A/N: I'm sorry this took so long and that this is so short. But this is also a filler-y chapter before the real action continues in the next chapter.

Some of you expressed concern on the Mystery Train case. No need to worry. It is coming. I just place movies when they were released in relation to anime. So no need to worry. I just have this warped sense of time here. :)

But now we have Takuya figuring things out! Whoot! This is important event when it comes to his character development. Just telling. ;)

Chapter 61.

It must've been some sort of mistake. It simply couldn't have been true. Completely impossible so to say.

Takuya stared at the test result on the paper sheet. It was the result from the fingerprint analysis Mai had requested from him and later forgotten about. But hey, who could blame him? His best friend had been kidnapped not a day later.

But this…

"Mai is never wrong. So either this is on purpose… for whatever reason it may be for." The young officer muttered and dug up his old police notebook which held all of his notes. Yes, he did remember them by heart but it was always nice to confirm the facts. Handy that he'd been the officer to investigate the case… Or that Mai happened to take interest on the case he'd been working on.

"T-This case…" The man paled. Nothing was making any sense. The bullet wound on the temple but the body lying down on the front seats. He got that the victim had been shot but didn't killers usually want to see the light go away from their victim's eyes? Temple shots were more usual in suicides… Okay, people could be threatened from the side but then there was a reason why the killer didn't stand in the line of the victim's sight… And then there was the prints itself. Right hand in fireproof pocket so by some luck those prints would survive to conveniently be compared with the prints that foreign woman brought? And the prints matched? But the prints Mai gave him didn't? For some reason he was more inclined to trust the prints Mai provided than the ones from 'roadside restaurant where one nice man picked up the phone'.

"What sort of elaborate body exchange trick is this?" Takuya muttered before freezing. Body exchange? That could make sense in a way… Someone people wanted dead had faked his death and the woman had been tricked into it. So most likely the woman – Jodie Saintemillion – was an associate of the man who also thought the man was dead. But where could've Mai gotten the prints? This was most likely a confirmation for the theory she had and before it she couldn't start searching for the man. If that was ever her goal. She hated footwork. Like Mycroft Holmes. Maikurofuto Hoomusu. Mai. What a horrible pun…

But anyways, Mai wouldn't move forward in her investigation before confirming facts even if at the beginning she'd worked based on a hunch. So she must've met the man prior this car fire and gotten the prints somehow. And now she wanted to know if that man had been in the fire. Well, he hadn't. But that still didn't mean that he'd been the intended victim no matter what Mai thought. Or that's what Takuya was telling himself.

So he went to think about the phone conversation he'd had with Mai months ago when she'd asked 'if anything interesting had happened around Friday the 13th'.

"'An FBI agent on a holiday with a boyfriend and getting involved with cases'?" The brunet muttered and with a fluid movement he stood up from his chair and made his way to the archives. There weren't too many cases from that day where Takagi had been called to…

After a bit of browsing, Takuya found a case from New Beika Hotel where one of the suspects had been a vacationing FBI agent Andre Camel. It didn't take much to put two and two together and conclude that Miss Saintemillion was also an agent.

"I wonder…" The young officer sat down in front of the only computer down there in the archives and typed the woman's name to the search bar. It gave him a list of cases she'd been involved in, mostly as a witness. Well, there was that one case in arcade, which was actually the first mention of her, where she'd been a suspect…

One case caught his attention though. The bus jacking where Mai had been too. Takuya clicked the file open. It had all the witness testimonies. But Takuya wasn't paying much attention on them though. He read the line where Mai told being knocked down but one other hostage helping her out of the exploding bus.

"I gave Mai money to buy one coffee can from the vending machine but she came back with two… She drank only one though…" As a worried cousin Takuya had paid extra attention on the girl though for a moment he'd lost her from his sight when he'd been arranging other witnesses on the seats to wait for their turn to be questioned. "Where did the other one go?"

He went to read the testimonies again extra carefully to find any notion of his cousin. It was possible that Mai had bought the other can as a thank you.

"Akai Shuichi…?"

"I need to start looking at the bigger picture…" Takuya was standing in front of an empty wall in his living room. He was going to start doing the same case mapping that he knew Mai did every time she had any larger or more challenging case at hand. Now there was the text 'FBI?' on one side with three photos beneath it: Agents Saintemillion, Camel and Akai. From Akai went a line to Raiha Pass case. After a bit of digging Takuya had found out that man had a black Chevrolet 1500A. Even more of an evidence towards the man being the intended victim.

