As Officer Sato spoke, her voice gradually lowered. It seemed she, too, did not have much faith in the reliability of her colleagues from the Forensics Department.
Jiang Xia thought of those diligent forensic officers and interrupted her train of thought. "A phone is such an important item that it would be hard to overlook. If it really wasn't at the scene, then perhaps the victim deliberately threw it far away before falling."
"I see!" Inspector Megure, who had been listening in, brightened at once, feeling as though everything had suddenly become clear.
He immediately called the people still at the scene. "Before falling, the victim may have deliberately thrown his phone somewhere far away—you need to determine the possible throwing range and search it as soon as possible. That's critical physical evidence. You must find it!"
After hanging up, and only after repeating Jiang Xia's idea aloud, he froze in belated realization. "Wait, why would the victim throw away his own phone? Doing something like that specifically before his death... could it be that he deliberately planned his fall? So was this actually suicide?"
...Jiang Xia gave him a quietly reproachful look. Don't connect every abnormality to suicide. How else are the unfortunate Shikigami supposed to let go of their obsessions...
Inspector Megure faltered under his gaze and cleared his throat. "Ahem, of course, that's only one possibility. Maybe it wasn't suicide."
Jiang Xia checked the time and felt that it was getting late. By now, he had already pretended to hear all the clues he needed. Even if he helped the police wrap up work right away, it probably would not seem too abrupt.
Thinking this, Jiang Xia amiably ignored Inspector Megure's topic of "suicide" and casually steered the conversation back to the physical evidence.
"Since we're looking