Case Closed
After Conan, Xia Xi, and the others said their goodbyes to Miss Judy, they stepped into the elevator.
"Oh, right, Hattori—where's Kazuha? Didn't she come to Tokyo with you?"
Inside the elevator, Xia Xi looked at Hattori, remembering the school festival, and found it a little strange that Kazuha hadn't come along. Weren't the two of them practically inseparable?
"Kazuha?" The moment Hattori heard her name, something seemed to strike him, and his face went pale. "Oh no! I completely forgot I promised to meet her today!"
Conan was speechless. Seriously—if he had plans tonight, why on earth did he suggest coming to Miss Judy's place in the first place?
Xia Xi: ......
Kazuha really was to be pitied. How on earth had she fallen for a boy like Hattori?
Sometimes Xia Xi even suspected that Hattori cared more about Kudo than he did about Kazuha. After all, he'd blown off his date with Kazuha for Kudo's sake, hadn't he?
Hattori pulled out his phone and checked the time. It was over—almost eight o'clock already. He'd told Kazuha to meet him in front of a certain shop around eight, and there was no way he could make it there now.
The elevator had poor reception, so Hattori decided he would call Kazuha the moment they stepped outside. He just hoped she wouldn't be too furious.
When they walked out of the apartment building, Conan and the others waited off to the side, planning to leave together once Hattori finished his call.
"Huh? Wait—!"
Hattori's call had just gone through, before he could even speak, when he felt his clothes suddenly yanked backward. Dragged by the force, he stumbled several steps back before he could stop himself.
Conan at his feet was likewise seized by Nahida's hand and hauled backward a few steps.
Before the two of them, something plunged down in a blur—and looking closer, they saw it was a phone. Before they could even move to inspect it, something else fell right in front of them. This time, it was a person!
Hattori hastily exchanged a few words with Kazuha, hung up without bothering to answer her bewildered questions, and he and Conan rushed forward to check on the situation.
Upstairs in her apartment, Judy—having just seen Xia Xi and the others off—had finished checking over her room and was about to call Akai to tell him what she'd discovered that day, when the doorbell suddenly rang.
She opened the door, puzzled, and found Xia Xi and the group standing there, back again.
Thanks to Hattori's and Conan's explanations, Judy learned that a case had just occurred—the victim being her own neighbor, and the police had already arrived at the scene. Conan and the others had come back up first to ask if she knew anything useful.
Judy briefly told them what she knew, then—on the pretext of being curious how detectives solved cases—tagged along as they went to investigate the apartment next door.
Hattori used the key the victim's girlfriend had given him downstairs to unlock the sealed door, and the group stepped inside, surveying the room. Judy took out her camera as well, helping them photograph the crime scene.
Looking at the torn, wrenched-askew curtains in the victim's bedroom, Conan and Hattori exchanged a glance and understood at once: this was murder.
Just then, Xia Xi noticed that Miss Judy's camera lens had quietly swung around to point at them. She shifted her body to the side without a trace, unwilling to let her face be caught so carelessly.
Ever since learning that Kōya existed in this world, Xia Xi had made a point of keeping her face away from video cameras and photographs. After all, she looked far too much like that unreliable brother of hers—and the fact that he still hadn't contacted her meant something about his situation was surely off. She had no wish for her face to surface somewhere and cause him trouble.
Meanwhile, downstairs, Inspector Megure had finished questioning the three suspects—the victim's girlfriend and two coworkers—and upon learning that several of them had been asked the very same questions, he immediately guessed there was a detective on the scene, and that they might well have already gone into the victim's apartment hunting for clues.
Worried they would rummage through everything indiscriminately, Megure hurried upstairs at once.
"*Hah—hah—*"
"So it's you lot after all—!"
By the time Inspector Megure and Officer Takagi arrived, wheezing from the climb, they found the familiar group standing outside the door, lost in thought. Relieved, Megure said, "Thank goodness you haven't gone in yet. Leave the rest to us police."
Hattori: "What are you talking about? We're already done investigating."
Judy held up her camera. "Yep, and we took lots of pictures, too."
Seeing that Inspector Megure had arrived, Xia Xi decided to flip the table and crack the case outright—after all, this ought to earn her a few Primogems: "Inspector Megure, this was a murder. And I already know who the killer is!"
Conan and Hattori Heiji: ......
You've got to be kidding. Weren't we investigating this together? How did you get there so fast?
Conan, at least, had braced himself somewhat. Back when he was around Xia Xi, she'd often beaten him to identifying the culprit, which had dented his confidence a little—but he'd been through it before, so he could steel himself.
Hattori Heiji, however, had no such preparation. He wasn't all that close with Xia Xi. At the school festival, she'd barely done any deducting at all, and while he knew she worked as a detective, he'd heard her cases were mostly finding lost cats, making deliveries, and the occasional beating of street thugs—so he'd assumed she was roughly on par with Mouri-san.
He'd never imagined she could beat him to the killer. Slightly stung, Hattori wanted to hear her reasoning for himself.
"The killer is you—Mr. Kawakami." Xia Xi pointed at a man who had just followed the police up to the scene.
Kawakami's face flushed red, and he shouted back in a drunken haze: "What nonsense are you spouting?! I wasn't anywhere near here when Takai fell—I just called him, that's all! How can you pin this on me?"
Xia Xi: "That phone call is exactly how you killed Takai."
Kawakami gave a scornful laugh. "How can a phone kill someone? If I yelled at him over the call and he threw himself off the balcony, are you going to blame me for that too?"
"Oh, it's far more than that. And as it happens, I owe the inspiration to Hattori."
At those words, Xia Xi looked over at Hattori, who pointed at himself in bewilderment, utterly unable to think of anything he'd done to help solve the case.
"Earlier, Hattori tried to call Kazuha, but the elevator had poor reception, so he had to walk out of the building before he could get a call through. Mr. Kawakami—you used that very same principle to murder Takai."
"So that's how it was......"
As Xia Xi laid it out, Conan and Hattori recalled the marks left by the victim's shifted bed frame, and the killer's method became clear to them both.
While drinking with the victim, Kawakami had slipped into his bedroom and moved the bed. Then, after leaving, he'd phoned the victim and, citing bad reception, lured him over to the window. The drunken victim, unaware that the bed was no longer where it belonged, straddled the window out of habit—and never knew that beyond the glass lay not the balcony he imagined, but a sheer, unobstructed drop. One misstep, and he fell.
At this, Kawakami sneered. "All of that is just your speculation. Where's your evidence? Without evidence, this is nothing but slander. As for the bed—fine, I moved it, but Takai asked me to. How was I supposed to know it would make him fall?"