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The half-naked girl on the screen stirred. When she opened her eyes, they were unfocused; after a moment, they focused, flickered around the semi-dark room and widened at the camera for a moment.
Kazetani Yatsuhiro grinned to himself as he recorded that, cutting off before she started to scowl. This would get his quarry running, he was sure. The blood on her legs and on the floor looked worse than three hours ago. Very good. He pushed the clip to a newly-created tube account then posted the link on the Nichiuri TV twitter with a riddle. He laughed to himself. He would get him, that Kudou guy, he was sure.
A suppressed growl made him start. Before he could even begin to turn around, the cold metal of a gun pressed into the back of his neck. He froze.
“Where is she?” an ice-cold female voice asked as a hand gripped his hair.
With an effort, Vermouth kept her temper reigned in. Now wasn’t the time. Ran looked like she was barely holding on, though she could see her muscles twitching, like she was trying to free her hands.
Kazetani had frozen, but at her question, he laughed. “You really want to know that?”
Vermouth rammed his head into the table. “I’m really out of patience,” she warned.
“You can’t be worse than Gin,” he said in reply.
Vermouth froze for a split-second, before she shot his right little toe off, returning the gun to his neck. Kazetani cried out.
“You are wrong,” she replied with a calm she did not feel. “So Gin told you to kill that girl?”
“No,” Kazetani croaked. “He said I had five days to kill Kudou Shinichi or he would kill me.”
The idiot. “So, how do I get her out?” Vermouth asked, putting her stiletto heel on his left hamstring and pressing down.
Kazetani laughed again, sounding strangled. “Kaisai-yu Sento, in the cellars,” he said.
Vermouth pressed down some more into his hamstring. “You know, I can do to you what you did to her before I go look.”
He shuddered.
“And make sure you die excruciatingly slow if I don’t come back.” She gripped a garotte from her pocket and fixed him to the chair in its strangle grip. She didn’t dare look at the screen again, she was too close to losing it.
As she secured the thin rope around his throat, he started to whine. “Please, I had to do it.”
“Do what?” she asked as she tied the end of the rope to the chair, taut enough to press on his Adam’s apple.
“The guy is so smart; I booby-trapped the whole place.” He wheezed. “You can get in, but when you try to save the girl, boom!” He laughed breathlessly, as if he’d won.
Kazetani still laughed when his hands were tied to the chair. He could still see the girl bleeding out on the screen. If it was the last thing he saw, why not? Then the gun was pressed into his crotch and the voice behind him demanded: “Tell me everything you did.”
He shuddered. Gin was crazy, but her hate was personal. He didn’t doubt she could make him beg for mercy.
“Three … two …”
He started to describe which bombs he had set where and how they were triggered.
***
Kaito was scanning through the two-days-ago archives of any surveillance cameras near Teitan High he could get into. When his phone rang from an unknown number, he considered not getting it for a second. But you never knew what Lady Luck might be up to.
“Kuroba-kun?” said a female voice he could not place when he picked up the phone. “I was a friend of your father’s. I need a magician’s help to save someone.”
“Ah,” Kaito said, confused, as his message app pinged with two new messages. One was a streaming link, the other a voice file. “I’m rather busy already with...” he began to say when she cut him off.
“I thought you might, given who she is,” the female voice added meaningfully. “Does the link work?”
Oh. Kaito clicked the link and saw Mouri Ran, bound and bleeding. It clearly was a live feed, not a copy of the videos posted at Nichiuri TV. “How? ...” he spluttered, too shocked to find words.
“Can you get a drone into the cellars of Kaisai-yu Sento?” the female voice asked. “A small one shouldn’t trigger any of the bombs.” Kaito shook his head dizzily, trying to follow. After a moment of thought, he grabbed his newest drone, the one he had constructed so his doves could inconspicuously place them where he needed them, and ran up to the roof. “On it.”
“The voice file is the kidnapper describing which bombs he set. But I wouldn’t put it past him to leave something out. Like a pressure trigger on Ran-san’s seat or something like that.”
The woman sounded calm in a way that drove shivers down Kaito’s spine. How had someone like that been friends with his father?
He sent Tano-chan off with a whispered word, then told the unknown woman: “We’ll know in about an hour.” He hastened down the steps, sure he should be able to pull out the blueprints of the place from somewhere and start planning.
“I’ll call back.” The line went dead.
Listening to the audio file, Kaito drew in the bombs on the plan. The description definitely fit with the building plans. Damn.
Waiting for the signal of his drone to signify that it reached its destination, he started to compose a text to Kudou. He should know. Or should he? If that woman was right, their chances to save Ran-san were extremely slim.
His laptop beeped twice, and Kaito opened the drone navigation app. He set it to record and started to lower the drone through the chimney into the building. As he seemed to be low enough, he started to scan the walls for an opening, finding the former burning chamber half-open.
He landed the drone and made it crawl outside with retracted rotors. A few meters to the right, the drone indicated a faint electric signal with the signature of a weight sensor. Kaito cursed loudly. This fit with the depressing description of the booby-traps.
