The Ryabolsk Serial Murder Case
Tension hung thick over the crime scene. Ten corpses lay in a neat row along one side. It was a disaster without precedent in the history of Ryabolsk City.
In a single night, ten people had died at nearly the same hour—and in nearly the same way. No one could possibly hold a grudge against all ten at once, which left the pool of suspects awkwardly empty. No weapon had been found. Not a single footprint marked where a killer might have come or gone. And if anyone hoped the victims' valuables had been taken, they were disappointed there as well.
A total dead end. Once the case sank into a pit with no way out, everyone started barking up the wrong tree.
Inside the tent of the temporary investigation headquarters, the groaning had gone on for four straight hours. A stranger passing by might easily have mistaken it for a field hospital full of war wounded.
"I'm certain of it. Someone's playing the hero, claiming they'll execute the criminals who've been slipping so cleverly through the law."
"But... doesn't that make them one of the good ones? Do we really have to catch them?"
"This is exactly why you detectives are hopeless! Anyone who kills is the same. What, some of them are good and some are bad?"
Detectives and officers puffed furiously on their cigarettes and seized one another by the collar, each insisting they were right, while crime specialists and support staff sweated through the thankless work of keeping them apart. No one could reach a firm conclusion, and the case board only grew messier. Empty paper cups had been stacked into a tower as tall as a person; a few had toppled or been crushed flat, trailing drops of black coffee as they rolled across the floor.
"Hey—hey, you can't come in here!"
"Why not? What are you even doing? I'm just curious."
"No, don't—ack! What kind of strength is this...?!"
A woman suddenly poked her head inside.
Unusual pink hair and violet eyes gathered, in a single glance, every stare from the investigators who had been wearing themselves ragged.
"What are you all doing in here?"
"Authorized personnel only. Get out, right now!"
The patrolman who had followed her in strained with everything he had to drag her back out, and only succeeded in turning his own face bright red. An Aura User who had wandered in out of sheer curiosity, then. A few detectives, whose eyes had drifted naturally to her chest, let out sighs of disappointment. They had been on the verge of suggesting that, if she was a detective come to help, perhaps they might share lunch.
They were tired, yes, but a joint investigation with a woman like that wouldn't be so bad. Then again, did she even have to be a detective? The case hadn't advanced an inch in hours. At this rate they would never identify a suspect; all that would surface was talk of the headquarters' incompetence, so hearing an outsider's opinion might not be the worst idea.
What spectacularly idiotic thinking. Fine. Let's just do it.
"Actually, this is a detective I invited. Right this way, please."
"What are you talking about? She's with our party."
"Hey, don't yank the chair!"
"Eheh. These people don't even know their place."
The pink-haired woman strolled over as if nothing were amiss and sat in the chair set among the detectives. The moment the room—which had been a breath away from fists flying—settled, the police and the other specialists began, one by one, to take an interest. Brushing past a patrolman a full handspan taller than her just to walk in had been extraordinary to begin with.
"Ugh. The cigarette stink is awful, though. Could you air this place out? Keep this up and I'll get lung cancer too."
Everyone involved in the investigation looked at one another in turn. The tent really was choked with a pale haze, as if someone had set off a chemical smoke canister. To them, however, this was simply how things were. They smoked while they walked. They smoked while they ate. They smoked in the bedroom. Half the city fire department's workload came from fires started by cigarette butts. So Lupin's request would not have been granted.
Under ordinary circumstances, that is.
Men and women alike ground their cigarettes out in the ashtrays with a hiss and, as if they had planned it, threw the tent's windows wide open. Atmosphere is a terrifying thing. The detectives were treating her with deference, so people who didn't know any better decided she must be someone important and hurried to stay on her good side. Cool air poured into the tent at once.
Now I can actually breathe.
Lupin asked, looking delighted.
"So what is this place, anyway? An investigation? What kind? I've only ever seen this in dramas. Seeing it for real is kind of amazing."
The police liaisons and the crime specialists glared at the detectives in unison.
"These people?"
"It's her hobby. Pretending to be an ordinary civilian. Gathering information that way is her specialty."
"That's right. Isn't it, Miss Rozovi?"
Rozovi meant pink in the language of the Rostov Republic. Lupin didn't understand the word at all, but she felt the earnest looks turned her way and propped her chin on one hand.
"Ah. Trade secret. You caught me."
Barging in anywhere without a shred of tact was the one thing Lupin did better than anyone alive. In any case, the officer who gave a short briefing whenever someone new arrived did the honors once again. Nod, nod. With nowhere left in her brain to store a thing, Lupin bobbed her head with great conviction. Everything she had just heard would evaporate within a minute.
But before it evaporated, even Lupin did some thinking. Just as she had seen in a detective manga once, she tipped her head forward and pressed her index and middle fingers to her brow.
"Killing ten people at almost the same moment... speed alone wouldn't get you there. They must have used some kind of special device."
Even Lupin couldn't murder ten people separated by a fair distance all at once. And they said there weren't even footprints?
"What's more, the killer can fly. Otherwise it's strange that not a single footprint was left at the scene. They flew in from the sky, smashed the window, killed the victim, and flew back up."
