A Perfect Crime (TWS)

The obvious place to start looking was under the body. After all, maybe he'd just fallen on the gun.

So I lifted it up, while Books filled out Crime Scene Form 47-Delta or whatever requesting retroactive authorization for moving a corpse. Unfortunately, I didn't find a gun - just a black market datapad with an article the stiff had apparently been working on. It was filled with nonsense about the Council doing anything other than working in the best interests of the city. I was going to tear it up like the trash it was, but the kid had already put it in an Evidence Storage Unit and was explaining exactly which rules required doing that.

It definitely wasn't going to be easy teaching this poor sap the real way to do things on the force.

"If he was planning to commit suicide, why would he be writing?" the kid asked. "I need to understand your theory better."

"I told you, he had to make it look like a murder. Did a really good job of it, too, I gotta give him that much. So he wrote up some stuff and then he shot himself so it'd look like he was killed in the middle of that garbage article. Makes the article look more credible, too."

"But we still haven't found the gun."

"Right, right. It'll turn up. I'll check his desk and dressers."

I pulled out every drawer I could find in the place, even the ones in the standard-issue refrigeration unit. But I couldn't find a gun. I found a few unpaid bills, which the Debt Collection Department would definitely be interested in, and a bunch of perfectly ordinary clothes with nothing good in the pockets.

It was time for a different perspective.

"I guess it's possible he got one of his dissident buddies to shoot him and run off with the gun," I said. "So technically this would be a murder."

"A novel theory! What should I do with Suicide Report Form 527-Lambda-G8?"

"Keep it for now. Might turn out to be what happened after all. But we'll at least look at possible accomplices for the moment."

It was a good line, but the fact is, I'd rarely had to get to this point in an investigation before. Where was I supposed to begin on figuring out who could have shot this guy?