"Eh?"
Reimi Sugimoto let out a small, puzzled sound. She had drifted in this place for fifteen years, and this was the first time anything like this had happened.
How the other party already knew her name no longer mattered. The stranger had laid a far weightier secret bare in a single breath—not just the cold case from years gone by, but the fact that, in a single sentence, this girl had revealed she knew Reimi was a ghost.
"What did you say? What murder case?"
Rohan Kishibe scratched his head, completely in the dark. Inori Yuzuriha had given him no warning whatsoever. How had the conversation pivoted so abruptly to something this grim?
"Fifteen years ago, the Sugimoto family was butchered by an unknown killer. And you, Sensei Rohan… you were a witness to that very case."
"…That's impossible!"
Rohan's first reaction was outright denial. He prided himself, with no small ego, on the conviction that an event so terrible would have left an indelible imprint on him. In his memory there was only a vague sense that, when he was four, something had happened at home, and he had left Morioh with his parents shortly after. But—if the place around him truly was where he'd lived as a child, why didn't he remember any of it?
"Reimi Sugimoto, you've stayed in this place for the past fifteen years without leaving. Wasn't it for the chance to tell someone what really happened?"
Inori didn't bother explaining further. The reason she had come for Reimi today was not to help Rohan recover his memories. She needed more intelligence first, before deciding whether to move on Yoshikage Kira tonight.
"Detective—how did you come to know all this? And the case—I remember they said the killer had been caught, that it had been closed cleanly?"
Reimi Sugimoto studied the lovely, pink-haired girl. Her face looked young—maybe even younger than Reimi herself. But the way she was dressed, and the confidence in every gesture, weren't those of an innocent child. Especially since she knew so much that she shouldn't have known.
"I have my own ways. All I need from you is everything you remember."
"For fifteen years I've been waiting for the chance to tell someone."
Reimi tilted her head down, eyes filled with sorrow. At that moment, a pet dog with its neck severed walked out from beside her leg. Blood still gushed continuously from the awful wound—like a tap that had never been turned off properly.
"He's Arnold. A ghost too, just like me."
"I do recall the records of the case mentioning a dead family pet."
Inori cupped her chin, striking her best detective pose. The detective persona was an invention, but Rohan wasn't foolish enough to expose her now. He, too, badly wanted to hear what this ghost girl had to say, and to learn whether any of it really did connect to him.
Reimi steadied herself, took her dog by the leash, and turned back toward the house behind her. Inori and Rohan followed.
"This house, right here—no one lives here anymore, but it used to be my home."
"That night, fifteen years ago… I was sleeping in my room. Then I heard this dripping, dripping sound. I called out for my parents, but they didn't answer… I was scared, but I didn't dare to get out of bed and check."
Reimi crouched and stroked her beloved dog's head. The dog wore the same deeply mournful expression. Combined with the still-bleeding wound at his throat, the sight cut at the heart.
He stretched out his tongue and licked his owner's fingers.
"Normally, around that time, Arnold would have been sleeping under my bed. All I had to do was reach down—he'd lick my fingers, just like this, and I wouldn't be afraid anymore." Reimi went on. "But the dripping kept going on and on—ten minutes, more, no end to it. I couldn't stand it any longer. I climbed out of bed to see what was happening…"
She was describing the details of her own death, and yet Reimi spoke with an unsettling calm, as though recounting a story that had nothing to do with her at all. Fifteen years she'd lingered here. Pain and tears had become routine long ago. She was simply tired.
"What I saw was Arnold, throat slit, hung up on the coat rack. Blood everywhere on the floor."
"And only then did I realize… the thing licking my fingers had not been Arnold."
Rohan drew in a sharp breath. This wasn't some urban legend. It was the unvarnished truth of something that had happened fifteen years ago.
"That's when a man came crawling out from under my bed."
"He said to me, 'Little girl, your hands are so smooth, so pretty. You're absolutely adorable. Hee hee hee…'" Even the killer's laugh, Reimi hadn't forgotten. "Your parents are already dead. Come home with me."
"Before I had time to make out his face, I was pinned down and stabbed in the back… and that was when he killed me."
She had finished.
It tracked, broadly, with what Inori already knew. But what she wanted to know went much further than this.
"Are you sure there's nothing you're forgetting?"
Inori took a step closer and met the ghost girl's lovely eyes with a concerned look.
"Don't leave out a single detail."
Perhaps it was the determination in the girl's eyes. Reimi's exhausted heart kindled with something like hope again. She glanced once at the pale young man standing behind Inori, then continued.
"Even though my wound was fatal, I didn't die immediately. That night, the neighbor's child happened to be staying over at my house. I forced myself, with the last of my strength, to find him. I helped him climb out the window and escape."
Hearing this, Rohan jolted as if struck. The horror on his face shifted into a tangle of other, far more complicated emotions. His pupils trembled. Long-buried images began to fall back into place inside his head, broken pieces clicking together. But it was still too vague—he couldn't summon the rest.
"Is that so? You really are a kind, good-hearted girl, Miss Reimi Sugimoto." Inori nodded, then deliberately raised her voice in a sigh. "If that little boy is still alive, I'm sure he must remember you to this day! Don't you think so, Sensei Rohan Kishibe?"
"I don't know."
Rohan turned away, unwilling to face them just now.
"Rohan… little Rohan?"
Reimi Sugimoto echoed the name Inori had just given, soft and uncertain.
That was right. The neighbor boy whom Reimi had saved at the cost of her own dying breath was, in fact, a four-year-old Rohan Kishibe.
What an extraordinary soul this was. This was what was meant by the Golden Spirit. Even drowning in despair and pain that immense, she had not given in. With everything she had left, she had saved a small child… So why did a girl like that have to suffer such a fate?
—Yoshikage Kira! You deserve to die!
Inori's fists clenched without her noticing. She had known the broad strokes of this story long ago, from watching the anime—but hearing it from the woman herself, in person, was something else entirely. The crime that had festered in Morioh for fifteen years had to be answered for. By her hand.
"For fifteen years I've never given up. I want to see him punished for what he's done!" Reimi suddenly grabbed Inori's hands, pleading. "Detective, if you really do have the power… please, find him, arrest him as quickly as you can! Because that man—that man hasn't stopped killing for a single day! Here in Morioh… in fifteen years he's killed dozens of people!"
"What?" Rohan turned back, stunned. "If serial murders had been ongoing for over a decade, the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department would have caught wind of it long ago!"
"He's a Stand user."
Inori said it bluntly.
Reimi couldn't have answered that question. Inori could.
Yoshikage Kira's Killer Queen could turn anything into a bomb with its First Bomb ability and detonate it without making so much as a sound or leaving a wisp of smoke behind. The crime scene could be wiped completely clean—every disappearance dressed up as just another missing-person case.
"This killer has to be a Stand user… and I think I'm starting to see the trail."
"Detective! You—you mean you've found a lead?"
"Yes. We'll have a suspect locked down very soon."
A brief flash of joy lit up Reimi's eyes, then turned into something worried.
"…No. Miss, you and little Rohan can't just act on your own."
"In all these years, I've watched countless souls pass through here. He's used some method I can't even understand—he's capable of destroying a person's soul completely. I could only watch, helpless, as those victims were unmade. There was nothing I could do."
"Miss, thank you so much for caring about this case… but please, please be as careful as you possibly can. That man… he's truly, truly dangerous!"