For one instant, Conan genuinely startled Haibara Ai badly enough to make her pupils contract. Her first reaction was that this kid might also be someone from the Organization.
But then she remembered that she had personally been involved in filing this little detective's death report, and the fear naturally turned into a new appraisal of him.
She had not expected the detective in front of her to investigate this deeply in such a short time.
"Melon~ melon~" Yimi sat on the professor's sofa, eating the very fruit she had originally brought over as a gift.
Professor Agasa smiled kindly. "Eating too much this late at night will give you diarrhea."
Professor Agasa might look like some young programmer in his thirties, but his true age was actually only fifty-two.
"Mm, we'll be home a little later. By the way, my voice isn't coming through fuzzy on your end, is it?" Conan pretended to be an ordinary child while talking to Ran on the phone.
No static, apparently. He had been worried Yimi might be carrying another bug or something similar, though this test could not rule that out with complete certainty.
Conan turned toward Haibara. "So you're from the Black Organization?"
"Shin... Conan!" Professor Agasa quickly raised a finger to remind him that Yimi was still right there.
"I only worked on drug development." Haibara Ai held a book in her arms. Since Conan was making no effort to lower his voice, she did not bother either.
"Because no body was found, the Organization sent me to inspect your house twice. The second time, when I discovered that all the clothes from your childhood were gone, it sent a chill down my spine. During earlier drug tests, there had also been cases where lab mice became smaller..."
At that point, Ai instead saw Conan make a shushing gesture at her.
Everything else was fine, but he did not want her talking about shrinking in front of that child?
Conan was keeping one card hidden. Whenever he talked to Yimi, her vague wording made it nearly impossible to extract useful information. So even if he discussed the Black Organization openly, he had no intention of revealing that he had shrunk or that his true identity was Kudo Shinichi.
A normal child's way of thinking would not connect much more from what they were saying anyway.
Ai lowered her book. "Don't worry. I found you interesting, so I marked you as confirmed dead on the Organization's list. But if the Organization discovers that report was written by a traitor like me, they'll probably start suspecting you again."
"A traitor?"
"Right..."
The basic story was simple. Her late parents had worked for the Organization, so she, whose real name was Miyano Shiho, and her older sister Miyano Akemi had naturally been classified as Organization people from the moment they were born. Their lives had been arranged for them from the start.
She and her sister had always been very close. A little while ago, Shiho noticed Gin behaving strangely. When she looked into it, she discovered that a member had been executed. Yet no body or related news ever turned up, so the search started again.
The member who had supposedly been executed was Miyano Shiho's older sister, Miyano Akemi. Even after Shiho repeatedly demanded an explanation, she never received a satisfactory answer, so she stopped her drug research and went on strike in protest.
Naturally, the Organization did not indulge her. They handcuffed her inside a room.
She had already done other things in the past that had displeased her superiors, and now there was the strike as well. Believing she was very likely about to be executed, Miyano Shiho swallowed a dose of the drug she had secretly kept, intending to kill herself. Instead, she unexpectedly shrank just like Kudo Shinichi and managed to escape.
Then, on a rainy night, the professor found her and took her home, much like Kiryu Sento being taken in by Evolto. That was how Miyano Shiho became the present-day Haibara Ai.
"Since we're in the same situation, I thought you might understand what happened to me..."
"Don't be ridiculous! How could I possibly understand someone who invented a drug for killing people?!" Conan shot back heatedly.
Haibara Ai's lips parted slightly, as though the accusation had left her speechless for a moment.
"Conan..." Professor Agasa put a hand on his shoulder with an awkward expression, reminding him yet again that someone else was present.
Yimi had finished gnawing through a slice of melon and was now leaning over the back of the sofa, a melon seed still stuck to her cheek, staring fixedly at the two of them.
Conan calmed down. He had already decided to lay things out in the open today. "APTX4869 is a drug that kills someone without leaving detectable poison in the body, right? What other kinds of research did you people do? Experiments on fetuses that fuse human and animal genes, for example?"
