Chapter 62, Chapter 61: Memories of Seven Years Ago

That's the situation. As for the specifics, we'll have to see how things develop.

“So, we need to keep an eye on this kidnapping case.” Alju sat in the back seat of the car, his hand resting on the window frame as he looked out at the quiet night view, recounting some details of the case that he remembered: “If nothing unexpected happens, the kidnapper will bring the hostage every Sunday at noon.”

"Next Sunday, six days from now, you can go to Poirot Cafe and wait for them," the black-haired girl said in a flat tone. "Although it's only the beginning of December and February is still a long way off, it's hard to say whether things will happen sooner."

"Get ready." She glanced at Rei Furuya in the passenger seat. "Anyway, following someone is nothing new for the police."

The blond man was checking on Curaçao's condition on his phone. After being choked by her, he didn't utter a sound and typed in the phone's notes app to record the prophecy concerning Date Wataru.

However, it was Morofushi Kagemitsu in the driver's seat who chimed in: "Kiri-chan, you mentioned before that the class president would have an accident in Tokyo. Is there a location restriction?"

“Just call me El,” El casually corrected, replying, “That’s what I thought before, but now it seems only the original source can affect the outcome.”

As they passed by Beika Square, a large billboard outside announced the good news that the Beika Ferris Wheel would be reopening.

She was briefly lucid when she arrived in Tokyo, and when she checked the time, she realized it was already the end of October.

The advantage of having Noah's Ark completely erase her tracks was that no members of the organization would pursue her, but the disadvantage was that she would also be unable to obtain information about the organization's activities.

After quickly sorting out his current situation, Ale started with what he was most comfortable with. As usual, he tried to ram the stubborn bomber with his car. After the expected failure, he left the mess to Scotland to handle and gathered some materials to start working on the Ferris wheel itself.

But as it turns out, even if the Ferris wheel in Beika was blown up, as long as the bomber, the cause of all this, was still alive, it only changed the location of the crime, which was only a temporary fix.

However, unlike the bomb disposal team that was targeted by the bomber, Date Wataru's death was a pure accident, and the fatigued driver was not targeting Date Wataru, and there was only a very small chance that he would appear outside of Tokyo.

“This kidnapping case might be considered the root of the problem.” Al breathed a puff of white mist onto the glass and tapped a pair of beady eyes on it with his finger. “If we had solved it, perhaps none of the subsequent events would have happened.”

After all, it was precisely because Ida Airi was working late into the night and reacting slowly that he happened to encounter a driver who was also exhausted, which led to this tragedy.

There are too few cases to refer to. The cases in which she and Rag successfully intervened were basically cases in which they intervened at the critical moment of death to save people.

Logically speaking, this bento box should have ended when Ida Air's unexpected transfer to Tokyo was delayed.

However, considering that the bomber was forced into such a predicament by the joint efforts of the police academy team in the investigation, and that the "12 million hostage crisis" still occurred steadily after the location and time were changed, then the timing of Ida Wataru's death cannot be viewed so optimistically.

It's possible to manipulate events to delay or ignite conflicts earlier, thus altering the timing of the death event. However, whether the death event can be eliminated in advance remains an open question.

"That's the situation. You can decide for yourselves." Having witnessed the strength of these people, Elju finished speaking after telling them what he knew and quietly stared out the window in a daze.

Having arranged the general affairs, Furuya Rei placed his phone screen face down on his lap and looked at the girl leaning against the window through the rearview mirror. His purplish-gray eyes on the square mirror revealed a look of inquiry: "Er, how do you know all this?"

Elle glanced at the purplish-gray eyes beneath the blond bangs in the rearview mirror, then looked away and said indifferently, "Mind your own business."

"Hiro, I don't think it's my imagination." Furuya Rei felt his temple twitching uncontrollably. However, the other party had seriously told him how to avoid Date Wataru's death, so he couldn't be rude and retorted. He could only look at his childhood friend beside him and say, "She's just targeting me, isn't she?"

"Well, it seems so." Morofushi Kagemitsu gave a smile with his eyes crinkling, looked at the black-haired girl with her face turned to the side through the rearview mirror, and said, "But it seems that I was also saved by Kiri-chan in the same way."

"After all, the whistleblower text message you sent to Rum was only five minutes apart from the whistleblower text message sent by the mole in the Metropolitan Police Department."

"If Kiri-chan hadn't arrived first, I probably would have collapsed in some corner?" The man who had taken off his hood had hair that had grown slightly longer during his escape. His blue-gray eyes looked over gently. He insisted on using his own form of address and said, "We haven't had a chance to communicate properly before, but now we can finally say it."

