Tantei wa Mou, Shindeiru - Volume 6 - Chapter 4.5

May 5 Siesta

Two days had passed since then. Bruno Belmondo, the Information Broker, had told me about the fight with a certain vigilante group who claimed to be on the side of justice. I’d apprehended Baht the mercenary; then Boy K. and I had managed to defeat the con artist, Krone. Right now, I was still at Sun House.

In the end, the home had escaped complete destruction, and the children were all safe. Jekyll, the head of the facility, had been found unconscious in the nearby woods. He had no injuries to speak of, but he was still sleeping in one of the facility’s beds. Had he been attacked by the vigilante group’s remaining members? I hoped he’d recover soon.

In any case, this string of incidents had been resolved. The threat to us had disappeared for now, and the children of Sun House would probably never be targeted again.

I still had one job left to do, though. In the grassy field near Sun House, after I’d made sure there was no one around, I took a call from a certain individual.

“Good work, Siesta. I expect you’re quite tired.”

The caller was Ice Doll, the Federation Government official who’d asked me to look into Danny Bryant. Since I’d resolved the incident, I’d emailed her a report of what I’d found. That seemed to be why she’d called.

“If you understand that I’m tired, I wish you wouldn’t call me.”

I had hoped to finish the job over email. Talking to people is work. It’s even worse if the other person outranks you.

“Yes, I did feel bad about that. However, it appears you’ve failed to record an item, and I wanted to confirm that.” Ice Doll’s tone was perfectly serious, despite her apparently playing dumb.

“Failed to record something? You wanted to know what had happened to Danny Bryant. I sent a detailed account of that.” If she was going to play dumb, then I would, too.

“You did. You said that Danny Bryant had, unfortunately, met his demise a year ago. You also gave details regarding the background of the incident, along with plausible theories. I appreciated your work ethic very much. However…” Ice Doll had finally reached the reason she’d gone to the trouble of calling. “You haven’t said what Danny left in the safe at the children’s home.”

Oh, I was right, I thought.

That said, in my report, I’d told her that the safe’s contents had been a USB drive, and that it had accidentally been incinerated during my fight with Krone. It was all Boy K.’s fault for throwing it into the fire. I wasn’t to blame, not at all.

“I’m sorry. I had no idea your people considered the data on that flash drive so important,” I responded.

Ice Doll fell silent.

One would almost think she’d known Danny Bryant was dead already—and what she’d really wanted was the data he’d left behind. “But of course that’s not true, is it?” I asked.

“As a spy who worked directly for the Federation Government, Danny Bryant knew far too much. We were concerned that the classified information he’d taken might have been leaked, that’s all,” Ice Doll responded, parrying my question with sound logic.

“Then you’re saying it would be terribly inconvenient if whatever was on that flash drive became public?”

“…You’re very insistent, aren’t you, Ace Detective?” Ice Doll’s tone grew as cold as her name. “Do you suspect us of something?”

“No. Only…”

I hesitated over whether to finish that sentence.

Then I decided I needed to.

“I thought Danny Bryant might have been investigating the Akashic records, which are in the Mizoev Federation’s possession. Was I overthinking it?”

Had Ice Doll mistakenly believed that the results of his investigation were on that flash drive? At the very least, the secret couldn’t possibly be anything as tame as a list of children with special abilities. Krone had been lying to Boy K.

On the other hand, the Akashic records were the secrets of the world itself and must be kept from getting out at any cost. I asked Ice Doll, point-blank, whether that was why the government had gotten agitated and had sent a Tuner on this investigation.

“Ice Doll does not have the authority to answer questions about the Akashic records.”

I almost wondered if the voice was synthesized.

However, it was definitely Ice Doll’s. She’d just positioned herself as a third party and refused to answer, in a tone that was ice cold and inorganic.

She’d neither affirmed nor denied it. She wouldn’t even listen to the question itself. Ice Doll was telling me she didn’t have the right to.

