A.N.: Done for the 19th themed writing contest at Poirot Cafe forums. The theme this time was Untraceable. This wasn't my first idea for the story, but the first one wasn't working and since today was the deadline I went with this instead. I was hoping to save this idea for use in the super long story that I'll probably never finish, but it fit so nicely with the theme that I decided to use it here instead. Not super polished, but hopefully people will like it.

I looked with amazement at the absurd hieroglyphics upon the paper.

"Why, Holmes, it is a child's drawing," I cried.

"Oh, that's your idea!"

"What else should it be?"

-The Adventure of the Dancing Men

Here's the trick, thought Edogawa Conan as he scrambled through his backpack. Everyone makes such a big deal out of the dancing men. People are so impressed that Sherlock Holmes broke the code.

It's not that impressive, though.

But we're not to that point yet. Right now, Edogawa Conan was at the edge of a playground, in the same clothes he wore yesterday. Right now, there was a man in a dark car, watching him through dark glasses, making sure he didn't try anything. There was another, a woman, dressed as a young mother, who had been smiling falsely at him from a park bench, but had now turned her attentions to the man jogging around the perimeter of the park. Conan wasn't sure if she was waiting for a target or for another operative. He was also thinking that he was only here because they needed a kid; an adult sitting watching a playground without one was... suspicious.

Well, okay, he was also here because he was following them and was stupid enough to get caught, and apparently there was more than one criminal in the world capable of improvising.

Yesterday, he'd left the school with Haibara, planning on spending a few days doing bloodwork for the next potential antidote. Ran had been told it was a science sleepover. The other kids has been told it was a visit from really boring overseas relatives. Hattori had been told the truth, because he had a tendency to make plans at really bad times. And Hakase had been told not to bother Haibara, since biochemistry really wasn't his thing and she needed to concentrate on this.

But everyone had been told that he might not be back for a while. They won't worry that he's not in school today, though they might start worrying tomorrow. Hakase's probably worried already, but he's known Conan for too long as both Shinich and as Conan to assume he wouldn't run off for some reason. No one, yet, has had reason to look for them.

The unfortunate key to being untraceable is to give no one a reason to look.

But Conan, being the idiot that he calls himself in his head, noticed something that shouldn't be there, something that might have been espionage or might have been a drug transaction, and had to follow it, and Haibara, with that patient "you are a moron" face of hers, thought it wouldn't take too long, and followed.

And, well, here we are.

They'd both spent last night unconscious, medicated by something that Conan had been too hazy to identify but the evidence suggested had been an aerosol. Haibara hadn't been awake enough to think of what it could've been, and once she realized what had happened, and where they were, she was too out of her head with fear to think of much at all.

He didn't blame her for that. But it could've been worse – much worse. Their captors hadn't touched them in any real way; they'd been fed, they'd been given water. And neither of their captors seemed to have twigged to the fact that he and Haibara were anything but normal children.

But most importantly, there was no sign that they were associated with the Black Organization. Sure, there were dark cars and a few dark suits. But there'd been mistakes and unsecured captives and credit card transactions in full view of convenience store cameras, and the unplanned kidnapping of children who followed them. The Black Organization was untraceable. These guys, good at improvising as they seemed to be, really wouldn't be. Not once someone had a reason to look.

But just because it could've been worse didn't mean it wasn't bad.

He had no idea where they were; they'd driven in circles for most of the morning until he was completely lost. His watch was gone. His phone was gone. His belt was at Hakase's house for repairs. And his detective-boy's badge? Out of range. His shoes were still on his feet, but he couldn't really use them, because Haibara, at the moment, was "asleep" in the back of the dark car. And by asleep, he meant unconscious. They'd drugged her again when she couldn't calm down. And he, at the moment, was held to good behavior by the promise of her safety. Which meant, for now, playing calmly on the playground, not drawing attention to himself, and being a good little prop so the woman on the bench could do whatever it was she was doing. Almost definitely espionage.

He'd taken the opportunity to do what reconnaissance he could. The playground featured one of those brightly-colored plastic towers, for kids to pretend to be pirates or captured princesses or whatever (or, from his own actually-a-child-hood, Sherlock Holmes pursuing a suspect up the tower of London. Which he will never admit to) and he'd used it to get some elevation over the trees, to get a look around. He couldn't place precisely where he was, but he knew for a fact that it wasn't in Beika. There was a vaguely familiar clocktower off in the distance, and the Bell Tree Tower even further in that direction. And it was close on high noon, so he couldn't guess the direction from the sun. No other landmarks that he recognized, though.

