Detective Conan: The Road To Hell

The Devil's in the Details

the devil's in the details: details are important; problems or difficulties are often in the details. 
Expect lots of devil idioms 
It's a devil murder case. What did you expect
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With steady hands, Ai carefully filled a small syringe with Kudou's blood. Absently, she thought that he wasn't really Kudou, his body being about three to five years younger than his mental age. The boy lying before her wasn't quite Edogawa at the moment, either, so she settled on using his older name. 

The fact of the matter was this: Kudou was neither of the ages he should be. His regression to an elementary schooler had stopped midway, leaving him as a pale, sickly, pre-pubescent boy. His face had yet to grow taller, to mature into Kudou's true face. It still held some of the child like innocence he liked to exploit as a six-year-old, but a hint of his not-at-all-a-kid's snarkiness hovered around the edges of his eyes, the corners of his mouth, and in the faint creases in his brow.

Ai messed up. She created an antidote and tested it herself, skewing the data. She had no way to know which part of her data was wrong. The data from her intentional transformation and Kudou's accidental one was splayed out across the guest room floor. None of the data matched up— not between herself and Kudou, not between Kudou's theoretical and actual data, and definitely not between his data and a normal teenager's.

It would all be fine if she could simply pinpoint where she had gone wrong. The problem lay in the fact that there were too many sources of error. She could only guess how much Paikaru he'd ingested. Overestimating that amount would lead to overestimating how much time he had at his full height, and vice versa for underestimating. Luckily, she'd been within an hour of his actual time— he'd gotten five hours instead of six. While the percent error was astronomically higher than she wanted, it was acceptable. Because Ai had left a spare antidote pill with Kudou, she could safely render the Paikaru a moot point.

With the second antidote pill came a whole other can of worms. According to the Osaka boy, Kudou had lasted about four more hours before he was reduced to...this. Ai had calculated that Kudou would have almost a day. Obviously, there's a bit of difference between the two (over eighty percent error, supplied the voice in the back of Ai's head). She searched every piece of data for hours at a time, combed through her notes, looked for any miscalculation. Her math was clean— she had the professor check it over, and he found nothing.

Something had to be wrong, though. She had a list of every possible factor, ranging from what food Kudou ate to any physical exertion he'd been through. Over two pages long, she narrowed down the list of factors by extensively interrogating Hattori-kun. He eliminated the more obscure factors, but that still left half the list.

In short, Ai had no idea what caused Kudou to not be Edogawa. It could be sleep deprivation, a lack of nourishment, high stress levels, or even a byproduct of his cold. She had no way of knowing and likely never would. There were too many factors, and Ai was not willing to conduct another test just to satisfy her scientific interests.

A movement downstairs made Ai flinch. Lost in thought, she'd forgotten that other people were in the house. Sorting through the papers again, she put a milliliter of Kudou's blood each in three different test tubes.

Downstairs, the Osaka boy, his mother, and his girlfriend waited for Ai to come back down. They trusted her to give them an accurate assessment of Kudou's condition. Judging by the slam of the front door, Hattori Heizo had just come home. Ai was grateful that Hattori-kun had stayed downstairs. He'd take the brunt of any arguing, keeping his father away from upstairs until she was finished.

Another twinge of irritation made her hand twitch as she carefully wrote out observations of Kudou's condition. In less than twenty-four hours, four more people discovered that Kudou Shinichi was Edogawa Conan. For nearly a year, she and Kudou kept their mutual secret safe with lies and tricks and manipulation only to have it all come crashing down in one night.