A/N: Gosh, did I get bricked on last chapter. –ogles at screen– (butterfly-chan, put that knife away!) still, being a kind soul (and wishing to avoid death threats), I bring you the next instalment of Lawyer's Problem, yes! (but no Gems yet. Writerblock is HELL, and so is Lupin, damn that Maurice Leblanc guy.)

Yeah. So, finally, the 'YOU'RE THE CULPRIT AHAHAH' chapter. Um. (By the way, to (evil), who dropped off an anonymous review… uh… is your heart better? I hope this will make it fine again :D)

Disclaimer: DC is not mine. Nor is Shakespeare (a quote, or two, somewhere).

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Chapter 12 – A Detective's Deduction

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'In brief, he is a fraud.'

H.L. Mencken

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There was light.

No, there wasn't. There was a dark-grey pitch hovering uncertainly in the black, black bliss. And it grew. Faintly, but it grew. And the darkness fled before it, trickling away like glimpses onto something else, flickering still at the borders of her consciousness as her eyes cracked open and regained sight again.

She closed them immediately, blinded by so much light in the outward world. The temptation was great to let herself sink back into the dark softness of sleep… but it were many seconds before she opened her eyes a slit, her gaze filtrating through the trembling veil of her eyelashes.

As her eyes accustomed themselves to the light, it morphed and changed blurredly till it appeared there wasn't so much of it after all. The room was dark, and only a heavily-fringed affair was lit on her left, casting a shaded gold onto the nearest corners. Farther ahead, shadows engulfed the lines and shapes. Everything was hazy with drowsy safety…

Her body came back to her then, and hurt all over. Her legs imprisoned under the heavy blankets, her arms lead-like she couldn't move, the sharp pain at the back of her head, like a tightening cramp, the piercing headache around her temples. She drew in a large gulp of air, before she realized she was actually breathing.

Oxygen flooded freely in, her lungs, fresh and cool, life-full, and it was incredible, being able to breath in and out deeply as she did, being able to feel how good that was. She could still sense the strong, frozen fingers squeezing her throat–she winced, tried to shake her head to wash away pain, but it was too heavy. She let it flop back onto the pillows and tried to think.

Thought n°1–she was in a bed, under what weighted like a ton blankets, without any clothes on but her underwear. The reason for that was obvious, once her mind was back to clear sailing. Her body was damp with swear, and the growing headache felt like she had a fever. Which explained the drowsiness, sort of.

Thought n°2–apart from her, in the room were only Araide and–surprisingly–Sonoko. This either meant her friend had come back earlier than expected, or several days and night had elapsed since her aggression. And she had a thousand questions to ask, she realised.

She tried to speak, but only articulated a chocked gurgle–it was enough, anyway, to call their attention onto her. Sonoko swooped down on the bed and clasped her hand with an anguished wail of 'Oh, Ran! I've been so worried? How are you feeling?' or at least Ran supposed that was what she said, for she'd understood one word out of ten. Her friend was babbling away with tears in her eyes, and she could only squeeze her hand gentle to say she felt good–which was a flat lie–while trying to form syllables in the back of her throat.

Araide seated himself on her left and held her wrist for a while, controlling her pulse with a thin pocket watch upon which Ran absurdly focused. When he let go her hand flopped back lifelessly on the cover. "Well," said he, smiling, "you certainly scared us this time," and extended a hand for a plastic goblet on the nightstand. He filled it with water and dropped… something, a pill or the like, watching it dissolve in it.

Sonoko was still babbling. Ran gathered her strengths and opened her mouth to ask–"What–"

"Here–drink," Araide said, gently easing the goblet nearer to her lips. "It'll do some good to your headache."

Ran drank obediently, thinking, Headache? How does he know I have a heada–

--

When she woke again a grey light trickled through the curtains and the lamp on her left had been turned off. It was dawn. Dust glistened faintly in the cold rays falling through the thin curtains, and outside an early bird was twittering gleefully, welcoming in the rising sun. It stopped, then started up again. All the world was moving and shifting, and she'd come back to reality just in time to witness that ephemeral moment of grace between night and morning.