"But what would there be in Beika and Haido that would need FBI's attention? Because this is no coincidence." The brunet frowned while tying his hair on a low ponytail. "And why isn't the police involved?" His eyes strayed on the kidnapping case on Halloween where Agent Saintemillion had been involved in. The case smelled of suspiciousness and cover-up. Especially when the body of a sniper had later disappeared from the morgue. Higher up assured it was just moved to other location but for some reason there had been no notion about it. Same had happened again after the case on Tanabata where the man pretending to be Superintendent Matsumoto had been shot by some terrorists… The body had disappeared.

"Terrorists? Broken sprinklers in Haido Park creating rain?" Takuya remember Mai telling him about those. The sprinklers had been shot open according to the girl.

"And on that day Mizunashi Rena-san 'disappeared' only to appear again right before Raiha Pass…" Takuya tacked a post-it note with the newsreader's name underneath the opposite side of the board from the FBI. Above the name came a paper with 'Terrorists?' written on it. More post-its marking the two missing corpses appeared next to Mizunashi.

"But where is the Japanese police? It's not like them to let things like these to… go…" Takuya's eye widened in realization. In two realizations actually. The first was that these terrorists were extremely dangerous and probably had infiltrated their way to some of the higher positions of Metropolitan Police Department. The second was that there actually was no way that Japanese would just let the things be like this. "All offices are extremely territorial… I've heard jurisdiction battles in America between FBI and CIA and other agencies… But what do we have here…?"

And he tacked a new paper in the middle of the board. It had only one number in it. Zero.

"Rei… You… disappeared. And that man warned Wataru and I not to dig any deeper. So could it be…" With a shaking hand, Takuya drew a line from both 'Rei' and 'man with a Scotch glass' underneath the 'Zero' to 'Terrorists?'. "Undercover? It has to be. And I already knew you use the name Amuro Tooru." There went another line to 'Mouri Detective Agency'. Takuya had a feeling the place was important.

"Unsolvable mysteries… Just like Hunter of Crows… but if I were to guess. I say these crows are part of the terrorists more or less." There wasn't such things as coincidences. Not here. Not now. Not in this case. "And to think this all began unravelling from some bloody sprinklers…"

Takuya turned his back to the wall and slowly dragged himself to the kitchen. He was in dire need of a stiff drink or two. He was about to open his liquor cabinet but stopped then.

"To hell with this. I'm going to bar."

The trip to the bar, Blue Parrot wasn't pleasant one. Takuya spent his time moping over the fact he'd been left behind. Date he couldn't blame because it had been a freak accident that took his life but Rei… Rei was free game. He had left them behind without a word. Without even a goodbye. Takuya didn't care what the blond was doing. All he had wanted to know if the older man was safe or not. A word via that one Scotch drinking man wasn't enough.

And then it happened. Amuro Tooru himself walked to the bar and dared to sit on Rei's seat. Yeah, Takuya knew the two were the one and same but back then the young officer had been a bit tipsy. Clearheaded but still tipsy. And that tipsiness caused him to use that old nickname on the other man. Zero. It was more than enough to convey the message: that he was well aware who the other was and probably also what was going on.

Maybe it was a mistake but Takuya didn't give a damn. He was pissed and that one hissed word was more than enough for him to take his anger out, as strange as that sounds…

It was less than a week and Takuya was becoming paranoid. He had a feeling he was being watched. It wasn't easy to spot but having used to scorning and disgusted looks from his 'relatives' and Miyoshi Corporation's business associates… He could feel the similar prickling at the back of his neck.

"Either they are making sure I'm not going to babble and ruin Rei's cover or then they are making sure I'm not in any sort of danger due my digging around…" The man muttered when he made his way back to the parking lot. The day had been exhausting. Two murders and three assaults… Thankfully he'd been paired with Satou this time. Not that Takagi or Chiba didn't get the work done but Takuya had known her the longest. But apart from that, he'd also made some process. For example he'd found a half-buried file of Haido City Hotel's fire from which Masuyama Kenzou's body was found. With a bullet hole in the forehead. He'd need to take a better look of it later.

"Maybe most stressful in this situation is that I can't tell anyone what I've found." Takuya sighed while dialing Mai's number. It was a miracle that Ichirou and Satako hadn't contacted the police yet because of Mai's disappearance. Maybe the fact that she hadn't dropped out of school was playing a factor in this. In any case, Takuya needed to be careful for two reasons now when calling to Mai. One was the people who were watching him. One was the people who weren't watching him but could overhear anyways. And he didn't want anyone to go after Mai. Her move out had come on an opportune moment.

