Baccano! - Volume 11 - Chapter 1.5

Interlude I The First Murder

At present, the number of serial murders had climbed to twenty-seven.

The case had truly humble beginnings. The incident hadn’t been covered by the newssheet, and the city police hadn’t taken any major action.

The victim had been a boy who’d worked in the port market. When he was murdered, no one had grieved over his death. They hadn’t even noticed it.

The boy had died a lonely, utterly solitary death in a warehouse at the port. His face was covered with a mask, and his heart was run through with a single stab of a blade.

No one investigated to discover whether the warehouse had been locked.

This was because—at first—no one had even mentioned the murder.

The boy’s master didn’t initially report his death to the city police or the military police, and the boy himself had had no family. There was no one to trouble themselves over his death. Apparently, the owner of the locksmith where the boy had worked only muttered, “That’s one petty laborer gone.” He probably thought he’d been a casualty of a fight between some drunks.

There was a reason the owner did eventually make a report to the police.

It was the second murder, which happened a few days later.

This killing occurred inside the mansion of a certain aristocrat, and it threw both the city police and the nobles into an uproar. Curiously, the identity of the deceased was a mystery—but as in the first incident, the corpse wore a mask and had been stabbed through the heart.

The mere fact that a murder had occurred in an aristocrat’s mansion was enough to spark a commotion. Rumors spread through town like wildfire, and the word mask sent a shiver down the owner’s spine.

If there was some sort of connection—if they thought he’d hushed up the first murder—would he be suspected of something? He’d almost forgotten the incident by now, but that reason alone was enough for him to make a report.

In other words, that was the type of person the first victim was.

No one had mourned his death, but no one would have wished for it, either, in all likelihood. He hadn’t stood out much at all.

This made the criminal’s objective unclear, and the investigation was a confused one right from the start.

Then, just as the murders were being linked and people had begun to suspect a serial killer—

—a girl came forward to say she’d seen a suspicious figure near the storehouse on the night of the first murder. She was the first to mention the “mysterious masked phantom,” and in the beginning, only the city police whispered about it among themselves.

At first, no one believed in any mysterious phantoms, but that changed almost immediately.

A few days later—

—the witness became the third victim.

Her body was found in a church on the edge of town, and this time, a boy testified about it to the police. He’d seen a masked figure lurking around the church, he said, and information about the masked figure hadn’t yet been revealed to the public.

There was no way some passerby could have known about it.

The police were finally compelled to believe in what the witnesses said.

However—it was all too late.

It happened to him, too.

The boy was also discovered, two weeks later…

…as the seventh masked victim.