Another pillow had been added up behind her head. She straightened up against it slightly, her body no longer tense and heavy–her muscles were stiff, but that should ease off. Probably. Araide's mixture had partly cleared her headache, and her ideas were clearer, more easily classified, at any rate.

She couldn't remember much of her aggression–only glimpses and blows. It would probably return to her–one thing she should never be able to forget, anyway, was the frozen print of those long hands around her throat… she brushed absently her fingertips against the damp skin there; she could almost feel them there.

But she had marked his wrists (or hers; Sakagushi-san certainly was strong enough), dug her nails into them so hard there was no way it could be hidden. With this, and Shinichi's evidence, there was no way the culprit could esca–

Shinichi.

The door opened, on Sonoko. She didn't look inside at first, but turned back to talk to someone outside before she even noticed Ran was awake and sitting, smiling faintly.

"Ran! How're you going?" She came in, in a dash, and Makoto and Araide followed, the latter of whom carefully closed the door.

For a few minutes Ran found herself engulfed first in Sonoko's teary embraces then in Araide's expert checking of her pulse, heartbeat, and tongue. In all this not a single word was intelligible. At length she was grateful to Makoto-kun to push them both away and force a breakfast tray on her lap. "Here you go, Ran-chan. I'd thought you'd be hungry after two days under the weather," which were probably the most sensible words she'd heard in weeks.

She felt ravenous, which was unromantic but logical. It was finally between a plate of buttered toasts and her second cup of coffee that she got her explanation.

"We didn't catch him," Araide confessed sheepishly. "He fled just before we found you–he probably had just turned the corner, and you didn't look like you were breathing, so we preferred staying with you to make sure you didn't–"

"Wait a second," Ran said. "How did you know I was in danger? You weren't supposed to tour the house until at least an hour, and I'm sure I couldn't have screamed…"

"Well, that's curious. Just minutes before I went off after you, Kudo-kun called–" here Ran couldn't miss Sonoko eyeing her warily, "–panicked. He asked where you were, and when I told him you were touring the house he shouted to go find you immediately if we didn't want to find ourselves with a corpse in our hands. So I rang off and went in search of you–and I found you just in time. You were barely breathing, and you stayed in this bed two nights and days–"

"Makoto and I came back yesterday," Sonoko took up. "Araide-san had phoned to say you'd been attacked, so we packed up in a rush and took the first plane back. Kami, I'm so sorry, Ran. We should have come back as soon as Makoto won the competition–we should never have left you in lone charge of this–"

"I wasn't alone," Ran squeezed her hand, smiling. She turned to Araide again. "Doctor–where's Shinichi?"

"Well–he drove back here the night you were aggressed, but he went away again yesterday evening, after Sonoko-chan and Makoto-kun had arrived." Left. "He went to Tokyo–and I'm afraid he'll be bringing back the police. He said he knew who the culprit was–"

"Didn't he leave any message in case I woke up?"

"No. I suppose the police really is necessary this time–there could have been murder done–" Ran was no longer listening. She'd relaxed against her pillows, laying her coffee cup on her lap, and closed her eyes.

He'd left. Once more, without warning, he'd gone away and left her behind, when she was certain that at waking he'd be first by her side. He'd left, backing away like he'd said he would, holding the door open for her to step through. And the perfect, fittest, most reasonable end was this–

"Ran?"

–falling apart quite simply. Without shock. Without tears. And when time had passed again, the memory of it would resemble that of a dream. 'The sweetest sleep, the fairest-boding dreams/that ever entered in a drowsy head…'

"Ran?" Sonoko's face, close to her own. "You okay?"

"Are you suffering from your headaches again?" Araide asked worriedly on the other side of the bed.

"I–yes. No. I'm fine. When did you say Shinichi would be back?" Sonoko's clutched her shortly; by the look on her face, her best friend wanted to know all about this, but dared not ask. It would have to wait. Ran wouldn't talk about it–it was too early yet.

"By the end of this afternoon," Araide said, looking thoroughly puzzled. "He didn't say–have you seen who assaulted you, Ran-chan?"

