Inspector Megure sighed. "How could someone so young just die... By the way, Brother Jiang Xia, what are you doing here?"
Jiang Xia briefly explained the Cause and Effect behind their gathering here. "After the power went out, we had just turned on the circuit breaker when we heard a scream from the second floor. We ran upstairs and found a corpse lying at the end of the corridor."
Mouri Ran and Suzuki Sonoko nodded like pecking chicks, both still shaken. "Before the blackout, there was nothing under the windowsill. But once the power came back and the electric light turned on, there was suddenly a corpse there—someone actually killed a person in the dark right in front of us in barely ten seconds, and we had no idea!"
Thinking about it now, if the murderer had killed Himemiya Nobuko and then turned around to give each of the three of them a blow... Suzuki Sonoko thought of Himemiya Nobuko's bloodied head and shuddered, unable to stop herself from quietly clutching her own head.
"But..." Unlike Inspector Megure, who was chatting with Jiang Xia, Officer Takagi had already thrown himself into his work.
He touched the cold corpse before him and asked the two high school girls doubtfully, "But this body is already somewhat cold. It looks like she's been dead for at least half an hour, while the police cars took less than ten minutes to get here. If you called the police as soon as you found the body... then the timing doesn't seem to add up. Were you too scared and mixed up what happened?"
"Scared or not, we've been through so many cases already. How could we be scared enough to misremember things?" Suzuki Sonoko snapped indignantly, feeling that her professionalism had been questioned. Then she