"Moshi moshi? Miyoshi Mai speaking."

"Hi, Mai-chan. Takuya here."

"Takuya-nii! How are you?"

"I'm just fine. And you?"

"Alright I guess. Worried sick because of Tsukiko-chan but I heard she'll be alright. My shift isn't over yet so would you tell me why you called?"

"I have some of your mail here. When could I come to drop them off?"

"Hmm… I don't know really… I'm busy this week just like Kouki. Maybe we can see later… You know… cherry blossoms are going to bloom soon…"

Takuya smiled. "That sounds like a plan."

A/N: Huzzah! And now all the scenes from the one-shot trilogy I wrote for Takuya are in. Ain't that great? :D

Would you beliefe me if I told you I wrote this up in a day? My fingers practically flew on the keyboard.

By the way... what do you imagine Tsukiko voice to be? Please tell me, I'm curious to know. It can either be Japanese seiyuu or English VA or both. And if you were to but Tsukiko/Kage/RM in DC openings, which openings would you use in which scene would she be in?

And go to read my Scenario of Phantom Thief F. It's DC fic based on the vocaloid song. I wrote it a while ago. ;)

Replies to reviews:

-A'stories10:
Take your time. But if you decided to write them up, I'd be curious to read them :)

-Grace F:
Ah, yes... The meeting is coming up eventually. I just want to drop enough hints for Tsukiko even though she is too afraid to come to the final conclusion. I mean... Would you come up with the idea that your own sibling is in the DC World with you and probably has been there for several years? XD
Mental vault? That sounds interesting. I need to think about it. Right now the three of them can keep each other apart quite well aside from some kicking and information stealing. I'll think about this. Good idea though.
Bell Tree Express explained in A/N at the top. ;)
That's great to hear. I try to continue this fic when I have the chance. :D
It's alright. Long reviews are always nice. It means the reader has more or less thought about what they have to say.

-SunnyStormCloud:
Well... Shugo appeared in person though with Haibara and Agasa. Showed his personality as an teenager at last. Tsukiko/Kage was in trouble... The usual stuff happened. Conan trusts Tsukiko a bit more again. I don't remember anything else. :P

-Kiara97:
Ah, I don't know should I hug you or run far away from you because of that comment. XD
But you are welcome. If you want to, I can recommend you some DC fics via PM.
Two days? That's fast indeed... *wonders*
It's great to hear you like my story and the protagonist-trio. :D I've noticed during the years how much a good plot affects the story and thus I'm working hard to make this a good fic. One of the reasons why I stopped writing after chapter 21(?) was because I had no idea how to continue onwards.
The situation with Mai... Tsukiko forgave her quite soon compared to Camel because she understood that Mai hadn't much experience about friends and in the end no harm was done. It was good that Takuya explained her the situation or otherwise Tsukiko might still be giving her silent treatment. What's more, Mai understands now that she did rong. Camel in the other hand... He is supposed to be a responsible adult, and FBI agent to boot and he locked Eisuke in the room with Tsukiko. He didn't bother checking if the room was empty. Imagine what could've happened if Eisuke had been some random guy. And Camel locked the door. Tsukiko spent almost the whole night unlocking it and thus lost her sleep. With Mai she only got a slight hangover. Plus I don't really like Camel so Tsukiko doesn't either, this is just more reason for her even if it sometimes seems childish. So you can see the difference between those two situations.
I can't wait for the reunion either. I have some scenario in my mind already but it still needs a lot of work.
Thank you, I try my best. :D 3

-Kimmiko T:
Thank you. I hope you like this chapter too.

-Karen:
Hi! It's alright. I like nicknames.
Thank you very much. It's great to hear you like her.
I skipped it because honestly I didn't really care about the movie. It might appear with Shugo's fic but I'm not sure yet. Same with Movie 16, that was awful in my opinion and I'm not much of an football/soccer fan.
Because movies are officially canon(though they have potential) and aren't mentioned in manga, I keep them out too. They have some important events but unless I take them actively with me to the plot, they aren't going to get any extra mentions. It just brings too much detail. And you have to understand I'll heavily favor the movies I thought great. But yeah, Shugo might get movie 15. He is already getting 5, 6, and 12 at least.

-OTrizy:
Great to hear. I hope you also liked Shugo's story.
Finn Power!

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Alright, let's see when I'll write the next chapter. That will be The Cabin Trap by the way.