SailorStar9: With Chapter 28 uploaded, this is Chapter 29 of this fic. (Sighs) Guys and girls, is it too hard for you to leave a review, instead of just putting this fic up on your favorited list and story alerts?
Disclaimers: I own absolutely nothing, except this plot and potential pairing.
Pairing: Developing!Furuya Rei/Mizuno Ami
Chapter 29: The Ex-Boyfriend Living Next to a Crime Scene, Part Two
"When was that?" Megure questioned.
"He said it was after the husband and the housemaid left the building." Chiba answered.
"Why didn't the concierge stop this person?" Megure asked.
"He thought it was a resident, since they used their keys to come in normally." Chiba replied. "And he said the son of the family was also here. He said the son arrived before the husband and housemaid came back, too. But he couldn't remember whether it was before or after the suspicious person left. Wait, aren't you..." he noticed Sakurako. "Sakurako-chan, from one year behind me?"
"Chibi-tchi." Sakurako beamed. "Long time no see."
"So, you're the housemaid here." Chiba noted. "Oh yeah, maybe you don't' remember, but there was somebody always behind you."
"Chiba-kun, go check it out." Megure interrupted.
Outside the corridor...
"What's wrong with you, brat?" Itami Yasuie demanded. "Let go."
"No way I'll let you go." Genta snapped, holding onto the older ma's leg.
"What are you guys doing?" Chiba opened the door.
"Isn't it obvious?" Genta retorted. "We just caught a suspicious guy."
"I'm not suspicious." Yasuie stated.
"But you were looking inside the peephole, weren't you?" Mitsuhiko accused.
"That was just for laughs." Yasuie explained. "You'd be surprised if someone were peeping right back at you. Besides, I can't even see anything from the outside."
"Your hair is weird." Ayumi pointed out.
"I just haven't redyed my hair brown lately." Yasuie muttered.
"Aren't you just making excuses and you're really here because you're intrigued?" Haibara sighed. "As they say, 'the culprit always returns to the scene of the crime.'"
"Culprit?" Yasuie echoed. "What do you mean by 'culprit'?"
"Was he really peeping inside?" Conan asked the officer on guard.
"He did it all of a sudden after ringing the doorbell." the officer confirmed.
"I know that voice." Itami spoke up. "Is that Yasuie?"
"Pops." Yasuie blinked at his father.
"Why are you here?" Itami scolded. "Weren't you supposed to be at driving school?"
"I skipped class." Yasuie shrugged. "I wanted to show you that car catalogue."
"What car?" Itami scoffed. "Leave that until you get a proper job."
"What's with you?" Yasuie chided. "Didn't you approve me of me getting a driver's license?"
"With a cream-caramel hairstyle like that, there's no way you can pass." Itami retorted.
"Pops, what are you so mad about?" Yasuie was confused. "And the cops are here, too. Did something happen?"
"Actually..." Chiba started.
In the crime scene...
"Mum killed herself?" Yasuie echoed in shock. "Why?"
"We haven't ruled out murder yet, either." Megure informed. "Come to think of it, you were here earlier today."
"I came here to show my parents this catalogue." Yasuie showed the inspector the printed book. "But nobody answered when I rang the doorbell, so I thought they went out shopping. So I killed time by wandering about for a bit and came back for another visit."
"Can anyone attest to that?" Megure questioned.
"Hold on, Inspector." Itami stepped in.
"Are you suspecting me?" Yasuie glared.
"Isn't that someone's phone ringing?" Conan spoke up. "Sorry, it was mine." he added, after seeing everyone else take out their cellphones. "But all three of your family members use the same phone."
"It's a pretty popular model." Itami replied.
"But the covers are different." Yasuie added. "So, we don't get them mixed up."
"Speaking of phones, didn't you say you heard the bedroom door closing before you found the mistress' phone, Sakurako-san?" Conan asked. "How did you know it was the bedroom door? You can't see the door from the entrance."
"All the other doors were slightly open." Sakurako recalled. "Though, I thought they were all close when we went shopping,"
"Then, the bedroom door was slightly open, too?" Conan inquired.
"How did you know?" Sakurako was surprised.
"When you were out shopping, were you with her the whole time?" Megure asked Itami.
"I waited in the smoking area until she finished her shopping." Itami shook his head.
"Then, you don't have an alibi, either." Megure pondered.
"Were in you in your flat the whole time, Haneda-san?" Takagi asked the Shogi master.
"I went outside." Shukichi answered. "And the policewoman rang my doorbell right after I came back."
