Disclaimer: I don't own DC or MK. The main characters just make me so happy that I want to play with them. Enjoy!

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"What are you looking for, Hattori?" The pair was standing outside the window of Room 118, the Kimuras' guest room. Or, to be exact, Conan was on the ground and Heiji was standing on the sill, running his fingers over the top of the window frame.

"Some kind of contraption. I was thinking that we'd ruled out entry by window too quickly because a person couldn't fit through. But…"

"There could have been a clever way to kill him without setting foot in the room," Conan finished. "Good call."

"What, you hadn't already thought of that?" Heiji asked innocently.

"Shut up. I'll look down here."

"Perfect task for you, shorty."

"Oi!" Conan snapped on gloves and rooted through the bushes, muttering something about an old newspaper sheet and an ant colony, but no obvious tools. "Hattori," he called a few minutes later. "Got something."

Hattori looked down. During the other detective's search, he'd wandered until he was under the window of the next room over. "What're you doing over there, Kudo?"

Conan showed him about four feet of string with a small loop in one end. "I'm not sure how this fits into your killing device theory, but it is mildly suspicious."

"Hold onto it. We'll come back to this later. For now, let's check out the spot where Morita-san said she was smoking. Even if she didn't do it, she could've seen something."

"I'm surprised." Heiji frowned at the comment, and waited for Conan to continue. The tiny teen smiled perkily up at him. "You're just full of good ideas today, Hattori."

"Jerk."

"That was for the 'short' comment." The detectives found a quartet of employees smoking outside an inconspicuous door. Heiji watched Conan slip back into his child persona, tromping through the grass playfully and running a little bit ahead of the Osakan. Kudo's good, he privately acknowledged, though it was clearly something the pocket-sized teen had worked at for a while. It had only taken Hattori two cases to unmask the Eastern detective in his early days as Conan. If Heiji had met the miniature investigator when the latter was better at acting, he wondered how things would have turned out.

"I'm here with the detectives about the incident earlier today," he said to the group. "My name's Hattori Heiji." Then, seeing one worker look questioningly at Conan, gestured dismissively at the kid and added, "Sorry about the sidekick; he lives with Mouri-san. Were any of you out here at around 10:45 with Morita Hitomi?"

One man in the group raised a hand. "I was, and so was my buddy. Want me to grab him? His break's in a few minutes."

"We'd appreciate it," Conan replied, nodding seriously. Of course, kid-mode only works when he remembers it, Heiji thought. Pick grass or something, Kudo. Don't forget your cover.

To that end, Heiji bent down. "Conan-kun, let this niichan do the talking, okay?"

Unfortunately, it did not have the desired effect. Conan glowered. "Well, aren't you being cute today?"

Heiji couldn't help himself. "Not as adorable as you, little boy."

"Don't call me that!"

"Then don't call me cute, idiot. Look in a mirror."

"I'm sick of being treated like –"

"Like a child? Heaven forbid," Heiji teased.

One of the hotel employees snickered, snapping them out of their diatribe. "They're like an old married couple," she murmured to her coworkers.

What?! "No no no no! He's only– we're not–"

"HELL no," the seven-year-old detective answered succinctly, echoing Heiji's look of unadulterated horror.

"I was going to guess siblings," an older gentleman offered.

"Better," Conan allowed.

Thankfully, the man and his friend returned, and Heiji spoke before the smaller detective could open his mouth again. "Can both of you verify that Morita Hitomi was out here earlier today?" The employees nodded. "What time?" he asked to make sure.

The original man spoke up. "I left my spot at 10:40 and Morita-chan came out right after me, swearing like a sailor about all those dishes. Screwed up her nails real good, she said. She wasn't out here more'n ten minutes, though."

Heiji grumbled as he and Conan walked away from the group. "There goes that idea."

"It seems Morita-san had no opportunity to commit the crime. Yamazaki-kaichou still could have, though. That people heard him on the phone isn't really a solid alibi."

The Osakan shook his head. "Keycards register electronically in the locks. It would be recorded if a master key was used in the door right around the time of the murder. As the owner, he might know the risks that would present."

"Huh. Do you think he could find a way to get in without it registering? Get someone to disable it under the pretense of rebooting?"

"Too memorable. The techie doing that would speak up once a body was discovered."

"Or not, if he wanted to keep his job." Conan rubbed his chin. "Too bad it wasn't a manual lock. Then all he would need is a… oi, Hattori, we've been complete morons." He pulled out the evidence bag containing the bundle of string. "I'll bet no one's even looked in the adjoining room since the door's locked from the victim's side."

Heiji recalled the type of lock on the joining door and made the connection. "Oldest trick in the book," he groaned. Loop the string over the bottom of the lock and pull it mostly tight, thread it under the door when you close it, and tug at an angle from the other side of the door. The lock flips, the string comes off. Get rid of the string and voila, instant locked room mystery. "Let's go bother the staff at registration and see who booked that room."

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"'Bea Ezuka'?" Heiji exchanged a glance with Conan. "That's a pseudonym if I ever heard one."

"Mmm," the small investigator agreed. "It's in hiragana rather than kanji, which suggests that the characters can be rearranged. The registration was online, right?" He looked up at the befuddled staff member stuck answering the questions of a teenager and a kid. The part-timer nodded.

