Warnings, disclaimers, I love villains with brains, don't you?

Pts. 6-11

Conan's report had been wry, short, and to the point: the lack of evidence, the speed with which the case had been filed cold, even the small size of both headline font and full article about Kumori Hibari... everything pointed to Black Org behind Hibari's death. And, really, it made sense-- not too many things would drive Kaito's parents, or the Kudous, to hiding children from each other. But a murder by a powerful criminal syndicate was very near, if not at, the top of the list.

Kaito hadn't really thought much past finding out why his brother and adoption had been hidden. Still wasn't sure what to do with the information, now that he did know. Though getting Black Org busted and eradicated, as he'd been doing already, was a good start. He didn't really have any strategies other than his original one (draw them out with big, noisy heists), and possibly luring Conan (Shin'ichi? No, he couldn't risk saying the wrong name at the wrong time) in to help...

So without any strategies, and with a few days to breathe before he had to set up another heist, Kaito kicked back in a trick armchair in Kid's lair, put up the picture he'd framed of baby-Shin'ichi hugging baby-Kaito, clicked on the radio, and began rereading Conan's report.

Aloud. In Conan's voice. With his best guess at the snarky commentary Conan wouldn't have bothered to write down, though the boy had circled a phrase or two in red pen, with accompanying "ha! birthday!" and similar notes in the margins.

The music paused for a commercial and news break. Kaito mostly ignored the catchy, annoying jingles and the newscaster's voice, until his own name caught his attention.

"-- a Kaitou Kid heist note early this morning. Preliminary decipherings indicate the Kid's next target is the Tsuda family, of Suzuki Industries. Stay tuned for developments in the case."

Kaito's eyes narrowed at the radio. He certainly hadn't sent any note... and Suzuki Industries meant Sonoko would drive her parents nuts to be there for the heist. Which meant Ran would be there, with Conan.

Considering his brother's track record...

Which Investigation Unit One officer hadn't he impersonated for a while...?

-0-0-0

"Between port and rice field, the youth unload a treasure ship. Fortune smiles upon the goods, one by one til the last is left behind." Conan looked like he'd bitten into a lemon. "This is perhaps the worst Kid note I've ever seen."

Kid looked down from watching Megure and Nakamori hammer out jurisdiction rights while Hakuba (there was no other word for it) sulked. "Is it?" he asked curiously. He leaned forward to peer at the paper, pretending not to notice how the move made his blouse gape slightly over 'Detective Satou's' cleavage, or how Tsuda-san's eldest son angled himself to get a better look from afar. "It's obscure enough... isn't it?"

Conan made a scoffing sound in the back of his throat. "No," he replied sharply. "I mean, look at this. You don't unload ships between a port and anywhere, you unload them at the port. Since they're both very specific kanji, you can only get Shinden or Tsuda out of them. Treasure ships are Chinese, but they're only treasure ships until they're unloaded here in Japan. So, the reading is Tsuda. Much too easy, see?" Kid nodded, stifling a smirk when Conan continued, "The rest is just stupid. Unload what from a treasure ship? The gold? The silver? Crystals? Hats? An object with pictures of the ship, or the shippou pattern symbolizing them?

"As for 'fortune smiles' and 'the last left behind', that at least gives us a number: seven treasures, six-day cycle of luck, but does it mean the sixth day after the police recieved the note? The coming most-fortunate day? The coming least-fortunate day? There's no clues to the real time or target... tonight's just the first likely possibility."

"So," Kid-as-Satou murmured, eyes narrowed at the innocuous photocopy, "You think it's a forgery."

"I know it's a forgery," Conan replied absently. Then he blinked, cast a wary glance at Satou, and beamed childishly. "Unless Kid hit his head on something!" he chirped. Kid blinked. Right. He'd been sounding too old for Detective Satou's ears. "He certainly wasn't drunk," Conan continued too cheerfully, kicking his legs under his chair. "The note would be a lot longer and more difficult to understand."

Hakuba stepped past Kid and leaned against the wall on Conan's other side. "I wish he'd been drunk," he grumbled, with a dismayed glance down at Conan's too-innocent face.

Kid made a sympathetic sound. "Do forgeries make you nervous too?"

Matching incredulous looks. "Considering his track record with them?" Hakuba asked, gaze dropping pointedly to Conan again. "The most favorable outcome is the mere destruction of this building." Kid's eyes flicked to the ceiling overhead, deliberately unnerved. "The least favorable..."

