A/N: No significant warnings on this one, and no notes that can't wait for the end note. I'll save everything for that.
Chapter 13
"You are welcome," Komarov said curtly. "Now, if you will excuse—ah, it seems a person who fits the description you gave has turned up in the station. I suppose this is what you expected?"
"I'll need to speak with him," Shinichi said, deciding not to answer. This is it. We're so close…
A small clatter from KID's chair had Shinichi looking up to see the thief leaning forward with wide eyes, while Eisuke slumped in obvious relief. Meanwhile, Hattori just grinned.
"That can be arranged quite easily," Komarov said. His voice dropped in volume as he continued, "You are very fond of traps. One could almost consider it a weakness."
"Excuse me?" Shinichi asked, confused.
The answer came in familiar, English-tinged Japanese. "If our common opponent had checked after your supposed death for your deduction style rather than your face, you would have been found within two weeks, Conan-kun."
Shinichi's fingers fell slack. The bowtie slipped through them and landed on the carpet, bouncing once, twice, and then landing, voice-changer up.
"Hakuba," he said, voice breathless and high-pitched.
Heiji startled and cursed, and Eisuke's eyes flew wide, while KID's eyes narrowed and he looked as though he was barely restraining himself from taking the phone.
"Now, that is rude," Hakuba—and it was Hakuba, it possibly had been him all along—replied. "And that's another point—your acting is at times alarmingly bad. You'll never convince anyone you're a real elementary school student if you go around dropping honorifics without a care and giving every third criminal a death glare while in full view of gossiping police officers."
"Hakuba-san, I appreciate the advice, but you're the one who suddenly left home," Shinichi said. "We don't know why you left, but if you're in trouble, or if there's someone after you, maybe there's something we can do to help…"
"Well, it's good to know that you haven't been told every detail of my life yet," Hakuba said, tone acidic enough to make Shinichi flinch. "But I will tend to my own affairs myself. Does KID seem as though he'd like to speak to me in private?"
"How did you know that KID was—"
"He might as well have sent a card; his fingerprints were all over your plan. Now, answer my question."
Shinichi glanced at KID, who was currently making grasping gestures at the phone, with desperation barely hidden under the forced neutrality of his expression.
"Yes."
"Don't let him," Hakuba ordered. "Put me on speaker. I'd like Hattori-san to hear this as well."
He knows about Hattori too?
Not knowing what else to do, Shinichi set the phone down on the carpet and pressed the "speaker" button.
Hakuba's voice was a fierce whisper, hardly distorted by the phone's speakers. "All of you are young, bright, promising people with great potential. Don't throw away your time on a pointless investigation. I neither want nor need your help, and I will not be returning to Tokyo or to my life as Hakuba Saguru. Everyone will be better off if you concern yourself with other cases and leave me to what I am doing."
KID opened his mouth to speak, but Hakuba continued before he could even form a word.
"If you wish to forcibly detain me, you will have to convince the Russian police that your helpful police-affiliated informant is impersonating their chief of police. Preferably without creating an international incident. I doubt you will be successful before I leave the building."
"As this will be the last time we speak, I will take the opportunity to wish you all the best of luck in your future endeavors. Goodbye." The last word, spoken in English, was followed by the "beep" of Shinichi's phone announcing that the call had ended.
"No, don't—s***!" KID exclaimed, face utterly blank but voice still strained with emotion.
"How the—" Hattori broke off, cursed, and ran a hand through his hair. "I can't believe he saw us coming."
"He didn't see us coming, he saw Kudou-san coming," KID corrected, ice to his tone. "That plan? It was mostly his."
If that's how we're going to play it, Shinichi thought, anger at KID's accusations and sudden overwhelming paranoia about how Hakuba had found out his identity churning in the back of his mind until they became something poisonous.
"How about we start with what you haven't been telling us about Hakuba?" he sneered back. "He knew I was Conan."
"Of course he did, idiot, you dropped the bowtie," KID said.
"That's why I dropped the bowtie," Shinichi corrected coldly. "Because he called me Conan-kun."
"The h***?" Hattori said, swinging around to stare at Shinichi.
"He called me Conan-kun and critiqued my acting repeatedly," Shinichi said. "He also predicted that KID would want to speak to him privately. Why is that, exactly?"
KID glowered. "Part of this arrangement was that I was allowed to keep my secrets."
"These secrets are seemin' kinda relevant ta the case!" Hattori snapped.
"He knew KID was here?" Eisuke asked.
"Yeah," Shinichi said. "He knew about Hattori too."
