Chapter 48
T'Gegos leans back into her chair, looking at the inventories that Lorius was searching through for the past few months. It was one of his primary tasks, although he did admittedly help her filtering the commonalities between all of the victims, although it was not as productive a search. So far, she only had the list of items from their evidence lockup searches, as well as the records related to each file that they determined that the items were missing from. She had worked every name related to the cases but only their supervisor's supervisor of the arresting officer was common, but given how high up that was it would not be a surprise.
She glances over to Lorius's desk, wondering how long they could keep up the rouse. Sure, Theran Medethis looked similar enough to him to most people. Except for the most discerning detective who new about how his mandibles flared whenever he was deep in thought or the ancient scar that was barely visible by the edge of his collar. She was good at relating footage to her perp, so she could pick up on these details, but she is not sure who else can. Granted, very few actually step into their workspace, but she was still skeptical.
Medethis had the rank of private first class in the Turian army, so he was no stranger to paperwork before he finished his required service. He was supposedly on vacation before he determined what he wanted to do next when he was taken so there was no reason that he could not process their arrests from their required morning patrols, even though that was usually Bassius's task. This left Bassius to process the DNA samples while Anoin worked on verifying the structure of PDAT.
The Colonel had arrived before them that morning, which was only slightly unusual. He always would check in on them about an hour into their investigation time each day, but today he was just hiding in his office. She did not like anything that would imply, but she still tried to focus.
She tries grouping the arresting officers instead; she needed to turn her brain off. Searching files was mind-numbing enough. She grabbed a piece of paper and starting grouping them at first by species. Not surprisingly, most of the arrests were by Turians. Then there were more Asari arresting than humans, and just slightly less Salarian arresting than humans. It all followed the ratios of the species of the officers in C Sec. There were a few different analysts, mostly Salarian, but even that was not a surprise as seventy percent of their analysts were Salarian. Everything made perfect sense allowing nothing to stand out on its own.
Medethis drops a large stack of files on Bassius's desk, who immediately starts signing them. She perks up when she realizes that Bassius was signing all of the files as the arresting officer. There was no rule against it, as Bassius was marked as the group trainee. It was a shortcut to allow trainees to file the paperwork for all of their supervisors. So long as the officer could be traced to the trainee, it was allowed. Similarly, it allowed for a person in a group like theirs, where it was documented that all four of them always worked together, for any member on the team to file the paperwork.
"Anoin, can you encrypt my searches for the rest of the day?" She asks, knowing that her searching all personnel files would draw attention to herself.
"I can't, but Lorius's data pad is already encrypted if you know his password." He says without looking up from his own setup.
"What makes you think I know his passwords?"
Anoin and Bassius exchange glances at each other, until Bassius speaks up. "Because you regularly cover him when he is late on his verifications?"
"I cover you and Anoin as well." She argues, ignoring whatever they are implying.
Medethis speaks up. "I thought we had a thing going on?" The way he had adjusted to the language it almost seemed like he had to assume an identity before. She did not like it but it was useful.
"No, we didn't." She speaks flatly.
"Yeah, okay." He almost seems to roll his eyes as he speaks, almost like his counterpart would have.
She sighs and heads to his desk, knowing full and well that it is still hidden in his bottom drawer with his snacks. She may not know his password for sure, but she is fairly certain that he still hid it in the bag of chips that he had been using as a trash bag. It was not a good hiding spot, but no one would necessarily think that it was an important scrap of paper. In the same bag he would have ten other scraps of paper with as random combinations of letters and numbers. It takes her just a couple of seconds on each scrap before she recognizes which one it would be, for no other reason than it is the only one that does not look like a secure password, but she knows that is the right one.
She types it in quickly and ignores the half smirk from Medethis. She just sighs and moves the focus off of her; "I have a new direction to look into. How is it going on the science front?"
"Verified structure." Anoin says simply.
"Turns out it is literally a variant of tetrodotoxin but it has sulfurs instead of oxygen. It took humans over a century to develop an antidote but Anoin thinks he can derive the new one within the week." Bassius clarifies with much more enthusiasm. "He tried the old one and it almost worked so he is just fine tuning it."
"Great, now we just need to figure out if we can make enough for whatever is going to happen." T'Gegos adds.
"And you do not have a lot of time to do it." Medethis adds cryptically.
"Do you happen to have a timeline to share with us?" She adds with a raised eyebrow.
"All I know is that things were winding down so there must be an endgame. They stopped running tests on us a couple of weeks ago and I was assigned to distribute armor to everyone. Don't you have a bug on your guy?"
"The Colonel—Garrus—is in charge of that."
"Then I am sure he will more on that."
