"Hurry up and eat. Don't run around."
The robot vacuum made noises under the blankets. Yimi was hiding under there too, with only her tail sticking out and swaying from side to side.
"What bad thing are you doing?" Kisaki Eri reached over and lightly grabbed her tail.
"Mm!"
Yimi scrambled out from under the blankets and put Little White back into Storage Space.
Even after coming to this world, she had not forgotten to feed the robot vacuum regularly.
Eri lifted the sheet and peeked under the covers. "What was making all that noise just now?"
"This." Yimi raised the children's watch on her wrist.
Eri did not suspect anything. Ran had also hidden under the blankets to stare at the glow of a watch when she was little, and Eri had no idea how far children's toys had developed these days.
"Queen, look." Yimi changed the subject and pressed down one of her cat ears. "Ran."
Eri froze for a moment. She stared at the single ear sticking up, then burst out laughing.
Yimi had discovered this by accident. When she crawled out from under the blankets that morning, one ear had been pressed flat by the covers, and the System suddenly popped up to tell her that she had unlocked an achievement called "Mouri Ran." It took her a long time to figure out what that meant.
Seeing Eri in a much better mood, Yimi tugged on her clothes and reminded her, "I'm hungry."
Eri nodded. "Right, neither of us really ate much. Let's call the front desk and have them send two meals up. What does Yimi want?"
"I'll call." Yimi reached for the phone, still fascinated by this world's advanced technology.
Eri gently pinched one of her ears. "You don't even know the front desk's number, do you?"
"Mhm." Yimi gave up on the idea and looked instead at the gift box sitting on the table. Inside was the tie Eri had picked out.
She tilted her face up. "You're not giving it to him?"
"Ran asked me the same thing just now. She even offered to give it to that man for me, but something like this really should be given on the anniversary itself. Besides, he's so drunk right now that he probably can't communicate at all."
More importantly, Eri had realized that Yimi and Conan had vanished the moment she stopped watching them, so she had come to find the children first.
Eri called the front desk and ordered two meals.
"Let's wait a little. They should bring it up in about twenty minutes."
"Grrrrowl~" Yimi deliberately made the strange noise herself.
Ordinary people really did take too long to cook. But Kitty had been through those days too, so she would not blame them.
Yimi reached for the door handle.
"Where are you running off to?"
"To hurry them up, cooking."
In truth, Yimi remembered Conan telling her not to play with the bowtie in front of anyone she knew, so she wanted to run outside and study it somewhere else.
She planned to go a little farther away first. But as she rounded a corner in the hallway, she happened to see Saku-san—the man who had gone shopping with Eri during the day—closing the door to Ritsuko-san's room before heading toward the other end of the corridor.
Perhaps because he had a guilty conscience, he actually did glance both ways first. But Yimi was extremely quick and ducked out of sight the instant she saw him.
A prankish idea came to her. Yimi fiddled with the dial on the back of the bowtie, hoping to switch it to what she considered the most intimidating voice of all: Diego's.
"Where are you going?" Instead, the voice that came out belonged to an adult woman.
Saku jolted and whipped around. "Who's there?!"
The door he had just closed showed no sign of opening. At this distance, there was no way he could have missed it if the door had opened, and he was certain that woman had already stopped breathing.
The voice sounded very similar, but it had come from around the corner in the hallway. Was someone speaking to him?
Law was a profession that demanded precision, so Saku naturally did not dare trust to luck. He had not figured out what he would do if someone truly had discovered him, but he still hurried toward the corner to make sure.
"Meow~"
All he saw was a strangely patterned cat standing inexplicably in the middle of the hotel corridor.
Under normal circumstances, Saku probably would have been fascinated enough to take a photo and share it with Eri, who kept a cat. With his guilty conscience stretched to the limit, however, all he felt was a faint chill crawling up his back.
He looked down at the cat more carefully. The longer he stared at its eerie markings, the more unnerving they became.
Not daring to think too hard about what had just happened, Saku Norifumi hurried away as quickly as he had approached.
"Meow?"
Yimi changed back into human form and tilted her head in confusion.
The prank seemed to have successfully scared him, but the instant she had transformed into a cat, her powerful sense of smell had also picked up something strange.