"That's what we're here for, Hakuba-san!" Conan chirped.

Hakuba managed not to wince. "Speaking of which, how did you manage to be present without Sleeping Kogoro?"

As Conan answered, pointing at Ran and Sonoko and babbling excitedly, Kid let his eyes track over the crowd. Ran, Sonoko, Task Force, Investigation Unit One; Tsuda-san, a man in his fifties whose suit was due to be changed for the next size up; his square-faced wife; three sons ranging from mid-twenties to just fourteen; a daughter who was... ow, yup, had just slapped the unfortunate Task Force officer who'd checked her for a mask (read: pinched her face bruisingly hard); housekeeper, bookkeeper, gardener...

What was the gardener doing here at 8:30 at night?

Slowly, the crowd shifted, Nakamori and Megure's argument growing quieter. Conan slipped off his chair, slipping into a subtly ready stance. Kid followed his lead, but his attention was only half on the obvious target. Something was wrong. Something... where...?

"GET HIM!" Nakamori and Megure bellowed.

The Force pounced on the gardener, just as shots rang out.

Mrs. Tsuda collapsed. Ran and Sonoko began screaming as the Tsuda's daughter fell, a small round hole trickling blood from her forehead.

Kid caught a flicker of movement behind the loft railing overhead. "Upstairs!" Satou yelled, bolting in pursuit. Most of Investigation Unit One followed, Hakuba and Conan hard on Kid's heels.

Too many stairways in this house. Main stairs, side stairs, back stairs, three wings... the unit split up, four to a hall with Hakuba and Conan vanishing somewhere in the mess. Satou "accidentally" lost Shiratori and Takagi pretty quickly.

The flicker of movement had been black. The forgery had been too obvious, meant to have the violent crime unit on the spot... and the girl had been killed in full view of everyone, without any real attempt to fake an accident.

Everybody knew Kid didn't kill.

Somebody wanted Kid there.

Somebody wanted the police distracted while Kid was there.

And that somebody wore black.

Kid picked the lock on the garage and hurried inside. Forget the glider, forget changing out of the Satou disguise, he was out of here. Regular murders, Black Org trying to kill him at a heist, that he could handle. Not people getting killed to draw him out.

Ooh, full tank on the Mercedes. Kid popped the lock and hotwired the car in about two seconds, and floored it out of the garage. Thank all the gods Detective Satou drove like a madwoman when she was chasing a suspect. He threw the wheel into a turn, tires screeching on the road.

The back windshield shattered.

Trap!

Kid let Satou's mask fall into his trademark maniacal grin. If they were chasing him out here, they weren't shooting at his brother in there. He'd just find a nice high bridge, drive off it, and escape on his glider from there.

A small head popped up in his rearview mirror. "Move your arm!"

"Holy shit!" Kid yelped. He grabbed his brother by the front of his shirt, dragged him into the front seat, and clicked the seatbelt in place before he took another sharp turn. "What do you think you're doing? You could get killed!"

"I'd noticed!" Conan twisted to pull something out of the back of his seat: a syringe topped with a red tuft. A second dart lodged itself into the radio console, a few threads catching on the hinge of Conan's glasses.

"Get your head down!" Kid suited action to words, ducking as he pushed Conan as deeply into the seat as possible. "These things are meant for large animals, not you!"

"Not you either," Conan replied sharply. He opened the glove compartment, rummaging through it as Kid wove through traffic, and came up with a large, metal flashlight. "Perfect," he said, leaning down to press at the sides of his shoes. "Get us out of traffic if you can."

No traffic, plus big conspicuous black van with the fedora brigade hanging out of it, guns blazing, plus Conan's superpowered kick and a hefty blunt object... Kid felt his madman's smirk gentle into something more genuine. "Have I ever mentioned you're my favorite detective, Tantei-kun?"

Conan glowered at him. "Stuff it, Kid."

Kid took an entrance ramp onto the freeway and headed out of town. "Dare I ask?" How you spotted me?

"Your feet are a size larger than Detective Satou's."

"Hm, yes, you'd have a better vantage than Hakuba-kun there." Ooh, if looks could kill.

Warehouse district. Not a large one, but one of the tiny "storehouses and small office blocks" that sprung up in the shadows of factories, where people didn't want to live. Kid took the next exit and circled into the maze of little streets and parking lots, weaving between buildings as fast as he dared.

