Before Jiang Xia could receive the signal, Officer Yamamura came up with a new theory. He raised a hand and gestured. "It's very dark out. Even the criminal probably wouldn't dare run around the mountains at random. He must have thrown away the gun and fled along this road."
In the end, Conan still couldn't hold back. Unwilling to give up, he challenged Officer Yamamura's logic again. "But there aren't any footprints in this snow, and there weren't any on the road we took here, either. Did the culprit fly over from the opposite bank?"
—I'd like to see how you explain the culprit's flying the same way you explained the snow on the gun just now.
"Well..."
Sure enough, the elementary schooler's insidious plan worked. Officer Yamamura rubbed his chin and sank into arduous thought.
Conan pushed up his glasses, and a faint smile quietly slipped across his lips.
But before the smile could fully form, a young police officer searching by the valley suddenly waved his flashlight and reported loudly, "Mr. Jiang Xia, there's a rope hanging from this tree, and it drops down into the valley!"
Conan: "...?"
Beside him, Officer Yamamura first froze slightly. Immediately after, a flash of inspiration struck him, and in an instant he felt he understood everything.
Soon, like a class representative for Chinese reciting an extremely difficult text in front of the teacher, he cleared his throat and said solemnly:
"What happened should be this—the culprit came here to scout the place, then tied a hemp rope to this tree and let it hang down to the bottom of the valley, all the way until it touched the water.
"After that, once the male actor came to this hotel, the culprit set off upstream. He took a boat downstream, and when