"No choice. Anyway, that's not important. You want to go to the station, right? I'll show you the way. Look over the information first, and ask me if there's anything you don't understand."
'Female High School Student Disappearance Case': About three months ago, Mai Hirano vanished without explanation after school. They investigated her relationships and found that she never stayed out overnight, had few friends, and did not associate with any unemployed drifters. They also interviewed witnesses, but hardly anyone had seen suspicious individuals around the places Mai Hirano frequented.
There really were too few clues.
When the investigation hit a bottleneck, someone found Mai Hirano's hairpin. The place where it was found was actually near the police station in the 8th Ward.
"Near the police station in the 8th Ward?"
"Yeah. It was left by the roadside in front of the station, in a very conspicuous spot."
0225 Nothing Gained, Please Subscribe
"Did someone find it and deliberately place it in front of the police station?"
"If that were the case, they should have handed it directly to the relevant law enforcement officers. Unless, of course, they had some reason they couldn't do that."
"A reason they couldn't hand it directly to law enforcement."
"For example, they might be connected to the case." Shūhō turned around and gave Amon a meaningful look before saying, "Mr. Amon, I said this before. I think this case was the work of a human."
Shūhō had always maintained that view. He had expressed the same thought when discussing the case with Ichiryū, and he firmly believed it.
"But there were ghoul bodily fluids on it."
It was precisely because the evidence pointed to a ghoul that the case had been transferred from an ordinary police station to the investigators. There was solid reasoning