Daybreak | F. Dostoyevsky

15 | Mind Games

Her name had been Miwa Fujioka, before it was Chiasa Kuse. That was all they knew.

"Interesting," said Yosano, holding up the half-shattered glass Rubik's Cube with its strange symbols and swirls with her latex-gloved hand. "So you're saying this woman was the killer of all our previous murders involving puzzles?"

"Yes," said Mayumi, shoving her hands into her pocket and glancing behind her, catching someone's eyes, "I'm certain. I've been doing some independent investigations of my own."

"Of course you have. And how about your helper from overseas?"

This "helper from overseas" was Fyodor Dostoyevsky. He would hide in plain sight, he had said, and hide in plain sight he did. He had his hair tied up high and hidden by a black fedora that rivaled Chuya Nakahara's—the lights in the warehouse was dim and no one could tell this from that unless they used the police's standard issue searchlights, which Fyodor stayed out of—and he was wearing extravagant clothes they had quickly bought on the way here; they mirrored what she had made Faulkner wear earlier, albeit with a clear and rather aristocratic English touch to it.

"Mr Doyle," said Mayumi, "has been an amazing help."

"Arthur Doyle, yes? Does he have an ability?"

"Conan," added Fyodor. She'd recently discovered that he wasn't that bad at imitating accents, and had put it to use. "Arthur Conan Doyle."

"Sorry, Mister Doyle," said Yosano with a roll of her eyes. "Mayumi, could you have picked anyone snobbier?"

"That's not how you pronounce h-o-t-t-e-r," whispered Mayumi.

"Oh, my days. So does he have an ability or not?" Yosano crouched down to Kuse's body, turning it over and inspecting her ruined face.

"Yes," said Mayumi, "of course."

"And?"

"It's called 'The Lost World'."

Yosano made a face. "Fancy."

"He reanimates things."

The resident doctor suddenly looked much more interested. "Oh? Like," she gestured to the corpse of Chiasa Kuse—Miwa Fujioka—with her brains blown out from the back by a gun and her eye on the floor next to her, also shattered just like the Rubik's Cube.

"Nah, he prepares to stay away from the icky dead bodies."

Another roll of her eyes. "Of course."

In the end, she and Fyodor had decided they were going to call the Armed Detective Agency, after all, after they had seen the state of Chiasa Kuse's body. They had thrown together the outfit, and Mayumi had told Yosano to come alone, saying it was a special case, which it was.

Yosano picked up Kuse's glass eye. "Look at this," she said. "It isn't a standard glass eye."

The eye was round and clear, with veins on the outside and a bulging iris—a perfect imitation of a real eye.

"How so?" asked Mayumi. "I'm not quite an expert in this. I mean, it's not supposed to be clear, I know that as much."

"And glass eyes aren't round," said Yosano. "They're moulded to the shape of a patient's eye, and they're made to not really move around that much, and maybe to stay in front of the leftover eye or a stabilizing implant. So that's not a standard prosthetic."

"What is it then? It's covered in blood enough that we know it must have come out of the socket, and her left eye is missing."

"I don't know," replied Yosano. "But it looks as if it was an actual eye, turned to glass."