The day I tricked the SAD with a little drop (part II)

Therefore.. let's get to work!

First thing; I went to that zombie's former apartment who was arrested for killing Gerald McMiller.

From the information I received Gerald was a passerby who died in front of the zombie apartment just in the same time he was running from the police after stealing the jewels, which in itself is very suspicious. Of course it wasn't him who killed the man, no zombie was thaat stupid.

After that, the police decreed death by running over in the fraudulent report, covering the truth of the case, but in practice they arrested the zombie for the murder.

The apartment was inside a two-story building tucked away in a Marshmoore alley. When I got outside I saw how hard it was to get in. The iron rolling door was closed, and the only possible entrance was through the door, because from the information they gave me, it had no windows to the street, only to the parking lot, which was inside.

Even though I looked like an underage girl, I didn't like to draw attention to myself, so things like standing around staring at a building from the outside aren't part of my repertoire of activities I usually do on my free afternoons.

I thought about pretending to be interested in renting the apartment. If the owner agreed to let me in and check the apartment for myself and if I could get some time alone I could do the job while he wasn't looking. I thought better and concluded that this possibility had two holes: first that the owner would not necessarily give me the necessary time without supervision to complete the service which would suck, and second it would be very strange for a minor searching for an apartment on her own.

I gave up.

I waited for the street to clear a bit then jumped on the roof of the building. With one jump I climbed the pole and with another I was already on the roof. Dropping my body onto the roof surface so I couldn't be seen, I crawled until I saw the complex's parking lot. As far as my information went the apartment had not been rented yet, so if I found the right window I could break it and get in easily, and there would be no one there to see me.

You might have guessed, but all this information I had came from Greta. She does her hacking magic and knows everything, it's amazing! That was also how I learned about the Johnson's murder and the invitation on that day that Dragon called Craig. I had talked to Greta before going to his house. That woman may be frightening, but she has her utility.

I looked down just a little to peek at the windows. I spotted one with a 'for rent' ad placed on the glass. (It must be that one.) I pondered how to get in. I'd have to hold on to the edge of the roof, let myself fall, drop a little, and when I was facing the window I would've to put my hands back on the rail, supporting myself. Then I would want to remove the entire window, using my nails as a spatula, digging into the corners until it came out. I couldn't make any noise, I had to remove the entire glass and bring it with me as quietly as possible.

The problem was that the part of removing the putty had to be done quickly, before someone in the front building decided to look out the window and saw a little girl hanging.

If someone spotted a little girl hanging, it would be more chaotic than the circus.

(I hang up, let go, hang back, remove the putty, pull out the window and jump carrying it with me inside.) I kept repeating this phrase to myself for a few moments.

And so I did. I let myself go until I was at the desired window level, hung back, and poked the window's pulp around the corners to try to loosen the glass.

Easier thought than done.

There was no time to take it all off the first time, so I had to resort to my finesse. No... I wasn't going to break the glass. It was going to make a lot of noise and draw attention, and I needed to get in there with time and without anyone noticing. What I did was use my hawkeye.

Have I never told before? I have photographic memory.

No... I'm not a nerd, it's a hard-earned skill which demanded a lot of mental training, a process that lasted long years until it was complete. It's hard for us parasite roaches to learn skills as fast as other paranormal beings, so we have to pick early on what we're going to improve on. We get our finesses from the fact that we live many years compared to others, but unfortunately the skills acquired do not come so easy for us.

The first skill I thought would be important was photographic memory, because I thought I was going to be a detective when I was little, so it would come in handy. How lucky it came in handy even in my current job, although I've become... You know... The opposite of detective.

After becoming accustomed to memorizing the dispositions of objects in the scenes I witnessed, I began training my second finesse: peripheral vision. The ability to see everything around me at once, with one glance, without taking me long. It's like speedreading a book, except I trained with the scenario instead of words. Once these two skills are combined, I arrive at the hawkeye, which I consider the fruit of all my mental learning.

