“Heavy drug user?” asked Kix.
“Are you saying he was using illegal drugs?” asked Arron.
Ms. Watopod nodded her head.
“So this was a drug deal gone wrong?” asked Kix, who was using his helmet camera to record the entire interview. It would be sent to Tooth as evidence to help them find the drug dealer or dealers.
“I believe so,” said Ms.Watopod.
“So this was why Mother and Father wanted us to quickly take care of the case,” said Arron over the secure comms.
“They must have had some idea that something was wrong,” said Kix.
“Madam, is there any other information that you can give us?” asked Arron.
“He was a heavy drug user and there were many attempts to go to drug rehabs. After the last meltdown, he was fine for nearly a year…”
Arron and Kix silently waited for the woman to collect herself as she wiped new tears from her eyes.
“It was only recently that I found out that his wedding ring was missing… he sold it for drugs.”
“What caused him to relapse?” asked Arron hoping she knew something about it.
“… he and the company are both heavily in debt…”
Upon hearing this Arron saw Kix nodding his head as if he understood the situation. Seeing Arron looking at him Kix explained.
“I’ve seen similar stuff like this happen to others. The rehabs cost an extreme amount of money. Due to the mega-city’s massive population, most rehabs have a limit on how many days the recovering addicts can stay. When their time has run out and the rehab has sucked them of all the money they can get, they refer the recovering addict to one or more other rehabs. The process continues to repeat as the rehabs continue passing them around preying on those trying to get clean.”
Ms.Watopod nodded her head in full agreement.
Arron was appalled at hearing all this. He couldn’t comment on it at the moment while they were in the middle of an interview so he put his questions about it on the back burner for now.
“You were the one that found your husband and the secretary correct?” asked Arron as he looked at the scrolling case information that was being updated live by Tooth as he listened on the other end of the holocall.
“Yes.”
“Was there anyone else that may have seen the bodies before you? Do you know if your building or any local security drones were recording that area during the time of the murder?” asked Kix.
“The security footage from the building only has recordings for the front entrance and inside the building. If that will help you, then you can take the footage. The only other footage I know that might have caught anything is the building’s security bots. I don’t know anything about sector 8’s patrolling security drones.”
“Where can we look at this footage?” asked Arron.
Ms.Watopod pointed to the many file cabinets embedded in the wall.
Both Arron and Kix walked over to file cabinets that had no handles. When Arron touched one, a holographic menu popped up but was immediately replaced with a red warning message that locked down all functions.
[By order of Office of Reason all information stored in this database is under the Protection of Office of Reason. Only authorized personnel may access the database.]
“Tooth, we need the Office of Reason to give us clearance to view the security footage,” said Arron.
“…on it. Just wait a few minutes while I take care of this…” said Tooth as he started to fiercely type on the holo-keypad in front of him.
Arron and Kix stood around in silence waiting in front of the cabinets that housed the data banks while Ms.Watopod was sniffling in the background. It was quite awkward.
“You should now have access to the files for ten minutes. Make sure to get as much info as you can,” said Tooth.
As he said that the over 50 file cabinets gave several clicks and extended out revealing several hundred brick data servers that stored the security footage for the building.
“Only Ten minutes?” asked Arron in horror as he looked at everything in front of him.
Kix cursed under his breath before saying, “No point in complaining. I’ll begin searching the building’s recordings. You look at all the security bots footage.”
Kix pulled the attached wires from the back of his helmet and plugged them into one of the brick data servers and began his search.
Arron followed suit after wasting a minute trying to find the servers for the security bots.
When he plugged into one of the main servers a 3d hologram screen popped up and started streaming several dozen live video feeds that expanded to cover the entire wall.
Arron ignored the live video and searched for the menu. When he found the option he was looking for he used the holo-keypad and typed in the exact time when Ms.Watopod had called in the murders.
Arron closed the video screens of the security bots that were nowhere near the areas that Mr.Watopod would have most likely been.
That left over 20 different security bots that were active during the night patrol. With so many screens Arron was forced to quickly skim over all the footage as fast as he could to get through all of them in the less than ten minutes that had left.
“Jackpot!” said Arron when he reached the data from the 17th security bot.
Kix looked up from the swamp of overflowing data and asked, “You found something?”
“Downloading it now. Tooth, Inform that Office of Reason that I have made a copy of the last 24 hrs of recorded footage from security bot #17.”
“Will do,” said Toothbrush.
Copying such a large file was done in only a few seconds using the direct-wired connection. In the past, such a large file would have taken at least a day to transfer.
Without commenting on what he found he transferred the footage to both Kix and Tooth for them to watch.
He was still rushing to scan through the rest of the video recordings with the remaining few minutes they had.