A white Mazda drove through the shadows cast by a building, and the black-haired girl turned her gaze at it, her dark eyes sparkling with the light from the streetlights.

"Thank you for your hard work." Morofushi Kagemitsu stepped on the brakes at an empty zebra crossing, smoothly bringing the car to a stop at a red light, and said gently and sincerely, "Arigato, Kiri-chan."

"Thank you for saving me, Hagiwara, and Matsuda." Those broad, upturned phoenix eyes, as vast as the ocean, looked through the mirror and said to Elle, who had turned to face him from the back seat, "I think we can trust each other now, right?"

“There’s no need for that, Scotland.” Ale gazed at the vast, alluring yet easily drowning blue-grey ocean, and did not accept the trust that was based on three favors. “Saving you was Rag’s idea, but she is not free to move around freely, so I was just doing it on her behalf.”

"We are not rescuing you in order to cooperate with the police."

It's not about taking advantage of a favor, but simply because you are Morofushi Kagemitsu, you have the strength to struggle out of the darkness and take flight, and your story shouldn't end abruptly in a corner of a rooftop.

That's all, without any entanglement of interests or personal relationships.

In fact, she never expected to end up in this situation. Zhuge Tongzhi closed his eyes, recalling the chaotic aftermath of carrying people from the explosion site back to the safe house.

Originally, they planned to release the person on the spot after he woke up, but he was unconscious for several months. She and Rag tried all sorts of methods, but they couldn't get rid of this hot potato. They had no choice but to cover their tracks and hide the person in a safe house.

Finally, when she was forced to defect, Morofushi Kagemitsu finally woke up. When he regained his memories, he found that he had been led by her all the way to some unknown town in Japan.

That night, when he sat up in the unfamiliar bed, Elju, who had suddenly become a child, actually picked up a dinner knife and sat down next to Morofushi Kagemitsu's bed. He looked at the dinner knife in the moonlight and thought about it seriously for a while.

Damn it, could I have been set up by Scotland?

"As for Hagiwara-kun and Matsuda-kun, it's the same." Elle let out a soft breath, trying to expel all the unpleasant memories from her mind. She looked up at the two police officers in the front row and said, "They are very good, very good. I am happy to help. This has nothing to do with the organization."

“As the old saying goes, ‘Those who walk different paths cannot make plans together.’ My goals are different from yours, so there’s no need to force each other to trust each other.” The black-haired girl said calmly, almost coldly, “Let’s just treat this as a cooperative relationship.”

The ancient language that Elle suddenly uttered made Morofushi Kagemitsu pause for a moment. After understanding her meaning, he couldn't help but chuckle and shook his head, saying, "I understand what you mean, but these things can't be decided according to your opinion."

“You’re gathering information about Lag, but all the information points to her being purged by the organization after her defection.” Morofushi Hiromitsu did not hide his investigation into Elju. Some of this information was what he had gathered during the period when the other party’s memory was disordered, and some was information he had extracted from Curaçao.

“You need a member of an organization with status and influence to help you investigate Rag’s defection, and that person should ideally be able to get close to Rum.” He smiled, winked at himself in the mirror, and said, “We will help you, as partners.”

As Morofushi Hiromitsu said, she really needed first-hand information to help her. Although she could randomly capture members of the organization thanks to Conan's protagonist aura, it was difficult to accurately obtain the information she wanted.

Even Curaçao, who was in charge of the relay, didn't know much. Elle put her finger to her mouth and gently bit her dry lower lip as she thought. Her reason for leaving Tokyo this time was to reconnect with the people she had left in the organization.

But those people all came from training camps, and very few survived. Those who actually received codenames were still some distance from the center of power.

As Rei Furuya, sitting in the passenger seat, watched the black-haired girl lower her head and bite her lip in thought, a strange sense of familiarity washed over him, as if he had seen a similar scene from this perspective at some point in the past.

However, something seemed to be missing. The blond man narrowed his eyes slightly, trying to grasp that fleeting feeling in his mind.

After finishing his sentence, Morofushi Kagemitsu gave Riel time to consider, turned the steering wheel and reversed the car into a parking space under an apartment building. The warning sound from the rear radar began to beep inside the car.

Amidst the increasingly urgent notification sounds, the car smoothly came to a stop in the parking space. The overhead light above the parking space suddenly lit up, illuminating the faces of the people inside. Aljh loosened his clenched teeth and nodded in agreement, "Deal."

“But there are conditions.” She took a bottle of water from Morofushi Kagemitsu, took a sip, smacked her lips to moisten them, and continued, “You have to cooperate with Edogawa Conan. He knows all the information I can remember.”

"You mean Shinichi Kudo?" Rei Furuya asked, lost in thought. The memory of solving a case seven years ago with his colleagues after encountering two children flashed through his mind. "Speaking of which, why did he turn into a child?"