When Conan unbuckled his belt and shoved the back of his seat down, laying low over it, Kid spared a hand to help hold his brother semi-safely in place, easing just a hair off the gas.

Three... two... one... Kid skidded into a straight stretch of road. The van's tires squealed as it raced around the corner, and Conan jumped up to dropkick the flashlight out the missing back window like a rocket.

Tires screeched, men's yells abruptly cut off by the crunch of a couple thousand kilograms of twisting metal.

Kid floored the gas. Somebody really needed to spring for one of these for Satou, her standard-issue pursuit vehicle wasn't nearly so smooth and light... though her driving likely made up for that.

Several kilometers passed before Conan settled his seat warily back into place and rebuckled the belt. A sudden intent look, and Conan's hand slapped at his wrist.

Kid held up the watch he'd palmed when holding Conan in place. "Sorry!" he said cheerfully, darting Conan even as the boy lunged for his seatbelt. "You'll just have to catch me another time..." Conan's eyes fluttered, and he slumped in his seat. "... Niisan."

Kid ruffled Conan's hair, then flipped on the radio. Now, off to the Mouri's, and then he could change out of Satou and vanish once more.

-0-0-0

The test shot had been a miserable failure from the perspective of actual capture and preservation of resources.

From Koln's perspective, though, the falsified heist had worked better than he could have hoped. The video from inside the van, in particular, showed excellent results. The Kuroba boy's ability to calculate and cut his losses, his evasive manuevers... granted, it had been against a small team of bottom-level minions. But that wasn't the detail catching Koln's attention.

On the video, a second, far smaller form had been in the car. Edogawa Conan, anticipating the Kid, matching his every move, coordinating with him so easily against a common enemy...

Dilemma solved.

The Mastermind project, long shelved, had been intended to train the next generation of Black Org. So far, it had failed with every subject. The only one who hadn't turned out an idiot, dead, or both was Sherry. The less said about her, the better. They'd been much too lenient, letting her sister run free.

Had Kudou been alive, Koln could have recreated the Sherry situation without it turning to disaster. Without him, though, Koln had been planning to break Kuroba, at risk of ruining him. Seventeen was just too old to train without leverage.

Six, however, was not.

Koln hit rewind on the motel's battered VCR, then took out his cell phone as the machine whirred softly. One ring. Two.

Click.

"Remove the surveillance from Kuroba. Put them on Edogawa Conan."

-0-0-0

Click.

Vermouth had known learning the voice of the head of Koln's lackeys would come in handy. Twisting in her chair, she opened a window into the phone company's operating computer, routing the number back to the lackey's phone and dialing it.

One ring. Two.

Click.

Switching to Koln's voice, Vermouth repeated his exact words as she pulled up another window. This one went directly into the Org's archives, where she had to type her password every minute to keep it from dumping a virus into her hard drive. But she at least had the password, one of two that wouldn't let anyone track her file history.

Kuroba. Kuroba Toichi, magician, dead. Not that one. Kuroba Kaito, high school student, alive.

She pulled up his school ID, and the corner of her mouth twitched upwards. It looked like she had more silver bullets in the clip than she thought.

-0-0-0

Kaito yawned as he wrote the date out on the blackboard. Morning duty. Yuck. There never seemed to be enough caffeine in the world to face it.

Staying up late working on his next heist (and debating whether or not to do it, for a change) might be part of the problem, there. But that was too much thinking for right now. Coffeeeeeeeee...

A takeaway cup appeared under Kaito's nose, the scent of a decent mocha curling up in thin wisps of steam. Ooh, he hadn't known he knew that magic trick...

"Good morning, Hakuba-kun!" Aoko caroled. "How are you?"

... oh. Not his fault, then. Kaito grabbed the cup before Hakuba could steal it back, taking a cautious drink, and discovered it was fresh-brewed and just under scalding hot. Okay, Hakuba was his best friend right now. Aoko didn't bring him mocha.

"Tsuda's wife commited suicide in her jail cell last night," Hakuba said darkly, eliciting a sympathetic sound from Aoko. Kaito felt the hairs on the back of his neck prickle up. Standard Black Org procedure. "Considering the police had yet to obtain definitive information regarding her stepdaughter's killer..."

Kaito lowered his coffee, staring at the plastic lid suspiciously. "Case closed?"

