Conan: About the fact that I have a black brother

It is called an archive room, but it is actually more like a grocery room.

The moment the door was opened, countless dust fell down, choking people. The room was full of dust and cobwebs, old toys were piled in the corner, and the wooden cabinets exuded a rotten smell.

The dean stepped in, took out the key to open a newer cabinet, took out five photos from the top, checked them one by one, and then turned around and handed them to Zhu Fu Gaoming.

Zhu Fu Gaoming looked at it and handed it to Lin Xiaochen.

Lin Xiaochen looked through the photos one by one. In every photo, the children's faces were filled with happy smiles, and the adoptive parents were looking at the camera with either gentleness or seriousness.

He turned the photo over and found the last name of each adoptive family and the time the photo was taken written in the corner.

In order of adoption time, they are:

Yamaguchi xxx June 7, 6

Qi Mu xxx September 7, 9

Ueno xxx7 October 10

Shanye xxx7 October 10

Gaoqiao xxx November 7, 11

"Are these the only children who were adopted in the same year as Takahashi?" Zhufu Gaoming asked.

The dean nodded: "Yes, only these few children are lucky enough to find adoptive parents."

Lin Xiaochen took photos of the front and back of the photo and returned it to the dean, and the three of them left the archive room again.

"Do you know the address of the adoptive family?" Lin Xiaochen asked after returning to the dean's office.

"I remember. Sometimes we will make return visits to adoptive families." The dean took out a few registration forms from the drawer and pushed them to Lin Xiaochen and the others. "These materials are all about the adoptive parents."

"Do the children go out often?" Lin Xiaochen noticed that it was a little noisy outside.

I don't know when snowflakes started to fall from the sky, and the earth was covered tightly in white, like a fairy tale world clad in silver.

The children finished their meal without waiting and rushed out to play. They were wearing cotton-padded clothes that were not too thin, and some of them wore pilling woolen gloves, with innocent smiles on their faces.

The dean stood up, looked through the window at the courtyard, then opened the window and shouted to Jiang Shoujian: "Jiang Shou, keep a close eye on them, don't let the children run out!"

Jiang Shoujian gestured "OK" with his hand.

The director closed the window again and sat back in his seat: "The children can only play in the orphanage. We will not take them out easily."

Lin Xiaochen seemed to be thinking about something, recalling that he could easily break through the fence three times in and out, and felt that the probability of the child sneaking out was not low.

"Lin." Zhu Fugaoming winked at Lin Xiaochen, who understood and stood up and walked to the bookcase behind the dean, "What's in here?"

Logically speaking, photos of children who have been adopted in recent years should not be deliberately stuffed into a disused archive room that is almost never visited.

"These are some financial statements that need to be submitted to the government." The dean walked over, opened the cabinet door, and took out a thick stack of slightly yellowed papers. "These are from before."

Lin Xiaochen glanced at the dean, flipped through the papers casually, and then stuffed the papers back into the bookcase as if he had lost interest.

Lin Xiaochen looked at Zhu Fu Gaoming and said, "Senior, I have asked all my questions. Do you have anything else to add?"

Zhu Fu Gaoming shook his head slightly: "In this case, we will take our leave first."

The dean personally escorted the two out. The moment they got into the car, Lin Xiaochen noticed that several children were supporting Mrs. Ge Mu as they walked into the house. He frowned, but ultimately said nothing else.

Zhu Fu Gaoming asked as he drove: "What did you see, Lin?"

Lin Xiaochen would never call him senior directly, and the fact that he did so suddenly could only mean that there were some things that needed to be discussed in detail in private.

"There's something wrong with this dean. There's a valuable watch in his drawer and a newspaper in his cabinet. On the surface, I can't tell anything, but if I look into it carefully, I'm sure we'll find some clues of false accounting."

"You are very sensitive to numbers." Zhu Fu Gaoming praised. He remembered Lin Xiaochen's previous calculations of the trajectory.

Hearing this, Lin Xiaochen smiled in response, but a sense of uneasiness arose in his heart, so he changed the subject.

"The orphanage educates the children to be obedient and sensible, and to learn to accept whatever comes their way..." Lin Xiaochen seemed to have recalled some bad memories, and his originally cold voice became even deeper.

"Yes, this is almost all parents' expectation and requirement for their children. After all, compared to those naughty and trouble-making children, well-behaved and obedient children are always more likely to be loved and recognized by others. In today's society where tolerance for children is getting lower and lower, they are also more likely to be adopted."

Zhu Fu Gaoming sighed helplessly and said,

"I guess everyone's comments on the situation investigated by Ganzhu are nothing more than these."

Lin Xiaochen nodded silently in agreement, then looked toward the street outside the car window.

"I'll go to the Ministry of Transport to retrieve the surveillance footage." Lin Xiaochen stated his plan.

Zhu Fu Gao Ming hummed: "I will go to Yamaguchi and the Saiki family to find out the situation."

The two of them agreed, Lin Xiaochen: "I hope everything goes well."

——I can get the surveillance perfectly.

Afternoon. Ministry of Transport.

Lin Xiaochen: ...I'll beat you to death for being such a jinx!

A colleague from the Ministry of Transportation shook his head apologetically at Lin Xiaochen and said, "Thank you for making this trip. However, the surveillance has been broken for a month. We really can't help you."

Lin Xiaochen's face was filled with black lines: "Are there no more before that? Can you find the surveillance footage of xx Street in November?"

Upon hearing this, the colleague from the Ministry of Transportation sat down in front of the computer again, typed for a while and nodded: "Yes, I will help you copy it to the USB drive now?"

Lin Xiaochen: “It’s troublesome.”

"It's as it should be. It's really strange. The surveillance camera has been broken every day for the past few months. We previously discovered that it was someone who deliberately smashed it. Kids nowadays are really something." A colleague from the Ministry of Transport complained while operating the machine.

"What does this have to do with children?" Lin Xiaochen asked curiously, "You don't like children?"

"Hey, I didn't say that," she denied. "The surveillance camera was broken before, and we checked and found that it was a few middle school students who broke it on purpose. No matter how we taught them, it was useless. It was a little better in the past two months. Just when I wanted to say that he was finally obedient, the surveillance camera broke again."

The traffic policeman was a little angry: "It has increased my workload a lot."

"This time the children can't be blamed," another traffic police officer interjected. "This time it was the heavy snow that broke the power lines. It's not a natural disaster that we can decide."

The female traffic police sighed, "It's hard to do our duty in this kind of horrible weather. Okay, Officer Lin, please keep the USB drive and change it back later."

Lin Xiaochen took it and put it in his pocket.