Imagine if looking only once you could memorize the whole scenario... This way with a peek in a mirror or a drop of water you can see everything around you without having to turn around, and not only that: you still have complete control of events because by remembering the disposition of all things, with every glimpse you know everything that has come out, everything that has entered and everything that has remained in place, revealing any minor movement that occurs around you since you last looked. No movement escapes unnoticed by you.

I call such possibility 'hawkeye'.

Because the window glass was so clean it was kind of reflective, so I had control of everything that happened in the building behind me without turning around. As soon as I saw someone heading to the window, risking noticing a girl hanging on the railing of the neighboring building, I would jump down to avoid being seen in those suspicious conditions.

Fortunately, I only had to do this once. I removed some of the glass with my fingernail, almost half of it. Then I realized from the glass that someone was coming in the fourth window of the third floor of the building behind me, so I let go. I fell to the parking lot pavement.

I stopped the impact of the fall by using the indarra on my feet just in time, obviously. When I do this I do not suffer any damage.

Once the scene was clear again, I climbed to the window with a sequence of hops and finished preparing my entry. Best of all, I'm sure no one saw me because of my hawkeye.

It didn't take long to get in. I was carrying the glass with me. I set it quietly on the floor so it wouldn't fall. Once on the floor there is no way to fall, right? Now I was in the apartment of that zombie that was used as a scapegoat. As I imagined, all the furniture had been removed. Now it was just an empty apartment, ready to be rented. It was an empty place like Craig's head.

But I had to leave some evidence that a human serial killer had come by. Anything that would satisfy a DEA half-assed investigator.

I stopped to ask myself: what exactly did I want? Well ... Obviously I wanted people to think that the one who was caught by the crime, Jeffrey Sprohic, whether they knew he was a zombie or not, had been unjustly arrested. It would be perfect if I could cast suspicion on someone else. This would make it clear that the two crimes are correlated and the arrest of the zombie had been a grotesque mistake by the police.

Another condition is that I wanted them to think that the culprit of the crime was an ordinary human being. An ordinary human being leaves clues when he goes somewhere, because besides being a tong he is kind of limited. He doesn't just jump from the floor to the window like I do.

First I thought of forging a clue on the door. I went to the front door. If I opened it now there was a chance someone would be passing by just in that time, and if anyone saw me there that day, any false leads I left would lose purpose… "Do you know if anyone else came into this apartment? Oh, a little girl was there the other day... " No… I definitely shouldn't open the door.

What kind of clue would anyone leave that would have gone unnoticed by the police? From what Greta told me, they were chasing the zombie here in Marshmoore, and after they found the body it took a while to get into the apartment ... And when they did, it was no longer there. Which suggests that he fled through the parking window and got a car. He could have left a clue on the window ...

I returned to the window through which I entered. The glass was missing and the pulp had been moved, which is obvious... I took the glass by poking the pulp and fiddling with the rubber.

"Wait... If I get out of here now and the SAD police come, they'll realize there's something wrong with the putty and the rubber... Will they notice that someone recently came in?" Hadn't thought about that.

I hid my body from being seen by the people in the front building and stopped to burn my gray mass. All I had brought was some human blood that was in a bottle that I always carried with me. Craig told me it was the blood of someone without a police record, so it could not be identified by analysis.

The only story I could make up to hide my entrance justifying the change in the window was to pretend that the guilty human used it to blame Sprohic on the day of the murder. Yea... There was no other way.

'The serial killer carefully removed the glass and set it back before fleeing through the parking lot. Sprohic who was then on the run from the police, went into his apartment, took what he had to get, and went out the same window. When he left, he left his digitals and the window open.' And indeed the most recent digitals he got from the railing after that day coincided with those of the zombie. 'But the real killer... He hid the evidences...'

'Unfortunately for him the serial killer injures himself while poking the pulp and leaves blood somewhere. Not in the house, because it would be a clue that wouldn't have escaped the first forensic... But he leaves a clue somewhere outside...' (...If only I had an object...)

