Q.E.D. iff volume 13 review

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Q.E.D. iff, vol. 13, by Katou Motohiro. Grade: B
Satsujin Fuukei (Homicide Crime Scene, Magajin R 2019 2)
Kuniaki Kaibashira and Akinori Ikada are sitting in rental massage chairs in Yodakawa Camera (maybe a play on Yodabashi Camera). Kuniaki takes a pull on his whiskey bottle, and starts a conversation with his partner. He runs a cram school, and he's getting bored with his life. He wants to get out from under a bunch of debts, and run off to have more fun. He recalls the second home the two of them had grown up around when they were kids, and he develops a plan. A little later, he invites Yuri Ebisawa, Rukurou Tako and Kyouzou Kanie to the old cabin in the woods for dinner. Yuri is the daughter of a pawn shop owner, training to take over the business. Rukurou and Kyouzou both work at different kinds of banks. All three of them have loaned money to Kuniaki, and he's now trying to sell the cabin to them. While Yuri is enjoying the food, the other two men threaten Kuniaki over his implied inability to pay off his loans.

After the meal, Yuri is walking outside the cabin when she hears Kuniaki describing a plan to Akinori to kill their guests. The plan is that there's a false ceiling in their current room, with heavy timbers and boulders above it. All he has to do it pull a rope to trigger everything. Akinori tries to get him to stop, but Kuniaki won't listen, and instead heads for the door. Akinori pulls the rope and the ceiling, timbers and rocks come crashing down on his boss. Yuri goes into shock. When she recovers, she calls the police. They quickly arrive at the cabin, along with a recovery crew. They remove the rubble, but there's no body. The two bankers show up and say Yuri is lying. In fact, they saw Akinori kill Kuniaki in completely different places. Rukurou had been invited out to the road to talk about something, and as he got close to the meeting place, he witnessed Akinori ramming into the victim with his car. Kyouzou had been invited out back, where he saw Akinori stab the victim in the chest with a knife before pushing the body down a well. The police check - Akinori's car is slightly damaged, but there's no body near the road; and the only thing in the well is a knife with no blood on it.

Yuri is friends with Kana, so she begs her friend for help, asking her to bring in Touma. Unfortunately, the boy is in France and won't be back for two days. The two women interview the two bankers for clues, but come up empty. They camp out in front of Touma's house until he returns. The police can't do anything, and the case looks like a deadend.

Questions: Who is lying? If they all are, why? If not, what exactly is going on?

Science: Nothing.

Note: All of the character names contain kanji for sea creatures (kai = mollusk; ikada = skewered baby eel (ika = squid); ebi = shrimp; tako = octopus;  kani = crab).

===== Spoilers 1 =====

Touma comes up with the answer pretty quickly, and has Yuri drive him, Kana and Akinori out to the cabin. The girls want to know why the killer is with them. Touma says that the original plan had been to get all three witnesses into questioning each other, and eventually wanting to give up and drop the whole thing, which would include no longer pursuing Kuniaki in getting him to pay off his loans. That is, he would officially disappear and the bankers and Yuri would write off the money he owes as a business expense. To fake his death, first Kuniaki rigged the ceiling so it would only drop at one end, leaving a safe pocket for him to huddle within at the other end of the room. While Yuri was still in shock, he clambered out from under the false ceiling and up the main beam into the cabin's rafters. There, he cut the rope holding up the far end of the fake ceiling so that it would drop flat on the floor. Elsewhere, Akinori had a stuffed dummy set up, which he drove into close to the appointed time with Rukurou. As that guy had to walk out of the way to get to a bridge to cross a gorge along the road, Akinori put the dummy in his car and took it to the well at the back of the house. There, he stabbed it with a knife as Kyouzou approached, and threw it in the well. Kyouzou moved away to call the police, and that's when Akinori pulled the dummy out by a rope, and hid it somewhere before the police arrived. Akinori tells them that Touma has it exactly right, except that he hasn't seen his boss in the last 4 days, and he wants to know what Kuniaki has been doing since then.

Question: What has Kuniaki been doing?

===== Spoilers 2 =====

When Akinori and Kuniaki were kids, they'd climb a tree growing next to the cabin to get up on the roof. With all of his planning, rigging the fake ceiling and everything, he hadn't noticed that the tree had been cut down to improve the view of the countryside from inside the cabin. After getting up into the rafters, he worked his way to the roof somehow. When the police arrived, he realized the tree was gone, and his only option to avoid being seen was to sneak back into the cabin through the big fireplace chimney. Unfortunately, he also forgot that his family had had problems with monkeys getting into the cabin through the chimney, and had installed a fixed grating in it to keep them out. Kuniaki got into the chimney, discovered the grating, and couldn't climb back out. The group gets to the cabin and Touma takes Akinori to the fireplace to show him his boss passed out above the grating. The chapter ends with Kuniaki and Akinori in the massage chairs at Yodakawa Camera, and the boss saying that they're back at square one.

