Editing Toaru Majutsu no Index:Item3 Chapter2 (section)

===Part 8===

Takitsubo twirled her stick.

That was the one she had used to dig up the dark soil to reveal the white knife.

She poked at the knife’s grip with it.

And…

“Mugino, do you see ''this black stuff here''? ''I think it’s pieces of the leather glove.''”

“Oh.”

Without meaning to, Kagiyama made a sound instead of Mugino.

“''You can get DNA from animal cells the same as with human ones.''”

Hadn’t Frenda Seivelun made a fuss about that in the convenience store?

Something about using a forensic investigation kit to get the DNA map of the meat in her nikuman and see if it was really the advertised Hokkaido brand-name pork?

And the voice on the phone had said the DNA had to be taken from pieces of skin, not from the sweat itself. And what was leather?

“The biodegradable plastic itself will break down on its own while buried, but this stuff on the grip won’t. It will stay.”

The shotgun microphone left on the table sent the distant convenience store voices into Saetani’s ear through her wireless earphone.

“Pressure me all you want, that answer super isn’t in the magazine! It only gives things like he owed the victim money, he had a twin, or Anti-Skill is incompetent. How twisted a criminal are you if not even expert psychologists can measure your criminality!?”

“My answer was completely normal! In the end, you get hundreds of kilograms of meat from a single cow. All meat taken from the same cow will have the same DNA, so while the man was getting drunk at home, Anti-Skill assumed he had been at the izakaya!”

Whether or not she knew about this other conversation, Takitsubo expressionlessly spoke on much the same topic.

“I don’t know exactly how leather gloves are made, but I assume they use leather from the same animal for the outside and inside. So if anyone has pieces of leather with the same DNA as the pieces on the knife’s grip, we can conclude they were wearing the exact same glove.”

Kagiyama looked down at his hands.

The ends of his nails were a bit dark.

No, there was something underneath the very ends of his nails. Caught where washing his hands with soap wasn’t enough to get it out.

Mugino’s face went blank.

There was no smile in her eyes.

Not even a hint of one.

“Oh, really?”

Their eyes met.

Kagiyama averted his eyes. His face was covered in uncontrollable perspiration.

They didn’t even need to check the DNA.