In that case, who had taken that right from her? No doubt she wouldn’t tell me that, either.

“Then what about this?”

As long as it wasn’t about the Akashic records themselves, it should be all right. On that thought, I asked Ice Doll one more thing I badly wanted to know.

“Is there a reason you didn’t mention that Danny Bryant was the previous Ace Detective?”

No one had told me. It was only a hunch. Even so, I had several reasons to believe that was the case.

First, Ice Doll had sent Fuubi and me out to search for Danny, even though it had nothing to do with our actual missions. The only conceivable excuse was that Danny had come to possess taboo information, something on the level of the Akashic records. However, I didn’t think that would have been possible for a rank-and-file spy. If he’d been able to access the Akashic records, he’d probably been a Tuner.

If I assumed Danny Bryant had been the Ace Detective, several things made sense. For example, the fact that Bruno had been in Japan, certainly not by coincidence, and had taken my request. Could the real reason have been that the former Ace Detective had given him a message to pass on? And the final key that had opened Danny’s safe: The Inventor had presented it to me as something that was handed down from one Ace Detective to the next. That was supporting evidence as well.

On top of that, it had been roughly a year since I was appointed Ace Detective. Who had held the post before that? Would it be so odd to think that a certain private detective who’d died a year ago had been my predecessor?

“It’s likely that what you have in mind is true.” Ice Doll’s tone had returned to normal, and she implicitly acknowledged Danny Bryant’s identity.

Then she explained why she hadn’t told me that he was the former Ace Detective.

“I merely thought knowing the Ace Detective before you had fallen in the line of duty would have been distressing.”

Ah, yes. That struck me as a clever excuse.

“I see. Thank you for your consideration,” I said, although I wasn’t actually grateful. I was good at saying things I didn’t mean. “There’s no need to worry, though. I won’t die.”

I could just as well have said I wasn’t afraid to die, but I thought that might make me sound like a child whose only virtue was recklessness. So I just promised not to.

And, in order to achieve that objective, I—

“I’m about to acquire a companion.”

I hardly needed to say who it was. Of course, I had no idea whether he’d let himself be yanked around at my convenience. At the very least, not now… No, not right away.

He needed time, too. I’d wait. If the time never came, then that was all right. This was my story, an adventure I’d begun. I would have preferred not to get him involved.

There was one thing I knew for sure, though: A certain deceased detective had intentionally planned for Boy K. and me to cross paths.

Danny had known that if he happened to die while holding the secret of the Akashic records, the Federation Government would never let it slide. The government was bound to dispatch a Tuner to retrieve the secrets he’d left behind—and he’d deduced they were most likely to send the next Ace Detective. He’d assumed the new Ace Detective would make contact with Kimihiko Kimizuka, the person in Japan he’d spent the most time looking after.

In that case, what had Danny been trying to accomplish by bringing us together? If I assumed he’d understood the truth of that dubious talent of Boy K.’s, then I had my answer. In short, it was the kid’s special predisposition, what he called his “knack for getting dragged into things”: the Singularity. Danny had seen that for what it was before anyone else did, and had protected Boy K. by keeping him close. Then he’d passed that mission on to me, his successor.

Danny couldn’t see the future like the Oracle. He didn’t know everything, like the Information Broker. I was sure he hadn’t been as strong as the Vampire in a fight. Still, the Ace Detective had the brains to foresee his own death—and to read all the potential paths the world could follow from that point.

And now, I had inherited that old detective’s mission. Through a vast power I shouldn’t dismiss with a simple word like coincidence, guided by that great detective, my fate had intersected with Boy K.’s. Therefore…

“Someday, my companion and I will reach that place.”

The detective was already dead.

But his last wish would never die.

I would take on that responsibility and carry it with me.

“A companion, hm?” When Ice Doll heard my declaration, she gave a little laugh.

True, when I thought it through, this might actually seem pretty childish.

Still.

“Did you know? In stories about saving the world, the protagonist is always a kid.”