The diabolical scheme of the notorious(?) Lady Lock

The voice of the woman on the other side of the phone had been cordial, almost sweet, when she'd just been checking to make sure she had the right detective agency. However, once I confirmed that we were indeed the On-Demand Detectives, her voice took on a new tone. It shrunk to almost a whisper, like they were asking me to let them in on a secret. "Are you the newbie? Are you Katsumi Hojo, the newest employee of the agency?" the lady questioned.

I'd only been employed for a single day and furthermore, this line was usually completely unmanned, from what I could tell. How did the person know I worked here, and furthermore, how did they guess that I'd be staffing the front desk? If this was some serial, I'd start worrying that I had a stalker.

This wasn't anything so fantastical, of course, but just my ordinary, mundane life. For that reason, I proposed a different theory, internally: this person must be related to my employer. I suspected they must be calling me in to a test or possibly, optimistically, to have me take a photo for my badge. With no reason to be suspicious besides having watched too many crime dramas, I answered in the affirmative.

"Ah. Good," the woman on the other side chuckled... then laughed... then erupted into a peel of villainous laughter, the kind usually reserved for the evil overlord in a children's cartoon. "Ho ho ho... Ooooh ho ho ho ho ho ho ho! You don't know who I am, do you, Rookie?"

"A prank caller?" I questioned, lowering my eyebrows in a skeptical expression hidden by the distance of the phone call. "You're not going to say you're a long lost aunt or something, are you?"

"Aunt?! I'll have you know, we're closer in age than we are apart!" the woman scoffed indignantly, before composing herself. "Ahem. No, no. Perhaps you've heard some of your compatriots talking about the extraordinarily crafty criminal known as Lady Lock?"

I had not. I politely reminded the woman this was my first actual morning of work, so I hadn't heard anyone say much of anything.

"Whaaat?! What a load of nonsense! To think that they would allow you to begin your first day of work without knowing about the greatest threat to the On-Demand Detectives and this very city!" she scoffed. "That's probably why you're not taking things seriously."

Before I picked up the phone, I thought that no matter who I had to deal with over the phone, it would be preferable to sitting silently at the desk and doodling in my notebook. Now, I wanted to go back to my doodles. I told her that she was making things pretty hard to take seriously. It wasn't just the ODD; I'd never read any paper print a word about "Lady Lock," nor had I ever heard the local news say a thing about her.

"We'll see if you remain calm once I tell you about the bombs."

Ha! Bombs. Wait...

"Are you still there, Rookie?"

Bombs?! I practically shouted the word into the receiver.

"Finally, a decent reaction! Oh ho ho ho ho~ I was beginning to get insulted, as a criminal mastermind!"

A cold sweat began to run from my neck, just beneath the bob of my hair, to my shirt collar. What was this? A bomb threat? Did this rinky-dink detective agency really have a nemesis like that? An unknown criminal mastermind who stalks its agents and calls them with bomb threats? How was I, a rookie detective, supposed to respond to this? I had to tell Genki to get his best agents on this-

"Before you go running to solicit help from one of those other detectives, I must insist that you keep this threat between you and me. I'm interested in testing the mind of a new and promising rookie. For now, I've got no interest in retreading old ground. You'll come to the first location alone or else you can say bye-bye to that first bomb. You'll also be bidding farewell to everything in a very large radius around the point of explosion, of course. Tick, tock, Rookie! The clock is ticking-!"

I screamed into the phone for her to wait, reminding her that she hadn't even told me where to go yet.

"Check in the back page of that little sketchpad you're holding."

I flipped to the back and was alarmed to find an envelope discretely pressed into the pages. Whoever this stalker was, they'd already been close enough to get into my personal belongings and plant something like this! Nervously, I unwrapped the paper, holding it at a distance, pinched between two fingers, as though I was afraid it was going to explode in my hands.

Enclosed was a low resolution photograph of a small cafe in Akihabara, crowded with the blurred shapes of people moving quickly-- likely from a discrete camera. The only other feature easily identifiable was a set of boxes, marked A, B, and C. Were those the bombs? I had to find them immediately and stop a terrorist attack! This was way too much for my first day...

... But on the other hand, as much as I was terrified, what a rush this was! This was just the kind of detective work I'd been looking forward to when I joined the agency!

As I stood up and grabbed my coat to head out, something else fell out of the envelope. It was a second photograph. As I grabbed it in one hand and held it up to squint at it through my thick spectacles, I found it somehow more surprising than anything so far. The picture was shot with a much higher quality camera than the other and featured a woman, posing reclined on an elegant, cream-colored chaise lounge seat with her head tilted up and one arm across the back.

In contrast to the classy cushion and the studio she was shooting from, the woman was dressed in an all-black leather ensemble consisting of long gloves, long boots, a corset, and bikini-style pants. The most noteworthy part of her outfit, however, was a full-head mask, out of which her platinum blond hair extended in a lengthy, snaking ponytail. The mask wasn't zipped, laced, or buttoned. It seemed to actually be locked on with a padlocked collar around the neck. The only opening was around the mask, through which red, lady-like lips smirked. The same lips had been pushed to the photograph to mark it with her signature: a bright, red kiss.

Besides everything else about her, her body was also pretty much the opposite of mine, with a fantastic, hour-glass figure. I couldn't say much about her face, given her mask, nor her age. Her pale skin made it look like she was probably a foreigner, even though she'd spoken my language pretty naturally. She seemed to know me pretty well, but I'd never seen anyone like her in my life...

Plus, what a freak, dressing like this! Then again, I was working for a futanari fetish detective agency, so maybe this was a pot and kettle situation. I quickly hid away the photo, worrying about what anyone might say if they saw me carrying something like this...

That was the last thing I ought to be worried about! I had a bomb to defuse! Who cares if the lady who set it looks like someone out of a bondage doujin?! I stormed out of the door, carrying the pictures for reference and leaving the phone hanging off the hook.