Bird of Ill Omen
A Yami no Matsuei/Detective Conan Crossover
Kudo Shinichi felt a frisson of awareness as the other boy leaned over his shoulder. His newest classmate seemed unaware of how he was violating Shinichi's personal space. "Huh. Is that a clue?" the boy asked in a soft voice.
Although he was only sixteen, Shinichi had accrued enough of a reputation to allow him access to murder scenes. He couldn't figure out why Kurosaki Hisoka had been allowed in, too, but Inspector Megure hadn't made a mention of getting rid of him. Shinichi decided it would be best to include the other boy and not raise a fuss about his presence. Pointing out that Kurosaki shouldn't be present would only be hypocritical.
"It might be a dying message," Shinichi said, staring at the rather gruesome image of an antelope being devoured that had been pried out of the victim's hand. He mentally ran through his three suspects. One was a photographer, another an avid hunter, while the last was a wildlife biologist. This wasn't going to be easy. Sometimes he wished people could just write the name of their killer down, instead of leaving obscure messages that took a genius intellect to decipher.
"I don't think so," Kurosaki replied. "I think the killer planted it on him."
"Why do you think that?" Shinichi asked, his voice carefully neutral.
"There's blood on his hand, but none visible on the photograph. That means the killer had to place it after the blood had dried... which means the killer came back at some point."
Shinichi's eyes narrowed as he considered what Kurosaki had said. He mentally kicked himself for not noticing something so obvious; his mind wasn't at its sharpest today. But that gave him his answer, since there was only one person who could have done it. A half an hour later, he gathered the suspects.
"The killer is you!" Shinichi declared, pointing a finger at the biologist. As he explained his reasoning, he saw the other boy slip out of the room. He made a mental note to talk to Kurosaki later, but when he arrived at school the next day, no one remembered him.
"I saw you looking at him," Tsuzuki said as they made their way back to Meifu. The assignment to retrieve the picture which had inadvertently captured the souls of all three people in it had been complicated by an unexpected murder. It'd only been quick thinking on Tsuzuki's part that had made the switch possible, while still leaving enough evidence to convict the murderer.
"What the hell is he?" Hisoka asked, finally asking the question that had been preying on his mind. The case was one of their easier ones, since Hisoka hadn't been kidnapped and Tsuzuki hadn't had to do any summoning. However, the presence of the Kudo boy had thrown him off-balance. There was something about the boy's aura that just wasn't right.
"You haven't met any of them before, have you?" Tsuzuki asked.
"Them?"
"We call them owls." Tsuzuki seemed uncharacteristically hesitant. "There's just some people out there that attract death, or at least show up around it. After a while, you'll get good at picking them out – and you'll run into a lot of them. They just can't keep away from us."