"Professor, if it really is possible to alter a fetus's human genes and combine them with animal genes, could that fetus end up with enormous physical strength?"
In the passenger seat of the Volkswagen Beetle, Conan rubbed the bump on his head and asked Professor Agasa, who was driving.
This was not Professor Agasa's field of research, but he still answered helplessly, "Shin... Conan, have you forgotten about Ran?"
"Ran is mixed with a unicorn?"
"..."
Did Yimi's punch knock you stupid?
In any case, if Ai was the person who developed that drug, then she could develop an antidote... yeah, right.
The Organization's research on that drug had not begun with Miyano Shiho. How could she possibly remember such a massive body of data?
The pharmaceutical facility where she had carried out her research had been burned down. The other places connected to her work had probably met the same fate.
But Ai vaguely remembered that she had once sent her sister the wrong disk, and that the person who had kept disks for her sister was a university professor who had traveled with her at the time.
So they were now on their way to find that professor. Night was about to fall, but because they were afraid something unexpected might happen, they had decided to come the very same day.
"Hoo~"
Exhausted after a full day, Yimi had fallen asleep in the back seat, her head resting on Ai's shoulder.
She had forced her way onto this trip. Nobody had originally intended to bring along the one genuine child in the group.
The still-unsatisfied Conan had asked whether she had ever seen people dressed entirely in black. Yimi immediately thought of the bad guys from the SAO world. Convinced she must not have killed them all, she planted her head against Professor Agasa's stomach and stubbornly pushed until they agreed to take her along.
Ai held Yimi's hand and glanced down at her wrist. "The watch is just an ordinary children's watch too. Satisfied now, Great Detective?"
There was no way to hide much else inside a child's clothes. Having become a child again himself, Conan knew very well how little privacy children had around adults. If Yimi really carried some hidden device, Kisaki Eri or Ran would definitely have discovered it.
But Conan did not answer Ai. Compared with Yimi, whom he had known for quite a while, he was far more suspicious of Ai, an actual former member of the Black Organization, and had little desire to engage with her.
Ai noticed this, but after being the one answering questions all evening, she still had not satisfied her own curiosity. "Did you realize I had also been shrunk by that drug because of the shot I fired?"
"Hm?" Conan waved a hand a few times. "No. Mostly because Yimi said you looked like somebody's mom, which made me wonder if you were an old auntie who had turned into a kid."
Ai folded her arms. "How rude. I'm only eighteen in reality."
She looked displeased, but she still did not shrug Yimi off her shoulder even though Yimi was the one responsible for the insult.
No one spoke again for the rest of the drive.
When they arrived, Conan deliberately had Professor Agasa park some distance away. He had not intended to wake Yimi, but the rule that "cats remain alert even while asleep" chose this moment to prove itself.
"Professor Hirota, I've come to visit." By coincidence, this professor had the same surname as Miyano Akemi's alias and the horse-racing enthusiast who had been killed.
They rang the doorbell, but nobody answered.
"Hawww~" Yimi grabbed Professor Agasa's clothes and yawned.
The professor smiled helplessly. "That's why I told you to stay asleep in the car."
At the same moment the doorbell rang, the little black silhouette inside the house, separated from them by two doors, paused with one hand raised halfway. Then anger won out, and he brought it down anyway.
After impulsively doing the deed, the black silhouette stared at the fallen Hirota while his brain froze for a moment. Then his mystery-story instincts awakened, and he immediately came up with the perfect method for clearing himself of suspicion.
"Professor, ram the door!"
But Conan had already sensed something was wrong outside and shouted while simultaneously searching for an unsecured window.
The professor had spoken with Professor Hirota by phone shortly before they came. Knowing visitors were on their way, Hirota could not possibly have left.
Professor Agasa looked down at Conan.
I invented those power-enhancing shoes for you, and yet every day you make other people break down doors.
Inside, the black silhouette jolted. He no longer had time to carry out the elaborate method he had planned, so he hurriedly knocked things all over the floor and climbed out through a window.
He even came face-to-face with Conan as Conan scaled the wall, though in the darkness Conan saw little more than a black silhouette with shifty eyes.
"Stop!"
Naturally, shouting was not going to stop him.
Conan clung to the window and looked inside. "Damn it! Professor, call the police!"
He climbed through the window and checked Professor Hirota's breathing. The professor had only been knocked unconscious. Had the culprit failed to use much force because they arrived at exactly the right moment?
Was it someone from that Organization? No. If it were the Organization, they should not be this incompetent.