"Much as it pains me to admit it, yes."

That explained the mocha. Hakuba didn't like being the bearer of bad news. A killer on the loose, one who would target people to draw out Kid, that was about as bad as Hakuba could get.

Hakuba turned away to put his satchel on his desk. "Nakamori-chan," he said, voice carrying in the quiet room, "I think it would be prudent if you suspended your protesting at Kid heists for the foreseeable future."

The coffee in Kaito's stomach turned to ice. He'd been wrong; Hakuba's news could get worse. Aoko.

"Don't be silly, Hakuba-kun. Nobody's going to buy a hit on me."

A new voice rang out from the doorway. "I should say not. Good gracious, what children speak of these days!"

All three heads snapped up to spot an elderly woman in the doorway. She was short, her spine curved forward in a granny hump and her bra not doing its job anymore. Her hair was the silvery gray that came only with one's nineties or a bottle; a very intelligent choice, Kaito thought, since she was too wrinkled and jowly to pull off browns and blacks anymore. Despite the curvature of her spine, she carried no cane, and her only hint at infirmity was a pair of ugly orthopedic shoes.

She stumped slowly into the classroom, sharp eyes landing on Kaito at the chalkboard. "Kamezawa, if you would. Marsh for sawa." Kaito blinked, realizing she meant him to write her name on the board. As he did so, adding kana next to the kanji to help a few of the students at the bottom of the class, she continued, "I'll be taking over your class while your teacher recovers from a broken hip."

This was... disturbingly convenient. Too much so. Black Org didn't know about him... did they? They knew about Kid, and they thought Kid was Toichi. But something was definitely fishy-- worrying about this. There weren't that many retired teachers on the roster for substitutes... most of them were young, fresh out of college and stuck as subs until they got some experience under their belts.

If Black Org was watching him, they might be thinking they could use him to get to Toichi. Or his mother... He was definitely checking for bugs and suspicious people around Mom, as soon as he got home and before he hacked into the school database for their substitute list.

Not that there was likely to be anything off in the database, if their hackers were any good. Kaito's best hope would be a discrepancy between the information in the database and the actual phone book in his house.

Still, it would probably be best to operate as if Kamezawa-sensei was Black Org. Which, dammit, meant no checking up on Conan, none of his more complex tricks, and definitely no heist this month.

He was getting predictable anyway.

-0-0-0

Nobody would fault an old woman for pulling the only cushioned staffroom chair over to a sunny spot by the window, nor for commandeering the teapot. Several of the older female teachers -- the ones who'd come back to work after their children started lower secondary school -- smiled indulgently, with traces of future self-centeredness underlying their consideration.

Therefore, Vermouth was able to get an excellent view of Kuroba-kun and his friends eating their lunches, looking as carefree as high-school students normally did. To her eyes, pretty much everybody outside the Org looked carefree, except the police and the little detectives on a case. Most people never had life-and-death constantly, or even regularly, on the line.

Except this little group had somehow managed to score a grassy spot under a healthy, lush tree that blocked most overhead lines-of-sight. And Kuroba just happened to have his back to the wall, while Hakuba had his to the trunk of the tree. Vermouth could count half a dozen escape routes from Kuroba's spot alone. (Nakamori, at least, seemed oblivious to the fact that she was in the most protected spot between them.)

Good. With Kuroba wary, he should stay far away from Conan while her silver bullet was under increased survelliance... and keep his own behavior in check for some time. Perhaps not long enough that Koln would write the two off, but certainly long enough for her to undermine his machinations.

She smiled sweetly into her teacup.

-0-0-0

Every report on the Edogawa child made him more appealing, Koln thought, reading the latest results of two weeks' surveillance as he wound his way deeper into the Org complex. (Ostensibly, he was inspecting the facilities; in truth, he didn't particularly care past security and accomodations, neither of which were in the outer maze of abandoned and low-priority labs.) Between his guardian and his little friends, the boy seemed to have the highest body count in Japan. A convenient detail to have in the child's history; who would suspect someone with such long-standing poor karma to be pulling the strings? Particularly when, with a little training, the boy could apply his experience to never dirty his hands with the actual work.

He dropped the file into his escort's hands without preamble. "The boy is always with Sleeping Kogoro," he informed her. "Arrange some murders in Beika-- discreetly. Don't repeat the Kaitou Kid fiasco, or indeed kill anybody yourself. I'm sure you know people with problems. Aggravate them. I don't care how or who they kill, just as long as your team can kidnap the boy without revealing us." He paused, meeting her eyes for a moment before she politely dropped her gaze. "Once you have him, implement 'Aleph'."

