Chapter 138: Chapter 1.2
Detective, assistant, and chief
The detective agency was on the second floor of a mixed-use building.
"So, how did you make it work this time?" I asked Siesta. I was leaning back into a well-worn sofa, opening the box of pizza that had just been delivered.
After the uproar near the hotel, the man with the knife had been safely handed over to the police. By the time we'd finally made it back here, it was well after sunset, and I still didn't have a complete picture of the incident.
"Oh, I want a slice with lots of shrimp."
Siesta had been in her usual spot at the back of the office, typing on her computer. Now she was drifting over to the freshly baked pizza, like a butterfly drawn to a flower.
"Siesta, are you listening to me?"
"I'm always listening to the voice of your heart. Snarf-snarf."
"If you're gonna eat with sound effects, at least be cute about it, wouldja?" I shot back, and I meant it. Siesta had taken a seat across from me and was stuffing her face.
"Once he knew for sure that she was cheating, the client flew into a rage and attacked his wife and her lover... Isn't that what happened?" Nagisa asked. Bringing over three glasses of soda, she set them on the table in front of us.
"Well, one of our original assumptions was wrong." Now that she'd finished a slice of pizza, Siesta finally began answering our questions. "The man with the knife—our client—wasn't married to that model."
Nagisa and I exchanged looks. Neither of us had been expecting that one. "The client was stalking her. When he suspected she had a real partner, he
hired a detective to find out for sure."
...I see. In that case, we'd basically aided and abetted a stalker.
"But what about the copy of the family register he brought as proof that they were married?"
"Probably a forgery. There are people who'll take on under-the-table projects like that."
"So you realized he was lying back then, Siesta?"
"I didn't find anything suspicious in the documents right away, but what he told us about his wife seemed rather unnatural."
"How so?" Nagisa asked, sitting down beside her.
"It was almost as if he'd memorized an online profile. Superficially, he knew a lot about his wife, but there was no substance to it." Siesta took a long swig of soda, then added, "For example, I know the things my assistant commonly says in his sleep, and that he likes his fried eggs with soy sauce, and I've seen him scrunch up his face when he takes powdered medicines. I know everything about him."
"Huh? Are you trying to one-up me?"
"That's the sort of information you can't know if you've never lived with your partner. The client didn't have any of that."
Oh. So the client—or rather, the criminal—must've felt as if he knew the woman just from looking at her data. He'd probably started to think he was the only one who could understand her or something.
"I see," said Nagisa. "You know, it did feel vaguely off to me, too."
Now that she knew what had really been going on, Nagisa nodded as if everything made sense to her.
She was right: Even in the hotel, she'd seemed to think there was something odd about the incident.
"Hrmm. I've got to try harder. I'm already studying for school anyway," Nagisa told herself, smacking her cheeks sharply.
Like me, Nagisa was majoring in psychology. According to her, there was a motive behind every incident, and behind that motive was a human heart. In order to grow as a detective, she said she needed to better understand the mind.
"So I was the only one who didn't notice anything, then?" Geez. If Siesta had figured it out, she could have filled me in.
"They say if you want to fool your enemies, first fool your friends, right?" "That's not fair... Well, I'd like to say it's not, but were you trying to
accomplish something by doing that?"
"If we were all on the same page, we wouldn't be able to handle unforeseen situations. It's like the way the pilot and copilot eat different meals on a flight to avoid any possibility of food poisoning. It's risk management—we should be coming at this from different angles."
"You mean even if we all have the same basic goal, sometimes it's effective to intentionally have individual perspectives and do different things?"
I didn't even have to think very hard to see we'd always worked that way. "Actually, I found this a little while ago. It's a private account." Siesta held up
her phone, displaying someone's social media page.
"Does this belong to that model?" Nagisa asked. In a post, the OP mentioned feeling like they were being followed. The woman must have noticed her stalker.
"But it's an anonymous account. How did you find it?"
"I just applied the same method I used to identify your account way back when."
"You tracked down my account?"
And apparently she wasn't planning on telling me how. This sucks.
"...Well, I'll turn a blind eye to the past for now. Point is, you thought the woman might have a stalker, so you were on the scene again today."
"Yes, although it was only a theory. I hadn't completely ruled out the possibility that the client might have married the model in secret."
However, because Siesta had noticed all the possibilities, we'd avoided a worst-case scenario.
"I used to be able to resolve these things a bit more neatly." She smiled faintly, remembering distant days.
When she'd been a Tuner, Siesta had had a certain special notebook that
granted its bearer every sort of qualification there was. If she'd used that, it would have been easy for her to check with the ward office and find out if the client and model really were married.
However, at this point, she didn't have that sort of authority. "I'm just a detective now."
Right; she wasn't a Tuner or the Ace Detective anymore.
