"Did he confess?"
"He confessed to everything, including the situation with Genji Firefly."
"And the murders? He admitted those too?"
"Yeah. The evidence is conclusive, so what room is there to deny it? He did dispose of the murder weapon, but the records of him using the security company's lost-item tracking service to retrieve it are still there. We also found records of his communications with certain people on his computer."
"Hmm..."
Fumimaro Ayanokoji folded his arms and looked at Saijo Taiga, who was slumped there and answering practically every question. Something about this felt wrong no matter how he looked at it.
What felt wrong was not that this case had ultimately depended on several young detectives to solve it, but that those young detectives were still insisting it was not their achievement.
After doing all that detective work and reasoning, they still had to emphasize that the successful resolution had relied on the Phantom Thieves of Hearts. What kind of sense did that make?
"Inspector!"
As he pursed his lips and mulled over the suspicious aspects of the matter, an officer in charge of the search hurried out of the temple.
"What did you find?" Ayanokoji immediately straightened up.
To conclusively establish that Saijo Taiga was the true culprit behind the entire serial murder case, they still needed plenty of physical evidence.
If they failed to make such a high-profile, textbook case airtight, the people at the prosecutor's office would eat him alive.
"Um, Detective Hattori may have been telling the truth, about this..."
The officer looked at Fumimaro Ayanokoji's stern expression and unconsciously lowered his voice.
With a faintly bad feeling, Fumimaro Ayanokoji took the card sealed in the evidence bag.
On a red-and-black paper card, letters cut from newspapers had been pasted together in varying sizes