Disclaimer: I don't own Magic Kaito

Yay, oh boy. Things are starting to pick up.


In just a few minutes time, Saguru would be very happy that it was the middle of winter and thus he was wearing a hat. He currently stood in a telephone booth, dialing the long since memorized number of the police station. It picked up quickly, as if they were expecting him. Which, he supposed, they probably were. That shopping center murder had been rather well publicized. "Hello, Montreal Police Department, how may I help you?"

"I'm calling on behalf of the murder at Oakland Shopping Center yesterday," Saguru said, trying to sound as old man-like as he could. He was nowhere near as good as Kaito, but he could change his voice a little.

There was a pause, the man on the other end undoubtedly alerting someone nearby to start up a tracer. "I see. Would you like to know the facts?"

"No, I've gathered all I need from the papers. Clearly it was the shift manager who killed the cashier. He has a connection with the mugger, does he not? He probably called the mugger there on purpose to make him take the blame in an armed robbery gone sour. How he got the mugger to pull an armed robbery I don't know, maybe blackmail is in play. But it doesn't take much digging to discover that the cashier was a prime suspect in an unsolved rape-murder case from several years ago where the victim was the shift manager's younger sister, and that the shift manager himself recently transferred from a separate branch. He walked over when the mugger pulled the gun on the cashier, and then when the lights went out he grabbed the gun from the shocked mugger, shot at the place the clerk had been in four times to make sure he'd gotten him, and then wiped his prints and tossed the gun aside. He probably got the lights to go off with some sort of device or timer, something a mugger who had never been to the store before, let alone within the month, would be able to do. The shift manager's got the motive and the ability; he's the one you want to take into custody."

There was no noise for a few moments; the man on the other end clearly scribbling down everything Saguru had said. "Thank you very much. We knew about the rape-murder case, but we didn't think it was relevant so we didn't dive too deeply. I hope you know how much the Montreal Police Department appreciates your help."

Saguru smirked. "Of course I do. It's kind of hard to miss the radio speeches. I really wish you wouldn't though, I'd prefer to remain anonymous."

"Well either way we've got a few more current unsolved cases. Would you like to hear the facts in those cases?"

Saguru laughed, then became serious. "I know exactly what you're trying to do. You're trying to keep me here so that someone can come pick me up. Sorry, not going to happen. Really, you boys are chasing me like a common criminal even though I'm helping you."

"You hit the nail right on the head," the officer said, and Saguru, despite the warnings of his mind, stayed on the line. "It seems a higher-up or two has gotten it into his head that you're actually a criminal who wants to atone for something you've done but avoid going to prison, or something like that. Most of us don't think you've done anything wrong, but that higher-up or two wants to know for certain."

"Haven't they ever heard the saying, 'don't look a gift horse in the mouth'?" Saguru asked. He glanced around, wondering if he had time to milk some more information from the talkative man on the other end. He froze as he saw a cop car speed around a far off corner. "Your buddies are here so I'll be going now," he said nonchalantly, though inside he was panicking. He threw the phone back onto the hook and fled from the booth.

It was too late. The passenger side window rolled down and an officer with a loudspeaker poked his head out. "This is the police!" the loudspeaker bellowed. "Please do not run!"

Saguru swore under his breath and pulled his hat down low as he ran. But he was running, and the cops were in a vehicle. He had no chance unless he ducked down an alley that was either too skinny or too cluttered for them to go through. If he remembered right, the one next to that second-hand bookstore should fit the bill.

He made a quick turn into the alley and glanced back over his shoulder as the car went speeding past. This turned out to be a mistake as his eyes briefly met with one of the cops. He increased his speed down the alleyway, and didn't stop running until he'd made it back to the apartment.


Meanwhile, the local police department was practically in shambles. Photocopies of a drawing done by an officer were being passed around like wildfire, some officers saying that something about it looked vaguely familiar, others claiming that they had never seen this person before. A few higher-ups were debating hotly over whether the drawing should be released to the papers or not. While it might help to find out who exactly that person was, it might also scare them away if the chase earlier hadn't already. Or a third option, it might be a disguise and wouldn't actually help at all. One of the telephone operators said that he sounded older than the person in the drawing, and one of the junior officers who had said that the drawing looked familiar brought up a Japanese thief, Kaito Kid, to prove that it was possible for it to be a disguise.

Any way, the office gossip for the next few days centered on one very specific topic.


Kaito's hand found the pause button on the CD player before he said anything. "What do you want, Hakuba?" he asked, a tiny bit angrily. "Shouldn't you be out making sure justice prevails or something?"

Hakuba sat down on the couch opposite the one Kaito was lying on. "Well yes, I suppose so. Except I'm getting the niggling feeling that there's an injustice right in front of me that I've been completely ignoring."

"Hakuba, you've been hinting at that for a week," Kaito pointed out exasperatedly. "Either get to the point or shut up."

"Kaito Kid," Saguru said simply.

With a groan, Kaito pulled the throw pillow out from under his head and started trying to smother himself with it. "If you do not have a very good reason for bringing that thief up, I will bodily escort you from my house of my own accord. I will."