She was only a detective, and...
"You're also the chief here, remember?" I told her. Siesta smiled. "Oh, that's right."
She was the chief, Nagisa was the detective, and I was their assistant.
About a year ago, peace had abruptly come to the world. The string of global crises that would later be known as "the Great Cataclysm" were resolved by the Ace Detective and many other heroes, and the world was saved.
As proof that perpetual peace had arrived, the Oracle, Mia Whitlock, had lost her ability to see the future. That meant global crises were no longer being recorded in the sacred text.
It had been a year since the Tuner system itself had been dissolved. Siesta had established this detective agency because she believed that, even in this peaceful world, somebody somewhere would still need justice. Nagisa and I had agreed, and we'd kept on working with her even as university students.
"Well, I'm not very fond of the name you gave us, Kimi."
For no apparent reason, Siesta started criticizing the agency's name, even though we'd settled on it a whole year back. Sheesh. As always, she'd had me choose because she couldn't be bothered, and now all she did was complain about it.
"Hey, it's a good name. The Shirogane Detective Agency."
I'd borrowed the name of a certain benefactor of mine. I didn't know why, but Siesta wasn't happy about that.
"Still, the year just started, and I'm already wiped out." I stretched, then relaxed.
This request had come in at the end of the year, and it had taken us until today, January 2, to solve it. I'd known there wouldn't be holidays at any detective agency run by Siesta, but still.
"Should we relax and make our first shrine visit of the year tomorrow?" Siesta suggested unexpectedly.
Come to think of it, she'd always been the type to put seasonal events right up there with work.
"Hooray! A chance to wear a kimono!" Nagisa agreed enthusiastically, flexing her muscles.
It might be a break, but going anywhere with Siesta and Nagisa was bound to become a headache in one way or another. I felt I should replenish my energy stores while I could, which was why I bit into a slice of pizza. Just then...
"It looks like we have a job," Siesta said. When I turned to look, she was opening the window. Cold night air blew in, and I put up the collar of my jacket. Then, with a rustle of wings, something flew into the agency.
"Thank you. I'll take this," Siesta told it, relieving our visitor (an owl) of the letter it held in its beak.
"What are you, some kind of wizard?"
"Don't you know about carrier pigeons, Kimi? They can fly a thousand kilometers."
My comment had been specifically because our visitor was an owl, not a pigeon, but more importantly... "Who's the job request from?" I couldn't tell from her expression.
Nagisa watched her, too, waiting for an answer.
Siesta's eyes remained on the letter for a little while longer. Then, finally, she looked up.
"For the first time in a year, we have a summons from the Federation Government."
Proxy Ace Detectives
Thanks to the Federation Government's orders, the next evening found us in the city of a thousand temples—Kyoto. We'd spent a little over two hours on the bullet train, and no sooner had we reached our station than a shiny black car had legally abducted us.
"I wanted to have some dango or yatsuhashi first," Nagisa grumbled. She was kicking her feet like a kid, protesting the way we were being treated.
"Yeah. I was just wishing they'd brought us over in first class," I said, adding a gripe of my own.
That said, these were demands for our employer.
"We won't necessarily be able to write it off as a work expense, so no." Gazing out the window, Siesta spoke like a business owner. "After all, we don't know whether they're going to be our client yet."
By "they," she meant the Federation Government—the entity who'd sent the carrier owl.
The letter hadn't mentioned any specifics. They'd just told the three of us to come to this location, at this time, on this date.
"Man. Not fair." The words were out of my mouth before I'd even thought about them.
I hadn't been saying that phrase much lately. However, right now, those were the only appropriate words for the situation I—well, technically, the two girls— had been placed in.
What business could the Federation Government have with the former Ace Detectives, after all this time?
We spent another forty minutes in the car before reaching our destination.
Just as the sun was setting, we followed our driver-turned-guide up a gravel path. Before long, an enormous Buddhist temple came into view.
"Isn't this an important cultural asset?" Nagisa murmured. The building looked like something that would show up in a Japanese history reference book. I was pretty sure it was off-limits to the general public, but our guide gestured straight at the entrance, telling us to go in. Then I realized that all the pigeons on the temple grounds had turned to look at us.
We took off our shoes and stepped into the main temple, where an expanse of hard wooden flooring lay before us. Off to the sides, several dozen masked servants dressed in white stood in long rows.
"...Why do they all have spears?" That seemed ominous. I swallowed hard. "Assistant, look." Siesta pointed at the back of the room.
There was a dimly lit Buddha hall back there. The hall enshrined a huge Buddha, and someone was sitting in front of it. They wore the same mask as the servants, but their clothing resembled a court lady's twelve-layered kimono. Between that and the long hair, it seemed safe to say that this was a woman.
"A Federation Government dignitary, hm?"