So he wasn't too far from Beika. The Bell Tree Tower was tall, but if Tokyo had one thing it had tall buildings, and too far away something would block it. He didn't have a good enough mental map of Tokyo to figure where he'd have that line of sight just in his head. The dark car had circled three times in the time he'd been up there. So there wasn't too much traffic. That had narrowed it down – no major highway onramps or offramps, no complex intersections, no major thoroughfares. Not near a mall or large shopping area, then, since that would have traffic even in the middle of the day. Add that to the clear signs of a residential area – high walls, well-tended park, extensive playground, few mid-day cars – and he could narrow it down even further.

That was confirmed – well, confirmed enough – when the clock started ringing out the lunch hour in the distance, and from another direction he heard the same melody, slightly off time, that sounded like the bell of a school. He slid back down the fire-pole on the colored climbing tower and occupied himself on the swings (which faced the right direction) for a few moments until he saw the inevitable few highschoolers that wander out to the park to eat lunch on the grass.

And he found out exactly where he was when he recognized one of them.

A blonde head stood out against the dark-colored uniforms, perfect posture making an already tall person even easier to spot. Hakuba Saguru, scowling and... glittery? With school-books under one arm and a bento under the other. Conan hadn't met him often, but he'd recognize him anywhere. The teenager sat down with an aggressive grumpiness, shook pink glitter out of his schoolbooks, and started reading them over as he ate his lunch one handed. Any of his classmates that tried to approach were promptly glared into submission.

Conan hissed through his teeth.

Hakuba Saguru, with all the connections and skills and knowledge that he'd need to get out of this... And he couldn't approach him. Not without them seeing. And that would not end well for Haibara.

So that's the situation to bring us back around to now. They were both captives, Haibara was drugged, he was being watched by a pair of semi-skilled criminals, and he had nothing going for him but his brain and his feet and the schoolwork in his brought-as-a-prop backpack.

It... wasn't the best situation he'd ever been in.

But his brain and his feet were his best qualities, and he had something like the start of an idea.

He jumped off the swing and started scrambling through his backpack.

He found a blank piece of paper and the crayons that he only had because Genta kept forgetting his own, and ran back over to the brightly colored tower. The floor of the tower was flat and fairly clean and neither of his watchers could see what he was doing up there. Even if they could, though, he was almost positive they wouldn't stop him.

At the top of the page, in his best little-kid handwriting, he wrote: "DANCE PARTY!"

The three figures below that were done in thick crayon lines. The one on the left was the tallest, posed like he's jumping into the air, with Hakuba's blonde hair and black uniform. The second was shorter, with Conan's jacket, glasses, and cowlick, standing on one foot with his arms in the air. The third was jumping again, with Haibara's red coat and blonde hair. He added smiling faces and lots of motion lines, trying to make it as little-kid-esque as he possibly could. Then he filled the rest of the page with other dancers, none of them in obvious lines, some looking more like scribbles than anything. He switched colors often to break up any patterns that popped out. Then, stars.

He sat up, and looked at his handiwork.

Good enough.

He packed his things back up and slid down the firepole again, drawing clutched in one hand the way he'd seen his classmates hold them, and ran over to the woman watching him. He showed it to her with a proud face.

"See what I made?"

Her eyebrows went up in an appraising sort of way, a convincing sham of a mother receiving a terrible drawing that she was obliged to praise. "Very nice. Is that you and your sister?"

"Yep! And that's Amuro-san from the cafe! He gives us cake sometimes." Because thank goodness he knew a lot of blonde men who wore black.

"Dance party," she read. "That's a lot of dancers."

"You need a lot of people for a party!"

She smiled at that. "Well. It's a very nice drawing."

"Thank you!" he chirped. "I'm going to go give it to that niisan, okay?"

She looked over to where Hakuba was grumpily shaking more glitter out of his notebooks. "Him?"

"Why?"

"Because it looks like he's having a bad day," he explained. "So I thought a dance party would cheer him up!" She looked like she was about to say no, so he pulled out the big wobbly about-to-cry eyes. "Please? I made it just for him..."

She looked at Conan, then back over to Hakuba, then back to Conan. "Alright," she said. "But don't talk to him, and come right back, okay? I'll be watching."

"Okay!"

He didn't give her a chance to change her mind. He was off like a shot across the grass, drawing fluttering behind him. Hakuba glared at the sound of the footsteps approaching until he realized they weren't a teenager's stride and looked up in surprise.

Here's the trick, though, to the dancing men. The code isn't that impressive. It's an alphabetic substitution, one of the simplest forms of code. Anyone with enough time and enough letters can crack it. They don't have to be Sherlock Holmes.

The trick is realizing that it is a code.

Conan skidded to a stop in front of Hakuba just as the teen looked up. He was covered in glitter, and whenever they got out of this whole kidnapping thing he wanted to hear how that had happened. But not now.

