A/N: So this update is late as heck. In my time zone, at least, it's not even Tuesday anymore. But this was honestly the best I could do.

On that note...I'm afraid I'm gonna have to take another hiatus. Not as short as the last one, either. It'll be two or three weeks before I post another chapter, and you're gonna have to watch my tumblr (the riddle in reverse tag, specifically) for updates, if you aren't already following and you want to know exactly when the next chapter's coming. I'm sorry, but at the same time...if I try to write this arc chapter by chapter, it will suck. And with RL the way it is, that's how things will be if I keep updating weekly with no breaks. It's also getting to the point where the fic's become a minor source of stress, which is not great. So, please enjoy the chapter; the next will be up in a few weeks.

This chapter is full of my headcanons about how good everyone is at English; none of it's necessarily canon and some of it was done specifically for the purpose of plot. Also because the author is a linguistics geek.

This fic is not Britpicked, but I did at least try to make the British characters not say obviously American things. If you need a mental reference point for Julie Cassidy's accent/manner of speech, please look up the British sitcom As Time Goes By; her accent is the same as the one the three female recurring characters have.

I reserve the right to add further notes later when I'm awake. Warnings in the end note, as always!

Chapter 23

They stopped at the hotel to drop off their bags and try to sleep off some of the jet lag-a lost cause, Shinichi knew, from experience, but it was a nice thought-and then got up around when most businesses would be opening to pursue their only real lead. That bit of blood spatter, after all, had been found and processed by a specific forensic investigator, and they could be interviewed. Moreover, they would certainly know more about the crime it was involved in than Kaito's mother had bothered to find out. There were a lot of details that could actually be useful in finding Hakuba, once they had them. So, the police station was their first stop, much to Kaito's chagrin.

Kaito had his phone with him-apparently, his mother wanted to be in contact badly enough to pay for international calling. Shinichi suspected guilt was among her motivations, but he decided not to question it too deeply. At least it meant one of them was able to call the person they intended to speak with ahead of time.

So, not that long before normal business hours started, the four of them headed out of the hotel. On their way out, Kaito practically bounced past some of the brochure racks, selecting ones about various attractions seemingly at random.

"Don't tell me you want to steal the London Eye," Eisuke groaned.

"Not at all," Kaito replied, grinning widely. "I'm just trying to keep up our cover. Graduation trip, right?"

"Could you not?" Shinichi snapped, as they walked down the street toward the nearest Tube station.

"What?" Kaito asked, and...oh, that actually looked like real confusion. Granted, it was hard to tell with Kaito, but it looked like he hadn't actually been doing it on purpose.

"Sorry, nothing," Shinichi said, embarrassed.

"No, really, what?" Kaito said. "I try to only annoy people deliberately. If I do it by accident it detracts from the fun."

Hattori made a soft moaning sound. Eisuke patted him on the back.

"Could you not make such a big deal out of the graduation trip thing?" Shinichi asked, feeling very silly.

"O-kay," Kaito said, slowly, tone almost patronizing.

Hattori scowled at him. "Hey, if Kudou doesn't like lying to the people at the hotel-"

"I lie all the time; if I can lie to Ran why should I care if you lie to a bunch of strangers?" Shinichi interrupted. "It's just...you realize I'm not going to graduate anytime soon, right?"

"Oh," Hattori said. "Whoops. Sorry, Kudou."

Kaito looked a bit stricken. "I didn't think about that."

"It's not a big deal," Shinichi said brusquely.

"I think...maybe it kind of is?" Eisuke offered.

Shinichi glared at him, and, to his surprise, Eisuke glared right back. "Maybe now's not the time for this conversation, but sometime, we're going to have it."

And with that, he brushed past both Shinichi and Kaito, then asked, "This is the right direction, right?" as he pointed down a side-street.

It occurred to Shinichi, then, that he'd made the near-fatal mistake of almost forgetting that Eisuke Hondou was kind of terrifying. After all, if Kir's reflexes hadn't been as good as they had been…

He really had to stop underestimating people.

