"Hmm-hmm." Suzuki Sonoko smiled smugly and high-fived her with a smack. "You too, Ran!"
"What do you mean, 'you too'?" Hattori Heiji cut off the two Tokyo schoolgirls' immersive mutual praise in exasperation. "I wasn't finished. That ship anchor was covered in shells and seaweed. That couldn't have grown in just one year—it had been sunk there for at least four or five years."
"Four or five years ago?" The long-haired man froze, as if that crucial time had struck a chord. He looked toward the blond man. "Come to think of it, wasn't that when Mayor Jincheng's family suffered a whole string of misfortunes?"
The blond man nodded.
Curacao silently pricked up her ears. Here it comes, just as expected. But this time, she was no longer a listener completely ignorant of the background—she had heard something about what happened four or five years ago.
Still, even if she was not listening, plenty of others were. Conan asked curiously, "What happened?"
The long-haired man had been worrying over whom to tell. Hearing someone ask voluntarily, he immediately poured out everything he knew as though emptying a bamboo tube, as if sharing it might shift some of his fear onto someone else. "It started five years ago. The mayor's only daughter—Miss Xiao Du—was kidnapped by a group of thugs from who knew where. She never appeared again after that.
"About a year later, another gang of robbers broke into the mayor's home. They stole one of his treasures: a folding screen embroidered with gold thread."
"The mayor and his butler at the time both received calls from the kidnappers. According to them, the kidnappers and the robbers who appeared one year apart were actually the same group."
"Robbery would have been bad enough, but they even kidnapped a young woman.