She bowed and hurried off, not foolish enough to delay his orders.

Koln almost smirked as he continued towards the center of the building, pulling out his phone. The reception bars flickered out, one by one, as he wound his way through concrete-walled hallways and into the basement. By the time he reached the new, steel door installed on a storeroom, the coverage was completely gone.

He flicked on the light and opened the door to examine the room. Futon, clothing, water tap... everything looked to be in order. It needed just one finishing touch. Koln took a small box from his pocket, tapped out a fresh piece of chalk, and wrote on the wall in schoolteacher-neat lines. Then he set the chalk on the floor, stepped back, and left.

-0-0-0

There was something seriously wrong with the world when a teenage genius couldn't finish a seven-year-old's homework. Not that Conan wasn't trying, but for nearly a week it had been just one thing after another. If it wasn't a body on the way to school, it was one on the way home, or in a case brought to Kogoro, or somebody dropping dead in the restaurant the one night Ran hadn't cooked.

Even the officers were starting to look as worn-out as Conan felt. It was just like entrance exams all over again. This body needed more sleep than he'd had time for, dammit -- the only person managing so much as eight hours was Kogoro himself, and even he wasn't getting it all at once.

This time, Kogoro was catching his catnap up against a half-open sliding door, which led out into the garden the victim had been found impaled in. (Conan was never going to look at a sundial the same way again.) He fought off a yawn as he finished his spiel, brandished Kogoro's arm at the killer, and watched the police dogpile the protesting young man.

Finally, Conan thought, wobbling to his feet. Now maybe he could get the stupid worksheets done, and even -- please oh please -- catch a nap before Kogoro dragged them both home. He scrubbed a hand over his face as he went looking for a quiet alcove in the house. Two murders in a single night, what the hell was in Beika's water this week? Maybe Ai had the right idea... locking himself in his room until the spree died off was looking more appealing with every late night.

It took a good ten seconds for Conan to realize the pun. Killing spree. Died off. Ugh. Definitely too many murders and late nights recently. He took a deep breath and exhaled, hoping the oxygen would help a bit, then trotted around the corner... into a faceful of pink smoke.

Kid! Conan cursed, the world spinning to black... but not before he realized the arm scooping him up was entirely too rough to be Kid's.

Oh shit.

-0-0-0

Saguru rarely appreciated the mornings his father was off the clock. Not that he didn't care to breakfast with more company than the housekeeper, nor was he unaware that she put a bit more effort into making a fine meal on those days... but Saguru had yet to succeed in getting to the newspaper first. Therefore, he was deprived of both masculine conversation and the news until after school.

Unless, of course, he played upon Kuroba's sensibilities and obtained the paper from him. That wasn't particularly difficult to do, which was why Saguru had walked a bit more hastily than usual on the shortest route to school, foregoing an extra coffee at the vending machines near the building.

The classroom was perhaps half-full when he entered, his classmates milling about near the desks of the more popular students. Kuroba was doing some form of magic trick for Nakamori, involving a lot of sparkles and smoke, with no sign of the paper upon his person or his desk. Saguru knew better than to assume Kuroba hadn't picked one up this morning, though.

The pattern for the usual before-school antics broke a few rows in front of Kuroba's desk, where a girl had fallen asleep, long red hair trailing across her folded arms and desktop. Saguru's eyes narrowed. Usually, she was in high spirits, holding court with a gaggle of helpless young men. Saguru himself had been hard-pressed not to join in, early in his academic career here... he'd only managed because the poor girl didn't look like she had space for yet another starry-eyed hopeful. Then he'd matched Kid's profile to Kuroba's, and the girl had become relatively unimportant in the scheme of things. Kaitou Kid vs. pretty girl had been no contest.

That didn't mean Saguru had completely foregone his sense of chivalry, nor his deductive capabilities. Without her horde of followers to block him, he paused next to the girl's desk. "Koizumi-san?" he asked, getting a twitch in response. So at least she wasn't fully asleep. "Are you unwell?"

She peered blearily up at him from under the curtain of her reddish hair, dark circles prominent under her eyes. Blinked. Then her hand snaked out --

"Koizumi-san!"

