Inspector Megure looked at the security guard in charge of handing out coffee. Suddenly, he felt he had found a blind spot. "The paper cups used at the stall all looked the same. When you handed out the drinks, did you lift the lids and check what was inside?"
—As long as he had lifted the lids, he would have had a chance to secretly poison them!
The security guard understood the implication. "I-I did lift the lids, but I only checked my own cup! As for those two iced coffees, they had little cartons of milk and sugar on top, so you could tell them apart without opening them. Yumemi can testify to that!"
Suzuki Sonoko had originally been curiously watching Hattori Heiji get beaten up, but upon hearing about this case, she could not help becoming interested.
Playing the role of the "detective's assistant" she had appointed herself, she offered a guess. "Speaking of which, since iced coffee comes with milk and sugar, the murderer could have poisoned him by switching the creamer and syrup! You wouldn't need to open the lids at all. As long as you secretly swapped those two little complimentary containers while passing out the coffee, you could poison the victim's drink without anyone noticing."
The fashionable nurse, clearly experienced, retorted unhappily, "Cyanide takes effect immediately! If that were the case, he would've collapsed right when the play began. How could he have suddenly died halfway through it? And look at his cup."
She pointed at the paper cup that had fallen beside the corpse. "It was completely empty, so it's not as though he simply didn't drink it for a long time after the show began. In any case, I couldn't have poisoned him!"
The female clerk froze. "Wait, if you knew that,