There's an episode from the older days of the Detective Conan anime that I remember for some reason. The female client was drawn to be ridiculously beautiful, and when I rewatched it recently, it turned out to have a pretty bitter ending.
In this world, there's a popular mystery novel, and the client is the novelist's daughter. Her father, the author, and her mother had been missing for a full month, and she wanted Conan and the others to track down their whereabouts.
The strange thing was that every week, on a fixed day and time, the father's manuscript was sent to his editor via fax. Conan and Kogoro deduced that the two might be held captive and forced to write, and that if they didn't find them soon, they might even be killed. The client looked like she was about to cry. Conan, Ran, Inspector Megure, and the others desperately tried to decode a hidden message in the manuscript.
After a while, they cracked the code, which contained a plea for help ("Save me") and the location of a hotel. They rushed to the hotel by taxi, and on the way, the client cried inside the car, whispering, "Mom, Dad, please don't die."
When they arrived at the hotel and Inspector Megure and the others burst into the room, the father was already dead in bed, with the mother and his personal doctor standing beside him.
The mother explained that the father actually had terminal cancer, that the code had been intentionally planted by the father himself, and that his final dream was for a reader who solved the code to come meet him. She told the daughter—their client—that even that wish hadn't come true, as he had passed away just moments ago.
The daughter, who had known nothing, was deeply shocked and broke down crying in front of her father's body. The episode ended right there, making it a pretty awful conclusion. It's just so heartbreaking and leaves such a bad aftertaste: the parents went missing without her knowing anything, the code she worked so hard to solve ended up being meaningless, and her father died in the end.
To top it all off, the very first thing the mother said to her right after they reunited was, "I called you an hour ago to tell you your father was reaching the end. But you didn't answer." Meanwhile, the daughter hadn't answered because she was desperately trying to decode the message with Conan and the others... The daughter was just so pitiable, and it leaves you with a lingering sense of frustration.
In the original manga, I think it ended with the daughter declaring that she would carry on her father's will, writing the continuation of his work, and featuring characters resembling Conan, Kogoro Mouri, and Ran Mouri as new characters. I guess the anime just ended right there, though.
Didn't they say in an interview that Kindaichi has a quota of at least three deaths per long story (murders, suicides, and accidents all count)? I wonder if Conan has some kind of restriction too, like "stories without any deaths are only allowed when the Junior Detective League is the main focus." Even so, they could have at least made it in time for the final farewell.
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