Chapter Text
The library at the Kudou household was neither the biggest nor most expansive library that Conan had ever visited, but it was the most private, and therefore the one where it was least likely for well-meaning patrons to walk up to him and start gushing over how many “big words” he must know or giggle over the picture of a grade-schooler “pretending” to read a newspaper, so that was usually where Conan ended up if he needed to do any research. It went much faster without people interrupting him every five minutes to ask him if he wanted to try reading something written for someone closer to his age.
The only person here to bother him at the Kudou house was Okiya Subaru, and he was generally polite enough to make himself scarce when Conan came over to use the library. Or maybe he didn’t and Conan was just too engrossed in his books to notice. Either scenario was possible. Whatever, at least Okiya didn’t interrupt his work to pat him on the head and call him “good boy,” as if he were a dog that needed encouragement not to eat the pages of the book he was reading.
The only downside was that he had to deal with the persistent ticking of a particularly loud analog clock that his dad had left on one of the shelves, possibly just to be annoying. But that was far less annoying than well-meaning old ladies who missed their grandkids trapping him in conversations for hours that he could've been spending actually working.
Anyway.
Doing background research to try to figure out KID’s heist notice was no different, which was why Conan let himself into his parents’ house after kiddy school the day after KID’s next heist was announced and beelined straight for the library.
KID’s heist notice was a little more convoluted than Conan had anticipated, which meant that he hadn't been able to figure it out during his lunch break. KID had opted for the usual quatrain, and it even truly rhymed this time instead of being a slant. He wasn’t sure if that would be relevant to figuring out the heist note itself, but he appreciated it. There was something about slant rhymes that just rubbed him the wrong way.
Did KID know that?
Conan didn’t see how he could but he wouldn’t be surprised if he did. Maybe this was a sign that KID had forgiven him for being a raging dickhead the last time they’d met?
…Or maybe KID just preferred his heist notices to rhyme properly. That was the most likely scenario. Conan was probably reading too much into it.
Unfortunately, it was seeming more and more likely that Conan was going to have to apologize. With words and everything. And he would have to actually mean it, too.
That part, he thought, probably wouldn’t be an issue — the intent behind it, at least. He was genuinely apologetic about the way he’d acted towards Asano Keisuke.
…He just wasn’t sure that he’d be able to make KID believe it. Conan could admit that he wasn't the best when it came to saying important things. Laying out his deductions clearly and logically was easy, but the moment emotions started getting involved, his words got all twisted in the back of his throat. His hopes of making an apology that actually sounded genuine were not high. He would have to plan the conversation carefully if he wanted KID to take his apology seriously, and preferably avoid accidentally insulting him further.
He was getting ahead of himself, though. That was step three of his five step plan, and he still needed to get through step two before he could work out the finer details of the next steps. The rest of his plan didn’t matter if he couldn’t figure out where the heist actually was.
(Well. He guessed he could try calling the number on the card that KID had given him for Asano Keisuke, but he was pretty sure that KID had blocked his number and possibly anyone associated with him after Ran had tried to call him. Based on the sound quality, Conan was almost certain that KID had actually picked up the phone before pretending to be his own answering machine, so it was clear that if he wanted to actually talk to KID, he was going to have to do it in person, where he couldn’t just hang up.)
Conan sighed and let the book he was reading fall flat onto his face. The Complete Works of William Shakespeare had not been helpful at all, though he hadn't really thought it would.
Who knew, though, with KID. Conan could definitely see him spelling out a soliloquy in emojis or something, which would somehow be the key to deciphering the heist notice.
He dug the heist note out of his pocket and set it on the floor next to his current stack of books, absently smoothing out the crinkles.
As one turns two and two turns three,
the cries of restless souls converge –
yet three's a crowd so some must leave;
again the twain shall never merge.
Unfortunately, just reading it again provided him with no new revelations. Not that he had really expected it to – KID's heist notices usually required more brain power than that.
He pinned the heist note in place against the hardwood floor using thumbtacks and turned to grab his laptop, pulling it closer to him. He took a second to pat it fondly before opening it – he hadn't been able to take it with him to the Mouri Detective Agency because he hadn't been able to come up with a reasonable explanation for a six-year-old having a brand new high spec laptop. He'd missed it.
According to the statement in the official press release made by Nakamori Ginzo, the man in charge of the KID Task Force, the notice had appeared on his desk in the middle of the workday – which didn't suggest great things about the TMPD's internal security, if Conan was being honest. But, well, it was KID. The world had yet to come up with a room he couldn't break into.
