——In a dimly lit room, a middle-aged man wearing a black tuxedo and a magic hat was suspended in mid-air, swaying slightly. Several thin ropes hung from the top of the house, hanging from each joint of the body.
The whole corpse's limbs were twisted and its posture was weird. Its bloodless face was turned sideways to the door, and one hand was open and facing this way, like a soulless puppet, greeting the audience outside the door.
Maya Hashimoto looked at this increasingly familiar posture, and her mind buzzed: This, this damn action is exactly the same as the puppet that Jiang Xia lifted out of the machine box before!
——The puppet with its limbs broken off and stuffed into the machine box as a "threat letter" turned out to be a small and accurate preview, showing the scene at this time in advance.
"Isn't this the missing magic troupe leader?" Officer Takagi, who had just been looking for this thing for a long time, immediately recognized it. He couldn't believe it, "How could his body appear here?!"
Maya Hashimoto stared at the puppet strings on the corpse, feeling that this terrifying sight perfectly matched what he imagined Uzo's methods were.
"This 'Hell Puppet Master' is indeed the one chosen by Uzo." Maya Hashimoto was extremely happy for a moment:
"Fortunately, I wasn't too lazy to ignore the tickets sent by Asako Miyoshi before. Otherwise, if the adult had worked hard to create a good script and was waiting for the play to be performed with great anticipation, and when it started, he found that I, the person in charge, didn't even have an audience.
Come on, the gorgeous theater is empty and no one is watching..."
As he thought about it, Maya Hashimoto shuddered silently.
When he looked at the man hanging in the room, his eyes were a little more complex like those of a fellow sufferer: It was almost, just a little bit close, that the person hanging dangling in the room might be him.
"Team, leader?" At this time, the fake psychic who was paralyzed by fright recovered. He got up from the ground and looked at the room in disbelief, "Is he really our leader..."
"It's a pity, it should be." Jiang Xia raised his hand to stop him, "Don't go in, leave the scene to the police."
Conan, who was about to sneak in, tightened his grip and was caught on the spot by Suzuki Sonoko: "Didn't you hear what Jiang Xia said? Don't go in, leave the scene to the police!"
Conan: "..."
Maya Hashimoto glanced at them and slowly recovered.
Maya Hashimoto: "..." Although the working environment is harsh, scary, and life hangs on a thread, there is still some fun occasionally, such as now - watching the internal fighting of the king of war, there is a lot of fun.
…
Not long after the bus arrived at the station, there were not many people walking back and forth in the hotel, so the news spread extremely quickly.
Not long after, the news spread among the guests: "Have you heard? The leader of the fantasy magic troupe was killed!"
"Really? What about the magic show tonight?"
"Well, life is at stake, so it should be terminated - by the way, isn't your focus a bit strange?"
"Isn't this strange? I came all the way here just to watch the show, so of course I care about it. But I remember, wasn't the group leader already dead when we were on the train?"
"He just disappeared on the train, and his body was just discovered! - I heard that he was hung from the beam, dangling like a broken puppet."
Gin who was drinking tea next to him: "..."
After leaving Tokyo, that guy's methods have really become more and more arrogant. Are you afraid that insiders won't know that it's his handiwork?
But that's fine. With this strange story in mind, other anomalies will be figured out by the customer... which just makes his next task easier.
…
It is different from the guests who have nothing to do with the matter and treat it as a conversation piece after dinner.
In the Fantasy Magic Group, the atmosphere at this time was miserable.
"Why, why would my husband be..." "Mermaid Ji", who was full of mature charm, was covering her lips with a handkerchief, crying like a little girl, "It's not that what happened in the car was just prepared by him.
Magic? Why did he really die like that?"
Several members of the group sighed and quickly began to comfort her in low voices.
Not far away, the police were also having a headache.
"There are no trains at this time, so no autopsy is possible for the time being." Officer Takagi misses his brothers in the forensic department very much. "We can only make a judgment with the naked eye first."
Officer Sato nodded: "Currently, it seems that the cause of death was a stab wound to the vital part, and the time of death was probably between 9:00 and 12:00 this morning."
Suzuki Sonoko looked at her watch and recalled seriously: "It coincides with the time when we saw Tengai... Tengai disappeared. It seems that the one we saw at that time was really the body of the leader of the magic troupe."
Next to him, Jiang Xia poked the palm-sized puppet and said casually: "It seems that the magic of 'disappearing from the sky' brought by the 'Hell Puppet Master' actually consists of two steps.
"The 'corpse disappearing from the sealed carriage' we saw before was just the opening scene, and the entire performance includes the corpse we just saw.
"In other words, the complete content of this magic is to transform a corpse in a sealed room on a high-speed train into a hotel room thousands of meters away in full view of the public."
Maya Hashimoto looked at the clattering puppet in his hand and was frightened: "..." Why do you have to hold such an unlucky thing in your hand - put it down, put it down quickly!
Officer Sato didn't care what Jiang Xia was playing. She imagined the scene described by the famous detective and got a headache: "Can anyone really do such a thing?"
Compared with the current "Puppet Master of Hell", the magician murderer in the previous case suddenly became more approachable and cute.
In the eyes of Maya Hashimoto who breathed a sigh of relief, Jiang Xia finally put down the puppet in his hand.
He said seriously: "Now that the 'Hell Puppet Master' has done it, what we should be thinking about now is how to crack his method. Magic is not magic. As long as the key is found, this 'performance' will be no different from an ordinary murder case——
Just investigate the case at the pace you're used to. It's impossible for such a large-scale magic trick to leave no clues."
The phrase "no different from an ordinary murder case" caused some unique bubbles of murderous aura nearby to quietly expand.
Jiang Xia tried hard to restrain his gaze. He stood up and led everyone to the front desk of the hotel.
…
It didn't take long for the hotel staff to provide the detective with the clues he wanted to know.
"Room 219... was found! The previous tenant there was a Mr. Duzingen." The manager flipped through the registration book and handed it over to Jiang Xia for inspection. "But not long ago, Mr. Duzingen checked out.