"No," she said absently. "It was dark, and he or she or whatever was careful to stay in the shade. And they didn't talk, nor did anything to allow me to recognize them," she added, seeing that Araide opened his mouth again. He closed it. She yawned.

"You look… exhausted. You had better rest some more," he said, standing. "We'll come and fetch you when–when the police arrives."

Sonoko and Makoto followed, uncertainly. "Ran," Sonoko said, then stopped. Araide opened the door and left with a smile. At length she spoke. "… are you sure you're okay?"

No. "Yes," she said, eyes half-closed in the growing light of dawn. "I'm just tired."

I'm so tired.

So am I.

--

She drowsed for the best part of the day, wandering listlessly on the frontier between sleep and wake for hours. When she fully came to again, the afternoon was drawing to an end. The light was a darker shade of gold, and the portion of sky she could glimpse through her window was not so clear a blue as she remembered.

In terms of body, she felt much better. Her limbs were still stiff her hell, only a logical result of having remained in almost the same position thirty-six hours through, and the misty headache that used to roll painfully in her mind had by now completely cleared. She was able to think.

A pullover and jeans had been folded at the foot of the bed. Atop the pile, a note in Sonoko's handwriting said, Kudo-kun and the police have arrived. We won't begin without you. Come down when you think you can.

She slipped limply out of bed and pulled on the clothes. They fitted her like a second skin. When she watched the effect in the looking-glass by the door, what with the clothes and her messy hair and pale face, she felt she looked like a high school student. Back to the past. Maybe that was the necessary path to get rid of it.

When she came down the grand staircase it was to find the whole assembly gathered in the hall. First to notice her and come up was Sonoko, followed closely by Araide and Hikaru-san, both asking after her health.

Megure-keibu met her at the foot of the steps, with a hearty handshake and a delighted, "Aah, Ran-kun! Long time no see! What a beautiful woman you have become–I heard about your aggression. Seems that Kudo-kun and you are still as trouble-magnets as ever," he grinned and gestured at Shinichi, who was standing with a more mature-looking Takagi-keiji at the other end of the hall.

And if she had expected to find him changed she was disappointed. His face was as poker-faced as Conan's had ever been.

Most of the guests came to ask after her during the following half-hour. Only Sakagushi-san kept away, burrowed as she was in conversation with Sato–sorry, Takagi Miwako-keiji, but she smiled at her from afar, and Akira-san was eagerly attentive by her side. He seemed to feel guilty for the aggression.

"It's my fault," he said to her, in a low voice. "If I hadn't told you about the blackmail–"

"Of course not," she patted his arm. "Besides, if anything, I'm alive and safe now. And the culprit will be caught shortly."

He didn't look any better. "You could have died then. I would have been attacked instead if I hadn't spilled it out to you…"

"Don't be a fool," Shinichi's deep voice said from behind them. Ran turned to him, but he didn't return the look. "They still need your money–they wouldn't have killed you. Yet. Besides, there's not a certainty that they and Ran-san's aggressor were the same."

Ran-san.

"Would you mind telling everyone to gather in the drawing-room," he added, and when Akira-san had nodded sheepishly and pulled himself off, turned to her. "Well–" he took her hand, looked at it for a second, then back to her face. "How are you feeling?"

Horrible. I'm fine. Tired. I feel good. I've been better. Not so bad, considering. I needed you. Answers butted in her head, but none came into speech.

"I'm okay now," she said, looking away. "So you've found the culprit–haven't you?"

"Yes." He gave her hand a soft squeeze then let it go; it fell back to her side, lifeless. "They're moving. We'd better go in." They walked together to the breakfast table, silent, and parted at the door, Shinichi going to sit in mid-table and Ran at the far left end, along with Sonoko and the Araides. The guests were strewn around the table, daring not glance at the policemen–twenty of them or so–situated every two yards alongside the wall.

Noise reduced, then revolved into silence.

Stall. Ran thought she could hear her blood throbbing in her eardrums as she looked from pale face to pale and scanned the expressions–nervous, patient, irritated, calm, falsely relaxed. Megure-keibu, Takagi-keiji, and Shinichi. He was looking at his hands, carefully folded, oblivious, it seemed, to the outward world. He looked weary and strained.