The Tube was incredibly crowded and unpleasant-Hattori hated the crowds, and Shinichi wasn't sure if he or Kaito was less fond of the fact that they were hemmed in by a group of people they didn't recognize, with no room to maneuver if the situation turned ugly. Eisuke seemed fine, at least.

They made it to the police station, somehow, and Hattori calmed slightly the moment they passed over the threshold. Kaito, on the other hand, went on high alert. A police officer's kid in his natural habitat and a thief surrounded by natural enemies-it only made sense, Shinichi supposed.

"We are looking..um..Julie Cassidy," Kaito said, or at least tried to say, in English, to the officer at the desk.

To the poor man, it probably sounded more like a scrambled batch of vaguely linked phonemes.

"The h*** was that?" Hattori demanded, in Japanese. "It sure wasn't English!"

"Hattori-san, be nice," Eisuke said. "But, Kaito, you should have asked someone else to do the talking if you knew your accent needed that much work. Also, you forgot the preposition."

"Prepositions are like après and avant, right?" Kaito asked. "That's right, English has those too, dangit, for, that's the one I was supposed to use. I...don't speak English a lot. We mostly read it in class, and it's not like I ever get to practice speaking it outside of class…"

"Après and avant...you speak French?" Shinichi asked.

"Of course; that's where Mom and Dad met," Kaito said. "Mom's family lives there, at least some of them do. So sometimes we videochat in French."

"But your English is horrific," Hattori said.

"I'd like to see you do better," Kaito huffed.

Hattori smirked and approached the desk. "Please excuse my friend," he said, in remarkably clear English. "The Tokyo school system does not have a very good English curriculum. Schools in Osaka are better. He was asking if we could meet with Officer Julie Cassidy. She should expect us."

"The schools in Osaka are better," Eisuke breathed.

Kaito stared, then looked over at Shinichi. "Did you know he could do that?"

Shinichi smirked. "He's better than me, too. I forget articles all the time, and you've heard my accent."

"Articles?" Kaito asked. "Okay, those I don't even remember."

"A, an, the," Eisuke said in English. Then, in Japanese, "My old enemies."

"I hate English," Kaito said passionately.

Eisuke's grin had an edge. "At least you don't have to speak it all the time."

"I'm buying you chocolate when we get lunch," Kaito said. "A lot of it."

"Um…"

"Don't try to argue with me, I've decided," Kaito said, with a nod of determination.

"Hey, you guys are being rude!" Hattori said. "Wow, is this what it's like ta be everyone else? It's weird." He switched to English. "Officer Cassidy wants to take us back to the forensics lab."

Shinichi glanced over at him, and winced. Officer Cassidy was apparently a small woman with lacquer-brown corkscrew curls and skin near Hattori's tone, currently occupied with glaring murder at the three of them and being even more dwarfed by Hattori than Eisuke.

"Sorry, Officer," Shinichi said quickly. He turned to glare at Kaito. "We're coming."

"What?" Kaito asked, attempting English again. "I did...something?"

"Your mother warned me you hadn't practiced English much together but this is ridiculous," Cassidy said, shaking her head. "Come on, the sooner we do this the sooner my poker debt is clear."

"Your what?" the desk clerk asked loudly.

"Never you mind," Cassidy chirped, taking off down the hall.

"She's Mom's friend all right," Kaito muttered in Japanese.

Eisuke shushed him.

The forensics lab was bright with fluorescent light, and surprisingly quiet.

"I'm the first in this shift," Cassidy said. "The night shift just left, of course, but there's a little bit of a lull right now, at least this time of the week. So, we get a bit of privacy." She grinned, smile fanged, then shoved a finger straight into Kaito's chest. "Which means you can explain what on Earth is going on here."

Kaito blinked, then glanced at Eisuke.

"Did you catch any of that?" Eisuke asked in Japanese, a bit despairing.

"Um, a few words?" Kaito answered in the same language

Eisuke paraphrased, and Kaito's expression sharpened.

"Never you mind," he said, carefully mimicking Cassidy's earlier statement.

"What are you even looking for?" Cassidy asked. "I mean, you're here-"

There was something odd about that emphasis, but Shinichi couldn't put a finger on it.

"Hakuba Saguru," Hattori said, seeming just as confused. "He's a detective. He's our age. He used to live in England."

