Chapter 55: Chapter 55

Death In The Family 5

 

From the window of his hospital room, Kogoro could see the sunset with clarity. Unlike the setting sun, however, his mood was soaring through the sky. No matter how he wanted to deny it, Fuyuki really did help him by milking out the content of his balls. Now sated, the detective could think more clearly than before he had sex with the certified MILF.

With the return of his rationale, however, came his dread. After all, while his lovers all had to set aside their works –and school, in Ran's case; instead of resting like he was supposed to do, he was seduced quite easily by the vixen currently sleeping on the chair.

Fuyuki had fixed her makeup before she fell asleep, so one could not tell that the woman in the forties had just had sex; but her well-fucked smile told another story. Her sleeping posture also served as another clue to what happened between the two of them, and there's nothing Kogoro could do to mask that from anyone; especially his women. The longer he waited for their arrival, the more nervous he became.

'Who knows that they did not even bat an eye?' Kogoro was thinking about his paramours' reaction to the new member of their family. Other than a raised eyebrow from Eri, the only looks all of his women had was that of jealousy. And between them, the one with the most epic pout was definitely his daughter, Ran.

"I want to thank you girls for doing all that work. Now, we only have to place all of the pieces together." When Kogoro said his praise, some of them subconsciously straightened their postures. Velma, in particular, was smiling widely in happiness. For her, Kogoro's acknowledgement was worth all the troublesome things she had to do all day!

"After I compiled all the data you sent me, and a little bit of help from Fuyuki here…" Kogoro only muttered the second part, but Ran's eyes narrowed, her pout piercing his heart like an arrow. Hurriedly, he continued his speech.

"…The most likely place Conan is being kept would be-" Kogoro traced his pointer finger on the map he got from Eri, and stopped at a particular spot.

"-around this area!"

"…"

All the girls present were dumbfounded, because the place Kogoro was pointing at was not one of the places they surveyed today!

"Daddy… Do you mean this one?" Ran pointed at the Heiwayou, which would be across the street of the area where his index finger was resting.

Kogoro smiled, but shook his head. He turned around and gave all the girls a copy of something he had Fuyuki printed. 'Well, not exactly her, but more like her assistant. Fuyuki could barely move her sore ass from all the pounding I gave her.'

"First, I realized that 'death' that I got from the clue, 'candi', was too broad of a theme. Because I'm not in my right mind at the time, I just told you directly without any further thoughts. After I regained myself-" Kogoro briefly glanced at the sleeping beauty, before he proceeded with his explanation, "-I asked the people on the internet on what the word 'candi' means in their native language, and one guy from Indonesia said that 'candi' is the way they called their temples or shrines!"

By this point, his audience's mind was going through Kogoro's thought process as he kept going with his theory.

"As you can guess, with how many small or private shrines there are, we could be searching for months. Instead, I asked for the image of a 'candi' as a reference and used my connection-" Kogoro's gaze went to the sleeping snow white, before he returned his attention to the urgent matter, "and found out that as a peaceful way of warning towards some of the more rowdy Muslims currently doing business around Heiwayou, a Buddhist priest hired an artist from Bali to build them a 'candi' right across the street from where the Heiwayou was located."

Pausing to drink some water, Kogoro looked at all of his women, and noticed that although they were impressed by his research results, only Ran and Velma showed vibrant and giddy expressions.

Kogoro coughed, before he started speaking again. "After that, I tried to figure out where Vermouth could hide a seven-year-old boy, and realized that the temple itself is too small to fit even a child inside. That's when I remembered that the code sheet Vermouth had left us was mainly symbols, with only one written word as the key."

Kogoro took out the copy of the code sheet Vermouth left them and began breaking down the whole thing.

"From the top, Vermouth drew a tower, and a crescent moon next to it. As you girls are thinking right now, the first symbol is of Touto Tower, while the crescent moon represents the 'moon' character in a place's name, while also signifying the night time. The 'moon' character told us where to look after we arrived at the tower, while the time told us when to look."

Yoko then chimed in, "You already figured out the last part this morning, right?"

Amused, Kogoro nodded, before he continued.