-- and fisted in Saguru's shirt, tugging him five centimeters to the left. The cool glint in her eyes all but dared Saguru to not humor her. Well. Far be it from him to disregard a lady's wishes... though asking for an explanation was perfectly within the bounds of propriety. "What on earth...?"

Kuroba yelped, Saguru glancing over just long enough to see the boy leap from his chair and pluck a thumbtack off the seat.

"Ninjas," Koizumi growled.

Saguru blinked away from Kuroba. "... pardon?"

The floor heaved, slamming up against Saguru and tearing at his hearing. Heat blasted over his body, scoring his face with razor-thin lines of fire. Shrapnel, he thought dazedly over the shrieks ringing in his ears, then, explosion, as he failed to gasp for breath.

Even under the rush of panic -- he couldn't breathe and it hurt -- his mind raced to catalog what it could. Koizumi's hand was still curled around the front of his shirt; one of his own was tangled in a mass of human hair, and only she had hair that long in their class. Warmth trickled down his face, unmistakably blood, but there were no accompanying pools spreading across other parts of his body.

Then the weight across his chest blossomed into a sucking pain, smoke clawing at his throat as he finally managed to breathe, and his vision cleared. The outer wall of the classroom was a smoking ruin, shattered glass and twisted metal jabbing out of a massive hole. He could see into the classroom above theirs, a ceiling light spitting sparks and fiberoptic cable trailing between floors.

He couldn't see any further.

Saguru -- against his better sense -- turned his head, the bridge of his nose grazing against a metal bar. A desk's leg was impaled through the floor just to the right of his head, the ruined laminate top blocking his view of everything else.

There hadn't been anybody on that side of the classroom, anyway.

He turned his head down, finding Koizumi crumpled partly across his legs -- he'd not even noticed the extra mass, though he'd no doubt have odd bruises later -- then to the left. Kuroba and Nakamori had been on that side...

Kuroba lay crumpled in a heap, the floor around him bare. Nakamori was sitting up over him, somewhat, one arm held oddly and a leg jutting out at an unnatural angle. Tears streamed down Nakamori's dirty face already, but her face was set in an expression Saguru had seen on too many survivors.

She wouldn't pass out until she either saw every one of her friends loaded into an ambulance, jarred her broken leg, or was packed into an ambulance herself.

"Don't move him," Saguru rasped, as the girl tried to do just that. "Possible..." he coughed, god the smoke, "...spinal injuries." Exactly why he shouldn't have moved his head, but that was his decision. Though his judgement was likely not the best at the moment...

"Hakuba-kun..."

"Try not to move. The authorities will be here soon." Structural integrity compromised...

His fingers sought out Koizumi's head, just barely within reach, and he began checking her skull for bumps or soft spots.

Dimly, he started to hear sirens wail. A shadow passed over his eyes, and when he blinked it away, two white-clad EMTs were loading Kaito onto a stretcher. That was quick... how long had he been unconscious for, that they'd arrived, filled out the paperwork, begun searching the building and performing triage...?

Though it was odd they'd taken Kaito first...

Oh, look, shadows again...

-0-0-0

Conan woke to pitch black. His glasses were gone, he lay on something that offered just a hint of softness, and his feet were cold. He blinked once, twice, seeing no difference between open and closed eyes. No light source... where was he?

He pushed himself up, swaying slightly -- though that might've been his brain misinterpreting the sudden movement without visual data -- and patted himself down. Someone had replaced his clothing with something that felt like a samue: a long-sleeved cotton wrap top and trousers that were a bit short on him, the traditional ties replaced with velcro and an elasticized waist, respectively. No badge, no watch, no shoes. Even his underwear was gone.

Conan swallowed against the surge of nerves. These were just basic intimidation tactics, sensory deprivation and theft of personal items, and he would not let it work.

He went on to investigate the room, one handspan at a time. His head had been resting on a floppy pillow, which was sewn into the twin-sized futon he'd been lying on. That gave way to a cold concrete floor on three sides, and a matching wall on the fourth. Conan got to his feet, fingers dragging against the rough stone and mortared grooves of the wall, and leaned close. A whiff of bleach and cold-wet-stone -- a basement room, which was unusual in residential buildings in Japan, and one that had been recently scrubbed of the mildew that ran rampant to cause that.

