Chapter 32
This unforeseen development brought the investigative work of the Public Security officer and the detective to an unprecedented stalemate.
The reason was simple. “You can’t even open a case for this!” Edogawa Conan complained.
The police officers undercover at the resort hotel were there to catch Kinoshita Yatarou. Who could have expected that the suspect would suddenly, with a snap, become the victim?!
“If someone were to report him missing, a case could be opened,” Amuro Tooru said reasonably. “For example, his emergency contact.”
The emergency contact was a required field on the registration form, but no one dared to dial that number.
Edogawa Conan: What if his emergency contact is Gin?
The well-known big brother of the distillery was like a spiritual pillar in the hearts of the organization’s employees.
Kinoshita Yatarou, at the moment you wrote down that emergency contact number, were you thinking of Rum’s earnest teachings, or Gin’s model-like, cold, heroic figure?
No one dared to bet. Both sides of the coin were hell.
“There’s another possibility,” the great detective pointed out. “Missing doesn’t equal dead. The hotel’s power trip was clearly tampered with. Perhaps it was part of the killer’s plan.”
The killer wanted to use the darkness to hide his tracks. A person who is nominally missing or dead will disappear from people’s sight and will no longer be considered a suspect.
Edogawa Conan: A high probability. I’ve seen this episode in Danganronpa.
“Are you saying there will be another incident?” Amuro asked.
Edogawa Conan: Guaranteed.
He and Suspect An were gathered in the same place. Double the buffs, double the excitement. The flags were raised higher than the grass on a grave.
Wait a minute. The great detective had a sudden jolt. “Mr. Amuro, if the killer is really hiding, who do you think he will target first?”
Was the killer’s actions governed by his mission, or by hatred?
Amuro and Conan looked at each other. They had the same answer.
“I’ll go find An’an,” the blond Public Security officer said decisively.
…
A knock came on the door of room 414. After a series of soft footsteps, the girl, wearing a slip dress, opened the door and poked her head out.
“Mr. Amuro, is something wrong?” An’an asked, puzzled. “It’s very late, I was about to go to sleep. If you want to hold a late-night test of courage, please come back at four forty-four and forty-four seconds.”
An adult male knocking on a girl’s door at night. If he couldn’t find a suitable excuse, he would be treated as a criminal.
Fortunately, Amuro had an excuse, and it was one that An’an wouldn’t refuse.
“I remember An’an said before that she has a special attachment to room 414.” He hadn’t forgotten the girl’s fond telling of her unforgettable memories back home, a description filled with black humor and dark jokes.
She had once invited Amuro to stay with her in room 414, to share in the “good fortune,” an offer he had tactfully but firmly refused.
Amuro: I’ve changed my mind now. Is the offer still on the table?
It was. An’an was super generous.
“I see,” the dark-haired girl said, stepping aside to let Amuro in.
She introduced the room: “Room 414 is really great. The air conditioning is even colder than in the other rooms. When you lie in bed, you can hear the sound of marbles bouncing on the ceiling and the dripping of the faucet in the bathroom. It has a great atmosphere. You won’t be lonely even if you live alone.”
For a moment, Amuro felt like the room was packed with people.
He silently reported the faucet issue to the hotel manager. In truth, he was more inclined to suggest that room 414 be left vacant from now on. It really wasn’t suitable for human habitation.
Besides the bed, the room also had a sofa. Amuro Tooru brought a pillow and a blanket from room 413 and arranged them on the sofa as a temporary bed.
The dim bedside lamp cast a warm, hazy glow. On the bed, the girl, wrapped in her blanket like a caterpillar, was buried in her pillow, tossing and turning.
Amuro leaned against the sofa and watched the caterpillar’s acrobatics for a while, feeling a little strange.
This wasn’t the first time they had spent the night together. The night of the power outage, An’an had slept soundly and deeply in the back seat of the Mazda. Even falling to the floor hadn’t affected her quality of sleep.
Why the sudden insomnia?
“Can’t sleep?” Amuro asked with concern. “Are you still thinking about the drowning incident? Are you scared?”
