March 4
Prosecutor's Office
Room 708
1:35 PM
Getting back to the Prosecutor's Office was our cue to kick off the investigation all over again, and I let out a sigh as soon as we were in the hallway just outside the office. The space had been mostly cleared out of police officers compared to the day before, but there were still a few that dotted the area. The other major change was the fact that the body had been removed from the inside of the room. Instead, there was only white tape to outline the place where the victim had been the last time that we were in the area. Forensics was probably investigating to see if they could find anything else of note in terms of lab tests, and that meant that we were going to have a little bit more room to move around since we didn't have to worry about accidentally tripping over the victim.
"Alright," I declared as soon as I had taken in everything that there was to see about the scene of the crime. "Let's get right to work and see what we can find out. There has to be something that will be able to help us show that Apollo wasn't the one who did this, so let's get to looking!"
"I think that it should be pretty obvious where we're going to be starting off," Mr. Wright declared as he gestured to the right side of the room where our target of the day was standing tall and proud.
"Ah, yes... The magical evidence cabinet," Trucy smiled. She shot me a brief wink, and I couldn't help but laugh at how excited she was about all of this. "Let's go and see what we can find in there. I'm sure that there's something to explain why the doors were closed and then wound up open."
I nodded and started to walk into the room. The three of us all found ourselves gathered around the evidence cabinet in a half-circle, and I looked at the cabinet from top to bottom before a frown overcame my features. "This just looks like an ordinary cabinet," I commented. "Well, all the shelves have been taken out, but aside from that, I really don't see much of anything wrong with it. I mean, there has to be a reason that it wound up moving around so much on the day of the murder, but... I don't see it."
"Hm... It really is a lot more spacious on the inside than those pictures would have led you to believe," Trucy murmured under her breath. She pressed her hands against either side of the cabinet before she made an instinctive decision to jump inside. Much to my surprise, she was easily able to stand inside of the cabinet with her hat still on and everything. "Wow! This would be really useful if I could use it for my performances!"
"That cabinet really is huge..." I murmured, though in hindsight, I supposed that it made sense. After all, it was meant to be a place for prosecutors to store all sorts of case files and evidence regarding past and future trials, so it wasn't too out of the ordinary for it to be that big. Still, I frowned to myself as I reached for the door handles. A smile appeared on my face as an idea came to me, and I waved to Trucy with one hand. "Stay there, 'kay?"
With that, I flung the doors shut dramatically. Mr. Wright stared in shock from beside me, and I simply smiled at the cabinet. Trucy didn't seem to mind it in the slightest, and after a few moments of quiet shifting from the inside of the cabinet, the doors popped open without any influence from myself or Mr. Wright. "Ta-da!" Trucy declared, spreading her arms wide in a grand gesture.
I let out a laugh at her actions as she hopped out of the cabinet. Mr. Wright just sighed. "I don't know what possessed you to do that, but I guess that we know now that the cabinet is big enough to fit a person," he remarked. "As long as they're shorter than you with your hat, that is."
"I feel like somebody taller probably could have still fit in here," Trucy confessed. "There's more than enough room to crouch on the bottom of the cabinet. When all of the shelves and papers are taken out, this place really is huge, so there are tons of people who could have fit inside as long as their shoulders weren't too broad."
I made a mental note at the cabinet with a light nod before my attention shifted to the nearby window. "This was the thing that we were talking about in the middle of the trial," I commented to myself as I pressed my hands against the base of the windowsill. A gasp left my lips soon afterwards. "Hey, you guys... Check this out!"
The other two came to stand on either side of me as we looked out the window to the world below. I hadn't noticed it before because of the perspective of the pictures that had been taken of the scene of the crime, but there was a rope tied to the windowsill. It was long enough to grace the ground, and it went down all of the other stories of the building. My eyes were wide as could be as I realized this, and I nudged gently at Trucy's side. "You wouldn't happen to know anything about rope tricks, would you?" I asked of her.
Trucy put one finger to her chin. "I guess that it would have been technically possible for somebody to climb down the rope like this and wind up on the ground... You know, if they were strong enough to hold themselves up for that long," she commented. "But this is a bit more problematic than the knife. We were wondering how someone would smuggle a knife into the scene of the crime, but a rope long enough to go seven floors to the ground would be a bit harder to get into the building."
