Chained
Chapter 14

There's a sense of disorientation and uneasiness when you wake up in a cage. You don't know what you can do in your surroundings. You don't know how far you can push their limits. Every action requires care and promotes anxiety. The best thing to do—the first thing you should do—is study the environment and analyze it for weaknesses.

I woke up with a cable tie around my right wrist, binding me to a rusty pipe. The pipe ran vertically, so I could stand and slide the cable tie along the pipe's length, but that was all I could do. The floor was cement-like, and I first thought I had to be in a warehouse or other industrial type of building. There was a void where shelves might've rubbed away some of the dark red paint from the floor. If those shelves had still been there, I would've been able to touch them. There were more shelves on the other side of the room, well out of reach.

A single incandescent bulb lit the room, with a pull cord dangling from the ceiling. If it swung far enough, I might've been able to put a fingertip on it, but it was about half a meter too far away while stationary. Not counting the pole, the only object within my reach was a blue, plastic bucket. It was new—probably because the kidnapper had left their previous bucket at the stables. I would've been caught dead before peeing into a bucket, so I did something useful with it instead: I threw it at the dangling cord, and the bucket made a satisfying clunk when it skipped off the floor. The cord bounced against the shade and floated sideways, still beyond my grasp.

The sound must've drawn someone's attention. The door to the storeroom opened, and a woman walked in. She had short hair tied tucked underneath a baseball cap, and she wore a respiratory mask. She looked at me, then looked around to see what the noise was. When she found the bucket lying on its side, she snatched it up and sat it down straight—and out of my reach.

"Don't break my lightbulb," she said. "They're not cheap. If you need to go, ask for the bucket."

"What's this about?" I demanded.

"I'm setting you free, Sherry."

She left again, and as far as I could tell, my wrist was still tied to that pole. Freedom must not have meant what it used to.

My captor was a strange woman. After a time, she came back with set of microwaved gyoza on a paper plate. Only paper was soft enough that I wouldn't be left with a dangerous object. She brought out a short stool and watched while I stared at the plate, and when I wouldn't eat, she took one of the gyoza—I insisted on a particular one, just to be sure they weren't drugged—and ate it clumsily, trying to obscure her face while eating since she couldn't continue to wear her mask. "Eat," she insisted. "You need your strength."

She was interested in my well-being—as interested as she could be while holding me against my will. She was willing to hear questions, but she absolutely wouldn't give helpful answers. I asked if she was working with Professor Noto, but she wouldn't give a straight answer. "There are only two people here: you and me." I asked if she was the same person who'd taken Amari-san or Tsuruya-san, but she gave the same answer. "Nothing else matters except what's going on in this room."

My captor wouldn't say what she wanted from me. In the meantime, she set some ground rules—which, of course, were not up for negotiation. I would sit there and not attempt to escape. No hunger strikes or anything of the sort would be tolerated. She would ask me questions, and she expected my truthful and unguarded cooperation. If I met all those conditions, she would release me unharmed. The process should take no more than a day-and-a-half, and after that, she would never see me again.

"I keep my promises," she stated. "I've left no one with permanent harm. You know that."

"Are you referring to something outside of this room?" I asked. "Because inside this room I don't know that."

"Don't be stubborn," she said. "Think of this room as your temple, a place to wash off all the crud that's built up on your soul. If you have an open mind about that, this won't take long."

Temples are generally considered places of spiritual healing, and I had a feeling that my captor needed a great deal of healing, but however mad she was, she was also meticulous: when I finished eating, she took the paper plate away, not even allowing me a flimsy tool, and she wheeled in a rectangular cork board full of documents and photos. It was my life in fragments, with snapshots of me at all ages, and even with a few spare photos of my friends back home, the Detective Boys.

"You've been through a lot," she began, and she plucked one of the photos off the cork board—a photo of me with my friends back in Tokyo. "You didn't have many friends before them, did you? Did their company help you deal with being on the run?"

Of all the questions she could ask—about criminal conspiracies and drugs that shouldn't exist—that's what she was asking?

