Yimi Detective Agency was not going very smoothly.
Besides the person who got caught for drunk driving that day, there were also a few clients who came to ask Kogoro to investigate cheating spouses. But none of them seemed to pay any attention to Yimi trying to solicit business. At most, amid all their worries, they praised her for being cute a couple of times.
Yimi was already considering giving up on this mission. She had never seen a task with so little hope. Even becoming the Hakurei Shrine Maiden had felt more achievable than this.
She lay motionless across the desk, staring at the mission panel without blinking. It had not changed in the slightest.
"Your Ran-onee-san called and said she'll be back late. Looks like the two of us are eating out tonight."
Kogoro propped up his cheek and stared at Yimi's head. From the gift box Vermouth had brought that day, he took out an orange and balanced it exactly between her two ears.
Then he took a second orange and stacked it on top.
He stopped after the third one and scratched his neck again. "Damn it. My neck's been bothering me lately."
"I'll look." Yimi removed the oranges from her head and pattered over in tiny steps.
Kogoro pointed out the spot. "Yeah, right here. If it's some kind of skin problem, don't touch it carelessly... Hm? That feels a lot better. You know how to give massages? Ever since Ran learned karate, I hardly ever let her massage me anymore."
"Uncle, I'm back." Conan happened to return at that exact moment, reminding Kogoro that dinner would involve one more person.
When Conan saw Yimi massaging Kogoro's neck, his eyes guiltily slid away. Then he noticed the opened gift box and the half cup of alcohol that had not yet been cleaned up.
"Did someone visit today?"
"That Dr. Araide. I'm starting to wonder if he's interested in Ran too. He heard she wasn't here, barely said a couple of words, and left."
Kogoro stood up, yawned, and patted Yimi on the head. As a reward for the massage, he put one of the oranges she had removed back on top of her head.
"You two wait here. I'm going to change." He headed farther inside.
"Dr. Araide..." The corner of Conan's mouth twitched.
He had once had a nightmare where he could never turn back into an adult. He simply grew up alongside Yimi and Haibara like this, until one day Dr. Araide proposed to Ran.
"What's this thing?" Conan noticed the desk Yimi had modified.
In truth, all she had done was stick an extra piece of paper on it.
"This is Yimi Detective Agency." Yimi tore the paper off, gradually losing patience with the whole idea.
She stared at Conan without blinking. For the moment, she put aside the matter of him refusing to lend her apples and humbly asked, "How do you, be a detective?"
"Huh? You just do ordinary deductions." Conan obviously had not expected the question. To him, this should have counted as common knowledge. "You connect the clues together until they form the truth. That's all a detective does."
Yimi had asked him something similar before, but back then he had been pretending to be an ordinary elementary-school student and simply laughed it off. Conan could show a mature side in front of Ayumi, Mitsuhiko, and Genta, but around Yimi—the most mysterious child of all—he had never been able to relax.
Things were different now. Yimi seemed to know far too many of his secrets. She had even taken a risk to deliberately help buy him time back then.
Conan still had no intention of giving up on investigating Yimi's secrets, but by now every suspicion he had pointed toward the conclusion that Yimi was completely on his side.
The strangest part was that even though she really was a child, there were moments when she showed courage and cleverness that even he might not be able to match.
Thinking of the words "real child," Conan involuntarily continued explaining. "Haven't I told you before? Someone who sees the crime happen is called an eyewitness. That doesn't make them a detective, because nobody could possibly witness the scene every single time."
Even Ayumi could not be the hostage every single time, right?
Yimi half understood and nodded. "Then why do you, always shoot people, and talk with the bowtie, and get bigger and smaller..." Conan was always shooting people and voicing them, which was exactly why Yimi had spent so long thinking that this was what detectives were supposed to do.
Conan immediately made a shushing gesture, while his mind simultaneously went blank.
Hadn't she delayed Gin because she knew about Gin and Conan? Could it genuinely have been a coincidence? To exaggerate only slightly, the odds were practically on the level of the infinite monkey theorem!
No matter how much he thought, he could not understand it. He could only lower his voice. "Listen carefully. Don't tell anyone about this, okay? That includes Ran-onee-san. I have to keep the anesthetic needles secret too... I only use them because adults won't take a little kid seriously. It has absolutely nothing to do with becoming a detective. Don't do that anymore."
Yimi took out a little notebook. Under Conan's twitching gaze, she wrote down what he had said. "Then do detectives have to go, wherever there's a case?"
"No. Normal detectives actively look for cases, right? Haven't we talked about this before too?" Conan replied. He noticed Kogoro, now changed, coming back out and immediately fell silent.
Conan looked at Yimi's serious, thoughtful expression and decided for the moment that she had understood.
Could this girl's situation be even more extreme than he imagined? Did she actually have a split personality? Maybe she really had taken that drug too, then split off a child personality to act on the surface? No, that did not make sense either...
But he had already received an answer that she did not know Gin. If she had lied once, there was no point asking the same question again.
Besides that, Conan had another important thing he needed to ask.
He leaned close to Yimi's ear—her human ear. "When Dr. Araide came today, what did he say?"
"He said I was cute. And said, he didn't know Ran had a little sister."
"..."
Trying to win over your future sister-in-law? A bag of little goldfish would work better.
Conan stared with dead-fish eyes.
Then something seemed to occur to him. He ran over to the guest chair, looked around it, and crouched down.
The reflection on his glasses hid his eyes while also revealing a tiny dot.
A miniature listening device.
...
Detectives had to seek out cases themselves. If a detective was a child, adults would not listen to her. A detective had to use clues to investigate the truth instead of simply witnessing the scene. Normal detectives did not shoot other people with anesthetic needles.
Combining all those requirements, Yimi became proactive in a different way. She dug through the news for an unsolved local case involving a group of robbers who had used bombs to attack a jewelry store the previous month. Only one had been caught, while the other three criminals remained at large.
People called it "last month," but a full month had not actually passed in terms of days. Scent tracking should still work.
"To think your license got revoked for drunk driving. Oh~ If I hadn't pleaded for you, you might even have been fired from the school."
On a bus, a blonde beauty who mixed large amounts of English into her Japanese hid the hatred in her eyes and teasingly chatted with "Dr. Araide."
Vermouth gave a wry smile, seething inwardly.
It was all that hateful white-haired brat's fault. She had gone to so much trouble to steal this identity, and now she did not even want it anymore.
Still, she had confirmed something very interesting. Her Cool Guy had actually turned into a child...
Thump-thump—
Two people dressed conspicuously differently from the other passengers boarded the bus. They wore ski clothes that covered them from head to toe. First they swept their gazes across the passengers, then pulled open the bags on their backs.
One took out a gun and pointed it toward the rear. "Everybody shut up!"
The driver jumped in fright. But before the robber could give any other orders, a powerful force yanked the driver bodily out of the way so he would not block the entrance.
A beggar in ragged clothing—or more accurately, someone draped in rough burlap—stooped slightly as he stepped into the bus.
His face was completely swallowed by shadow, and the round cat cradled in his arms added an eerie sense of mystery. He looked like some crazed fortune-teller who had stepped straight out of a movie—he was even carrying a set of scales in one hand.
Compared with the ghostlike The World, this Stand could be seen directly with the naked eye and looked much closer to an actual human.