It was this memory, buried deep within his mind, that led him to deduce Conan's identity through the youth-restoring alcohol, and then belatedly realize that the bespectacled boy in front of him looked exactly like the kid who aspired to be a detective seven years ago.

“Besides, he’s cooperating with the FBI right now…” Furuya Rei opened the car door and his pupils contracted when he looked at the girl in the back seat whose face was suddenly illuminated and who was drinking water. He stammered, “Wait, haven’t I seen you before?”

"Never seen you before," Alju denied crisply, pushing open the car door beside him. "Old-fashioned, clichéd pickup line, bam."

“No, we met seven years ago.” Furuya Rei pushed open the car door, straddling Elle with his long legs. Using his height to look down at the unfazed girl, he further confirmed his suspicions: “You’re the elementary school kid who got lost from her sister and then kept grabbing Hiro’s pants and crying, right?”

"What nonsense are you spouting, you idiot." The black-haired girl looked coldly at the blond man who was still nodding, and denied it again: "I wasn't even in Japan seven years ago."

"Huh?" Morofushi Kagemitsu, who had circled around from the front of the car, was taken aback by the words. He stood next to Furuya Rei and looked at the six-year-old boy with a blank expression from the same angle. A strange sense of familiarity made him mutter involuntarily, "It really is him. How come I never noticed before..."

Al's face gradually fell.

"I was the one who drove you to the police station back then. On the way, your sister contacted you, saying that her phone had run out of battery and she had to find a place to charge it." Furuya Rei spoke more and more smoothly, and finally put his hands in his pockets, bent down and looked at the elementary school student in front of him, and said in a tone that seemed to have seen through everything: "Moreover, you were in Japan seven years ago, and you even drove your car and hit someone into a nursing home."

Ale: ...

"I remember that house we discovered marijuana smuggling went on fire shortly after we split up." The blond man, who had connected everything, straightened up, a smile of finally winning the game appearing on his face, and said, "Now that I think about it, it was you guys who did it, right? So, the middle school student who came to pick you up was Lag?"

“So we clashed with the organization so early on?” Morofushi Hiromitsu stroked his stubble, recalling the incident that happened before he graduated from police academy, following Furuya Rei’s words. “I had no recollection of that.”

Al silently unscrewed the cap from the empty water bottle, tore off the wrapper, and threw the bottle and its contents into three different trash cans by the door. After a while, he turned and walked back into the house.

"Well! I just remembered too." Furuya Rei raised his voice slightly and said to the girl's back, "After all, what we saw back then was a little girl with her eyes all swollen from crying."

The black-haired girl stopped, took a deep breath, and turned around with her hair slightly sticking up. She walked back to the increasingly annoying Bourbon, pointed at his nose, and cursed, "That was a deal with the organization. If we don't clean up the scene to avoid media coverage, what's the difference between you infiltrating here and going to your deaths?"

Seven years ago, she came to Japan with a rare mission opportunity. As soon as she landed, she was dragged along by Lag, who had come with her on the mission, to do some kind of "pilgrimage to holy sites". When they arrived at the place, she found that the "holy site" was actually their mission target.

The pilgrimage ended, and the performance began.

Al and Lager immediately split up and managed to make the scene look passable before handing it over to the organization. They then used the excuse of investigating the cause of the fire to stay until November, and after hastily confirming the identity of the bomber, they left Japan.

"If you ask me, with hair and skin color like yours, you dare to go undercover? There's definitely a mole in the top ranks of the Public Security Bureau!" The short-haired girl's hair stood on end, and mimicking Conan, she stomped hard on Furuya Rei's leather shoe. "We kindly let you into the organization, and you dared to hook up with my sister!"

That damn blondie should have promoted his "top police academy student" title back then, so that the police would have backed down when trying to forge his identity.

"Hiss!" Furuya Rei was stepped back two steps by the trampling. Morofushi Kagemitsu behind him reached out to support his shoulder and said inexplicably, "When have I ever seen Lag since seven years ago?"

Elle glanced at him, then raised her foot high again.

"Well, let's go inside first." Morofushi Kagemitsu stepped aside to separate the two of them and said helplessly, "Although most of the houses nearby are empty, we still have to be careful."

"Let's have a late-night snack first, then we can continue." He pushed the two of them towards the house. "Let's go, Zero, Kiri-chan."

The night was deep, and dawn was breaking.

-----------------------

Author's Note: Lag: Quick, quick, come with me to see what's going on!

El:

After arriving at the scene

Lag: Holy crap, how did they manage to find our mission objective?

Lag: Xiaotong, go!

El: ...

…

Mwah