Things You Shouldn't See

Posted on Fri Nov 25th, 2016 @ 8:49am by Commander Jordan Gunning

Mission: Lie Of Omission
Location: Peluu, Archa IV

Gunning listened and made sure to nod in the right places even though his brain was already putting strands of a story together. The woman's name was Shara Ir and by rights she should have been looking forward to her wedding. She was engaged to a young man called Cha Ep - she had shown Gunning a photo but the face had barely registered with him - an insurance and fraud investigator for one of Galactic South's many questionable business conglomerates.

Shara Ir herself was a singer, a pretty successful one as Gunning was to find out later. Her career had gone from the heights of performing as part of a group in Archa IV's huge entertainment complexes and selling - as her encyclopaedia entry read - billions of albums right across the galaxy, to working the nightclub circuit and doing her major gigs around the festival of Carrianan. She didn't look like she'd be in any fit state to participate in the celebrations this time around.

She told him about their life together, her touring the resorts around the planet and him travelling almost constantly for work. It had been a tough relationship and they'd had their ups and downs, so much so that when she found Cha Ep lying dead on the sofa in his pokey apartment, the police had immediately suspected her. Canvassing the neighbours had led to stories of screaming matches in the middle of the night, sounds of smashing crockery and the dull thuds of skin impacting on skin. Shara told him that she had been taken into custody almost immediately and interrogated for hours - she had come straight here from the station.

Jordan had pressed her a little, trying to find out more about what she had found at the scene. They would have moved the body and catalogued most of the evidence, Gunning had told her, he would have to rely on what she had seen until he could get access to the crime scene logs. That was going to be tough enough without Lazlo breathing down his neck.

She told him about the blood, it was all she could focus on to begin with. Ep had been shot with a projectile weapon which were becoming more and more fashionable outside Starfleet with anyone who didn't have worry about low gravity environments carrying the bullet off course. Based on what she was telling him, the shot had caught him in the neck and he had bled to death rather than dying instantly and nothing had been interrupted at the scene. No sign of forced entry - although it was hard to tell with modern doors - and nothing missing except, as Ir had told the police, a PADD which he had carried with him everywhere.

Apparently the police were currently searching her home for the PADD. It was obvious from her demeanour that they weren't going to find it.

What was on the PADD? She didn't know. He had tried to press her, get her to remember if she had ever seen anything in a momentary glance over his shoulder, but nothing. The hire was that - find the PADD. She didn't trust the police, for whatever reason, and she believed that whatever he had held on his private file was enough to get him killed. If Gunning found the PADD, he would find out who killed him.

Gunning was walking back across Mantovani Plaza when the rain started. It was a fairly common occurrence at the height of the Archan summer to have fleeting rain showers which added to the shimmer of the pavements and caressed the skin with an enriched glow. He looked down at his comm, trying to follow the address of Ep's apartment, turning his collar up against the deluge.

He thought about the kid, about Murak Sazarel, whose case suddenly seemed much less pressing than the plight of this woman, wrongly suspected, who had seen something which would traumatise her for the rest of her life. He was probably living the life of reilly, off his head on whatever the latest fashionable hallucinogen was, unable to tell what the date was, let alone his own name. He began to resent having taken the case in the first place, resent the worried mother whom he had been so dismissive of.

The map pinged to let him know he had arrived at his destination and, had he not been so distracted, he'd have noticed it hours ago. Police vehicles sat at the kerbside surrounded by a small cluster of officers wearing body armour. There was someone tapping something out on a PADD beyond the cordon - Gunning could smell journalism off him.

He approached the officers and told them who he was and what his business was there. "We're still to remove the body - waiting on the coroner." One of the officers pointed toward his wrist, which was watchless, to indicate that their progress had been hampered for hours by the inefficieincy of their medical colleague.

Gunning decided he'd walk the block for a bit and try to get a feel for the kind of place where someone could be shot in the neck and left to die without anyone reporting a disturbance. That was until he ran into the reporter.

"Excuse me, excuse me!" The man was frantic, speaking an octave higher than Gunning thought he usually would, such was the excitable nature of journalists. "Archa Chronicle, can I ask you about your involvement here?"

Gunning tried to walk past the man whose physical stature was about equal to his own. The journalist wore a recording device of some kind, slung around his neck above a deep red tunic. Were it not for the tatty coat which adorned his shoulders, from a distance he'd have looked like a Starfleet officer. "Is it not unusual that a private contractor would be hired so quickly after a crime of this nature, before the police have had a chance to process the scene properly?"

It took him a few minutes to connect the dots and realise that he wore his investigator's badge - a licence requirement for Federation territory - clipped to his belt. "You don't need to know anything about my involvement." He told the reporter as he once again tried to move past him. The reporter blocked his path.

"Mister... Gunning, right?" He was undeterred. "Have you been hired by the victim's employer to tamper with evidence?"

That was a leap - it was a rocket jump from Venus to Neptune - and Gunning instantly regretted pushing the man to the side, sending him staggering toward the wall of the building next door. "What do you know about the victim?" He rounded on the reporter. There was no way he could have known the identity of the victim unless one of the police officers had told him, something they were forbidden to do until the crime scene was cleared.

"I know he worked for High Rise." That was more than Gunning knew - the fiancé couldn't remember the name of the company. "I wouldn't be surprised if there's something up there they'd want rid of."

"And that's what I'm here to do, is it?" He was seething. "Sweep High Rise's muck under the rug?"

A wide smile spread across the reporter's face. "If the gumshoe fits."

The Archan police were bristling at the confrontation beside them, the proximity of the two men implied that it could come to blows. "Clear off, Gunning." The lead officer said, shoving Gunning off down the street. That was all Gunning needed to know about who'd leaked Cha Ep's name.

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Jordan Gunning
Private Investigator