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Q.E.D. iff, vol. 12, by Katou Motohiro. Grade: B
Ii Yatsu (The Nice Guy, Magajine R 6, 2018)
Argent Roserio is a naive Italian web-journalist wannabe traveling in the area between Turkey and Syria. He's convinced that this is the only way for him to get to the truth of the conflict there. His taxi driver betrays him and hands him over to terrorists who then hold him as a hostage for ransom. Meanwhile, in Oxford, England, Touma and Kana are visiting Loki, who is preparing to present a research paper. Kana wants to use the trip as an excuse for eating scones with clotted cream, and tries to drag Touma to some shop on a guide map, but they quickly encounter Sheena Sando ("sando" is Japanese for "sandwich"). She's a white hacker, a contractor that restores computers that have been hijacked by ransomware. She knows Touma from his days as a fellow white hacker at MIT, and now asks him for help with a home electrical problem (her long-range satellite dish stopped working). Sheena teaches Kana how to make scones as Touma does stuff to her laptop. She mentions that she really needs to get back online quickly because her current job is a hostage negotiation - her ex-boyfriend has been kidnapped.
When Argent had been preparing to go to Syria, Sheena told him that it was either that, or her. Argent insisted on leaving, so she broke up with him. Some days ago, she intercepted a signal from someone named "X" demanding money for Argent's release. When she talked to the Italian embassy, and Argent's uncle, it seems they'd also received demands for money. The government isn't helpful, and the uncle is former military and wants to take matters into his own hands. Touma concludes that there are actually three competing groups claiming to have Argent in their possession - X, and two others hoping to steal the money from X when it's delivered. Sheena, Touma and Kana visit the embassy, and Argent's mother, and the mother forces the embassy agent and the uncle to work together with Touma to do whatever's necessary to get her boy back.
During all this, we also get a parallel story of a middle eastern refugee trying to escape his home country by paying smugglers to get him to Europe. Unfortunately, most of the other refugees in the truck die from the heat, and the final destination is a prison camp run by the traffickers. The boy tries to escape from the camp multiple times, and on the last attempt gets free and almost dies in the desert. Ultimately, he spots a car passing by on a distant road.
When we do get glimpses of Argent in the kidnapper's hideout, he's being beaten by one captor, while a second one treats him more nicely by bringing him extra food and water.
Questions: How do Touma and group plan to rescue Argent without getting caught in the crossfire between X and the two rival terrorist groups? What's the connection between the refugee boy and everything else? Why does the uncle not want to play along with Touma's plan? Does Sheena get back together with Argent?
Science: Nothing. Just some history about the local region between Turkey and Syria.
===== Spoilers =====
X tells Sheena via her spy dish to deliver the money to a specific location in the desert. The drop-off point is approached by car on a road that runs along the top of a ridge. There's a side road that runs down along the ridge face to the ravine below, where X is supposed to be waiting with Argent. The region is littered with wrecks of tanks and other military vehicles from past battles. Kana takes a car to the meet-up point, where X and his partners are waiting with Argent. They make the money-for-hostage swap, then spot one of the rival groups waiting to ambush them with an RPG. In the ensuing gun fight, Kana gets Argent to a group of boulders and pulls out the end of a cable, some harnesses, and a paraglider chute. At the same time, Argent's uncle shows up in a one-man attack helicopter and starts shooting at the enemy, too, (there's never an explanation of how he got it, outside of his having been in the military before). Touma is hiding in a bush, and he gives Sheena the order to hit the gas. She's driving a jeep hidden in one of the burned-out tanks. Touma jumps in the jeep and it tears off, with the other end of the cable attached to her rear bumper. The cable yanks the harness buckled around Argent, Kana and the parachute, and they go airborne and disappear to freedom, leaving the money and everything else behind them. Over 10 years later, Argent is back in Syria, commenting on how peace has finally returned. He remembers having been treated well by one of his captors from long before. Behind him is a shadowy figure, who says that he'd been a small boy trying to escape to Europe, and had been about to die in the desert when some traveller from Italy stopped their car and saved him. The guy turns out to be the nice one from X's group, and he really wishes he could say thanks to his "good Samaritan."
Saisei no Toki (Playback Time, Magajine R 1, 2019)
Ei'ichi Kurisu is a magazine writer currently doing a story on a mystery body case from 17 years ago. He's in a small town with his writing partner, Gentoku Aoyama, doing research. One day, Kurisu approaches a building contractor, Marumachi Mogai, to shake him down for money ($30,000) based on what he'd been able to dig up. One week later, one of Kana's friends, Marina Mogai, asks Kana to bring Touma out to this village to help her with a problem. Kurisu's dead boy was found on a grassy sand bar in the middle of a river, and her boyfriend, Seiji Kurima, is being interrogated for the murder because he'd threatened the reporter on the day of his disappearance.
After a lot of footwork, and some threatening of Aoyama by Kana and Marina, we learn more about what happened long ago. It starts with Seiji's father, back when he was in high school. Shousuke Kurima had been on the school baseball team with Marumachi. But after graduating, he became a drunkard and a gambler. The team's manager was one Kyouka, who started dating Shousuke at one point. But, he abused her endlessly and sponged money off her. One night, they were driving home and Shousuke had too much to drink. He ran into a tree, totalling the car, putting a deep gash in his forehead, and badly injuring Kyouka. Terrified of the police finding him, he ran off to Tokyo, where he found a job at a construction company, and room at a company dorm with a guy named Kousaku Sumiya. Back in the village, Kyouka was taken to a hospital, and was tended by Marumachi.
