So, this is something of a filler chapter, but it does contain elements that will be pertinent later. Also, I have discovered that spelling is correct when I use the voice recognition to type, but as I'm still faster typing even if I can't see what I'm doing (I'm a touch-typist), I am still inclined to had-type things and use the screen reader to read it back to me. I think I got at least most of the errors, but... well, it is what it is. Looking into a new service dog as well, but so far no good match.
I've also gotten a number of reviews praising my dedication, but I'll be honest: this isn't dedication. While I can't write as much as I would like to, I would go insane if I didn't write at all. I enjoy it, and I'm not going to allow health issues to stop me from doing something that isn't going to do me any harm that I truly like doing. Stop trying to maintain fence-lines and the like on my own? Sure. Stop writing? Not as long as it's physically possible. I'm a stubborn thing.
Chapter 17
Miya startled awake to the sound of a small explosion and took a moment to press a hand over her racing heart and breathe in deeply before letting the breath back out with measured care. From somewhere in the hall, she heard Ai-chan scolding the hakase and the sound of a fire extinguisher and couldn't quite stifle the giggle.
She was already getting less alarmed by the semi-regular explosions, and when she was awake before the first, she barely even blinked at the noise these days. Hearing her little sister scolding Agasa-hakase not for recklessness or endangering anyone but rather for making so much noise before 'Onee-chan' had woken was hilarious.
And also spoke volumes of how safe this place felt, despite the more than occasional enthusiastically experimental inventing. She glanced at the clock - it was still a bit early, considering she worked part time as the night shift for the little convenience store nearby, but she was awake so she might as well get up.
Ten minutes later, still smiling, she emerged from her room mostly ready for the day. "Good morning, Ai-chan, Hakase-san."
"Oh... sumimasen, Miya-kun," Agasa-hakase rubbed the back of his head sheepishly, "I didn't mean to wake you."
She giggled again, seeing the stink-eye Ai-chan was giving the man for the budding familial affection it was. "It's all right, Hakase-san. I can forgive you an hour here and there. Oh, thank you, Ai-chan," she added as Ai set a plate and bowl on the table and pointed to the seat she'd placed them before imperiously. "Are you sure there's enough?"
"I'll just cook the last portion now," Ai dismissed, going to the fridge to pull out a third small trout, deftly flipping the second onto another plate and dishing up a portion of rice before ladling a second bowl of miso soup and taking a moment to drop the last fish into the still-hot pan and placing the second plate and bowl across from Miya and directing the still-sheepish Agasa to sit as well.
Miya abruptly felt relieved. She'd been grateful to the man for taking them in so easily, but if Ai was already bullying him into healthy meals and having them eat together before Miya herself woke up, then this was the best decision they could have made.
She smiled at the man, earning herself a confused blink, "Arigato, Hakase-san."
"Ah... you're welcome?" he asked, looking confused.
Miya beamed and went to get three cups of water, setting one before the hakase and one before the empty seat that would be Ai's, taking a quick sip of her own before setting it at her own place and going over to serve up Ai's soup and add rice to a third plate while Ai tested the last fish to see if it was done.
They hadn't had a true family breakfast since they were children, and now - the hakase wasn't their parents, but already it felt more like home than they'd had since long before their parents had died.
(It was easy, now, to think of herself and her sister as Haibara instead of Miyano, to even think of them as their new names first. Miya and Ai weren't bound to the service of evil people, weren't trapped. Miya and Ai had friends, even if they'd only just met them. It was so much better to be Haibara instead of Miyano, and if their names were given to keep them from forgetting, these new lives of theirs holding fragments of tribute to the old, Miya was grateful for that too. She was sure their parents would be happy to see them safe like this, and not begrudge them abandoning their old names for their freedom.)
xxxx
"O-oi, Conan-ku-" Takagi cut himself off and cleared his throat, remembering that while the '-kun' didn't upset Conan, he didn't seem entirely comfortable with it either. "Erm, Conan," he corrected. "This... seems like a bad thing," he stated, looking around at what was clearly a murder scene.