I nodded my agreement. "And I don't think that the victim would just so happen to have something like that lying around... It just doesn't seem like something that anybody would have on them... You know, unless they just so happened to be a master magician," I teased with another nudge in Trucy's direction.
She grinned before tapping one hand against the brim of her hat. "As for if I do keep something like that on me... It's a magician's secret! I'll never tell!" she proclaimed firmly.
I turned to Mr. Wright a moment later, my smile starting to melt away. "What do you think of this? Could the culprit have really gone down that far?" I questioned.
Mr. Wright reached one hand out to grab at the rope, and when he tugged on it, he offered me a small nod. "It certainly does seem to be on the stronger side... I feel like it would be possible if someone knew what they were doing with this sort of thing. It would require a pretty specific set of skills though, I think."
"That's probably true," I agreed with a nod. "And I don't think that it would be all that helpful for us to go around asking everybody involved with the case if they know how to climb a building with rope. I feel like that would get us a few looks, and it isn't like the culprit would be honest with us about something like that in the first place."
Mr. Wright and Trucy both nodded their agreement, and from there, footsteps reached my ears. I was the first one to notice that we were no longer alone, so I perked up and glanced to the door. The other two followed suit a moment later, and soon after the fact, Detective Skye came into view with a paper in her hands.
She just about jumped out of her skin at the sight of us, and I was glad that she wasn't carrying anything like coffee or tea; she would have spilled it all over herself in her moment of shock. "I didn't realize that you three were back here already," she remarked before sighing in an attempt to gain a grasp on her breathing again. "I hope that you're making more progress in terms of figuring out what's going on."
"We might have found a thing or two," Trucy shrugged before pointing to the paper in Detective Skye's hands. "What do you have there? Is it anything related to the case?"
Detective Skye nodded. "As a matter of fact, it is. This page just so happens to contain some of the test results for the investigations regarding this case. I'm sure that you're already excited at the idea of hearing everything that we found at the scene of the crime, right? After all, it's bound to help you out with your investigation from here," she smiled.
Trucy was practically beaming as she nodded enthusiastically. "Of course! Go on and tell us all about it!"
Mr. Wright nodded along with a light smile on his face. "I think that it would be a good idea to hear about this as well," he agreed.
"In that case, let's get right down to it," Detective Skye declared. Her smile was so bright that it could have blocked out the sun if she put enough effort into that, but I knew that she wasn't even trying. She began to flick through the paper, and I realized that she was actually holding a stack of pages that had been stapled together in one corner. "For one, we've been looking into the black jacket that was found at the scene of the crime. We were able to lift something unexpected from it, if you can believe that."
"Something unexpected?" I echoed. I already had a strange feeling about what she was going to say, and my stomach did flips with anticipation. Still, this was the only way that we were going to figure out what was going on, so we would have to tough it out no matter how nervous we were.
Detective Skye nodded. "Yeah. There were traces of chloroform found on one of the sleeves," she explained. "It seems like the person who did this snuck in a bit more than the knife to the scene of the crime. The jacket didn't have all that much chloroform on it, so if I had to guess, I would say that it was residue from another source. It could have been used to clean up extra traces of chloroform after it was used initially for another purpose, and that would have explained the reasoning that it was found in such small quantities."
I gasped as I turned to face Trucy and Mr. Wright. "Do you two remember what we were talking about after the trial?" I said even though I knew that they were already fully aware of what had taken place in the aftermath of the case being adjourned for the day. "We needed to find a way that would have knocked Apollo unconscious easily and without leaving behind any evidence of physical injury on him. We said that it must have been chloroform even though we hadn't found anything like that yet, and now..."
"It seems like we were able to find exactly what we were searching for in terms of chloroform," Mr. Wright finished for me with a small nod before he looked back up to Detective Skye. "Do you know what the original source of the chloroform was? If it was only traces that were wiped up by the jacket, then there must have been something else that was used as the actual source of chloroform to knock Apollo unconscious. Have there been any successful attempts to figure out what that could have been?"
"I'm afraid not. These test results are pretty new, and I came here to drop them off. I've been with forensics since I left the trial earlier today, and I'm the only one here who would have a way of knowing about them right now," Detective Skye replied with a shake of her head. "So we're still going to have to look for the original cloth, but we at least have evidence that chloroform was used at the time of the crime."
