The officer froze for a moment, then followed his pointing finger and looked over. Sure enough, a Lighter lay on the relatively flat roof ridge, matching the victim's "burned" state of death.
He took a few photos, picked up the Lighter and placed it in an Evidence Bag, then paused slightly. "Strange..."
There was a fan-shaped dry mark beneath the Lighter.
The eaves and roof ridge had already been soaked by the rain, their color darkened, but that fan-shaped area was a dry, pale shade, as though it had never been rained on.
It was normal for the area beneath the Lighter to be somewhat dry, but the Lighter was a flat rectangular object. No matter how one looked at it, it could not have blocked the rain into a fan shape.
The detectives all had sharp eyes, and they had noticed it too.
They quickly understood the cause.
"It looks like something roughly cylindrical had been placed in the same spot before the Lighter." Jiang Xia gestured. "A circular dry mark was left on the roof ridge first. Then that object was removed, while one corner of the Lighter was placed over that circle, sheltering it from the rain. The rest of the circle got wet, eventually forming this strange fan shape."
"A cylindrical object? Could it have been the bomb he used to kill himself?"
A voice drifted over from behind.
Jiang Xia turned around and saw that the other four members of the travel group had somehow slipped in as well. Apparently, because the victim had visited the Tenshukaku before disappearing at noon, they were identifying every place he had gone before his death.
The woman playing "Nene" sighed and pushed up her glasses. "He'd been looking forward to this trip all along. Who would've thought this