He must be exhausted, after to-and-fro-ing endlessly between the mansion, going to find proofs, coming back in the dead of the night, going away again, coming back–never, ever getting a wink of sleep.

At length Asama-san spoke. "I take it you've found the culprit among us," was his matter-of-fact assessment, and the tension between them built tighter.

Shinichi looked up from his hands to the vase of daffodils in the middle of the table, right before him. "Yes."

Pause.

"You see, we've all been wrong somewhere in this case. Sonoko-san was wrong in thinking the letters were simply the works of a lunatic. Ran-san was wrong in thinking the dog had to do something in the nighttime–meaning, that something should be fishy about the keys to Kyogoku-san's office. And I was wrong in analysing the culprit's motive like I did–that, by the way, was the greatest error of all. It nearly lost a life.

"We were wrong all along; or, rather, we've been looking into the matter the wrong way. All we had to do was give it a shake and seek another perspective–"

This little speech had the result to make everybody look uncertainly at one another. Oblivious to this, Shinichi went on, in the same empty, monotonous voice, "I had assumed the study was the centre of all–and it was, though not the way I thought. My prejudice also covered our culprit's novelist-schemes to confuse us–"

"What's this all about?" Sonoko whispered to Ran.

"And Then There Were None and The Purloined Letter," Ran whispered back, and it probably didn't help her much, but her attention was on Shinichi only. (Then again, when hadn't it been?)

"–in truth, the culprit manipulated me–us–all the time, and did it well. I have made great mistake, greater than perhaps I would have in some other situation…" a pause here, an infime hesitation, "but I was also right sometimes. I had assumed the man's aim was to stop the study. I'd thought the aggressions on random people were only a way to hide the real motive… and I was right.

"Sakagushi-san was shot. Hikaru-san was assaulted from behind. Ikenami-san was poisoned. Ran-san was strangulated. And every time, the murder attempt failed. But it was meant to succeed once.

"Of course, we would've had to assume that the culprit had gone too far–that it wasn't meant to kill, but hands had slipped, so to say. I'll have you notice that all his victims were women–and two of them lawyers. You can link this with the fact that Sakagushi-san was one of the most violently aggressed by the anonymous letters… the way I should have done from the start," he added bitterly.

"The tree was to be hidden in the forest–the other crimes were supposed to hide the real, only one, like in those mystery novels the culprit so likes to read. It was the culprit's aim from the start to kill but one. He only intended to kill you, Ran-san." He looked at her for the first time, and in the blue of these eyes she saw something uncertain shift.

Her breath caught. There was a rattle of chairs and sudden racket as everybody started talking all at once–Sonoko's high-pitched shrill on her left, Makoto-kun's graver tones on her right, Akira-san's excited voice further off, Sakagushi-san's grey eyes turning to her, Sato-keiji's hand on her shoulder–and then Asama-san booming above the din, "How is that possible? Ran wasn't even among us when the letters started arriving."

Silence slammed back down.

"It was logical," Shinichi said quietly. "Sonoko-san's been Ran-san's best friend since high school. It was rational enough to assume that under such circumstances and the pressure of the necessary discretion, Sonoko-san would have called for her."

"But the possibility–" began Kenjin-san, "would have been ridiculous. What if it hadn't worked? What if Sonoko-san had called the police–or someone else? What if Ran-san had been too busy, and declined?"

"Then he would have tried some other time, some other place. There would have been other opportunities to succeed." His eyes had revolved back to the daffodils, and the flicker of intellectual excitement she had perceived in the blue had vanished. It then hit her that he mustn't have known all this before he'd left for Tokyo. What he'd told them just now was only what he'd learnt out there.

"Another thing that meddled in my deductions was the second case in this." General sensation. "The culprit was, unknowingly, helped–because I had to disentangle the one from the other, which, by the way, I shouldn't have known so precisely as I do now hadn't it been for Ran-san's lucidity and foresight. I had guessed as much–but I shouldn't have had any evidence if she hadn't immediately noted down everything Kano-kun had just told her."

Ran turned to Akira-san. He had gone uncommonly pale, and dared not look back at those who glanced at him.

