Findings from an Old Investigation
Beika Central Hospital — the room where Hidemi Hondou, codename Kir, lay recovering.
Separated from her bed by nothing more than a curtain, the next room over was packed shoulder to shoulder with more than a dozen FBI agents.
They had just noticed Rikumichi Kusuda behaving strangely, and had caught him red-handed photographing the patient's information — but he had slipped away from them anyway. Akai Shuichi had chased after him the moment he bolted, yet even he had failed to close the trap, and the man had found an opening to end his own life.
It was obvious now that the snake had been flushed from the grass and warned. Judy proposed moving Hidemi to a new location, but Akai Shuichi shot the idea down almost immediately. This, he argued, was a perfect chance to face those people head-on — with Hidemi as the bait.
Their superior, James, mulled it over for a while before siding with Akai. Then Akai suggested they take turns resting and conserve their strength for the storm that was coming. With that, he left the room.
Judy watched his retreating back with a trace of worry, and in her conversation with James, the subject of Akai's ex-girlfriend came up.
That was how Conan learned that Akai Shuichi had once been undercover in the Black Organization himself, under the codename Rye Whiskey — and that he had also been Miyano Akemi's boyfriend, the older sister of Haibara. Indirectly, he had been part of the chain of events that led to Miyano's death, and thereby to Haibara's defection from the Organization.
It was a staggering amount of information to absorb all at once, and it took Conan a while to digest it. Then he went looking for the man himself, and finally found Akai Shuichi up on the rooftop, leaning against the wall with his phone out, reading a text message.
"Um — could I talk to you for a minute?" Conan stood at the doorway to the rooftop, looking up at him.
Akai Shuichi glanced down, smiled faintly, and pocketed the phone. "Sure. What did you want to talk about?"
"Well... Judy-sensei said that you and Miyano Akemi-san used to be boyfriend and girlfriend — and that you were also cousins. She said Cointreau was the one who told you. Is that true?"
Conan's expression turned a little awkward. These questions edged dangerously into prying at other people's private lives, but he had reasons he couldn't avoid asking.
After all, if Miyano-san and Akai-san really were cousins, then Haibara and Akai-san had to be cousins too.
It would be a good thing for Haibara to have family left — assuming, of course, that she'd ever accept a cousin who had played a part in her sister's death.
And then there was the most important question of all: how did Cointreau know about this in the first place?
From the way Judy-sensei had told it, Akai-san had been completely in the dark until Cointreau brought it up. So how could he have known something even the man himself didn't know?
At the mention of it, a shadow of melancholy crossed Akai Shuichi's face. "Yes. Akemi and I — we really were cousins."
He went on to describe the leads he had dug up afterward, once Cointreau dropped that bombshell on him. "Akemi's mother was Miyano Elena, and she and my mother were sisters by blood. My mother lost contact with her little sister a very long time ago, and I hadn't seen her or her family in over a decade. That's why I never recognized her."
"Looking back now, they must have joined the Organization back then — cut off from the outside world, and that's why the contact broke. I never imagined the next time we'd meet would be like... that." At the end, Akai lifted his head to gaze at the stars overhead, and let out a quiet sigh.
"So how did Cointreau know about it?" Conan hurried to ask the question that had been gnawing at him.
"No idea." Akai Shuichi's answer was brisk and matter-of-fact.
"You — you don't know?" Conan was dumbfounded. He'd never imagined that even someone as formidable as Akai-san would have things he didn't know.
"That's right. No idea." There was helplessness in Akai's voice. "Honestly, when he told me, I even suspected he'd invented the whole thing just to toy with me. Until that moment, I genuinely had no idea Akemi and I shared blood."
He glanced down at Conan before continuing. "Cointreau is too much of an enigma. He unsettles me even more than Vermouth does — a more dangerous man to deal with than Gin himself."
Conan was startled to hear Akai-san rate someone so highly — but then again, the person in question was Cointreau, and somehow it didn't surprise him at all.
After all, in every single encounter they'd had so far, the man had never once come out on the losing end.
"Oh, right — boy. That remarkably capable girl who's always at your side, the one called Natsume. How much do you know about her?"
The mention of Cointreau reminded Akai Shuichi of how interested the man had been in that girl back when they'd met at the hotel — the one with such impressive fighting skills.
Afterward, uneasy about it, he'd had an FBI colleague look into her file. The results turned up nothing suspicious. At most, it was a little odd that she had a missing older brother, and her travel history while searching for him was somewhat unclear — but beyond that, she appeared entirely unremarkable.
(Once Cointreau learned about the offhand cover story Xia Xi had improvised back then, he had quietly padded her background with supporting records — and with help from Nahida and Noah's Ark, made sure the whole thing was airtight.)
On paper, there was no conceivable way the girl could be tied to the Black Organization. And yet Akai's gut insisted she was anything but ordinary — especially after he learned that she didn't just know Kaeya, but was on close terms with him.
"I know a fair amount, I guess." Conan found it a little strange that Akai-san would suddenly bring up Xia Xi-nee-san, but he dutifully shared what he knew — everything about her that could reasonably be shared, anyway.
As for the fact that Xia Xi-nee-san was searching for her brother, Conan hesitated and ultimately kept it to himself.
In his view, that was her private business. It wouldn't be right to tell strangers without her permission.
What he didn't know, of course, was that Akai Shuichi had already uncovered the matter of Xia Xi's brother through his own investigation. Since Conan hadn't brought it up, Akai assumed the boy simply didn't know, and let it pass without comment.
"Why did you suddenly ask about Xia Xi-nee-san?" Conan looked up at him.
Could the FBI have found out that she was close with Kaeya — and that Kaeya had ties to the Black Organization?
But on reflection, Conan decided it made sense. They were the FBI, after all; it would be stranger if they hadn't noticed things like that.
"That girl's friend has connections to the Black Organization. And she herself is far from simple."
Akai Shuichi weighed it for a moment, then decided to tell Conan about the hotel incident — including the startlingly revealing exchange that had spilled out when Kaeya and Childe, the one called Tartaglia, had clashed and started arguing out of nowhere.
After all, Conan would likely be crossing paths with Kaeya and his crowd again down the line. The more he understood going in, the better.
And so, over the course of that conversation, Conan traveled the very same emotional road Akai Shuichi had once walked upon first hearing this intelligence: shock — disbelief — and finally, numb resignation.