"It seems like we're already taking grand strides in the right direction at least," I smiled to myself before I glanced up to Detective Skye once again. "So? Are there any other interesting parts of that report that we should keep in mind from here on out?"
"We've figured out a bit more about the blood that was found under the victim's fingernails, I suppose," Detective Skye said. "We already knew that the blood found under his nails didn't belong to him or the defendant, but we're doubly sure of that now. The blood must have come from an outside party, but we still don't know whose it could possibly be. There are too many gaps in the case for us to be sure of whose blood it is. We've had blood tests done involving Prosecutor Blackquill and a certain glimmerous fop though, and neither one of those came back positive. In other words, their blood isn't what was found at the scene of the crime. It was somebody else entirely, and that only leaves us with more questions about what's going on, unfortunately."
"But at the very least, we know for sure that it wasn't Apollo's blood. That's a good thing," Trucy said with a small nod. "Is there anything else?"
"The blood situation does get a bit weirder, if you can believe it. The blood that was found under the victim's fingernails belongs to someone unidentified at this point, but we can say that the blood that was used to write Apollo's name was the victim's. That much is clear as can be," Detective Skye replied as she started to play with some of her hair using two fingers. "That leaves us with a few questions since I doubt that he would have been able to write something so cleanly after he had been stabbed so many times in the throat, but I guess that all we can do from here is hope that we're able to figure out what it is that could have caused that whole issue to begin with."
"There's a lot of strange stuff going on with this crime scene," I murmured under my breath. "I mean, at a first glance, it really does make it seem like Apollo was the one who did it, but the more that you scrutinize everything that happened, the clearer it is that there's something out of the ordinary happening here. The evidence cabinet was just the tip of the iceberg... And I'm saying all of this before we've even gone to check out the security footage from outside the building."
"Do you have anything else for us, Ema?" Mr. Wright asked next.
Detective Skye shook her head. "Nope. That's everything that I had to tell you. Forensics hasn't found anything else worth looking at quite yet, so I don't know if I'm going to have anything else for you for quite some time, if at all. I guess that it's a good thing that we're getting a bit of extra confirmation on what we already knew though... The chloroform fact is a good thing for sure, but we still have yet to see where in the world that could wind up leading us," she responded.
"There you are, Detective Skye."
Our conversation was ultimately cut short when a new voice reached my ears, and I perked up to see that a woman had arrived in the doorway of the room while we were distracted with speaking to Detective Skye. She was on the smaller side with dark brown hair that fell straight a could be around her upper body. Her torso was swallowed by a large jacket, and I found that despite her small size, she was somewhat terrifying if you looked at her for too long. Her gaze was piercing in a way that made me feel like my heart was going to seize up from within my chest, and all I could do was stare at her for a long moment as I tried to figure out just who it was that I was looking at.
"It's nice to see you, Ms. Russell," Detective Skye said as she took a step in the direction of the newcomer. She turned to face the rest of us before gesturing to the woman. "Everyone, allow me to introduce you to Darcie Russell. She's a coroner that's worked with the Prosecutor's Office and local precinct multiple times in the past to try and solve murder cases."
Ms. Russell offered us a small nod. "It's nice to meet all of you," she said bluntly. She handed over a small stack of files to Detective Skye a moment later. "I was told to distribute a few extra copies of the autopsy report here to the investigators. There are apparently a few people who don't know everything that they should, but this should hopefully catch them up on everything that they're going to need to know."
"Were you the one who examined the body in this case?" Mr. Wright questioned of Ms. Russell.
The dark-haired woman shook her head. "No, that was someone else. I was just told to come and drop off a few more copies for the sake of the police officers looking into this case. I had nothing to do with what happened on the day of the murder," she told us bluntly. I could hear a small amount of discord in the back of her voice, and I couldn't help but frown to myself. Why would she lie about something like that? We hadn't heard anything about her potentially being involved with this case, had we? Then again, I guess that it was sort of hard to gauge what we did and did not know since she was an outsider who had only just arrived at the scene of the crime.
"Well, thank you for the autopsy report either way," Detective Skye said to her with a firm nod. "It's nice to be able to have a few extra copies lying around. Some of these people are so forgetful that it doesn't seem like they should even have their jobs with how often they forget important things while looking around. It's getting annoying having to constantly pick up so many forgotten reports in the middle of the investigation."