Thankfully, Shinichi did not rub it in. He contented himself with a "Reading her notes allowed me to get the final distinction between our two cases," and a dark look in Ebihara-san's direction. Two gorilla-shaped policemen were squarely escorting him.

"Now we come to the important point," Shinichi, who was definitely backtracking, said. "It was our greatest mistake, and it defeated us all along. In fact, that too was a way to hide the real crime… we had reached only a degree of the reasoning. The answer was just a level higher, and no wonder we couldn't reach that, as we were convinced we knew it already."

"Translater, please," Kenjin-san said. There were several laughs, and the tension broke down a little. Shinichi himself couldn't help an amused smile.

"The 'incident of the dog in the nighttime,'" he added, "is how we came to call the wreckage of Kyogoku-san's office, and a quotation from one of Conan Doyle's most famous mystery novels, the Hound of The Baskervilles. In the book, Sherlock Holmes discovers the victim was running away from the dog–an enormous, fantastical beast–thanks to the footprints he found in the mud."

He paused, and Ran suddenly understood–what was coming, what he was about to show, what it was he had discovered three nights before in the moonlit field. And it was silly, indeed, so simple it became silly.

"The facts we had at our disposition were these," went on Shinichi, who obviously couldn't resist a good drumroll. "First, that there was no known way the culprit could enter the house through the door, since the only key was in Briggs' possession and had never mysteriously disappeared for a few hours; therefore, we were all the more likely to turn our suspicions on the windows.

"Second, the beautiful set of footprints Ran-san found under said windows, and the traces of wet soil on the frame's wood. The culprit evidently hoped to make us believe he had gone through here. However, it had only begun raining after the incident, and it stopped a little after dawn, so if they really had been made before, they would have been meticulously washed away. It was nonetheless very intelligent of our man to leave it to our subconscious to make the association.

"You see, he knew we'd made that assumption, and turned, consequently, our attention back onto the door or some secret passageway leading to the office. But what if the culprit had really entered through the windows the first time over? What if he had cut a circle out of the glass to get in, and then smashed the pane to hide it, instead to get in first and break the window later like he wanted us to believe? What if the prints of his first passage had been washed away by the rain, and he had come back after dawn to make some more, not to let us think he had gone through there, as he knew we'd see through that?"

A deafening silence followed the end of his sentence. Ran let out a breath, eyes sliding shut. If he was right, then only one person could have done it–but if he didn't have any evidence–

"You see how clever it was from the start," Shinichi went on unperturbed, though the atmosphere had turned to pure vinegar, "each level more transparent and delicately built than the former, constructing higher and higher until it gets so thin it is imperceptible. He was a degree of reasoning higher than we were; he anticipated not only our moves, but also our thoughts."

"But," Sakagushi-san began, "if Briggs locked all windows and doors giving onto the quad–"

"Ah, yes," Shinichi cut in, "and how do you know about that, Sakagushi-san?"

She deadpanned him with the darkest glare. "Must you ask?"

"No," he laughed, the tiniest laugh, "probably not. But you're right. All the doors and windows giving onto the quad had been locked, under Ran-san's request, by Briggs and his faithful company, and there is no way to open them forcefully, none. I tried. In fact, the only way in–or, rather, out–was, and is, Kenjin-san's window."

This was dropped quite casually; it had the effect of a bomb falling through the middle of the table.

The guests took it full in the face, and even when the effects started to wear off they looked somewhat shaken, as though suffering from shellshock. In the thick silence, Shinichi stood up slowly and started walking down the table towards Ran's end. He passed Asama-san's chair, Hikaru-san's.

"Of course I don't have a proof of what I'm saying," he went on. "Somebody else could have hidden in the quad, under the rain, before anyone closed the windows and doors–or come down a rope from a window on a higher floor."

Araide's chair. Makoto-kun's chair. He walked past hers, between the back of it and Sato-keiji, and Ran heard his step, felt his smell, sensed his presence before he was away again.

"But there is one point where you weren't so clever. I expect that exasperated by your urge to kill Ran-san, you didn't think, when you tried to strangle her, that she could easily mark your wrists. Knowing her to be a black-belt karateka, she certainly did."

