Well, I'm not dead. Pretty far from 100%, but not dead. Gragh, things are so hard to get done these days! On the upside, Dad's well, now. Also, short chapter is meant as proof of life.
Chapter 7
"This is so weird," Kaito announced as Hakuba spoke to the island's head officer, an older mustached man who really should have retired years before. Takano Jirou* was kind and well-meaning, but was beginning to have trouble getting around quickly on foot and not terribly observant, possibly due to nearsightedness as he was constantly squinting.
Conan rolled his eyes and trotted into the room where the poor man couldn't find a key that, to be fair, he probably hadn't needed in over a year. Still, the offices for the island police were not very well organized and didn't have anyone aside from the two island officers to keep track of it. (The last time—so to speak—Conan only remembered there being one officer. Which meant the other, much younger officer Sato Tadao had probably been either ill or elsewhere.)
Rather than waiting the hours it had taken the last time they'd needed the key, he dug into the relevant drawer and pulled out a labeled key, ignoring Hakuba's startled blink and the officer's gaping as he handed it over.
Hakuba pinched the bridge of his nose as the younger officer turned a questioning look in his direction, "Don't ask. Just—don't. He always knows. Everything."
"That's not true, Hakuba-san," Conan chirped cheerfully in a mix of Japanese and English. "I only know relevant things."
Kaito snickered, "He does kind of come off as psychic, though."
Hakuba paused, clearly turning the idea over. "Are you sure you're not, Conan?" he asked in English.
"Nope!" Conan assured with a eerily sweet smile, "That was just the only drawer he didn't think it was in. So…"
The younger officer blinked twice and wavered. "I'm… not going to ask," he decided, his own English heavily accented but in use for the 'child's' benefit.
Twenty minutes later, they had the sheet music and Hakuba hesitated only briefly, glancing at the officer before handing it to Conan. Conan, in turn, frowned at the papers, then nodded to himself and trotted towards the door, two teens and a young adult trailing after him.
"He's psychic," Kaito confided in quiet Japanese to Tadao-san. "It's the whole reason we're here."
Well. Not true, except—well, hm. What exactly did non-precognitive knowledge of events that hadn't been anything but decided in a person's mind qualify as? And it was as good an excuse as any, he supposed.
xxxx
"Seiji-san?" Conan asked the apparently female doctor as soon as he got inside the clinic, holding the stack of papers in his hands.
Kaito settled to watch him work, intrigued by the quietly serious air to him.
"Hm? Oh, hello, boya," 'she' crouched slightly, looking startled but not too off-balance yet. "I'm Asai Nerumi, the doctor for this island. I haven't seen you here before; are you visiting?"
Conan paused, mouthing a few of the words with a slight frown as he made a slight show of parsing through the meaning, and Hakuba stepped forward and offered a quick translation.
"Oh," Conan nodded seriously, speaking a little stiltedly in his current rendition of childish American-accented Japanese. "Right. Um, Asoh Seiji-san? Your father left this for you. It's a code. I think you should translate it and hand it over to the police—he wouldn't want you to do anything you can't take back."
Seiji's legs went out from under him and he stared wide-eyed at Conan, "How—how did you—"
"You sent a letter for Kudo Shinichi," Hakuba stated, ignoring Kaito's mostly-suppressed wince and going along with the 'psychic' story. "Conan said we should come as soon as we could to make sure nothing bad happened, and then took those and brought them straight to you."
"But—what? How…"
"Shinichi's my husband," Kaito said quietly. "He's been missing for almost a month, now. I'm taking care of Conan until his parents get out of the hospital in America. But when there are letters from names I don't recognize, it's usually cases. Hakuba's a detective, too, and Conan has his own talents, so…"
"I…" the confused young man looked down at the papers in his hands, and Conan glanced at Hakuba, who took the hint readily enough.
"… Seiji-kun, is it?" he asked carefully.
