Chapter 996: An Invisible Ghost?

At the open-air hot spring, Akaso Kaze walked over from the recreation hall.

The door to the women's bath had been removed and placed to the side, with a "10:00 to 11:00 Reserved" sign hanging on it, and underneath was a paper doll of a Hannya kimono sleeve.

The landlady discovered the incident when she came to remove the sign.

Shibasaki Asuka's corpse was still floating on the steaming water, wrapped in a pile of gorgeous long-sleeved kimonos.

The deaths of these two people were very similar to the local legend of the Kimono Sleeve God, or rather, the murderer also had the intention of using the legend; a Hannya kimono sleeve paper doll was placed on Anzai Ema's corpse.

Akaso Kaze looked at the kimono sleeves spread out like a painting in the bath and suddenly remembered Suzuka Sakurako, the college senior mentioned by Fukatsu Harumi.

If the suicidal Suzuka Sakurako was the Kimono Sleeve God Kohana, then Shibasaki and Anzai were the two village headmen's daughters in the legend.

They died as they deserved, so Akaso Kaze did not intervene.

"Hmm?"

Akaso Kaze looked down and found that something seemed to have fallen to the bottom of the pool.

He pointed to the water and said: "I think this should be the murder weapon."

There were two items at the bottom of the water: the knife used as the murder weapon and a stun gun.

Judging from the wounds on the bodies, Anzai and Shibasaki should have both been killed by this murder weapon.

"So the murder weapon was here!" The old policeman's expression froze. "If that's the case, Miss Asuka was murdered after Miss Anzai, that is, after 10:30. But the landlady and the waiter were in the recreation hall the whole time, and no one passed through there. Could there really be a ghost?!"

"Where would there be a ghost? It must have been deliberately designed."

Akaso Kaze looked at a blood-stained printed headscarf floating next to the long-sleeved kimono.

It was the one Anzai Ema had been wearing on her head.

Judging from the situation at the scene, the murderer first killed Anzai Ema at the shrine, then killed Shibasaki Asuka here, and threw the murder weapon into the pool.

The key point is that whether entering or leaving the open-air hot spring, one would definitely pass through the open-air bathhouse, and the landlady who was in the hall the whole time did not see anyone pass by.

Moreover, there were doubts about the snowy courtyard; after 10:30, only Anzai passed through the hall to the shrine, and only Anzai's footprints were left on the snow.

All clues pointed to the only possibility.

The murderer was an invisible ghost.

Akaso Kaze looked again at the Hannya kimono sleeve at the entrance of the bathhouse and the reservation sign hanging on the door, a meaningful smile appearing on the corner of his mouth.

In the inn's social hall, Editor Yasuda and her group did not go to the Japanese-style living room to wait; they remained sitting on the sofas in the hall, the atmosphere silent.

The old policeman said: "I have already checked; there are no suspicious traces on the cliff. If someone had bypassed the recreation hall to go to the open-air hot spring, it should have been clearly visible."

"In addition, the landlady just confirmed that the murder weapon found in the bathhouse is the divine sword originally enshrined in the shrine."

The female editor said in a deep voice: "Added to the blood-stained headscarf of Miss Ema in the pool, if it was used to wrap the murder weapon, the order of the crime should have been Miss Ema first, then Miss Asuka."

"But how did the murderer do it?" Fukatsu Harumi grabbed her fingers tightly. "Maybe it really is the curse of the Kimono Sleeve God. Only the Kimono Sleeve God could do such a thing."

"That," the landlady hesitated, "during the day, I saw it at the shrine in the village; there were two new dolls used to worship the Kimono Sleeve God." ===== CHAPTER 998 =====