Conan, forced to listen in: "?!"
Conan had been staring at the corpse in the room, feeling that something was off no matter how he looked at it, yet he couldn't figure out exactly what.
But now, the fake detective's casual spoiler was like a flash of electric light, suddenly illuminating the vague thoughts that had begun to surface in his mind.
Conan quietly took the remote Inspector Megure had left on the table and rewound the surveillance footage a little.
Now that he had a target, he leaned closer for another look and immediately spotted the problem.
Conan turned to look at Kojima Chihiro.
Jiang Xia's sudden remark seemed like a blow to the head for Kojima Chihiro.
She froze where she stood, her face full of blankness at having been exposed.
Conan looked at Jiang Xia again. When dealing with an old client, Jiang Xia seemed to be more tactful than he usually was when solving cases.
Since Jiang Xia was too embarrassed to spell it out...
Conan, who hadn't solved a case in a long time, cleared his throat. Perhaps he could offer the confused Kojima Chihiro a little help.
Putting on a childlike voice, Conan pointed at the surveillance footage on the television and suddenly asked, "Auntie with the face mask, did she really love beauty?"
"Yes." Between Jiang Xia's words and Conan's, Kojima Chihiro instinctively chose the easier topic to answer. "My mom was more fashionable than girls who'd just come of age. Dyed hair, perms, contact lenses, platform boots—she'd even tried tanning makeup. She never skipped any of it."
"I see." Conan pointed at "President Kojima" in the footage, who had gone out to greet the security guard, and said innocently, "No wonder Auntie was wearing lipstick even while she had a face