For the next 2 years or so, Shousuke and Kousaku were drinking buddies, but Shousuke would bum money off him to gamble on the horses, and they'd fight when Shousuke refused to pay the money back. One night, the two had a massive fight outside a bar. Shousuke returned to the dorm, bleeding from a knife wound on his face, saying that Kousaku had attacked him. Shousuke then went back to the village, where he checked into the hospital for stitches. Marumachi was the only one to visit him in the hospital. Eventually, he gave up gambling and drinking, married Kyouka, and the two of them started up a boat rental company on the river running through town. Kousaku was not seen after that day. However, his body was found in the back of an abandoned house up in the mountains, 14 years later. There was a rope noose around his neck, and the police ruled it a suicide. Shousuke was briefly suspected of killing his partner, but the body was too far away for him to have taken it to the site and then coming back before getting to the dorm (witnesses at the bar and dorm confirmed he'd been out of their sight for 30 minutes, and the body was located 1 hour away up the hill).
It's this death of Kousaku that Kurisu had been digging into. On the day of the reporter's disappearance, he'd been in the cafe that Seiji works at part-time, and had been overheard bragging about blackmailing Marumachi a bit earlier. Since Seiji is dating Marumachi's daughter, he attacked the reporter for saying bad things about the family. When Kurisu's body was found on the sand bank in the middle of the river, the only way to get to the sand bank was by taking one of Shousuke's rental rowboats. Shousuke himself couldn't have been involved this time, because he was busy taking care of Kyouka - she's currently suffering from cancer and her husband is the one administering her shots for her, and otherwise shuttling her to and from the hospital. Shousuke's son, Seiji, could have taken one of his father's boats, but his alibi was that he'd still been working at the cafe that evening.
The detective on the case, Kasuo Mizude, discovers that Touma is a good sounding board for ideas, and tells him that Kurisu and Aoyama had been staying at a hotel near the train station for several weeks, working on their story, but that they were running low on funds. On the day of the disappearance, they checked out of the hotel, and Kurisu had told Aoyama that he'd just been given $30,000 for their story. Problem is, the money never turned up. Kurisu was known to frequent three spots at night - an izakaya (a kind of pub), a ramen shop, and a restaurant, but his choice of eating places was unpredictable any given night. If someone had wanted to kill him, it would have been difficult to prep for any one spot. Only one of the three places was near the river, and if a boat had been waiting along the shore for some days prior just for this opportunity, someone would have noticed and commented on it. Oddly enough, along with the stolen boat was a report of one of Marumachi's construction company's front-end scoop shovels being stolen and discovered in the neighboring hills.
Questions: Did Shousuke kill Kousaku, and if so how could he have driven the body to the abandoned house 1 hour away in 30 minutes? Does Kyouka die of cancer? How could Kurisu have been predicted to be at the restaurant near the river such that the killer would know to steal a boat to take the body out to the sand bar without anyone seeing them?
Science: Nothing.
===== Spoilers =====
Actually, it turns out that Kousaku's and Kurisu's situations are identical, and this is what everything revolves around. Kousaku also had three places he frequented at night. To prepare, the killer stole a shovel truck and parked it in a lot near one location, put a boat near the second, and had his car in a parking lot near the third. When the victim left their location for the night (the bar for Kousaku, the restaurant for Kurisu), the killer strangled him and used the method for that spot. In Kurisu's case, it was the boat to take the body to the sand bar. For Kousaku, the killer put a noose around his neck and used the shovel truck to throw the body directly up the hill. Just by accident, the body landed in an abandoned yard and was not found for 14 years. But, why would Kurisu try to blackmail Marumachi, who was not involved in the first death? And what happened to the blackmail money?
Seventeen years ago, Kousaku and Shousuke had been in their dorm room together, when a photo of Kyouka fell out of Shousuke's bag. Disgusted, he cursed that it was of someone he'd dumped, and he balled it up and threw it in the trash. Kousaku, at that point, had had enough. After preparing, one night he went to the bar with Shousuke, and staged the fight in the back alley in front of their coworkers. He then killed Shousuke, took the body to the shovel truck, changed clothes and ID, and used the shovel to throw Shousuke into the air. He slashed himself in the forehead to duplicate the victim's car crash scar, and returned to the dorm room, dripping blood, to say that "Kousaku" had attacked him. Kousaku, now going by the name "Shousuke," travelled to the village, checked into the hospital for stitches, and was immediately identified as an imposter by Marumachi. "Shousuke" explained what had happened to both Marumachi and Kyouka, and they decided to cover for him. He and Kyouka got married and started up the boat rental company, and with the $30,000 he took from Kurisu (the reporter had discovered Kousaku's secret) the night of that murder, he was able to pay for the last set of treatments that send Kyouka's cancer into remission. Kyouka tells "Shousuke" that she's loved him ever since the first day they met. Kousaku then agrees to turn himself over to the police. Kousaku shakes Touma's hand for finally letting him come out of the shadows, and as Marina watches her boyfriend's father prepare to go to jail, she comments on how quickly someone's life can be turned upside down.
Comments: Well, I still prefer the stories that revolve around science and math. The Nice Guy was hard to follow, and there were too many loose ends. Playback Time (my choice of translation, the other options being "regeneration" and "rehabilitation") was so transparent that I'd figured out most of the tricks very early on. One trick not mentioned above was in how Kousaku planned to have an alibi with his car if he needed to use it. He'd parked it for the day at an outdoor parking lot, so that if the police checked the electronic tracking system, the car would be shown to have been there all day. The thing is, the car had really been in a space between the real parking places and the sidewalk, so the space the police would be verifying would actually have been a few feet farther over and occupied by another car. I doubt something like this would work in real life, given the way modern parking lots are designed, and the fact that they have paved surfaces with the car spaces marked in bright yellow paint. Anyway, recommended to those that already like the series.
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