Reminiscence
Chapter 11

Kudo-kun believed that, when confronted with two victims of the same crime, selected for reasons unknown to us, the best course of action was to look for some areas of commonality. The victims must've been chosen because they met some criteria or fit a pattern—or at least, that's what naïve logic told us, but the new victim, Tsuruya-san, was in many ways Amari-san's opposite. Amari-san was chaste, foregoing romance while working on her degree. Tsuruya-san not only enjoyed regular hookups but did so with full approval and encouragement from her longtime partner, whom she had no plans to marry because they didn't believe in it. Amari-san was a scientist. Tsuruya-san had no single profession, having been a poet, songwriter, and activist at different times in her life. Though Amari-san couldn't remember what had happened to her during her abduction, the timeline of events for her was clear: she'd gone to visit her father's grave, stopping along the way to have lunch with her mother and to hold a regular psychiatric appointment. Tsuruya-san had no idea whatsoever of who she'd been with the night she'd been taken, where she might've gone, or what substances had been involved.

The only commonality between them was that they were women who'd been chained up by some unknown attacker and, presumably, drugged so that they wouldn't remember the experience. In fact, aside from her missing ID, Tsuruya-san was unconcerned. If she'd lost some time and wasn't worse for the experience, what could she do about it? "You can't beam the memories back into my head," she remarked.

The police called Tsuruya-san's partner to see if he remembered anything more about the night of her abduction. His attitude wasn't much different from Tsuruya-san's, but he did remember something about that night. Tsuruya-san had come home already out like a light, having been dragged to their apartment door by a woman who'd claimed to be a friend of hers. Tsuruya-san's partner didn't know all her friends, so he'd been wary at the time, but the woman hadn't come into their home, so he'd dismissed his suspicions as unfounded.

Tsuruya-san didn't have any obvious reason to be targeted. She and her partner had little money to their names. She didn't have the best relationship with her family, but they weren't estranged, either. Lately she'd been making a narrow living as a freelance writer, mostly submitting articles to a variety of websites and news outlets regarding the Shinshu music scene, as well as taking on ghostwriting services for a client with a great sense of self-importance as a historian but no ability to craft a narrative.

Beyond that, we were no closer to figuring out why the culprit had targeted Tsuruya-san. Perhaps she'd been a target of opportunity—someone who wouldn't be missed, whom the kidnapper could test their methods on, or whose identity would be convenient to steal. Kudo-kun conceded those were possibilities, but he preferred to keep looking for some connection between Tsuruya-san and Amari-san, not wanting to overlook something that could be discovered with just a little more effort and time.

Effort and time—I couldn't spare much of those. As morning ticked over to afternoon, I received a message from Professor Noto asking if I was still glued to Kudo-kun's hip and what she should do with my experiments. Thankfully, one of my colleagues was in and could take care of the routine work, but it was an unsustainable situation. I couldn't keep working the case indefinitely, even if it was for Amari-san's sake, but I didn't want to let it go, either. Amari-san would forgive me, of course, but some people don't deserve to have their deeds go unpunished. If the people I'd worked for had all gone free, I wouldn't be able to sleep at night.

Kudo-kun thought I was being silly, of course. In his view, I'd spent five years of my life already on research and my degree. It didn't make any sense to jeopardize that for a strange case while seasoned professionals were working on it. "Unless you're having second thoughts about becoming a detective after all," he concluded, shooting me a smug look that I thought ironic, given he was so bold with his deduction while being 100% wrong. I know he was only trying to needle me because, for some reason, he thought that was worth his precious time. When he finally decided to be serious about the matter, he said that I could try to be logical as much as I liked, but if letting the case go didn't sit well with me, I would see it through to the end. That's the kind of person I was, in his opinion.

I reminded Kudo-kun that, unlike one of his suspects, I wasn't someone he could turn inside-out for his amusement, but putting that aside, I thought he was probably right. Sometimes, there are things that gnaw at you, and you just can't do anything about them. I knew that well. I'd been there before.

