Chapter 33: The Groom's Motive for Murder
Seeing Sayuri Matsumoto collapse, chaos erupted in the bridal lounge. Conan immediately took charge, his sharp voice cutting through the panic as he urged Ran to call for an ambulance and notify the police.
Amidst the frantic shuffling of feet and terrified gasps, Conan noticed Natsume standing perfectly still near the vanity. She made no move to help, her expression unnervingly calm, which sent a flicker of confusion through the young detective's mind.
But the situation was too urgent for him to dwell on it. Saving the bride was the absolute priority.
Conan dropped to his knees and leaned close to Sayuri's face to check her vital signs. As he observed her closely, his brow furrowed into a tight knot. Something was entirely wrong. Her breathing was steady, her skin lacked the terrifying pallor of severe poisoning, and there were no signs of asphyxiation. It looked exactly as though nothing had actually happened to her at all.
He shot a glance back at Natsume. She had been standing off to the side from the very beginning, doing absolutely nothing to intervene. More than that, she had subtly positioned herself to block the other frantic guests from getting too close to the fallen bride. She likely assumed that a mere child wouldn't be able to see through Sayuri's true condition, which was why she hadn't bothered to block his approach. In reality, Conan had simply moved too fast for her to intercept him.
The gears in Conan's head turned rapidly. This entire setup had to be related to Natsume. What exactly had she whispered to the music teacher to convince her to play along with such a dramatic charade?
Despite his suspicions, Conan kept his mouth shut. He hadn't known Natsume for very long, but he had already grasped the core of her personality. She was pragmatic to a fault. She would never orchestrate a fake poisoning without a very specific, calculated reason—especially one that required the bride's willing cooperation on her own wedding day. But what could that reason possibly be?
Recalling Natsume's subtle reactions earlier in the day, Conan's gaze slowly drifted toward the doorway. Could this whole theatrical display be centered around the groom?
The wail of sirens pierced the air outside, and paramedics rushed into the room shortly after. Conan stood back and watched quietly as Sayuri was loaded onto a stretcher and carried away for emergency treatment, maintaining her lifeless facade perfectly.
Since the vast majority of the wedding guests were off-duty police officers, securing the crime scene took mere seconds. Inspector Juzo Megure arrived with his signature trench coat and hat, quickly taking command of the investigation alongside the forensics team.
A few minutes later, a forensics officer approached Inspector Megure, holding up a sealed evidence bag containing a swab from the spilled drink. The chemical analysis was complete. The substance mixed into the fallen can of lemon tea was sodium hydroxide.
"Sodium hydroxide?" Natsume blurted out, her voice laced with genuine shock.
She had originally assumed that if someone was twisted enough to drug a bride on her wedding day—attempting to end her life at the absolute peak of her happiness—they must harbor an unfathomable, venomous hatred toward her. Naturally, she expected a highly lethal substance like cyanide or arsenic.
She never anticipated the groom would use caustic soda, a chemical that was rarely used for outright murder.
Natsume frowned, her mind running through her knowledge of chemistry. Sodium hydroxide was strongly alkaline, highly irritating, and severely corrosive. Ingesting it would cause horrific, permanent chemical burns to the digestive tract, and in extreme cases, it could induce fatal shock.
However, its intense, burning corrosiveness meant that the moment it touched a person's lips or tongue, the agonizing pain would cause an instant reaction. A victim would immediately spit it out, making it incredibly difficult to ingest a dose large enough to cause systemic shock and death.
In other words, the groom never actually intended to kill Sayuri.
But the reality of his plan was somehow even more sinister. As long as the caustic soda passed her lips, it would violently corrode her mouth and throat. The tissue damage would be irreversible. Sayuri might find it agonizing to speak for the rest of her life, let alone sing.
Sayuri Matsumoto was a beloved music teacher. Ran and Sonoko had spent hours gushing about her beautiful singing voice. That man hadn't planned to take her life; he had carefully planned to destroy her voice, her passion, and her career in one fell swoop. Natsume didn't know whether to call his method mercifully non-lethal or unfathomably cruel.
What on earth could Sayuri have possibly done to drive a man to exact such a vicious revenge on a woman who loved him deeply enough to marry him?
Watching the shock ripple across Natsume's face, Conan instantly deduced the missing piece of the puzzle. The specific chemical in the lemon tea was not part of Natsume's arrangement. Someone in this room had genuinely attempted to drug the bride, and Natsume had known an attack was coming.
There was only one person whose involvement would compel both Natsume and Sayuri to hide the truth rather than expose the culprit immediately. Conan slowly turned his head, his sharp eyes locking onto the other half of today's tragic ceremony: Toshihiko Takasugi, the groom.
Meanwhile, the police officers were tearing the venue apart in search of clues.
Inspector Megure gathered the facts. A total of seven people had entered and exited the bridal lounge before the poisoning occurred: Conan, Ran, Sonoko, Atsushi Umemiya, the bride's best friend Kazumi Takenaka, the groom Toshihiko Takasugi, and the bride's father, Superintendent Kiyonaga Matsumoto.
According to the recording from the video camera left running on the vanity, only four people had physically touched the can of lemon tea in the bride's hand: Umemiya, Takenaka, Takasugi, and Superintendent Matsumoto.
