Nevermore
By: Hikari-chan (Chitsuki)
Disclaimer: If you recognize it, it's still Gosho's. If it's Poe's, it's referenced in the text. I (unfortunately) make no profit from this.
Musings: Thank you to my 6 reviewers from the last chapter. You really do make this happen! Some quick thoughts/notes:
I'm sorry that overall, this story doesn't have that many Conan/Ai fluffy romance scenes. This is mostly because this story is my shot at trying a mystery story, so it is case-focused. Another reason is that I just can't imagine Conan shelving an unsolved case in order to be affectionate with Ai. If nothing's going on, sure. If there are dead bodies, I think it would be extremely out of character for him to not resolve that first. The only reason I can think of is if there are lives at stake, and obviously, so far, there haven't been. Plus, I always thought one of the best parts of their relationship is their silent understanding of each other, and I think there's plenty of that. For these reasons, the romance has been downplayed.
If it makes things better, the next story I'm planning in my head is a shameless romance. :P
And now, I'll stop being in your way. Enjoy the chapter. Cheers~
-o-o-o-o-o-
Chapter 8
-o-o-o-o-o-
Conan wasn't sure if the light-headedness he felt was because of the lingering smell of chloroform in the room or the fact that the two detective badges scattered on the floor confirmed his suspicions. He also didn't know how long he spent just staring at those two badges. What he wouldn't give right now for this to be one of Ai's pranks on him.
"Conan!" Genta's voice came over the badge. "Mitsuhiko and I are on the second floor, but you never told us what we're looking for!"
He automatically answered the call. "You can stop looking," he replied, trying to keep his voice from shaking. "Come up to the fourth floor."
He took the few minutes it would take his remaining two friends to come upstairs to calm down. There was no use panicking right now, and Mitsuhiko, Genta, Ayumi, and Ai were all counting on him to be the collected one with a plan. He stood and picked up the two badges from the floor, checking them for any clues. He didn't think Ayumi and Ai would willingly leave those behind, which meant that the culprit must have somehow seen them communicate with each other through the badges, and got rid of them before taking the girls.
Mitsuhiko and Genta chose that moment to appear in the doorway. Genta was breathing heavily, one hand holding the doorframe, while Mitsuhiko looked a bit worried.
"What's going on?" Mitsuhiko asked.
Conan held up the two badges. "They're gone," he stated succinctly.
"What?!" Mitsuhiko and Genta both exclaimed.
Conan sighed. He reached up to turn off his glasses. "The tracking glasses led me here," he explained. "But all I found were the badges. No Ai and no Ayumi. I think we all know what that means, even if the scent of chloroform wasn't lingering about."
"They were kidnapped?!" Mitsuhiko asked. "But...they weren't even gone that long!"
"The culprit had to be watching them, waiting for them to be alone," Conan deduced, narrowing his eyes as his mind raced. This was comfortable grounds; he could deal with logic. "If a kidnapper was choosing random victims, it would be about easy preys. There's a specific reason it had to be Ai and Ayumi. Why else would the culprit pick the two girls who had spent the majority of our stay at the resort investigating the case?"
"Maybe because they were investigating the case?" Mitsuhiko suggested.
Conan shook his head. "If they were investigating alone, maybe," he said, "but we were all looking into the murders and kidnappings, and asking questions. Doing this would just make us more determined to find the truth."
He put the two badges in his pocket and took a closer look around. Mitsuhiko was right about one thing though – it hadn't been that long since the girls had left them, so it must have been a hasty kidnapping. Plus, this was the first time he had smelled chloroform. He glanced at the pile of pens on Ai's bed that he had thought was strange. Her detective notebook, which she almost never used, was also there. He frowned and picked it up, seeing that there were some folded pages that were sticking up. He flipped open the notebook, his heart beating faster.
He smiled when he saw a hastily scribbled series of symbols in Ai's handwriting.
"Conan-kun?" Mitsuhiko prompted him.
He looked up and saw Mitsuhiko staring questioningly at him while Genta looked particularly depressed. He addressed Genta's uncharacteristic expression first.
"Genta, are you okay?"