Heiji rapidly went through all possible combinations of the characters, and his eyes flicked to Conan. "Abe Kazue," they said together. It made sense and was the simplest answer, since it was just the characters in reverse (1).

"We should take a look at our suspect," Conan proposed.

Heiji turned to the staff member. "Think you could hook us up with the security tapes for that hallway?" The young man hemmed and hawed for a few minutes before leading them to the security booth.

"So he can operate on his own," Conan muttered, staring at Kogoro's back. Heiji was also surprised to see the famous detective in the booth looking over the tapes. "I've knocked him out so many times that I forget he solved cases before I was Conan." There were a handful of police officers crowded around the screen too, obscuring the Eastern detective's line of sight, so Heiji sat Conan on his shoulders. He grinned at the murmured expletives coming from the mouth of an apparently seven-year-old boy.

The time stamp read 10:35am when a bulky figure in a long brown coat and large hat (which covered the face, of course) approached Room 116. The officers and Kogoro groaned in frustration. "Wrong room," Kogoro grumbled as the figure closed the door. "No one's even paused in front of 118." But it's exactly what we're looking for, Heiji thought. After borrowing the list of keycard entries for 116 and confirming the time, the two teen detectives left.

"Library?"

"Down the street. You want a computer?"

"Yes. I want to know if Abe Kazue exists."

"One way to find out," the Osakan replied.

Typing her name into a search bar led to a bunch of different women named Abe Kazue. One of Heiji's leads bought him to an online newspaper obituary. "Kudo? 'Abe Kazue leaves behind a loving husband, Yoshi, owner of a lucrative pharmaceutical company, and devoted daughters Sakura, Chika, and Toshiko.' Take a look at the picture."

"Bingo," Conan said, his glasses reflecting the image of a slightly younger Kimura Toshiko – no, Abe Toshiko at that point – standing between two much older girls and an older couple in a family picture. "We haven't got her yet, but I'm sure we can find more evidence."

"She mentioned receipts from her shopping trip."

"Shall we go, then?"

The policewoman handling evidence didn't know Heiji but, after some convincing from the other officers, ultimately let the detective pair look at Toshiko's shopping receipts. "They're in order by time," she pointed out. "That's the way I got them – Kimura Toshiko said she did the bills for both herself and her husband – and I want them back that way. Are we clear?"

"Perfectly, ma'am." The detectives flopped down on a sofa in the hotel lounge and began to sort through the receipts. There was one for the hotel's Western restaurant that had an order of pancakes, an order of steak and eggs, and two coffees. Heiji's stomach growled – Kazuha had brought two lunches to eat during the magic show, but that was a bust now. One receipt from Osaka Chocolates for two small boxes of assorted candies and a bag of truffles, one for a scarf at a tourist clothing store, and one for four tops and a skirt at a different clothing store called Oshima's.

Heiji waved the breakfast receipt at Conan. "Wanna bet the wife ordered the steak and eggs? That's probably how she got the murder weapon."

"We'll ask their waiter if she was wearing gloves at breakfast. When we got to the scene I overheard one of the officers say there were no prints on the handle."

"It would be just as easy to wash it and put on gloves later, since she didn't give it back after her meal."

"Point. The other thing that bothers me is this one." The Eastern detective held up the second clothing receipt. "I'll back up to explain: Let's say she left the hotel at 10 – we can check tapes later for a more exact time. It would take some time to walk to the tourist shops and then buy chocolate at," he checked the receipt, "10:14. From there she went to another store where she bought a scarf… at 10:17. You've been out clothes shopping with Kazuha, right? A woman doesn't just walk in, pick out the first thing she sees, buy it, and leave. There's browsing, comparing, trying on, waiting in line at the register, etc."

"What's bothering you about the next store, then?"

"She left there at 11:39. She walks through the entire park fifteen minutes later and waltzes back into the hotel at the same time the body is found just after noon. What was she doing for over an hour? As someone who moved through those other stores pretty quickly, she was in there for a long time."

"Kudo, right now this is all speculation. Maybe she just liked the clothes there."

"That's why we're going to time the walk to each of these stores and chat up the people working the registers. Her second mistake was to make the pseudonym personal, and her third was to rush through the shops in order to piece together an alibi."

"And her first?"

The razor-sharp grin appeared, the one that couldn't be mistaken for a child's. "That was killing her husband in the first place. She won't get off clean now – she's unlucky enough to have not one, but two extremely competent detectives on her trail."

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(1) Sorry if that was confusing. Vowels can stand alone in Japanese, but consonants generally can't ("n" is the exception). The pseudonym in the story is made up of 5 characters: be+a and e+zu+ka. Reversed, it's a+be and ka+zu+e, or Abe Kazue, which could be a real name. The hiragana versus kanji thing is hard to summarize here, Google should be a good resource if you're interested.

From Meri: I have literally no idea if the keycards-have-an-electronic-signature thing is true. It just made sense in my head and fit here so it was included. I don't know how many of Heiji and Conan's cases I'm going to cover here. I have this one finished and an idea for the next one, but the semester's starting up, so we'll see how much time I have.