Natsume had been on high alert all morning, her senses sharpened by the suspicion that something dark was brewing beneath the festive atmosphere. Because of this, she had caught the groom's subtle, nervous hand movements when he swapped the drinks. She had also noticed a critical detail—just before Sayuri collapsed, the bride had accidentally picked up the open can of lemon tea that Sonoko had left on the table earlier. Natsume had seen the mistake and was just about to warn her when the groom rushed into the room, escalating the situation.
The video camera had captured the entire sequence. Due to the forced perspective of the lens, the two identical cans of lemon tea on the table appeared to merge into one. But a careful observer could see that the direction of the printed label on the bottle shifted slightly after someone's body blocked the frame.
Because of this swap, only the fingerprints of Sonoko, Sayuri, and Toshihiko Takasugi were found on the poisoned can., Sonoko had taken a large gulp from that exact can earlier and suffered no ill effects, proving the drink had not been poisoned from the start.
Additionally, since sodium hydroxide rapidly deliquesces into a liquid state when exposed to moisture in the air, the culprit had to store it in a sealed glass capsule with a desiccant before dropping it into the drink. A brief search of the premises yielded exactly that—a small glass vial containing desiccant beads, discarded carelessly in a hallway trash can. This indirectly proved that the poison was brought into the room from the outside by someone other than the bride.
By simple process of elimination, the culprit could only be the groom.
Natsume had no intention of letting this agonizing investigation drag on any longer than necessary. Seeing that the police had gathered the physical evidence, she stepped forward, her voice calm and authoritative as she cut through the murmurs of the detectives. She pointed directly at Toshihiko Takasugi and methodically listed every single clue, dismantling his alibi piece by piece in front of the entire room.
When Superintendent Kiyonaga Matsumoto processed the words, realizing that the man who had just poisoned his daughter was the very man she was about to marry, his professional composure shattered. A father's raw fury took over. He lunged across the room, his massive hands grabbing Takasugi by the collar of his immaculate white tuxedo, lifting him nearly off his feet.
"It was you! Tell me, why? Why did you hurt my daughter?!" Kiyonaga roared, his voice shaking the walls of the lounge.
Faced with the mountain of conclusive evidence and the wrath of the Superintendent, Toshihiko Takasugi didn't even attempt to deny it. He reached up and forcefully brushed Kiyonaga's heavy hands off his shoulders. A twisted, bitter smile spread across his face, his eyes burning with a toxic mix of deep-seated resentment and the sick joy of a vengeance finally fulfilled.
"This is all your fault," Takasugi spat, glaring daggers at the older man. "What happened to your daughter today is entirely because of you!"
He then laid bare the ghosts of the past. Twenty years ago, while Kiyonaga Matsumoto was furiously chasing down a dangerous fugitive, he had barreled through a pedestrian crossing, knocking down a young Takasugi and his mother. Kiyonaga had been so consumed by the pursuit that he never even stopped to check on them. Because of that reckless collision, his mother had missed the critical window for life-saving medical treatment and died shortly after.
Left entirely alone in the world, the orphaned boy was eventually adopted by the wealthy Takasugi family. Seven years ago, Toshihiko discovered a sickening coincidence: his girlfriend's best friend was Sayuri Matsumoto, the daughter of the police officer who had indirectly killed his mother. From that day forward, he began a careful, years-long campaign to court Sayuri, solely to orchestrate this exact moment of revenge.
Silence fell over the room. So that was it. That was the dark root of Toshihiko Takasugi's murderous intent.
Natsume crossed her arms, her expression flattening into one of deep disappointment. She had initially assumed that Sayuri had unknowingly committed some terrible wrong against Takasugi, or perhaps there was a tragic, impossible misunderstanding between the couple. But the truth was that he had ruined a woman's life entirely because of the sins of her father.
Natsume found herself completely unable to process Takasugi's twisted logic. If Kiyonaga Matsumoto had caused his mother's death, and Takasugi hated him enough to dedicate his life to vengeance, then he should have targeted Kiyonaga directly. What did any of this have to do with Sayuri?
Paimon's voice echoed in Natsume's mind, sounding equally baffled. "Traveler, why did the groom target the bride? Miss Matsumoto didn't do a single thing to wrong him, right?" The little guide paused, trying to piece the human psychology together. "Do you think he wanted Superintendent Matsumoto to taste the pain of losing a loved one as his ultimate revenge?"
Natsume's eyes narrowed slightly. 'Probably not... Isn't this guy the heir to a massive corporate conglomerate? He has the money and resources to ruin a police officer's career or life. He couldn't possibly be so utterly classless in his revenge...'
"I want you to taste that exact same agonizing pain of losing your most beloved relative!" Takasugi suddenly shouted, throwing his head back with a satisfied, manic laugh as he watched the sheer devastation wash over Kiyonaga Matsumoto's face.
Natsume stared at the laughing groom, her face completely deadpan.
Ah. So it really was exactly that.
What a pathetic display. Instead of facing the strong man who had actually wronged him, he had spent years manipulating and poisoning a weak, innocent woman who loved him.
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