To Draw the Line
Sometimes Ran wondered how much it would take to get Shinichi to appear before her.
Ran understood detectives, their gravitation pull towards cases, and their need to find justice. But Shinichi so easily dropped everything, including her, for cases, and wasn't that painful to admit. His latest case was especially telling – months in and he still refused to resurface. Phone calls were rare and physical appearances were practically non-existent.
Ran was patient – she had to be, by the frequent dead bodies around her childhood friend – but there was only so long she could wait before losing hope.
Sometimes, in a fit of loneliness and insanity, Ran truly wondered how much it would take. If a case was the only thing to send Shinichi running, would her case lure him in?
It had to be murder, because homicide was Shinichi's evil. But it couldn't be simple, or else the police would have no need to call the famed Detective of the East. Nor did she want Conan and her father to solve it before Shinichi showed up. Ran had been around enough crime scene explanations to work out a decent locked room mystery. She knew the clues detectives looked for, and what to avoid.
If she truly put her whole life's experience to the job, Ran thinks she might actually manage to conceive a murder perplexing enough that Shinichi would had no choice but to come home to solve.
Sometimes it was scary how much thought she'd put into it.
Even scarier how she might one day slip.