"Okay, that's it, we need a full summary of that conversation," Eisuke said, catching and holding Shinichi's gaze. "Everything we didn't hear. I know your memory's good enough."
Shinichi scowled, but nonetheless repeated it all, down to intonation and language switches. By the end, everyone else was wide-eyed.
"He's not just scared, he's angry," Eisuke said.
"The line in between isn't always that thick," Shinichi said absently.
"He's got a point about you and traps," Hattori said.
Shinichi glared up at him, ready to snap, but Hattori quickly held up his hands.
"It ain't a bad method, against yer average criminal, but ya use it so often…it makes sense that he recognized it," Hattori said. "He's seen ya pull it before."
"It was a good plan!" Shinichi said, defensive.
"If it really was, he wouldn't have been able to counter it so easily," Eisuke said carefully. "It's not that your methods are bad…but I think we really underestimated Hakuba."
"There's underestimated, and there's whatever the h*** that was," Hattori said. "He didn't know we were after him until after we called Komarov the first time, there's no way. So he figured out all o' that on his feet."
"While putting together a disguise, no less," KID said. "I'm certain he didn't go in there planning to disguise as the police chief—too much risk, not enough potential reward, given the circumstances. But at some point he put together that disguise and replaced the man."
"Probably while we were figuring out how to find Hakuba," Shinichi said, realization almost tangibly bitter in his mouth. "We could have had any strategy for capturing him when we called back; it wouldn't have mattered. Only Hakuba ever heard anything I said from that point on."
"How'd he know, though?" Eisuke asked. "You only talked to Komarov before, right?"
"Yeah, but he couldn't have been Komarov from the beginning, like KID said, impersonating him the whole time would be pointless and risky," Shinichi said. He thought for a moment, then smacked himself in the face. "Ugh, that question about whether the tipper had suggested the timing of the raids!"
"He got annoyed at it, right?" Eisuke said. "How's that important?"
"He probably complained afterward," Shinichi said. "Just from talking to him that long, I'm going to guess he complained loudly. Loudly enough that a person disguised as a plainclothes cop could easily pick out my name from all that Russian, if he was in the station—and we know he was."
He swore. "I'm so used to Inspector Megure and the rest of Division One putting up with weird questions when they know they'll help solve the case that I forgot not everyone's used to that." He paused. "No, I forgot not everyone's willing to deal with it." Shame sunk into him like a sudden chill as he dropped his gaze to the carpet. "I screwed up."
A moment passed in silence.
"I'm not sure any of the rest of us would have done any better," KID said, a tentative note to his tone. "We all underestimated him."
Shinichi glanced at the subtle bits of body language and combined them with the tone and words, and found there, It wasn't just your fault and I shouldn't have blamed you.
He was unexpectedly gratified. Still…
"Maybe, but I'm the one who did screw up," Shinichi said.
"All right, so you screwed up," Hattori said. "That's bad, but it's good that ya know what ya did. Now you can avoid doin' it again, an' we can learn from it too. But goin' over'n over it's kinda pointless. We should be talkin' about what ta do next."
"Like what?" KID asked, voice slightly strained. "He's right, isn't he? We can't call them again and say he's disguising as the chief of police. Assuming he still is."
"No, we can't," Hattori said. "He slipped us. We ain't getting' him in Omsk. First step is acceptin' that. Sometimes part of an investigation is hittin' an obstacle an' regroupin'."
"This isn't an obstacle, it's a dead end," KID said flatly. "We have no idea where he's going, and now that he knows we're after him he'll be hiding even better than before."
"Thinking like that's not going to help anything," Eisuke said firmly. "We'll get another lead. We'll figure this out. If you want to find him, KID, you have to accept that this might take longer than you expected. Can you do that?"
KID took a breath. "Yeah. Yeah I can."
"Hey, we still have one ace up our sleeve," Shinichi said, smiling for the first time since Hakuba hung up. "Hondou-san. Hakuba knew about the rest of us, guessed KID and Hattori's involvements, even, but he's still never met Hondou-san and he has no idea who he is."
"So next time we get close, Hondou-san leads," KID declared. "Hakuba will have less of a chance of predicting him."
It chafed, just slightly, but KID was right. "That's a good idea."
"Considerin' puttin' me in charge'll have the same problems as Kudou, an' Hakuba'll read KID easiest of all…yeah, yeah that's probably the best plan," Hattori said.
Eisuke took a shaky breath. "I'll do my best, I guess," he said. He paused for a few seconds. "Kudou-san, about Hakuba-san knowing you were Conan…do you have any idea how that happened?"
