Chapter 4: The Inverted Cross

Ignoring Ikeda's astonishment, Tian Yi made an even more outrageous statement. “This policeman is Paper rank, just like me. We're on a different level from ordinary humans like you, so there's no book with his name on it in my shop. But that doesn't matter. He's bound to tell his colleagues and superiors something about his deductions. I can piece together clues from other people's thoughts.”

“Just who…” Ikeda stammered.

“Who exactly am I?” Tian Yi finished the question for him. “My name is Tian Yi. Tian as in ‘all under heaven,’ Yi as in ‘number one.’ It's not a stage name. I can show you my ID.” He took another sip of coffee. “Of course, that doesn't matter. What matters to you is remembering that policeman's name. Jingniao.

“With his abilities, he'll have you cornered in forty-eight hours at most.”

Ikeda answered in a panic. “Are you kidding me? I had nothing to do with Mr. Matsuo's death! Whether it was suicide or murder, it's got nothing to do with me!”

Tian Yi picked up Miura's Book of the Heart. “I'm offering you a second transaction.

“If you give up reading Miura's thoughts, I'll tell you who really killed Matsuo, and what incriminating mistakes you made last night that will come back to burn you.”

Once again, Ikeda faced a choice, but this time he decided quickly. “All right, I won't read Miura's book. Just tell me about last night!”

“Hahahaha…” Tian Yi burst into wild laughter. “So fear makes you give up your chance to get back at Miura that easily? You actually agreed that fast.”

The laughter grated on Ikeda's ears. He felt like a doll in this bizarre man's hands, yet there was nothing he could do.

Only after a full minute of convulsing with laughter did Tian Yi stop. “All right. I keep my word, at least where transactions are concerned.” He cleared his throat. “Most of the things you thought to do last night were needless complications. The things you forgot to do were all potentially fatal.”

Tian Yi picked up the coffeepot beside him, topped up his cup and continued. “Let's start with you opening the staff office door.

“The fingerprints on the door can't serve as evidence. It wouldn't be strange for dozens of people to have left prints on an office door like that. I'm sure you thought of that too, which is why you didn't go back to wipe the door afterward. You only wiped the prints off that window in the first-floor corridor.

“But you forgot that you'd left a whole row of fingerprints somewhere nobody else would ever put their hands. Or rather… palm prints.”

Ikeda's heart lurched. “Oh, shit!”

Tian Yi said, “When that cold corpse scared you onto your backside and you started backing away across the floor, you left quite a few palm prints. Such a strange, neat row of palm prints in a place everyone walks over. Were you planning to explain that you'd entered the office walking on your hands earlier that day? If you'd actually done that, someone would certainly have noticed.”

Ikeda was in no mood to joke with him. “But… in an ordinary suicide case—no, even a murder—would anyone go as far as collecting fingerprints from the floor outside the door?!”

Tian Yi slapped the desk. “Well said! Excellent insight! Your reasoning is absolutely correct.

“Take Sakura Prefecture, for example. Whenever there's a death, the first officer to arrive secures the scene and makes a preliminary examination. Afterward, a bunch of tech geeks carrying expensive equipment turn up late to collect evidence. The so-called Physical Evidence Section. At that point, the first officer on the scene decides what kind of case it is and which direction the investigation should take, based on his initial assessment.

“If it's treated as an ordinary suicide, there's no need for particularly thorough evidence collection. Lift a few token fingerprints from whatever caused the death, take a few photographs of the surroundings, the evidence and the deceased, then cart the body away and call it a day. If they're quick, the whole process takes two or three hours…

“They can easily question the relevant people while the evidence is being collected. The subsequent autopsy just establishes the cause of death. They won't run many tests. Once the evidence, statements and autopsy report are all in, the officer handling the paperwork writes a brief report, enters whatever information needs recording into the computer for storage and backup, tosses the assorted physical evidence into a file envelope, and closes the case.

“Sakura Prefecture has always had an extremely high suicide rate. Even if you couldn't say the police handle these cases effortlessly, they've certainly had enough practice to get good at it.

“There are plenty of guys who evolve straight into full-time NEETs after high school, sit in sunless rooms for years romancing two-dimensional characters and registering marriages with them, then finally wank themselves to death when their semen runs dry.

“There's absolutely no chance of anyone collecting fingerprints from every inch of the area around the death scene in a case like that.”

He delivered this whole spiel in one go, then finally spat out one fatal word. “But!”

Tian Yi picked up Miura's Book of the Heart, opened it to a page, pointed to a line and held it in front of Ikeda. “Read.”