I used the hawkeye to make a panorama of everything in the parking lot: perfect! I saw a little piece of metal lying on the floor or something. That would help a normal human being remove the mass from the window and poke the rubber out and let the glass drop. And he would have then thrown the little iron piece outside just in time to leave. If the detail of the glass had been escaped the police escaped, they wouldn't have bothered to examine that thing.

I waited until no one was watching the apartment on the other side of the building, then, hanging from the railing outside, I carefully placed the glass, using the handle to fix it again, and jumped to where that little iron thing was.

With a simulation I found the right spot where one would have missed a drop of blood if he had really injured his finger with it when removing the glass, and then I splashed just a little of the bottle's blood on the spot. Then I put the iron back in place.

Done. Just a small detail. Was there any chance of anyone even seeing my clue? Yes... But hardly. The DEA's avengers insisted on coming to the scene and catching something that went unnoticed by the SAD. They would check the window and notice the putty removal. Therefore they would think who took the glass would've used an object and voilà. They'd find the blood in that little thing.

That would put the DEA against the SAD, as they would claim the latter did not do the job right, and additionally put them on the wrong track. The less they associated the murders with the zombie himself, the better. We don't want any more police than the SAD involved with paranormal beings. And setting the DEA after a serial killer would give Wilkinson himself some more time to conceal his relationship with Sanford before they brought the investigation into that line.

By the other hand, if they didn't find out anything about the iron that'd mean they weren't as eager to avenge Sanford as I thought, which would be even better.

Therefore I called that a good job.

Then you ask: Why did I help Wilkinson when I was working for the Dragon? There are two reasons... First, I have to do what Wilkinson says if I want to stay undercover; Second, putting the DEA off the track of paranormal beings and Deluxes trafficking means they won't be after us, the Dragon's gang, either, so... We both win.

After that I took a bus and set off for Meadow Park, where the other murder had taken place. I needed to leave another clue there.

Meadow Park is downtown and is not very big. It must occupy a couple blocks. It has a play area, some trees and a pond where the kids throw dirt at the fish or something. It is literally in the middle of the street. To make matters worse, from what I saw there was a lot of movement at this time of day, which would make everything more difficult if I really had to fake a clue there.

That being... The first thing I noticed when I got there was the job couldn't be done.

The yellow and black crime scene stickers had already been removed. The whole scene was already clear. Everything had already been searched.

And one thing was for the police to overlook a detail that is on a piece of iron thrown into the parking lot of an apartment where they didn't even spend much time in, another thing is for them to overlook something in such a public scene. If there was to be a lost clue what would it be? Something thrown in the trash they haven't seen? Impossible... That would be the place to look in when in the event of a crime. Something the killer tried to throw in the trash but missed and ended up flying in the wind? If so it was something that would be lost forever... There was no chance for me to forge a clue like such and hope that the DEA would find it and think it was genuine...

No ... Whatever the police found in the first forensics was what was on the scene... Everything was already searched. Everything was already seized. Now all that remained was the ghosts and rumors.

Rumors?

While wondering I bought a bag of popcorn from a stand in the square. While eating some I was thinking of that word: "rumors."

I wonder if I can could I convince Craig to spread some rumors for me? If the blood left in the first scene hints to the police that another man was the wrongdoer, a rumor would be far more credible than a second physical clue in the second scene. If you stop to think, leaving more blood in the second scene would be very artificial.

I felt my vial of blood in my pocket. I thought I shouldn't use it this time.

Instead of leaving a concrete clue in the second scene, I would invent a rumor of someone suspicious-looking who was supposedly spotted at the crime scene. A suspect walking through the park at night. Yes... That would put more doubts on the DEA for now and would certainly guide their investigation into the hypothesis of a human serial killer not involved in trafficking, a hypothesis leading far from Wilkinson and more importantly: the Dragon.

I threw away the popcorn bag after eating just a handful of it. Humans are weird. Why do they need to eat so much to sustain your body? With less than a third of a small bag I'm already stuffed!

I almost picked my phone, but I thought I should ask Craig this kind of things in person, so I went to his house.