Genta met his eyes and fidgeted. Then suddenly, he blurted out, "This is all my fault!"
"Huh? Why would it be your fault?" Conan asked.
"Because," Genta explained, "if I hadn't been hungry, Haibara and Ayumi wouldn't have left and they wouldn't be kidnapped."
"Don't be ridiculous," Conan scowled. "We skipped lunch; it's only reasonable that you were hungry. Besides, Ai made you stay behind. There's no way you could have known this would happen. "
"I guess," Genta muttered, dropping his gaze to the floor.
"Hey Genta." Conan waited until Genta looked at him again before starting to speak. "We're getting them back. You guys keep telling me we're a team, right? Are you backing out on me now that we're down two people?"
"Of course not!" Genta protested indignantly. "We're a team all the way to the end!"
"So pull it together," Conan replied, a small smile on his face.
Mitsuhiko smiled too, seeing the expression on Genta's face go from depressed to determined. "So, what do we do now?" he asked.
"You and Genta start searching the resort again; they have to be here. It doesn't make any sense otherwise. Turn this place upside down if you have to," Conan instructed, more steel in his voice than ever before.
"And what about you?"
Conan's expression turned grim. "I have a meeting with our murderer-kidnapper."
-o-o-o-o-o-
The place was silent. Now that the storm had stopped, there wasn't even the sound of wind, just the strange echo of silence. He wasn't particularly religious, and certainly not Christian, but this seemed fitting somehow. He looked up at the statues of the Holy Trinity – the Father, the Son, the Holy Spirit. He supposed they were as good as any witnesses. He opened the bottle he held in his hands, lifting it to his lips...
"You know that no one was killed in Edgar Allan Poe's 'Eleonora', right?" a voice rang out in the silence of the chapel.
He whirled around, some of the liquid from the bottle splashing onto the floor. "Who's there?!"
A teenage boy wearing oversized glasses stepped out from the shadows of the pillars near the door of the chapel, hands tucked in the pockets of his winter jacket.
"Edogawa Conan, tantei sa."
He raised an eyebrow at this introduction. "Ah, the kid who has been asking questions around the resort. What kind of guesses do you have about the rumours of the murders that have been happening?"
The smirk the teenager sent him was knowing and confident. "I'm not guessing...Enomoto Haruki-san."
"I'm not sure what that means, kid," the reporter replied.
Conan took slow steps towards him as he started speaking. "Eight years ago, you met Arakawa Eiko, and even though she was already married to Arakawa Daisuke, you became romantically involved with her. You planned to meet her at the Hope Hills resort that used to be here. On the morning of Eiko-san's death, you were supposed to meet her sometime around, say 8:30 in the morning, after she had asked her husband to leave earlier. Instead, you came across Shima Chiaki-san, the couple's friend, leaving the room. You hid because you didn't want your affair to be known. You most likely tried calling Eiko-san, but no one answered. Later, you discovered that Eiko-san had died in her room between 8:30 and 9:30, and realized Shima-san must have been the one who killed Eiko-san. Being the couple's friend, she would have known Daisuke-san had a morphine prescription.
"Unfortunately, Shima-san had scheduled ski lessons with Chiba Ren from 9:00 to 11:00. Chiba-sensei was notoriously laidback about keeping track of his lesson schedule and never noticed the time Shima-san actually showed up for her lesson. Mostly likely, she showed up closer to 9:20 or 9:30, but since they had the full lesson, he never really noticed the 20 minute difference, inadvertently giving Shima-san her alibi.
"You became a reporter partly to gain access to some of the information around Eiko-san's death and be kept updated on the investigation. Through this connection, you discovered that Uchida Ayako and Uchida Kyoko were right next door when the murder happened. If they had said something about what they heard or reported it when they heard it, Eiko-san might have gotten the medical attention she needed and not have died. Therefore, you added them to your list."
Conan was now only about ten feet from Enomoto. He paused, standing still and looking at the reporter.
"That's a nice story," Enomoto said lightly, "but that doesn't explain why you're telling me that."
"You're not interested, Enomoto-san?" Conan asked innocently. "My, you certainly lack the intuition of a good reporter. No wonder you never made it big."