The futon and clothing had been enough evidence this was a well-planned kidnapping. But the extra bother of cleaning the place indicated they expected to be keeping Conan for a considerable amount of time. Which meant no ransom and no further clues for the police, so he could only hope they'd kept his glasses or badge, with the tracking devices in them.

One hand held loosely out before him, feet shuffling slowly, Conan made his way along the wall, patting up and down as far as he could reach. He'd found nothing by the time he reached a corner a meter from the pillow side of the futon.

He continued along this new wall for another meter, then his fingers landed on a worn industrial spigot, while his toes brushed against a depression and a small drain. The drain's cover felt too slick to be anything but new, a grid of holes half the width of a pencil in the center, and the faucet's handle turned easily when he checked... though he didn't turn it enough to run the water. If they weren't monitoring him with an infrared camera or something, they might hear the noise.

The third wall was another meter past the spigot, and felt different from the first two, smoothed over and almost dusty to the touch, like a chalkboard. Conan frowned, tapping it with a fingernail. The shuddery way it caught was exactly like a chalkboard. What was that doing down here?

This wall was blank, nearly three meters long if Conan was guessing right, and the fourth wall went back to concrete. Barely two handspans later -- one had he been an adult -- his fingers touched steel. A thin piece, a seam, then more steel... there was no mistaking a door. Conan explored it by touch, looking for any distinguishing marks. He only found a smooth faceplate where the knob should've been, a gap at the floor just large enough for his fingers to fit through, and the other seam; the door's hinges must be on the outside.

Okay. He was locked in a basement storeroom, barely two meters by three, with one futon, a faucet that might or might not have clean water (and certainly wouldn't be warm), and a steel door that opened outward. No toilet or blankets. If there were air vents, they were up too high for him to find in the dark. The chalkboard wall was his best clue. Somebody had to have done that on purpose.

Conan couldn't think of any reason to put a chalkboard in a storeroom... but there was a very good reason to have one in a room with a prodigy kid. Namely, so the kid could write (which would require a light, though Conan hadn't found a switch for one). Which would only be encouraged if they wanted him to work for them in some manner.

He fumbled back to his futon and lay back down in the same position he'd woken up in, forceably squashing down a twinge of vulnerability. At his size, sitting up ready for action wouldn't do a thing. Playing possum might buy him a bit of time to think.

His initial deductions weren't encouraging at all. Sensory deprivation, theft of... no, elimination of personal possessions, and no control over light, food, temperature, hygiene, or bodily functions. That coupled with his earlier deductions added up to two things.

One, they probably knew his true age, and therefore that he was Kudou Shin'ichi.

Two, they didn't want him dead. They wanted him brainwashed.

Conan wasn't sure how long he lay there in the dark, feigning continued unconsciousness. He may have dozed off once or twice, in fact, but he was wide awake when the storeroom erupted in blinding light.

He couldn't help but flinch, eyes squeezing shut. The lock clanged, the door opening to let someone enter. Their boots clunked against the floor and a meaty hand clamped down over Conan's jaw. His eyes flew open even as a large, black-clad arm scooped him up, pinning his arms to his sides.

A second man, burly and dressed as an ambulance worker, trudged in, with a slim, barefoot figure in black samue slung over his shoulder. He bent to set his burden down on the futon, hand catching the teen's head as he shrugged the boy off. Messy brown hair spread over the pillow, the slack face tilting towards Conan.

"Oh, sorry. I don't think we've met." The boy peeked up from behind a hand, violet eyes flashing as he shoved sopping wet bangs out of his face. "Kudou Shin'ichi." A quick grin. "Detective."

Conan froze, staring at the teenager he'd deduced to be Kaitou Kid in the bathhouse just a couple of weeks ago.

There had been one clue he'd completely ignored in his shock over Kaitou Kid's murdered mother: they'd been in the bathhouse, scrubbing clean. Kid couldn't have been in disguise; it would've washed away.

How was that possible?

He could figure that out later. For now, they'd caught Kid. This changed everything.

The man holding Conan followed the ambulance worker to the exit, stopping at the threshold and setting Conan on the floor, giving him a hard shove back into the room. The door slammed shut in the moments it took for Conan to stumble to a stop, and the lock clanged once more.

Conan glared back at the door, then the ceiling with its one inset fluorescent light, then the anomalous chalkboard wall. With the light on, now he could see a message written neatly just out of arm's reach for him.

His wellbeing depends on your cooperation.

The light snapped off.