"Miss Suzuki, why did you buy this single-edged kitchen knife at the convenience store?"
Inside an interview room at Obama City Police Station, a female officer opened Suzuki Maika's handbag. Lipstick, a compact mirror, her driver's license, and various other small items were laid out on the table. The most conspicuous item was a white kitchen knife, roughly an inch long, in a sheath.
When the kitchen knife was found, Suzuki Maika blinked, a trace of panic flickering across her face unnoticed, but she quickly calmed down.
She pressed her lips together, then smiled.
"Officer, buying a kitchen knife isn't illegal, is it? When I went back to the guesthouse last night, a drunk whistled at me. It made me a little uneasy, so I wanted to buy a knife to protect myself. I'm a delicate young lady, after all."
"Really? Where did you run into him? What did he look like?"
Suzuki Maika answered without hesitation, saying he was a tourist from out of town she had encountered on a certain stretch of beach.
After all, tourists flocked to the Mermaid Festival in droves, and there were no surveillance cameras at that location. With no witness to contradict her, Obama City Police Station had no way to disprove her story.
That morning, Suzuki Maika, Sakaki Namiru, and Uchiha Naruto had barely left the fisherman's guesthouse when the police summoned them to the station.
Suzuki Maika had gone pale, thinking her drowning of Yukako the night before had been exposed. She had almost tried to make a run for it.
In the end, however, she had calmed down and followed the officers back to the station, ready to play things by ear.
Fortunately, she had already hidden Okubo's diary in Sakaki Namiru's backpack. It would have been trouble if the