She was in a completely different class from the servants who were waiting off to the sides. Even though we'd grumbled on the way here, we now straightened up, whether we felt like it or not. We seated ourselves in a row, kneeling formally, with Nagisa in the middle.
"I apologize for summoning you so abruptly."
For a moment, I didn't know who had spoken. Then I realized that the dignitary was bowing so low that her forehead touched the floor. She was
apologizing to us?
"Nagisa, do you know that official?" I asked. Nagisa was kneeling formally beside me. This much humility coming from a representative of the Federation Government was extremely weird. All the dignitaries I'd ever dealt with had been much more overbearing, mechanical, and sort of lacking in humanity.
"No, I don't know her. I doubt Siesta does, either."
On Nagisa's other side, Siesta gazed at the dignitary dubiously, but she was the first to speak. "And? What did you want with us?"
"First, take a look at this."
The masked dignitary raised her head.
In the next instant, a vivid image was projected onto the Buddha hall behind her. It was something like projection mapping that used the uneven background as a screen.
However, what it showed made me want to cover my eyes.
"The corpses of government officials?" I heard myself say. And I hadn't meant "corpse," singular. The beheaded bodies of several masked dignitaries were projected on every surface of the Buddha hall as 3D images, one after another.
"At present, Federation Government high officials are being assassinated all over the world."
...The Federation Government ruled the world from the shadows, and the murderer was only targeting them? If that was really happening, that would be...
"So it's a new global crisis?" Siesta asked, speaking for all of us.
"Wait, though. Aren't global crises a whole lot rarer these days?" Nagisa broke in. As she said, no new enemies of the world had appeared on Earth in the past year. As if to corroborate this, Mia's clairvoyance hadn't activated even once. In that light, what sort of crisis could the killing of these dignitaries be?
"We view them as an 'unknown crisis,' which even the Oracle couldn't detect."
That was the name the masked dignitary across from us gave the situation. "We see the basic problem. Why did you summon Siesta and Nagisa for this,
though?" I asked, even though I already knew the answer.
"I'll speak plainly: We would like the two former Ace Detectives to investigate."
Ridiculous. Though this had nothing to do with me, I still almost said that out
loud.
And my emotions were justified. Their mission as Ace Detectives was over.
Why should the Federation Government get to rope them into something now? "Take a close look at this," the official said, and the image zoomed in on a
certain spot to reveal—
"Those are tentacle fragments. Not from just any tentacle, either. They're fragments of the weapons wielded by the pseudohumans you once fought. We believe someone is misusing their power to kill these dignitaries."
...She was right. More than two years ago now, our group had fought Seed's pseudohumans. But that battle was over, and so were the sacrifices made to end it.
"Are you saying we haven't finished cleaning up yet?" Nagisa asked. Was the mission still ongoing?
"No. But given these facts, it is true that when we found these things at the scenes of the incidents, we wished to have the Ace Detective's help once more. In other words, Miss Natsunagi and Miss Siesta, in accordance with a special measure outlined in the Federal Charter, we would like to temporarily appoint you as proxy Ace Detectives."
Nagisa and Siesta exchanged looks. Both the reason for this summons and the substance of the request were completely unexpected. Then, for some reason, the two of them turned to me.
"Why do you look more irritated about this than anybody else, Kimihiko?" Nagisa asked.
"...I didn't know I did," I said.
Siesta showed me her hand mirror. "See?"
Oh yeah. My eyes looked about twenty percent meaner than usual. How did that happen? ...No, I actually knew the answer to that, too. I was just pretending not to.
Even so, for now... "It's not my decision anyway. What we do is up to you two."
Siesta and Nagisa nodded, then turned back the official. "All right. I'll take this Ace Detective job for you." "Mm, so will I. Just temporarily, though."
Right. They wouldn't leave a job half done. I'd known this was how it would go.
"We appreciate your help. Take these." The woman took two notebooks out of her robes. I hadn't seen those things in a while. Having them would make Siesta
and Nagisa Tuners again. "I'll get them."
When the other two started to stand up, I stopped them and got to my feet instead.
I respected their choice—I couldn't reject their work or how they felt. Even so, one thing just didn't sit right with me.
"Detectives always put their lives on the line in a fight. Show us you're serious about this, too."
Don't you run. Don't just give them orders without even showing your face. I won't allow it. Walking up to the official, I reached for her mask.
The masked servants who stood on either side of us all pointed their spears at me.
"It's fine." The official stopped them with two words. "I apologize for my rudeness."
She removed her mask.
"From now on, then, I will wear my true face with you. There is just a little more that I must tell you."
Long gray hair spilled over her shoulders, and moss-green eyes gazed straight up at me. I couldn't see any emotion in her expression, but it was full of dignity.
She was a lovely girl whose face still held hints of childish softness.
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