Chapter 88: Solving the Case
The metallic doors of the elevator slid shut, sealing away the quiet hallway of Jodie-sensei's apartment. Natsume leaned against the cool steel wall, her gaze shifting toward the dark-skinned detective from Osaka.
"Oh, right, Heiji. Where is Kazuha? Didn't she come to Tokyo with you?"
Recalling the recent school festival, Natsume found the girl's absence glaringly odd. Weren't those two practically joined at the hip?
"Kazuha?" Hattori blinked. Then, the color drained from his face, leaving him looking distinctly ashen beneath his tan. "Oh no!" He slapped a hand against his forehead, his voice echoing in the confined space. "I completely forgot! I had plans with her today!"
Conan stared at him, his mouth twitching in flat disbelief. 'Seriously?'the shrunken detective thought.'If you had evening plans, why on earth did you suggest dragging us to Jodie-sensei's place?'
Natsume offered a silent, sympathetic prayer for the Osaka girl. Kazuha truly had it rough, falling for a dense idiot like Hattori. Sometimes, Natsume genuinely wondered if the Osakan cared more about Kudo than his actual childhood friend. He certainly had no qualms about ditching Kazuha the moment a mystery—or Kudo—was involved.
Hattori scrambled to pull out his phone, flipping it open to check the glowing screen. His shoulders slumped. It was almost eight o'clock. He had promised to meet Kazuha at a specific restaurant right at eight, and from this distance, there was absolutely no way he could make it in time.
He stared at the zero signal bars on his screen. The elevator's metal box blocked everything. He would just have to call her the second they stepped outside and pray she wouldn't murder him.
The ground floor lobby doors slid open, letting in the cool evening breeze. Conan and the others stepped out onto the sidewalk, lingering near the entrance to wait for Hattori to finish his impending apology.
"Eh? Wait!"
Hattori's call had barely connected. Before a single syllable could leave his mouth, a sudden, forceful yank on the back of his jacket dragged him backward. Caught completely off guard, he stumbled out of the way.
Beside his feet, Conan experienced a similar fate. Nahida's small hand clamped around his wrist, pulling the boy detective back several paces with surprising strength.
A sharp whistling sound cut through the air. Smash! Something plummeted from the sky, shattering against the concrete mere inches from where Hattori had just been standing. Squinting through the dim streetlights, they realized it was a shattered cell phone.
But before anyone could even process the broken device, a much larger shadow eclipsed the streetlamps overhead.
CRACK!
A heavy, sickening thud echoed through the quiet street. This time, it was a person.
Hattori's eyes widened in horror. He barked a hasty, disjointed apology into his phone, completely ignoring Kazuha's confused shouting from the other end, and snapped it shut. Without missing a beat, he and Conan sprinted toward the broken figure bleeding out onto the pavement.
High above the gruesome scene, Jodie Starling stood in her quiet apartment. Having just seen her guests off, she conducted a quick sweep of her living room. Satisfied, she reached for her phone, intending to dial Shuichi to report the evening's rather interesting developments. Just as her thumb hovered over the call button, the sharp chime of her doorbell shattered the silence.
Frowning slightly, she approached the door and peered through the peephole. Her eyebrows rose in surprise. She unlatched the lock and pulled the door open, finding Natsume, Conan, and the rest of the group standing in the hallway.
Hattori and Conan quickly brought her up to speed. A man had just fallen to his death, and the trajectory pointed directly to the apartment right next to hers. The police were already swarming the ground floor, securing the perimeter. The detectives had rushed back upstairs to secure the victim's room and to ask if she had heard anything unusual through the walls.
Jodie offered a brief account of the quiet evening she had experienced, noting nothing out of the ordinary. Then, flashing a bright, curious smile, she claimed she simply had to see Japanese detectives in action. Using that convenient excuse, she tagged along as they moved to investigate the adjacent apartment.
Hattori slid the spare key—hastily borrowed from the victim's distraught girlfriend downstairs—into the lock. With a sharp click, the door swung open, revealing a dark, disheveled living space. The group stepped inside, their eyes immediately scanning the shadows for anomalies. Jodie, ever the helpful teacher, produced a compact camera, its flash illuminating the room in brief, stark bursts as she documented the scene.
Conan and Hattori gravitated straight toward the bedroom. The window stood wide open, the chilly night air billowing the curtains inward. The fabric near the windowsill was violently torn, the curtain rings snapped from their track. The two detectives locked eyes, a silent, grim understanding passing between them. This was no suicide or simple accident. It was murder.
Near the doorway, Natsume caught a subtle glint of glass out of the corner of her eye. Jodie's camera lens was angled just a fraction too far toward the group, capturing them in the frame alongside the evidence. Natsume's instincts flared. She casually shifted her weight, turning her back to the lens and stepping into a shadowed corner, ensuring her face remained completely obscured.
Ever since discovering that Aether was somewhere in this world, Natsume had become hyper-vigilant about cameras. She shared an uncanny, obvious resemblance to her troublesome older brother. The fact that the idiot hadn't reached out to her yet strongly implied he was operating under a highly sensitive, likely dangerous identity. If her face ended up in the wrong hands or on the wrong database, it could easily compromise him. She absolutely refused to be the weak link that caused him trouble.