Beep! Kacha! Clunk!
At exactly ten minutes the video streams for both Arron and Kix’s screens went blank and their wires were automatically spat out allowing the servers to shut and lock down once again.
Kix let out a long sigh. He had been unable to find anything suspicious so he opened the video that had been sent to him and watched it at 4x speed.
“This is it?” asked Kix as he re-watched it at a slower speed.
“That’s all I could find. We’re lucky we could find this.”
Kix was squinting at the video trying to make out what was being played.
“I can’t see anyone else entering until the wife finds them, what about you?” asked Arron.
Kix shook his head, “It’s too grainy and dark. I can barely make out the two people entering the alley.”
“I’m working on cleaning the video to try and make it clearer,” said Toothbrush.
“We might as well check on the other leads while that is being worked on,” said Kix.
Arron and Kix walked back over to the couch.
“Ms. Watopod, do you have the names for the last couple of rehab’s that your husband went to?”
Ms. Watopod was quiet for a moment as she thought and then she started tapping through her Wrist datapad’s menu before swiping several digital business cards over to both Arron and Kix.
Arron opened them and read the titles on each of the cards.
[Hugs and Kisses rehab], [Smile brightly Rehab], [Happy thoughts Rehab].
“What’s with these names?” asked Arron.
Kix shrugged, “Ma’am, if you have any new information please do not hesitate to contact us,” said Kix swiping a holo-card over to Ms. Watopod.
As Arron and Kix exited the building a large double-decker hoverbus passed by. The entire outside body of the bus was filled with flickering 2-d holograms of the most wanted troubled suspects and separatists.
This was Arron’s first time seeing such a vehicle in the mega-city.
“Odd seeing those here, they are normally only used in the civilian sectors. They are insufferable during the election time, always playing ads for Mother and Father,” said Kix as he opened the door to the APC.
The first two rehabs they stopped by were low-tier cheap rehabs that looked awful.
When they asked for any records they may have on Mr. Watopod.
“Um, I can’t find anything… but I remember seeing him here before.” said the front desk receptionist for [Hugs and Kisses rehab].
“Sorry that data was probably deleted,” said the receptionist for [Smile brightly Rehab].
“WHAT?” asked Arron.
“Look sir, there is no law stating we have to keep it after a year so we clean the servers to make space. Even if we did have it we are not going to give out that information.”
After striking out at the first two rehabs Arron and Kix were now standing at the front desk of [Happy thoughts Rehab].
The front desk attendants were behind thick parasteel glass and bars separating them from anyone on the other side.
The place looked more like a jail than a high-class rehab that was supposed to be raking in big money.
“The name you gave me did not match with anyone we have on record. But the bank account did match with someone that stayed here several times,” said the bored voice of the female as she looked at the scrolling data in front of her.
“Who was it?”
“The person who paid was… a Mr. W.D.40.”
“What kind of name is that?”
“Hey! Don’t look at me like that! I’m not in charge of intake or gathering the data. All Mother and Father require is that you keep the name and bank account in your records for a year so they can gather information and know how much tax we owe them. They don’t care about the fake names since they can tell who they are by looking at the bank account,” said the female receptionist when she saw Arron looking at her.
The doors on the lobby’s left wall opened and a man with his upper body in a half-straight jacket walked into the lobby with two guards escorting him.
The man was looking all over the place in a jittery fashion. He stopped walking and looked up at the new bright lights from the ceiling mumbling incoherently before receiving a kick in the back of the knee knocking him to the ground.
“Keep moving!” said the guard on the right.
The drugged-out man lay on the floor for several seconds before letting out an ear-shattering howl.
“eeeehhhhhhhhhhhhaaaayyyyyyyy!”
He jumped to his feet before getting kicked again by the guard. With inhuman strength, he ripped the restraining straitjacket in half freeing his arms.
With a quick uppercut, the guard that had kicked him was knocked out while the second guard grabbed for his stun stick and swung it at the crazed man.
“AHHHHH!” Screamed the man as he grabbed the crackling stun stick with his left hand while a high voltage entered his body.
Even with the numbing pain, he swung with his right fist connecting to the guard’s stomach knocking the wind out of him.
As the guard bent over from the pain, the drug addict’s knee slammed into the guard’s face, breaking his nose and sending blood everywhere as he crumpled to the ground.
This happened in only a few seconds, the crazed man now holding a stun stick turned around and saw Arron and Kix who were nearest to him and he jumped towards them wildly swinging the stun stick and his fist at them.
Arron stepped forward and blocked the stun stick with his arm and felt the blow of the right fist slamming into his insulated armor. A soft crack was heard as the drug addict broke his hand against Arron’s heavy chest armor.