The instant Ikeda's eyes fell on the words in the book, his whole body began to tremble. “That idiot Soggy Mosquito Coil. Why couldn't he just wipe away his own shoeprints? Doesn't wiping all the fingerprints off the window frame make it far too suspicious?”

Tian Yi immediately snapped the book shut and put it back in his desk drawer. “Even Miura was thinking more clearly than you. He'd just killed someone with his own hands, too. He really is different from a guy like you, who falls to pieces at the mere sight of a corpse.” Still smiling mockingly, he went on. “Use your brain. If Matsuo intended to kill himself, would he go out of his way to wipe off his fingerprints? And would someone who'd wiped away every fingerprint leave shoeprints behind?

“The guard as a witness, a big padlock as physical evidence. Those two pieces of evidence would let any normal person deduce that Matsuo sneaked into the school building after eight p.m. through somewhere other than the main entrance. However irresponsible the police might be, they'd at least have to check how Matsuo got to the crime scene. You anticipated all of that, yet you still made such an elementary mistake. Ah, stupidity… You could simply have wiped away Matsuo's shoeprints too. That would at least have made sense.”

“What did you just say…?” Ikeda hadn't heard the latter half of Tian Yi's speech at all. His mind was still stuck on the words “He'd just killed someone with his own hands.”

Tian Yi slapped the desk, laughing. “Hahaha… That's another way you've been stupid. If you'd stuck with the first transaction, you'd still have learned who the killer was when you read Miura's book.”

Ikeda ground his teeth in fury, but the man really had given him a choice. He had no answer to that.

Tian Yi said, “All right, I've said everything I needed to. Transaction complete. If there's nothing else, hurry up and get the hell out.”

Ikeda couldn't bear to leave it at that. “You could testify. You know Miura killed him! If you'd just identify him…”

Tian Yi wagged a finger, cutting him off. “I have neither the time, the inclination, the interest nor the obligation to do that.”

“Then… then… why did Miura kill Matsuo? And why did Matsuo go to the school by himself in the middle of the night?” Ikeda pressed.

Tian Yi spread his hands. “Miura's method, his motive, Matsuo's actions, and how to shake off Jingniao's investigation. If you need to know all that, we can make another transaction.” He gulped some coffee, then added, “Of course, you can also get the hell out of here while you still can, bare your neck for the blade, and wait for Jingniao to use his limited clues and his limited intelligence to arrest you in the end.”

“But Miura killed him! You know that too!” Ikeda replied.

“Hahaha… After Miura killed him, he even made it look like suicide. After Miura killed him, he even remembered to shut the door behind him. While killing him, Miura didn't leave so much as a single hair, never mind fingerprints or shoeprints. Finally, before he escaped, Miura saw you. He stayed perfectly calm, hid in the shadows and watched, only slipping away after you'd left.” Tian Yi looked at Ikeda with contempt. “So… which of you do you think the police are more likely to catch, you or Miura?”

At these words, Ikeda's chest churned like a pot of boiling water, and blood rushed to his head. An emotion he couldn't explain swept aside his reason. Every word Tian Yi spoke struck at the most vulnerable points in human nature, drawing Ikeda toward the next step.

“What do you want me to do?” By the time Ikeda asked the question, he already looked like an addict.

…………

December 11, 4:53 a.m. Wearing a battered leather jacket, Jingniao squatted beside the corpse, munching on a bean-paste bun.

He had been at the scene for over ten minutes, and his colleagues had yet to arrive. After asking the guard a few simple questions and looking around, he had climbed onto the desk himself and taken the body down.

“Crawling out of bed before dawn and coming all the way to school in the freezing cold. Makes me feel ten years younger.” Jingniao poked fun at himself as he examined the body.

“Hey, hey… what's going on here…?” Right before Jingniao's eyes, a pattern was gradually appearing on Matsuo's pale face.

It consisted of two black rectangular strips crossing at right angles, each more than two fingers wide. The longer strip ran from Matsuo's forehead over the bridge of his nose to his chin, as though dividing his face into left and right halves. The slightly shorter one stretched from cheek to cheek, like a strip of tape sealing his mouth.

“So once I untied the rope and laid the body flat, the backed-up blood passed through the neck and finally reached the head, making this show up…” Looking at Matsuo's face, Jingniao muttered to himself, “A black inverted cross… What could it mean? Did this fellow become a devout believer in some strange religious group and kill himself in this extreme display of faith? Or is it the personal signature of some new psychopathic killer… Heh. This is getting interesting.”