Maori Kogoro began to understand everything

Katsuya Ota, who used to be an imported car salesman and is now a photographer, Kakuko walked past Mori and went outside to the balcony.

"Maybe it came up through the tree."

"Tree?"

After hearing the conversation between several people, Mao Li looked outside carefully again.

"Huh, really,"

Mr. Sonoko looked at the dark outside of the villa with a worried look on his face, then turned to Xiaolan and said with an expression that said "you are so disappointing", "Xiaolan, when you were attacked, why didn't you use karate to fight back? With your strength, you can definitely knock down that bandage guy with one kick!"

Xiaolan blushed upon hearing this and said helplessly: "But, I can't do anything with monsters or ghosts..."

"all in all,"

Jiao Gu said in a deep voice, "That guy might come and attack again. It's too dangerous for us to scatter. Let's just gather in the restaurant and wait until dawn."

"It can only be this way."

……

In the restaurant on the first floor, everyone was sitting at the table except Maori and Conan, who took the opportunity to go to the bathroom together to sneak into the room of Ota Katsu and others to search, and then left through the back door with umbrellas to check around the villa.

However, after searching everywhere, nothing was found. The things inside the bandages were not hidden in those people's rooms, nor were they found outside the villa.

This is strange. If the bandaged man was someone in the villa, he would definitely hide his bandage cloak somewhere.

Could it really be someone outside the villa?

Walking to the bottom of the balcony on the second floor of the villa, Mao Li tried to climb up to the balcony with the help of a nearby tree in order to test the feasibility of the climb. With his physical fitness, although it was a bit difficult, he still managed to jump onto the balcony.

"Ok?"

Picking up the umbrella that was thrown to him first, Maori was suddenly stunned.

There were clear traces of his muddy footprints on the floor, but he remembered that there were no footprints there before. If the bandaged man had come up like him, there was no reason why he wouldn't have left footprints, right?

So, it was someone inside the villa who committed the crime...

Maori put his hands in his pockets and continued to check along the balcony, but found nothing except some new-looking scratches on the railing on the second floor of the restaurant.

Although it is still unclear what use these findings will have, as long as we can find the key breakthrough point, these will undoubtedly be important clues...

Maori thought about it and went back to the restaurant downstairs. He borrowed the camera that Kakugu used to record the filming and carefully checked the recorded content.

The scene of the bandaged man taking Chikako away from the window was indeed captured by the camera. He had just watched it carefully and discovered an important suspicious point.

According to Suzuki Ayako, Chikako's necklace was found at the entrance before, but if that weirdo kidnapped Chikako, the necklace should have fallen into the forest...

And Suzuki Ayako also said that in the evening, Chikako seemed to have read the note stuck in the crack of the door before leaving through the back door...

Notes, notes...

Mao Li was stunned for a moment, then stood up and looked at everyone in the restaurant while thinking.

Not only his detective intuition, but also the clues that Maori has found now clearly indicate that the murderer is someone in this villa, but how did he do it? When the bandaged man passed by the window, everyone was in the villa...

"Boom——!"

Suddenly, a thunderclap interrupted Maori's thoughts. Before he could recover from the loud noise, the house suddenly fell into darkness.

"power cut?"

"Maybe the lightning just now broke the line!"

Everyone was talking in panic in the restaurant, and Suzuki Ayako took the initiative to offer, "I'll go to the kitchen to get some candles!"

"I'll go with you! Miss Ayako!"

Xiaolan followed Ayako worriedly, but before Conan could say anything, Maori grabbed Conan and shouted, "Conan, this brat and I are going too!"

Chapter 18: Maori Kogoro Begins to Kill People

In the darkness, Suzuki Ayako quickly found a candle in the kitchen. After lighting the candle with a match, she breathed a sigh of relief: "Great, with a candle, we can at least hold on for a little while..."

Maori stood at the door, waiting for Ayako and the others to walk out of the kitchen carrying candlesticks. When they were about to cross the corridor, the sound of breaking glass suddenly came from the direction of the restaurant.

"It's over there in the restaurant!"

Ayako and the others immediately stopped, looking panicked: "Could it be that bandage weirdo again?"

"Don't move!"

Maori tensed his body and listened attentively. Following the sound of glass breaking, hurried footsteps were heard on the stairs, and then a sharp wind sound came from the corridor behind everyone.