Ten minutes later, an ambulance, the police, and Professor Hirota's wife, who had been out, all arrived.
"Other than this gentleman, was anyone else supposed to visit tonight?" Local Inspector Yokomizo lowered his head as he questioned the professor's wife.
She looked down. "I think he said three or four people would be coming to see him tonight..."
"Um, excuse me. What happened?" A young man who had just entered spoke up.
"Mrrrow!" The drowsy little cat suddenly cried out, startling Ai, who was standing closest to her.
This was the first time Ai had ever seen a human being physically puff up like an alarmed cat. She hurriedly looked down to check whether she had accidentally stepped on Yimi's tail.
"And you are?" Inspector Yokomizo asked.
The young man looked at him in confusion. "I'm Shirakura. I arranged to visit Professor Hirota today..."
"Diego!" Yimi hid behind Ai and pointed at his nose, exposing his true identity.
Ai turned to look at her in confusion.
This child was trembling?
Of course Yimi was scared. More accurately, she had developed a psychological trauma.
This was terrifying. What was going on? Diego's true body had already been captured in the previous world, and her younger aunt had personally kept watch over it!
"Diego?" Inspector Yokomizo crouched down, intending to ask the little girl for details.
Conan hurriedly pulled her aside. "Ahaha, she's always mistaking people for someone else."
She had mistaken Haibara for somebody's mother before too—though Haibara's claim that she was genuinely eighteen years old had turned out to be true.
Inspector Yokomizo nodded and looked back at the professor's wife. "Other than Shirakura-san, were there any other visitors expected tonight?"
"Well..."
"The culprit is definitely Diego!" Yimi pointed confidently at Shirakura.
"Huh?" Shirakura took a confused step backward.
"Why do you think that, little girl? Did you see what the culprit looked like?" Taking her seriously, Inspector Yokomizo crouched down again.
Yimi shook her head. "Diego has never been a good person."
"..."
Conan pulled her aside again with an awkward expression. "What cartoon did you get that from this time...?"
Inspector Yokomizo stood back up helplessly and told the professor's wife, "There's nothing else we can do. We'll have to wait for Professor Hirota to wake up and identify the attacker himself."
What the hell? That blow didn't kill him?
Shirakura froze. Remembering the instant of panic caused by the doorbell and realizing there was no way he could escape now, he lowered his head and confessed with a mixture of terror and relief. "There's no need. I did it."
Conan: "?"
It really was you?!
Shirakura clenched his fists and painfully explained his motive. "I work as a model now. A magazine is planning an article about the unexpected sides of models, so I remembered a photo from my school festival where I cross-dressed and posed with Professor Hirota. I knew he had a habit of saving photographs on disks, so I came to borrow it..."
"But the package he sent me included a note saying, 'You don't look any better than this,' and the photo inside was an ordinary picture of my old face. It was what I looked like before plastic surgery."
He had wanted the cross-dressing photo because the makeup hid the difference, only for the professor to send him that picture instead.
There was no way he could upload evidence of his plastic surgery, so he came in person to ask Professor Hirota to lend him the cross-dressing photo.
But the old man had been completely drunk. He said he did not remember where it was, then said he could find the photo he had mailed Shirakura right away and asked whether he should send it to him again. Shirakura lost control of his emotions and struck him.
Professor Agasa frowned. "Shirakura-san, don't take this the wrong way, but I think Professor Hirota sent you that photograph because he wanted you to stop disguising yourself and have more confidence in who you really are. If you get the chance, you should talk to him properly."
Shirakura lowered his head. "If that's true, I wish I could hear him say it himself... And here I was planning some elaborate locked-room alibi using the telephone."
"But you still dared to come back to the scene because you wanted to make sure the professor could still be saved, didn't you?"
"..."
Conan chuckled. In any case, it was nice that nobody had died this time, though he was rather interested in that locked-room trick Shirakura had mentioned.
For now, he turned his face away so he would not have to look at Yimi's smug "See? I told you it was him" expression. A lucky guess did not count as deduction.
With nobody left to show off to, Yimi crouched down and examined the telephone that had been knocked onto the floor. This landline was even more advanced than the others because there was a strange object inside it.
The little cat did not know that the thing was called a "cassette tape."
Puzzled, she took her own phone out of Storage Space and wondered whether she should return to the Spirit world and ask Origami to buy her a phone as advanced as this one.
Then she saw more than twenty missed calls from Miyano Akemi.