Page 15 of Natural-Born Cullers

“Obakemask,” said Cal. “It’s a class ofyokai, preternatural creatures in Japanese folklore.”

Gray nodded. “Shapeshifter in meaning, but…?” He pressed play again.

Leather picked up the razor blade and gag, then after fastening it around the mother’s mouth—he slit the daughter’s throat.

Speak no Evil had been chosen.

But Black Leather wasn’t finished. As the daughter choked her last breaths—he kicked once at the mother’s throat.

Gray switched the phone off. “I take it the mother lived long enough to be found, but they damaged her vocal cords so she couldn’t speak?”

Cal grimaced. “Pretty much. They also broke her hands, so writing was out of the question. She died from infection to her hands not long after the police found both her and daughter.”

Which meant the mother had been forced to watch over her dead daughter’s body for a long while for infection to set in.

“Who traced the live stream?” asked Gray.

“We did. It’s why I took time away in Japan over the past few months.” Cal looked down at his tea, but glanced away a moment later.

“With the live stream and established audience, you suspect this isn’t a one-time Red Room event?” said Gray, watching him, more his reactions.

Cal sent him a hard look. He didn’t like the term Gray gave it. Event. “No.” Cal sorted through his phone for something else, then handed it to Gray. “Two years ago, around roughly the same time, a family who owned a remote farm in Germany went off the radar. When their bodies were found, this was written on the walls.”

Hear no Evil, See no Evil, Speak no Evil.

The scrawl was untidy and blood-red across a bedroom wall.

“I’ll not go into which family member was forced to play what part, but like the mother and daughter in the live stream, they were raped first, hands broken afterwards, but none of the family members were left alive for anyone to discover. The youngest was fifteen. I need to know your thoughts, Gray.”

Gray gave a heavy sigh. “In what capacity are you asking? Because this isn’t a formal setting required to talk MI5 profiling.”

“I’m asking as a father to son. As father to a lead… something else altogether.”

This was the drawback to asking favours. They always came at a price, this one being so dangerous for Cal if it was ever found out Gray allowed someone else other than the Crown to whisper in his ear as a culler. But as Cal’s previous favour over Zak’s death had protected Light… then Gray in most other ways….

Gray studied the photo. “You’ve found no live stream covering the photo here in Germany, right? And you don’t feel the other live stream event in Japan on your phone is a copycat because of this shared phraseology?”

“No, we don’t think the video is a copycat,” said Cal. “Although we can’t say for certain whether or not the Germany event isn’t buried on the Internet somewhere. I could really do with Konami here to make sure.”

Gray nodded and thumbed in his own secure email into Cal’s phone, then sent the two files over to his own. “You mentioned two years ago, roughly around the Twentieth, similar to the live stream date. So the run-up to Christmas, outside of school term dates.”

Cal nodded before drinking his Earl Grey.

Hearing the text alert, Gray took his own phone from his pocket, then sent the files over to Simon with a message. Cal still wasn’t aware that Simon was Konami. Gray had made sure Raif didn’t mention anything. “So it was an isolated farm,” he added to Cal. “With a farming family that would mostly stay out of sight due to the workload unless it was trips to school or selling stock, but the offence was done on the run-up to Christmas, outside of when most relatives might have visited or where the family could have arranged to visit them….” Gray tightened his jaw, denying every ounce of feeling and echoes this dragged up. “He’s not an opportunist Red Roomist. He keeps track of his victims over a period of months to get their schedule. But he was in emerging territory in Germany. Testing out skill. That was also his first mass kill, one he did alone.”

“His accomplice is clear from the live stream,” said Cal. “Someone else is controlling the camera. But how can you tell for sure that he didn’t work with one back in Germany and that it was his first mass kill?”

“Because he killed all of the German family in isolation of the victims’ home, with a love for brutality that saw he took that private and intimate setting to live out his need to the full, no witnesses left to tell any tales, no live stream. He’d want all that pleasure for himself: experiencing the brutality in raw form, with no mind for sharing when it comes to sidekicks, no one there to call stop.”

“How can you be sure the two women in the live stream weren’t killed at home? In Japan, it wasn’t clear from the footage where the mother and daughter were killed.”

“Yes it was. Black Leather’s voice had that auditorium effect that you’d get with talking and walking an empty underground tube station, and brickwork was old, the mortar joints crumbling, so not a modern-day tunnel. He wouldn’t go back to a home setting after his first kill, maybe fearing what he exposed about himself and not wanting to lose total control again, yet needing an extra kick to keep that family link with the mother and daughter tie. And you were where over there? Osaka?”

Cal sat back and folded his arms, not saying anything.

Gray brought up a map. “Not far from there, there’s a very small rural town, Namaze. The now-abandoned JR Fukuchiyama line starts there. It doesn’t see many visitors and branches off into several disused tunnels. This happened there, right?”

Cal nodded. “It’s still an isolated location.”

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