Conan only sighed dejectedly and scuffed the floor of the genkan with a socked toe, outside the range of the immediate evidence in what should have been a surprising display for a kid, but was completely expected from Conan after seeing how he tripped over just as much death-related crime as Kudo-kun. Well, the two both tripped over a fair amount of more petty crime, too, but Takagi was fairly sure that was less because they encountered more of it and more because they noticed it more than the average civilian. Petty crime wasn't exactly uncommon after all.
"Also, are you by yourself today?" Takagi asked as he looked around, not seeing either of Conan's usual... he wanted to say 'minders', but half the time it seemed like it was the other way around.
Conan shook his head, "I was with Nakamori-san. She's, um..." he pointed outside, and Takagi turned to look, seeing the girl that looked almost as much like Ran-san as Kaito-san looked like Kudo-kun. Only unlike Ran, she clearly was not prepared for a bloody murder scene, because she was sitting curled up with her knees against her chest looking more than a little shaken and clinging to her cellphone like a lifeline.
"Ah," Takagi winced. He vaguely remembered meeting the girl before - the daughter of the man in charge of the Kaitou Kid's taskforce and Tokyo's Division Two. She probably wasn't nearly as familiar with violent crime as Ran-san was as a childhood friend of Kudo-kun. "Can she tell us anything that you can't?"
Conan shook his head, "She saw him covered in blood and as soon as I said he was dead, she ran out there. I think she called her dad, and maybe Kaito, too, but I heard he's gone to Kyoto for a seminar or something. I think he took a plane, so he probably didn't answer, and Kaito lost his phone yesterday so it ran out of battery, and even though he found it just before she and I left, it probably isn't charged yet."
That was Conan. Just as logical as Kudo-kun, if with far more limited phrasing. Then again, he was picking up Japanese fast even for a kid, and he'd actually gotten to the point of full, if accented and somewhat simply worded, conversations already.
Also, he had a better vocabulary for synonyms for blood, violence, and death than any six-year-old should, much less a six-year-old who had only been learning the language for a few months, regardless of near-complete immersion.
Takagi sighed and very deliberately put those thoughts from his mind. "All right," and it was probably bad that he felt more comfortable questioning the six-year-old than the seventeen-year-old, but Conan was obviously coping better. And used to it, depressingly enough.
"Right. Do you want to call anyone, Conan?"
"Mm," Conan glanced back at the girl curled under the tree and frowned, then waved for Takagi to wait and ran over to her, asking her something in English that Takagi couldn't quite make out.
The girl blinked, looked up, and spent several seconds thinking through whatever she'd been asked before she nodded and entered a number into his held-out phone before passing it back to him.
Conan then called the number and spoke quietly to whoever answered before hanging up and switching back to English to say something else to Nakamori-san and then jogged back over to Takagi and switching back to Japanese with fair ease.
"I called Momoi-san from class," he explained. "I know Hakuba is busy, but Momoi-san is Nakamori-san's friend, and she said she'll come over right away."
"That's probably a good idea," Takagi conceded as Sato arrived with forensics just behind, "She seems pretty shaken up. Ano... why did you talk to her in English?"
Conan rubbed the back of his head in a gesture a lot like the one Kudo-kun used when he was embarrassed, "She still has to stop and think when she hears English in the classroom," he explained. "With how upset she is, I thought it would be good to make her focus on something else, even if it was only for a little bit."
Takagi looked over again, and conceded that she wasn't curled up quite so tightly. "You're really kind, Conan," he observed. Kind and smart about it, keeping it from being obvious and all the kinder for it.
He really was like Kudo-kun... well, except for his tendency to prank people, which was like a moderated version of Kuroba.
Conan looked aside, then abruptly frowned and took three quick steps into the house, paused in the genkan, and kicked off the socks he'd run across the yard in before padding barefoot across the floor to frown at a corner of the wall that had a small grey scuff-mark.
