Taking a side entrance inside the school, they snuck around to the music room.
Mitsuhiko tried the door. He shook his head as to indicate "It's no use."
"Give me a boost," Conan said. "I'm gonna peek inside."
With their assistance, he managed to peer into the small rectangular window on the door.
When he saw it, he fell backwards, onto the floor.
"Are you alright?" Nancy asked, helping him up.
"What'd you see in there?" Nancy asked.
"A red stain on the carpet," Conan said. "It was fairly large too. If I didn't know any better, I'd say that..."
He turned to the kid. "Alright, you go on home now. If your card's in there, we'll retrieve it, and hand it back to you tomorrow."
The kid nodded, and walked away.
"What, do you think somebody was...?" Nancy asked.
Conan nodded. "I know technically we're not supposed to be here, but we need to find an adult."
"Ehh? What are you three doing here?"
It was Yasuda, who'd just turned a corner, wet mop in hand.
"Ah, Yasuda-san!" Conan said. "We need you to unlock this door for us. Hurry, it's important!"
Without entirely comprehending the situation, Yasuda nodded and went to find somebody with a key.
A few minutes later, he and another member of the school faculty were unlocking the door to the music room.
They opened it. Mitsuhiko ran inside, and:
"AAAAAAAAAAHHHHHH!"
His scream resounded across the school, and soon other adults came running.
In that room a man, Keitaro Nagatoshi, age 55, lay dead, several stab wounds on his body.
Opening
(Shameless by CATEGORICAL IMPERATIVE)
Whoo girl you're as cool as ice
Deal me another full deck o' lies
Dontcha dare break yer poker face
Empty my heart's vault at record pace
Baby yeeeeeah!
(Not all that glitters is gold! A pearly white smile can mask a heart as black as coal! A murder in the music room at Teitan Elementary! Can we reconstruct the victim's dying message? Perceiving the one and only truth! With the body of a child but the mind of an adult, my name is DETECTIVE CONAN!)
And so we find ourselves at this crossroad again
Per my count, you've lied to me five times tonight
You've woven a tale that'd leave J.R.R. Tolkien speechless
A carefully constructed narrative flimsier than a house of cards
I don't know if I should let you walk away
I don't know if you're worth the trouble
But what I care enough to demand an answer to
"What did I have that you wanted for your own?"
You shameless thing, a web of deceit left in your wake
Antithetical to the driving force that binds people together
A thick veil of mist shrouds the true you that you can't let slip
In the name of all that's true, I'll deconstruct you piece by piece!
The Green Witness! Part Two!
"...Do you remember me?"
She didn't answer.
"Well, I guess that's a trick question anyhow. If you didn't, you wouldn't have run. Am I wrong, Sherry?"
Her lip quivering, she let out a barely audible response:
"What are you going to do to me?"
Without looking away from their face, she reached her hand into her pocket. As she began to pull it out, That Person grabbed her hand and yanked it upwards.
He/She snatched the phone from her hand. He/She looked at the screen.
Haibara took this chance to run the other way. That Person tossed the phone over his/her shoulder and ran after her.
That Person grabbed her, picked her up, and slammed her against one of the lockers.
"What do you WANT with me?!" she demanded, exasperated.
He/She sighed. "We need to talk."
Haibara suddenly felt like her right shoulder was being squeezed, squished even.
"You're hurting me," she said.
"Then let's make it quick, shall we? You know I can't help it."
"You could let go of me."
"Do you promise not to run?"
"...Yeah. I promise."
Mezcal let go of her. Haibara breathed a sigh of relief.
"You said you needed to talk to me? About what?"
"You know what. The reason why they sent me here, to this school: to retrieve our man."
"First, I have a question for you," she said. "it goes without saying you know my face. More likely than not you know that happened to that test mouse we administered the apotoxin to."
"Yes. I figured it out shortly before your defection."
"So all this time, you knew where I was, the name I go by now, the fact that I had degenerated into a child's body?"
"Yeah. In the days following your defection, it didn't take me long at all to find you. I was there at the Queen's Cup soccer match on New Year's Day, taking pictures of you from another part of the stadium. I wore sunglasses and did my hair differently, so that you wouldn't recognize me. I sat in Location K. I figured out that a major incident had taken place there, one that might potentially put your life in danger, so I called your mother and warned her."
"You...called mom?" Haibara repeated.
"Yeah," Mezcal said. "Apparently I looked suspicious to the police. One of their people was watching me. I thought for a second they might've known I was with the Organization, but I figured running would make me look even more suspicious."
"But...If all this time you knew about me, about my mom, and the fact that she's still alive, then...!"