Shinichi took a breath, and thought about it. "There's…a memory I have, that I can't explain," he said. "I remember hearing a person with an accent like Hakuba's, cursing, while I was turning from Shinichi to Conan or back again. I can't remember when, though."
"You can't?" Hattori asked, in obvious confusion. "Your memory's usually pretty precise."
Shinichi winced. "The transitions don't usually stay with me very well," he said. He took a deep breath. "The pain levels are a little…distracting."
"Ah," KID said lightly. "I can speak to the effects of pain on memory after the last month or so."
Hattori nodded slightly, tight-lipped, then said, "When the h*** would that have even happened, though? Spying on KID is one thing, but spying on Conan, especially if he didn't know who you were…that's creepy."
"Maybe he had suspicions," Eisuke suggested carefully. "I thought for sure you were at least a prodigy until you told me what was actually going on."
"Why would it matter to him, either way, though?" Shinichi said. "He didn't have a reason to be interested in me—KID said that Hakuba never interfered with heists I attended."
"That's right," KID said. "And I'm beginning to think I know why. Predicting you is one of his newer skills."
"What's that supposed to mean?" Hattori asked.
"I believe I ought to apologize," KID said suddenly. "Not all of the secrets I'm keeping are entirely for my own protection. Most are. But some…there are things I am aware of about Hakuba that he did not give me permission to know. That's why he didn't want to speak to me on the phone, and why he was relieved that Tantei-kun didn't know 'all of his secrets.' I don't think those things are important enough to finding Hakuba to risk the possible outcomes of telling you them."
"Which are?" Shinichi prompted, more curious than anything.
The brief flash of anger earlier aside, he was surprised to find that he really did trust KID. Which was…disquieting at best, and he needed to examine it, but in the meantime, the matter at hand was most important.
"He values his privacy," KID said. "I'm worried that if he thinks he won't have it anymore he won't come back. I'm worried that thinking he'd already lost it is part of why he left."
"So the information could help us find him but it could also be the reason all our efforts to convince him to come back fail," Eisuke said.
"Yeah," KID said. "For right now, I still don't think it's worth the risk."
"Ya trust him more'n I do," Hattori said. "I'm not sure I love the idea of lettin' ya make that decision. An' if he gets outta control I expect ya ta at least reconsider it. But I'll let it go fer now."
KID nodded.
"I can trust your judgment for the time being," Shinichi said.
KID nodded, and he knew that the apology he'd meant to give had been received.
"I agree," Eisuke said. "There's one other thing, though—this means we're going to have to continue the investigation after Hattori returns to school. Are we going to have to meet less frequently?"
"Yes, if for no other reason than on my account," Shinichi said. "I can come up with a project I'm working on with the professor, but Ran will probably only be okay with me going over to his house and staying out late a few nights a week. When Hattori's here, she trusts him to be looking out for me, but if I'm going to the professor's she knows I'm walking around alone at night."
"Let's not figure that out right away," Hattori said. "We're all tense as it is."
"Want to at least find out how Hakuba's plan is going?" Eisuke asked.
"I guess if we can't get him back here, it would be nice to at least know he's getting some of Them arrested," KID said.
"Yeah," Hattori agreed.
Shinichi moved back to his laptop and woke it up, wincing as the top headline for the search "Omsk News" caught his eye.
"Hattori, you were right again," he said quietly. "Explosions outside of multiple warehouses in downtown Omsk, police investigate."
"What?" KID whispered.
Shinichi clicked through the article, and let the browser translate it. The translation was awful, but he could make out some of it at least.
"Structural damage and panic, but no casualties, it looks like," Shinichi said. "The police went in after the explosions. No updates yet on arrests but, given what we know…"
"He gave them a cover," Eisuke said, half-impressed.
Hattori caught KID's eye. "Sure keeping his secrets is worth it?"
"No one was hurt," KID said. But his voice was just a little bit shaky.
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A/N: This chapter is dedicated to every Detective Conan fan who's sick of Shinichi being right every single gorram time, no matter what, even if other characters who are normally just as smart as him have to make OOC mistakes to preserve his reign of correctness.
Now that I've got that out of my system, there's art for this on pixiv-specifically, of Shinichi dropping the bowtie. I also want to acknowledge that I know some of KID's dialogue this time is confusing-he's coming to realizations he can't share with the detectives without telling them everything. He's going to be narrating again in Chapter 15, so if you can't guess based on the dialogue what he's thinking, he'll be clarifying a bit then. If you want to know what the heck Saguru's thinking, on the other hand, I'm afraid it'll be a bit longer.
I hope you all enjoyed the chapter; I love any and all reviews people choose to leave me, including the kind that are basically screaming (and I realize I've earned a few of those this time).