Togami glared at Kirigiri as she considered his demand. Her obnoxious face was as unreadable as ever, but he knew her mind had to be whirring fast behind those expressionless eyes, even if she didn't show a hint of it. Where had a girl like her learned to put up a mask like that? He knew from experience that it took years of work to achieve such a flawless façade. In fact, though he'd never admit it aloud, her mask might even be a hair better than his own. She certainly employed it more frequently.
After a few seconds of thought, Kirigiri smirked, though Togami couldn't be positive what the expression meant other than her intention to be as aggravating as possible. "What makes you think I had an actual plan? It would be a much more effective distraction to perform suspicious actions at random, encouraging the mastermind to try to find meaning where I intended nothing."
Togami shrugged. "If that's the case, you should have even less of a problem explaining the actions you took. And before you get any ideas about fabricating an alternate plan, remember that I intend to follow up on everything you claim you did for confirmation."
"Of course you do." Kirigiri didn't show anything close to the appropriate level of concern for this threat. "What makes you think that there's any evidence for you to find?"
"According to you, this murder plot was meant to catch the mastermind's attention," Togami said. "You couldn't have done that with a plan that only existed in your head. You must have done something to put the plan into action – and if you wanted to be certain the mastermind would notice, it would have had to be something that unmistakably indicated a murderous intent. Anything like that would leave some kind of trace."
"Not if I was careful," Kirigiri said calmly. "I wanted the mastermind to observe me, but that doesn't have to involve leaving a trail of my actions. In fact, if I wanted to present a convincing murder attempt, it would make much more sense to hide my actions as much as possible."
"So you claim to have covered your tracks entirely?" Togami asked. "Fine. Prove it. Explain what you did, and we'll see whether there are any traces." He raised his eyebrows. "Unless there's some reason you don't want anyone to know your plans."
"But – wait a second. Wouldn't it be dangerous to put a workable murder plot out there?" Naegi said. "Especially if it's all primed and ready to go."
Togami felt his shoulders stiffen, Naegi's words hitting him like a cat's fur being rubbed in the wrong direction. "Are you suggesting that either you or I would use Kirigiri's plan to murder one of the others?"
"No, of course not!" Naegi said at once, eyes widening as he realized just what his words had implied.
"Exactly. So there's no problem." He pinned Kirigiri with another glare. "Well? What are you waiting for?"
"All right, if you're going to insist." Kirigiri gave a bored shrug. "I took a kitchen knife and concealed it under my jacket so that the mastermind would watch to see what I'd do with it. After the trial ended and I had no further use for it, I returned it to the kitchen."
Togami narrowed his eyes at her, but she just met his eyes head on with a calm smile. She was lying – he knew she was lying. There was no way in hell she'd used a plan that simple, not if her goal was what she'd stated – but he couldn't say so. With a plan like that, all the evidence would be gone already. He hadn't been the one to check the kitchen during the last investigation – Ogami and Asahina had handled that. He didn't know whether a knife had been missing at the time or not. Even if Kirigiri was lying, he didn't have a way to prove it.
"Hang on."
The staring contest broke as both Togami and Kirigiri turned sharply towards Naegi, and Togami couldn't help the way his heart lifted to see Naegi's face creased with the same frown he wore during class trials.
"So the plan you made to distract Monokuma – it was just carrying a knife around?" Naegi asked slowly, eyes fixed on Kirigiri as he thought. "That – I'm sorry, but I don't think that makes sense."
A rush of bitter triumph flooded through Togami as Kirigiri's face went utterly blank. So Naegi's shot had hit home, even if she wanted to hide the fact.
"I mean, you'd have to be around other people for the knife to be a threat, right?" Naegi went on. "But in the time we needed a distraction, there wouldn't have been any people for you to threaten. We made the plan with Alter Ego right before the nighttime announcement – even if you'd gone to get a knife right after we finished, everyone else would have been in bed pretty soon afterwards. That wouldn't have distracted the mastermind at all."
Togami couldn't stop the smirk that crossed his face at Naegi's attack on Kirigiri. Maybe this meant he was finally starting to see the girl for the snake in the grass she really was. And even if he wasn't fully at that point yet, at least he was able to spot the holes in her story and share them. Kirigiri had obviously been banking on the fact that Togami didn't know the exact details of how and when she'd developed this plan – and it hadn't occurred to her that Naegi might connect the dots.
"So it sounds to me like you're caught," Togami said to Kirigiri. "Either you lied about your plan just now, or you lied to Naegi earlier about your true intentions. Which is it?"
Kirigiri looked from one boy to the other. "You're accusing me of lying?"
"That's right," Togami said. "And don't try to pretend that you just came up with a stupid plan to distract the mastermind, either. No one in this room believes you're that much of a fool."
"Quite the compliment," Kirigiri said dryly. "Well, you don't think I'm a fool, then you can't possibly expect me to behave in a foolish way. I refuse to tell you what my plan was."
"Because you intend to use it in the future," Togami said with grim satisfaction.
"I haven't admitted anything of the sort," Kirigiri said. "I just don't see any reason to share my secrets with someone so determined to believe the worst of me."
"The only reason you would fear something like that is if you have something dangerous that you need to hide," Togami snapped.
"Is that what you think?" Kirigiri raised her eyebrows at him. "Then prove it."
Togami gritted his teeth. Why was the blasted girl insisting on being so stubborn? Didn't she understand that she was cornered? Why was she still demanding proof now? What was there that he could prove?
He ran through the sequence of events again in his head, now that he had Naegi's additional information about what he and Kirigiri had been doing. They'd been in the bathhouse when they'd made the plan, so the mastermind wouldn't have known about that part of it. Then they'd carried Alter Ego down to the hidden room to hook him into the network – probably drawing the mastermind's attention with that suspicious action, regardless of anything that came after.
So whatever Kirigiri had done after that, it would have had to be something meant to distract the mastermind from looking into what she and Naegi had been doing in the hidden room. And if the nighttime announcement had happened immediately afterwards, it had to be something that she could do on her own, something that didn't require other students' involvement.
It also had to be something she could have finished during the night, because as soon as he and Naegi had met in the cafeteria after the morning announcement, she'd come in and demanded they find the others, starting the chain of events that had led to discovering Hagakure's corpse.
She had made that demand. Togami frowned at the memory. Now that he thought about it, Kirigiri never had fully explained just why she'd been so certain that something had occurred. She'd dragged them off to search for the other students as if she'd known that they would find something terrible. She'd been right about it, yes – but how had she known? Fukawa had managed an almost entirely closed room mystery for her murder, with all the relevant clues at the murder scene.
Wait – no, that wasn't right, was it? Most of the evidence used at the trial had come from what Naegi and Kirigiri had found in Ogami's room – but there had been one thing that Togami had found that had been important. Not a physical piece of evidence, but an absence of it. There had been poison missing from the chemistry lab.
Two bottles of poison had been used during the murder – the one Ogami had thrown away in her supposed suicide attempt and the one Fukawa had used to poison her needles. But Togami had noticed all three bottles of that particular type of poison missing from the lab. That meant one bottle was still unaccounted for – and it meant that whoever had taken it would have seen that the other two bottles were gone.
He looked up at Kirigiri, a dark smile spreading across his face. "You've been hiding the last bottle of Monokuma's mystery poison."
