassination plot.
...On the other hand, that meant that the culprit was above not only the house alarms, but the ninjas, as well.
Now, if it wasn’t a hired murder, it could also be a personal grudge, but I’d already established that the link between the two victims was far too thin to think the culprit would kill them both two days in a row using the same method.
And according to the DIN, I was the first to acquire the info that both residences had been built by the same contractor, so if the culprit was someone uninvolved, he couldn’t have known where they’d been designed or where to find their blueprints.
A part of me felt like he’d chosen his targets based on who had safes he could easily rob of gold and goods, and that would make the third theory highly likely.
“I should go for a little questioning,” I said, preparing to pay a visit to the contractor in question.
Before going there, I first went to one of my contacts, little Elizabeth, and asked her to make me a temporary investigator.
She immediately replied with a lively, “Anything for my teacher!”
I went straight to the one in charge and asked if they had any Masters among their employees.
The answer was “No,” and from his expression, it didn’t seem like he was lying.
I followed it up by asking whether they had designers working at home, and he said that they had a total of eight, so I asked for their addresses and took my leave.
“Sooo... there was no culprit, huh?” asked Babi.
“We can’t be certain of that yet, Babi.”
“Ehh? But there aren’t any Masters working for the contractor, right?”
Indeed, I thought back. At the very least, the chief was being honest about that.
“However, Babi, Masters may pretend to be tians,” I said.
Though it was a severe crime for tians to pretend to be Masters, there was no law or punishment for the reverse.
Consider Ray: he’d lost his left hand and now used a prosthetic. The left hand was where we Masters had our crests, and losing it made it move to a part of the left arm that was still healthy, be it forearm or — as it was in Ray’s case — upper arm.
I didn’t know what happened when a Master lost his whole arm right up to the shoulder, but I was certain that it moved in that case, as well.
Now, what if someone who’d lost their left hand began using a prosthetic that, unlike Ray’s, focused not on function, but on looking as much like a real hand as possible?
You would have a person who didn’t have a crest on his left hand.
Now, all he’d need to do was to proclaim himself a tian, and he would appear to be such, even under the scrutiny of Reveal. Though that skill had no trouble with names, jobs, and stats, it didn’t give any information about Embryos.
That person would look like a tian as long as you weren’t around to see the moment he summoned his Embryo from his crest.
“Oh, I get it,” Babi nodded. “But why are you only looking at those working from home?”
“No matter how well they fake being tians, Masters are still Masters,” I replied. “They log out every now and then, and if someone found that suspicious, it would invalidate the rest of what made up the façade. Because of this, a fake tian cannot work alongside others.”
They could only do jobs from home, where they were by themselves.
In that case, our culprit could easily come to see the plans of the houses he’d committed the crimes in if he’d just went and said something like, “I need to see the previous blueprints to help me with my work.”
“Wouldn’t he just quit right after seeing the blueprints?” asked Babi.
“Anyone would be able to see the link between a person who quit upon getting a gander at the blueprints and the incidents that happened at the residences based on them,” I said. “The culprit should still be working there, in order to avoid that scenario.”
If all my deductions aren’t off the mark, anyway.
“Also, there’s probably another reason,” I add
ed.
“Another reason? For pretending to be a tian and working at the contractor?”
“There are Masters that do such jobs and do them properly, but this time, we are dealing with someone who commits burglary and murder. For all we know, he might be planning something.”
If I was correct in my assumption that the culprit wanted to flaunt the extent of his power, it was likely that he had someone who knew of his situation — someone who, the culprit believed, would be impressed by his deeds.
In that case, there might be some sort of secret organization involved here.
“The culprit and his ally were planning something, and he began working for that contractor as part of the preparation for it,” I said. “These murders were a personal plot that had nothing to do with the original plan. That’s what it seems like, anyway.”
That assumption gave me a decent idea of what the culprit was like. He was part of an organization, but his position there wasn’t all that great. He was dissatisfied with that and didn’t have the patience to hold back from acting on his own authority to prove his ability.
He was also so imprudent that he hadn’t considered what it meant to use the blueprints he had handy for a crime. He’d thought leaving behind cryptograms would be more than enough.
“Hm...”
The really troublesome part about this person was that, despite all the flaws, he actually had an impressive set of abilities.
Just as I’d told Babi, the “how” of this incident wasn’t too important.
Even so, his feat was such that I only knew three people who could do it: Shu, who had his Mythical special reward; Marie, a Superior Job from the onmitsu grouping; and the King of Assassins, who’d kidnapped Ray.
That made it safe to assume that the culprit had powers matching theirs.
To summarize: our person was an extremely rash, thoughtless, Superior-tier fool with a strong desire to stand out.
“Oh, dear,” I muttered.
I was capable of finding the culprit, but it didn’t seem like I would be able to do anything about him.
The situation would turn quite dangerous if the situation became rough, so I had to think of someone who could fight against him. Marie, Figaro, and little Xunyu came to mind, but they were all outside of Gideon right now, so the only one I could rely on was... him.
At first I would have to handle the situation all by myself, but I was sure I could do it long enough for him to finish the culprit off.
I’ll probably have to ask Elizabeth to help me with the legal process, I thought. This incident certainly has me relying on her a lot. I’ll thank her by teaching her a high-level thief technique.
I couldn’t imagine Liliana and her Royal Guard liking that, though.
“Nngh...” Babi groaned.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“Your thoughts just now were either toooo fast or allll over the place. They’re hard to understand.”
“I don’t feel that way myself, but I guess it might seem that way to someone else,” I conceded.
Oftentimes, I had developed convictions that looked like far-fetched gambles to others — mostly my mother and father.
