Shinichi hadn’t even stepped onto the downward escalator when his phone buzzed violently in his pocket.
It was a call from Inspector Megure.
“Kudo, my boy!
The shop manager’s alibi is indeed fake, but he isn’t the killer!” Megure’s voice crackled through the speaker, tight with urgency.
“Forensics found skin fragments under the victim’s fingernails.
Preliminary DNA test results indicate a female.
Also, an unknown translucent residue was detected on the victim’s collar.
The laboratory can’t confirm its composition yet!”
Shinichi stopped dead in his tracks.
His grip tightened on the phone.
Without a word, he hung up, spun on his heel, and sprinted back toward the first-floor crime scene.
Up on the second floor, Tōhō Getsukai watched through the pristine floor-to-ceiling glass as the teenage detective bolted back into the fray.
Getsukai casually speared the last piece of strawberry cheesecake on his plate and popped it into his mouth, savoring the rich sweetness.
“Running off again?” Sonoko leaned over the table, pressing her hands against the glass to look down at the commotion.
“The case isn’t over,” Getsukai murmured, dabbing his lips with a napkin.
“But it has nothing to do with us.”
Ran nodded in agreement.
She leaned comfortably against Getsukai’s shoulder, her thumb idly scrolling through her phone screen.
The warmth of the afternoon sun bathed their quiet corner, a stark contrast to the grim atmosphere below.
Downstairs, the air had grown heavy.
Shinichi crouched beside the victim’s body, a magnifying glass held steady over the collar of her uniform.
He squinted at the mysterious residue.
It possessed a translucent, film-like texture composed of extremely fine particles.
Leaning in closer, his nose twitched.
It gave off a very faint, sharp scent of alcohol.
It wasn’t an industrial solvent.
It wasn’t a commercial cleaning agent, nor was it any common adhesive he recognized.
He scoured his vast mental database of chemical compounds, flipping through pages of encyclopedic knowledge, but came up completely empty.
The victim was a twenty-six-year-old saleswoman from the first-floor jewelry store.
Cause of death: a blunt force strike to the back of the head.
The murder weapon, a heavy marble display base, had already been recovered from the nearby fire escape.
With the new DNA evidence, the suspect pool had instantly shrunk from three down to one.
A woman around thirty years old stood near the police cordon.
She wore a dark silk shirt and sported an exquisite, flawless face of makeup.
She calmly claimed that at the exact time of the crime, she had been upstairs trying on products at the second-floor cosmetics counter.
A sales clerk had already corroborated her story.
But Shinichi’s instincts screamed that something was wrong.
He stared at the woman’s face.
There was a distinct dissonance in her appearance.
He scrutinized her for ten solid seconds, his eyes darting across her features, yet he couldn’t isolate the anomaly.
Was it the harsh mall lighting?
The angle of her posture?
A subtle color difference between the left and right sides of her jaw?
The Great Detective’s vaunted reasoning engine ground to a halt, stuck in a field of knowledge he had never once bothered to explore.
“Kudo, my boy, her alibi is completely solid,” Inspector Megure sighed, adjusting his beige hat.
“The sales clerk confirmed she was at the counter testing products during the entire window of the crime.”
Shinichi bit his thumbnail.
He remained crouched on the tiled floor, unmoving.
His gut told him this woman was the killer.
But intuition wasn’t evidence.
Seeking a momentary distraction, Megure looked up to routinely scan the upper levels of the mall, checking the civilian evacuation progress.
His gaze drifted to the window seat of the second-floor dessert shop.
Long, shimmering silver hair.
A black pleated skirt.
Two familiar high school girls sitting on either side.
“Isn’t that Mouri’s daughter?
And that child from Eri Kisaki’s family?” Megure blinked.
He turned to the young officer beside him.
“Takagi!
Go up there and take a look.
Remind them to stay safe, and make sure they don’t wander near the scene.”
“Yes, sir!”
Officer Takagi jogged up the stationary escalator, his heavy boots thudding against the metal steps.
He pushed open the glass door of the dessert shop, wiping a bead of sweat from his brow, and scanned the room.
His eyes locked onto the window table—and his breath hitched.
The afternoon sun slanted through the floor-to-ceiling glass, casting a warm, ethereal glow over a cascade of silver hair.
An incredibly elegant beauty sat in a plush chair, legs gracefully crossed.