I mean, yes, they did help, but not a day went by without me worrying that my former colleagues would find me and everyone I'd come to know. It'd been selfish that I let them befriend me, but I'd needed them. I couldn't have endured those times without them. Growing up, I'd never known that kind of camaraderie. In the schools I'd attended in America, I hadn't fit in. I was too bright for my classmates, and my mixed blood hadn't helped. Being in hiding, I had to try to fit in enough to pass as ordinary, and it put me in a position to have the social life I'd never had before. If I could've gone to university with all of them as Haibara Ai, with them never knowing what I'd been through and that I was so different from them, I just might have done it, but even Yoshida-san, who wasn't naturally suspicious, had figured out I wasn't who I said I was. It was pointless to think of it as a missed opportunity when, in fact, it was never an opportunity at all.

"Maybe," I concluded.

My captor didn't think that was an informative answer. There had to be more to my feelings, but I didn't see the value in cooperating. Why did she want to know?

"I said this place is a temple," she began. "That means you should be willing to look inside yourself and reflect."

"Mirrors are for reflecting, and probes are for looking inside yourself," I pointed out. "I don't see any of those here."

Losing her patience, my captor rose, and she turned the cork board over with a steady, deliberate motion. On that side were details of a man's death. He'd been an Englishman, in his late 30s, dead by electrocution.

"Okay, Sherry," said my kidnapper. "What can you tell me about this man who died four years ago?"

Four years before, after I'd accepted Professor Noto's offer and joined her group in Nagano, she took me to my first conference. Juggling research and coursework hadn't been easy—it'd been some time since I'd had to study for difficult classes—but after some acclimation, I'd managed to make a small contribution to the group's work. I hadn't been the lead researcher on that effort, but the professor believed a conference would be good opportunity to make connections and talk with other researchers about the field, and it would help me decide on my own project.

I brought a poster presenting our work on how a newly-discovered compound affected learning rates of rats, and for a few hours each day, I stood by my poster, talking with passers-by—all scientists or students in their own right—about my work and others', about interesting talks we'd attended, and whatever else came up. These conversations were productive and useful, but they were also few and far between. As one of my colleagues told me, all the new and exciting work was in machine learning. The habits of animals and how that informed human cognition wasn't getting a lot of attention. That was just how it was.

That's why, when a man in a gray suit came up to my poster and started asking about my work, I did my best to cultivate interest. I gave him the same spiel that I'd given most of the other passers-by, and he nodded along, not saying much. When I was finished, he didn't have any questions, which I thought was strange. Almost everyone thinks it's polite to ask at least one question, but he didn't. I asked him who he was, and he said we had a mutual friend. At the time, I assumed he meant Professor Noto, but the man handed me a business card and went on his way. The card's front side was blank. The back had only a handwritten message: "17:30, UK Okonomiyaki. Come alone. -PS: Call Agasa."

My adoptive father, Professor Agasa, inconveniently had a meeting with a client for the first two days of the conference, which meant that, though I was in Tokyo, I couldn't see him until later. This strange message made me think his client's sudden interest might have been more than just a fit of curiosity. I called the Professor, and he seemed to be enjoying himself. His client had taken him on an indulgent tour of a nearby resort. The Professor was confident that he was on the verge of a huge sale, and all he had to do was close the deal. He'd have to do that in the morning, though, since he and his client had gone for drinks, and he knew better than to negotiate that way. I asked him what he was drinking, and the Professor laughed.

"Eguchi-san recommended the house mead. It's really something! I'll have to buy some when I get back home. It's made with honey; did you know that?"

I did know that, and I warned him not to drink too much. Just because it was sweet and made of honey didn't mean it was any less intoxicating. Beyond that, I told the professor I would get back to the conference, and that I hoped to see him when he was done with his negotiations. By that point, it was already 16:45, so I started looking for how to get to this okonomiyaki restaurant. I made a point to be early. Always be early to a meet. It deprives your counterparts of the ability to set up surveillance and control points of entry without you noticing.

My contact followed the same rules. I'd made a point to be early, but he was already waiting for me outside the restaurant, which hadn't even opened yet. "Hello, Sherry," he said, grinning and greeting me in his native Yorkshire tongue. "You've been doing well, I see."

So was he, considering he was supposed to be dead. In hindsight, I wasn't too surprised to see him alive. Mead had always prided himself on getting out of seemingly impossible situations. This feat had been no different. Once the owner opened the restaurant for the evening, Mead insisted I join him inside, and he explained how he'd managed to cheat death. Mead had been on his way up in our outfit, having set his sights on joining the boss's inner circle, but one of his operations had gone awry—through no fault of his own, he insisted—and when he found out that Gin himself had been assigned to take him out, Mead had taken matters into his own hands, faking his death by making it look like he'd fallen into a vat of molten steel. "It was really a rotting pig carcass!" he confessed, laughing uproariously about the whole thing. "I couldn't believe those idiots never smelled it!"