Standing on tiptoe, she crept toward the door Saku had just closed. Yimi remembered that this was the room of the woman who worked with Eri. But from this direction, and from Saku himself, she had smelled the heavy scent of alcohol clinging to Kogoro.
Using telekinesis, Yimi turned the handle from the other side of the door and opened it. The first thing she saw was a security chain. The second was Ritsuko-san lying on the floor, unmistakably dead.
Yimi had never seen a security chain before. She pushed at the door and noticed a thin white cord tied through the middle of the chain.
...
"The victim is Usui Ritsuko, female, thirty-two years old. And the first person to discover the body was a seven-year-old girl. Is that correct?"
"I'm a detective." Yimi raised her hand to object.
This police officer was a new face to Yimi, but not to Conan. Once, when he had attended a party hosted by one of his mother's close friends, a case had occurred there too, and this same rookie officer named Yamamura Misao had responded.
Conan stared with dead-fish eyes.
Seriously? It had not even been a full day before another case happened. And this one was especially troublesome, because the number-one suspect was Mouri Kogoro, who was suspected of drunkenly cheating on his wife.
"What happened?" Mouri Kogoro rubbed his eyelids.
He was still half asleep.
Eri glanced at him and pressed a hand to her forehead. "This is obviously a frame-up, isn't it? When we first came in, there was a very thin white cord visible on the chain. The trick was probably meant to hide the fact that the chain had already been broken."
She looked around the room. "A white cord obviously couldn't conceal a broken chain for long. In other words, the culprit intended to become the first person to discover the body and ram the door open in front of everyone, creating the impression that the chain had been broken on the spot. That would create a locked room and frame my husband. They simply didn't expect the door lock to suddenly malfunction and refuse to stay shut."
That meant the culprit was probably one of the younger men with enough strength to ram the door without looking suspicious.
At most, that ruled out Eri herself. It proved nothing else. The other three lawyers were all men.
The rookie officer objected, "This is the best hotel around. How could a lock malfunction that easily? Maybe Kogoro-san deliberately took advantage of that point to clear himself of suspicion."
"..."
While the adults argued, Conan first made sure Ran was not watching him. Then he shuffled a couple of steps toward Yimi and whispered, "Give me the bowtie back for now. We've got an emergency."
"You promised. Until tomorrow." Yimi turned her back on him. No.
Conan had already accepted the detective novel Yimi had given him, because in front of Ran he had to pretend the unfamiliar characters in it were doodles he had drawn himself, to keep up his act as an ordinary kid.
Conan grew anxious. "Clearing Uncle's name is the most urgent thing right now, isn't it? Didn't you see Auntie Eri's expression?"
"I know who the culprit is." Yimi was not stupid. She had literally watched Saku close the door. How could she not know who had done it?
"You know?" Conan was surprised, though once he remembered she was the first person to find the body, he was not quite as surprised anymore.
"Wake yourself up properly and explain exactly what happened." Over on the other side, Eri was supporting Kogoro out of the room with a murderous look on her face. Ran's attention also seemed fixed on the shock that her father might have cheated, so nobody was watching this side.
Other than Conan, there was nobody here Yimi knew.
Yimi grabbed Conan's wrist and flipped open the watch he had refused to lend her along with the bowtie.
Conan: "?"
Last time, you made me take over after you said one sentence!
The anesthetic needle shot out and struck Ritsuko-san squarely in the neck before her body had even been placed in a body bag.
Conan: "??"
Why are you shooting a dead person?!
Yimi quickly hid behind the bed. Conan had hidden in ridiculous places plenty of times before and nobody ever noticed him anyway.
In Ritsuko's voice, she said, "I already know who the culprit is."
Saku's face went deathly pale.
"Y-You?!" The rookie officer reacted even more strongly than he did and dropped straight onto his backside.
Yimi continued, "The culprit is Saku Norifumi!"
"Don't mess around like this!" Conan lowered his voice and angrily snatched the bowtie back.
Wasn't this disrespectful to the dead?
But Saku Norifumi was drenched in cold sweat. He lowered his head and confessed. "Yes. I'm the culprit..."
Conan: "..."
A lawyer got scared that easily?