Conan: Science Cartoonist Kudo Yuji

"Xiaolan?"

Fei Yingli seemed to understand who her daughter recognized Conan, but it seemed that Xiaolan didn't recognize Conan at all, as if she had forgotten a lot of things.

"I'm fairly experienced in this."

Yuji pushed Mouri Kogoro away and pressed his hands on the bedside of the hospital bed: "Xiaolan, how old are you now?"

"Seven...seven years old..."

What to do, suddenly an unknown elder brother looked at her, and her parents didn't regard him as a stranger at all.

Xiaolan remembered that her first-grade teacher said not to trust strangers casually. She looked at the boy and wanted to do the same, but she had no choice.

Seven-year-old Xiaolan is still an ordinary good friend to Shinichi. They haven't been together for ten years and they can't even be considered childhood sweethearts. Compared with childish friends, they are better as handsome older brothers.

"It's true. It's the same as when I was in the United States." Yuji put his hand on Xiaolan's forehead and comforted her, who seemed a little nervous.

[Are you scared because you don’t know what’s going on? 】

"It's okay, we will all be by your side."

"Hi…"

Xiaolan, who still looks like a girl on the outside but is in a loli state on the inside, begins to blush. Compared with Shinichi, who occasionally bullies and laughs at her, this brother is not only good-looking, but also gentle in speech, and has a light fragrance on his body. .

"Uncle, I think it's better to let Xiaolan stay here tonight and keep an eye on her."

Yuji raised his hand and glanced at his watch: "It's already two-thirty in the morning. Even if the doctor comes to diagnose her now, he will postpone the diagnosis report to eight in the morning. Now let Xiaolan get some sleep first."

"No... I won't be awake all the time!" Mouri Kogoro looked at the boy in panic.

Counting from the time when his wife separated from him, the father and daughter had been dependent on each other for a full ten years. If something happened to Xiaolan, he really didn't know if he would go crazy.

"Are you really a thirty-seven-year-old adult?" Yuji curled his lips helplessly.

"Aunt Yingli is not in good health, so please go back first."

The boy took out his home keys from his pocket and threw them to Yue Yue: "This is very close to my home, so you should go and have a rest first."

"That's all it can do now."

Kudo Yukiko supported Fei Yingli, and everyone slowly walked out. Yuji coughed when he saw the father who was following secretly at the back.

"Great writer, there is a serial murderer out there. You probably don't want to go to bed so early. The case is calling you."

His whole body trembled. Kudo Yusaku fell behind the rest of the group. After some hesitation, he said, "I...that's what I thought..."

[I don’t think so. 】

Xiaolan has been worried about her since she woke up, and Conan finally couldn't help but ask.

"Xiaolan? Why do you keep looking at him?"

In fact, this is not what he wanted to say. He wanted to ask why Xiaolan didn't look at him. Jealous Shinichi, who had been offline for a long time, quietly logged in.

"Hey." Xiaolan played with her fingers. From the corner of her eye, she saw the older brother looking at her because of Shinichi's words, and lowered his head in embarrassment.

"I think I've seen this brother before."

Because his daughter was awake, Kogoro relaxed a little now, and muttered after hearing Xiaolan's words: "Isn't he only seven years old? Where have you seen him like this?"

Still not understanding what her father meant when she said he was only seven years old, Xiaolan hummed: "Although I have never seen him before, this brother is good-looking and speaks better than Shinichi and his father. I feel like I have seen him before and pretend I haven't seen him in a long time." Is there anything wrong with my brother?"

It sounded a bit like coquettishness, so Mouri Kogoro let her go. Only the jealous king raised alarm bells in his heart and looked at his brother in a daze.

[I seem to have heard this somewhere...]

..."So you stayed in the hospital all night?"

Putting breakfast in front of Yuji, Akiko looked at the boy who kept yawning.

"I don't know why, but Xiaolan grabbed my sleeve and wouldn't let go as soon as I planned to leave, so she had to sleep on her stomach next to the hospital bed."

Yuji picked up the chopsticks, brought the fried egg to his mouth, and nibbled on it bit by bit.

"Then...what happened to him?"

Pointing to Conan, who was staring blankly at the eggs at the dining table, Akiko leaned close to the boy's ear and said, "The dark circles under his eyes are so heavy."

"Adolescent children are so elusive."

Yuji pretended to sigh, then drank his morning coffee, picked up his suit jacket and car keys and walked out.

"I'm going to the Metropolitan Police Department."

As he drove slowly on the road, he kept recalling the scene in the women's restroom last night.

Xiaolan fell to the ground, several toilet stalls were wide open, and the outer layer of Officer Sato's dress was placed on the sink, not even wet.

Either the prisoner's force level far exceeds that of Xiaolan, or the prisoner's assassination ability is high enough to knock them down before the two of them react. But if he can do this, why on earth did he kidnap Officer Sato?

"Did a previous case involve something?"

After hesitating for a moment, Yuji murmured in a low voice: "However, it may be someone they all know."

The car parked in the parking lot outside the Metropolitan Police Department. Yuji did not enter the building, but walked towards the Amuro Detective Office outside.

"It's really early to open today..."

When he opened the door, he saw Matsuda Jinpei sitting on the sofa smoking. Yuji kept shaking it in front of his nose: "How many cigarettes have you smoked? The whole room is filled with smoke."

He opened the window to disperse the smell, and after a while, the boy saw Toru Amuro, whose face was green from smoking secondhand smoke in the middle of the night.

"He called me at about three o'clock and said he would come and sit for a while until dawn."

Hearing the sound of Matsuda knocking on the coffee table, Toru Amuro rolled his eyes, took out a pack of Marlboros from his back and threw it to him: "This is the last pack."

"You don't even have ten packs of cigarettes here?!"

It seems that smoking can help Matsuda Jinpei concentrate. The shortage of cigarettes makes him a little unbearable: "You are still open for business."

Generally speaking, shouldn’t everyone have cigarettes on hand for the convenience of customers?

"I don't really run a detective agency, this is just a cover."

Amuro Toru rubbed her temples: "So did you think of anything?"

"I checked the surveillance outside the hotel." Matsuda Jinpei touched his mouth: "The person who parked his car under the women's restroom was a blond pervert."

The room was silent for a long time, not to mention the curious Yuji who was hiding behind the desk. The veins on Toru Amuro's head were about to pop out on the sofa.

"There...is there surveillance?!"

"Yes, last night Officer Megure said that there was a murder case in the hotel before. A guy who installed a monitor to peek into the women's locker room was killed by the female foreman. The memory disk of the monitor was taken away as evidence, but the monitor Haven’t had time to dismantle it yet.”

Today's monitors have built-in memory that automatically overwrites the video every six hours and then transfers the previous video to the memory disk.

"If the police department hadn't asked them to cut off all power in the hotel and the surveillance camera wouldn't continue to record, the video would have been completely invisible after overwriting."

Although the surveillance video was blurry, no one else could see clearly. But his intuition already told Matsuda who this person was.

"Tell me, why did you kidnap my wife?" (End of Chapter)