Solving a Murder (part 1)

Posted on Sun Mar 26th, 2017 @ 11:06am by Lieutenant Mira Jayna & Commander Hans Munich & Lieutenant T'Pral & Lieutenant Arnon Barak MD, PsyD & Lieutenant Illise Hale & Commander Alexandra Vance

978 words; about a 5 minute read

Mission: Shadow Dance
Location: Calypso
Timeline: Day 4, morning

ON

Lt Johnson was checking the recorded evidence that was brought up from the Crime Scene; the Jenefrans were adequate at their job of keeping a scene somewhat sterile, without the more advanced technology of the Federation such as sterilizing force fields and such it is a fairly good containment.

The first thing he wanted to get was the 'fingerprint impression upon the King's face; the ones that were connected to Tate, that was among the more harsh proof being used to keep her as a suspect. Cursing under his breath the 30 year old technician had high marks in his training to be sure. He was a Scene recreation Specialist, if it were an old dig-site reconstruction of a crime scene reconstruction Johnson treat them both the same he was processioning the Physical evidence and recreating the scene from the surface before he delved into the other aspects of the evidence.

It is hard to get a fingerprint off skin; in essence a fingerprint is residual from the sweat-pores that form the rides of a finger print on another porous surface with sweat pores. The major question was how did they get them off the body?"

"Let's check the chemical compounds of the suspected Toxins applied to the skin." He spoke to himself aloud. "Maybe even some of the way the fingerprint was 'pressed' upon the skin would also allow some guessing to the finger used... eventually after many filters and processing.

Jayna walked into the room and stopped long enough to look around and get a good idea of what Johnson was doing. "Hi. How is it going?" she asked when he paused in his work.

"Hello, all," the ship's chief counselor said.

"Hello," Jayna replied to the Counselor.

Arnon entered the room, walked over to Lieutenant Johnson, and began to peer over his shoulder.

Illise stood a few feet away from the others. She desperately wanted a coffee. In the three days since all this had begun she had been getting only her minimum requirement of sleep - and way too much caffeine. When all this was over she was going to have to reduce her intake, lest it become a habit. She was rubbing a temple absentmindedly while reviewing the data on a PADD which she held in her other hand, containing all the evidence she and her staff had analyzed so far. She looked up when she heard Arnon's voice. "Doctor Barak, how is Victoria?"

"She's recovering nicely," Arnon said. "In fact, you may be able to ask her yourself if she feels up to joining us here. Thank you for asking. I do appreciate the concern as I'm sure Victoria does. If she doesn't join us I'll be sure to let her know you were asking after her."

"Thank you Arnon," Illise gave him a friendly smile.

"What do we have?" Alexandra Vance stated as she stepped through the doors entering the room wearing her standard issue uniform with a PADD in her hands analyzing data on it. Forensics and data analysis were outside her specialty but her resources at the time were lacking, as was time.

"That's what we're here to sort out," Jayna said. "There are a lot of pieces to this murder. We need to get them together and see if anything jumps out at us."

"I was done with things 'jumping out at us' back at the village," Arnon said. "Maybe we could just see what we find?"

It was a weak attempt at humor but Arnon wasn't feeling all that humorous about the Jenefrans at the moment.

"What exactly jumped out at you doctor?" Alexandra asked willing to take any information from the surface she could get as anything could prove significant.

"A poison arrow 'jumped out' and nearly killed Doctor Drani," Arnon replied.

"From where?" Jayna asked.

"It was discovered that some of the bodies in the third village had been booby-trapped." Illise said to Vance, "Unfortunately Doctor Drani set off one while examining a body and was shot through the lung with a poisoned arrow, which had been concealed beneath." She paused for a moment, then added, "The traps were well hidden. The Doctor's injury was the first indication of their presence, actually." It still bothered Illise that the traps had not shown up on any scans.

"Nasty business." Johnson said as his concentration changed from the centrifuge. "I have broken down the components of the King's Blood, separating the blood coronals from the other matter and in turn managed to get some information. The Toxins defiantly have an artificial design to them and when put with the Newmark data of the Poison from a local source we can surmise that the King was killed by a manufactured nature. This is pointing to elements being outside Jeneran manufacture, I do not yet have the breakdown in our database so we will have to expand the search for the toxin."

"I can run it through the Intel database," Jayde said. "We have a few poisons that aren't generally found in standard Starship databases."

T'Pral blinked at the illogically flowing conversation. The points were valid and interesting, but she would have gotten right to business instead of visiting violence around the proverbial shrubbery. "Lieutenant Hale and I have confirmed that the security cameras have indeed been tampered with. Mister Rroden confirmed that the biometric traces found upon the camera in question belonged to individuals who are authorized to access them." Her hands folded neatly upon the table as she glanced to the scientist, "I believe she performed a DNA comparison with samples taken from the garden to help identify our culprit."

(To be continued...)

Lieutenant Johnson
Crime Scene Investigator

Lieutenant JG Mira Jayna
Assistant Chief Intelligence Officer

Lieutenant Arnon Barak
Chief Counselor

Lieutenant JG Illise Hale
Chief Science Officer

Commander Alexandra Vance
Intelligence Officer

Lieutenant T'Pral
Chief Engineer

 

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