"Of course not. I'm not sure how often Detective Sparrow met with Big Mouth Sparrow, and the odds of him being in town right now are low. If he really showed up just as we arrived, I'd instead have to wonder whether all this was someone's arrangement."
As Shade spoke, having experienced the Fated Story, he no longer believed in coincidences:
"I only want to check the lodging records at the town's inns. Neither of them would have registered under their real identities, but fortunately, Margaret gave me most of the information on 'Gray-headed Eagle,' including details of the false identities he used.
"As long as I find the year and date when Detective Sparrow stayed here, I'll know how often he met with 'Big Mouth Sparrow' and when their next meeting will be. If there was also a suspicious person staying at the inn who appeared according to the same schedule as Detective Sparrow, then we might be able to confirm the identity of the still-unfound agent, 'Big Mouth Sparrow.'
"Of course, all of that depends on whether they truly stayed in town, and whether Big Mouth Sparrow used the same identity every time."
It sounded complicated, but for Shade and Daniste, it was quite simple. After all, it involved only ordinary people.
Although the town was small, trains passed through it, so there were two modest inns. That morning, Shade and Daniste visited them one by one. Daniste hypnotized the innkeepers into bringing out the registration books from the past ten years, while Shade searched through them using Rapid Reading.
Shade had actually worried that Detective Sparrow might have used some casually invented alias when he came here, one that even Gray Gloves had never recorded. Fortunately, he found the name he was looking for in the very