Chapter 12

Kudo had hoped to put a good night's rest between their argument and any serious attempt at reconciliation, but a text from Shiho jolted him from his futile efforts.

Too much to discuss over text, meet me out front.

He had barely dragged his legs from the bed when Ran turned to him in concern. "Is there news?"

She wasn't a particularly light sleeper, and must not have been able to sleep either.

"No, I don't think so, Shiho just wants to talk."

"Oh, is that a good idea?"

"Probably not," he rubbed his face. "A worse idea not to."

Ran kneaded a hand along his shoulder and they spent a minute or so that way, in tender wordless support. Eventually Kudo leaned back to kiss her forehead and then twisted further to speak soft words to her swollen belly.

"I promise I won't keep your mama up with worry anymore, not for something I can help anyways, so I'm going to go apologize to my friend. But you have to promise not to keep her up too."

"We'll be fine, go fix things with Shiho."

"Thanks, Ran. Goodnight."

"Goodnight."

It wasn't a long walk from the bed to the front door, despite the size of the house. Still, Kudo was halfway to forming a decent apology by the time he opened it, only for all thoughts of conversation to fall away.

Shiho waited under cover of his porch, as expected. But, not within those parameters of what his exhausted mind deemed reasonable, a tall figure haunted her shadow: Gin.

His gut reaction was to pull her inside, slam the door, and bolt it behind them, but she stopped him at his very first lurch forward. Her arm fanning just slightly free of his, she stepped back and offered a look that said 'don't' almost more clearly than if she had spoken it.

"Thanks for coming down," Shiho said, her even voice entirely at odds with the shot of adrenaline now pounding its way through him.

"You could have warned me." Kudo let the door inch closed but not fully latch behind him, his mind coming to terms with the pair before him slowly, like eyes adjusting to a change in the light. And they were undeniably a pair; twin expressions of exasperation and an air of shared purpose about them.

"I didn't want to give you time to overthink it," she said, "or convince yourself I was a hostage."

"Then you're not-?" He asked, half in jest, half in search for a signal or tell from Shiho to that effect.

She sighed. "No, I remain hostage only to the chemical fluctuations of my brain and poor life choices."

Kudo couldn't be certain, but he thought he saw Gin crack a smile out of the corner of his eye. It was feasible he merely found her quip amusing, but Kudo also couldn't discount the possibility of a more sinister meaning- if Sherry had lied, and he had been pleased both that she had and that it seemed to convince Kudo. It was only the exact benefit of such a ruse that eluded him.

Kudo couldn't rule Gin out as a suspect in Elaine's abduction, despite Shiho's insistences, and the inconsistencies in the parking garage timeframe. It was still entirely possible Gin had a partner responsible for killing the man in the parking garage who either took off with Elaine, or stashed her in the car Gin had left in.

And if Gin were the culprit, he could easily use Elaine to control Shiho's actions. But again, what did he have to gain from showing up with her here?

"Even now, I can see you overthinking things." She swatted the air around him, as if she could shoo away his thoughts. "I'm really not a hostage or being coerced into tricking you. If anything I dragged Gin over here against his will, so stop running away with your thoughts and listen."

Her words weren't implausible he supposed. Besides that brief smile, Gin had yet to move in the slightest since Kudo answered the door, and looked not only unhappy to be there but unsurprised it had not been going well.

"And you don't have to glower like that," Shiho directed back over her shoulder. She hadn't turned back to look at Gin since Kudo had answered the door and must have decided to reprimand him based entirely on assumption and Kudo's reaction.

Gin readjusted as Shiho started in on what she'd come to say, uncrossing and promptly recrossing his arms. "We know who contracted the Yakuza Family to kidnap Elaine, or rather, we've narrowed it down to a specific set of people from ten years ago with a common interest, who may still be acting towards it. But we don't know which of them it may be or where they've taken her."

"Was a ransom demand sent to you?" Kudo guessed, leaning a bit to the side to more directly pose his question to Gin. Shiho hadn't received any sort of ransom note or call since the abduction, which was odd in an abduction case with a specific target carried out by strangers. Gin receiving the ransom demand would also reasonably explain how convinced Shiho seemed of whatever Gin had told her.

"A warning beforehand, but not from the abductor."

That alone wasn't conclusive enough evidence to narrow down a culprit then, and from his phrasing Gin knew it too.

"Then you're claiming to have known it was coming, which also would conveniently explain away your presence at her abduction site."

Evidently done with engaging directly with him, Gin turned his attention back solely to Shiho. "Are you still of the mind that your detectives will waste less time knowing where we've gone? Or can we stop wasting time of our own?"