The caterpillar turned over, lying on its side on the bed. Half of An’an’s face was buried in the blanket, only her eyes showing.
“Only a little bit,” she said, her voice muffled. “I’m trying my best to overcome it.”
Is the method of overcoming it to roll around on the bed like a wave? Amuro coughed to suppress a laugh.
“If you learn to swim, you won’t be afraid of drowning,” Amuro said, thinking about his schedule. It seemed he could free up some time. “Do you want me to teach you?”
For real? An’an was instantly energized.
The caterpillar broke free from its cocoon. The girl, barefoot on the floor, knelt on the sofa with one knee and met Amuro’s gaze. “Guaranteed to learn?”
“Guaranteed,” the blond young man nodded.
Now she should be able to sleep peacefully.
The dark-haired girl lowered her eyes. She seemed to hesitate for a moment. Instead of going back to the big bed, she sat down on the sofa, her knees touching Amuro’s.
“There’s something I want to tell Mr. Amuro,” An’an said, twisting the hem of her dress with her fingers, her face a picture of conflict. “This is… a little difficult to say.”
The girl’s eyes darted away, not daring to look at Amuro.
The undercover Public Security officer, with his extremely high EQ, felt his heart skip a beat.
Words of refusal rose to his tongue, but he swallowed them, replacing them with a more tactful, less hurtful phrasing.
No, no, no matter what I say, it’s impossible not to hurt her. And they live so close. How would An’an face him in the future?
I don’t want to hurt her… maybe I should just agree?
That didn’t seem right either. Could he change the subject first? Move, you dead mouth! Move!
In the end, Amuro couldn’t make a sound. He could only watch as the girl’s lips opened and closed.
She said—
“I think I killed someone.”
Amuro: “…Eh?”
“EH?!”
His mouth was suddenly covered by a hand. An’an made a “shh” gesture.
“Quiet,” she complained. “What if the security guard hears and calls the police?”
The Public Security officer, whose mouth was covered, was speechless. “…”
The complicated expression in his eyes could have flooded the entire city of Tokyo.
“The reason I say ‘I think’ is because I’m not sure if he’s dead or not,” the dark-haired girl said, fiddling with her fingers. “I left after I dumped the body. I didn’t check carefully.”
“But!” she raised her voice, emphasizing, “I was acting in self-defense! At most, it was excessive self-defense! It was definitely not manslaughter or premeditated murder! It wasn’t!”
Suspect An began her defense. If necessary, she could also play the victim.
Amuro struggled free from the girl’s hand. His mind was a mess, as if a thousand Sleeping Kogoros were snoring in his ear.
Suspect An said she thought she had killed someone.
And there was indeed a person who had gone missing in the resort hotel.
Amuro remembered his purpose for staying in room 414 tonight: he was afraid that An’an would be targeted for revenge by the killer hiding in the shadows, and he wanted to stay by her side to protect her.
Now, it seemed, it was unclear who was protecting whom.
“Can you be more specific?” Amuro wiped his face. “How did you act in self-defense?”
Hearing him define the case as self-defense, An’an thought, Mr. Amuro is so on the ball. It was worth confessing to him.
“When the power went out, I was in the back kitchen.”
The head chef, a graduate of Totsuki Academy, had made a special dish for An’an and had even packed an extra portion for her, filling a take-out box to the brim.
An’an thought of the scene where she would return with the take-out box and proudly declare to Amuro, “I’ve returned from the hunt!” and happily helped the head chef.
“Excuse me, can you help me for a moment?” a man in a chef’s uniform had called out to her.
An’an hadn’t suspected anything. She had nodded and walked over. “What do you need help with?”
The hotel’s back kitchen was extremely busy. The sink was piled with dishes to be washed. The pastry station and the meat-cutting station were separate.
The man in the chef’s uniform had led An’an to a remote meat-cutting station. Half a pig’s head was on the cutting board.
Seeing the pig’s head, An’an had felt a sense of familiarity. She had glanced at the long and short knives on the knife rack and asked, “Do you need me to help you cut the meat?”
The man had neither nodded nor shaken his head. He had picked up a sharp boning knife.
