"You two noticed something off about this guy's identity before you came back, didn't you? And not only did you not tell us, you quietly made a bet about it here?"
Having figured out the whole sequence of events, the veins on Mori Kogoro's forehead throbbed. He had nearly smacked each of them over the head.
They had risked entering the forest to find the clues they needed before returning to the inn, yet they had not shared them and were instead making some kind of wager.
If he had been familiar enough with Akechi Goro to joke and roughhouse with him, he really would have given them a good knocking.
"Even if he didn't seem all that dangerous, this guy was still a dangerous individual." Tangze pulled out more photos from the cabin and showed them around. "Wouldn't it have been better not to alert him?"
Aside from the roomful of Shinichi Kudo clippings and slashed-up photographs, two lines had been carved into the cabin table with a knife—"Succeed, or die trying."
They had also found fragments of a mirror inside, as well as the most troublesome thing of all: an empty box that had held bullets.
"Seeing these things was enough to prove my earlier theory. Whoever this guy was, he couldn't possibly be Kudo himself, right?"
"You're right." Heiji Hattori's brows had already twisted into a knot. "A shattered mirror, along with this obvious malice directed at Kudo... Isn't the situation clear enough?"
"Yeah, just seeing this scene should make everything obvious." Natsuki Koshi nodded in agreement. "Judging by the traces, someone really had been living here for a long time. Unless they were emotionally agitated, no one would keep so many dangerous things in the place where they lived. What exactly happened for someone who hated