Mrs. Kujukuri sighed. After going in circles, things had somehow returned to square one. The cruel truth lay before them—the person who had killed her husband was among those three apprentices who had spent every day with him.
"But who could have done it?" Mrs. Kujukuri rubbed her aching brow. "My husband shouldn't have done anything to wrong them. Those three children don't seem like cruel people either..."
Jiang Xia pointed at the long string of gibberish on the phone screen. "Your husband already wrote down the killer's name. These numbers separated by asterisks are the letters he left behind. For example, the first group, '126871,' looks difficult to decipher at first, but if you press those keys on a phone in order..."
He traced through the air with a finger. "It becomes a letter: 'D.'"
"I see!" Mrs. Kujukuri finally understood and hurriedly looked at the next set of numbers. "'32489'... This is 'C.'"
With invisible strokes, the four groups of numbers quickly turned into letters before everyone's eyes.
[DC Mako]
"'Mako'... Asako?"
Looking at the two kana, Mrs. Kujukuri immediately connected them to that beautiful, considerate female student. She found it hard to believe. "How could it be Asako? Is there some misunderstanding here?—Wait, there's also 'DC' before it. That isn't part of her name. Could my husband have been trying to use Asako's name to convey some other message in his haste?"
Jiang Xia glanced at his watch. "I remember you saying that your husband liked classical music, and there's a piano in this basement. 'D.C.' is a common notation in sheet music. It comes from the Italian da capo, meaning to return to the beginning and play again."
Amuro Tooru's gaze shifted slightly. Then he suddenly said, "Perhaps the victim meant that Miyoshi Asako intended to