Conan's mind was awash with wild thoughts.
Listening to the kids, Juzo Megure, like Watson, noticed the blind spot and grew curious.
"What did you get wrong? What's the same? What case was already solved?"
"Fujino, what did you discover?"
Faced with Megure's question, Fujino did not keep them in suspense and immediately explained.
"Just now, didn't these kids find a cat paw beneath the sofa?"
"That's right. It seemed to be a left cat paw, didn't it?"
Megure immediately recalled it. Fujino was not surprised. Besides being a culprit eliminator, Megure was also the detective world's Yu Qian—the queen of straight men in the reasoning world, perhaps?
Turning around, he asked Chika Murai, "Do you remember whether the Maneki-neko you used had its right paw or left paw raised?"
"I don't remember..."
"It doesn't matter."
Fujino was not surprised. Given Chika Murai's panicked state at the time, how could she possibly remember such a detail?
But if she did not even know something like that, could she have used the falling Maneki-neko to clear herself of suspicion?
Most likely not.
Fujino turned around, took out his phone, composed a text message, and sent it.
Then he slowly walked over to the crime scene and stopped before the pile of Maneki-neko fragments that had yet to be cleared away.
After searching through them briefly, he murmured, "Among these fragments, there's a right paw. Although the whole Maneki-neko was smashed to pieces, a small piece like a paw would not easily break. The larger a ceramic object is, the more easily its structure causes it to shatter when dropped. Smaller objects are more stable instead."
"Look, aren't these two raised cat paws different?"
Fujino found the cat paws, then took the evidence bag from Megure and held them up for comparison.