Craig has a lot of contacts among the city gossipers, as he is part of a poker club that plays on Saturdays, there he hears a lot of rumors about the various parts of Sproustown, so I imagine it wouldn't hurt to take advantage of the environment to spread some too.

Arriving at his house, I found him in Marcelle's room, they were both crouched on the floor, surrounded by a pile of paint. The buckets of paint were stacked in the corner and drained of paint, indicating they had been toppled over and that then Craig gathered them there.

That Marcelle...

"Huh... Hi Craig...? And Marcelle...?"

"Huh, hello and welcome. Hahaha" Marcelle replied with a laugh more of embarrassment than of jest.

"I just arrived and Marcelle was down trying to put things in place... And now she insists she wants to clean up this on her own. Help me convince her otherwise, Bubble."

"Now Marcelle... Craig's gonna clean this all really fast. Come on, I'll put you back in the chair."

"But... I can help. I just need to get the cloths and..."

Ignoring her, I put the stubborn one on the chair. After a while the floor was more or less clean.

"What happened anyway?" I asked as I changed Marcelle's paint-stained shirt.

"I think I dragged my chair back too far and hit the shelf... Then I accidentally dropped everything."

I glanced at Craig. He had a little guilt. If he was going to let Marcelle paint, he had to leave the cans closed to prevent disasters like that. To be honest, he shouldn't even let her paint without supervision.

"Yeah... I think we'll have to find a new place for your paints. This is getting dangerous since you don't want to follow my idea of covering them after using'em."

"But that makes the dilution dry! Then it makes all take a lot longer!" Marcelle protested.

(I still think there should be supervision.)

Craig looked my way and scowled. Could he know what I was thinking?

All of that had tired the little artist and she decided to leave her work for later. She preferred to take a shower and most importantly: a nap. Craig went to bathe her and I waited on the couch, moving a little farther into the Cinder Clash.

Since we were alone in the room as usual, I managed to bring the topic out. I told Craig of my inability to reproduce a false lead in an open crime scene and that I needed him to spread a rumor for me.

"Me? Spread a rumor? And for Wilkinson? I have nothing to do with Wilkinson."

"It's not for Wilkinson, it's for us! Or do you want the DEA to start suspecting that there are supernatural beings involved in drug dealing and call the FBI and all of that...? Would you rather hide from five hundred police units instead of one?"

Craig sat again. He keot getting up, walking around then sitting, and then repeating. It looked like some sort of chair dance.

"This is all your guess, my dear... I still don't see why I should do your job for you. If only I had an incentive…" Craig looked up wryly. He really was a mercenary.

"You're gonna ask me for money, huh?"

"I'll do half of your task for you. You put the fake clue in Sprohic's apartment and I put the fake clue in the Sanford scene. Nothing fairer than I get half. How much are you gonna make it anyway?"

"Not much. Just $2,000."

"For a mercenary deed? Isn't that a bit low?"

"It's nothing exatcly dangerous... It's just... Prevention."

Craig examined me calmly and steadily as I answered. He let out a smile. He realized that I was 'rounding' the money down. I hate his finesse of mind reading.

"Ok. And how much are you 'really' gonna get?"

I dropped the phone on the couch and stared at him with a withering look, without answering. He asked:

"If you don't want to pay me, why don't you spread the rumor yourself? I mean... really? It is not a rhetorical question. Why not?"

"Because I'm a kid, Craig. What kind of adult would believe on rumours spread by a kid?"

He shrugged the shoulders off.

"Makes sense... It must be harder for your kind."

"What's more is that you are part of that poker club, so you have contact with a number of influential people who love to spread a rumor told by their opponents."

If you stop to think about it, joining that club is a tremendous cheat, as he can read each player's mind... I don't know what fun he sees on it.

Stopping to examine throughly there's no reason for him to not quit his career in illegal services and invest in poker. If I had a finesse like that I wouldn't think twice. Maybe if I had also chosen a finesse that would help me more in some other area so I didn't have to literally fight in order to survive. But now it was too late...

