Chapter 48: The Ten Billion Yen Bank Robbery Case
The crisp rustle of newsprint broke the morning quiet. Natsume lowered her cup, her gaze locking onto the bold black characters splashed across the front page of the daily paper. A ten billion yen robbery had occurred yesterday at Beika Bank.
Her eyes scanned the columns of text, absorbing the details. It seemed Akemi Miyano had finally set her plan into motion. Natsume leaned back in her chair, drumming her fingers against the wooden tabletop. She needed to carefully calculate her angle of intervention in this unfolding mess.
In truth, her objective was simple. She wanted to intercept that stolen ten billion yen. Returning such a staggering sum to the bank was entirely out of the question, and letting the Black Organization get their bloodstained hands on it was even worse. While she was not exactly destitute at the moment, one could never have too much capital. The Teyvat organization was still in its infancy, and building a shadow empire required an endless flow of resources. Ten billion yen would grease a lot of wheels.
A sudden itch tugged at the back of her mind. She paused, her fingers stilling on the table. Did I forget something?
Natsume searched her memory, trying to pinpoint the source of the nagging sensation, but the thought slipped away like water through her fingers. She gave a faint shrug. If it was that easy to forget, it probably held no real importance anyway.
Far away from the quiet streets of Beika, the salty winds of Yokohama whipped across the harbor. Matsuda Jinpei let out a violent sneeze, aggressively rubbing the bridge of his nose. He scowled at the gray sky, wondering if he had managed to catch a cold in this damp weather.
A heavy sigh escaped his lips. He seriously considered tracking down a local shrine to throw a coin into the offering box. Absolutely nothing had gone smoothly for him lately. He had barely found a spare moment to track down a certain someone before a sudden, inexplicable transfer order had ripped him out of Tokyo. Now, here he was, exiled to Yokohama for some mandatory technical exchange program.
Back in the shadows of Tokyo, a dimly lit room hummed with the sound of cooling fans.
"Finally done." Cointreau pushed his chair back from the desk, stretching his arms high above his head until his joints popped.
He stared at the glowing monitor. Displayed on the screen was a photograph of Natsume, an image the media had originally prepared to broadcast across the country. Cointreau let out a long, exhausted breath.
"As expected, a troublesome younger sister," he muttered to the empty room. "Running around being so high-profile. It took a massive amount of effort to scrub the networks and subtly bury your information."
His fingers danced across the keyboard, pulling up a secondary window. It was a classified Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department transfer order. The document clearly detailed Matsuda Jinpei's reassignment to Yokohama for a three-month technical exchange.
Cointreau studied the ID photo of the curly-haired detective on the screen, a face he had pulled from the brink of death three years ago. He rubbed his temples, wondering if acting on that impulsive urge to save a life had been a mistake. It had certainly done nothing but exponentially increase his current workload.
Wouldn't Matsuda have been better off just staying quietly in the Explosive Ordnance Disposal team? Why did the man suddenly push for a transfer to the violent crimes division? He was moving too fast, digging too deep. Now was absolutely not the right time for Lumine to learn about certain hidden truths.
A cynical thought crossed Cointreau's mind. Were the police in this city truly that incompetent? The culprit from the bombing three years ago was still roaming free. He paused, correcting his own mental timeline based on the deep-dive investigation he had conducted. Judging by the exact date of Hagiwara Kenji's sacrifice, it had actually been seven long years.
Seven years, and the authorities had not managed to scrape together a single viable clue about the bomber. As an executive of a ruthless underground syndicate, Cointreau really did not know whether to laugh at the police's ineptitude or feel insulted by it.
The sharp, jarring vibration of a cell phone on the desk shattered his train of thought.
He picked up the device, glancing at the caller ID. Gin. Exactly as expected.
Cointreau pressed the answer button, his voice dropping into a smooth, detached drawl. "Hello. To what do I owe the pleasure? Have all the loose ends at the Cocktail Bar been dealt with?"
"That place no longer exists," Gin replied, his voice a low, gravelly rasp that wasted no time on pleasantries. He delivered the confirmation of the cleanup before cutting straight to the point. "Do you know the reason for Tequila's accident?"
Cointreau relayed the exact findings of his digital and physical sweep of the MANTENDO game presentation. He laid out the sequence of events with clinical precision, ultimately concluding that Tequila's explosive demise was the direct result of his own abysmal luck and sheer incompetence.
Silence stretched across the line.
Gin offered no immediate response, seemingly struggling to find the right words to comment on such a pathetic, trivial death for an organization member. When he finally spoke, he pivoted to an entirely different matter.
"You should be aware of the conditions Akemi Miyano proposed to the organization, correct?"
Cointreau kept his expression perfectly blank, his tone matching the dead air of the room. "Yes, I am aware. It seems you are planning to make your move against her."
"I recall you knew her parents," Gin said, the faint hint of a sneer bleeding through the speaker. "What? Are you feeling reluctant to see her go?"
"You do not need to waste your breath testing me," Cointreau replied, his voice dropping a fraction of a degree. "You just said it yourself. I only knew her parents. That does not equate to any sort of close personal relationship., I have never held the slightest interest in this pursuit of eternal life. Let alone Akemi Miyano, even if you were putting a bullet in Sherry, it would not matter to me in the slightest. They are, fundamentally, insignificant people."