"Ah, hai… I came here to avenge my father, and it seemed like it would be easier if…"
Hakuba nodded, expression darkening for a moment before he held out a hand, "May I?"
Seiji nodded, handing over the sheets, and the poor confused officer in the background seemed to need some support, so Kaito took it upon himself to provide while the two detectives did their thing.
"It looks like a basic keyboard alphabet code, with each note being assigned an alphabet letter. If you take this one here as 'A'…" he knelt beside the doctor, pointing at a place on the first page, and Seiji took over, sounding it out slowly.
Another ten minutes later, and Hakuba was nodding. "Will you come to the city building with us? We can get a copy and a transcript, and call Megure-keibu over from Division One. Get this settled legally."
"Yes," Seiji took the hand up, "Yes, of course. I… thank you. Thank you."
It turned into something less than Kaito's Taskforce's usual three-ring circus to round up the drug-runner murderers, but for a murder case, there was a remarkable lack of bodies.
Conan was visibly relieved at the end of it, and Kaito was glad, although he had to wonder at the timing.
Back at the inn, he wondered out loud, ignoring Hakuba's confused look.
"… I don't know," Shinichi sighed, dropping his 'Conan' façade in the relative safety of a bug-swept and white-noise-generator protected room "It doesn't make sense that this would happen so soon after…" he indicated his lack of height with a wave, "Not again, anyway. It's not a full year later than last time, either, and Seiji had been careful about the timing last go 'round. I have no idea what changed or why."
Kaito grimaced, "Well. That's encouraging. Do you think it may have to do with that thing in Canada?"
"What thing in Canada?" Hakuba asked, and Shinichi raised an eyebrow at him.
"Landslide," he reminded, because they'd explained properly in more secure surroundings.
"Ah," Hakuba grimaced.
"And… I don't know. Maybe? I mean, we know magic exists, and ghosts—I guess other mononoke and youkai or even kami* wouldn't be such a surprise."
Kaito made a face.
"I know," Shinichi gave his own grimace, "but—what other explanations do we have? There's only so much that can be attributed to coincidence, and we passed that a long time ago. And this—this is beyond human agency."
"Agh," Kaito told him, Hakuba's determined move to tuck himself into the bed at the far wall obviously agreeing with the sentiment.
Shinichi shrugged, a motion that was more of a 'what can I do?' than anything else, and Kaito nodded, picked him up, tugged back the covers of the unoccupied bed with a twist of will, and dumped him onto the mattress before snagging the covers in one hand and flipping them up over mini-Shinichi.
A muffled "Hey!" preceded some complicated wiggling before Shinichi's head popped up out of the tangle of blankets.
Kaito ruffled the easy target that was his hair and climbed under the covers himself, dragging a halfheartedly protesting Shinichi in close enough to cuddle. "No more thinking about this," he instructed. "Sleep."
Shinichi huffed and relaxed. "Tell that to Hakuba. He's the one twitching in the corner."
Kaito glanced over just in time to see the lump under the blanket on the far bed twitch and snickered, "I can't even blame him," he admitted. "We at least had years between massive supernatural revelations."
"You go to sleep," Shinichi grumbled back, closing his eyes determinedly.
Kaito grinned and followed suit. Nothing was happening that couldn't wait until morning.
xxxx
*The officer in the episode is never actually named. Also, it makes no sense to only have one officer on the entire island—I've labeled them horribly understaffed at two and gave a younger officer as the run-around man this time.
*Most anime-viewers are at least passingly familiar with the concept of youkai, if twisted through many anime. The most common English translation is 'demon', but that's not entirely accurate, considering what 'demon' generally connotates in English. More accurate would be 'inhuman/non-human spirit with power'. Mononoke, from what my research has yielded, seems to refer to human spirits of varying types. There are separate words for spirits of the dead (ghosts), wandering spirits of the living, vengeful spirits, etc. Kami are natural gods, again a familiar term to anime-watchers.