And Saguru had no doubt that Kaito would not let such a little thing as being blind stop him from doing that, so he quickly elaborated. "Kaito Kid once challenged me to find out for myself why he stole. Now under any circumstances vanishing off the face of the earth for eight years and then just as mysteriously showing up again seems a pretty good place to start. So I did, working under the theory that the Kid in action now is not the one that first debuted, which meant checking obituaries. Of course that's a rather lot of people, so I preemptively narrowed it down a little. Considering how Kid answered my question when I asked him why he did it, I highly doubt he does it just for the hell of it. So I eliminated those that had died of natural causes. He was also very rarely active outside of Japan, so I limited my search to here. And of course I eliminated those that were either too old, too young, or handicapped in some way or another. So I was left with a rather short list of people who were of the right age, resided in Japan, and had died in some sort of accident within a few months after the first Kid's last heist. And among those people, one of them was a practicing magician. You knew him intimately, Kuroba." What Saguru wasn't going to mention was that he'd really just kept going on the assumption that Kaito was Kid and had in fact started right with Kuroba Toichi. And he fit like a glove.

Kaito snorted. "Yeah? And what does my dad have to do with any of this?"

So, he was still going to be tough about it. "I checked the dates; every single one. Whenever there was a heist outside of the country, your father was doing a show in the very same city. Whenever the heist was in the country, your father was not traveling somewhere for a show. Nor was he in the hospital for any of the heists. Hell, there was even a heist scheduled for the day you were born that Kaito Kid never showed up for."

"What does that prove?" Kaito grumbled, though Saguru had little doubt that he was panicking inside.

Saguru's voice grew soft. "The final two dates are within two weeks of each other. And explosions certainly leave very little evidence."

A familiar smirk slowly grew across Kaito's face, probably one of the more bizarre signs of surrender that Saguru had ever come across. "I didn't know you were one to kick a dog when he's down, Tantei-san."

"I'm not here to kick him," Saguru insisted. "I'm here to feed him, if he'll accept it."

That certainly got Kaito's attention. "What?"

"I said that I'm here to feed him. Help get the starving mongrel back on his feet."

"Hakuba, what the hell are you talking about?"

"I'm a detective. I right injustices. I've found an injustice. I intend to right it."

"How exactly do you plan on going about that?"

"I'm going to find out who killed your father."

Kaito started laughing so hard he nearly rolled off the couch. "And you think it's going to be that easy!" he snorted. He only spoke again once he had gotten his breathing under control. Suddenly serious, he rolled up his sleeve. "Around here," he said, pointing roughly at a scar across his upper arm. His hand moved a little higher, further than the sleeve would roll. "Here-ish too." The sleeve was dropped and the hem of the shirt pulled up slightly to reveal another scar. "And here. There are a few others that we'll not get into right now." Finally his hand went to the back of his head. "And here. It wasn't outright, but they started the chain reaction."

"Which is precisely why I need to do something about this," Saguru replied. "You can't possibly be content to just sit there and do nothing."

"You forget, Tantei-san, that I was doing something. At least until they knocked me out of the game, permanently. Besides, I already know who killed him."

Saguru leaned forward. "Really? Who?"

Kaito acted exasperated, raising a finger to his lips and making a tutting noise. "No. I'm not telling you."

"But certainly you want to see him behind bars, don't you?"

"Which is precisely why I'm not telling you. Right now the only thing standing between you and him is your lack of knowledge as to who he is. And I am not sending you into the line of fire. Even if you manage to capture him, he's still got many goons, as well as a man behind him. Any one of them could decide that you're worth taking out. Therefore, I will not tell you. Besides, I don't even know his real name, just what he goes by."

Saguru continued to try and find out more information, but ended up leaving shortly later, dejected. The next day however he was back. "Shiny gemstones," he started out with.

"Yeah?" Kaito asked, pausing the CD player again. "What about them?"

"There is method to the madness. The apparent method is shiny gemstones. Why?"

"Maybe they're convenient."

"You stole a statue that was twice as large as you," Saguru deadpanned. "Or at least you tried to, before I chained it to the ground. And then there was that insane debacle involving a clock tower that I'm almost glad I missed. Clearly convenience isn't an issue. Shiny gemstones. Why?"

"It's your job to find out the answer, isn't it?"

Saguru growled, running his hand through his hair. "We've been over this before. I'm trying to help. Shiny gemstones. Why?" he repeated.

Kaito paused. "You're really not going to give up on this, are you?" he finally asked quietly.

"Have I showed any reason that I would?"

"You really want to help," Kaito said, almost as if it had just dawned on him.

Saguru plopped down on the couch. "Yeah. You're just figuring that out?"

Kaito groaned. "Fine. You of all people deserve it, I suppose."

Half an hour later Saguru's mind was blown, as well as a little disbelief. And there was a plan forming in the back of his mind. A very insane plan that he couldn't believe he was even thinking about contemplating, but a plan nonetheless. And, well, Kaito had managed to impress upon him the danger of going after whoever it was that had been shooting at him. So, therefore...

Saguru got very little sleep that night.


Inspector Nakamori had a headache. A very bizarre headache. Or to be more specific, the cause of the headache was bizarre. It wasn't that it wouldn't normally cause a headache, it was just that what had just happened was so very incredibly bizarre.

As it was, he was currently staring at an empty display case. An empty display case that was supposed to contain a ruby. An empty display case that wasn't quite empty, because it contained a piece of paper. A piece of paper which was not blank. A piece of paper that for all accounts and purposes was a genuine Kid heist note. Except it wasn't a heist note. But it was almost definitely genuine. But it was bizarre, it was abnormal, it was, well, strange.

It went thusly:

Dear Inspector Nakamori,

I'm so very sorry I couldn't invite you to this party, but I'm feeling a bit under the weather at the moment. I just don't feel up to our usual acrobatics. So it may be a while before we actually meet again, but do keep an eye out for my work!

Kaito Kid

"Can someone please tell me what the fuck is going on here?" Nakamori shouted, causing nearby officers to cower and cringe.


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