Worlds Apart

Chapter 8

A • P A T T E R N

Sep. 09 2020 05:17 CET

Room #04 / Foyer / Ulberg's Office, The Port Inn

Daisha flipped the first file open, and recognised it as the one she had been studying in her hotel room in Oslo. "The first incident occurred on the twenty-seventh of February in 2019 in the Minamitsuru district in Yamanashi, Japan. It was an isolated incident at the time, but through retrospection, The Agency found that it was connected to other incidents that have occurred since then." There was very little in the file she currently had; the rest would be in the ones in Owen's possession.

The Agency had a rather intricate method of storing information. They had a limited number of physical copies of each file, so disposing of them was effortless — an almost unassailable failsafe against a security breach. Amongst these copies, all the data pertaining to a single case was split between two or more files, so even if someone managed to get ahold of one despite their measures, they would have incomplete information. In addition, miniature tracking chips in the folder allowed them to keep track of its location.

As narrow-minded and stuck-up as The Agency could be, Daisha had to admire their methods of securing confidential, and sometimes dangerous, data. And this case — the Crescent's murders— definitely involved something dangerous.

"Two people living in Fujikawaguchiko — Ren Kobayashi and his daughter Mio — were killed in the middle of the night. Slit..." Owen frowned, but pushed on, "Slit throats, no fingerprints... front door was wide open when they were found the next morning... local police labelled a foreign young man who arrived that morning as the main suspect," he read out from the corresponding file. "Locals said that he had been walking around town, talking to them, and asking odd questions." He looked up at Daisha, "He hasn't been seen in that town since."

"Definitely suspicious," Daisha remarked. Then her brows furrowed, "What had he been asking about exactly?"

"Uh..." Owen's eyes flitted across the pages. "They said he was asking if they'd seen a... doorway of some sort?"

Daisha stared up at him, incredulous.

"And," Owen continued, "the last people he'd met were the Kobayashis. He'd refused to stay in any of the hotels there. He'd refused to say where he came from, simply saying he was from 'far away'." He snickered, resuming only after Daisha gave him a deadpan look. He cleared his throat. "The police had traced his steps back to Aokigahara forest. The security camera footage near the entrance shows him leaving the forest, and they checked the footage for the whole past week, and never found him entering it."

"But there are other entrances, right?"

"Yeah, of course there are. But it looks like it's easier to get lost in the forest if you enter from there. Plus, he didn't seem to have any camping equipment, no cameras, no guiding tape, no nothing. He wasn't there for a trek or for sightseeing."

Owen flipped through the pages, looking for any other intriguing details while Daisha contemplated this new information. She hadn't reached the suspect list back earlier. A strange man walks out of a famous suicide site — apparently never having entered it — then asks people about a door, refuses stay there, then possibly kills two people that same night. And then he disappears. There was no motive that she could discern. There were very few things in common between their current case and this one — no fingerprints, and haunted locations. The method of murder couldn't be compared. Regine Ihle was merely missing. If she wanted to make a fair comparison, she would probably need the files of the other Ihle deaths, or any of the related cases involving missing persons.