Down on the street level, Inspector Megure had just finished his preliminary questioning of the three primary suspects: the victim's girlfriend and two of his drinking colleagues. When the suspects mentioned that a dark-skinned teenager and a little boy had already grilled them with the exact same questions, Megure's mustache twitched. He instantly deduced that amateur detectives were prowling the scene, likely already contaminating the victim's apartment upstairs.
Fearing the worst for his crime scene, the burly inspector abandoned the sidewalk and charged up the stairs as fast as his legs could carry him.
"Hoo... hoo..." He arrived at the open apartment door, chest heaving, sweat beading on his forehead. "I should have known... it's you guys."
Officer Takagi trailed right behind him, equally winded. They found the familiar group standing near the bedroom doorway, expressions deeply contemplative. Megure let out a heavy sigh of relief, adjusting his trench coat. "Thank goodness you haven't gone in and touched anything yet. Step aside, please. Leave the rest to us police."
Hattori shot the inspector a flat look. "What are you talking about, Inspector? We've already investigated the whole place."
Jodie cheerfully raised her digital camera, the flash winking merrily. "Yep! And I took lots of photos to document everything, too!"
Megure's face fell.
Seeing the police officially take over, Natsume decided it was time to wrap this up. There was no point in dragging out a deduction show when there were potential Primogems on the line. She stepped forward, her voice cutting clearly through the room. "Inspector Megure, this is a premeditated murder. And I already know exactly who the culprit is."
Conan and Heiji snapped their heads toward her, their jaws practically hitting the floor. 'You've got to be kidding me,'their synchronized expressions screamed.'Weren't we all investigating this together? How did you figure it out so fast?!'
Conan recovered first. He was somewhat mentally prepared for this kind of shock. During their past outings, Natsume had a terrifying habit of pinpointing the culprit before he even finished gathering all the clues. It had dealt a few heavy blows to his pride initially, but by now, he had built up a reluctant immunity to her terrifying intuition.
Heiji Hattori, however, possessed no such immunity. He wasn't familiar with Natsume's terrifying efficiency. During the recent school festival, she had mostly stayed on the sidelines regarding the actual deduction. While he knew she held a detective license, the rumors he had heard painted her as a glorified errand runner—finding lost cats, delivering takeout, and occasionally beating up street thugs. He had honestly assumed she was just a slightly more competent version of Kogoro Mouri.
To have her beat him to the punch so effortlessly stung his Osakan pride. Hattori crossed his arms, his eyes narrowing in stubborn skepticism. He was more than a little unwilling to concede defeat. He needed to hear this so-called deduction for himself.
"The killer is you," Natsume declared, raising a hand and pointing directly at one of the suspects who had just been escorted upstairs by the officers. "Mr. Kawakami."
Kawakami flinched. His face was flushed a deep, unhealthy red, and the sour stench of cheap alcohol clung to his clothes. He immediately puffed out his chest, his voice booming defensively. "What kind of nonsense are you spouting?! I wasn't even here when Takai fell! I just called him on the phone. How the hell can you blame me for him slipping?!"
Natsume's expression remained perfectly calm, her golden eyes locking onto the sweating man. "You killed Takai through the phone."
Kawakami let out a harsh, mocking sneer. "How can a phone kill someone? Are you insane? What, are you saying I cursed him out over the line, and he got so depressed he decided to jump? And that makes it my fault?"
"Of course it's not just that," Natsume replied smoothly. "Actually, Hattori here gave me the final piece of the puzzle."
She shifted her gaze toward the dark-skinned detective. Hattori blinked, utterly bewildered. He pointed a finger at his own chest, racking his brain. What on earth had he done to help solve this case? He hadn't even finished looking at the window!
"Earlier," Natsume explained, her voice steady and clear, "Hattori needed to make an urgent call to Kazuha. But because the signal inside the elevator was dead, he had to step outside the building to get reception. Mr. Kawakami, you exploited that exact same principle to murder Takai."
"I see..." Conan murmured, his glasses flashing under the overhead light.
Hattori's eyes widened as the pieces violently snapped into place. Recalling the faint scrape marks on the floorboards near the foot of the bed, both detectives instantly unraveled the killer's gruesome mechanical trick.
While drinking in the apartment earlier, Kawakami had slipped into the bedroom under the guise of using the restroom. He dragged the bed away from its usual position. After leaving the apartment, he called Takai. Knowing the apartment had dead zones, Kawakami likely claimed he couldn't hear Takai clearly, forcing the heavily intoxicated man to wander toward the window for better reception. Disoriented by the alcohol and relying on sheer muscle memory, Takai had attempted to sit on what he thought was the balcony ledge, completely unaware that the bed's new position had misaligned his spatial awareness. He hadn't sat on a balcony ledge. He had sat on the edge of an unobstructed, fatal drop.
Kawakami's sneer faltered for a fraction of a second, but he quickly recovered, scoffing loudly. "These are all just your wild guesses! Where is the evidence? Without hard proof, this is nothing but baseless slander! As for the bed, yeah, I moved it! But Takai asked me to help him move it earlier! How was I supposed to know the idiot would get drunk and fall out the window because of it?"
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