Fandom
Though some of the police had come to recognize Conan and the Detective Boys (well, mostly Conan) as insightful detectives, it was still a surprise to be invited to investigate a case. In a rare murder that Conan and company did not happen upon by chance, the police had found that the victim had been unusually interested in Ai—not, it seemed, for nefarious reasons. Instead, she was a fan.
"Ai is the most interesting and well-developed of the Detective Boys," the victim had written in an online journal. "Conan is too much of a dolt for his own good."
This group of fans had followed the Detective Boys in their exploits against Kaito Kid. They followed all the latest news, gossiped amongst each other, and even wrote imagined stories about the children. "Ai is the only one who can understand Conan and keep him in check," another fan had written.
Never mind that having people hoard photos of her was dangerous; Ai grew increasingly dismayed at the concept of people writing imaginary stories about her, the Detective Boys, and in particular, about her and Conan in various states of suffering innocent childhood crushes toward each other—or just as bad, with the other Detective Boys.
The victim had come into conflict with a group of rival fans. Some of them liked Ai with Mitsuhiko more. Others still had some deranged age-gap fantasy about Conan growing up and dating Ran, which would've made a startling amount of sense if they'd known his condition, but since they didn't, that was the most bizarre group of the bunch—well, outside of the Ai/Genta fans.
To try to defuse tensions in the Detective Boys community, another fan had hosted a get-together dinner, and there the woman fell to foul play. The host was a respected member of the community, but she leaned toward Conan and Ayumi more as a pair. The second guest was an artist. She was evasive about the types of drawings she made and where she shared them on the Internet, and once Conan and Ai found her gallery, they wished they'd never known about it. The third guest was a video blogger who obsessively followed every new showdown between Kid and the Detective Boys with half-hour-long videos sporting five minutes of news and the balance made of wild speculation.
The victim had died outside the house, having stepped outside to write a bluntly critical review of a fellow community member's story, which had fantasized about Conan and Ai finding love on a ski trip. She was only halfway through eviscerating Conan's lack of romantic qualities (in the story, Conan hoped) when she'd been stabbed with the pointy end of a paintbrush. For this reason, Inspector Megure suspected the artist, who had quarreled with the victim in the past about painting technique, media, and subject matter. The victim was no fan of digital art, and the two of them had often butted heads over the which form—digital or traditional art—was superior.
After some inspection, however, it became clear that the artist could not have done it. The paintbrush was nothing like the kind the artist typically used, and while some of her fingerprints were on the handle, Conan deduced that they were inconsistent with the how fingerprints would usually be left on a wooden brush. They had been planted.
Instead, focus shifted to the video blogger, who had pestered the victim to record a video together, but she'd refused, not wanting her face online. It had been a persistent source of friction between them, and the video blogger had asked again during the meetup if she would reconsider. The video blogger had also been out of the main room when the victim was attacked, but the police determined she'd been recording a "selfie cam" video trashing the victim's snobbishness and "delusions of privacy" around the same time that the victim was attacked.
The host claimed never to have left the main room, and each of the two other guests said that they never say her leave the room, either. Conan believed that there could be only two reasonable explanations: either all three of the other people in the house had conspired against the victim, or someone else was involved. The Detective Boys spend the afternoon and evening reading the victim's stories, which were generally safe for children, but Conan and Ai would ask the Professor to "read" the ones with adult content privately—in fact, Conan or Ai would read the story on their phones while the others had different assignments.
After reading pages and pages of reviews for the victim's work, Ai honed in on a particularly disgruntled reviewer who constantly pestered the victim to write more Conan/Ai romance and who seemed aggravated the victim wasn't going far enough. In particular, the victim had written a pair of epic stories that, when put together, rivaled War and Peace, pitting a grown-up Conan against a particularly androgynous Sailor Moon character (no, another one) in trying to claim Ai's heart. The suspect had browbeaten the victim over the ambiguous ending, in which it's unclear whether Ai picked Conan, the Sailor Moon character, was dead or alive, was dreaming or part of a poker game, or had some sort of time manipulation effect.
It was far from proof of murder, of course, but whatever happened, Ai knew she would not feel the same way about the Higo fanclub ever again.
For Christmas 2018, and for my friend, I'm sorry.