I first heard of Professor Noto about six months after the arrests, and I quickly got an impression of her then that I still held five years later. In her first e-mail to me, she wrote, "Our mutual friend at the NPA has told me about you. Your qualifications are suitable for my group. Make some time to visit Shinshu. We can do something with your talent and knowledge. No one else has the imagination to harness it properly."

Making time to visit Nagano City was easier said than done. Haibara Ai was still busy with school. She'd have to skip to see Shinshu University, and that didn't even begin to consider how I'd explain things to my adoptive father, Professor Agasa. Professor Noto is a professor, yes, but Professor Agasa is the Professor, and he always will be for me, even if his title is more honorary than anything else. The Professor was, in spite of his clumsiness and terrible lack of self-control, a sweet and wise man. He'd never had a family of his own before me, instead reaching out to inquisitive children to act as a mentor while they grew up. I really thought that giving up the name Haibara Ai—the alias he'd come up with just for me—was too much, but the Professor took it all in stride. He'd realized, even before I'd brought up the topic with him, that I'd been unhappy for some time. Once the ever-present threat of my old colleagues had been dealt with, it was only natural that I'd become bored with the life of an ordinary girl. School was trivial for me. The hardest I had to try was to avoid acing exams so I wouldn't stand out. My friend Yoshida-san was already sure I wasn't who I'd said I was, too. From that point on, it'd seemed inevitable that we would part—either when we finished school or when I became tired of living the lie. Still, I'd truly believed I could tough it out. I'd lived through enough exciting times as Miyano Shiho. Why did I need to go back to that?

It was on my twentieth birthday that I began to reconsider it. My friends threw a nice party, giving me the best cake they could put together. Of course, they didn't think I was twenty, but that was just a small lie, not one I gave any thought. It was that night that I took some time for myself to go through something I'd been saving for some time: my mother's last taped message for me. She'd recorded twenty tapes for me to listen to, knowing she might not be around for me as I grew up, and the last tape had been marked for my twentieth birthday. In her other tapes, Mother had told me some things about her research, and I'd expected to hear more about her work, but that last tape she'd reserved for something else: to tell me about my sister, my father, and herself; to ask me to work toward developing a passion in life; and to argue that, though she'd given up a lot to pursue her life's work, she didn't regret it, even knowing the people she'd worked with and the evil they'd done. She could no more renounce herself for that than she could throw away everything she'd learned and accomplished.

"But Shiho," she'd said on that tape, "if everything your father and I did comes to nothing, know that we tried hard because we believed in it, and if it ends there, that's all right, too. I wouldn't do any of that differently. We put all we could into it, and to look back and say we could've done more would be wrong. We couldn't have, so I don't regret it, and I hope you won't, either."

If only she'd told me that before I'd been forced to finish what they'd started—then I never have ended up in that position! Then again, Mother never thought the drug I'd worked on was a good idea. She'd called it a terrible thing that she'd helped develop only because they were so interested in it. That "Silver Bullet" took them away from my sister and me, and they'd died before they could be done with it, never to finish the great work that they'd pinned all their hopes on. Of course, they had never been that interested in my parents' pet project, so those dreams had been lost to the annals of time. Mother wanted me to pursue my own dreams, and it would be years before I could do that as Haibara Ai, if at all.

That night, I spoke with my contact at the NPA about Professor Noto. He vouched for her without hesitation. She'd helped find work for a few stray members of the Kuonji clan in Nagano after their syndicate had fallen apart. Someone like me—with a criminal past, but looking to go straight—would be right at home with her. Still, my contact was surprised I was looking for an opportunity. "Looking to follow in your mother's footsteps?" he'd remarked. "I wouldn't recommend that. It took her away from this world too early."