The last door on the left was closed, but faint light filtered through the air slits at the top of the door. Again, Kaito retracted the rotors and the drone crawled in. A part of the slit’s frame fell off and made a sound as it hit the floor. The infrared camera made it much easier to see Ran-san than the stream did. Her head came up as she looked into the direction of the sound. His infrared readings indicated she was already hypothermic. On a tripod, a mobile phone was filming her. Carefully keeping out of that camera’s viewport, he circled above Ran twice. He took a deep breath, feeling desperate. The drone indicated a pressure-sensor near Ran-san, so that woman had been right.
Ran’s eyes had followed his drone for a moment and then scowled at the tripod camera, struggling a bit. Kaito appreciated her quick thinking.
He hit the automatic setting to recall the drone to the top of the chimney to gain time to think.
He had no idea how to disarm the bomb Ran-san was sitting on. You’d need a larger drone with better equipment for that. Maybe the bomb squad had something like that? They might get them in through the sewer system. If they didn’t run out of time.
The best was to dump the drone recording on the Meitantei to take it to the police. Oh, and maybe contact Scary-san first to keep him from running into the trap. She’d probably have to tie him down or something. Kaito pressed his right thumb and forefinger against his eyeballs for a moment using the uncomfortable feeling to stop seeing the images in his mind. “Lady luck, help me.”
The upload had finished.
Scary-san replied “I’ll try.”
His phone rang. Meitantei. Kaito gulped before he took the call.
“How do you know?” asked a breathless voice over the sounds of a scuffle. “Stop struggling Kudou,” he heard Scary-san’s voice in the background.
“A woman called. She said she was a friend of my father’s,” he replied.
“Vermouth,” Kudou hissed and all struggling in the background stopped.
“Gin knows?” Scary-san sounded … scared.
“It seems someone asked someone to kill Kudou, and he thought kidnapping his girlfriend was the way to go,” Kaito replied as evenly as he could. Scary-san being scared was a new and unwelcome concept. The line just went dead.
Kaito contemplated calling back when his doorbell started to ring. And ring, and ring.
As he opened the door, Akako gave him a dirty look and stomped in. “Took you long enough. Lucifer said you want to save a crow’s angel and need help.”
“Thank you, Lady Luck,” he breathed.
Akako stared at him. Since when did he go along with any of her mentions of Lucifer?
He grabbed her arm and dragged her upstairs to his laptop. She stopped short at the sight of the stream still playing on the laptop. He felt her rage like a wave hitting him, but she only said: “If you already know where she is, why do you need my help?”
Kaito explained. Silence. They both jumped when his phone rang.
“And?” the female voice asked.
“Verified. Working on it,” he replied just as tersely.
“There really is a bomb under her,” the voice replied. “He set it on a three second delay just for the fun of it.” Whoever she was, he wasn’t going anywhere near her. Ever.
“A three second delay, she said,” he told Akako.
Akako perked up, then her brown eyes became thoughtful. “Do you trust whoever that was?”
“Hell, no.” Kaito started to pace, three steps in the direction of his father’s life-sized photo on the wall, three steps back looking at Akako. “But without her info, we still wouldn’t know where Ran-san is.”
“And it’s unlikely they were after you from the start and confused her with Aoko-chan?” she asked with all the anger she had for him.
He shook his head. “Kudou seems to know who she is.”
She nodded. “I have an idea, but we have to cover up my involvement.”
***
The ready room was buzzing around him as Takagi watched the stream of Mouri-san in a dark cellar. The link to it had come with the drone data and the carefully marked blueprint of the derelict Kaisai-yu Sento. From an anonymous source that had contacted Kudou, as it seemed.
To his right, the bomb squad was discussing possible methods to defuse the bombs. Satou was checking the surveillance tapes for the area for the day Mouri-san had vanished. Everybody was the kind of busy that meant they didn’t have much hope but couldn’t not try.
After a moment of though, he walked out into the corridor and made a single call. He was back before anyone noticed.
***
An hour later, Conan stared at the text. “Behind Nishikamata, 5-chōme−10−8. In 60 minutes.“
***
Ran felt the dark creeping up on her. She was drifting in and out. She couldn’t even muster the energy to scowl at the camera any more. She wondered if she had imagined the tiny drone. Her hope had been up for some time after she saw it. But each time a nightmare shuddered her awake, she felt colder and it felt darker. Was this really it?
With a small pouf, there suddenly was a woman in the room, hovering on a broomstick behind the tripod? She was clearly hallucinating. The woman gestured at the mobile, and gestured at Ran. The ropes tying her to the metal bars that were welded to the drum she sat on fell away. She was hallucinating. It couldn’t be anything else. The woman grabbed her, and suddenly she was outside, in a street, the moon shining brightly and a male figure in black clothing caught her. That face. “Shinichi?” she murmured.
“RAN!” she heard Conan shout just as a massive explosion went off somewhere nearby.
***
Two days later, everyone was still busy going over the bombed-out building, Chief Inspector Megure put in a commendation for forward thinking in Takagi’s record. His warning to the hospital to secure some blood of Ran’s type was, in the end, the most important thing anyone at the police station did that day to save Ran’s life.