It was almost an instinctive reaction. Maori pounced behind him quickly, knocked away the axe that was chopping towards Xiaolan, and continued to hit the attacker with his fists without losing momentum.

Ok?

Feeling the strange touch on his hand, Maori was slightly stunned, and it was this stunned moment that made him react, and the attacker had already hurriedly fled out of the corridor.

"This guy……"

"What happened? Detective Maori?"

Ayako hurried over to Maori with the candlestick in her hand, and when she, Conan, and Xiaolan saw the axe falling to the ground, they were suddenly shocked: "Could this be..."

"It's that bandage weirdo!"

Conan looked grim, and tried to calm down, then asked Maori, "Uncle Maori, did you see anything?"

"No, but it felt weird when I hit him with my fist,"

Mao Li's face was heavy, "It was as if what he hit was not a living person, but a cotton doll."

"A doll made of cotton?"

"Anyway, let's go to the restaurant first."

Unable to figure out why for a while, Mao Li simply put this strange thing aside for the time being, "Wasn't there a noise over there just now? Maybe we can find some clues."

When they returned to the restaurant, the power in the villa suddenly returned to normal and the room lit up again. It was then that they discovered that the window on the second-floor balcony next to the restaurant had been damaged from the outside, with glass fragments everywhere.

It seemed that he was disguised as coming in from outside, but this made Maori and Conan more certain that the bandaged monster was in the villa and was one of Ayako's classmates.

Mao Li's eyes slowly swept over the people in the villa, and soon locked onto the only target that could perfectly match the cotton touch he had just felt. According to this idea, some of the doubts about Chikako's death before could also be perfectly explained...

But why did he attack Xiaolan again and again?

(It's that guy! Everything is clear now!)

Conan, who was standing aside, had a gleam in his eyes - he came to the villa earlier than Maori, and knew more details than Maori, and it was these details that allowed him to solve all the puzzles faster than Maori.

Although my uncle probably already has an idea of ​​my true identity, doing this is very risky... but no matter what, finding the murderer is the most important thing at the moment!

After a psychological game, Conan's eyes fell on Maori's back. Seeing that Maori was still thinking, he quietly opened the watch-shaped anesthetic gun and aimed.

"call out!"

The sound of the anesthetic needle from the watch was very slight, and Maori, who was thinking, did not notice it at all, but now he had begun to understand everything, and had been alert to Conan at this critical moment of solving the case. Therefore, he instinctively twisted his neck to the side and avoided Conan's anesthetic needle.

After dodging the anesthetic needle, Maori turned his head and saw Conan, who was still holding the watch-shaped anesthetic gun and looked confused, and couldn't help but reveal a half-smile.

"Lie, lie?"

Conan stared blankly at Maori dodging the anesthetic needle, then noticed his expression and gaze, and quickly shrank his neck, smiling guiltily, "Um, uncle, I'm going to the toilet..."

"Okay, I'll go too!"

Maori smiled and picked up Conan, who was trying to sneak away, from behind, and carried him towards the bathroom like a chicken.

Half a minute later, Maori, who got the last piece of the puzzle (key clue) from Conan in the name of going to the restroom, completed his logical chain of reasoning. He took Conan back to the restaurant and shouted to everyone here: "Everyone, I, Maori Kogoro, can now reveal the true identity of the bandaged monster!"

"what?"

Yuanzi was stunned and asked, "Uncle, do you already know who the murderer is?"

"That's right,"

Mao Li went straight to the point and said, "Although I had this intuition and guess at the beginning, after finding enough clues, I am completely sure that the bandaged man is not a ghost, but someone in this villa!"

"What did you say?"

Ayako's classmates looked at each other, "But aren't we the only ones here?"

"Yes, among you guys!"

Maori smiled confidently and looked at them: "Don't you find it strange? When Conan and the others were attacked by the bandaged man, if he climbed the tree from outside to the second floor, why were there no muddy footprints on the balcony? There should be some traces left, right?"

"This……"

"That's right. The criminal actually went to the balcony from another room. The room next to that room was the room where Chikako, who had been killed, lived. The special structure of the villa made it very convenient for the criminal to enter and exit."

Jiao Gu asked anxiously: "Who is the criminal?"