"That's not whose blood sample your mother sent me," Cassidy said, sounding confused.

Kaito flashed her KID's smile. "Yes, it is."

"No, it's not," Cassidy said. "You're not making sense!"

Kaito frowned, and turned to Eisuke, then spoke in Japanese. "I don't know how to say the quote about 'six impossible things before breakfast,' in English," he said.

Eisuke blinked. "Um, I don't know that one," he whispered back. He turned to Cassidy. "He's saying something about six things that aren't before breakfast? And it's a quote?"

"'Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast,'" Heiji quoted. "It's from, um...not Fushigi no Kuni no Arisu, the other one, with the mirror…"

"Oh!" Cassidy said. "Through the Looking-Glass." She narrowed her eyes at Kaito. "So, you want me to just believe you, is that it?"

Kaito shrugged, his smile only faltering for half a second before he grinned even more widely.

Cassidy frowned and crossed her arms.

Kaito kept grinning.

"I don't think he's going to break first," Eisuke said.

Cassidy huffed in frustration. "So let's say that I did find Hakuba Saguru's blood. Which is not what happened, and your friend knows it. What do you need to know, beyond that?"

"Where you found it," Hattori said.

"Anything you found out about him from your, what's the phrase...forensic analysis," Eisuke added. "You would have had to look into the spatter for the official case, right?"

"Yes," Cassidy said. "Where did you learn English? Your accent's very odd."

Eisuke and Heiji blinked at once, but Heiji was the first to actually speak.

"He's got an accent?" he demanded.

"Yes, you both sound like Japanese people who've learned to speak American English, but he's got a….ah, I used to know the word for this, when the vowels are long….it's not important," Cassidy waved a hand in dismissal. "He sounds odder."

Eisuke shrugged. "I haven't even been in Virginia a whole year, there's no way…"

"Okay, no, I can hear it now," Kaito said. "When you say, uh, Virginia."

"Seriously?" Heiji asked, tone strangled and high-pitched to the point of a whine. "He has an accent? And I don't?"

Eisuke giggled. "Would you have been like this if I'd lived in Osaka with Dad while he was in Japan?" He stumbled a little over "was," but held up pretty well through the sentence, considering.

Shinichi paused to swallow some leftover guilt as Heiji blinked.

He recovered in a few seconds, though, and his answering smile was crooked, and deliberately gentle. "No! Then it would have been...uh...we would have been the Osaka Team. Much better than Tokyo." He all but sneered at Shinichi and Kaito.

Shinichi smirked back, confident that Kaito was doing the same.

Kaito sighed. "Case. Deadline." He glanced at Cassidy. "Please?"

His English had gotten a lot clearer. Except...he could hear the pitch and cadence jumping around. He wasn't actually pronouncing the words himself; he was mimicking the way he'd heard the phonemes pronounced by the others. Kaito had realized the weakness only a few minutes ago, and already he was trying to maneuver around it. As expected of the Kaitou KID.

Cassidy raised an eyebrow. "If it's really that urgent…"

"He is in danger," Kaito said.

"Is he?" Cassidy asked, eyes never leaving Kaito.

"Six impossible things," Kaito said, in a perfect impression of Heiji, down to the pronunciation.

Cassidy sighed. "Okay, so here's what I know. Whatever happened to injure...whoever this blood came from happened after the murder. The forensics people on scene could tell, because the blood was less dried than it should have been, if it was before. Also, someone saw someone other than the suspect with blood on them near where we made the arrest."

"So they aren't arrested?" Shinichi asked.

Cassidy shook her head. "They threw the coat while we had police in pursuit. Probably trying to slow the chasers down. It was enough to prove they were the murderer, at least."

"If you have a copy of the eyewitness statement, we would like to have it," Heiji said.

"You mean, from them seeing him?" Cassidy said. "It wasn't a very detailed description. What good will it do you?"

Heiji looked at Shinichi, who looked at KID, who looked at Eisuke.

"Why are you looking at me?" Eisuke asked.

"You're the one who believed he was a woman for a few weeks!" Kaito hissed, in Japanese. "Just tell her that!"

