It didn't come as a shock for Togami realize that the culprit had apparently entered his dorm room in order to knock Ogami unconscious — but until he said the words, he hadn't realized just how close they must have come to Naegi. Ogami had kept her chair right at the side of the bed, immediately in arm's reach of Naegi in case he'd needed anything. Anyone who could have crept close enough to adulterate something in her possession must have been inches away from Naegi while he was asleep and vulnerable. If they'd decided at the last moment that an attack would be a better plan than simply drugging Ogami…
But they hadn't. At least he had that much to be grateful for in this mess. Whatever the culprit was trying to accomplish, it hadn't involved murdering Naegi as he slept. In fact, it apparently hadn't involved killing Ogami while she was helpless, either. Which meant…
"But why would anyone do something like that?" Naegi asked with a frown, catching the same apparent flaw in the culprit's logic that Togami had. "It would have been really hard to get in here without Ogami noticing. What would be the point if all they wanted to do was knock her out?"
"Exactly," Togami said, sparing a moment to nod in acknowledgment at Naegi's ability to keep up with him. "Especially when they obviously have no compunction about murdering their victims. Why leave her alive when they killed someone else? She'll presumably wake up eventually, and then we'll have a potential witness on our hands."
"Maybe they were really sure she didn't notice anything?" Naegi asked. "I mean, she wouldn't have drunk something that had been drugged if she'd thought there was anything wrong. But… I guess that wouldn't have helped much. I mean, she would have figured it out as soon as she woke up."
Togami frowned. "Unless she had some other explanation for falling unconscious."
He circled around to the scattered glass shards and slowly lowered himself to kneel on the floor beside them. Carefully, keeping well out of range of any contact, he leaned forward to peer down at the liquid pooling across the floor. He might not be able to test that for any chemicals it contained, but he could still learn something of value. The liquid ran thin, its consistency just barely thicker than water, and on closer inspection, its color was actually closer to a very dark brown than black. And when he leaned close enough, he caught the faintest whiff of a very familiar scent drifting up from the mess.
He leaned back abruptly — a little too fast, perhaps, since the movement sent the room tilting around him for a moment in a fresh wave of dizziness. But Togami held his expression stern and unchanging, and he was sure Naegi was too occupied with his own injuries to notice the brief weakness.
"That's not just any liquid," Togami announced, once he was sure his voice wouldn't reveal anything that Naegi didn't need to know. "That's coffee — or at least something claiming to be coffee, anyway. I'd say it's from one of those bottles of pre-brewed muck some idiot stocked in the kitchen." He scowled. Disgusting as that bottled garbage might be, after an entire night awake he could understand the appeal of getting a jolt of caffeine despite the appalling taste. "Sitting here alone for hours on end, she must have needed something to keep her awake."
"Wait." Naegi blinked, realization hitting him. "Wait, you mean — she was awake all night? Without a break or a rest or anything? But —" He looked over at the clock. "But it's nearly morning!"
"Someone had to stay with you while I was busy. Thus the coffee," Togami said impatiently. "And that must be why the culprit thought they could get away with simply drugging her. If I hadn't come in and found her unresponsive, she could easily have assumed she just fell asleep."
"So we wouldn't have had any reason to think anyone had been in the room at all," Naegi said, nodding. "They could do whatever they liked, and we wouldn't even notice."
"And I can only think of two things they might have done that would benefit from being unnoticed," Togami said. "They could have taken something out of the room… or planted something incriminating." He frowned. "It wouldn't be the worst method of framing an alternative suspect, if you could be sure that you could sneak past her."
"So you think they might have come down here after the murder to leave something behind that isn't supposed to be here?" Naegi looked around the room with a frown. "Well, it's your room — is there anything here you don't recognize?"
Togami shrugged. "Considering that I have no idea what I might be looking for, it's impossible to say. After all, last time we were dealing with needles — there's no point in wasting time scouring the room for something that small that might not even be here. It's not as though I'd be able to tell if something had been disturbed or —"
He stopped short, his words catching up to him. No way to tell if something had been disturbed — that wasn't entirely true, was it? There was one thing in the room that he'd done his best to make sure he could tell if anyone had touched. Slowly, Togami raised his head to look up at the section of the wall near the ceiling where he'd hidden the vicious-looking knife in the air vent. The cover hadn't been removed from the vent, of course, since he would have noticed immediately if something so obvious had been missing…
But all four screws had been turned until they faced in the same direction. His security measure had been sprung — and remembering the outline of a knife sticking out of the corpse's chest, Togami thought he knew why.