One of the detectives muttered.
"Isn't this the same deduction I made earlier?"
"It got thrown out because nobody can fly."
"Unless it was a grandmaster of the Seven Stars, or one belonging to the Rounds. And why would a grandmaster commit a murder like this in the first place?"
"Right, right."
The reception was not encouraging. Lupin wanted to linger at the headquarters a little longer, so she put her brilliant brain to work and delivered another line meant to turn the tide.
"Isn't it a prejudice to assume that only people can fly?"
...Isn't it usually the other way around?
A few people began to whisper, and as the mood soured, Lupin pressed on.
"Why are you all looking at me like that? A bird could attack a person."
It was the aggrieved appeal of someone who had nearly lost an eye to a pigeon. The detectives sighed. Bird feathers had already been found near the scene, and the headquarters had already gone over that angle. The problem was that the feathers belonged to a pigeon, and the notion of a pigeon pecking a person into rags was so unrealistic that no one could accept it. Had she shown even a passable deduction, they might quietly have let it slide. Spouting nonsense like this would only drag their own reputations down with her.
In the end, one detective raised his voice.
"No—she wasn't Miss Rozovi after all!"
"Aigoo, we're terribly sorry. We had the wrong person. It wasn't pink hair, it was crimson. Haha!"
Cut loose by the detectives, Lupin was shoved outside by three officers.
"Come in again and it's obstruction of official duty."
"No, wait! Then what about arrows? They could have shot an arrow through the window from far away—wait, now that I think about it, there are guns too. A sniper?!"
"Out."
"Ehh..."
The investigation tent flapped shut again. Lupin kicked a stray pebble for no particular reason and muttered.
"Hah. At least I got one fun show in before lunch."
Still, that was pretty entertaining.
A space packed to the brim with men and raw, animal spirit. For the first time in a long while, her heart had burned hot. The female investigators wedged in among the men had been no ordinary presence either. That atmosphere—like they would pull a trigger on a criminal without a heartbeat of hesitation—had nearly bowled her over.
The police had a real mess on their hands, though. Ten people, dead out of nowhere.
"What should I have for lunch today..."
Lupin had only come out to look around for a good place to release pigeons tonight. She had opened ten Secret Safes, but she hadn't known whether ten people had died, and she had only poked around the investigation camp because the whole thing struck her as marvelously strange. There had been a considerable gap between the moment she marked the departed pigeons' positions on the map and the moment she went to collect the Secret Safes. In that interval the pigeons had caused an incident on their own initiative, without reporting in, and then fled—though of course the pigeons' side of the story deserved a hearing too.
When Lupin arrived, only a single angel remained to mark the Secret Safe's location, cooing softly to itself. Whether a corpse lay on the floor below the safe, in the next room, or just outside the door was none of her concern. She didn't even have a reason to lift the sheets over the bodies laid beside the investigation headquarters to see how they had died. That would hardly have been proper respect for the dead.
Meanwhile, after Lupin left, the investigation headquarters hit a sudden turning point. The medical examiner, so swamped that he arrived four hours later than scheduled, autopsied the dead and delivered a shocking conclusion.
"This isn't an awl. These wounds were made by a bird's beak."
A complete reversal. The killings by bird that no one had believed until now had turned out to be fact. But what they had found near the scene were pigeon feathers. Did that mean pigeons had really murdered every one of them? The conclusion was impossible to accept, and everyone fell into confusion.
"Could it have been an experiment by the Church?"
When something incomprehensible happened, pinning it on the Church was usually close enough to right.
"It's possible. Using pigeons, so familiar to people, to slaughter them without mercy. Truly the sort of idea only the Church's trash would come up with."
With everyone at headquarters in agreement, the things Lupin had casually spouted on her way out were back on the table.
"That one from earlier. The pink-haired detective. Bring her back at once!"
To repeat: Lupin had simply said whatever came into her head. Sitting her down again was not going to produce some brilliant deduction. These, however, were detectives who took money from the police and the crime specialists to hand out theories, and who were regularly called frauds for it. A chance had come not only to restore their honor, but to knock the police down a peg. How could they let it pass?
And so the detectives scattered in every direction, throwing around every threat they could muster as they scoured the city, and before long a rumor spread through the streets—one twisted again and again, inflated beyond all recognition. As it happened, there was only one person with pink hair in all of Ryabolsk.
Lupin, who had eaten her fill of lunch and was leaning back in her chair, patting her stomach, suddenly found herself surrounded.
"Excuse me—are you, by any chance, the legendary master detective, Saint Tail?"
Stuffed as she was, Lupin's interest in the investigation headquarters had sunk as low as it could go. Still, it felt a little wrong to ignore people begging so earnestly. Wasn't there a saying that a request landed better as you climbed from a text, to an email, to a phone call, to showing up in person? And it wasn't even one person. It was several.
I don't want to go. Can't I send someone in my place?
"...Hold on."
As it happened, Lupin knew one relatively sensible person: the cocktail maker she had left abandoned at the Association branch for three weeks while she hunted Secret Safes. These days her head was working a little too well, and that was becoming a problem. Lupin found herself newly impressed by the wondrous efficacy of treasure chests.