"Look, I've been covering for you, okay? You've been real sloppy, Sherry. I considered you something close to a friend, so I took it upon myself to keep you hidden from the rest of the Men in Black. You oughta be thanking me, really. But I'm not here for a thanks, or to catch up on old times. I've been sent here to retrieve Rum. The old one."
"B-but if you know that he's still alive, then..."
"Then what? We know your people have the elixir, and that you found out about him dying, and so you revived him, shrunk him, and hid him here. That's it, as far as I'm care. Now, listen up, because I'm only gonna say this once. We're gonna get our guy back, and you're not gonna interfere. You won't tell the so-called White Organization about me, and you most definitely will not identify me to them. Because if you do, we'll kill all your friends. Mitsuhiko Tsuburaya. Genta Kojima, Hiroshi Agasa, Ayumi Yoshida...and of course, Kudo. Or as they call him now, Conan Edogawa. If you breathe a word, I'll tell my buddies all about him, and about Ran Mouri, or as they call her now, Nancy Akechi. Do I make myself clear?"
Haibara was silent.
"Do I MAKE myself CLEAR?!"
"YES! Perfectly so! And as you make yourself comfortable around here, stay the h*ll away from me!"
Mezcal hesitated, but then nodded. "I don't think I can do that one hundred percent, but I can try. It was good seeing you again, if under these circumstances."
That Person patted her on the head once and then turned around and walked away.
As soon as Mezcal was no longer in view, Haibara picked up her phone and then ran back to the cafeteria, and tried to act like nothing had happened.
Scene Transition
It was a hassle for the police to keep random parents and teachers out of the music room where the murder had taken place. A crowd formed in the hallways nearby.
"Ah screw it!" one angry mom said to her husband. "I was told this was a safe school! I'm withdrawing Dohji first thing in the morning!"
"B-but the only other school he can walk to every day is private," her husband protested weakly. "We don't have that kind of money!"
Inside the music room:
"Your report?" Megure asked Takagi.
"Rigor Mortis on the body indicates he's been dead somewhere from 3-5 hours. Mitsuhiko-kun's testimony, that there was no dead body when he was in here about 5 hours ago, makes it unlikely that the victim's been dead longer than that."
"Hold on," Nancy said. "The door was locked when we tried to get inside, so that means..."
"Somebody must've locked the door after Mitsuhiko and that boy left," Conan finished. "The culprit was not in the room when we discovered the body, and there are no windows in here. Furthermore, there's no reason why the victim would lock himself in after he'd been stabbed. Therefore, the culprit must've locked the door from the outside, with a key. However, the key was still on the victim's person when we found him. Yasuda-san and I were the first persons to examine the body, so it couldn't have been planted there by the culprit. Not unless Yasuda-san were the culprit, that is."
"Ey, I don't like what you're inferin' about me, kid," Yasuda said. "But yeah, I get your point. The culprit is somebody who had access to a key. In short, a member of the school faculty."
"The doors to the school are generally locked after hours," Conan said. "Save the Principal or a janitor or nightguard, or a teacher as trusted as Kobayashi-sensei, nobody would be allowed to take the keys home with them. Yasuda-san, is that right?"
"Oh, uh, yeah. I unlocked the back entrance about an hour and a half ago so I could get inside and start my shift as janitor, and the front entrance, where the parents came in, was probably unlocked by the Principal. So in between school letting out and then, the doors to this place would be locked. The Principal would surely notice if there was a missing key. Therefore..."
"The culprit had to have been someone who never left this school since it let out in the afternoon," Megure said. "Yasuda-san? Could I ask if you could verify that you couldn't have done it?"
"Sure. I was with Ayumi-chan at the estimated time of the murder. You can call her and ask."
"Inspector, here's the Principal," Takagi said.
The old, long-bearded, and very wise principal of Teitan Elementary entered the room.
"I'd you don't mind me asking, who was here on the school grounds from the time that it let out earlier to when the parent-teacher conference started?" Megure asked.
"Hmm, if I recall, the only people here were myself, the deceased Nagatosho-san, Furui-san, and Sakaki-chan."
Scene Transition
Tsubasa Furui, age 35, the geography teacher, and Sakaki Naito, age 22, the school's secretary, were called into the music room.
Most likely, one of these two people did it, Conan thought. One of them is the murderer of Nagatoshi.
"Furui-san, why were you here after hours?" Megure asked.
"I was in my office scouring the internet to make sure the essays my students turned in weren't plagiarized," Tsubasa said.
"And I'm on shift until 7:00 at night," Sakaki said. "Mainly I'm just there to pick up the phone."