Just as quickly, his expression shifted to sharp realization, and the tilt of his head sent a harsh glare across his glasses, obscuring one eye completely and half-hiding the other. In that moment, he looked frightening.
"Ano... Conan-kun?" he asked warily, suddenly feeling the need for the suffix no matter what Conan's usual opinion on it was, because it added a tiny bit of distance without being formal enough to be off-putting, even though he wanted to use '-san' in face of that expression.
Conan's expression blanked so fast it was eerie and he turned to face Takagi again, the light flashing off his glasses. By the time his eyes were visible again, he was back to being the Conan Takagi was getting used to, brilliant and focused but still a child, no matter how perceptive.
"We should call those people marked on his calendar today and see if anyone knows anything."
"R-right," he hesitated a second longer, "Ano, Conan... what did you just see?"
Conan paused, and Takagi felt very much like a slide under a microscope, all his secrets laid bare if only the eyes looking knew how to unravel them. After a moment, the boy nodded and gestured to the wall, "Look, and then call those people, and look at them. I think..." he glanced to the scuffed wall, "I think you'll understand, then."
Slightly puzzled but willing to give it a shot, Takagi approached the scuffed corner and squatted down to eye the mark.
"Eh?" he looked closer, "The paint is chipped off and the plaster is crumbled a bit. And what is this grey stuff?" he spread his hand next to it and snapped a picture, then reached out to touch the very edge of the mark. "Colored chalk?"
He considered, then took a second picture to document the part he'd smudged, the same hand in the picture so the bit of chalk that had rubbed off on his glove was obvious.
"The kind we use to draw on sidewalks," Conan agreed. "Do kids here do that much? They're pretty popular in the summer back home. They always came in packs with a few different colors, and only the really big packs had grey. Mostly the little four-packs are all bright colors, or sometimes three bright colors and white or black."
"Huh," Takagi straightened and went to look at the calendar on the wall above the hall table, and just like Conan had said, there were names and times penned in on the date, and an address book on the table itself conveniently provided phone numbers.
Conan was just as scary as Kudo-kun - maybe more - if only due to his age, and Takagi was willing to follow his advice. "Right, then."
"Takagi-kun," Sato came into the hall, "What have you got?"
"Here," Takagi scribbled down two of the four pertinent numbers and passed the address book to Sato. "I'll call the first two from the calendar. Will you call the last two?"
"Eh?" Sato blinked and looked at the calendar, blinking at the picture - a fluffy-looking tortoiseshell kitten that was curled up cutely in a basket lined with a white blanket - and then checking the calendar date and making a sound of comprehension. "Right, of course."
Twenty minutes later, all four had arrived, and abruptly Takagi understood what Conan meant by 'you'll understand then'.
The one Takagi would have thought the least suspicious, being a small and somewhat mousey-looking man with a pronounced limp and a cane with an arm-brace, had grey pants with a faint lighter smudge near the knee.
Now the only questions were how and why, because who was already clear.
(Conan really was frightening, sometimes. The age and the glasses made it worse.)
xxxx
Takagi-keiji is really getting better, Shinichi observed from behind the shelter of Conan's glasses, watching as the officer sought out the clues that would lead to how the crime had been done. There was a great deal of blood, after all, and the weapon hadn't been anything as simple as a knife, though it was clearly a bladed weapon of some kind.
On that point, Shinichi recalled - not this case, but the people and the weapon. Well... the victim, the killer, and the weapon. The other three hadn't been involved at all.
That said, the weapon was well-hidden, and without a frame of reference or familiarity with the type of wounds, the police wouldn't know where to look for it for some time, and if the killer managed to get to leave before he was arrested he could likely get rid of it entirely. However, he also still had the weapon in his possession. So long as they knew what they were looking for, it would be found.
Takagi finally spotted it - a thin scratch along the hall ceiling, above where the dent in the plaster was, and just before where the first of the bloodstains started.
"Eh?" he squinted upward, "What is... that's too high for even a long knife..."
Shinichi kept his Conan-flavored Poker Face up and gave a mental smirk.