A pair of polished Mary Jane shoes dangled in mid-air, swaying to a silent rhythm.
Slender fingers held a delicate porcelain teacup.
Lazy, indifferent, and utterly stunning.
This person existed on an entirely different plane of reality from the bloody crime scene downstairs.
Takagi shook his head, violently forcing his brain back into official police mode.
“U-uh!
Excuse me!” He marched up to the table, his hand trembling slightly as he fumbled to present his badge.
“I’m Officer Takagi from the First Investigation Division!”
He cleared his throat.
“Miss Mouri, and…
this young lady—”
“Sir,” Getsukai corrected smoothly, taking a slow sip of his black tea.
“…Sir?” Takagi blinked.
“Yes.
Male.”
Takagi froze, his brain short-circuiting.
Beside them, Sonoko was already covering her mouth, her shoulders shaking with suppressed laughter.
“Officer Takagi, what is it?” Ran asked, sitting up straight to rescue the poor man.
It took Takagi three full seconds to reboot.
“Ah!
Inspector Megure asked me to come up and remind everyone to stay safe.
Also…
the case has hit a major snag.”
He scratched the back of his head.
“There’s an unknown residue on the victim’s collar.
Shinichi can’t confirm the composition yet, and the main suspect’s alibi is airtight, so the investigation is completely stuck.”
The honest detective answered whatever was asked, spilling the police’s troubles without a second thought.
Getsukai held his latte cup, his expression mild.
He hadn’t planned on participating in this little drama.
But his body betrayed his curiosity.
Leaning forward slightly, he cast his gaze down through the glass.
Inside the police cordon, the female suspect in the dark silk shirt was currently being questioned, her profile tilted upward toward the lights.
Getsukai’s sharp eyes lingered on her face for exactly two seconds.
A soft, amused smile touched his lips.
“Officer Takagi.”
“Y-yes!” Takagi snapped to attention.
“That residue downstairs,” Getsukai began, his voice a melodic purr.
“Translucent, extremely fine particles, with a faint smell of alcohol?”
Takagi stared at him.
“Probably…
yes?
Shinichi said the exact same thing.”
Getsukai set his teacup down.
His tone was breezy, as if he were discussing the weather rather than a murder investigation.
“That isn’t some complex chemical reagent.
It’s UD’s setting spray.
The long-lasting waterproof version, to be exact.”
He rested his chin on his hand.
“The ingredients include acrylate copolymer and denatured ethanol.
When sprayed over makeup, it forms a protective film.
After it dries, it leaves behind translucent particles that carry a faint alcoholic scent.”
Takagi turned into a stone statue.
Ran and Sonoko stopped breathing, turning their heads in perfect unison to stare at him.
Getsukai casually tapped his right cheek with a slender fingertip.
“Do me a favor.
Help me take another look at that female suspect.
Is the foundation shade in the transition area from her right jaw to her neck the exact same as the left side?”
Moving like a rusted automaton, Takagi leaned against the glass and peered down at the suspect.
Five seconds ticked by.
“Indeed…” Takagi muttered, his eyes widening.
“The colors on the left and right are a bit different.
The right side is noticeably darker.”
“Then there’s your answer,” Getsukai said, leaning back into the plush cushions.
“When she committed the crime, she had close physical contact with the victim.
The foundation from her own face rubbed off onto the victim’s collar.
Panicking, she immediately ran upstairs to the cosmetics counter to touch up her ruined makeup.”
He gestured gracefully to his own flawless skin.
“This perfectly explains why the sales clerk could vouch for her alibi.
But she was in too much of a hurry.
The tester shade she used for the touch-up didn’t match her original foundation, resulting in a glaring color mismatch on her right jaw.”
Getsukai crossed his arms.
“Normal touch-ups don’t result in a mismatch unless the original layer was rubbed off over a massive area, requiring the entire section to be reapplied from scratch.
And since setting spray makes base makeup adhere incredibly strongly, only intense, violent facial friction could rub off such a large patch.”
Silence blanketed the table.
Takagi’s jaw hung open.
Sonoko’s dessert fork slipped from her fingers, clattering against her plate.
Ran’s hands tightened instinctively on Getsukai’s dark cuff.
“Sister Tōhō is so amazing…” Ran whispered, her eyes shining with absolute awe.
