The police combed over the scene, tags labelled 5, 6 and 9 were lined up in the woods of the downtown park. They were highlighting a large pool of blood, a shell casing and a patch of fabric. Drag marks from the area toward a river likely meant the body would be slightly more difficult to find and washed clean of trace clues.
Fortunately though, the fabric was a bigger hint than they imagined. A tech had noticed some wires protruding from the edges and realized it was Electric Black. It was a new kind of material that used micro LEDs to give a kind of rippling iridescence to clothing. There were only a few people that had access to the stuff and only one that was in the area.
Aurora Vandersteen sat in the interrogation room watching the video of her entering the park where the murder took place. Her husband was still missing and it seemed like his body would be the one found. Her lawyer argued that the video only placed her near the murder and the fabric might have been torn, found and planted. The interviewer sighed. The Vandersteen’s could afford high priced lawyers and were known for weaseling out of just about anything due to doubt on circumstantial evidence.
“Besides,” she said “There’s no way I could haul my husband’s body all the way to the river.” The interviewer twitched at the admission. A voice in his ear told him the news story had already leaked. ‘So much for that’ he thought ‘It would have been nice if they kept a lid on it.’
“You also don’t have a weapon.” said Aurora, a little too certainly to just be going off the reports from the scene. Her lawyer looked both annoyed and smug as if they wanted to save that line for a potential court case. Sam was wary about interrogating suspects who flaunted their knowledge of the crime without also implicating themselves. He wanted to wrap up without seeming suspicious himself.
His other line of questioning, about fingerprints on the shell, was already anticipated and Aurora and her lawyer soon left. Aurora famously had her prints on file, as part of a biomertric enabled lock box parcel delivery service. They had already been checked and didn’t match. “Not much to go on, is there Sam?” said the interviewer’s superior as they cleared the room. “I don’t know about that” said Sam as the husband’s file joined the rest of them in his arms.
The unprompted alibis were suspiciously specific and almost odd. Mrs Vandersteen was the likely widow of a tech giant who’s inventions had solved many disparate problems. Sam thumbed through the pages of the latest tech. There was the Electric Black, of course, some medical advances, a few industrial composites and a library of code that ran most of the high tech stuff. He wouldn’t be able to make sense of most of it, but he knew he only had to figure out how a few things worked, and what to look for.
Sam looked at the crime scene photos again. He figured the shell casing was a red herring and didn’t waste any more time on that. There was a patch of black soot near where the fabric was found. The techs on site had assumed it was just ashes from a small fire, but it could have been a weapon. That only left the problem of explaining the strength.
He thought back to the last few headlines the couple had made. One was for rapidly degrading high strength plastic. Another was for a short lived muscle stimulant. The plastic broke down into mostly carbon and gasses with a particular harmonic of electrical charge after about three hours. The stimulant lasted about two hours producing a noticeable fever before providing one with about a half hour of extra muscle strength.
The plastic could have been broken down by the patch of fabric and there were thermal readouts on the camera footage to check. The techs found a small battery in the section of Electric Black, nearly exhausted, which was impossible to do with just the iridescence effect. The thermal view of the images also showed a tell tale fever.
When the body was found that afternoon, Sam had them check the wounds for plastic to confirm his theory. He also ordered a toxicology for Aurora before the chemicals from the stimulant exited her system. Mrs Vandersteen’s lawyer would have a hard time getting her out of this one.
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