Furukawa Etsuko had considered this question long ago. That was precisely why she had dared to touch the Remote Control without gloves. She kept smiling. "I'm a member of this household. I sometimes visit my mother in her bedroom, so wouldn't it be perfectly natural for my fingerprints to be on her Remote Control?"
Jiang Xia said, "But the maid said earlier that you'd been busy outside all day today and hadn't come back."
Furukawa Etsuko had no idea what this Detective was trying to do, so she could only keep up the act. "That's right, but I came yesterday and the day before. I used to come over every few days too."
The maid seemed to remember something, and her expression changed slightly. "This afternoon, when I brought tea to the old madam, I accidentally spilled the cup onto the small table. The Remote Control on it got wet too, so I wiped it down very carefully... Could it be that Miss Etsuko came to the bedroom after that?"
Furukawa Etsuko froze.
After stiffening for a moment, she gritted her teeth and snapped, "Nonsense! You must have been lazy. You only casually blotted up the water and didn't wipe it clean at all, did you?!"
The maid became furious too. Thinking of the exorbitantly priced carpet she had just ruined that afternoon, she shouted, "I wiped it very clean! Not a single old fingerprint could have remained!"
Officer Takagi hadn't expected things to develop this way. He hurried over to break them up. "Everyone, please calm down. Look at the evidence. Everything has to be based on the evidence."
He flipped through the relevant documents in his hands. "The Remote Control from the crime scene, right? Let me see... There are indeed fingerprints from two different people on it.