"What kids? What are you talking about...?"
"Oh, Dad got a new job. The fee is extremely high, but the client seems a little strange." Raising the invitation in her hand, Ran Mouri passed it to Conan.
"Another invitation, huh? Yeah, it's strange. It's also strange that they specifically named Uncle Mori and demanded that he bring the Junior Detective Agency. Ordinary clients wouldn't do that, would they?" Conan, already somewhat numb to this sort of thing, glanced over it casually. Only when he saw the amount at the end of the letter did his eyes widen. "Huh, wait, this number...?!"
"Shh!" Ran Mouri raised a finger and lowered her voice. "It's nearly ten times the rate for an ordinary job... but the letter doesn't clearly state what needs investigating... That's why it's so strange."
Mori Kogoro had long since become one of the biggest names in Tokyo's detective world. Not only was his reputation high, so were his rates.
Offering ten times his usual fee on top of that was already highly unusual, and coupled with such vague wording...
"It sounds like the kind of thing that's going to be very troublesome." Conan immediately understood what she meant.
"Someone this rich, with so many strange special requests, is either an incredibly idle rich person looking to burn money for amusement, or it's probably something exceptionally thorny." Mori Kogoro disdainfully stroked his little mustache. "Rich people have no end of trouble. Being a private detective who exclusively takes rich people's jobs has never been easy."
In this world, a person's power and desires often went hand in hand, and the former was always inseparable from money.
Jobs involving such people inevitably became entangled in complicated disputes, or the matter itself came with strict confidentiality requirements. Add voluntary price hikes on