Okay, this is bugging me.

I've been slowly replaying AA5 leading up to AA6, and I just finished Turnabout Reclaimed. I vaguely remembered feeling like "that's it?" when I played it back in 2013, but I couldn't recall the details of why. Replaying it now, I think I must either be missing something or there's a big-ol' hole in the last trial day.

To recap: as you approach the end of the trial, Rimes asserts that Orla killed Shipley in the show stage area by throwing him up into the air and him hitting the water when he landed. Then he and Sasha moved the body to try and cover things up for Orla. After some back-and-forth, he admits that he wanted DePlume to witness Orla finding the body.

The subject turns to the matter of how Orla could have been ordered to drag the body out in front of DePlume, and Phoenix offers up the idea of Rimes using the transceiver/video phone to have Orla pull the body out while playing the show song from a year ago. This is fine so far.

It's what happens next that confuses me. Rimes denies that he could have done this, because his transceiver was broken. But... he already admitted to manipulating DePlume into seeing Orla pull out the body! All of a sudden all the focus is on "could Rimes have manipulated the orca with a transceiver", and Phoenix further claims that if Rimes is carrying Shipley's transceiver (which he is), he must have murdered the captain. But that doesn't follow at all! Rimes already says he and Sasha moved the body in the skull statue to the orca pool; what would have stopped him from taking Shipley's transceiver after Orla allegedly killed him? Similarly, Phoenix's assertion that "Rimes didn't see Rifle, therefore he was at the bottom of the pool" doesn't matter; surely if the captain had just been killed, Rimes not noticing a penguin wouldn't be strange, since he'd be busy dealing with, you know, a dead captain.

I agree that when everything's taken together, it's suspicious towards Rimes, but all that's really proven is that he did what he already admitted he did: lured DePlume into seeing Orla pull out the body. In addition, it proves that Sasha did not manipulate Orla, which clears her name. Yet this whole thing is taken as the decisive proof that Rimes is the "killer", and makes him confess, even if it turns out to have been an accident in the end.

So, am I missing something here, or was this just a big oversight?

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As far as I remember, there was no reason for Rimes to have taken the walkie-talkie, was there? Phoenix's logic is that the killer had to have taken it.

Actually, that makes me wonder. The walkie-talkie that Rimes showed to the court was Shipley's, and it's broken. I presume it was broken since the incident from a year ago, however, I don't believe this is confirmed. So he couldn't have used that during his plot.

If that was the case, then Rimes used his own walkie-talkie to play the orca song on the PA speaker, then got rid if it and took Shipley's so he could claim that his walkie-talkie was always broken.

Edit:

Because he couldn't. As soon as Deplume saw the body and screamed, security was alerted. Not only was there such a small window of time for him to get it, he happened to be in the food prep room at the time, which was when Pearl stumbled across him.
Sasha couldn't have taken the walkie-talkie since she was unaware she was transporting the body; she thought she was moving just the rock. Therefore, the walkie-talkie was taken before the body was put in the rock. Meaning only the murderer could have taken it.

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