"Where were you and what were you doing?" Takagi questioned.
"Spit it out already." Yumi hissed.
"I can't tell you that." Shukichi replied.
"What are you doing, Chukichi?" Yumi demanded. "Can't you see they'll suspect you of murder? Come on, spit it out. If you don't, they'll think of you as the killer."
"Okay guys, it's gotta be somewhere around here." Conan gathered the Detective Boys together. "So, if you guys find it, show someone nearby the photo I sent you to make sure."
"Inspector Megure." Takagi reported in. "The handwriting test results are in. The hand writing might be messy, but the suicide note was indeed written by Itami Chiyoko-san."
"Then, she wasn't forced to write that by the killer?" Yumi wondered.
"Her killer would've told her to rewrite it after seeing such sloppy handwriting." Takagi nodded. "And the supermarket's surveillance cameras caught the housemaid on camera quite a few times, so her alibi checks out. Though, Naganobu-san who supposedly went shopping with her, was nowhere in the footage."
"Like I said, I was in the smoking area." Itami reminded.
"So, the suspects, the husband, his son, Yasuie-san, who claimed to have come here and rang the doorbell without getting a response, and then returned here after killing some time, and myself, who was out during the time of the crime, but for some reason, won't say where I was." Shukichi cut in.
"While there are some odd points, when the husband and housemaid returned from shopping and came through the front door, they heard the bedroom door slam closed." Megure stated. "And the mistress hung herself in the bedroom in question. Plus, the suicide note by her feet was determined to be written by her. This can't be nothing but a suicide."
"'A well-prepared move'." Conan quoted Shukichi. "That was what the suicide note was, right, Haneda-san? A player foresees a certain stage of the game and when the stage arrives, they go ahead and make a brilliant move. That's called 'a well-prepared move'. It's Shogi terminology."
"Still, why is the suicide note 'a well-prepared move'?" Megure asked.
"Aren't the contents of the suicide note kind of odd?" Shukichi pointed out.
"It says 'I'm sorry for causing your injuries, and I hope you'll get well soon.'" Takagi read. "'Yasuie-san, study hard for your exams. I hope you pass and get accepted. Please celebrate Ichiko-san's shichigosan by letting her wear my kimono. And please forgive someone as undutiful as me for leaving this world. Signed Itami Chiyoko.' What part of it sounds odd?"
"The exam part." Chukichi answered. "Yasuie-san's just taking a test to obtain his driver's license. It's not something so complicated that you have to pray for. Yasuie-san's now in his fourth year of university. Wouldn't that note make more sense if it'd been written four years ago, and the message was for her son who was preparing for the hard-to-pass entrance exam?"
"But four years ago..." Megure stammered.
"If it was four years ago, then your niece, Ichiko, who's turning 7 would be 3, so the shichigosan would also apply." Takagi realized.
"The mistress did show me a photo of that a while ago." Sakurako recalled. "She pointed at the girl wearing a kimono and said 'You can't tell that this kimono is 40 years old.'"
"Then was that suicide note really from four years ago?" Megure wondered.
"That can't be." Itami insisted. "I showed you the bruise in my eye. This injury caused by my wife throwing an ashtray at me last night and she wrote about it on her suicide note."
"Speaking of injuries, you mentioned you broke our foot before." Shukichi reminded.
"Mum was a rookie at skiing and crashed into Dad." Yasuie supplied. "Because of that, she had to fly solo to attend the New Year's party in the countryside where we go as a family every year and she always used to say she almost died on the plane."
"And that was four years ago, too?" Megure asked.
"If her aeroplane was about to crash, then it wouldn't be strange for her to write a farewell note to her family on the plane." Shukichi reasoned.
"That's why her farewell note has shaking handwriting." Takagi realized. "She wrote it on a tumbling plane about to crash."
"Then she wrote her full name on the note so that whoever found the crash would know exactly who wrote it." Megure surmised. "If the killer retrieved the note and used it for murder four years later, then it truly is a well-prepared move."
"There's still the mystery that when the husband and housemaid returned, the bedroom door slammed shut." Takagi reminded.
"It wouldn't just shut by itself." Yumi mused. "Who did that?" she demanded when the door slammed shut. "That was barbaric."
"Conan-kun, did you just shut this door?" Miike asked, seeing Conan run towards the room.
"What do you mean?" Conan was puzzled. "I just opened the front door to see if my friends were back or not. I did open the bedroom door slightly. The heating in there was too strong. When you discovered the mistress' body, the window was slightly open."
"The master closed it afterwards, saying he'd feel terrible leaving his wife in the cold." Sakurako confirmed.