Both attacks did nothing but jostle Arron a bit, but the drugged-up man continued to whack him all over with the stun stick several more times before Arron was able to grab his arms and drag him to the ground.
Arron struggled to restrain the drugged-out man who kept pushing Arron off even with all his extra weight from his armor.
As Arron became stuck under the man, Kix appeared behind the drug addict and pistol-whipped his neck on both sides stunning him.
Arron rolled out from under the stunned man and Kix stepped on the stunned man’s back keeping him pinned down while Arron grabbed his magnetic cuffs and hogtied the man with two pairs of cuffs.
The guards were still moaning in pain on the ground.
Breathing heavily, Arron stood up and looked to kix, “Why’d you wait so long to step in and help me?”
“It looked like you had it under control,” said Kix with a smile.
“Who is this guy?”Arron asked the lady who had watched everything with a blank face not even fazed by the event.
“A regular,” was all she said.
“The person that was connected to the bank account, did they have a roommate here?”
The female let out a loud sigh and pointed to the drugged-out man laying on the ground.
Kix squatted down and flipped the man over before doing several medical checks on him.
“Damn it, can’t we get at least one lead that doesn’t dry up?” grumbled Kix.
“What’s wrong?” asked Arron.
“He’s toast, whatever he took fried his brain. He’s just a vegetable now,” said Kix pointing to the white foam coming from the man’s mouth.
“Do you know of anyone that the payee was close to here other than veggie man?” asked Arron as he turned back to the receptionist.
“How should I know? We don’t record such information.”
Ping! Arron received a silent notification that an unknown number was trying to call him.
He looked to see that it was Ms.Watopod and immediately answered the holo-call.
“Ms. Watopod, have you remembered anything else?” asked Arron as he silently motioned to Kix to join the call.
“I just found a message on my husband’s personal datapad. It looks to be a blackmail letter,” said Ms. Watopod.
“Finally!” said Kix.
“Where is his datapad?” asked Arron.
“At home.”
“Okay we’re coming there to pick it up, can you send the digital information to this number first while we come over?”
The number Arron had sent to her was Toothbrush’s number at the M1 HQ information center.
“Yeah, anything to help.”
While Kix and Arron were on their way to the Watopods home.
Toothbrush sent them the cleaned-up and enhanced surveillance video.
“That should help you guys in finding the culprit.”
Arron watched the enhanced video and then said, “Thanks tooth, with this video and after verifying the blackmail letter on the datapad we will have a better chance at figuring out who killed Mr. Watopod.”
When they arrived at the home, it was an actual house and not an apartment. They were immediately let in and led to the study room by a butler service bot.
“This is the datapad that I found the blackmail letter on,” said Ms. Watapod pointing to the datapad on the desk.
Kix walked over to the desk with Arron and asked, “May I access it?”
Ms.Watapod nodded her head.
Kix quickly plugged into the datapad and sent the file to Tooth before reading it.
[… if you don’t, your secret will be released and it will ruin your reputation. So you need to pay the agreed-upon money or…]
Arron nodded his head as he read the blackmail letter.
“Thanks. With this, I am 99% sure that we will catch the troubled suspect that killed your husband,” said Arron confidently.
“That’s great!” said a happy Ms. Watopod.
“Put your hands behind your back,” said Kix.
“What?” asked Ms. Watopod.
“You were the drug addict, not your husband,” said Arron.
He used his wrist datapad to start playing the new cleaned-up surveillance video so that Ms. Watopod could watch it.
A dark-robed female figure was slowly walking down a side street using dark shadow to try and hide her entering the alleyway just minutes after Mr. Watopod and his aid entered.
Several minutes later the same hooded person left the alleyway her clothes were messed up with long dark hair escaping the cover of the hood. The killer continued to wipe their bloody hands on the dark hood as they blended back into the dark shadows.
The video skipped to a later time when Ms. Watopod showed up from a different direction in different clothes but the same shoes as the hooded person.
The recording footage managed to catch her cold expressionless face for a second before she entered the bright light and it warped into a ‘shocked’ expression to try and fool any cameras that were recording in the area.
“You were the drug addict, not your husband and you killed your husband and his assistant, after your failed blackmail attempt,” said Arron.
“You are the one who sold your wedding ring, and went to the many rehabs,” said Kix.
“So what if I am? That still doesn’t give Selkry the right to brainwash my husband into denying me money!” screamed Ms. Watopod was escorted out of the study room by Arron.
“Your drug habit was bankrupting your husband and was now affecting the company. Sooner or later Mother and Father were going to find out if he didn’t say no. Yet you selfishly decided to kill him and his assistant for standing firm against your addiction,” said Arron.
“You could have escaped their notice if you stopped but you just didn’t know when to stop,” said Kix.