As he spoke, Cointreau glanced at the digital clock glowing in the corner of his monitor. The hour was late, and his patience was wearing thin.
"Do you have anything else of actual importance to discuss?" Cointreau asked. "If not, I am ending this call. I have spent hours scrubbing the digital trail left behind by Tequila's mess. I need sleep."
Before Cointreau could even pull the phone away from his ear, a sharp click echoed through the speaker, followed by the dead tone of a disconnected line.
Cointreau stared at the screen, a dry sense of disbelief washing over him. 'I did not even complain about his pointless rambling and hang up on him, yet he actually had the nerve to hang up on me first.'
He shook his head, tossing the phone onto the desk, and finally prepared to get some rest.
By this time, the dust had settled on the MANTENDO game presentation bombing. Conan had slowly dragged himself out of the crushing frustration of losing the trail of the Men in Black when he had been merely one step away.
The sting of failure still burned in his chest, but he refused to surrender. He knew with absolute certainty that one day, he would drag those men out of the shadows and pry the method to reverse his condition from their cold hands.
But right now, he had a much more immediate crisis demanding his attention. Yesterday, while accompanying Kogoro Mouri to the bank to deposit some meager earnings, Conan had stumbled straight into an armored car heist. It was the exact same ten billion yen robbery currently dominating the morning news cycle.
From the very beginning, Conan had found the bank teller, Miss Hirota Masami, highly suspicious. His instincts flared even brighter today when Uncle Mouri casually mentioned that all the masked robbers from the heist had been found shot dead. The police had discovered a single tube of lipstick belonging to Hirota Masami left deliberately at the crime scene.
The puzzle pieces snapped together in Conan's mind. There was a third party involved. A shadow group that had ruthlessly executed the robbers and carefully framed Miss Hirota Masami for the slaughter.
Moving fast, Conan extracted Hirota Masami's home address from a clueless Inspector Megure. He broke into her apartment, his sharp eyes quickly locating the key to a rental safety deposit box hidden among her belongings. But in his focused haste, he made a critical error.
A shadow moved behind him. Before he could turn, a blunt force slammed into the back of his neck.
Pain exploded through his skull. The room spun wildly as Hirota Masami stood over him, her face a mask of desperate resolve. As his vision darkened and his knees buckled, Conan forced his heavy limbs to move. Fighting through the dizzying wave of unconsciousness, he managed to slap a magnetic tracker onto the bumper of her car just before she sped away.
When he finally came to, the throbbing in his neck was a dull roar. He didn't waste a single second. Dropping his solar-powered skateboard onto the pavement, he kicked off, the engine whining as he chased the blinking red dot on his tracking glasses.
Twilight bled across the sky, casting long, bruised shadows over the deserted seaside warehouse district.
Hirota Masami, wearing the true face of Akemi Miyano, parked her car and stepped out into the chilling sea breeze. She pulled a heavy pistol from her bag, her knuckles white as she gripped the steel. Taking a deep breath, she walked into the cavernous darkness of the warehouse Gin had designated.
The air inside was thick with the smell of rust and salt. As her eyes adjusted to the gloom, she saw them. Gin and Vodka stood near the center of the empty floor. But they were not alone. A third figure stood silently in the deep shadows near the back wall, their features completely swallowed by the darkness.
Akemi did not have the luxury of caring about the stranger. Her heart hammered against her ribs, entirely consumed by the singular promise Gin had made her.
But the cold, mocking curve of Gin's lips told her everything she needed to know. He had lied. From the very beginning, the organization had never harbored the slightest intention of letting Sherry walk free.
The metallic clack of a hammer pulling back echoed in the empty space.
Gin raised his weapon with terrifying speed. A deafening gunshot ripped through the warehouse.
Akemi gasped, the force of the bullet punching through her chest and throwing her backward onto the cold concrete. Blood pooled instantly, dark and thick. Gin lowered his smoking barrel, his eyes devoid of any human emotion, and ordered Vodka to retrieve the safety deposit box key from her dying grasp.
From his position in the shadows, Cointreau watched the execution with blank eyes. But then, a subtle shift in the atmosphere caught his attention.
The air around him was growing heavy. The ambient moisture was thickening, the humidity rising at an unnatural rate.
Cointreau did not move his head, but his eyes darted toward a cluster of shipping crates in the darkest corner of the warehouse. He recognized that specific elemental signature. He let out a quiet, barely audible sigh.
'I can only say it is incredibly fortunate that we are standing right by the sea,'he thought,'where the air is already saturated with salt and moisture. Otherwise, this sudden spike in humidity would be impossible to hide.'
The faint sound of his sigh caught Gin's sharp ears. The silver-haired killer turned his cold gaze toward the shadows.
"What?" Gin asked, his voice dripping with dark amusement. "Remembering your old ties to her parents? Feeling a bit reluctant now that the blood is on the floor?"
"No," Cointreau replied, his voice flat, cutting through the heavy air like a blade. He stepped out of the shadows, his face an unreadable mask. "Since we have the key, let us go."
He did not wait for Gin to respond. He turned his back on the bleeding woman and walked straight toward the exit, his footsteps echoing sharply against the concrete.
He needed to get Gin and Vodka out of this warehouse immediately. If they lingered even a minute longer, they were bound to discover the person hiding in the dark. And that was a complication he refused to allow.
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