"That's it." Takagi realized what had happened. "Air flows from areas of warm temperature to cold temperature, so when someone opened the front door, the warm air in the room flowed out of the window, causing the bedroom door to slam shut. That's why the killer opened the bedroom window and door ahead of time."
"But wouldn't the bedroom door close when the killer opened the front door to escape?" Megure pondered.
"Come to think of it, the mistress' phone was in front of the bedroom door." Conan reminded. "If you stick it in the gap between the hinges, you can keep the door open. If only the phone had feet and could walk on its own, then it could've worked."
"The phone vibrated." Takagi realized. 'The killer stuck the phone on the hinge, left the flat with the door still open, and then called the phone from outside to make it vibrate and fall."
"But, there's no record of a call on the mistress' phone found in front of the door." Megure pointed out.
"Then, maybe it wasn't the mistress', at all?" Conan suggested. "After all, all three of you have the same phone model, with just different phone covers. It wouldn't be too strange if someone mistook the phone for the mistress' and brought it with them, would it?"
"The killer replaced the mistress' phone cover with his own, so he could make it seem like it was the mistress' phone." Megure nodded. "If the killer used that trick and re-swapped the covers before handing the phone to the police, they could make us think the mistress' phone hadn't been used during the crime. And the only one who could've achieved that was the one who held onto the mistress' phone before giving it to us. Naganobu-san, it could only have been you. Most likely, you came back when the housemaid was still out shopping, strangled your wife and hung her from the ceiling, placed the farewell note from four years ago under her feet, opened the bedroom window, stuck the phone in the door and left the scene. Then you called the phone from outside to make it vibrate and fall out, met back up with the housemaid and went back home against: all to disguise your wife's death as a suicide. After you came home, the reason you didn't enter the bedroom and discover the body immediately was because you needed to hide the fact that some time had passed since she had been hanged."
"Then the suspicious person the concierge at the lobby spotted was..." Takagi gaped.
"The husband himself." Megure declared. "He probably prepared a change of clothes in the toilet at the supermarket. We can tell for sure just by looking at your phone."
"That reminds me, somebody did call me at the supermarket's smoking area." Itami spoke. "It was a wrong number."
In front of the convenience store...
"We found a public phone." Ayumi made a call to Conan.
"It's one in front of a corner shop nearby." Genta shouted.
"When we showed the cashier his photo, he said that the guys did make a phone call while looking sneaky." Mitsuhiko added.
"Not many people use public phones in this day and age, so his fingerprints are probably still on it." Haibara shrugged.
At the crime scene...
"What they said." Conan smiled, putting his phone on loudspeaker.
"This is Megure." Megure picked up the call.
"Inspector, I have 98% certainty that this is a murder." Ami voiced over the phone. "The ligature marks on the deceased clearly indicates that she was strangled. Her rectal temperature also indicates that she has been dead between three to four hours."
"That was from our coroner." Megure added.
"Pops, is this true?" Yasuie was shocked. "Did you really kill Mom?"
"I did it because I thought luck had finally landed on my side." Itami confessed. "To be honest, I wasn't sure whether to go through with this murder plan or not; until last night." he then related that his wife had took out a loan by putting up the flat as collateral. "We had a huge fight after that, and when Chiyoko threw the ashtray at my eye, something inside me just snapped. I figured now was the best time to carry out the murder plan I hatched in my head ever since I found the farewell note. I figured the god of luck would be on my side."
"Don't tell me you knew who the killer was?" Yumi asked Shukichi.
"The 'suicide note' raised my suspicion." the Shogi master replied. "But I was only sure when I heard those two talk by the front door. He hadn't seen his son for one year, yet he knew what his son's hair looked like under that hat. That's gotta be from when he saw the son through the peephole, standing outside the door while he was hanging his wife. The son likes peeking back through the peephole and if he didn't take off his hat, which as a brim, he wouldn't be able to peep back, would he?"
Later that evening...
A splash was heard echoing through the swimming pool in a sports complex.
The camera panned out to reveal Ami in a single swimsuit and swimming laps in the Olympic-sized pool.
"Drank enough chlorine for the day?" Amuro joked, tossed a dry towel to the younger woman who had climbed up to shore.
"Funny." Ami rolled her eyes, drying off.
"I do believe it's dinnertime." Amuro gave his wristwatch a causal glance. "Come, I'm in the mood for... soba."
SailorStar9: Any OOC-ness is regretted. *Sighs* Don't you just hate plot bunnies sometimes? Read and review.
