"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..."
Germain 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, Sebastian? 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.
Germain 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 Bridesmaid'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, Germain, 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... 707 had said so. But they still had no idea what linked the victims together.
Germain 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 Believe Bridesmaid's chest, this was mutilation of the corpse, with no relation to the cause of death. She 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 Germain feel a little sick. Germain might be an FBI agent, but she 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, Germain. Killing children or adults—equally horrible," Sebastian said, unaffected, almost.
Indifferent. "Sebastian..."
"I've checked everything once," Sebastian 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, Germain?"
"Oh... sure."
"One moment," Sebastian said, heading for the kitchen. Germain wondered if he had jam in the fridge again but decided that she didn't care. She abandoned that line of thought, and sat down at the table. She had somehow missed her timing to tell Sebastian about being attacked. Oh well. She might as well avoid mentioning it, and see how he reacted. She had no proof her assailant had anything to do with Sebastian, but not telling him made it easier for her to catch him off guard.
"Here you are."
Sebastian came back from the kitchen, carrying a tray with two cups of coffee on it. He placed one in front of Germain and the other opposite her, then pulled out the chair.
"Augh!" she yelled, spitting it out. "Cough... hack... urrghhh..."
"Something wrong, Germain?" Sebastian 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 beautiful, so you should try to present yourself accordingly."
"M-murderously sweet... poisonous!"
"Not poison. Sugar."
"..."
So you're the killer?
Germain 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 Sebastian's posture, she had allowed this substance to touch her lips...
"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 her, Sebastian was happily sipping away... lapping away. Apparently he had not made Germain'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," Sebastian said, finishing his cup and what must have been at least two hundred grams of pure sugar. "Now then, to business."
Germain would have liked to get up and go wash the sugar out of her mouth, but she tried to ignore the impulse. "Go ahead," she 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, Germain. All three victims have rather unique initials. Believe Bridesmaid, Quarter Queen, Backyard Bottomslash. B.B., Q.Q., B.B. Both their first and last names begin with the same letter... what is it, Germain?"
"Nothing..."
Was that all? Her disappointment had clearly shown on her face and interrupted Sebastian's line of thought, but she couldn't even be bothered to try and cover. What a pointless waste of time. Germain had noticed that the moment she first saw the victim's names. It wasn't worth bringing up like this.
"Sebastian... do you know how many people there are with alliterative initials in the world? In Los Angeles? 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."