"Craig... Could it be... You like killing people?"

"What? All of a sudden? Where did you take that from?"

Well... It was the only reason I could come up that would keep him from dropping his lifestyle for poker...

"Er... Forget it."

Craig stared at me strangely.

"You're weird."

(You are the most weird, Craig).

"I'm going to pay you $1000. please do the job right."

"Didn't you just say you were gonna get more than that?"

(You were the one who said that, Craig. Even though you're right...)

"But what you're gonna do isn't half the service," I clarified while getting up, "I still have to go to that journalist's house and do... 'supervision' there or something. And this part I have to do on my own. Which means: my task is not yet over."

Craig made his typical skeptical face, but eventually accepted. It wasn't like the mere obligation to spread a rumor during their games was worth that amount of money anyway...

I prepared to leave, turning off my game and heading for the door.

"Ah! Before I forget... How was that day? With Spencer?"

Craig gestured nonchalantly with his right hand.

"It was as expected. No one stranger approached, nobody suspected his identity was Spencer Flemming, the deputy. In short, it was a good day."

"You mean a monotone day. And the Dragon?"

"The Dragon called him into a separate room where they both dealt with business while we stood outside waiting. Thus, of course, I didn't see his face."

"Hah!"

"And I tell you, I don't even know if Spencer saw it. What if he was wearing a mask inside the room?"

"I wouldn't doubt... Wait... Did you say 'we stood outside'? What 'we'?"

"Yeah ... Sub-Zero was there too. Since a priori he wanted you to go but you ended up being 'unable to'..." He emphasized the last part ironically.

I casually sticked the tongue out.

"Don't worry, I was convincing when he asked me why you didn't go. He didn't suspect anything."

"You don't know... You can't read his expressions if he doesn't show his face."

"I meant... Sub-Zero was the one who didn't suspect anything when I told him your motive..."

"I don't wanna know what Sub thinks of me. Only the Dragon opinion matters. The Dragon's and Wilkinson's."

And also Craig's. I have nothing against Craig. But I wouldn't say that in front of him, don't wanna inflate his ego even more.

"Looks like now the only one of us who never stood by the Dragon was me." I said.

"Yeah? Worry not... One of these days your beloved Dragon will call you before him."

"Can't wait for it! Yuck!"

I twisted in revulsion just thinking about the possibility. Who wants to meet such a weird being?

Craig laughed briefly.

After that I said goodbye to him and checked my phone where I had written the address of the journalist. What was her name again? Megan Bourne? "Is that a B"? No... Megan Morne... From the Daily Inquirer. From Greta's information she was more actively looking for clues and news about the Sanford case. That's because she was a personal friend of Sanford, she's also a friend of Beth Wilson, a cop from the DEA. It seems they live on the same floor of the same building or something.

Greta didn't tell me that by message or anything, of course. I just have a folder on my phone where I write down important information myself, but I always use it when I'm offline so there's not danger of anyone stealing my information. When I see the kind of information a hacker like Greta is capable of obtaining, I realize I have to be even more cautious about how I handle my virtual life. Especially in this line of work. When I go to Bodongo in person, I always turn my mobile off. My finger itches to play Cinder Clash during the dull moments, but I control myself. If she can get any of my data, even a mere Cinder Clash username, she can plot the data and verify that I access the game inside Craig's house, and if she's strong-minded enough, she can find out Craig is related to the Dragon and sum up two and two. I use internet as little as possible. Less internet means less Greta, which means less danger.

The rest of the day I had to go to that condo and go through all those Elizabeth Wilson and Megan Morne had figured to get a grasp on how well they knew the situation. If I ended up deciding they knew enough to guide the DEA on the right track, some action would have to be taken. Otherwise, for now I would just stay watching. We don't want to take any violent action against the DEA or the Daily Inquirer. Especially right after Sanford's death.

But I won't waste your time and energy on the dulliness that was my visit to that place, where nothing happened.

The rest is story for another day.