Haibara Ai looked at Yimi. "The projects I was responsible for did not include anything of that sort. As for whether the Organization had other research along those lines, I can't say for certain."
Conan did not listen to her explanation at all. "Stop playing dumb. This kid has poison you developed on her! And you definitely developed a drug that turns men into women too, didn't you?!"
"Why would the Organization develop a useless drug like that?" Haibara Ai was completely baffled by him.
Of course, an accidental byproduct would be another matter.
"Meow?" Yimi was unhappy now. She stood on the sofa. "I don't have, poison!"
Kogoro had given her a proper lesson about how dangerous poison was. It was something that looked like catnip but was even worse than catnip. He just had not done a very good job explaining the distinction between poison in general and a poisonous drug.
Conan looked back at Yimi. "You've made it too obvious. A normal kid would already be trembling in fear after facing criminals like that."
At this point, the only thing he had not figured out was the method. The reason he could still interact normally with Yimi every day, aside from the fact that she really was a genuine child, was that all the deaths had technically resulted from excessive self-defense.
Embarrassing as it was to admit, he had even been saved because of it once.
"You attack with biodegradable poisoned needles, don't you? That cartoon watch, plus the ears and tail under your hat that can move—those extra organs that normal humans don't have must be the key to how you use the weapon."
Having finally figured everything out, Conan reached for Yimi's watch.
Yimi dodged away and refused to let him see it because his attitude was terrible.
"That's enough. Until the very last stage of my work on APTX4869, it only existed in a form meant to be taken orally. And I've never even heard of the drug you're talking about that turns men into women." Haibara Ai walked over to stop Conan and stroked Yimi's head to calm her.
In truth, she mostly wanted another chance to touch those ears.
"I never carry, poison!" Yimi raised a little fist and bonked Conan on the head.
With a fresh bump swelling on his forehead, Conan suddenly looked a lot more clear-headed.
He had almost forgotten that Ran's nominal little sister had the same kind of absurd physical strength as Ran herself.
This girl was definitely lying. She did not look like she was lying at all, but at this point there simply seemed to be no possibility other than Conan's explanation.
Holmes had said it himself: when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.
If Conan had not been absolutely certain that Yimi was the culprit, he would never have laid all of this out openly here, even if Yimi herself seemed not to understand any of it.
Conan hid his eyes behind the reflection on his glasses. Even so, he did not go so far as to abandon basic gentlemanly manners and forcibly inspect Yimi's ears and tail.
"Anyway, you should have seen that long-haired man dressed in black by now, right? It was the day you went to deliver melon to the professor."
The bug had moved from Yimi onto that man. Could that really have been pure coincidence?
But throughout that entire recording, there had been none of the static caused by another device, which meant Yimi herself had not been carrying any other bug.
"Black clothes? No."
Yimi tapped her chin and thought back. "I finished delivering melon, then went to find Ran, then a woman came to hire us, then that woman left, then I followed her and saw a dead person, and four cats. I went to find her, she changed her face, then she got hurt, then I saved her, then I went home. She also gave me a key to give the police."
"She changed her face?" Her answer sounded suspiciously like an attempt to change the subject, but Conan still extracted the odd detail from the chaotic explanation.
Come to think of it, there really had been another case involving black cats that day. Based on the timing, Yimi could not possibly have met up with the man in black.
It was not as though Yimi could have gone out, bumped into a friendly, good-natured man in black who said, "You've got a bug on you, let me take it off," after which he removed Conan's bug and let her go on her way.
Conan pinched the bridge of his nose as he sorted through the chain of events, then asked the key question in Yimi's story. "What was the name of that woman who could change her face?"
"Hirota Masami. But she said, she's actually called Akemi."
"!"
Ai's hand trembled. Her gaze shifted toward the melon on the table.
The professor had not taken that melon out of the refrigerator, yet it was still this fresh in hot weather. That meant the whole thing could not have happened more than a few days ago.
Gin had never found a body. Could it be...?
"This kid isn't from the Organization."