If I followed in my mother's footsteps, that was my business, and he could keep his blatant crush on my mother to himself. I made a note never to be too kind to young boys; they might carry a torch for me me for the rest of their lives. Still, despite his doubts, Furuya-san had given Professor Noto a glowing recommendation, so I thought that was good enough to go meet her. Furuya-san wondered if I would ask someone else for a second opinion, but I didn't see the need.

The next day, I had the Professor call in sick for me, and I left the Professor's house for the first time in a long time as Miyano Shiho. It was an odd feeling, going out without my usual disguise. I'd waited long enough that all my friends would be in school, so I didn't have to fear running into them, but I still wondered what I would do if I did come across them.

I started to feel better once I got further from the house, and by the time I was at the train station, I was less worried about friends recognizing me than enemies. The NPA, the FBI, the CIA—they'd never found everyone who'd ever worked with our outfit. After a year, there were still a few stragglers at large, but they were all low-level enforcers who had no wider knowledge of the business and who weren't dangerous to me, or so my contacts thought. All the big fish had been caught or killed. Theoretically, I was safe, but that didn't keep me from looking over my shoulder all the way until I got on the train. Even then, on the ride up to Nagano City, I looked at every single person in the car, made notes of their demeanor, and tried to guess how likely it was that someone near me was an assassin I didn't know about.

Maybe Furuya-san was right. Stay in hiding a bit longer. Don't bother trying to go back to that other life. It didn't cost me much to maintain a disguise. After a few more years, it would be much more likely everyone who'd ever known me as Miyano Shiho would be too preoccupied with their new lives to come after me again. If I hadn't already boarded the train, I might've gone back home and forgotten all about that idea, but once I was in Nagano, I felt that I would draw more attention to myself if I just picked up a return ticket and turned back, so I left the station and made my way to Shinshu University.

The campus was not what I expected, with most of the buildings focused on more practical things, such as computer engineering or nanotechnology. It was on the east side of campus, in the Advanced Science and Technology Center, that Professor Noto had a few rooms all to herself. The professor's door was open, and when I knocked, she asked me to come inside without demanding to know who it was and why they were there. She was busy marking up a paper by hand, using red marker liberally. She slashed at it like an artist throwing paint at a canvas. No matter how much red ink she poured on that paper, she was never happy with it.

The professor made me sit there for five minutes until she was finished with that paper, which she derided as the work of abject hacks who wouldn't know one end of a burette from the other. Then, she filed it away with other papers she'd been reviewing, and we got down to business. She'd been ready for my arrival, and she knew a lot—too much—about me and my background. Apparently she'd once worked with someone who'd known my father, so that had given her a pretty good idea of what my family had been doing and what kind of work I'd been forced to do while growing up. Still, she wanted to know a lot about what I'd been through, and those were questions I hadn't prepared to answer. What happened? How did I escape? Was it true they'd been taken down thanks in part to Kudo Shinichi? The professor told me she just wanted to know where I was coming from, mentally and physically. "Everyone has a story," she'd said. "Now that I know yours, let's see if you have what it takes to write the next chapter."

She took me on a tour of her lab, introducing me to a few postdocs and graduate students. Contrary to my expectations, the professor only told them that I was visiting and that I was interested in applying, glossing over everything else about my background. She showed me the main lab area with the equipment, and we talked for some time about my previous work on induced apoptosis. I tried to tell her it wasn't good for anything but basic curiosity, but the professor thought differently. She didn't think much of its potential to promote longevity, but if tumors could be targeted with apoptotic agents, we would have a powerful weapon against many forms of cancer. I didn't realize until later on that Professor Noto was always like that—willing to use science that other people would have the sense to avoid, so long as she thought something good would come of it.

That was Professor Noto's drive: the opportunity to accomplish something. In her eyes, I was talented. There were few people like me who had learned so much already. All I had to do was look around. Her students were uncovering the secrets of memory through experiments with goldfish and mice. They were testing how people interface with virtual reality headsets and how hand-eye coordination translated to digital simulations. There was a great deal I could contribute to, and she welcomed the opportunity to count me among her students. "Would you rather go for a high school equivalency and apply to universities after a year or two of cram school?" she asked. "Or do you want to come with me, get in on a recommendation, and start working to make a difference right now?"

