The Strange Water Stains
Though a whole chain of guesses had already assembled itself in his mind, Conan's face betrayed nothing as he asked Mona about the circumstances of the commission.
As it turned out, a while back the flowers in the front garden had kept disappearing — picked, one after another — and no matter how many times she tried, Mona had never caught the culprit. That was why she'd finally decided to hire a detective.
Noelle, meanwhile, had heard the name Tokizu Junya back when she was working in Shikoku. He was a high school detective, they said — one who had helped the police crack case after case — and she'd heard he recently came to Tokyo after reading reports of the Lavender Villa incident in Shikoku. That was why Mona had entrusted the matter to him.
Later, Tokizu Junya presented his findings: the flowers had been picked by the neighbor kid, who'd wandered over to play. He even produced evidence — the unmistakable imprint of a child's shoe in the grass. Mona had accepted the conclusion at first. Only, ahem, she'd been short on money at the time, so she'd told him to come back for his fee in a little while.
Then, one day, Noelle happened to see the truth with her own eyes: the flowers were being carried off by the stray cats that roamed the neighborhood, and the flowerbeds were ringed with a mess of muddy pawprints. When Mona confronted Tokizu Junya with this, he flatly refused to admit he'd been wrong, insisting instead that Noelle was lying through her teeth. Mona, in a flash of temper, decided she wouldn't pay him a single yen.
Having heard the whole story, Conan frowned slightly. Frankly, he thought the evidence this Tokizu fellow had offered was flimsy — footprints alone could never prove the child had done it. And when a client raised doubts and produced counter-evidence, the proper thing to do was reopen the investigation and see whether a clue had genuinely been overlooked — not to blindly double down on one's original conclusion.
Besides...
"Mona, you're an astrologist, aren't you? Couldn't you just divine who's been picking the flowers? Or is that beyond your astrology's power?" A thin sheet of white light glinted across Conan's glasses.
"O-of course I could! But astrology exists to read the fates of others. One does not squander it on such trivialities!"
This brat is genuinely not cute at all, Mona grumbled inwardly, especially not with that bulldog determination to dig everything up by the roots.
Just then, the questioning on the other side of the room wrapped up, and the officers moved to get the details from Mona as well. She seized the moment to produce the security footage — the camera that faced the study directly.
And naturally, for evidence this important, Conan made absolutely sure to quietly wedge himself in at the edge of the group to watch.
The footage told a clear story. Before Tokizu Junya entered the study, the books on the desk could be seen through the open door, perfectly intact. After he stepped inside and closed the door, it never opened again. No one came or went the entire time — and the study had only a single window, at the top of the wall, sealed shut. In other words: a locked room.
And when the door was finally opened again, the books had already been destroyed.
Tokizu Junya watched the footage to the end and howled, "Impossible! There's something wrong with this recording! Someone must be framing me!" He then scrubbed back and forth through the video several more times, but no matter how he looked, he couldn't find a single flaw.
Conan finished watching as well. As things stood, every piece of evidence pointed to the same conclusion: Tokizu Junya had done it, intending to take revenge on Mona over the unpaid fee — he'd simply been unlucky enough to still be inside when she cornered him at the door.
But studying everything Tokizu Junya had said and done so far — and factoring in the connection between Mona and Noelle — Conan's instincts told him this was not so simple. And if he hadn't done it, why would Mona and Noelle frame him? Did they have some old grudge? No — from Tokizu Junya's behavior, they showed no sign of ever having met before. And surely a withheld detective's fee wouldn't drive anyone to this. Would it?
As for Detective Takagi, the footage had evidently settled the matter for him: Tokizu Junya was the culprit.
And yet Takagi Wataru found himself quietly muttering inside: Since when do I catch the criminal this smoothly? Normally some detective would have shown up to lend a hand by now — but today, nothing! It feels like something's missing... and that makes me uneasy.
He laughed at himself. He was probably overthinking it. The evidence was ironclad — there was no way he could still get this wrong.
"Ahem. Mr. Tokizu, I'm afraid you'll have to come with us. And Miss Mona's damages — those destroyed books — you'll be responsible for those as well." As he spoke, Takagi casually asked Mona roughly how much the books were worth.
"Around 35 million yen, give or take." Mona walked over to the desk and ran her eyes across the titles, making a rough estimate.
"Thirty-five million?!" Everyone recoiled.
Tokizu Junya nearly lost his mind. "Why don't you just rob me at this point?!" He had already been preparing to give in — a few books couldn't cost that much, he'd reasoned, so he'd pay up first and figure out the rest later, maybe even avoid jail time. Then he heard the figure, one that would swallow every yen of savings he'd scraped together from years of detective work, and he couldn't stay put a second longer.
"Why so surprised? I'm not exaggerating one bit. Didn't I tell you? These are out-of-print editions! Extremely valuable." Mona's tone left no room for argument.
That price had been chosen with great care — calibrated to wring out every last coin to his name. A detective like him was a fraud anyway; who knew how many wrongful convictions his "deductions" had produced? A little money was positively merciful — after all, there were probably others out there who wanted his life.
"In fact, the least expensive book in Miss Mona's study costs 500,000 yen," Noelle added earnestly from the side. "Which is precisely why I said Miss Mona could never have been unable to pay the commission fee."
Conan blinked in genuine surprise. Half a million yen for the cheapest book — and there were this many shelves of them? How much did this one room hold? No wonder Noelle had said Mona wasn't strapped for cash; quite the opposite, she had to be wealthy. Which would mean that business about her living an ascetic life as "training on the path to truth"... might have been true as well?
As for the surrounding officers, the moment they learned the books were worth a fortune, their hands turned feather-light and their movements painstakingly delicate — one careless bump, and several months' or even years' worth of salary would come out of their pockets.
Still, Conan couldn't accept that this man was the culprit. He watched the footage another few times and still found no hole in it. After Tokizu Junya entered, the door truly never opened again; the recording showed no signs of editing. Unless someone could enter a locked study through a closed door, there was simply no explaining how the attacker could have knocked him out inside a sealed room and then vanished without a trace.
Aside from one thing — the odd water stains by the study door — Conan could find no other clues at all.
"Huh? Hmm... These water marks by the doorway are so strange. It's almost like something wet got dragged across the floor." Unwilling to let the mystery slip through his fingers, Conan darted over to the study entrance and pointed at the stains.
"Ah!" No sooner had the words left his mouth than a fist thumped down on his head. Sonoko glared at him. "Brat, what did I say about running around?! It's just water somebody spilled on the floor. What's there to be curious about?"
Conan looked up and saw that Tokizu Junya's resistance had been swiftly quashed by the officers; they were now fitting him with handcuffs, preparing to take him back to the station for further questioning.