"Near Touto Tower, there are quite a few places that have the character 'moon' in their names. However, there's only one particular type of place that I think suits the code, and that is Tsukimi Street. This way, the horizontal lines below the tower and above the fish also make sense. The emphasis on the night gave us the clue that we would only know the whereabouts of the next symbols if we look for them during the night. Something that we could see during the night would be light sources like lamps or neon signs."

The junior detective duo were taking notes, and Kogoro rattled off the next part of his analysis.

"So we could infer that the symbols below the tower were various places along the street of Tsukimi which have neon signs with these exact shapes. And I know from your faces that you girls think I would tell you to redo your investigation because night had just started. Luckily, none of you forget to take photos of the establishments along the roads you took, so we just need to match the picture of their signs with the exact same shape and order of the symbols below the tower."

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With that, Kogoro scoured through the files in Velma's laptop. He awkwardly held the notebook screen so it was facing up, in a way that every one of them could see what he was talking about.

"This hat-like sign is a match for this ice-cream shop, then the inverted triangle was from the mini stadium. The bowtie symbol is from a bar; then the star was from a carousel. And the last one is this building, the only one along the street that had two rectangles-shaped neon signs. An apartment complex? No… Anyway, it doesn't matter. The most important thing is we know where they were, so we don't have to track these locations one by one."

Yuko and Rukia took the laptop from Kogoro so he could point his finger back and forth between the notebook and the code sheet.

"Unfortunately, I'm not one hundred percent sure about the meaning of the fish symbol aside from the aquarium at the end of the road. Because we only have photos for the buildings along the sides of the streets you girls visited, we don't know if the place even had a neon sign. But, with the help of the word that was written right next to the previous symbol, we could narrow our guesses further!"

Feeling a bit stiff on the neck, Kogoro massaged the back of his neck. Seeing this, Ran just skipped everyone else and took over for him. She ran her thumbs back and forth across the base of his head. Her father looked over his shoulder and mouthed thanks to the eager girl.

"Ermm… Does this mean that 'candi' doesn't have anything to do with death like you said before?" Looking unsure after hearing Kogoro's explanation up till this point, Yuko asked with a pensive expression.

Kogoro scratched the back of his head, feeling guilty. "Well, not directly, no. But I think I figured out why Vermouth used that particular word. From what my Indian acquaintance said, the proper way to Romanize the name of the goddess we talked about before is 'Chandi', with an 'h'. And by using the word 'candi', as in the temple, Vermouth is saying that the temple where she hid Conan in is the one which name is without the letter 'h', or without the number '8', because 'h' is the eighth alphabet in the English language. That-" Kogoro gestured to the stacks of postal codes and addresses around the Touto Tower, "-got us to the filtered list, which only contains places that lack the letter h, and/or the number 8 in their address."

"…"

His explanation was met with a brief silence, before the vibrating Velma finally could not hold it any longer.

"That is amazing, Kogoro! You managed to figure almost everything out of the code sheet in just a few hours!"

"A-ahaha,,," Kogoro laughed awkwardly, still uneasy about his lovers not saying anything about Fuyuki.

"Anyway, the only thing left is to search for the area around this last building that we already knew, and look for the fish symbol, in case it was not the aquarium. Eri, please let Miwako know everything! She might be on duty right now, but having her as a backup will give all of us more reassurance. After all, I only recovered enough to go search for Conan with you girls, but I'm not in a condition to fight yet."

"Right." Eri excused herself to make a call, and the rest of the girls relaxed themselves inside the room after she left. Right as Kogoro was about to do the same, a voice behind him sent the mustachioed man into a stupor.

"Ara, I don't know there would be so many girls here~"

Kogoro turned around, a bitter smile on his face as the previously sleeping Fuyuki Natsume woke up, a foxy smile was already back on her beautiful face.

"Fuyuki, meet everyone. Everyone, meet Fuyuki."

As the Natsume matriarch seamlessly blended in with his girls, Kogoro looked to the sky, and thought.

'I'm doomed!'

 

~To Be Continued~

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A/N: Sleep deprivation is really bad for creative thinking. I need sleep so bad! But before that, I want to thank my patrons who are still with me despite the numerous problems kept popping up that left me with a very irregular updating schedule this past week. Shout out to Dragon_knight240, phil, and omar amurrio, and to all the loyal readers of KMPE!

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