"Sorry for causing you so much trouble today."
Watching from a distance as Shuichi Akai and the police pushed and pulled each other to the limit, Tangze heard the voice beside him. He turned around to see Ran Mouri smiling at him while holding back the eager Sonoko Suzuki with one hand.
From her unusually polite attitude, Tangze sensed a subtle note of probing, which piqued his interest.
The last time he had encountered her face-to-face in this identity had been not long after Shinichi Kudo's disappearance, when she had understood nothing. Things were completely different now. Would Ran Mouri notice something off about "Ren Amamiya"?
"Would I? I thought it was pretty interesting." Tangze slipped both hands into his pockets, turned around, and returned her smile. "I heard the people next door were a famous writer and detective, so I was looking forward to it. But after moving in, I barely saw them a few times. Life must never be boring when you deal with detectives, right?"
He strictly followed the usual persona he adopted as Joker, acting far more like someone who enjoyed a good spectacle than he normally did. As expected, he felt Ran Mouri's guard rise even higher.
"It definitely isn't boring. It's more trouble than anything." Ran Mouri blinked and blocked Sonoko Suzuki again when she tried to speak. "Amamiya, we met in too much of a hurry last time, so I never found out what you did. Are you a student too?"
It was quite a fundamental question. The neighborhood where the Kudo Residence stood was clearly not somewhere an ordinary family could afford to buy a home, and even renting there was difficult.
In many conveniently located Tokyo apartment buildings near the city center, rent for a fifty- or sixty-square-meter unit could run