Albedo's File
What did Klee mean, business had already stabilized? Did that imply the Black Organization could now reliably obtain these potions? That was not good news at all.
(With Lisa gone, the brewing of the Life Potion had passed into Albedo's hands.)
Worried that pressing the point would make Klee suspicious, Conan decided not to ask any further.
For the next little while, everyone devoted themselves wholeheartedly to enjoying the delicious buffet.
Before long, however—because if nothing goes wrong, something always will—trouble arrived.
Sirens suddenly wailed outside the restaurant.
Everyone turned toward the sound to see two or three police cars pulling up below the hotel that housed the buffet.
Out of one of them stepped a man they all knew very well: Officer Takagi.
Conan immediately darted out to intercept him, and managed to learn that a murder had taken place in the hotel not long before.
On the thirty-ninth floor of the building sat a talent agency that managed foreign entertainers, and its president had been found dead.
At the news of a case, Conan and Genta and the others instantly perked up. They had more or less finished eating anyway, so they decisively decided to follow Officer Takagi upstairs.
And so they were all treated to the sight of Inspector Megure's utterly speechless expression at Takagi once again casually handing out case details to anyone within earshot.
Before long, the police had identified three suspects.
But what made Conan's blood run cold was that one of them was an investigator he had met only yesterday—a man attached to the FBI: Agent Camel.
Just as Conan had predicted, when questioning began, Camel's inability to state his occupation dramatically deepened the suspicions of everyone around him.
Left with no alternative, Conan contacted Judy, who was still at Beika Central Hospital handling the aftermath, and asked her to come up with some way to vouch for Camel.
When Judy arrived at the scene, she informed Inspector Megure that Camel, like herself, was an FBI investigator.
Though she had some doubts about Judy's claim that she and Camel were dating—that he had come to Japan purely to travel and relax with her—none of it had any bearing on the case, so Inspector Megure asked nothing further.
It was Klee, standing nearby, who tilted her head and spent a while watching the two of them as they linked arms and stood at Megure's side, cooperating with the investigation, her face full of puzzlement.
Then Klee pressed her lips together, walked over to Conan, and asked in a low, hesitant voice, her expression all tangled up: "Conan... Klee doesn't think they look like real boyfriend and girlfriend. They don't seem familiar with each other at all."
At that, Conan felt only a flicker of alarm—but Klee's next words made a few beads of cold sweat break out on him.
"They're deceiving the police officer like that, making up a fake relationship," she went on, tapping her chin with her index finger and affecting a look of profound thought. "Could it be that Agent Camel is today's murderer, and Miss Judy is lying just to cover for him?"
"Mm-hm, Klee is very sharp," Haibara said, nodding in praise beside them after overhearing the deduction.
Conan shot her a sidelong glare: *Please, Haibara. This is NOT the time to be making things worse.*
Watching the children's attention converge on Camel thanks to Klee's reasoning, all of them rubbing their hands together as they hunted for clues and flaws in the man's story—
Conan picked up the pace of his own deduction, hoping to bring today's headache-inducing detour to a close as quickly as possible.
The sky slowly darkened as dusk fell, the last light of the setting sun glinting across the surface of the sea.
The moment Kir set down her left hand after phoning the television station to resign, every nerve in her body went taut at the feeling of a gun muzzle pressing against her back.
Gin.
Facing Gin's interrogation, Kir took a few steps forward to put distance between herself and the muzzle, then slowly turned around, offered a faint smile, and raised her watch-bearing left hand, her voice steady. "With this special terminal in my possession—wiretap, camera, and tracker all in one—and with someone watching me around the clock," she said, glancing at the shadows in the surrounding corners, "what exactly do you imagine I could do?"
Gin gave a cold chuckle and made no reply.
Seeing that Gin had no more to say, Kir spoke again. "Gin. Have you come to find me now because it's time for me to act?"
"Mm." Gin answered with a grunt, then handed Kir a pistol. "Use this gun to eliminate Akai Shuichi. That is how you will prove your loyalty to the Organization. It is the only way for the Organization to trust you again."
......
Beika Central Hospital, parking lot.
After receiving the phone call from Kir—Hidemi Hondou—Akai Shuichi stopped James from notifying Judy.
Then, upon receiving the message from her naming Raiha Pass as the meeting place, he got in his Chevrolet and drove off toward it.
Meanwhile, on Conan's side, the murderer had been found and Camel's name cleared.
Aside from one final episode in which Klee marched straight up to Judy and asked her point-blank whether she "really, really liked Camel," leaving Judy blushing in embarrassment, today's case could be considered satisfactorily resolved.
By then the hour had grown late, and worried for Klee's safety, her brother Albedo had come all the way to the hotel to pick her up and take her home in person.
For some reason, Conan couldn't shake the feeling that there was something strange about Albedo.
He glanced at Haibara, who was hiding herself among the children to avoid any contact with Albedo—clearly she felt something similar.
At least as far as he could observe, Haibara wanted to keep her distance from Albedo even more than she did from Kaeya.
A short distance away, Judy watched Albedo's figure, her expression unreadable and complicated.
Ever since Shuichi had been paid that warning visit by Kaeya and Tartaglia, the FBI had indeed stopped assigning anyone to keep close surveillance on the people connected to Teyvat.
But they could hardly leave the matter entirely alone either, and so they were at least aware of the recent arrivals in Japan—the two men, Diluc and Albedo, whose ties to Kaeya were plainly anything but shallow.
The FBI had investigated their backgrounds. Diluc was nothing remarkable: his papers were complete, his origins clear—far more transparent than Kaeya's file, in fact.
The crux was Albedo. Not only was the information scarce, what little there was consisted entirely of surface details.
No known parents, relatives, or friends. All they could learn was that Albedo had been entrusted to the care of his adoptive mother by some unnamed friend—and who that friend was, they had no idea.
That adoptive mother was a traveler, forever circling the globe, and she too was currently listed as missing.
Which meant that, in a certain sense, the only person Albedo was close to these days was Klee—the child he regarded as his little sister.
As for how Albedo had come to know Kaeya and the others and become their friend, the FBI was, for all practical purposes, completely in the dark.
Yet from these very circumstances, they could draw one firm conclusion: Albedo, like Kaeya, had to be a man of Teyvat.