0 Detective Conan Episode 1146: The Whistling Bookstore 4

Episode 1146: The Whistling Bookstore 4

Scenario: Conan and the Detective Boys are having a leisure time at Yujiro Tamaki's bookstore café when a woman named Ami Komachi enters the bookstore. As part of a recent purchase of used books by the bookstore, a novel called "The Lonely Sea," one of Ami Komachi's father's keepsakes, was accidentally sold to the bookstore. Ami asks if she could buy the book back, but unfortunately, the book was already sold to another customer.

Shortly after, that customer, a regular customer named Kenichi Kirishima, enters the bookstore. When the Detective Boys ask whether he has a book called "The Lonely Sea," Kenichi says he remembers buying it from the bargain items rack in the bookstore and that he had already sold it to another customer. He quickly pulls up an online listing showing the sold-out item on his phone.

Detective Boys and Ami Komachi.

After Ami, who gives up on finding the novel, and Kenichi leave the bookstore, Haibara tells the Detective Boys that she noticed that the novel's listing was 200,000 yen, even though the books from the bargain items rack should not be more than 500 yen. Yujiro Tamaki confirms the low value of the book by saying that the novel was only recently published and is not that rare.

A few hours pass, and the Detective Boys decide to go home, but Yujiro says he will join them on the way home to drop off Kenichi's lost key. When Yujiro opens the apartment door, he and the Detective Boys find Kenichi lying dead.

The police arrive, and Conan points out that the blood marks on the table are in an L-shape, indicating that an object of that shape was placed there before the murder and taken away afterward. The police also find a safe in Kenichi's apartment. The key that Yujiro was going to drop off was the key to the safe, and after unlocking the safe, lots of jewelry was found. Takagi mentions that the jewelry is similar to that which was recently robbed from a jewelry store. It is confirmed that Kenichi was a part of that robbery.

Conan deduces that the price of "The Lonely Sea" novel was so high because Kenichi was involved in black market deals, specifically in the exchange of robbed goods. The book is used as a camouflage for the exchange. Meanwhile, the police use the apartment's security camera footage to narrow down the suspects who murdered Kenichi to two people: Ami Komachi and a delivery man.

The book cipher.

Conan wonders why the murderer had to take a book from Kenichi's apartment and then finds a notebook with a ripped page and some blood. After shining his Wristwatch Flashlight onto the page underneath at an angle, a page filled with numbers is revealed. Conan notes that each row of numbers has three numbers. The left column of numbers keeps going up with each consecutive row, and the other two columns have seemingly random fluctuations in numbers. Conan realizes what the numbers mean but tells Yujiro to explain the cipher. Yujiro says that it is a book cipher, where each row of numbers contains the page number, line number, and character number. However, the numbers cannot be deciphered without the book.

Using the set of receipts that Kenichi stored away, the Detective Boys narrowed the list of books down to those on the receipts but not in Kenichi's apartment. This leaves 20, and Yujiro narrows it further by using each book's average page length. With three books left and the bookstore having a copy for each of them, the Detective Boys, Yujiro, and the police head to the bookstore to decode the cipher.