Ch.167Request Log #015 – Even a Single Drop of Blood Calls the Sharks (2)

I could see why the paint on the wooden floor would prevent blood from soaking in immediately. Still, a single drop of blood was strange. Blood doesn’t fall in just one drop.

Even if someone had pricked themselves on a splinter while touching the window frame, they would have bled more than a single drop. If that wasn’t the case, then the blood drop was deliberately placed.

This was my only starting point. I got up and began examining the surroundings. There didn’t seem to be anything nearby that could cause bleeding. The window frame was neatly maintained, and there was no reason to cut one’s hand near the bed.

Moreover, considering the uniform shape of the blood drop, it definitely hadn’t fallen naturally. Someone had placed it there. And I was quite familiar with blood that didn’t dry.

It was a ritual. The ritual circle wouldn’t be here. If the blood disappeared or anything happened to it, it would be a ritual circle designed to alert the warlock. Rituals generally worked that way.

Good thing I brought the platinum branch from the Veterans’ Hall. If this involved rituals, I might actually get interested. Whether it was an affair or whatever, no one deserved to be subjected to rituals.

“That banker may not know it, but he found the right person.”

I clicked my tongue once and continued examining the room. The room was quite neatly arranged. Actually, it wasn’t that clean. It was just made to look presentable.

The bed was well-made, but the sheets were wrinkled, and the pillows were scattered haphazardly. The banker must have tidied up. He probably cleaned up his traces and fled after waking up to find the woman gone.

Fortunately, my client wasn’t very thorough. There were still traces on the bed, and the drawer contained clothes someone had worn, stuffed in carelessly.

Then this blood drop wasn’t placed when the woman disappeared. If it had been, my client would have stepped on it while hastily cleaning the room.

So obviously, someone visited this empty house after the woman disappeared. Probably a warlock. Unless someone had a hobby of examining houses where people had disappeared, it had to be the perpetrator or an accomplice.

It would be simple if I could just find them. If she was good enough to be the banker’s mistress, she’d be good enough for warlocks to use as a sacrifice. Assuming the culprit was a warlock made the story simple and coherent.

Sacrifices were better when young. Better alive or freshly dead. Like my comrades who died in the Argonne Forest without even closing their eyes, or the woman who had lain in this bed.

Am I being narrow-minded? What else could young women be used for? The thugs in the red-light district weren’t powerful enough for such operations. And if it were human trafficking, America was a buying country, not a selling one.

For now, warlocks were all I could think of. Even minimizing their responsibility, they were at least involved in the abduction, which was reason enough to pursue them. I started searching the house for similar blood drops.

There were no other blood stains. There was a part of the window frame that had split sharply due to rot from moisture, but it only had faint traces of dried blood.

Since no one else should visit this house, I gathered all the mail that had started piling up in the mailbox and brought it inside. The homeowner wouldn’t mind if I said I read them to find clues.

“Bring your best dish,” read an invitation to a social gathering of the New York Ogre Association. Nothing too fancy. More like a notice for a modest neighborhood party.

Was the woman an ogre? Could be. I checked the next letter. It was a returned letter. The delivery address matched my client’s address. Inside were just a few photographs.

The photos were all trivial. They seemed to be landscape shots, perhaps from a trip he took with his mistress. Judging by the height at which the photos were taken, she wasn’t an ogre.

More important than the contents was the handwriting on the envelope. Ogres, with their large hands, often wrote in big, thick letters, but this woman’s writing was thin and elegant. I couldn’t tell why it had been returned.

If he was allowed to go on a trip with his mistress for days, his wife was either already exhausted or having an affair herself. The commandment against adultery was practically obsolete.

And I could easily figure out why an invitation from the New York Ogre Association had arrived in the mailbox of a woman who wasn’t an ogre. The next letter was from an ogre tailor.

It was a letter saying that the custom suit she had ordered was ready for pickup. I searched the letter drawer for more. There was a letter from a week ago asking her to come in for a fitting.

Apart from my client and his bank colleagues, the last person to see her would be this ogre tailor. It might be worth visiting him. He might know something.

Judging by the familiar tone of the letter, they seemed to know each other quite well personally. There was still time before my client would get off work and I could meet him, so it would be fine to check this place out first.

For an impromptu visit, I’d made decent progress. The clues were fragmentary, but more than enough to sketch an outline. I’d often had to search the streets with even less to go on.

To prevent anyone from worrying about the empty house, I emptied the mailbox and brought in the newspapers thrown into the front yard. This much should keep anyone from getting curious.

As I got into my car, I organized what to report. The sudden disappearance seemed to be an abduction rather than a missing person case. Now that I had some clues, it shouldn’t be too difficult to find her… That should be enough.

Talking about rituals would only make my client anxious without helping. People feared rituals because they didn’t understand them. And because they feared them, they didn’t try to learn.

I headed to the tailor shop that had sent letters to my client’s mistress. It wasn’t the kind of place that made suits with armor lining like lawyers wore, but it was an upscale establishment occupying the first floor of a fairly large building.

Still, ogres tended to charge reasonable prices. Thanks to my client, her expenses would have been low, so saving up for a custom suit wouldn’t be difficult for an ordinary bank clerk.

I opened the door and entered. An ogre with a cleanly shaved head, wearing just a vest over his shirt, removed his glasses and greeted me warmly.

“Welcome. Ah, could you wait a moment? I’ll be with you as soon as I finish cutting this fabric.”

He put his glasses back on, which seemed too small for his broad face. Apparently, he wasn’t the type of tailor who would put down his work to avoid keeping a customer waiting.

“Take your time. Neglecting one customer’s work to attend to another is the quickest way to ruin a business.”