"You have a lead?" Kudo asked, not missing the various other implications of what Gin had just said. He rubbed at his wrist as if recentering the watch that he hadn't taken the time to put back on, fighting the urge to charge between them.

"I was trying to get to that," Shiho stepped a bit more to the side in order to more easily glare at both of them, each in turn. "Vermouth has an in with whoever is behind Elaine's abduction."

"You're sure?"

"Her intel has proven good so far." Gin explained, "the warning came from her. She knew they were coming for Elaine before it happened, and tipped me off to try to prevent it."

"Then she's helping for- some reason?"

"Not exactly."

Vermouth's motives, or at least their speculation on her motives, took some minutes to explain and weren't overly helpful besides the consistent thread of actions she had taken: both threatening Elaine's life, and bringing Gin in, ostensibly, to prevent her abduction. A steady breeze cooled the slick of sweat at the nape of his neck in that time and made it difficult not to shiver despite the fact that it was an otherwise fairly temperate night.

"-Although I can't say Vermoth's mistaken belief that I fathered Elaine is technically relevant to her motives other than to explain why she didn't just outright kill her."

"Mistaken?" Kudo questioned.

"I don't think we need to get into this again," Shiho interjected before Gin had a chance to respond.

"Given up as well then?" Gin ribbed, his tone while addressing only Shiho was altogether kinder, if no less superior. Kudo hated it all the more for its implied familiarity.

"It's a rather difficult notion to dispel, apparently," Shiho responded without dropping eye contact with Kudo.

He tried to explain, "it's just surprising that Gin didn't also assume-"

"In any case, the issue at hand is Vermouth, and whether or not we can get her to help now."

"Right, do you have a way to contact her?"

"Not reliably," Gin supplied, "and not that she's answering. She may have already dumped that burner."

"What about her location?"

Another no, as Gin offered only speculation.

"But we do have an idea to get her to come to us," Shiho cut in, redirecting the conversation and handing the task of explanation back to Gin with a nod.

"Vermouth evidently had more important matters to attend to at the time of Elaine's abduction. Which is why she failed to make an appearance." Gin produced a torn piece of paper from inside his jacket pocket; it looked like it had originally been a standard A6-sized sheet of notepad paper with a hotel's letterhead printed across the top. Scrawled across the middle in black ink was a series of numbers. Kudo immediately set to work memorizing the sequence. If Gin and Vermouth had a standard cipher they used, it would be well worth his time to figure out how to decode it. "Since I have some idea where she was around that time, it should be possible to piece together whatever mischief she was setting into place and undo it. She's generally quite proud of her work and no doubt she'll find time to come back and set it to rights, or otherwise fully erase her tracks."

"Hmm," Kudo considered the plan at face value for a moment, and then, without entirely meaning to, entertained the perspective of Gin's actions and information as a simple ruse to buy time to get away with Shiho, or perhaps to accomplish something more elaborate.

Shiho stood between them still, an adamant mediator. Perhaps it was because and not despite the fact that she had so quickly trusted Gin's word and spoke in agreement with him that Kudo couldn't let himself do the same. It seemed the only logical explanation was that she was being coerced or manipulated. The urgency of separating them pressed at him, that tight feeling in his gut only tensing more and more as this conversation wound along, especially since Gin had stated his intentions to leave with her.

"What do the numbers mean?" Kudo asked. There was a set of five, two sets of seven, and a set of four.

"They were the location of a weapons' cash." Gin dismissed with a smirk. "Empty now. "

The numbers didn't immediately break down into a clear address. One of the sets of seven was easy enough to account for, since postal codes in Japan were seven digits. It was the remaining three sets of numbers that weren't so easily assigned a role. He supposed if he discounted the set of four at the end as a door code, and assumed the set of five at the beginning represented the district, block, and building, that the first set of seven would have to correlate to the prefecture, city, and subarea. Figuring out how would be the trickiest bit, since it was the one part of an address not traditionally written with numbers, but not the only one that left a wide margin for error. There were also a number of options for where to place the dashes in order to separate district, block, and building in the five-digit number. With so many possible readings, it cast doubt on whether the numbers were meant to be read like a Japanese address at all.

Like so much of what Gin has said, it seemed plausible on a surface level at least, if not immediately verifiable.

"You'll need Elaine's things, something familiar for when you find her." Kudo gestured back behind himself toward the door.

Shiho smiled weakly at him, it was a patient smile he saw more often on Ran than he did her, that told him she knew exactly what he was doing, but was going to go along with it anyways. "You're right."