Sonoko's chair. Akira-san's chair.

"And she must have dug into them so hard there was no way to hide the wounds," Shinichi added. "Which is why you've kept your hands under the tablecloth all along, isn't it, Hiragami-san?"

"Hiragami?" Ran repeated. Shinichi's blue gaze flickered at her.

"Rings a bell?"

"Yes…" dumbfounded, her eyes devoured Kenjin-san's face, seeking a resemblance and–kami–finding it. "He's a murderer I charged a few days ago–"

Half the assembly gasped; it gave a very strange, echoing sound.

"Kenzaki Kenjin's name is Hiragami Shogo," Shinichi said, in a curiously clear, transparent voice. "He was tried nine years ago for the murder of his wife's lover, who had just killed her. It was one of Ran-san's first trials, and one of those which brought her the success she knows today. According to the defence, the deceased had murdered his lover and then turned to her husband, so that the jury would have concluded to simple self-defence and acquitted him, had not an eager young trainee stood up and proved that the woman had been killed at least a day before the murder in question.

"He got out with ten years. Being an exemplary prisoner, he was released after only six. He then went to see a chirurgical surgeon, who can be called up to witness if needed, to change his features slightly – and in three years sprang out of nowhere to become the politician we know.

"From then on I can only conjecture, by my rough guess is this: that finding himself invited to the study in this mansion, he remembered that its owner was best friends with Mouri Ran, and compelled by his desire to revenge, thought it most logical to call her if such a scenario as that of the anonymous letters occurred. As we can see, it worked beautifully.

"The wreckage of Kyogoku-san's office was not only a diversion but also a effect of pride. He wanted to raise his intellect above everybody else's, and never assumed that this snag in our deductions was also the one detail which should allow us to identify him.

"We now come to the aggression on Sakagushi-san. Here again it was all carefully thought-out–the shattered mirror, which led us to suspect Sakagushi-san of having shot herself, had been broken way beforehand. It is situated in a dark, rarely-visited corridor, and it is therefore unlikely that anyone should notice it in the matter of hours, maybe of minutes before the beginning of his plan."

There was a soft rustle of whispers around the table, and Sakagushi-san looked like she would have talked, but Shinichi, passing behind her, laid his hand on her shoulder, and she kept silent.

"I can imagine that Hiragami-san was not altogether happy to find me interfering, and the aggression onto Hikaru-san was also a warning to me. Its violence, compared to the shrewdness of his previous ministrations, were meant both to scare and confuse me.

"I suppose–I cannot be certain but I suppose this is when Hiragami-san thought it would be best to hide the real crime in a succession of them, just like one of those Agatha Christie books he himself confessed to me he was fond of. Two murders attempts had already been perpetrated, and it was most logical to await a third. The only condition was that it should more dangerous than the first two, so no one would be surprised when at the fourth attempt there would really be murder done. And he put poison in Ikenami-san's medicine.

"He put in a smallish dose, one that wouldn't kill her–but being no doctor himself he didn't realize that there was also another smallish dose of the same poison–strychnine–medically added. The two doses added up and could have been fatal to Ikenami-san hadn't she been saved just in time.

"Hiragami-san was then in a more perilous position. He had burnt all his boats but one, and he knew I was getting closer to the solution. I guess it must have been a blessing to him to see me go to Tokyo two days later. He could now act freely. He did not wait. The same evening he tried to strangle Ran-san."

His voice was smooth and empty.

"A happy coincidence made that I phoned Araide minutes before that, and made him find Ran-san before anything drastic happened. It was the last confirmation I needed–and the evidence of that is marked on your wrists, Hiragami-san."

He had talked calmly, politely, and having now finished his tour of the table he sat down again, exhaustedly, almost facing Kenjin-san. The rattle of his chair disturbed everyone in their trance-like silence, unperturbed again till Akira-san dared speak up.

"Ken-kun!" he exclaimed, leaning forward with a sort of reluctance in his stance. "Are you going to let them accuse you without protesting? Are you not going to speak? Are you not going to deny?"

There was a pause. Kenjin-san had bowed his head, and when he looked back up Ran recognized, without the shadow of a doubt, the man she had stared at in the dock nine years before. It appeared incredible that she should not have known him before.

