Cross-Questioning

Keitaro searched the crime scene top to bottom. He was specifically looking for the murder weapon, but he wasn’t able to find it nor was he able to find anything else.

“Damn it! We’re dealing with a real professional here. Not a trace left behind.” Keitaro pulled the brim of his cap down over his eyes.

“We really don’t have much to go off of.” Jack squatted down, examining Fatma’s destroyed Core. “What’s strange are these holes in their Cores. It looks like they got stabbed by a small knife or something.”

“Yeah…but how could they get stabbed? No way the Truce would allow that.” Keitaro thought it over. If only he could ask someone exactly how Truces worked… Except he actually could. “Hey! Nulla! Are you there!?” Keitaro called out into the air.

“Keitaro!?” Jack, as well as Ella and Toko, looked at him like he was crazy.

“What’s with that look? I know he’s watching.”

“Uh…” Jack winced, unsure of what to say.

“You know, I don’t appreciate being called upon like a dog or something.”

Keitaro spun around to see Nulla lounging around. Jack, Ella, and Toko (as well as Klaus and Hana who were watching from the sidelines) were all shocked to see the childlike entity appear out of nowhere at Keitaro’s behest.

“Ah, Nulla. Thanks for coming. I’ve got a question. Isn’t a Truce supposed to make it impossible for two people to harm each other?”

“Yes.” Nulla replied bluntly.

“Okay, then how did this happen?”

They sighed. “You know, I’m not really supposed to do things like this…”

“I think it’s well within your responsibilities to clarify rules.”

“All right, all right.” Nulla held up one finger on each hand. “It’s impossible for two people under a Truce to directly harm each other.“ They tapped their fingers together to illustrate this. ”Indirectly is a different story, though.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, let’s say Alice tried to push Bob off a cliff while they’re in a Truce.” They mimed pushing someone off a cliff. “She would find herself unable to do it. However, if she instead put a banana peel next to the cliff and Bob just so happened to slip on it, falling to his death, that would be fair game.“

“I see… What exactly is the extent of that?”

“Basically, if the victim pulls the trigger themselves, it doesn’t matter if someone they have a Truce with set it up.”

“Interesting…” Keitaro looked down, thinking it over. “That tightens the net a bit then, huh?” But as he looked back up, Nulla had completely disappeared without a trace.

***

Unfortunately, while Keitaro’s discovery that Fatma’s dying message was forged did overturn his guilty sentence, most were still wary of him, especially Sean. However, he had carte blanche to continue his investigation, so he did. One by one, he questioned each person. Most had little to say, but there were a few standouts.

“When you saw me with the victims last night, did you notice anything strange?”

“Fatma seemed quite agitated.” Sean was ice cold as he answered Keitaro’s questions. Even if Keitaro was innocent, he had no sympathy for the man.

“Do you know why?”

“It likely had something to do with your midnight discussion with the late Orange Knight.”

“And what’s that supposed to mean?”

“Nothing at all. Merely an observation.”

It seemed like Sean had a bone to pick with Keitaro, although he couldn’t figure out why.

He soon moved onto Yuri whose questioning was probably the strangest.

“How do you feel about this incident?” Keitaro asked.

“Honestly, it’s a shame what happened. I mean, only a real bastard does something like that.” Yuri leaned back in his chair. “But I don’t mind it either. I’ve known since liberating Istanbul that they’d be a tough rival.”

“So you’re admitting to having a strong motive to kill them?”

Yuri blinked a few times, his expression blank until it finally hit him. “Hold on, you know I didn’t mean it like that!”

Gabrielle Romano, the Violet Knight, wasn’t too interesting. However, Camilla Ricci, the Violet Maiden, left a few loose ends.

“So what were you doing last night?”

“Sleeping, of course.”

“What about Gabrielle?”

“He was sleeping too… I think…”

“I think? What do you mean?”

Camilla looked like she had made a big mistake. “Oh, um, it’s just that he has trouble sleeping sometimes.”

Suspicious, but insomnia was starting to seem a bit common around here.

With the interviews done, Keitaro and Toko had a discussion.

“D-do you have any suspects?”

“No, not yet. Something weird is definitely going on. Camilla and Hana are both hiding something. In Camilla’s case it’s about Gabrielle. I don’t think either are the killer, though.”

“A-are you sure? Camilla and Gabrielle are a bit suspicious…”

“The killer’s motive is probably over politics. The Italians want money just like us, so with Tokyo and Istanbul gone, it would be more for them.”

“I-I see… Wouldn’t that apply to the Germans too? I-isn’t it possible that Hana is lying to implicate you?”

“Maybe, but Berlin hasn’t been competing with Japan or Istanbul at this conference. They wanted Paris, we wanted money. The Germans just don’t have a strong motive.”

“I-if the motive was money then d-does that mean Sean is cleared too?”

“Maybe. His hostility towards me would be explained if he was the true culprit. But the motive isn’t there… Unless I’m missing something…”

“W-what about Yuri…?”

“Yuri is probably just a bit simple. I don’t think the murderer would spell out their own motive like that. It’s pretty idiotic, at least from a surface level.”

“W-we’ve hit an impasse it seems…”

“Yeah… I might be missing something, but right now you could probably make an argument for any party doing it.”

“W-what should we do next then…?”

“I think the most important thing in cracking this case is to try and figure out how the murder actually happened. They were stabbed, that seems undeniable, but how could that have been done indirectly?”

“You say that, but… do you think it really was murder…”

“What? Do you think they killed themselves?” But as Keitaro finished that sentence he froze. He had had an epiphany. “Toko! You’re a genius! They had to have killed themselves! If they destroyed their own Cores, it all makes perfect sense!”

“I-it does!?”

“The question then is, how did the killer coerce them into stabbing their own Cores?”

“W-with an Ability…?”

“Exactly! And what Ability could be used to do such a thing?”

“M-maybe something that lets you control people like puppets…?”

“No, that would count as direct. It would have to be something that would make them pierce their own Cores. Have you ever heard of cocaine bugs?”

“Cocaine bugs?”

“It’s a common hallucination that is experienced by drug addicts. Their brains become so fried that they start imagining that there are bugs crawling under their skin, so they pick and scratch at their own skin until they tear it apart.”

“T-that’s disgusting…”

“Yes, it is. But remember, Hana saw me go into Mehmet and Fatma’s room last night. For that to have happened, the killer either needs to be a master of disguise, or is able to make people hallucinate. I think our killer used their Ability to make Mehmet and Fatma hallucinate, showing them some horrific vision and driving them to suicide.”