"Gin," she turned and handed him her phone, "would you mind calling that number again to extend the rental? They should be open now that it's past three. We'll be back in a minute."

Gin nodded, taking the fact that he'd been dismissed better than Kudo had feared.

Once inside, and well out of earshot, Shiho entirely dropped her good-natured expression, her eyes taking on that annoyed and yawny quality more native to her features.

"So, let's have it. All those little holes you've poked through our plan."

"It's hardly the specifics of the plan that are the problem. It's the idea of you going at all. It would be crazy for me to let you walk away in the hands of a mass murderer, especially in pursuit of another mass murderer who you're hoping to piss off." The words were coming out faster than he had meant to say them, and with altogether less tact than intended.

"I don't need your permission." Shiho strode swiftly up the stairs, making it difficult to keep up with their argument. "I only came to tell you so you wouldn't worry about where I'd gone."

"How could I not?" He reached the doorway to the guest room just after her, and took care to slow his words so he could control his tone. "How can you possibly trust anything he says, or feel safe even being around him?"

"One-third." She stated without immediate elaboration. Her back was to him and she stood clutching Elaine's backpack to her chest, unmoved since she'd bent to pick it up. Hesitantly, Kudo entered and heard every creak of the floor in that still empty room as he came to her side before the tightly made bed.

"One-third of children abducted by strangers are recovered alive."

"Shiho-"

"The next third, are only recovered…the last third-"

"You don't have to say it."

"If going with him now brings me even just fractionally away from living in that last third, hoping vainly for the first, or even the second-"

"But you don't know that it could -You just can't trust him," Kudo repeated, needlessly.

"That part will just have to wait, because Elaine can't." She straightened, but still couldn't entirely pry herself away from the scene before her. Freshly washed guest sheets were turned down and waiting, joined by the dying glow of a nightlight in the shape of a blushing sun nearly drained of its charge now.

"Then I'm coming with you."

This, at last, got her to look up at him. "But I need you here. There could still be something-"

"Akai can hold down the fort here."

"I'm still not sure why he even is here." It'd been a topic relegated to mere questioning glances and an accusatory tone on Shiho's part. Kudo supposed it had been too low a priority for her to expend energy digging out the answers underneath Akai's surface excuses. "I can't imagine Akemi appreciated being left to fly the triplets out 14 odd hours by herself."

"I'm a bit worried the answer is in the question on that one." Kudo gathered up the small barely glowing sun and its charger and zipped them into the backpack Shiho still held. "But honestly, I can't say for certain. It seems too complicated to narrow down to just one reason, everything he said when he got here doesn't really seem substantial enough to warrant the flight over. Whatever it is, I don't think it will interfere with him playing detective here, or protecting Ran if that becomes a worry."

"He isn't going to like it."

"Akai, or Gin?"

She gave a snort, "Both"

"Good thing I got out all of my latent need to be liked in the early years then."

"I'm calling bullshit on that. You're liable to wither up and die without an adequate daily dose of admiration."

"Hey now, you can afford to pull your punches a little you know."

"Ah sorry, that was a bit far wasn't it," she delivered flatly.

"I won't hold it against you after the day you've had."

"Good, I wouldn't have apologized if I thought you would." She smiled a bit at her own remark, and he was glad she still could. "We should get going."

"Hey, Shiho." He snagged a bit of her sleeve as she started back, but let go when she turned around once more. "You don't have to go it alone, I know it's your habit, and I certainly didn't help things tonight. I shouldn't have ganged up on you with Akai. I was desperate for answers and stupid, on top of my failure to keep Elaine safe- it was unforgivable. You didn't have to come back here before leaving with Gin, and I'm glad you did."

A bit shocked, Shiho managed a nod and said, "I know you have my best interest at heart, or at least think you do. You're a good friend, even if your EQ sometimes dips into the negatives."

"Ah," he rubbed a feigned injury on his shoulder. "Deserved, but still so painful."

She shook her head and simpered in a suppressed laugh a time before sobering. "You might want to grab a change of clothes on your way out. I'm afraid this might be a bit more involved than you're thinking."

"I don't know, Pajama Detective has a nice ring to it, since you know Sleeping Detective is already taken."

And at that she actually did breathe out a laugh, even if it was just a little one.


Author's note: I know my kidnapping statistics are more than a decade out of date, but these ones are more✨ cinematic ✨. Aesthetic over accuracy I guess, not every day- but today for sure. Besides, the concept of only three outcomes stands even if the numbers are a little off.