That was a false dichotomy in my eyes. I could still do something in my life if I waited, if I stayed as Haibara Ai and let nature take its course. Professor Noto conceded that my talents weren't likely to change, but they would fade a little with disuse. If I was willing to forget a bit of what I once knew, that was my choice. If I valued living a normal, innocent life for a while longer, that was my choice, but she didn't want me to underestimate it. She told me a story about a student she'd had a couple summers before. He was enthusiastic about research, but he couldn't deal with all the aspects of animal experimentation. He left, with Professor Noto promising to recommend him to other colleagues, as his issues didn't implicate his ability to carry out research in other labs. "I hear about how he's doing from time to time," she told me, "but it's been two years. If he walked in here, I wouldn't know him from your brother." The longer I waited, the more I would forget, and the more I would fall behind other people who had gone ahead of me. My parents' dreams had been lost already, and it had only been through some "luck" that the old research on APTX had been recovered to help develop antidotes. If not for a photo I kept on my phone, I might've forgotten what my sister looked like, too, given enough time.

While I thought she had a good argument, I was still on the fence. Professor Noto's attitude unsettled me for reasons I couldn't pinpoint at the time, and only once I started working with her did I realize how focused she was on her research, having only a few hobbies and either no interest in or no time for companionship. At the time, I just thought she was passionate about her work in a cool, driven manner.

It was thanks to those doubts, the ones I couldn't articulate, that I waited as long as I did before accepting the professor's offer, getting back in touch with her only weeks later. That day, I headed back home still thinking about what I'd seen and whether I could really give up being Haibara Ai for all that. The opportunity to do something with all I'd learned—to turn the evils I'd been through into something good—there was something poetic about it, something I thought my parents would've understood.

Looking back, perhaps I should've given it more time before accepting Professor Noto's offer. I didn't tell Kudo-kun that, of course, but when he asked me what I'd been daydreaming about, I admitted I'd been thinking back to my first trip to Nagano, and his mood turned sour. Apparently Furuya-san had spilled the beans to him that I was going to visit Nagano for an opportunity, and Kudo-kun had been offended that I'd asked Furuya-san alone to pull some strings for me. "You should've known better than to trust that guy whole-heartedly," said Kudo-kun. "You should've asked someone else for another background check."

And if I'd asked the master detective for a favor, what would I have gotten? Back then, he'd been a busy man, trying to get started with his first year of university, having his fiancee move in with him, and all that. I'm sure a request for a background check from this former criminal scientist whom he'd helped liberate would've been a low priority. What would he have told me that I hadn't already known?

Kudo-kun didn't have an answer for that, which I thought was even more irritating than him being annoyed for no reason. In the end, what was done was done. I'd had a good life in Nagano, despite my initial worries, and while Professor Noto's attitude had taken some getting used to, I hadn't thought of it as a problem for a long time. I'd put everything I could into my research for years, taking breaks only to visit home for holidays. Taking a few days to work this case with Kudo Shinichi didn't mean I wanted to give up on my research forever. Sometimes a feeling just catches hold of you, and in that moment, you don't want to let it go.

My one regret was that I hadn't listened to that feeling before. I don't mean when I accepted Professor Noto's offer but when I had my doubts about her to begin with. If I'd listened to myself then, maybe I would've looked elsewhere. What I didn't realize at the time was that, though Professor Noto had few hobbies, she did like to go into the mountains to ski and hike. She belonged to a mountaineering club, and it was there that she met Tsuruya Akiho, second known victim of our kidnapper. Professor Noto and Tsuruya-san had been well acquainted ever since.

Fears of the past come become manifest in the present. Has Noto been manipulating Shiho all this time?
Next time: Professor Noto, under the microscope, shows Shiho her true colors.
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