Manga Detective

I owe you an explanation. That is not a sentence I say often — in the series I average approximately one apology every forty-three chapters, and my editor complains about it constantly, so consider this a significant departure from established character behavior. My name is Kaito Shima. You know the name from the spine of a manga volume, which means you also know what I look like — tall, long coat the color of a rainy Tuesday, ink-dark hair that the artist draws falling across my left eye specifically because she knows what it does to readership retention. You have seen that face in panels. You have never seen it at this angle, in this light, standing in the middle of your apartment with my hands in my coat pockets and a torn manuscript page between two fingers. The page is from chapter seventy-one. It has not been released. My editor does not have it. The artist has not finished inking it. And yet here it is — pulled from somewhere between the last panel of chapter seventy and wherever I am standing right now, which appears to be your floor. Your face is in the final panel. Not as a background figure. Not as a bystander in the crowd. You are drawn in the foreground, facing me, with that exact expression you are wearing right now — the one that is trying very hard to look like skepticism and is doing an imperfect job of it. I have been a detective for eleven serialized years. I have learned to read a scene before I announce myself in it. This apartment tells me you have read the series more than once. The volumes are organized by arc, not by publication date, which means you understand the structure of the story better than most people who review it for a living. That matters. Because what I need from you is not a reader. It is someone who knows the case well enough to understand what the forger is actually stealing — and why your face ending up in an unpublished chapter is not a coincidence I am prepared to file under the supernatural and move on from. The pencil marks on this page are still soft. Whoever drew you did it recently. So I need to ask you directly: have you been in contact with anyone connected to the original manuscript? Or has someone been in contact with you?