“But enough about me,” I said. “Let’s go question those working from home.”
“Okay.”
Before that, however, I had to go meet someone.
I’d contacted her ahead of time, so all I had to do now was go to the designated place.
“Hello, Kasumi,” I greeted the girl. “I’m glad you could help me.”
“I-It’s nothing... I-I’ll do my b-best!” she meekly replied.
The girl was Kasumi — a person I’d partied up with many times before.
Her Embryo, Taijitu, would be invaluable in this case.
It was capable of locating nearby Masters, and if it discovered one of them among the “tian” employees we were about to question, it would greatly increase the chances of them being the culprit.
“Rook, I feel that you’re bringing something waaay too useful and boring to this mystery,” Babi complained.
“Babi, just as I said, a detective’s job is to unravel the truth. If a method is effective, it has to be used, even if it’s excessively convenient.”
Not to mention that I have no obligation to be considerate of a culprit who is so insincere towards the mystery genre.
“We should go, then,” I said. “Oh, before that, though...”
There was another bit of preparation I had to do before walking around the houses.
“Babi.”
“What is it?”
“Can you break my right arm?”
“Okay.”
“Eh?” Kasumi became perplexed as Babi took my right arm with both of hers... and snapped it in the middle of the forearm, just like that.
It was now bending in a direction it shouldn’t be.
“E-Eeeehhhhh?!”
“There we go,” I said. “Looking good.”
“N-No you aren’t!”
“No, this is good because I now have a reason to use my left hand.”
Assuming the culprit was hiding his left hand using a prosthetic or something else, it was necessary for me to touch it directly to check if there was anything strange about it.
A handshake was a good method to do that, and if I had a broken right arm, it wouldn’t seem unnatural for me to shake hands using my left.
Handshakes, questioning, Kasumi’s Master detection, and one more thing — I would search for the culprit using this four-layer check.
“Y-You could’ve just put on a cast...” said Kasumi.
“If the person has Reveal and takes a look at my stats, it would be off if I wear a cast while not having the ‘Broken Right Arm’ status effect,” I explained. “Don’t worry. I will definitely heal it after all of this is over.”
Kasumi looked at me like she didn’t know what to say.
I guess seeing an acquaintance break another acquaintance’s arm was a bit of a shock to her, I thought. That’s no good. I’ll have to make it up to her, somehow. Both for her help and for giving her a scare.
And so came the time to walk around the houses of those working at home.
I started by showing my investigator badge and exchanging a left-handed handshake with each person.
Not hiding anything, I revealed that both of the buildings in which the serial murders had happened had been designed by the contractor they were working for and that I was investigating the case from that angle. I then gave them a few questions made with the assumption that they weren’t the suspects and keenly observed their reactions.
Along with asking Kasumi if the person ever showed up as a Master, I repeated this process on seven out of eight of the employees. Some among them hadn’t known that the residences had been designed by their own, while some hadn’t even known about the murders altogether.
None of them seemed to be lying, and I never saw anything strange in their reactions to my questions.
“Missing the mark this many times makes me think that my deductions were mistaken,” I muttered.
Or perhaps, like I’d once considered, the culprit might have an Embryo that could discover safes.
But since I had only one more employee to check, I decided to redo my deductions after finishing this.
And so, we arrived at the eighth person’s apartment building.
I looked at Kasumi, and she silently shook her head.
So she’s not detecting any Masters here, too, eh? I thought.
Nevertheless, I wanted to be absolutely certain, so I left Babi and Kasumi behind and made my way towards the employee’s apartment.
I rang the bell, heard a “Coming!” from inside, and a moment later, the door was opened.
“Ah... Umm... Yes? Who are you?”
The person behind the door was a young woman — probably in her late teens. Assuming she was a tian, she was clearly an adult by this country’s standards, and she didn’t have a crest on her left hand
, either.
“Good day. I am Rook Holmes,” I introduced myself. “I am a temporary investigator on a quest to investigate the series of burglaries and murders that began three days ago.”
“Oh, my.” Despite the lack of crest, I didn’t see the need to shake her hand to confirm whether it was a prosthetic — it was obviously flesh and bone.
However, this person was clearly the culprit.
Upon first seeing me, there had been a brief moment of surprise on her face. Then she’d quickly put up an expression of confusion. It was obviously a reaction one would make if they recognized me, but tried to hide it.
And it wasn’t far-fetched to believe she would know me. She’d tried to frame Shu, so it was only natural for her to look into those around him, and since I was being trained by him, I would definitely be among them.
As indelicate as it would be for me to say it myself, I didn’t exactly have a face so plain it could be easily forgotten, and that was exactly why the last part of the four-layer check was my own face.
Her reaction to it had been far stronger than that of someone who’d merely caught a glimpse of it before, and she’d instantly tried to hide it. That was more than enough to make her seem suspicious.
Still, since I didn’t have any positive proof, I had to dig deeper.
“The two residences that have been targeted were both designed by Fródi Construction — your place of employment,” I said. “I am currently visiting the employees to see if you might have any useful information.”
“Oh, I see,” she replied. “We shouldn’t stand around while talking. Care to come in?”
“...If you don’t mind.”
I walked through the door to her apartment, feeling like I was entering the lion’s den.
The young lady introduced herself as Gerbera. As I sat down on the sofa, she presented me with tea and doughnuts, saying, “Here you go.”
“Oh, thank you very much,” I replied.
“Heh heh. Those are the new doughnuts from White Sugar Peach Café. They’re delicious.”
...Eh? But that was the name of the shop in one of the cryptograms. Why would she present me with pastries she’d bought there?
“Well, they certainly look like they are,” I said.