A Perfect Pitch and an Obvious Mole
The mole was actually obvious. Xiayu could guess it without doing any real detective work: a whole group of guards bound up together in one lump, while the elevator girl had been tied off to the side, all alone. Could there be a clearer sign that this one person was different from all the rest?
Besides, though it was hard to make out faces clearly on the monitors, the guards all looked suitably plain and forgettable, while the elevator girl was obviously cut from a different cloth entirely. An author, after all, doesn't waste ink on unimportant characters — which meant this elevator girl was anything but a nobody.
"Um... excuse me, are you here to rescue... er..." The elevator girl seemed to have sensed something, and ventured a question.
Xiayu didn't wait for her to finish. With crisp efficiency, she knocked the girl out too. She had zero interest in listening to a criminal's babbling — it would be nothing but lies anyway, one way or another.
Of course, she didn't loosen a single knot on the other guards either.
Even if she was nearly certain who the inside man was, better safe than sorry. She'd leave everyone tied up and untangle the whole mess together with the police once they arrived.
Using the phone in the security office, Xiayu called the police and gave them a rundown of the situation at the department store.
With the call done, she turned her attention to the footage the robbers had been watching, searching the monitors for the remaining robbers and for Conan and the others.
"Hey, hey, what's going on over there? What was that noise just now?"
A voice crackled suddenly from the intercom on the desk. Xiayu didn't answer; she looked to the monitors instead. Sure enough, one of the robbers was anxiously speaking into a walkie-talkie — the one dressed in the Kamen Yaiba costume. He seemed to realize something, exchanged a few words with the companion beside him, and then the two split up, each walking out of the camera's view.
Xiayu checked the other monitors as well. No sign of Conan or Genta's group anywhere. So they were deliberately staying out of the cameras' sight, keeping the robbers' accomplice in the security office from picking up their location.
She thought back to where the robber had been standing on the monitor — the third-floor clothing department, by the look of it. Splitting up just now probably meant someone was heading back to check on the security office. If a robber wanted to come down here, his only options were the stairs and the elevator. The elevator had cameras, and with the situation unclear, they'd want to avoid the cameras as much as possible. Besides, an elevator was far too easy to ambush — the moment it moved, anyone watching would know someone was inside. Which meant the stairs. It had to be the stairs.
Xiayu moved to the stairwell, tucked herself to one side with her back against the wall, closed her eyes, and listened carefully.
Before long, faint, slow footsteps came down the stairs — deliberately lightened, no doubt, so no one would notice anyone coming. She listened closely. The footsteps never overlapped; there was only one person.
She didn't rush. She waited until the robber reached the landing — until the very moment he was about to catch sight of her — then exploded forward and sent him flying with a single kick. The Kamen Yaiba-suited robber slammed into the wall and went limp. Though, to be fair, it might not have been the wall that did it: to make sure the man stayed down, Xiayu had put a little extra force behind that kick. A few ribs were probably cracked. Maybe he'd simply fainted from the pain. Either way, it didn't matter.
That made three down. Cross-referencing with the monitor footage, two robbers should still be left — presumably playing cat and mouse with Conan and the kids right about now.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the store, Conan and the others were using the mannequins in the clothing section to set up a decoy trick on the robbers — until Genta's stomach let out a loud, hungry growl that blew their cover, and they had to bolt on the spot.
Conan ran, glancing back to count his pursuers — strange. There had been three just now; only two were chasing them. Was the third planning to cut them off from somewhere else?
No, wait. For a while now, the robbers hadn't seemed to know where any of them were. Conan had been careful to avoid the cameras, but things had been hectic, and Genta and the others were little kids — they'd slipped into frame more than once by accident. Yet even when they had wandered into a camera's view, the robbers hadn't immediately moved to grab them. Something must have gone wrong in the security office. The missing robber had probably gone back there to check.
Had someone seen the distress signal they'd left in the window and come inside? Conan decided to deal with these two robbers first, then go see what had happened at the security office.
Conan and the kids ran to the liquor section, planning to shake up some bottles, pop the corks, and spray the robbers down with champagne — when suddenly they heard the sound of a body hitting the floor behind them.
"Big sis Xiayu!" Genta, Mitsuhiko, and Ayumi shouted in unison.
They turned — and sure enough, there she was. Xiayu smiled and gave the kids a reassuring nod, then hurled the baseball she'd been idly tossing in her hand straight at the one robber still conscious. With a solid thwack, robber and baseball met head-on, and the man dropped where he stood.
Even Paimon couldn't help cheering inside Xiayu's head. "Traveler, what a throw! Nice shot!"
Conan glanced over at the robber who had fallen first, and — just as he expected — there was a baseball lying beside him too.
His jaw hit the floor. Throwing a baseball hard enough to knock a grown man cold, barehanded? How much strength did this woman have?
Ayumi and the others, of course, didn't spare that a single thought. The moment they saw that every last robber was down, they came charging over to Xiayu in delight, chattering a mile a minute about how on earth big sis Xiayu had appeared out of nowhere — and once they learned she'd come in because of the signal they'd left in the window, they launched into excited retellings of how they'd discovered the robbers and everything they'd done to outwit them since.
With that all settled, Xiayu led the kids back to the security office to wait for the police.
"Big sis Xiayu, the guard uncles and the lady from the elevator still haven't been untied. Let me untie them!" When they reached the security office, Ayumi spotted the elevator girl she'd seen earlier that day and the guards still bound in the corner, and hurried over to loosen their ropes for her.
Xiayu caught Ayumi's arm just in time. "No untying, okay? This young lady was the robbers' inside woman — their accomplice in the department store."
Light flashed through Conan's mind. So that's it. It had been nagging at him all along — how could the robbers have known exactly how many of them there were in the Detective Boys? Now he understood. She must have taken the elevator operator job at the store well in advance, all the better to scout the place and guide the heist. She'd seen the Detective Boys earlier that day, so naturally she knew their exact number.
And now this accomplice was lying there unconscious, presumably courtesy of big sis Xiayu as well. A dark line crept down Conan's forehead — she really does have a habit of knocking criminals out first and asking questions never, doesn't she.