“This isn’t being amazing.
It’s called basic common sense,” Getsukai replied, a dry edge of amusement in his voice.
“Any girl who knows how to apply makeup could spot it from a mile away.
It’s just that your Great Detective probably can’t even tell the difference between liquid foundation and a silicone primer.”
Takagi suddenly snapped back to reality.
He bolted toward the glass door, frantically yanking his walkie-talkie from his belt.
“Inspector Megure!
There’s a major breakthrough regarding the residue on the victim’s collar!
It’s not a chemical reagent—it’s a type of cosmetic setting spray!”
Down on the first floor.
Shinichi was still crouching by the body, gnawing on his thumbnail, when a rapid-fire string of words exploded from Megure’s radio.
Setting spray.
Color mismatch.
Foundation adhesion.
He recognized every single word individually.
Put together, it was absolute gibberish.
As Takagi stumbled through his breathless relay of Getsukai’s analysis, a vein pulsed violently at Shinichi’s temple.
“Inspector Megure,” Shinichi asked, his voice dangerously low.
“Who exactly provided this information?”
Megure simply raised a thick finger and pointed toward the second floor.
Shinichi snapped his head up.
Behind the dessert shop’s massive window, a familiar silver-haired figure was casually sipping black tea.
The gesture was so effortlessly elegant it made Shinichi want to scream.
He didn’t waste another second.
Pushing himself off the floor, he marched over to the female suspect in the dark shirt.
He stopped inches away and stared directly at her right jaw.
Left cheek.
Right cheek.
The skin tones were undeniably different.
The right side was a shade darker, the blending boundary harsh and inconsistent.
He had felt the dissonance earlier.
This was it.
He could see the visual anomaly, but his brain lacked the vocabulary to name it.
Because Shinichi Kudo, genius detective, had no idea what a ‘color mismatch’ was.
He had never hated his oblivious male nature quite so much.
“Madam,” Shinichi said, sliding his hands into his pockets.
His voice was cold, precise.
“Immediately after the crime, you went to the cosmetics counter to touch up your makeup, didn’t you?
The foundation shade on your right jaw doesn’t match the left.
The base makeup originally on your face rubbed off onto the victim’s collar during your struggle.”
The woman’s exquisite face drained of all color.
Her knees buckled.
She collapsed onto the polished mall tiles, burying her face in her hands.
“I…
I didn’t mean to!” she wailed, tears carving tracks through her mismatched foundation.
“She caught me stealing!
I just wanted to push her away so I could run!
I didn’t expect her to trip and hit the corner of the counter…”
A classic, textbook breakdown.
Up on the second floor, Getsukai rested his chin in his hand, watching the theatrical display unfold below.
The killer knelt on the ground, sobbing through a tragic confessional monologue.
The thick glass muffled her wails, but her exaggerated body language painted the entire picture.
In this world, this happens every single episode, Getsukai thought, stifling a yawn.
Honestly, it gets a bit exhausting to watch.
Megure waved his hand.
Two uniformed officers stepped forward, clicking handcuffs over the weeping woman’s wrists and hauling her away.
Shinichi remained standing by the crime scene, his shoulders slumped.
The case was officially closed, but his actual contribution to solving it hovered somewhere around three percent.
The critical, case-breaking clue had been casually tossed down from a dessert shop by a cross-dressing beauty drinking afternoon tea.
Surprisingly, Shinichi didn’t completely break down.
After all, he was used to this.
Whenever he had encountered bizarre, logic-defying problems during his childhood, he had often sought out Getsukai’s advice.
That guy’s deductive reasoning always took the most unorthodox, maddening paths, yet the conclusions were terrifyingly accurate every single time.
It’s not that I’m incompetent, Shinichi told himself, taking a deep breath.
It’s just that his methods are completely insane.
He repeated the mantra three times in his head, barely managing to glue the shattered fragments of his detective’s pride back together.
Back upstairs, a flash of movement caught Getsukai’s peripheral vision.
Down below, Inspector Megure adjusted his hat, turned around, and gave a hearty wave.
Then, with Takagi and several other officers in tow, he marched directly toward the upward escalator.
Their trajectory was dead set on the dessert shop.
Sonoko noticed them too, pressing her face against the glass.
“Eh?
Are they coming up here?”
[Akarin’s Note:
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