Enomoto stiffened. "What is that supposed to mean?"
"It means," Conan replied, a knowing smirk playing on his lips, "that you can't recognize a good story when you see one. You're writing a travel article about this resort, which, if you're lucky, will be published in either the travel section of a newspaper – typically only skimmed by interested travellers – or a travel magazine, which caters to a much smaller audience than say...if you wrote a news article about the quadruple homicide and the group of teenagers who initiated an investigation due to the inability of the authorities to arrive on scene. That kind of news would make the front page."
Enomoto looked dumbfounded at this point.
"I was curious why we never saw you come ask us questions," Conan continued. "That's when I started being suspicious. Of course, without the background story about Eiko-san to back it up, the suspicion was thin."
"So what makes you think that a reporter like me, who didn't even recognize a good story, would be able to plan the murders you think I did?" Enomoto prompted.
"Oh, I don't actually think you failed to recognize the story," Conan shrugged, "just that you didn't care to write it. Even if you hadn't been caught, it would have been too dangerous to write it. You could have given away details an innocent person wasn't supposed to know."
"Such as?"
"How the murders and kidnappings were committed, of course."
"What is your guess about how I committed them?"
"I'm not guessing," Conan repeated confidently. "I already asked Ryusaki-bucho. You asked for detailed plans of the resort, claiming they were for your article. You also asked him to show you that hut outside, how the snowmobile garage worked, and the type of security access around the resort. In reality, these were all just means to plan your escape routes to make sure no one saw you. We both know that no traveller would care to read that type of detail.
"You scheduled an early meeting with Chiba-sensei, claiming to want to interview him for your article. You brought him something – likely coffee – laced heavily with sleeping pills, claiming it's an 'apology' for the early meeting. After Chiba-sensei passed out, you cleaned up any damning evidence and made sure you sent Ryusaki-bucho an email to delay the discovery of the body. You were expecting the body to be discovered maybe a day later, since you left a note hinting at the murder and its connection to the Arakawa case for Kudo Shinichi. Unfortunately, it was discovered earlier than you expected, but the snowstorm ended up working in your favour.
"Shima-san was similarly taken care of. You scheduled a meeting with her, citing wanting to talk about Eiko-san to ensure she wouldn't tell anyone about the meeting. Then you drugged her drink and carried her down the backstairs to the snowmobile garage early in the morning. Of the three homicides, you wanted make hers the longest lasting because she was the one who killed Eiko-san, so you left her to die in the cold.
"You used your job as a reporter, telling Ayako-san and Kyoko-san that you wanted to ask them some questions about what was going on, but in order to keep it quiet, you wanted to schedule the meeting late at night. With their history of not wanting to get involved, you knew they would agree. And again, some drugs in their drinks and they were knocked out long enough to carry out what you had to do. The locked room was easy to create. All you had to do was tie a string around the bar lock, loop the string over the top of the door, and pull it as you shut the door. The bar will slide into place just before the door is completely shut, giving you enough space to cut the string and take it away."
"You seemed to have it all figured out," Enomoto commented. "I suppose you also think I kidnapped your classmates?"
"Considering the MO for the kidnappings was almost identical, yes. Ishihara and Hino were easy to kidnap since they were not on alert at all. All you had to do was appease to their teenage girl fantasies and tell them you wanted to interview them for a magazine, and they showed up right where you needed them. If you drugged their drinks, you could then hide them wherever you needed to. Fujimoto and Hamasaki were similarly handled since we kept quiet about the first two missing girls, which ended up working in your favour. By the third set, Kato and Miyoshi, you couldn't do the same, since everyone was on alert between the murders and kidnappings. You casually passed by when the cleaning staff were opening the doors to clean during the day, and put clay or thick paper into the place where the door typically clicks shut. This prevents the lock from clicking into place, and it was also why Ai and Ayumi's room door swung open once I pushed on it. In the middle of the night, you snuck in to kidnap Kato and Miyoshi.
