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"Huh? Jiang Xia, you got here so quickly?" Miss Yoko's manager looked up when she saw Jiang Xia and handed him a key. "This is the Hanzawa family's key. I just borrowed it from the landlord."
After a pause, she asked, seeming weathered by life's storms but unable to hide her curiosity, "Is Hanzawa really killing someone in his home?"
Jiang Xia took the key. "We'll know once we go upstairs."
The group made their way up to the second floor and used the key to open the locked room door.
When they reached the bathroom entrance and pushed open the door, they found an extremely bizarre scene inside.
—In the Bathtub lay a middle-aged man, bound up like a Zongzi with his mouth covered.
Above his head, a heavy cement brick hung from a thin rope.
The other end of the rope ran over the showerhead and was tied to a large block of ice. The ice was melting slowly, especially quickly where it touched the rope. It looked ready to split in two at any moment, allowing the cement brick to fall.
Officer Takagi froze. "W-what is going on?"
Jiang Xia glanced at the bathroom and patiently answered his question. "It seems Mr. Hanzaki wasn't planning to drown his manager. He wanted to use a Timer Device to crush him to death, then, after finishing his meal, place the body at a nearby construction site and make it look like he fell to his death."
As he spoke, a faint, teeth-grating cracking sound came from within the large block of ice.
"!!" Officer Takagi still had not processed what was happening, but his body moved on instinct. He lunged forward. The instant the ice broke and the cement brick fell, he grabbed the middle-aged man by the