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Tokuiten no Onna (Singularity Woman, Magajin R 2019 3)
Touma and Kana are in a bus in Germany, because the French airports are closed during a strike. Kana complains about this, while Touma is more pragmatic. She's hoping for a chance to do sightseeing in Frankfurt, when there's a gunshot and the bus screeches to a halt. Ahead of them on the street, three masked men are robbing an SUV, and carrying a large metal case to a van that then drives away. As witnesses to the crime, Kana gets her wish because she and Touma are now stuck in Frankfurt for questioning. Surprisingly, the lead investigator is Bia Brust, who has been introduced to Touma by Shinra (presumably, Shinra is busy and he'd rather let his cousin handle this one). Bia states that the robbers had thrown a mannequin in front of the van, to make it look like a traffic accident. The van then panic-stopped right in front of the SUV. The masked robbers jumped out of the van to grab the case from the guards in the SUV, then escaped along with a scooter (thrown into the back of the van) and the mannequin. According to the shipping manifest provided by the guards, the case held 5,000 heart medicine tablets, worth 4,000 Euros each. That's $22.7 million on the open market. It's an easy target because the tablets are light, easy to carry, and the pharmaceuticals company making them didn't think they'd need that much security to transport them. The operation was lightning quick and well-planned. The only monkey wrench was the unscheduled presence of the charter bus due to the French airport strike. The only thing Touma can add to the witness accounts is that there'd been a fourth person sitting in the front seat of the van.

Soon after, one of the gang members turns himself in, demanding leniency for cooperating with Interpol on "apprehending that scary woman." The guy's name is Blue Hadley. He says that he's a friend of Gabe Mients, and the two of them worked on construction sites during the day and occasionally hijacked cars at night. A few weeks ago, Gabe showed up at their hideout with this drop-dead gorgeous woman named Rouge Blen, and the promise of a big score if they worked together. Rouge spelled out her plan, and Blue interrupted a couple of times to try to suggest his own ideas, which were dangerous and stupid. The first time, Rouge slapped him in the face and warned him to not try to out-think her. The second time, she just insulted him, and he smashed a beer bottle and threatened to cut her. Rouge just pulled a pistol out of her bag and asked if he was feeling lucky. Gabe got between them to get them to calm them down. However, the plan required a fourth person to handle the mannequin, and Rouge brought in a friend of both Gabe's and Blue's - Berudora Fracky - for this purpose. On the day of the crime, Blue positioned himself, with a pair of binoculars, in a building opposite the pharmacy office where the case with the medicine would be handed over to the delivery team. After he witnessed the transaction, he then joined Gabe and Rouge and they drove out in the van to cut off the SUV in the deserted countryside. Fracky was waiting at a little hillock to throw the mannequin in front of the van to justify the panic stop and to get the security guards to step out of the SUV to investigate the accident and call for an ambulance. The robbery went smoothly and the gang returned to the hideout only to discover that the case was empty beyond a couple of magazines to add the appropriate amount of weight. When the men accused Rouge of duping them, she reminded them that they'd been in contact with the case the entire time, she never got close to it. But, she didn't act upset, so the men still think that she'd tricked them somehow. Blue hates her, and hopes to walk away scot-free if he cooperates with Interpol in having her captured. Bia doesn't make any promises.

Bia and some of his men capture Gabe and Fracky, using the information provided by Blue. They are willing to talk, and they paint a further picture of a mysterious ghost. Rouge had approached Gabe with the plan, and demonstrated that she knew everything about him and Blue in advance. Gabe turned her down at the beginning, but she talked about how society is biased against certain kinds of people, and that it's only fair to right things by fighting back when and where possible. She said this as "an outsider looking in." Gabe agreed to go along with the plan then. Fracky confirms Gabe's story, and adds that Rouge must be a witch or something; when she left the hideout after the case was found to be empty, he followed behind her. She turned a corner, and he was right behind her, but when he got to the intersection, she was nowhere to be seen. And none of them have been able to find her since then. It's like she disappeared into thin air.

