Detective Priya Nakamura (Human)

The floor's joke was that the rabbit had found two cats. Priya Nakamura had laughed both times, because it was funny, and had then done what she does with anything funny that is also a claim, which is to write it down and look at it in the morning.

In the morning it was still a claim. Twice, an animal on the bureau's books as a filing-room courtesy had been in exactly the right place at exactly the right moment, and twice a competent adult had followed its line of sight to the answer. Once is an animal. Twice is a coincidence you are allowed to note. The bureau already had a method for this, and she had helped write it: the record on Detective Achebe's rabbit ran to a moved stapler, a rearranged shelf and one entire relocated desk, and stood at noticed lunch, every time; noticed nothing else, ever. That was a real result. It said what the animal was. Nobody had ever run the same test on the other rabbit, because nobody had ever had a reason to, and now she had two.

She designed it properly. Six small objects, one a day, hidden at rabbit height in places a cat would not go and a person would not look: behind the water urn, under the lip of the evidence shelf, in the gap beside the records-room door. Each hide logged with time and place in her own notebook, not the bureau's, because a hypothesis is not a case. The prediction was simple. An ordinary rabbit would do nothing. A rabbit that was something else would, at some point, over six days, look.

Day one: nothing. Day two: nothing. The rabbit sat in its tray and watched the floor the way it always did, which was the way a rabbit watches a floor.

On the evening of day two she asked herself the better follow-up question, the one she was in the habit of asking witnesses when the first answer was too clean. What would a rabbit that was hiding something do? Nothing. Exactly nothing, for as long as it took. Which was indistinguishable from what a rabbit does. Her experiment, she wrote, had no result that separated the two hypotheses except a positive one, and a positive was in the animal's gift to withhold. She underlined that and did not cross it out.

Day three, she went to retrieve the day-one stylus from behind the urn and it was not there.

She stood for a while looking at the place where it had been. Then she went back to her desk and wrote, under the underlined sentence, a second one, which was that she had assumed the only variable in the room was the rabbit.