"You tried the same trick with Ai and Ayumi, but they didn't end up spending the night there. So you injected their bottled water with a knockout drug, hoping they might come back at one point. The plan worked through some stroke of luck, and they were thirsty enough to drink the water. Despite that, they gave you trouble." Conan couldn't help but smile a little proudly as he said this. "Ayumi might have passed right out from that drugged water, but Ai knew something was wrong. She gave you problems and you ended up having to chloroform her before taking them."
Enomoto smiled serenely once Conan was finished. "Isn't one of those girls yours? The strawberry blonde?" he asked, proving to Conan that he must have been observing them throughout. "Shouldn't you be looking for her?"
Conan narrowed his eyes. "There is one thing I don't understand," he said instead of answering. "Why the kidnappings? Even though I don't agree at all, I somewhat get the murders. They caused the death of Eiko-san and you think the murders are somehow justifiable. But why kidnap those girls? They had nothing to do with anything."
"To be remembered," Enomoto answered simply. "Nobody remembers Eiko except for me. Nobody wanted to bring justice to Eiko except for me. Maybe 8 more like Eiko will make people remember."
"That is one of the worst reasons I have ever heard," Conan stated flatly. "Now tell me where they are."
This time, it was Enomoto who smirked. He raised the bottle of water he was still holding in his hands in Conan's direction as though saluting him, then proceeded to start drinking from it.
Conan reacted automatically. He pulled his hands out of his pockets, flipping open his watch and shot the tranquilizer at Enomoto. The needle hit the man on the forehead, and he slumped onto the ground of the chapel in a boneless heap. The bottle of water fell from his hands onto the floor with a loud thunk, splashing its contents all over the aisle.
"Sorry, but I can't let you die," Conan told the passed out Enomoto, "even if a little part of me thinks you deserve it for wanting to take 8 teenage girls as burial accessories."
-o-o-o-o-o-
Conan stopped his snowboard in front of the entrance to the main resort, sending snow spraying three feet in front of him. He kicked up the snowboard and hurried to the entrance where Mitsuhiko and Genta were waiting for him. Yamaguchi-sensei and Ryusaki-bucho were on their way out with a bundle of rope.
"Edogawa-kun," Yamaguchi greeted him. "Your friends asked us to get this rope ready."
"Enomoto-san is knocked out in the chapel," Conan explained quickly. "He was the one who murdered those people and kidnapped our classmates. Please tie him up and keep an eye on him until the police get here. He tried to kill himself earlier."
"Enomoto-san?" Ryusaki sounded surprised. "I thought he was so nice..."
"Please hurry before he wakes up," Conan urged the two out the door before turning to Genta and Mitsuhiko. "What did you find?"
Without a word, Mitsuhiko held up a familiar-looking black card.
Conan snatched it from him. "That's impossible! He was planning on killing himself and creating the fourth scene of crime," he exclaimed, agitation in his voice. "Why would there be a fifth note?"
"I don't know," Mitsuhiko answered nervously. "Conan-kun, how did you know where the fourth scene of crime was supposed to be?"
"The passage in the fourth note talked about seraphs, angels, and divinity," Conan pointed out. "Those are all religious symbols, so it only makes sense that the fourth scene of crime is the chapel. Plus, like I said before, 'Eleonora' was about a lover who was already dead whom the narrator couldn't forget. This could only represent Arakawa Eiko – the only person in the whole thing who had been dead long enough to warrant the risk of being forgotten. That means the narrator is either Arakawa Daisuke – the husband – or a lover she had."
"But how did you know that was Enomoto-san?" Mitsuhiko continued.
"We were only down to Li-sensei, Yamaguchi-sensei, Ryusaki-bucho, and Enomoto-san at that point," Conan explained. "Li-sensei would have been in high school at the time of the Arakawa case, so she seemed an unlikely suspect. Ryusaki-bucho was the first to bring up the case at the old resort in front of Enomoto-san and me. If he was plotting to kill 4 people and kidnap 8 teenage girls in retaliation for Eiko-san's death, it seemed a premature time to so bluntly clue in a reporter. Plus, Enomoto-san never asked him to elaborate, which meant he already knew the details, he didn't want to bring someone else's attention to it just yet, or both. I admit, though, that I only realized when I was confronting him earlier that he meant to make his own death the scene that relates to Poe's story."
