"It's me, Dunn Smith."
A steady male voice answered from outside the door.
"Dunn... the policeman who came to see me before?"
At the name, Klein immediately recalled the gray-eyed officer Julian had deliberately mentioned earlier.
He tried to shake himself awake, then stood up and walked toward the door.
Before he reached it, however, Klein noticed something unusual.
The dawn light outside the window was suffused with an extremely strange color. It was neither simple golden yellow nor rosy red, but also contained an unnatural hue that seemed like a mixture of neon and ultraviolet light.
At the sight, Klein suddenly realized that something seemed wrong with his surroundings.
Besides, Melissa should have been up and finished making breakfast by now, yet the house was completely silent. That made everything feel even stranger.
...Is this an illusion created by supernatural powers, or a dream?
He quickly caught on.
Steadying himself, Klein opened the door without betraying anything and looked blankly at Dunn Smith outside.
The gray-eyed officer got straight to the point, presenting a new lead the Nighthawks had uncovered: Klein had visited Welch's home on the day Welch and Naya died.
Faced with this information, Klein did not panic. Instead, he calmly explained that he remembered none of it.
In response to Klein's composed explanation, Dunn first praised his mental fortitude, then brought up the missing revolver.
Klein concealed nothing. He admitted that the gun was in his possession while also offering a reasonable explanation.
Seeing that Klein had given nothing away, Dunn said he needed Klein to accompany him to the police station to assist with the investigation, which might take two or three days.
Klein nodded. By now, he had fully adjusted to the feeling that he might be inside an illusion.
He displayed an appropriate amount of nervousness, left Melissa a note, and followed Dunn downstairs to board a four-wheeled carriage bearing a police emblem.
On the way, he asked Dunn rather anxiously what would happen next and appropriately expressed his fear of the whole affair. His performance was flawless throughout, and he did not flee at the last moment as he had in the original story.
"...Officer Dunn, will I be all right?"
"Why do you think something might happen to you?"
Dunn asked with interest.
"I don't know, but those strange deaths you described earlier, Welch's and Naya's, sounded so much like some bizarre curse.
"I'm afraid the same thing might happen to me. So if going to the police station can guarantee my safety, even temporarily, that's a good thing.
"The only problem is, if my elder brother and younger sister get worried about me..."
Klein became so absorbed as he spoke that he did not even notice the scenery outside the carriage window beginning to warp, blur, and lose its definition.
The only thing that remained constant was that vivid, neon-like color.
"I..."
Klein took a deep breath, intending to continue, only to discover abruptly that the entire carriage had gone dark.
"!"
Klein's eyes snapped open. He sat up and began panting softly.
Suppressing his nervousness, he got up, stepped into the corridor, and headed toward the communal washroom.
Just then, however, Klein spotted a figure standing before the window at the end of the corridor.
"Let's get acquainted again."
The figure turned around and said to Klein:
"Dunn Smith."
Elsewhere, inside a three-story building, Julian slowly approached a family's door, wearing a beige trench coat and a gentleman's hat and holding a silver-inlaid Agarwood Cane.
This is it, Ray Bieber's home...
According to the original story's timeline, this descendant of the Antigonus Family should already have obtained the Antigonus Family Notebook.
The only problem was that Julian did not know whether the Secret Order had already contacted the man.
At that thought, he took out the Scholar's Legacy again and used the magnifying glass to search his surroundings for possible clues.
...Sure enough, something's wrong.
Julian soon discovered several anomalies.
Two distinct sets of right-hand fingerprints could be found on both Ray Bieber's door handle and the mailbox beside it. Judging by their frequency, degree of oxidation, and distribution, they should have belonged to Ray and his mother.
Apart from those, however, there was another, relatively fresh set of fingerprints on the door handle that did not appear on the mailbox.
Most importantly, judging by their distribution, these prints had come from a left hand.
As a former Detective, Julian easily grasped the crux of the matter.
The third set of fingerprints doesn't appear on the mailbox, so neither Ray Bieber nor his mother left them.
What's more, this person was clearly left-handed, unlike Ray and his mother.
That means this person was an outsider.
Julian paused, then continued his deduction:
Given Loen customs, even among commoners, an ordinary visitor would hardly do something as rude as trying to open the door directly... so this visitor may have been scouting the place or trying to steal something.
Of course, I can't rule out someone familiar with them, such as a neighborhood policeman or the building manager, so I'll need further confirmation.
With that in mind, Julian used Scene Recreation again to roughly reconstruct the fingerprint owner's visit.
Sure enough, a blurred figure wearing a tailcoat and a bowler hat appeared in the magnifying glass.
The figure tucked an amethyst pendulum, which was rotating clockwise, back into his pocket, then tried turning the door handle once. After confirming that the door was locked, he turned and left.
All this had happened at night. Putting the clues together, Julian could now confirm that this man belonged to the Secret Order and was most likely the Sequence 7 tailcoated Clown who had appeared in the original story.
Julian carefully lifted the fingerprints, then put on a pair of gloves and took out a piece of wire.
After a little twisting, the door to Ray Bieber's home opened silently.
Lock picking may be part of a Detective's knowledge, but why do I feel like a burglar...
Grumbling inwardly, Julian quietly reached behind himself and closed the door.
"Hrr... hrr!"
Heavy snores came from the bedroom on the right, sounding like a raging bull.
Steadying himself, Julian walked toward the bedroom and opened the door.
Inside, a man in his early thirties lay sprawled shamelessly across the bed, fast asleep. A notebook sat on the table beside him.
Its cover was made of deep-black stiff paper, and it exuded an air of distant antiquity.
So this is the Antigonus Family Notebook...
Julian swallowed, then silently reached for the notebook.
Just then, however, something he could not comprehend happened again.
The neon-colored radiance appeared once more, swiftly enveloping not only Julian but the notebook as well.
Moreover, Julian could even hear a faint, terrifying roar that seemed charged with some extreme emotion.
...Is that anger?
The thought surfaced naturally in Julian's mind!