"Grandma Senma, is something the matter?" Conan looked up, his voice filled with feigned childhood curiosity.
"It's nothing..." Senma Furuyo simply shook her head and fell silent.
Conan narrowed his eyes, scanning the faces of the master detectives gathered in the room.
As I thought. You all feel it too, don't you? That nagging sense that something is fundamentally wrong.
"The bridge has indeed been destroyed. We can't afford to just sit here and wait for death. Aside from us, there's no telling if anyone else is lurking in this annex," Kogoro Mouri remarked, his gaze sweeping over the group.
The owner of that mysterious Mercedes was likely the mastermind behind the curtain, yet they had yet to show their face.
The groups were quickly decided: Hakuba Saguru and Mogi Harufumi formed one team; Tsuneo and "Kogoro Mouri" were tasked with looking after Conan; and the remaining four women—Ms. Ishihara the maid, Ikumi Kyosuke, Ran, and Senma Furuyo—made up the final group.
"Is this really necessary?" Tsuneo asked, trailing behind Conan.
"At this point, it's a certainty that someone tampered with that car. You might as well give it to me straight," Conan said, looking up at the man ahead of him. He had dropped the act; there was no need for "ah-le-le" or playing the innocent child when he knew exactly who was standing in his uncle's shoes.
He was referring to Ms. Ishihara's car.
"It was a remote-detonated bomb, though it looked rather crude," Tsuneo replied with a dry chuckle.
Given that the bomb he had tossed into the bushes hadn't gone off, the operational range for the trigger was likely set to be very short.
"Using a bomb to stage a fake death?"
"It's a logical move..." Kogoro—or rather, Kaito Kid—mused aloud, adopting a pensive detective's pose.
Conan suppressed the urge to put a tranquilizer needle into the thief's neck. "You... you haven't been spying on the Detective Agency this whole time, have you?"
The fact that this "detective" had just happened to be passing by the gas station exactly when they had a flat tire was far too convenient to be a coincidence.
"How heartless! I literally just helped you out of a massive jam the last time we met," Kaito complained, his voice shifting back to its natural, youthful pitch. He shot Conan a look of feigned hurt. "Don't look at me like that. A person should know how to show a little gratitude."
"If I weren't grateful, I would have exposed you the moment we walked in!" Conan adjusted his power-kick shoes and flashed his wristwatch gadget pointedly.
If I hit you with this needle, do you think you'd stay conscious for more than a second?
"So, what do you think? Any leads on the treasure yet?" Kaito asked, seemingly unbothered by the threat.
"Even if I knew, I wouldn't tell you..."
Tsuneo watched them, feeling a strange sense of déjà vu. It's like watching Kudo Shinichi and Edogawa Conan arguing in the same timeline...
"Come on. It's time to pull back the curtain on the truth," Conan said after they finished bickering. He shoved his hands into his pockets and began walking toward the dining room.
"What about you, Sir Dark Knight? What have you found?" Kaito leaned against the wall, a playful smirk on his face as he looked at Tsuneo.
Tsuneo didn't look like the type to care about gold or jewels. Usually, if he wanted money, he'd find a much faster, more "direct" way to acquire it.
"I already know the answer to the riddle," Tsuneo replied calmly. "But I wanted to see this mansion for myself. Especially that crow..."
He was referring to the crow crests that were subtly integrated into almost every piece of decor in the annex.
After completing their sweep of the building, the groups reconvened in the dining room, taking the same seats they had occupied when Ogami Shukuzen collapsed.
"We've looked everywhere. It doesn't seem like anyone else is here," Ran said, letting out a sigh of relief.
She hoped the mastermind had simply fled.
"Ms. Mouri, to be honest, we weren't actually looking for a stranger," Hakuba Saguru said, a faint smile playing on his lips.
"He's right," Ikumi Kyosuke added. "Because the mastermind who orchestrated this entire charade—the person who murdered Mr. Ogami—has been sitting among us from the very beginning."
"Among us?!"
Ran looked around the table. She noticed that her father was the only one who looked as genuinely bewildered as she was.
"I think we should start with Ms. Ishihara's car," Mogi Harufumi suggested. He looked toward Tsuneo, then at the maid standing nearby.
"It's true. I removed a remote-controlled explosive from the underside of the vehicle," Tsuneo nodded.
The device hadn't been complex—just crudely taped to the chassis.
"My car..." Ms. Ishihara let out a long, shaky breath. Thank heaven I dodged that bullet!
"Generally speaking, a person who plants a bomb on a car would never actually get into that car themselves, right?" Conan chirped, his voice shifting back into his "innocent child" persona.
"They wouldn't get in?" Ran tapped her chin, looking at the people who hadn't boarded the vehicle for the test run.
Tsuneo-niisan, Ms. Ikumi, Mr. Hakuba, Ms. Ishihara, and me. Well... it's definitely not me or Tsuneo-niisan...
"Exactly. Usually, they wouldn't," Ikumi Kyosuke smiled. "Unless, of course, the culprit had a different objective in mind."
Ran was lost. Getting into a car rigged with explosives on purpose? What objective could possibly justify that?
"The Golden Cicada," Hakuba Saguru said, his eyes locking onto the silent Senma Furuyo. "A classic case of shedding one's skin to escape."
"Wait a minute... are you saying she meant to fake her own death?" Kogoro Mouri asked, finally catching up. His voice was thick with disbelief.
"Precisely, Detective Mouri," Mogi Harufumi said, shaking his head with a grin. "If that bomb had still been in the car, we would have been the perfect witnesses to her 'demise.' You've really got a nerve, Sister Senma."
"Ms. Senma?!"
"But why?" Ran asked, unable to grasp the logic. "If Ms. Senma is the mastermind and she wanted to escape, she didn't need to fake her death to do it, did she?"
"These crafty detectives... psychological warfare is their bread and butter," Tsuneo remarked with a dry laugh.
"Crafty detectives?" Ikumi Kyosuke shot him a side-eye. "You realize you were invited here as a detective as well, don't you?"
"Ahem. Forgive me," Senma Furuyo coughed lightly, pulling the room's attention back to her. She looked at them through her spectacles, her voice sounding old and frail. "My mind must be wandering in my old age. Are you suggesting I planted some sort of bomb?"
"High-level conversation technique number one: play the victim by showing weakness," Tsuneo noted aloud.
I'm old, I didn't hear what you said, it doesn't count, and please don't bully a poor old woman.
Senma Furuyo: "..."
"Heh. You certainly have a way with words," the old woman said, shaking her head with a smile.
"The staged death was likely intended to heap psychological pressure on the rest of us," Hakuba Saguru continued his deduction. "By removing yourself from the board, you could retreat to a safe vantage point and watch everything unfold through the surveillance cameras hidden throughout the annex."
Hakuba was spot on. At the very least, Tsuneo's group—with the help of the Phantom Thief, who was an expert at finding hidden mechanisms—had already located the central monitoring room.
"Even if you are correct," Senma Furuyo countered, looking at Conan, "we used a coin toss to decide who would get into that car, didn't we? It was a matter of pure chance."
The coins used for the toss had been provided by the young primary school student.
"Oh, that?" Conan smiled with terrifying innocence. "I made sure to do exactly what Tsuneo-niisan told me. I only put one ten-yen copper coin in the pile."
Tsuneo: "..."
Indeed. For a detective, the ability to lie and act is just as important as the ability to reason...
(End of Chapter)
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