"Both of you were alone, and had no one to corroborate your whereabouts?" Megure asked.
Sakaki nodded. "The Principal was asleep in his office, so I could left and come back without him noticeing. And if I went to the music room and back I wouldn't have passed by Tsubasa-san's office. Of course, the same could be said of him. Either one of us could've done it, easily."
"You know," Tsubasa said, "it's perfectly possible that earlier today a teacher unlocked a window here, returned onto the school grounds via it, killed Keitaro, and then left."
"Keitaro?" Megure repeated. "That means you knew him?"
"Yeah, sometimes we'd go and catch a movie together or something," Tsubasa said. "We weren't super close though."
"Hmm, that's odd," Yasuda said.
"Eh?" Conan said.
"This is the one classroom in which there's a carpet instead of a regular tiled floor," Yasuda said. "Furthermore, this is the only classroom to use an old-fashioned chalkboard, rather than a newer whiteboard. Kind of a had combination, honestly. You can see the white stains on the carpet underneath it. Some of those gotta be pretty old. How long's that carpet been there?"
"Dunno, " Conan said. "Ten years ago it was-
Nancy elbowed him hard. "Who knows, right? You'd have to ask the Principal or someone like that."
"...Oh, that's right!" Mitsuhiko said. "The trading card! I totally forgot!"
He ran over to the back of the room and found the desk. He looked under it and-
"Ah! Here it is!"
He ripped it out and peeled the piece of gum off.
"What's that?" Yasuda asked.
"What we came here for in the first place," Mitsuhiko said. "Um, would you please mind throwing away this gum for me?"
Yasuda accepted and walked over to the little, open-faced plastic trash bin.
"Hmm, that's strange..."
Conan, Nancy, and Mitsuhiko ran up to him, wondering if he'd found a clue.
"Did they have band practice today?" Yasuda asked.
"Umm, no, I don't think so," Nancy said.
"Are there any other classes in here besides band?" Yasuda asked.
"No," Conan said.
"That's funny, then, because I took out the contents of this last night. Who put this in here?"Nancy
Conan picked it up. "It's a plastic wrap for...an eraser?"
Realizing what had happened, Conan and Yasuda ran over to the chalkboard. They looked at it.
"It's chock full of random music stuff," Yasuda said. "Forte, Fortissimo, Haydn, Bach..."
"There!" Conan said, pointing.
There was a faint greenish-whitish blotch, where something had been erased. It was just about the only empty space left on the board.
"This must've been where Nagatoshi-sensei wrote a dying message," Nancy said. "The killer must've then come back, seen it, and erased it."
"And he had to go and get a new eraser to do it, since there were no other ones to be found," Conan said.
Conan and Yasuda looked at each other, and grinned.
"What?" Mitsuhiko asked. "I don't get it."
"His handwriting's all over the board," Conan said.
"Still, it's no use unless we know the killer's preferred style of doing *it*," Yasuda said.
"I think I know how to find out," Conan said. "Excuse me for a minute or two."
Scene Transition
Conan went outside. He looked around, confirmed that nobody else was there, and gave Sonoko a call.
"Shinichi-kun?"
"Uh, hey," Shinichi's voice replied. "You know that one day I actually showed up for class after my disappearance? In geography I noticed there was a new teacher."
"Furui-san?"
"Yeah, him. He's still around?"
"Unfortunately, yes."
"Unfortunately?"
"That jerk recently gave me a D on a big test!" Sonoko fumed. "He says Australia isn't in Europe! I mean, yes it is! Just look at a map!"
That's Austria, you dolt, Conan thought with a deadpan look. "So, um, listen. About him...there's something I need to know."
"Yes?"
"When he writes something on the board, and then he needs to erase it, how does he go about it? That is to say, how does he use an eraser?"
"Um, well, he, um, oh yeah. He makes a diagonal sweeping motion, from top left to bottom right, starting at the corner of the leftmost kanji character. After that, he turns it 90 degrees and goes up right, just like the aforementioned movement. Gosh, I just said 'aforementioned'. Bleh. Anyway, let's say he's trying to erase somebody's name, last name to the left and first name to the right. So at this point he would've erased the last name. To erase the first name, he mirrors what he just did, starting at the top right and brushing to the bottom left. You get the idea?"
"Yeah. Great memory you've got there, actually. I'm impressed. Well, nice talking to y-
"Wait! Before you hang up, I just wanna ask you...how're you feeling? Are you doing okay?"
"Yeah. Sure. What's this about?"
"About Ran, of course!"
Ah dang it, he thought. I forgot she doesn't know. "I-I'm doing fine. I think I've gotten over it. Is that all?"
