Detective Conan
Peering Through the Cracks
Prologue
by
Sgamer82

It had been just another day for police inspector Sango Yokomizo. A fairly dull one, at that. A theft investigation was the worst of it. No fantastical murder cases this time; and for that, Sango was grateful. It meant he could go home at the end if his day and enjoy a quiet dinner.

He did just that, eventually turning on the television after he'd had enough quiet. He was immediately attracted to a special on some of the previous cases solved by Kogoro Mouri. Mostly this was because he was a fan of the detective. Partly it was because the Night Baron murder, a case he himself had been part of, had been featured.

He groused over the fact nobody had approached him to ask about it. Even with his curly hair, he was fairly photogenic. While he fumed, the show moved on to a much earlier case of Mouri's.

Sango remembered hearing about the Billion Yen Robbery at the time. It had been a daring heist and Mouri's role had apparently been that he was unknowingly hired by one of the culprits themselves to find her missing father, actually one of her accomplices who had backstabbed the others.

On the screen Sango saw the photo he remembered from the newspaper. Mouri was there, along with his daughter Ran and Conan Edogawa. Conan looked more distraught in that picture than he'd ever seen the boy, even in the face of more grisly deaths.

Unbidden, another face appeared in his mind. A crying child's face. A little girl. Sango shook his head, trying to puzzle out why that had come to him.

The narrator discussing the robbery explained that the last suspect, Masami Hirota, had bled to death from a gunshot wound. Her final words, delivered to a witness at the scene, revealed the location of the stolen money. Between this and the fact that the gun which had fired the bullet had only her fingerprints on it, the police on the scene had ruled the woman had committed suicide out of guilt for the crime.

"Masami Hirota... " Sango said absentmindedly. The name sounded familiar, but he could not quite place why. When he considered it, he found himself thinking about Conan Edogawa, as well.

Someone I ran into in relation to the boy? Sango wondered. At that thought, he recalled a man who had died in what appeared to be an accident. It had, in fact, been a "locked room murder."

That was presumably why he thought first of Conan. Neither Mouri nor his daughter had been involved in that case. Instead Conan had been there with another old man he now knew as Hiroshi Agasa and another child.

Again the crying girl's face came into his mind. If Sango remembered correctly, the girl's name was Ai Haibara. During the case she had seemed reserved, only speaking to Conan in whispers until Agasa had begun his summation of the murder. She had then actively asked questions to try and disprove her guardian's theories, which Conan had been demonstrating. Questions Sango himself might have asked had she not beaten him to it.

Once the murder had been solved and the culprit taken into custody, however, the girl's composure broke. She began crying and begging to know why they could solve a murder like that and not save her sister.

"You still don't get it? My sister took her pseudonym from Professor Hirota. She's Masami Hirota!"

Sango found himself suddenly sitting up straight. He looked at the television again. As the segment on the robbery finally concluded, pictures of the three culprits were together in the screen. Sango found himself staring intently at the woman.

As he did, he tried to remember little Ai's face. The features were different, but close enough that Sango thought he could see a family resemblance.

Of course, she could just be an adult Ai-chan called 'onee-chan', and not her actual big sister, Sango thought. Resemblance aside, a gut feeling told him this wasn't the case. Even if it were the little girl clearly knew the woman enough to cry over her death.

So, Sango thought, what are the odds that a child connected to such a major crime would just happen to wind up so close to another child who had gotten mixed up in that same incident?

"Pretty slim," Sango answered himself out loud. "Who are you really, Masami Hirota?"