Conan wasn't superstitious, but he was good at spotting trends and statistical improbabilities. It was hard to miss the one that had him stumble upon a fresh corpse on an average yearly rate of one murder a week, no matter that actively looking for them just happened to be his hobby. He shouldn't have found them so often.
He didn't think he was somehow... mystically... provoking these murders. All the killers usually had their personal reasons for going through with the act, as petty or stupid as those got, and would have likely gone through with it whether he was around or not. Just so happened that he couldn't go anywhere without taking the one right path (or the wrong one, depending on point of view) that would lead him straight through the fresh blood. He'd gotten used to it eventually. (Besides, it saved him time reading the newspapers looking for justice to mete out. Now he could concentrate on the funnies as he ate his breakfast.)
But when Heiji was in his murder-finding radius, the corpses actively came to them.
From above.
First it was the body landing on the police car they'd been about to climb on. Fairly straightforward. Then it was the one where the guy sailed off a cliff in his car. And the body landing and impaling itself on the spikes of a front gate.
And the one where a man fell from the Osaka castle. On fire.
"They're escalating, aren't they," Heiji said as they watched the latest corpse from a safe distance away.
It had fallen through the trees as they took a walk in the forest. It hadn't fallen from a tree, though. Wrong angle. Kind of come in from the side, actually.
Through a beehive.
Conan wasn't sure if the landing or the pissed-off bees had finished him off. But the fall itself had certainly started it. With his grossly oversized shoes and his funny hair it wasn't long before they found the circus and the deliberately tweaked cannon he'd been shot from.
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Next time they went on a trip together, they avoided the forests, too.
Fat lot of good that did them.
"... We're in the middle of a FIELD and there's no planes overhead. What the hell."
(They eventually found the sabotaged paraglider. The agency name was printed on it. They kept track of their pilots. Case closed.)
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"Come on, we're in a tunnel, where the hell could she fall from?"
The answer was, badger hole breaking through into an air vent. The rental car company guy who filled the insurance papers asked them if they thought he could get them classified as act of god.
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"Hey Kudo, wanna go exploring caves? Big strong caves? Solid rock? Tiny passages where everyone but you will have to hang their heads? Absolutely no space to fall through?"
Conan would have loved to be optimistic about foiling the trend. But optimism wasn't a feeling he had very often. It required a sort of blind trust in the world and the future that he simply had never developed.
At least when the cave caved in, along with some miners, there were more than enough pickaxes to take from the bodies to dig a way back out. He didn't get why Heiji believed he couldn't be positive.
Next visit, TV show marathon. There was plenty to watch from the comfort of home, and no way in hell Conan was putting a toe outside with him.
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"... Seriously? Did someone just crash through the ceiling? Seriously?"
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When the cable that was towing a car to the tourist trap up in the mountain snapped and flung a whole carload of people at their feet, Megure-keibu forbade them from being in his city at the same time, ever again. They laughed politely and pretended he hadn't meant it.
There was the case where someone tried to frame Kid the Phantom Thief, again, because the gods knew there weren't enough examples of what happened to those idiots. Conan and Heiji had been able to tell the second they saw the unimaginative note, but seeing how late they'd been shown it, that didn't stop the culprit from sabotaging his accomplice's glider. Which, of course, landed with unerring accuracy right on top of them. Heiji had to snatch Conan away by his suspenders.
They found the real (surviving) bad guy and gave chase yadda yadda. The guy had a machine gun yadda yadda. Escape up a cliff, yawn.
Conan and Heiji got to watch him plummet down several times in a row, which was rather a novelty. As the killer raced away to his escape whatever, all bwahaha-ing and cradling his misbegotten gain, the real Kid had clipped a very long, very elastic bungee rope to his waist and tripped him over the edge. Because "No one gets hurt" was nice and all, but mutilating such an awesome state-of-the-art glider had to be a crime, and apparently mental trauma wasn't covered by Kid's policies.
Some of the cops wondered afterwards if raining corpses were really all that much worse than raining vomit, because seriously, ew.
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Nothing fell from the mountainside the hot springs clung to. Or from the dining room's rafters. There were no trees around the pools. There was a mysterious disappearance, but it had been a couple weeks ago. There was a mysterious drying spring, which only meant the water was getting low enough Conan wouldn't risk drowning. Not that he was supposed to be using it (the owners were going to call in experts in the morning, in the meantime the guests had to use the next one) but Heiji, when roughhousing, tended to forget their relative sizes, which Conan personally liked in the abstract and which got him accidentally hip-checked into pools otherwise.
Then the body that had been playing cork in the underwater spring tunnel sprang out, the ensuing geyser propelling it several dozen feet in the air before it landed mangled to mushy shreds all over half of the pool, plus Conan's fresh towel and yukata.
"Well," Conan mused as he dogpaddled to the edge, "The hole doesn't seem to be that big, so likely the body had to become mushy enough to be forced through first. Also, I will never feel clean again."
Heiji helped him out with barely a grimace, and even flicked a graying little bit of flesh off his hair. "Say... This one didn't fall on us so much as take flight from UNDER us. ...What does that say about the trend?"
"We're pulling the other side of the globe through," Conan said, "Watch out for the Chileans next week," and trudged his way to the shower room, doing his best not to tempt fate by hoping too hard they'd filled this trip's quota. They still had another three days of vacation there, after all, and he had so much skin to scrub human stew off of.
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In retrospect, going fishing at a river bracketed by cliffs had been asking for it. But goddammit, they needed a vacation, even one that only lasted a half-hour before a case hurtled itself at them.
As the body fell from the train, Conan was already facepalming. This was straight from Holmes - find a window over a train track, push the body out as the train goes past, and it'll get flung off at the next turn. Simplistic.
Of course it had to land on a kayak passing by. The rower was propelled almost a dozen feet away. He was still bitching up a storm about his rental and how irresponsible dumping corpses wily-ninny was when Heiji swam up to him, so Conan blinked his most innocent blink possible and went, "Aw, and it was almost two for one too!"
Ingrate. At least the corpses never complained.
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"Hey, by chance, are you in town?"
Heiji was at the other end of the phone connection, but Conan, being a pretty good detective, could tell he was blinking.
"... I'm still in the train. It was gonna be a surprise, Kudo, how'd you know?"
Conan gave a thoughtful look at the remains of the hot air balloon draped over the roof and the basket wedged into his window. "No reason."
Obviously their combined range was getting wider. Soon no one on Earth would be safe from sudden, strangely lethal tumbles.
"You know what, the way it's going... Let's not get buried at the same cemetery."
"Breakin' my heart there, Kudo."
"We'd be liable to end up ground zero for the Moon landing. On Earth."
"..."
"..."
"Very good point."
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"I draw the line at friggin' astronauts."