“Indeed. What would a customer think if they saw me toss aside someone else’s work because of them? They’d think, ‘He’ll throw my order aside when another customer comes in.’ That’s what they’d think.”

I didn’t mind having time to look around. The first thing that struck me was… the space was much narrower than it appeared from outside.

From the outside, it looked like it occupied almost the entire first floor of the building, but once inside, the shop was surprisingly small. Most of the space seemed to be used for storage.

That wasn’t unusual. If they offered alterations or cleaning services, they’d need space to store customers’ clothes. After noting the difference in space, I slowly walked around the tailor shop.

Even the ready-made items were of good quality. There was little reason to object to anything made by an ogre’s hands. Soon, the ogre removed his glasses completely and put them in his chest pocket as he approached me.

“Since I don’t remember your face, you must be a first-time customer, right? I remember all my customers properly.”

Should I pretend to be a customer, or should I reveal that I’m a detective? He probably wouldn’t call the police, but if he did, this ogre would also become a suspect, so I chose the latter.

“No, you don’t need to worry about not remembering a previous customer. Because I’m not a customer.”

I took out my wallet and handed him a business card from Husband Detective Agency. He read it and looked troubled. At least his tone didn’t completely lose its politeness.

“What brings a detective to an ordinary tailor shop? I pride myself on having no involvement with crime.”

“If it were that easy, half the criminals I know would be gone. Don’t you have a woman who ordered a custom suit but never came to pick it up? She’s missing, and I’m looking for her.”

The ogre tailor sighed, thought for a moment, then shook his head. His claim about remembering all his customers seemed to be true.

“No, there are no unclaimed suits yet. The last order was… from Miss Julia, and someone else came to pick it up yesterday or the day before.”

Julia was also the name of the mistress. I showed him the letter I’d found while searching her house, the one saying the suit was almost complete and asking her to come for a fitting.

“Ah… yes, the recipient of this letter was my last order. Miss Julia. Has something happened to her? She was such a gentle and warm person…”

It wouldn’t have been my client. He didn’t seem meticulous enough to go all the way here to collect the suit. But I had to check.

“I’m trying to find out what happened. Was the person who came to pick it up a banker?”

“A banker… not really, just ordinary errand boys. They dressed like you, but more shabbily than you.”

Errand boys. The woman seemed to live quite luxuriously thanks to her banker boyfriend, but she wasn’t rich enough to send someone else to pick up her suit.

I dug a little deeper. People generally tried to hide things, and digging them out was part of a detective’s job.

“They picked it up? That can’t be right. How did you know they were errand boys sent by her and give them the suit? You wouldn’t hand it over just because they mentioned her name.”

This seemed to touch on his pride, as the ogre tailor snorted once and nodded.

“Of course not. Our shop isn’t known for quality for nothing. Those two had the letter. The letter I sent asking her to come pick up the suit.”

That was a lie. That letter was in my pocket right now. Either the two people claiming to pick up the suit had lied, or this ogre was lying to me now. I couldn’t tell which.

“I see. This is strange. It seems completely different from the case I was hired for. The woman went missing five days ago. I’m looking for her. Would a missing woman care enough about a suit to send someone?”

If he had said it was possible, I might have been suspicious, but the ogre was clearly thinking it through. After a moment, he finally spoke.

“Well… those people, ah, there were two of them. Anyway, both looked quite shabby. Despite this summer heat, they wore overcoats, looking like vagrants who had just been given a quick wash.”

That was generally the impression errand boys gave. If they didn’t give that impression, and instead handled things neatly and got paid more, they started being called something other than errand boys.

“I see. What species were they?”

“One was a dwarf and the other was human. There was quite a height difference between them.”

One human and one dwarf. That seemed to be all the evidence I could get here. I didn’t have good memories of dwarf warlocks.

At least now I knew which part of the platinum branch to look into. If I searched for German rituals, I might find something about that blood drop.

The ogre went behind the counter and checked his business log, confirming that two people had come around 4 PM to pick up the suit. It was better to trust this ogre.

He removed a letter from the Ogre Gourmet Society on the counter and placed the log right in front of me to show. An ogre who knew how to earn trust.

It wouldn’t be a forgery. If one had to fabricate business logs for a month, two months, six months, or a year just to kidnap someone, it would be better to find another way to solve the problem without kidnapping.

“If those two come back or you spot them again, contact me. They might be kidnappers, and it’s not good to get deeply involved with such people.”

The ogre nervously stroked the back of his hand with his other hand. When violent crimes occurred, orcs and ogres were often the first to be suspected.

The reason was simple: both races were physically strong, so they had the ability to commit crimes. A ridiculous reason.

Even if the reason was ridiculous, it could immediately affect the livelihoods of orcs and ogres. As if to allay that anxiety, the ogre spoke up.

“Will the police come too? If they hear that the last customer who visited our shop disappeared, who knows what kind of trouble will break out here…”

“Probably not. The client hired just a detective for personal reasons.”

I didn’t reveal more than that. This much was explanation, but revealing that she was a mistress would only demonstrate my incompetence as a detective.

The ogre tailor looked uneasy, tapping the back of his hand with the fingertips of his other hand.

“I don’t know what to say. The police would find her fastest, but it’s also good that someone who won’t harm us is handling the case… Anyway, I understand. If those people come back, I’ll contact you.”

Politeness and neatness were in the nature of ogres. This case could be solved like any other. As I opened the door to leave, the ogre watched me and waved until I got into my car.

I got in the car. Once again, I drove through New York toward home. It was time to briefly acquaint myself with rituals, something I could never truly befriend.