Apparently Nakamori had come back from lunch with his daughter to find that someone had placed an innocuous-looking envelope on the center of his desk, while everything else had been arranged into Kaitou KID's signature caricature.
Not a particularly noteworthy presentation, for KID. It wasn't something he'd done before, but it wasn't outside of the realm of feasibility for him. Ran's dad had been sent photos of the scene in the hopes that he could figure out what KID's target was, but there was an Okino Youko special on TV this afternoon and he hadn't even noticed Conan printing out copies.
Conan scrutinized the photos of Nakamori's desk. If he were a psychologist, he would probably read into the way the stapler had been used for the mouth of KID's caricature, or the way that the pens had become the hat, but he wasn't. He only noticed the way that a magnifying glass had become the charm hanging from the caricature’s monocle, as far away from the rest of the caricature as possible while still being part of it.
Conan got the feeling that KID was probably still mad at him.
Nothing else jumped out at him, so he put the method of delivery to the side for the time being and returned his focus to the note itself. There had been something niggling at the back of his mind ever since he'd read it for the first time, but it had taken some time before he could put his finger on what was bothering him, exactly. Something about the phrasing was unusual, for KID.
Must leave.
Never merge.
It didn't sound like a heist notice, to be honest. It almost sounded like…
A reverse heist?
Had KID sent a heist notice so that he could return a gem he'd previously stolen?
That was unusual. Conan was fairly certain the only time KID had performed a reverse heist was the time with the Ryouma forgers, and that had been an outlier for several reasons. For one, KID hadn't actually stolen the original artifacts; he had only – so to speak – returned the forgeries to their creators. Besides, KID had told him that it had been a personal favor for someone close to him, which Conan had believed since it was so far outside his usual modus operandi.
But back then his note had been pretty straightforward. Soon, I will appear to return three items to the Ryouma Exhibition currently on display. There had never been any doubt about what he was doing.
So what had sparked the deviation from his usual M.O. this time?
Conan's eyes narrowed as he pulled up the page on the only jewel KID had stolen after the Mystery Train debacle on the museum's website. It matched KID’s usual targets (the majority ofthe ones he'd chosen when he hadn't been provoked, at least) – a big jewel, preferably with a mysterious provenance and/or a history rich with mentions of the supernatural. This one in particular had apparently belonged to an English Count who, according to first person accounts from the time period, including a prince of India who claimed to be his close personal friend, had returned from the dead at least once and had employed a demon to do his bidding. After he died – presumably for real this time – anyone who touched the jewel became plagued by insomnia and died shortly afterwards.
Conan scoffed at the obvious dramatization. The Count had probably got lost at sea for a few years or taken a vacation for so long that the rest of the English nobility had thought he'd died, then when he'd returned he had a new highly competent servant in tow, or something. That was much more likely. And as for the insomnia thing, well. Conan couldn't help but notice that the museum webpage didn't cite any specific firsthand accounts of that particular statement.
(Conan was a big fan of Victorian England, if only because it had produced Sherlock Holmes, but he had to admit that he didn't think much of spiritualism.)
He paused, a thought occurring to him.
Sure, he didn't put much stock in it, but did KID?
He ran through the events of last weekend in his mind, flicking through the memories like they were pages in a book, and concluded that, yes, Kaitou KID probably believed in ghosts. Or at least the guy he was pretending to be did, and that guy didn't actually exist in any police database or on any social media platform, so he was probably somewhat reflective of KID. The character had to have had some basis in reality, after all. That's what his mother had told him.
So, if KID were returning the Spirit's Cry, why was he making such a spectacle out of it? He usually just mailed the jewels he stole back to the owners, or sent them directly to Nakamori at the police station. Ocassionally, for no apparent reason, one would show up in Nakamori's dinner at home. But it was always perfunctory, usually without even a note, as if he'd lost interest once he determined that the jewels were of no use to him. It was almost as if he were searching for something
…Unless, of course, committing grand larceny was just a hobby for him. Which was not unlikely, actually. KID did seem like the kind of guy who enjoyed showing off, especially when Sonoko's grandfather set the stage for him.
Except that didn't explain the times that he'd shown up around big jewels without sending an advance notice, of the times that he'd aborted his heists halfway through for the safety of bystanders. Someone who decided to commit crimes because they didn't have anything better to do didn't seem like the kind of person to care about who got caught in the crossfire as long as they achieved their goal.