Bia can't find anything on her in the international agency databases, and the only photo of her was from a security camera in a parking lot near the hideout. Touma likens her to a black hole, and references Stephen Hawking while suggesting that the only option is to examine the "radiation" around her. That is, they can learn about Rouge by interrogating the other gang members, which is what led to Gabe and Fracky getting picked up. Bia tries getting more evidence to corroborate their stories, but Blue hid the scooter and bag with the mannequin at a bridge construction site, and they're now completely covered in concrete and used as part of the bridge anchor block. Fracky threw the case into a trash dump, where it had been incinerated, as per Blue's orders. And Gabe drove the van into the ocean, again under Blue's orders. It looks like there's nothing but deadends, but Touma says he knows how the robbery really went.

Questions: How did the heart medicine disappear from the case if Rouge didn't have any way of touching it unobserved?

Science: Just the mention of Hawking, and singularities.

===== Spoilers 1 =====

Rouge was an executive at the pharmaceutical company, tasked with sending the case to its final destination. She'd brought the two transport guards into an empty meeting room at the pharmaceutical headquarters, where she showed them a case with fake tablets, and had them sign a fake transaction sheet, while she switched cases with the one containing the magazines (the guards walked away with the empty case). She then dressed up as a delivery guard and went to the company's real rep and signed for the real case with the real tablets in full view of Blue as he watched through binoculars from the other building (she supposedly hid the real case and tablets before joining up with the gang for the robbery). The entire point of the "robbery" then was to give her the opportunity to switch transportation papers so that the real delivery people had the real signatures. At the end of Touma's explanation, Blue demands to be let free for having cooperated with Interpol. Bia says that will have to be up to the courts.

Questions: What happened to the real tablets, and where is Rouge now? Do Blue, Gabe and Fracky skate free?

===== Spoilers 2 =====

6 years pass, and Fracky shows up at a beach in southern France. He joins a shadowy figure and orders a beer. They start talking about what happened about 1 week after Touma's revelations. There'd been a junk yard the gang used to use for hiding cars they'd jack. After switching plates, they'd occasionally have the car run through the compactor, and it would never be found in the stacks of other cars. A different shadowy figure goes through the stacks, looking for the crushed van. They find it, and pry open the back end to pull out a large canvas bag. The lights in the yard come on, and Bia, Fracky, Gabe, Touma, Kana and two Interpol agents are standing below, watching Blue holding the bag. Touma says that Blue had been dreaming of retiring on the French Riviera and drinking beer all day. When the medicine case turned out to be empty, Blue had snapped and vowed revenge. The reason Fracky couldn't find Rouge when she got to the intersection is that just below the street was a canal, and Blue had killed the woman and dumped her body in a boat at that point. To get rid of the corpse, he cut it up, putting the head in the carrier compartment of the scooter, the arms in the case and the legs in the bag with the mannequin. The torso went into the back of the van. Gabe lied about driving the van into the ocean, instead following Blue's orders to have it compacted. After having the other two dispose of the van and case, and he had poured concrete over the scooter and mannequin at the bridge construction site, Blue turned himself in. The idea here was to create a cover for Rouge's murder, while trying to find the missing tablets before the police did. Touma's explanation hinted at the possibility that she'd kept the tablets in her jacket, which is why Blue returned to the van.

The shadowy figure at the beach is revealed to be Gabe. Fracky asks him how such a brilliant woman could have let herself be killed by a thug like Blue. Gabe shrugs, suggesting that Rouge was so focused on watching what was going on in front of her that she'd never thought about checking if something was sneaking up from behind. The chapter ends with an image of Blue, in a rage, about to hit Rouge in the back of the head with a pipe.

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Summary: Again, not much science this time. Homicide Crime Scene was a silly drama that obviously involved dummies and a trick ceiling. The motivation wasn't clear, though, and the part about Kuniaki getting stuck in the fireplace results in a big plot hole. The police were in and around the cabin for a couple days as they tried to find bodies, and Kuniaki had ample opportunities to call for help once he realized he couldn't climb back out of the chimney. Singularity Woman showed a lot of promise, and I was praying that Rouge would escape to reappear in later books. She'd be an excellent Moriarty to Touma's Holmes. I was very disappointed when she got offed that quickly and easily. This creates another plot hole - if she had done that much research on Gabe and the others before approaching them, Rouge should have known that at least one of the men would resent being shown up by a woman. There's no explanation for why she just didn't disappear before the others discovered the case was empty. In fact, the whole robbery is farfetched if the only point was to disguise the fact that she'd been the one to sign for the real heart medicine. There are much easier ways to cover your tracks than this. Recommended only if you like the series.