Detective Shiho Miyano dreaded dealing with celebrities. A good policewoman only wanted to do her job quickly and quietly. Cases involving celebrities were seldom quick and quiet. That was doubly true for this case: the murder of a fan at a soccer game. Just dealing with the crowd was enough of a problem. It was impractical to keep an entire stadium from leaving.

Of course, the first person she had to talk to was the person who'd found the body: Big Osaka's star forward, who'd been signing autographs for adoring fans.

Stadium security had been holding the forward in a secluded office just off the main concourse. He was, to Shiho's surprise, not especially tall, but he certainly had the legs of a soccer player.

"Did you touch anything?" she asked. "We'll need your fingerprints."

"Only the outside of the man's coat and his neck," he explained.

"You tried to wake him?"

"I came around in front to see if I could get his attention, but when I got in front of him, I saw that his lips were already blue from cyanosis, and there were strangulation marks around his neck. I touched his neck with two fingers to see if he had a pulse, but he wasn't breathing. He was cool to the touch. I don't have a thermometer on me, but I'd guess he'd been dead for almost two hours—maybe even since before the game started."

"What makes you say that?"

The soccer player seemed surprised. "Don't they teach you about this? It's Newton's law of cooling. It's exponential decay."

Shiho narrowed her eyes. "Newton's law of cooling is overkill if the victim has been dead for only a short period of time."

"That's true." The soccer player seemed embarrassed. "Sorry, I let myself get carried away."

That was natural in the case of facing a murder, but this soccer player knew a little too much about forensics. Shiho asked about that, and he admitted that his father was a crime novelist, and Shiho put two and two together. He was the son of that Yusaku Kudo, the one who liked to make crime-solving sound so simple. That explained everything.

"Well," said Shiho, "this is the real world, and real crimes are often messy and complicated, so if you don't mind, please leave this to the professionals, all right?"

"Of course. I don't want to be a bother."

That much she could appreciate.

"But Detective Miyano," he said, "when the coroner took off the man's sunglasses, did he notice any petechial hemorrhaging?"

Shiho sighed. She had a feeling this soccer player just wasn't going to let it go.

*For CoAi Week Prompt #7 – "AU"