"Of course it does," Ms. Russell muttered under her breath with a shake of her head. "But I suppose that there are simply some people who don't understand how much effort and time has to go into something like this. It truly is unfortunate."
Before anyone could make another comment on the matter, a knock came from the wall just beside the door. Ms. Russell stepped aside so that we could get a better look at the new arrival, not that it was particularly necessary. After all, Simon easily towered over her, and it was clear as could be who we were talking to before Ms. Russell even moved out of the way.
"The security footage is finished being rendered," he said simply. "If you want to come look at it, now would be the time."
Simon was gone before any of us could say anything, and I assumed that he was off to look after the footage to make sure that nobody tampered with it. I certainly would have worried about something like that in the midst of a murder investigation too, so I nodded and decided to follow after him as quickly as possible. After all, this was our change to finally start gathering more information that would be able to help us when it came to finding the truth.
I offered a quick wave over my shoulder in Ms. Russell's direction before I turned to go after him. "It was nice meeting you, Ms. Russell!" I exclaimed before I dashed in Simon's footsteps. Of course, saying that we had met Ms. Russell could have very easily been said to be an overstatement; it wasn't as if we had done much in terms of talking to her. She had appeared to drop off the copies of the autopsy report, and a moment later, we were forced to leave to take care of other matters. She didn't even know any of our names as afar as I was aware.
Even so, the woman offered me a stoic nod. "The same to you," she said, her voice blunt and dry as could be. Trucy and Mr. Wright offered her the same bid of departure before they trailed after me, and from there, we were off on our journey through the Prosecutor's Office.
Our quest down to the main lobby of the building was a silent one, and the air was tense along the way since nobody seemed to really know what to say. This was going to be our chance to gather more information regarding what had happened at the time of the murder, but I knew that it wasn't going to be quite so easy. It seemed as if nothing was ever simple when it came to cases that we investigated, and finding out what was going on with the security camera was bound to be just as difficult as everything else that we had the misfortune to come across.
Simon was sitting inside what I could only describe as a security booth, and I had to admit that he looked rather awkward in the small room. He was so large that it seemed as if he was a giant in a tiny car made for clowns, and while that was a strange analogy to make, it was the only one that seemed to even remotely describe how strange he looked in the midst of the tiny space. Still, I did my best to shove aside my wish to laugh as I focused on the screen.
Simon had pulled up a set of images, and when I glanced over them, I realized that there were three tabs open. Trucy shut the door behind her as we all settled in the room in full, and Simon took that as his cue to explain the camera in detail. "The camera stationed outside the office goes off each time that someone presses the buzzer to be let into the building," he explained. "A security officer is stationed in this booth and watching the camera to make sure that the person in question has a reason to be here. Prosecutors don't need to buzz in since they have keycards that will let them inside without any issues. As such, the camera is only set to take pictures of people who aren't meant to be working here in the office. Some detectives also have keycards to get inside, but that's not exactly a common privilege for someone to be given."
"And it looks like there were three pictures taken with this automated system on the day of the murder," Mr. Wright concluded with a small frown as he looked over the trio of tabs spread out over the screen. "When was the first one taken?"
Simon full-screened the picture in question, and it became clear as could be that the people who had entered the building through use of the buzzer first were Mr. Morix and Chrysalis. "This photo was taken roughly an hour before the meeting of prosecutors began. I presume that this was when they met with Prosecutor Lin. She wasn't at the greater meeting because she was already speaking with other people at the time, and it's safe enough to assume that she was speaking with these two given the circumstances."
I nodded to myself. That certainly made sense, and so far, we didn't have anything that could be used as a shocking revelation to turn this case around. "What about the second picture?" I questioned.
Simon showed off the next of the images from there, and a small gasp left my lips when I realized who was on the picture. "Wait... Is that who I think it is?" I questioned as I turned to face Trucy and Mr. Wright for confirmation on what I was looking at.
Mr. Wright nodded, and Trucy's eyes remained wide as could be as they continued to be fixated solely on the screen. "It seems like Darcie Russell was here on the day of the murder," he murmured. It certainly looked like her, that was for sure; she was wearing the same baggy jacket that she had been when we spoke with her earlier, and her long, dark hair was impossible to mistake. Everything about her was distinct because of how small and terrifying she was at a first glance, and I was sure that it was safe to say that she was the person in the photo.