"Y-yeah, but-
"Alright then, bye."
He hung up.
He sighed, and headed back inside.
Scene Transition
"In light of our investigation going nowhere," Megure said, "it seems best to release our two suspe-
"Hold it right there, Inspector."
Yasuda finished writing on the board:
翼 (Tsubasa) 古井 (Furui)
Tsubasa nearly fainted when he saw that.
He turned to run away. As he neared the door, he was stopped by a woman.
Weighing in at over 300 pounds, Iroha Namiki had little difficulty pinning him to the floor.
"Hmm, I wonder why he tried to run," Conan said. "Surely it wasn't because...what's written on the board is Nagatoshi-sensei's dying message, in his own handwriting."
"Of course, this is simply a reconstruction based on samples of Nagatoshi's handwriting scattered all over the chalkboard," Yasuda said. "This alone doesn't prove anything. Nancy-kun, Mitsuhiko-kun, you have it?"
"Haaaaaiiii!" the two of them replied in a singsong voice, returning to the room holding an unopened eraser packet.
"We have a hypothesis," Yasuda said. "That is to say, an assertion meant to try and explain something unknown. To turn that hypothesis into a theory, or even into a fact, we must first test that hypothesis with an experiment. First of all, this is the eraser our killer used to get rid of Nagatoshi's dying message, written in chalk on the board. To our good fortune, he left it sitting upside down, with the erasing side facing up. This means gravity hasn't eliminated the key evidence we need. Next, we have a brand new, unopened eraser."
Nancy took it out of the plastic wrap and gave it to Conan.
Yasuda lifted Conan up so that he could reach the dying message on the board. Doing exactly as Sonoko said, Conan erased the dying message.
Yasuda set him down, and Conan showed the two erasers to Megure.
"OH?!" Megure exclaimed.
"They're almost the exact same chalk pattern!" Takagi said.
"There's one more piece of evidence," Mitsuhiko said. "In the trash can right over there you should find a plastic wrap from the eraser originally used by him to erase the dying message. It should have his fingerprints on it."
Tsubasa fell to his knees. "I don't don't know how, but that man, Nagatoshi, he...he figured out that my college diploma is a forgery. He gave me a week to resign from my job here, and my job teaching at Teitan High, or else he'd destroy my reputation. And this job pays pretty good, enough to pay the mortgage, to put food on the table for my wife and children. I had to do it, you see! I had to...!"
He broke into tears. The police gave him half a minute, and then escorted him to the police station to face trial for his crimes.
Ending
(Hoshi Monogatari by Egoist)
I know you've taken this from my cold dead fingertips
I wrote this to tell you what I never had the nerve to say
Because I know that right now, you're punishing yourself
Because you of all people deserve to know the whole story
Once I was only a child, but I was old enough to understand
Something important was missing, though I didn't know what
I wandered in the dark, calling to the crowd, "Excuse me, sirs!"
"Somebody, anybody, please, tell me what I'm doing wrong!"
Finally, on the starry night of Tanabata, I looked out my window
And said, "Kami-sama, if you could let me have a friend, just one.
One who's true and faithful, and funny, but most of all spirited.
This one thing I ask, and I'll never ask for anything ever again."
And then I met you, and in what seemed like an eternity I had
The chance to know you, and for the first time I was really happy
It never ended, you see, that initial bliss: it grew, as we grew closer
Thank you, my one and dearest friend, for teaching me how to love
The Next Day
They were gathered at the Professor's House: Conan, Subaru/Akai, Jodie Starling, Andre Camel, James Black, Hidemi Hondou, Ryan Jackson, and Yoshiteru Nichimura.
"Is this him?" James Black asked, showing her the next picture, one of Sumiko Kobayashi.
"No," Haibara answered.
"How about this one?" It was Iroha Namiki.
"No."
"Him?" Kanehiko Torishima.
"No."
"Okay, how about this guy?" Shigeo Yasuda.
"No, it's not him."
Soon, they'd gone through every person on the list of faculty at Teitan Elementary.
Haibara got up off the recliner.
"Ai-kun, are you sure?" Jodie asked. " Are you sure that Mezcal's not a teacher or employee of your school?"
"Yes, I'm quite sure," Haibara said.
"Um, okay then," Ryan Jackson said. "The FBI was gracious enough to lend us a sketch artist. Would you consider having a session with her, so we can know who to look out for?"
"Okay."
"Come on, she's waiting in the other room."
I'm sorry, Haibara thought. I can't let anything happen to my friends. They're all I have.
Nobody noticed as Conan and the Professor glanced at each other suspiciously.
End of Episode