“Officer Kang.”
Though Rafael, the police substation chief, was by nature generous and full of laughter, even he could not help but look stern now.
“Let’s have some sense of time and place. Just because I speak to you nicely, you don’t take me for some neighborhood uncle, do you? A citizen has just suffered a theft. Does this seem like the time to joke?”
Chief Rafael had decided that Kang Jinho was fooling around.
A constable—one who had only just completed his paperwork and been assigned today, no less—was saying what? That the cake here was the culprit? Did he expect anyone to take that seriously?
He had heard that Kang Jinho had been called a genius back at the police academy, but in cases involving abilities, identifying the culprit was not the domain of geniuses but of ability users. And as far as Chief Rafael knew, Kang Jinho was powerless.
“Apologize, even now. We’ll be seeing each other for a long time, and I don’t want bad blood over something like this. We need to write the report quickly.”
Chief Rafael scratched his horn and let out a silent sigh. He had had high expectations for the new recruit, but for the boy to spout such absurd nonsense on his very first day… his disappointment was no small thing.
“Wait a moment.”
At that moment, Constable Park Eunyoung quietly stepped forward.
“I don’t think our Jinho is the kind of person who’d say something like this without thinking. We can hear him out first and judge after that. Right, Jinho?”
“Y-yes! That’s right!”
He had no idea when he had suddenly become “our Jinho,” but Kang Jinho nodded for the time being. After all, before causing this commotion, he had made a plan of sorts.
‘I already know who the culprit is.’
There was no doubt that this cake was the culprit. This was definitely a case he had solved when he played “Hishishi,” and since the trick had been rather interesting, it was one of the cases that remained vivid in his memory.
But the important thing was not naming the culprit. It was convincing the others of “how he had been able to catch the culprit.” He could not very well blurt out, “I saw it in a game!” or “Actually, I have a superpower, so I figured it out.”
So he had to explain, as persuasively as possible, why this cake was the culprit, and why he had been able to notice it. Since it was a superpowered crime, it could not be perfectly logical, but it still needed to reach the level where other people would think, “That sounds plausible.”
‘If the logical leaps are too big… Eunyoung might say she wants to crack my head open and take a look.’
For reference, Eunyoung cracking someone’s head open was not an exaggeration. It was an actual incident from the game. The cold sweat running down his back right now was not there for nothing.
Kang Jinho took a moment to breathe deeply and finished controlling his mind. From now on, I am a genius. A genius who, with terrifying insight and excellent intuition, caught the culprit in one blow. A genius rookie police officer who leaves Chief Rafael stunned and Eunyoung trembling…!
“So, you can explain it, right? Why this cake is the culprit?”
“Yes.”
At Eunyoung’s urging, Kang Jinho arrogantly lifted his eyes and began to speak.
“First, the table where the cash register was. Does everyone remember it?”
At that, one of the senior officers checked the scene photos he had taken earlier.
“Hmm… Aside from the severed wire, there doesn’t seem to be anything in particular.”
“That was exactly what I found strange.”
“Why?”
“If the café owner had wanted to hide the register, he would have disconnected the wire, not forcibly ripped it out like this, wouldn’t he? And if he had torn the wire out himself, he would have used some kind of tool. But if you look at the cross-section of this wire…”
Kang Jinho pointed to the roughly torn end of the wire.
“It’s been ripped apart roughly, as if someone tore it out by hand. I judged that to be impossible for an ordinary person, so I concluded that the café owner was not the culprit.”
“…That’s true, now that you mention it.”
The other officers nodded without realizing it. They could not find anything particularly wrong with Kang Jinho’s words.
“And seniors, you said that according to the CCTV, no one came or went from closing time until this morning except the owner, correct?”
“Uh, yeah. That’s right.”
“Then there are only two possible cases. Either it was someone who could freely move in and out of the building while avoiding the CCTV, or…”
“Or?”
Park Eunyoung was smiling in circles, as if she found this interesting.
“The culprit and the cash register never left the café in the first place.”
“Wait, wait. So what you’re saying, rookie… is that the culprit was hiding inside the café? Together with the cash register?”
Chief Rafael could not quite understand what the rookie was saying.
“Hah. My head hurts. Can you organize that a little more clearly?”
“Yes, I can. But before that, Constable Park Eunyoung?”
“Yes, Jinho.”
Park Eunyoung answered familiarly.
“I understand that among ability users, there are also those with transformation abilities. Is that correct?”
“That’s right. There are ability users like that.”
“When they transform, what happens to the clothes they are wearing?”
“Some leave their clothes in place and only transform their bodies… and some transform together with their clothes.”
“In the case where they transform together, if it were not clothes but a large cash register… would it be possible for it to transform with them? And if it transformed along with them, wouldn’t the cash register’s wire be torn out as if it had been yanked by force?”
“Yes, I think that makes sense too.”
“!!!”
