"Looking for your girlfriend who went missing this morning..."
As he watched the man seated across from him introduce himself that way, Mori Kogoro nodded while shooting a glare from the corner of his eye at the person behind him who had let out a loud sigh.
The client was still right here. That attitude was a little too outrageous.
The man sitting across from him, named Sankaku Atsushi, first gave the people standing behind Mori Kogoro a puzzled look before nodding and continuing with his request. "Yes, we live together, but when I woke up this morning, I found that she was gone. She didn't go to work either, and her phone was switched off..."
"Are you sure she went missing? Couldn't something urgent have come up?" Mori Kogoro quickly slipped into a private detective's usual line of questioning.
"I-I think so. Mainly, we had an argument last night. A bad one. So neither of us slept in the same room that night. When I got up again in the morning, she was already gone. I think she must have left home because she was angry with me..." Sankaku Atsushi looked somewhat dejected as he lowered his head to stare at the hands resting on the table.
"May I ask what the argument was about?" Mori Kogoro lifted his eyelids slightly and gave him a subtle look.
Looking for someone who had disappeared after an argument was hardly an unusual type of request. Finding people was one of the more common areas of work for private detectives.
Precisely because he was so experienced with such cases, Mori Kogoro found something subtly unusual about Sankaku Atsushi's behavior.
"It wasn't anything major. Just the sort of quarrel couples often have." Sankaku Atsushi lowered his head and looked at the tea in