Danganronpa Kirigiri

Chapter 5: Murder at the Sirius Observatory 3, Part 7

"If there's no blood in the body, livor mortis won't set in?"

"Yes. In this way, livor mortis is unlikely to appear. Yet, as a result, a different problem arises: the bloodstains at the crime scenes. There would not be enough blood to make it appear as if the body had been killed where it was found."

"You think maybe he prepared one of those blood packs for transfusions?" I piped up with a sudden thought. "Or maybe he saved the blood after he drained it, so he could use it later..." I was making myself feel gross with my own suggestions. I felt myself growing faint, and clenched my teeth to keep myself grounded.

"No, that wouldn't have been necessary. There was a supply here of the blood he needed."

"Supply...?"

The other victims?

"In any case, the culprit was planning on preparing three bodies. One in advance, and two within the building. Naturally, he had to dismember the ones killed here, too. It would be strange if only his substitute were in pieces."

"I see... He had to dismember the others too, so that he didn't expose which one was the substitute... I get that part, but why did he need to switch the parts around?"

"If he set the substitute on the bed without rearranging the parts, an unnatural situation would occur. That would be, as I previously referenced, the issue of the bloodstain. The substitute corpse, and only the substitute corpse, would clearly have bled less. The sheets would not be messy. It wouldn't at all look like he had been killed there."

"Ohhhhhh... So, because he mixed in parts from the bodies that actually had been killed there, he made it look like all three of them had been killed right there on the beds!"

"Yes. Once he did that, the blood seeping from the raw edges stained the sheets and eliminated the unnatural quality. I do believe that the culprit performed the dismemberment on all three beds. It would help make it more realistic that they had all been dismembered here."

"Yeah, it would... There were nicks in the sheets. I didn't even suspect." And maybe the severed edges were pressed up against each other to hide the fact that there were parts mixed in there that weren't bloody themselves.

"So? Have you managed to grasp the trick behind the dismembered corpses, Yui-oneesama?"

"Yeah... Somehow..." I nodded weakly. "From all of the evidence, and from what you've said... First, the culprit dismembered the corpse that he would use as his substitute, in order to transport it. In order to hide how that one had been killed a while before this incident, he drained the blood to avoid livor mortis. Then, after all of us fell unconscious here in the Sirius Observatory, he killed the other two detectives and dismembered them. After that, to make sure we wouldn't discover that one of them was a substitute, he switched the parts around to resolve the issue of its unnatural appearance."

I peered down at Kirigiri as if to ask, is that good enough? She gave a small nod in response.

"But we're still missing something crucial here. Where is the culprit?" I looked around. Was the culprit holding his breath and listening in on our reasoning even now?

"There were no signs of anyone entering or leaving the building-therefore, the culprit is still inside with us." Kirigiri sat up from against the backrest, her posture becoming slightly more vigilant.

"Haven't we searched all over the building already? There was no culprit anywhere. I even searched on top of the roof..."

"If we consider where the culprit hid the body, it will naturally lead to our answer. The culprit took the body out of there, so it should have become empty. And now, the culprit himself must be hiding there. Right? I needn't say any more for you to understand, correct?"

Where the culprit hid the body-

How did the culprit bring the body here into Sirius Observatory...? Right, the culprit cut the substitute corpse up into smaller pieces and stored it in his bag. I just need to remember who had what bag.