Ota Katsuno sneered: "Even if what you said makes sense, we were all in the villa when that guy carried Chikako past the window, right? How could it be one of us! Don't think you can just say whatever you want just because you are a detective!"

"What you think is impossible is just a trick of the criminal,"

Mao Li shrugged. "He used the dummy. The evidence is the fresh marks left on the handrail. I think those were the marks he left to let the dummy pass through the window."

"Dummy? Him?"

Ota Katsu was stunned.

"The criminal only needs to set up a small mechanism on the second-floor balcony, such as using piano wires, to give us the illusion that Chikako was kidnapped, and he can also clear himself of suspicion. Of course, he finally used the piano wires to bring the dummy and Chikako's body back to the balcony."

Mao Li reasoned like this, and turned his stern eyes to the fat man Takahashi who was sweating profusely beside Ota Masaru: "There is only one person who is capable of doing all that I said, and that is you who just finished repairing the roof! Mr. Takahashi, the murderer is you!! "

"Takahashi?!"

Everyone's attention immediately focused on the fat man named Takahashi.

"Please don't talk nonsense, haha."

Takahashi panicked and said, "If I really dragged the body to the second floor, then why was Chikako's body found in the forest later? I was behind you! And I had nothing in my hands at the time, you haven't forgotten it, right?"

Mao Li had no intention of wasting time with this guy who had gone crazy and even attacked Xiaolan many times. He asked sternly, "Really? Then tell everyone, what's in your clothes now?"

"what?!"

Takahashi's face was full of horror as Maori directly exposed the key point.

"When we chased her out, Ms. Ayako found the necklace that was supposed to be on Chikako's neck at the entrance. This proves that someone was carrying the body through the entrance at that time."

Without giving the other party a chance to continue his weak defense, Mao Li continued, "Of course, if it was a corpse, it would be difficult to hide it, but if it was just a head..."

Mao Li paused, letting everyone recall the scene of the head falling in the forest, and continued in a cold voice, "When we saw Chikako being held by the dummy, only her head was exposed. At that time, she had already been dismembered by you! Well, now please take off your shirt and prove your innocence, or let everyone see the truth! See if you are really that fat!"

"Fatty" Takahashi froze in place, and did not move for a long time under everyone's puzzled gaze.

His reaction made his classmates look horrified.

"Takahashi? Could it be that you..."

"Just now when the criminal took advantage of the power outage to attack Xiaolan, my fist clearly hit the criminal, but it felt like hitting cotton. That's because I hit the padding on your body."

Mao Li made the final conclusion, "As for your repeated attacks on Xiaolan, it was because when she first came here, she accidentally walked into the wrong room and saw you in disguise. Although she didn't pay attention at all, you were afraid that your true size would be discovered and your method of committing the crime would be exposed, so you tried to kill her to silence her!"

Conan stood behind and looked at Maori's back, with a serious look on his face.

Although Maori didn't say much even when he asked him for key details just now, Conan was 99.99% sure that Maori already knew his true identity.

(It’s just… why didn’t uncle expose me?)

Conan was rationally thinking about whether his true identity had been revealed, while Takahashi, whose identity as the bandage monster had been revealed, went crazy and screamed in pain: "All this was for Atsuko! That bitch Chikako stole Atsuko's work and killed Atsuko!"

"Takahashi,"

Ayako and the others looked at Takahashi in disbelief, "Tomokako actually plagiarized... But Atsuko committed suicide..."

"Shut up!"

Takahashi's face was grim. "The day Chikako won the award and became famous for that plagiarized work was the day before Atsuko committed suicide! At that time... Atsuko... she even called me and said she would never trust anyone again!"

"The debut work that made that despicable woman famous was the work that Atsuko showed me many years ago! It's exactly the same! That was the work that Atsuko had high hopes for!"

Takahashi said this, his bloodshot eyes filled with tears of grief. He recalled the most painful moment again, crying with extreme resentment, "So I left a note to that woman saying I would expose everything! Haha, out of guilt, she really went to the forest as I asked, and then as you saw, I chopped off her head in one go, hahaha..."

With a hearty yet resentful laugh, Takahashi threw all the stuffing and props to the ground, then took out a dagger and excitedly waved the blade to force back Ota Katsuki and others around him.

"Takahashi!"