"Oh, sorry." The middle-aged man answered meekly, opened the passenger-side door, and climbed out from the other side. "I really am not very good at driving, but I'm pretty good at fixing cars."
Officer Sato looked at the plain-looking, even somewhat ugly middle-aged man. "What about you?"
The middle-aged man said, "My name is Fukuchi Naokazu. I work at an auto repair shop. Our shop was off today, but this car still hadn't been fixed, so I stayed behind and worked overtime until now."
Officer Sato looked at her notebook. "But my colleague said that when he ran into you, you were driving around the shopping street."
"I wasn't driving around. I was test-driving it." The middle-aged man shook his head. "To make sure it was fixed and wouldn't come back to the shop, of course I had to test it before handing the car over to the customer."
"All right." Officer Sato noted down his situation, then looked toward the last car. "And you?"
The driver in the car got out. Unlike the yellow-haired man and the curly-haired one before him, his head was smooth, with a broad bald patch.
The Mediterranean pushed up his glasses. "My name is Degawa Toshiaki. I run a locksmith shop in 1-chome... I really didn't expect that someone like me, who sells locks and keys every day, would actually lose the original key to my own car."
Officer Sato looked at his car. "Your car is different from the other two—their cars are covered in mud and rainwater. Why is yours wiped so clean?"
Loving cleanliness was a good thing, but in a case, it became very suspicious. Seeing a suspect driving a clean car, Sato Miwako's first reaction was not "This person is so tidy," but "Did this car ever get blood