"Hello," said Hakuba, apparently taken by surprise.

"I drew this for you," Conan said, holding out the drawing with both hands. "Since it looked like you were having a bad day."

"Oh," Hakuba said, taking the drawing and looking it over. "...Thank you."

"You're welcome!" Conan said, little-kid voice and posture a thin mask over his desperate mental chant of see it, see it, please see it. "I've gotta go now, bye!"

Hakuba didn't say anything else.

He ran straight back to the woman on the bench, who looked up at him and smiled. "Make your delivery?"

"Yep!" he said. "I think he had a bad time in arts and crafts. He's wearing a lot of glitter."

She stifled a laugh. "I wonder why. Go finish playing; we'll only be here for a few more minutes before we have to go back and see your sister."

He chirped an affirmative and ran back to the swings, apparently seeing how high he could get while watching Hakuba across the park. The teen had pulled his phone out, apparently looking something up. He wrote a few things down in his notebook, stiffened momentarily, and then made a phone call.

Please, please, please let that be a good sign.

Meanwhile, another jogger, this one overweight and out of shape, made his way around to the playground bench, where he slumped next to the woman, breathing heavily. Conan watched them out of the corner of his eye as she made apparent small talk, then handed over a handkerchief – with something in it. He said something else, handed over a small card, and stood up to go on his way. She stood up as soon as he was around the corner of the park.

"Conan-kun!" she called, siren-sweet. "Time to go see your sister!"

"Okay!" he called back, and jumped off at the highest point of the swing. "I'm coming!"

He'd just scooped up his backpack again and ran to her side when Hakuba jogged up, a piece of lined notebook paper in hand.

"Oh – hello, ma'am," he said. "Pardon the interruption. I just wanted to give your son a thank you note for the drawing he gave me."

She gave him something of a poison smile, but took the note anyway. She read it over, then handed it down to Conan. "Thank you. I only hope he grows to have your manners."

Conan didn't get the chance to read the note until they were walking away.

Boy-kun,

Thank you for your drawing. I needed something to cheer me up today and that was very kind of you. Here is a dance party for you as well:

Conan couldn't help but grin.

Hakuba'd understood.

The line of dancing figures this time was much longer, and, in any other circumstance, would've looked like a code. Long, narrow, and written like text. It would've been seen as one and broken as one. But as a response to a child's drawing, they were just a doodle.

A doodle that read: "Message understood. Police have been contacted. Cooperate and stay safe. Help is coming."

Signed, Hakuba Saguru.

Conan tried to look worried as he knelt over Haibara in the back of the car. She was coming around again, though still groggy as anything, and he made sure she was safely buckled in as the car started up and moving through the city streets. He didn't know where they were going. But he was fairly sure they wouldn't make it there.

Not when the police had a request for help (SOS, the three big dancers), a reason to help (KIDNAPPED, AI DRUGGED) and the make, model, and license plate of the car (BLACK HONDA CRX, GUNMA 545 44-33). He felt especially proud of the numbers. He'd done them with the number of points on the stars.

There were very few things he liked about being six. But being able to make a full request for help and disguise it as a dance party was definitely one of them.

And five minutes later, when two police cars came out of nowhere, he was very glad he'd bothered with Haibara's seatbelt. The dark-glasses man in the driver's seat actually tried to get away. The screeching tires on acceleration woke Haibara up, and he grabbed her hand as she started panicking again.

But they didn't get very far. The man tried to make it onto a highway, but two more police cars blocked the onramp, and the two in pursuit slammed in behind, blocking off the escape. The two kidnappers lunged out of the car and tried to make a break for it, but neither one got very far. The woman was pinned to the outside of the car, and the man almost made it to the sidewalk before an officer tackled him to the ground. Haibara, still shaking off the edges of the drug, couldn't manage to talk yet, so Conan had to do the talking. Lucky he knew some of the traffic officers.

Thank goodness. Because otherwise they might have expected him to be traumatized.

Really. So much easier when someone knew him.

Later, at the station, once Haibara had calmed down enough to give her statement and they were sitting in the hallways waiting for someone to come pick them up, he saw a familiar (and still glittery) figure leaving one of the interview rooms.

"Hakuba-san!" he called.

"Edogawa-kun!" Hakuba answered, jogging over. "I've just finished giving my statement about your case. Are you waiting for your guardian?"

"Yeah," Conan said. "Um. Thanks for helping us."
"I couldn't do anything less," Hakuba answered, with something like a smile. "Though I'm afraid the dance party was confiscated as evidence."

"I'll draw you another one," he said, waving it off with a smile of his own. "But only if you tell me where the glitter came from."

He did.

But that was another story altogether.