KID liked being the center of attention, but probably not to the extent that it was his only reason for becoming an internationally wanted criminal. Something else had to be driving him.
Which bought him back to the hypothesis that KID was searching for a specific big jewel surrounded by superstitious nonsense. Except there were several pieces of evidence that contradicted that theory. Why steal the Fabergé egg? Why go along with Jirokichi's antics? Magic tricks like the ones that KID used at his heists didn't come cheap, so why did he return the jewels afterwards instead of selling them?
(Maybe he could just…ask KID about it the next time they met? And offer to keep it a secret as part of his apology, assuming it wasn't anything too illegal? Conan would need to prove his sincerity somehow, and he was generally pretty good at keeping secrets that weren't his own. It was something to keep in mind once he finally got to step three.)
Knowing KID's motives for stealing, while potentially useful for predicting his next target, wasn't particularly helpful for decoding this heist notice.
Conan stared at the museum web page, his focus narrowing to the name of the last gem KID had stolen. The Spirit's Cry.
The cries of restless souls converge.
'Restless soul' was another way to say 'spirit'. And, combined with the use of 'again' in the final line…
Okay, so it was definitely a reverse heist. That, at least, made the location was obvious. But what about the timing?
Conan examined the notice again, trailing his finger below each line as he studied them individually, then unfocused and refocused his eyes so he could look at them as a whole.
He frowned. Something was bothering him about the last two lines.
Three's a crowd.
Some must leave.
The twain never to merge.
…There was something wrong with the math there. If 'some' left, that meant that it was more than one leaving. Since there were originally three people – or, more likely, things, if KID were using the phrase metaphorically as he often did – then 'some' would have to mean 'two.'
But there were still three people/things, and with all the emphasis on the number 'three' in the previous lines, using 'the twain' in the final line didn't quite add up.
It was obviously intentional. KID's heist notices were never anything else.
He'd even used this kind of wordplay before – Conan recalled the first heist notice he'd ever solved, the first time he'd actually met KID face-to-face instead of gun-to-sheet. Then, he had used the counter for 'people' to mislead his pursuers.
It wouldn't be exactly the same this time, of course. That wasn’t KID's style.
(But the fact that he was reusing a red herring in his heist notice indicated that something was…off with KID. Like he hadn't had the bandwidth to come up with something new.
Conan thought back to his interactions with Asano Keisuke at the café. He'd been doing that a lot lately, examining them in a new light. In hindsight, KID had kind of seemed like he was near the end of his rope and only barely covering it up with a veneer of smarminess. The dark circles under his eyes probably hadn't been makeup, and – )
The insistent ticking of the clock that he'd mostly managed to block out through sheer force of will and the magic of attenuation made a sudden resurgence, echoing in his skull like the kids' voices when he got stuck in the middle seat on the way to a campsite and they decided it was time for a sing-along.
(Sometimes Conan missed the time before Haibara had come into his life, if only because she'd obtained perpetual front seat privileges by virtue of living with the professor. But that feeling never lasted long.)
Conan tsked, glancing up from the copy of the heist notice he'd pinned to the floor to glare at it. He had no idea why his father kept it in the library; it always managed to interrupt Conan's thought process just as he was hitting his stride.
It wouldn't be nearly as annoying if it didn't have a second hand –
Oh.
So that was what it meant.
It was annoyingly simple now that he'd figured it out.
When he'd first set eyes on the heist notice after the Youko special was over, Kogorou had declared that the first line meant that the heist was happening that afternoon at three, because 'one turns two and two turns three' had to be referring to a clock.
He'd been half right, which was more than he usually was. It wasn't the first line that referred to a clock; it was the fourth.
What had three parts but could be divided equally into two?
The hands of a clock.
'The twain' referred to two groups, rather than two individual units. Though most analog clocks had three hands, a significant number only had two, rather than bothering with an additional hand that was largely irrelevant for most people's day-to-day lives.
(In fact, Conan was pretty sure that the only person he'd ever met who cared about the second hand on a watch was Hakuba Saguru.)
In those cases, the minute hand moved slightly with every second, 'merging' the minute hand and the second hand.
Even on clocks that had three hands, there were usually two hands of a similar length and one much shorter one. It was easy to visually separate them into groups – in one, the hour hand, and, in the other, the minute and second hands.