Kenjin-san's first words made a strong impression–like a blowing concussion–on everyone in general and Akira-san in general. "You are so young," he said, way too quietly than was healthy.

"You cannot understand feelings such as grief, or revenge–or love," he added viciously. "I loved my wife, loved her more than any of you can probably imagine, loved her passionately, loved her to devotion–and he killed her. So I killed him. It was justice," he snarled.

He pointed at Ran, face distorting in a weird, ridiculously terrifying grimace of such hate Ran winced. She could almost feel the cold, cold fingers close around her throat again. "And this woman–this woman, she punished me for being just. I am kinder. I punished her for being unjust. Will any of you accuse me now?"

Akira-san breathed out loudly and sat back in his chair with a thump. There were quavering glances exchanged between the guests, and when Ran looked up at Megure-keibu, who'd moved from behind Shinichi to behind Kenjin-san, his face was closed.

"You dare not!" Kenjin–no, Hiragami spat. "You dare not accuse me! I wish someone would kill her. I wish I had. But you–" he glared at Shinichi, who was staring at the daffodils again, "you prevented me from accomplishing my mission. This is your fault. I would have killed her, and gotten out with it, hadn't it been for you!"

Ran closed her eyes, knowing there was no way to stop this. Hiragami would speak his heart out, and Shinichi wouldn't even try and interrupt. Just as she thought this, however, Sakagushi-san's frozen voice broke in with, "I am surprised. You killed once and got away with it, and you decided to murder someone else?"

"I–" for the first time, Hiragami staggered. "I… loved my wife. Adored her. But she died, and I–I decided to kill this woman, for her to understand what it's like to grieve, and to fear, and to know you're done for…"

"Yes," Shinichi said, quietly, "and you didn't think that some people love Ran, just as you loved your wife."

Ran looked at him.

This seemed to impress much on Hiragami. He burst in bitter, joyless–horrible laughter. "Ah, yes, of course," he told Ran, "your ending is happier than mine, isn't it? You're won everything–even a happily ever after with your detective boyfriend, am I right. I know people like you–you use those around you, and then you ditch them when they can't be of use anymore. You're disgusting, that's what you are. How long is this one going to last? How long till you dump him, too?"

"–that's quite enough of this, now," Megure-keibu said, closing an iron grip around the man's wrists. "I must now warn you that everything you say can be used against you at your trial–"

Hiragami Shogo let himself be led away without resistance, and all the guests stood and filed out into the hall, eager to see more like animals half-disgusted and half-fascinated. Ran paused at the door, leaning against it to keep on her feet. She was shuddering. Nausea gripped at her throat like a weapon.

"Ran?" Shinichi called, pushing past pressing backs and stepping closer. "Are you okay?"

I feel sick. "I'll be alright. Is this–this man–do I have to…" oh god. She couldn't even make complete, rational sentences.

"He'll be taken down to Tokyo tonight. Ran–" he stopped, and looking up in his face she stared into an empty mask, taking her breath away. Her eyes were burning red-hot, and How long till you dump him too echoed relentlessly in her mind. "You look exhausted. You'd best go back up. I'll take care of the police and the press if you'd rather."

She nodded bleakly. "I'd rather."

"And–I'll want to talk to you later. Will you wait up?"

I don't need this, she thought lamely. "Sure."

He smiled and gave her hand a squeeze before pushing his way back to the entrance and Megure-keibu. Stopping in mid-staircase on her way back to the room, Ran contemplated this: his half-shaded figure in the frame of the wide open double door, features hardly discernible, and behind the darkening gold of dusk.

--

Whoo! What a chapter. (Longest in this fic, I think.) Quite a lot of answers here, aren't there? Not all of them, though. About two-thirds of the whole plot or thereabouts–and Shinichi actually made a mistake in this. Mwahaha.

Next chapter should be loads of fluff and angst all rolled up to the size of a cookie. (Speaking of which… -grins and holds out plate-) It should be up by December 10th-15th-ish. And the last chapter for Christmas. (And then another fic. And another. But that's a secret.)