Because he'd fallen out of the boss's good graces, Mead had never held much of a grudge against me for working with the police. If anything, I'd done him a favor—there were fewer people looking to kill him—but his new life was getting more difficult by the day, which was why he wanted my help. Mead was after a stash that Vodka had kept in Gin's flat. It was a safe hidden beneath the floorboards. Mead had been close enough to Gin to know that the cache was there, and knowing Vodka, there had to be more than just money and weapons inside. Vodka had been meticulous about holding on to information, in part because Gin was more of a blunt instrument with a short memory. Vodka's cache could prove useful for building new connections and staying afloat in the criminal underworld—or so Mead believed. What Mead needed from me was a fingerprint. Vodka had had the foresight to install a biometric lock on the cache, and since Gin and Vodka were unavailable to supply their fingerprints, Mead needed an alternate source.

"You still have it, don't you?" he asked. "The locket."

Gin's locket—a token of twisted affection the likes of which only he would ever offer. Most people put cute photos or maybe strands of hair in a locket. Gin went a step further: he made a fingerprint in his own blood and expected I would return the gesture.

I did still have the locket, and since Mead was asking me to find it, I knew he couldn't find it without me.

"Guilty as charged!" he said. "You was always a clever one, Sherry. So, enjoy your pancake, and take us to the good professor's place and find us that locket. I think you know what happens if you argue with my terms, don't you?"

I'd argue with him as much as I liked if it meant less chance of the cops getting wise to his plan. If he'd already searched the Professor's home and hadn't found it, then he'd probably attracted the attention of the Professor's nosy neighbor. The two of us going back to the scene together would guarantee more unwanted attention.

Mead didn't like the idea, but even he wasn't reckless enough to argue. "Where is it?"

"It's in Tokyo," I assured him. "Give me until morning. Don't follow me."

We had a deal, and since I hadn't touched my okonomiyaki yet, Mead left me to hide away until we could make contact again. Mead had been one of the more jovial operatives, but that didn't make him any less disturbing. He could shoot a child between the eyes and shrug it off without a second thought. "We're all pieces of meat in the end. Nowt that happens to us or what we do makes a lick of difference." Being around most former members makes my skin crawl, but with Mead, it was something worse: it was like looking at a corpse that had been strung up by some demonic puppeteer. He was all dead inside, but I still had to watch him smile and laugh.

From the restaurant, I headed to the Professor's place. Mead and his people had done a real number on it. While they'd had the good sense not to mess things up too much on the outside, my old bedroom and the Professor's had been upended. I didn't bother trying to put things back together. That would have to wait until later. Still, it was pretty shocking to see the mattresses and futons thrown about and cut open. Mead had been indiscriminate—a sign of true ignorance and stupidity. Who would hide a locket in a mattress and expect to find it again?

It was in what used to be my private laboratory that I found the worst of the scene, with my old desktop computer's parts strewn about the room and not even the keyboard left intact. I could give Mead a tiny bit of credit for disassembling all the electronics instead of carelessly smashing them to see what was inside, but that was as far as I was inclined to start liking the man.

What Mead had failed to appreciate was that I'd expected Gin's fingerprint would be useful to me, if only to help identify him for his crimes. While I'd had no attachment to the locket once he'd killed my sister and turned on me, I'd made sure to keep that photograph, hoping it would be instrumental to his end. I'd hidden the photo and the fingerprint in another locket, one that the Professor had given me for my nineteenth birthday, with the Professor's picture in front of it. That locket must've been found because the jewelry box was open and lying on the floor, yet the locket itself was missing.

"Looking for something?" said a voice. A man came out of the hallway—where had he been hiding?—and from his hand dangled the gold chain and locket with the Professor's face revealed. That man looked at me, and seeing my reaction, he grinned smugly, knowing he was 100% right.

It was the kind of certainty that only Kudo Shinichi could muster.

They've met before, and their meeting ended up with Mead dead. What did Shinichi and Shiho do four years before?
Next time: The kidnapper continues her interrogation, and Shiho admits to making a sinister choice.
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