Therefore, the three's a crowd line had to refer to the time that he was planning on returning the jewel. Once Conan had deduced that, it was child's play to determine that 'three' myeant the hour hand was pointed to the three on the clock, 'some must leave' meant that the minute hand kept ticking past when it would join its fellow at 3:15, and 'never merge' meant that the heist would happen before the hour hand and minute hand converged again at 4:22.
Conan was pretty sure that KID would actually appear at 3:49 on the dot. At that time, the minute hand and the hour hand would form one single straight line, the ends 'never to merge,' because KID was dramatic like that.
As for the date, Conan thought that, contrary to what Ran's dad had declared, the first line was more likely referencing a calendar – more specifically, a paper calendar where a page was 'turned' each day. So it either meant three days after the heist notice had been delivered, or the third of the month, which was tomorrow. Given KID's condition the last time Conan had seen him, and the general layout of the heist notice, Conan was pretty sure that it was the latter.
He supposed it could also be the fifteenth, which was what he got after adding all the numbers in the heist note together (substituting two for the 'some' in the third line). But he was pretty sure that was actually referring to the fifteenth floor, rather than the date, since that was the floor Sonoko's foreign cousin, Michael S. something –Sebastian, maybe? – had been displaying the gem before KID stole it.
Michael had seemed kind of ambivalent about KID stealing the ring, actually, now that Conan was thinking about it. He'd had a small, secretive smile painted on his face the entire time KID'S heist had been going on – the kind that said he knew something that no one else did, but he wasn't about to mention it to anyone because it would ruin the surprise.
Conan snorted to himself. Maybe he'd thought ghosts would protect the gem.
Conan didn't even believe in ghosts, but he was pretty sure that if anyone could get past them, it would be KID.
…Wait.
He didn't believe in the supernatural, but KID obviously did. If he took that into account…
Conan quickly reread the heist note on the floor in front of him, this time keeping in mind KID's point of view instead of his own. If Conan assumed that KID had been telling the truth at the cafe (or at least thought he had been) then the heist notice started to make a strange kind of sense.
As one turns two and two turns three.
When Kaitou KID (one) stole the jewel (two), it came with a ghostly tag along (three).
The cries of restless souls converge.
The jewel – the Spirit's Cry – caused 'restless souls' (i.e.: ghosts, perhaps specifically of murder victims) to gather around KID, since he could now see them.
Yet three's a crowd so some must leave.
Too many ghosts were overwhelming, so he had to do something to get rid of them.
Again the twain shall never merge.
That was why he was giving back the jewel ahead of schedule, in hopes that the ghosts would go with it.
Conan took a moment to envision what being surrounded by ghosts all the time would do to a person. He supposed he legends surrounding the Spirit's Cry made a certain kind of sense if people contracted insomnia and died because ghosts wouldn't leave them alone. A twisted, bendy kind of sense that only worked if you thought at right angles to the rest of the world, granted, but he had to admit that sounded like a great description of KID, so maybe it wqs his kind of sense. Conan couldn't imagine that spirits had any respect for such mundane living things as sleep, after all.
Mostly because they weren't real, obviously.
But since KID seemed to believe in them, maybe he'd somehow tricked his mind into thinking they were there…?
Whatever. That was a problem for step five. He still had to get through three and four first, so he was glad he'd figured out step two – well, 2B, technically – even if it had given him a much shorter timeline than he would have preferred.
So. Between 3:16 and 4:22 on the third, on the fifteenth floor of the skyscraper owned by Sonoko's foreign relative.
Good. He had enough time to prepare.
Conan left the library in search of the only other person in the house, who he discovered typing away on a laptop in the kitchen. Ostensibly, Subaru was working on his thesis, although Conan doubted that was what he was actually doing.
He eyed Subaru pensively for a moment. He probably had some ideas about cornering criminals. Conan would have to modify them a bit since he didn't want to permanently capture KID, but it was probably worth asking.
“Subaru-san,” he said, “how should I go about apologizing to a friend who's difficult to reach?”
Subaru looked thoughtful for a moment. Conan could almost see the gears turning behind his eyes as he first deduced which friend Conan was talking about (not the Detective Boys, Ran, Sonoko, Heiji, or anyone whose phone number he had, which admittedly reduced the options significantly), then why the friend was difficult to reach, then the question that Conan was actually asking him.
An uncharacteristically smug grin began to spread across his face until he almost looked like an entirely different person.
“You should ask Bourbon,” he said.