“!!!”
As the eyes of the watching officers widened, Kang Jinho put the most genius-like smile he could on his lips.
“My guess is this.”
The culprit visited the café during a busy time when there were many customers and watched for an opportunity. Then, when the café owner’s attention wavered, he transformed in a place out of sight and hid.
“Seniors, you only checked the CCTV from after the café closed until the morning, right? If you check the daytime footage as well, there should probably be a customer who entered but never came out.”
“Wait a second, I’ll check now. Hmm… so… Oh! Here he is! This man wearing a mask!”
The senior officer who rewound the CCTV as Kang Jinho said let out a loud exclamation. They had examined only the nighttime footage carefully to see if anyone had broken in during the night, and it had not occurred to them to check the daytime footage when there were customers.
“Yes. He must have taken advantage of a blind spot in your perception. The culprit likely knew in advance that the interior CCTV was broken. That is why, after the café closed, he targeted the cash register.”
The culprit, having made contact with the cash register, transformed together with it. Whether the police came or not, he would endure in that transformed state, and later, once he was outside the café, he would undo the transformation. The reason the cash register was still there when the owner arrived at seven was because the culprit had to hold out all night anyway, so he had some leeway.
“When he undoes the transformation, the cash register would also return to its original state, correct? After that, he could break the register or do something similar to take out the cash inside. It’s not a large-scale case, so there’s no chance of a hero coming and catching him, and the police wouldn’t be able to investigate and catch him either.”
“Uh, rookie. There’s still something I don’t understand.”
Chief Rafael slowly raised his hand and asked a question.
“If he did things according to your scenario… I understand how he could steal the cash register. But wouldn’t the culprit have no means of escaping the café? An ability user who transforms into an object can’t move under his own power, can he? But if he undoes the transformation and leaves the café, he’ll be caught on CCTV anyway, so doesn’t that make it pointless?”
When one thought about it, that was true. The CCTV outside the shop was working fine, so if a perfectly normal person suddenly walked out from inside carrying a cash register, he would be arrested one hundred percent.
“That is why I thought the culprit transformed into a cake.”
With that, Kang Jinho grinned and shook the box containing the cake.
“Not an ordinary cake, but a squashed cake like this… There’s no way a sane owner could serve it to a customer. In the end, once the police leave and they conclude there is no proper solution, the owner still has to run his business, doesn’t he? Then he would throw away a defective cake like this.”
“!!!”
If he was transformed into a cake, there was nothing particularly suspicious about it. It was not strange for a café to have cake. And if the café owner put the defective cake into a garbage bag and threw it out, all the culprit had to do was undo the transformation somewhere without CCTV and run away.
“From the start, I found it suspicious that such a squashed cake was in the display case. So after watching it carefully, I saw that the cake was moving little by little. As if it were breathing.”
“…It makes sense. It really does make sense.”
“Amazing.”
Chief Rafael nodded repeatedly, impressed. At the same time, Constable Park Eunyoung looked at Kang Jinho with eyes sparkling like a cat that had discovered a fish.
It was not tightly woven logically. There were considerable leaps between each step. But the rookie’s words had a strange persuasiveness to them, as if he had come back after looking at the answer sheet.
Besides, the moment superpowers became involved in a criminal case, logic was no longer important to begin with. Rather, the intuition that could approach the answer tended to matter far more.
“You were thinking that from the moment we first entered the café? I had no idea…”
“I saw that the way the wire was cut was strange too, but… wow. That’s plausible.”
The two senior officers stared at Kang Jinho with dazed expressions. They had clearly arrived at the café before him, yet the rookie had used only a few pieces of evidence to instantly create a plausible scenario.
Clap!
“Well, even so, it’s still only a guess for now. We should take some time to confirm it, shouldn’t we?”
Constable Park Eunyoung clapped and smiled brightly.
“It would make for a pretty picture if the cake undid its transformation and confessed right about now… but it’s quiet at the moment. Like an ordinary cake.”
“…”
Park Eunyoung circled the table where the cake sat, humming.
“What should we do~ What should we do to make it listen~ It seems like we caught it red-handed…?”
“…”
“Or, hmm… should I poke it with this fork? Ahaha.”
Park Eunyoung laughed playfully as she brought a plastic fork toward the cake. But Kang Jinho, for an instant, glimpsed a flash of light in her eyes.
“Hy-hyaaaaaaagh!!!”
No sooner had those words ended than the cake wriggled and transformed, and a person came tumbling out with a crash. In his arms, he was tightly clutching what was unmistakably the cash register from the café.
“Please, please, just spare my life…!!!”
“I’m a police officer, you know? Why would I kill you?”
“Save me! Please save me…!!!”
“…”
Kang Jinho forcibly turned his gaze away from the scene.
“Shut up, or you’ll die?”
Because Park Eunyoung’s warm smile was, to be honest, terrifying.