"What were you expecting instead?" Mitsuhiko asked with a frown.
"I wasn't sure," Conan admitted. "That's why I didn't rush there right after I figured out the note. I wasn't expecting a fifth note at the point; I thought maybe he wanted something from the police in exchange for the girls. So my best guess for this note..."
"The kidnapped girls," Mitsuhiko finished.
Conan nodded in agreement and turned his attention to the note. He read it quickly to himself.
"And his eyes have all the seeming of a demon's that is dreaming,
And the lamp-light o'er him streaming throws his shadow on the floor;
And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor
Shall be lifted- nevermore!
II "
"What does that mean?" Genta asked anxiously.
"I know this one," Conan replied solemnly. "It's 'The Raven', the most famous of Poe's work. Where did you find this card?"
"In Enomoto-san's room," Genta answered.
Conan frowned, reading the note again. He suddenly remembered a question Ai had once asked him. Why were all the notes quotes from Edgar Allan Poe? Was it just because they fit?
"I need to see the other ones again," he declared, hurrying past Mitsuhiko and Genta. He took the stairs two at a time, his friends on his heels, and ran into his and Genta's room. He grabbed the other cards, reading each one again.
Speaking of Ai, Conan thought with a frown, she had left him some code too. He reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out the notebook he had found on Ai's bed with the folded pages, opening it to the list of symbols.
"φενι φιδι φιχι"
"What is that?" Mitsuhiko asked. He and Genta had crowded around, reading over Conan's shoulder.
Conan looked up. "Ai wrote me this before she passed out when she was kidnapped," he explained.
"Why isn't it in Japanese or even English?" Mitsuhiko frowned.
"Because Enomoto-san would have been able to read it if he saw it," Conan explained.
"So it's like...your and Haibara's own language?" Genta questioned.
"Uh...no. This is Greek."
"Another language?" Mitsuhiko sounded frustrated.
"I know this code's creator better than anyone else, which means I can solve it," Conan said with determination. He sat down on the floor and took out his pen.
"What do you mean?" Mitsuhiko prompted him.
"Well, first of all," Conan mused out loud as he thought, "Ai doesn't speak Greek, so these can't be actual Greek words since she wouldn't have had time to look anything up. She must have just used their alphabet. The English alphabet originated from the Greek alphabet, so each of these symbols more to less translates into an English letter. Let's see...this is... phi, epsilon, nu, iota, then phi, iota, delta, iota, then phi iota chi iota."
"Huh?"
"In English," Conan continued, "these would correspond to ph-e-n-i as the first word, ph-i-d-i as the second word, and finally ph-i-ch-i as the last word."
"Are those even words?" Mitsuhiko asked, obviously confused.
"No, they're not," Conan muttered, "maybe she had to use replacement letters?"
"Replacement letters?"
"The Greek alphabet only has 24 letters as opposed to English's 26 letters. And not all the letters correspond exactly," Conan explained absentmindedly. "Let's see...the ph might be f? Or v. The ch is likely a c. That makes...veni, vidi, vici! It's Caesar's quote!"
"That Latin and Roman spoken in Greek stuff you were saying during our class trivia?" Genta chimed in, clearly as confused as Mitsuhiko.
"Err, it's Greek and Latin that are spoken in the Roman Empire, Genta," Conan corrected. Wait a second. He frowned, looking back at the 5 notes. CL, CX, LX, XX, II. Greek, Latin, and Roman Empire. "Shit!" he cursed loudly, jumping up off the ground.
"What?" the other two boys startled at Conan's sudden outburst.
"These aren't initials!" Conan declared urgently. "They're Roman numerals! 150, 110, 60, 20, and 2. This is a countdown!"
"A countdown? Until what?" Genta asked.
Conan rushed up to the whiteboard. There were pictures of the 6 girls who had been kidnapped. They hadn't put up pictures of Ai and Ayumi, but he knew them well enough to envision them in his mind. "These girls were specifically targeted," he spoke out loud. "He had to have picked them for one reason or another because otherwise, he wouldn't have watched them enough to know which rooms were theirs. So why them? What's the common link in their 8 girls that Enomoto chose?"