"But why would she have been here?" Trucy questioned. "We haven't heard anybody else mention the fact that she was set to be coming by the office. In fact, nobody has said that they saw her at all on the day of the murder either."
"This photo was taken in the middle of the meeting, it seems," Simon cut in. He began to show the final image out of the three from there. "The same applies to the last of the three pictures."
This one was the image that we had all been waiting for. It was none other than Apollo, standing there simply with a stack of files tucked under his arm as he waited to be given the chance to enter the building. He looked the same as I would have expected him to, wearing his regular suit and nothing else of note. In fact, there was nothing about him that seemed to be out of the ordinary. It was just him, his bright red suit, his horns of hair, and the stack of files that had been found out in the hallway outside the scene of the crime.
"Both of them came into the building during the meeting..." Mr. Wright murmured. He turned to Simon with a light frown on his face. "Is there a way for us to see what keycards were used on the day of the murder? We could use something like that to see if there were any others who got into the building at the time of the crime."
"There is a way to look at the record, but I already checked it. Nobody entered the building during the meeting save for the coroner and your client," Simon replied. "I suppose that you'll be wanting to hold onto these two pictures from here on though. In that case..."
Simon began to type away at the computer, and a moment later, a small printer in the corner of the room began to whir to life. I hadn't even realized that the printer was there since I had been so focused on the computer screen and the man sitting before it, and I just about jumped out of my skin at the sound of it activating. Trucy stared at it as well, clearly not having been made aware of its existence either until the moment that it began to make noise. We both watched the printer for a long moment, almost as if we expected it to sprout legs and start dancing around the room, until it finally fell silent. I reached out and accepted the two pictures that had been printed out by Simon. The photo that was missing was the one of Mr. Morix and Chrysalis, though I supposed that we didn't have all that much in terms of use for it to begin with. What would we even want to use something like that for given the context of the investigation? We were probably fine to not grab it as well.
"I doubt that you'll last long in the courtroom if you're frightened by something as mundane as a printer," Simon told me with a light smirk on his face.
I knew that he was just playing with me though, so I simply rolled my eyes and hit him with the pages that were in my hands. "You're being ridiculous," I told him. "But you know what isn't ridiculous? The idea that we should go and talk to Ms. Russell about what she was doing here on the day of the murder. There's a lot that she's going to have to explain if she was really in the area at the time of the crime specifically."
"I bet that she's still speaking with Detective Skye," Mr. Wright declared. "We should try to catch her before she leaves. She's probably not going to be here for any longer than she has to be given that she was only here to drop off a few files."
"Then let's get up there!" Trucy smiled as her hands clenched into fists. She opened the door and started to walk from the room, her cape swishing behind her along the way. "Thank you for everything, Prosecutor Blackquill! We really do appreciate it!"
I nodded to Simon with a light smile of my own. "It means a lot to us. Truly," I told him gently. I offered him a small sigh before I started off towards the door as well. "Well, we have to go and see what we can get out of Ms. Russell, so I guess that we'll see you later. Until next time, Simon!"
He waved vaguely as I left the room behind and dashed in the direction of the stairs. Ms. Russell was going to have a lot to explain, but we were going to figure out the truth soon enough. I didn't know where this was going to lead us, but we didn't have any choice but to pursue this path to the very end, and so, we would.
Update time, baby!
This second investigation section has the chance to be the longest chunk out of those involved with this case, but I have to admit that we're already making pretty good time with it. There's a lot that's going to happen over the course of this investigation, but hey, given how much progress has already been made, I'd say that we're on the right path for sure.
The second half of the case is going to do quite a bit to shed some light on the major plot details of this story. How will it do that? Well, that's my little secret for the time being, but there's a lot that this case is going to drag to the forefront. After all, I love my big plot threads, and this is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to figuring out everything that's happening behind the scenes of this case.
Anyways, I'm going to leave things off here since I have a bunch of stuff to do and probably shouldn't procrastinate any longer than I already have. Whoops. Next time, we'll continue with the investigation by talking to Darcie about everything that she knows regarding this case. Until then, I hope you all enjoyed this chapter. Feedback is appreciated as always. Have a nice day, everyone!
-Digital