“Your good luck ends here.”
Kinoshita Yatarou had sneered. “If drowning you doesn’t work, a knife will!”
As his words fell, the kitchen lights had all gone out. A pitch-black darkness had descended like a curtain, so oppressive it was hard to breathe.
Before the lights went out, Kinoshita had memorized An’an’s position. He had stabbed down with the knife!
Hearing this, Amuro gasped. “And then? Did you dodge?”
The dark-haired girl made a “hmm” sound. “Well, I didn’t dodge.”
Kinoshita should not have, under any circumstances, carefully selected a boning knife from the knife rack.
An’an was a knife specialist, and the boning knife was her signature weapon.
“The way he held the knife, you could tell he was an amateur. His way of exerting force was also very strange, very unprofessional,” the professional pig butcher of eighteen years, Miss An, said honestly.
“So I snatched the knife from his hand.”
After she had snatched it, it was still dark. The environment was perfect. She had returned the favor with a stab of her own.
The tip of the knife had pierced the flesh, twisted counter-clockwise, and been pulled out cleanly, without a single drop of blood splattering.
After a series of smooth, fluid motions, An’an had suddenly realized, What do I do when the lights come back on?
In her panic, she had remembered that just a few steps away was a cleaning closet used for storing miscellaneous items—a body-hiding spot that Kinoshita had carefully selected after scouting the area.
An’an had inherited the wisdom of her predecessors. As if granted a pardon, she had moved Kinoshita’s body to the body-hiding spot he had chosen himself and closed the small door of the cleaning closet.
She had placed a “Disinfection in progress, do not enter” sign on the door, quietly moved back to the cutting board, and washed the bloody boning knife.
“I even helped him cut the half a pig’s head,” the girl said, as if asking for praise. “The head chef praised my knife skills and asked if I wanted to study at Totsuki. He said he would write me a letter of recommendation.”
Praised to the high heavens, Suspect An had forgotten her own crime. She had left the back kitchen with her take-out box and had even managed to get two servings of the complimentary cake the hotel was giving out to guests.
She had eaten with satisfaction and happiness, completely forgetting about Kinoshita in the cleaning closet.
It wasn’t until that night, when she couldn’t sleep because of the memory of drowning and remembered the culprit, that she had recalled the incident.
“That’s about it,” the dark-haired girl said, fiddling with the hem of her dress, slowly recounting the entire incident.
“I heard from the head chef that the cleaning closet is almost never opened. The body should still be in there. Has it started to grow maggots?”
After hearing her statement, Amuro only wanted to say: Public Security and the detective have been utterly defeated.
He and Edogawa Conan had been staring at the surveillance monitors all day, on guard against the killer all day, and now the body was probably already cold.
The perpetrator, wearing a soft slip dress, was fiddling with her fingers pitifully. The dim light illuminated her oil-painting-like, richly colored face, making it impossible to say a single harsh word.
Amuro wasn’t going to get any sleep tonight. He sighed and stood up, preparing to deal with the aftermath.
“Are you going to report me?” the girl tugged on the blond Public Security officer’s sleeve. “Can you go tomorrow morning? I don’t want to spend the night at the police station.”
The chairs at the police station were so hard. They made your back ache.
No, Amuro thought. In fact, the police won’t even open a case for this incident.
Kinoshita was a killer raised by the Black Organization. He had no legal identity and had no idea how many lives he had on his hands. Given that he had repeatedly tried to kill the girl, her counter-kill could certainly be defined as reasonable self-defense.
Cases involving the Black Organization would be taken over by the Public Security Bureau, bypassing the Metropolitan Police Department. An’an wouldn’t even have to give a statement. Amuro would submit a report to his superiors on her behalf.
But Amuro couldn’t say any of this. He was just a Café Poirot waiter who was a part-time detective. How would he know the inner workings of the police?
“How could I report you?” the blond young man said gently. “An’an trusts me so much. I certainly wouldn’t betray your trust.”
“Go to sleep,” he coaxed. “I’ll take care of the body for you.”
An’an: “…Eh?”
Did she just get an accomplice?