The room became silent as Conan, Mitsuhiko, and Genta all stared at the pictures. They all had dark hair, except for Ai. Ayumi had blue eyes, Ai had turquoise eyes, but the rest all had brown eyes. They were all students. Conan frowned. None of those traits were really that uncommon. Were Ai and Ayumi just picked because they were investigating or...?
"They're all pretty," Genta suddenly blurted out.
Conan and Mitsuhiko stared at him.
"What?" Genta said defensively. "Conan asked what was common about the 8 girls. They're all pretty."
Mitsuhiko sighed. "I don't think that's what we're looking for, Genta-kun."
Conan tuned them out and stared back at the 6 pictures, Genta's declaration ringing in his mind. Even though he usually didn't have eyes for other girls, he had to admit that the 6 girls whose pictures were on the whiteboard were very good-looking. Ayumi was too, of course, and he was biased when it came to Ai, so he would take Genta's word for the layman's opinion.
Suddenly, things clicked into place, and he let out a string of curse words that left Mitsuhiko and Genta staring at him in open-mouthed shock.
"That's why it's Poe!" he declared, his mind working a mile a minute. That's why Enomoto had merely smiled when he had asked about the girls' whereabouts. That's why the last note had to be 'The Raven'. That's why the final count was 8 girls.
"Conan-kun! What is going on?" Mitsuhiko yelled at him.
"Come on, you said we're a team!" Genta added.
Conan paused and took a couple of deep breaths, trying to calm down. "We assumed the murders were the main event and the kidnappings were accessories," he began, "but in reality, Enomoto meant for the kidnappings to be the main course and the murders were just appetizers leading up to it."
He held up the five note cards in his hands and told them grimly, "Edgar Allan Poe's favourite literary theme is 'death of a beautiful woman'. Enomoto kidnapped 8 pretty girls, one for each year since Eiko-san's death, because he 'wants Eiko-san to be remembered'. People forget about murders, even serial murders, because they're more common than we like to admit. There's too much going on in the world for most of us to remember 4 people who were murdered while vacationing. But 8 young, innocent, beautiful teenage girls who get killed in the name of a mistake from almost a decade ago? People will call that a tragedy; there will be media outrage."
"It will be remembered," Mitsuhiko finished in strained whisper, catching on Conan's meaning.
"That's why all the notes are Poe," Conan finished. "Each one is a piece, something small, but as a whole, as a theme, Enomoto always meant for them to represent the coming deaths of 8 beautiful women. Since their deaths will be the most remembered, the last note has to be 'The Raven', the most well-known of Poe's work."
"So he planned on killing them, but we caught him, right?" Genta asked nervously. "It should be okay?"
Conan shook his head, his gaze solemn. "He meant to kill himself at the fourth scene and somehow kill 8 girls at the final scene. He left us notes with a countdown. What would you conclude?"
"A bomb," Mitsuhiko answered for Genta. "A bomb would have a timer and he wouldn't have to be alive to kill the 8 girls he kidnapped."
Conan gave him a small smile despite everything. "You have a future in police work yet."
"So we have to save them," Genta added, looking at Conan. "How much time do we have?"
"The last note has a countdown of 2. Judging from the numbers on each note and the scenes they were found at, they likely represent hours. You guys found the last note a bit before Enomoto meant to kill himself, but we spent some time figuring this out," Conan mused. "So probably...we have between an hour to an hour and a half until that bomb goes off."
-o-o-o-o-o-
End Chapter 8.
Word Count: 4,479
Cumulative Word Count: 38,027
Note: In case you've never seen DC in Japanese, "Edogawa Conan, tantei sa." is Conan's catchphrase when asked who he is (usually by the culprit he's confronting). It sounds weird when I write it in English, so I left it. It roughly means "Edogawa Conan, a detective" like 007's "Bond, James Bond." :P
Chitsu's Corner: And that pretty much resolves all the puzzles. I'm sure there are questions of possibility and/or plot holes, but really, so do the DC movies. XP I (clearly) make a terrible criminal mastermind.