"Jiang Xia?" Mouri Ran froze for a moment before recognizing the person on the other end by his voice.
She took a dazed moment to process it, her head full of question marks. "Why are you with Shinichi? Isn't he solving a case out of town?"
Hearing that, Conan's inner alarm bell blared. He gestured wildly at Jiang Xia.
And Jiang Xia, as expected, did not disappoint him. He quickly came up with a plausible explanation. "His phone broke, so he mailed it back for Professor Agasa to fix."
Conan let out a heavy sigh of relief, feeling like he had narrowly escaped disaster.
"So that's what happened." On the other end, Mouri Ran readily believed it. Shinichi had indeed gone to Professor Agasa whenever anything came up ever since they were children, and that helpful neighbor had made plenty of gadgets for him.
Now that his phone had broken, it was perfectly in character for Shinichi to mail it all the way to Professor Agasa for repairs—who knew whether Professor Agasa had modified his phone too, making it impossible to fix unless it was sent back to the original manufacturer?
As she was muttering to herself, the enthusiastic classmate on the other end suddenly asked a soul-searching question. "What happened to you?"
Mouri Ran hesitated. "Well..."
She glanced at the pitiful-looking Nanakawa Aya beside her, sighed, and lowered her voice. "Sonoko and I are with Teacher Jodie right now. When we came to the Convenience Store, we..."
"Which Convenience Store?" Jiang Xia was even more eager than she had expected. "I'll head over right now."
"No, no!" Mouri Ran firmly refused. "There's no Murder Case, just a small problem."
She was about to explain the Cause and Effect as quickly as possible. But then her hand suddenly felt empty—Jodie