"... and it's really thin," Takagi muttered, mostly to himself. "Just like the cuts on the body... and there were scratches on the floor in there, too."
Shinichi allowed a pale hint of his smirk through to the real world.
"But what would leave marks like that?" he asked the air. "A long, thin blade... but it couldn't be a sword, because someone would have noticed if anyone left carrying something like that, and there's nothing in the house..."
Well, Takagi probably wasn't very well-verse in foreign archaic weaponry, even if not all of it was really old. "A rapier," Conan offered.
"Eh?" Takagi twisted to look down at him.
"It's a fencing weapon. Dad has one on the wall at home, because he took fencing when he was in college. It's a really thin, bendy sword. Aristocrats used to have them concealed in things like decorative canes and umbrella handles and things in England - Dad's is supposed to sheathe into this neat cedar cane so that the eagle that's the hilt makes the cane's handle, but the wood cracked a long time ago, so it's only a display piece now."
"Like a cane...?" Takagi's eyes widened, "So that's where - thanks, Conan!" he took off and Shinichi smirked outright, tilting his head just enough to have his glasses catch the light again.
Takagi was awesome. He was no genius with edietic memory, but he was smart and open-minded, and he paid attention. He wasn't inspector material yet - he was too timid still - but he was already one of the best detectives in Division One, and it wouldn't be long before he was the best at this rate.
Shinichi very much approved.
"Ah, Sato-san! I think I figured it out!"
Conan trotted to the genkan and picked up his socks, flapping the dirt and grass off of them out the front door as he sat, and turned his head just enough to catch Takagi-keiji's eye with a quick smirk and a nod, and Takagi nodded back, expression firming with the silent confirmation.
Conan put his socks and shoes back on, slipping out the door to go check on Aoko and Momoi under the wisteria. "It won't be much longer," he assured, mostly in English. "Takagi-san figured it out."
"Ah," Aoko perked up, replying in kind. "Is that person a detective?"
Conan nodded.
"The way to say that is 'Takagi-keiji', she informed.
"Right," Conan chirped, nodding.
Momoi glanced at him and smiled, because she probably knew that Conan had to have picked up those suffixes with how much time he spent around police. "Thanks, Conan-kun," she murmured, sitting back against the tree trunk.
Conan nodded back at her and settled in to wait.
xxxx
Kaito let out a breath and turned stepped back, closing off the lab-area with the blast shield again and pulling out his phone to turn it on and set an alarm for an hour and a half before he needed to make sure of the next step, adding ten-minute reminders just in case, and called Conan.
The response to his initial inquiry was not entirely unexpected. "Another case? Was it a repeat?"
"Mm... not exactly. I'll explain when I get back, but Takagi-keiji has already solved it so it shouldn't be much longer."
"Not exactly? Now I'm curious. Call me if anything else happens or holds you up, okay?"
"Right. I'm sorry about all the trouble."
Yeah. He always was. Kaito didn't blame him, couldn't blame him. But - on bad days, Shinichi blamed himself. Thankfully, only on bad days - but it sounded like it was bordering on a bad day. Then again, most repeats made for bad days, no matter how well he held up during the cases, and if this was really some 'not quite' repeat...
Well, worrying about it was pointless.
That in mind, Kaito headed to the kitchen and started cooking, aiming for one of Shinichi's comfort foods - red curry rice, with the curry spiced to have a bite just shy of hot.
He'd missed being there for whatever had just happened, but maybe he could make up for it a bit.
Not long after the curry was set simmering, Conan walked in the front door with a deliberately English "I'm home!"
"Okaeri," Kaito called back, tossing some rice into the rice cooker and setting the timer so it and the curry would be ready at about the same time, snagging out a jammer/white noise generator combo and flicking it on as he headed for the front hall, the door closing behind Conan with a click.
"It's clear," Kaito assured. "What happened?"
(The explanation was not encouraging, even if the later response to the curry was. Cases repeating, but not the same way? Things were changing outside of their direct influence, and that - that was both good and bad, it seemed. Changing, but not enough.)
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