"You're the one who believed he was a law-abiding teenage detective whose only interest in KID was catching you," Eisuke countered, in the same language. "And that lasted more than a year."

"You're being rude, and also trying not to tell me something else," Cassidy said. "Tell me now, or I don't tell you the interesting parts of the forensics."

"We don't know what he looks like at the moment," Eisuke said. "You said you know Chikage-san, right?"

Cassidy nodded.

"Her husband was his teacher for disguises," Eisuke said.

Cassidy winced. Clearly she did at least have some idea who Chikage had been married to.

Kaito just looked at him expectantly. Eisuke wilted.

"He convinced me he was a woman for a few weeks," Eisuke said.

Cassidy blinked, then stared at Kaito. "What kind of game are you running?"

Kaito just shook his head, grimacing.

"I don't know what he's not telling you, but he's not going to tell you unless you corner him," Heiji said. "And you haven't yet."

Cassidy sighed, then pulled a manilla folder out of a drawer beneath the desk. She spread out the photos within on top of it, then pointed to the one nearest Shinichi, depicting a tan coat's sleeve, streaked reddish-brown.

"This is a picture of the coat at normal magnification," she said. "Look at it. The blood is in small, smeared patches and streaks. He was bleeding, but it wasn't a lot. And the pattern doesn't indicate spatter."

"It looks like something else with blood pressed against it," Heiji said slowly.

Cassidy nodded. "We tested it in the lab; the stains aren't deep. The blood didn't soak in more than a millimeter, most places, though it did soak in a bit. Our best guess is that he and the murderer fought-why, we don't know."

"He might have seen the crime scene," Eisuke suggested.

"Then the criminal would have been unconscious and left for the police," Shinichi said, thoughtful. "What do you know about the murderer?"

"We already solved the case," Cassidy said, tone warning.

Hattori blinked. "You think he was after him for another reason?"

Shinichi nodded. "We know why he's here, don't we?"

Heiji stiffened, glanced at Cassidy, and said, "Isn't she in danger, then?"

"What?" Cassidy said.

"They probably aren't...alcohol," Shinichi said carefully. "They might not even know what they are involved with. She will be fine if she does not ask."

Cassidy crossed her arms. "That means you don't want to hear about the glass fragments, do you?"

"Glass?" Kaito asked.

"Look here," Cassidy said, gesturing toward one of the images. "This was also found on the suspect's clothes. Specifically, the sleeves."

"Same place as the blood," Heiji said.

She nodded. "That's right. There are tiny bits of glass all over the sleeves of the jacket. They're all flat, so it's likely that they're from a window or a glass door...something that might have broken during a struggle. What you four would be interested in is that there's almost no glass on the victim. None of their wounds came from being cut by glass, either."

"So the glass wasn't from struggling with the victim," Hattori said slowly.

Cassidy nodded. "It's our best guess at where the blood came from."

"Not your only one," Eisuke said flatly. "What's the other?"

"The murder weapon was a gun," Cassidy said.

Eisuke frowned.

"It was the glass," Kaito said, something dark under his smile. "His...hurt. Not the gun. Glass."

Cassidy just stared at him.

"He knows...to not be where the bullet is," Kaito said. "Very good with that."

"Are you sure?" Heiji asked.

Kaito nodded.

Shinichi sighed. "No explanation?"

"Can't," Kaito said. "Privacy."

Heiji groaned audibly.

Eisuke turned to Cassidy. "If we could have a copy of that eyewitness statement, and any other case files you can let us have...that would help."

Cassidy nodded. "I don't know what you mean to do, but good luck doing it."

Eisuke grinned. "Thank you, officer."

"And Kaito?" Cassidy said sharply.

Kaito looked up.

"Tell your mother she owes me an explanation, a clear poker debt, and a round of drinks," the woman said clearly. "In that order."

Kaito's grin turned strained, even as Heiji muttered, "Wouldn't mind the first and last myself," in Japanese.

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A/N: Warnings for canon-typical discussions of blood and forensics, as well as Shinichi's terrible coping mechanisms.

The quote is indeed from Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There. Fushigi no Kuni no Arisu is the Japanese title of Alice in Wonderland.