They walked down a corridor to a set of double doors.There were meshed windows on each door and above them stands a printed word on a wall, The MIT. Murder Investigation Team.
There were files and stacks of paper everywhere and a row of metal filing cabinets on top of which were-tea and coffee-making equipment.It was like most incident rooms, organised chaos.
Five whiteboards had been fixed to one wall and even before they walked up to them Ryouma knew there was one per victim. "Five Cosplayers all killed in the past two weeks" said Dante.
"Three male,two female. Ages between eighteen and thirty-nine. Two from south akihabara, one from Osaka, two from Tokyo. Two were gay and three were straight, so far as we know. Two students, one long-term unemployed, one website designer, one shop assistant. The one thing they have in common is that they were cosplayers. Strike that-it's the only thing they have in common.
"So they're hate crimes?" Said Ryouma.
"That's the theory we're working on" said Dante."But that's our problem. If the victims are being singled out because they're Cosplayer, that doesn't give us the profile of the killers"
"Killers?, Plural?"
Ryouma walked over to the first of the boards. Written across the top, in felt tip capital letters, was the name of the victim Arin Sasachi. To the left of the name was a head and shoulders photograph were five crime scene pictures. Arin had been stripped naked and her flesh were cut to ribbons. Ryouma grimaced as he looked from photograph to photograph.
"The nature of the crime scene suggests that there are more than one" said Dante. "But the only thing we know is that they hate Cosplayer. That's not enough to go on. The senior investigating officer is Detective Chief Inspector Billy but he's getting nowhere. Not from want of trying, it has to be said, he's done everything by the book but with zero results.
"Seems to me that it's the tail wagging the dog these days"
"Doesn't matter what's wagging what, what matters is that the commissioner wants this case breaking and he has dumped it on my desk like a huge steaming turd"
"And you think you can dump it at me? Ryouma tensed. "I know in the job shit rolls downhill, but i'm not even on the hill anymore"
"Billy hasn't put a foot wrong," said Dante. "It's not his first murder enquiry and he hasn't done anything differently to the way I'd've handled it. There's no link between the victims othet than they're Cosplayer. We're looking at it as a hate crime but there are no obvious suspects. They've been trawling through social media and anti-cosplayer and anti-gay websites but there's no one who stands out"
Ryouma looked back at the crime picture "And....you sure it's not a lone psychopath?"
Dante shrugged."These aren't simple killings" he said "What's being done to them takes time. It seems a lot of work for one person."
"And what's the cause of death? Please don't tell me she was alive when they cut her up?"
"The coroner says that she was alive but almost certainly unconcious; she'd been hit on the back of her head.But the cause of death was blood loss."
Ryouma shuddered."Were they all killed the same way?"
"Yep"
"When was the last killing?"
"Four days ago, at least that was when the body was discovered" Dante walked over to the whiteboard furthest to the right.He pointed at a head and shoulders photograph of a man wearing a swordsman costume.
Ryouma was fairly sure, that cosplay is from an anime called Sword Art Online. "Ryuji Kouhei, thirty-nine and unemployed. He was found in his flat after the neighbours had complained about the smell. He was the last body found but the coroner puts the TOD at about a week earlier."
Dante moved to the next whiteboard along. "Assuming she's right about time of death, that would make Kisa Natsume the last victim. She was found six days ago"
Ryouma looked at Natsume's profile. Kisa Natsume was barely out of her teens. She was blonde and blue eyed and had a cute smile that suggested either good genes or expensive orthodontics.
"That was taken from her university application" said Dante "She went Cosplaying about six month ago"
Below the photograph were half a dozen gory scene pictures. Natsume was lying across a blood-soaked bed with barely an intact scrap of flesh in her, except for her face.
"The killers doesn't slash the face" said Ryouma "Just the bodies"
"Maybe it's sexual" said Dante.
"The face turns the killers on, they can look at them as they butchers her"
"More like skinning them. Skinning them bit by bit, i mean it's not Jack The Ripper stuff"
"Yeah maybe"
Dante sit down at the chair behind him and fished out his phone
"Tired of standing?"
"Been standing all day, give me a break will ya"
Ryouma nodded thoughtfuly and continue studying at the whiteboards.