Case Eight, Chapter Two: Follow the Evidence
Daring landed in front of the Ponyville Police Precinct, dropping Phillip off before the revolving doors. The precinct had changed much recently: the letters above the door were freshly painted and free of rust, and they entered the lobby to behold that the chairs were clean and in good repair, and the water cooler and coffee machine were both new. A few ponies sat in the lobby, awaiting service. As Phillip and Daring approached, a donkey officer approached an older stallion and beckoned him to follow into an office area with a slightly nervous but reassuring smile.
The detectives proceeded down the hallway past the desk sergeant’s desk to the end and descended down the stairs to the basement. They entered the laboratory, which was currently unoccupied, though the record player in the corner was still emitting the strains of violins. The various tables and counters were still covered in beakers, test tubes, microscopes, and other equipment, a portrait of organized chaos.
“I’m going to go over this soil sample,” Phillip said, taking the plastic bag out of his vest and placing it beneath a microscope. “Check with Mortis, see what you can find out about Best Seller.”
“Great,” Daring grumbled. She walked out of the lab and down the hallway to the door marked “Morgue.” She took a breath and stepped through.
It was just the same as she remembered: two metal slabs for examination, a wall adorned with freezer doors, desk in the corner. Vitae Mortis herself sat at the desk, scribbling at a sketchbook. She looked up at Daring’s entry, brushing a strand of her blonde mane out of her eyes.
“Hold it!” she cried, smiling broadly and snatching up the sketchbook. Several charcoal pencils floated up, captured in her magic, and began to dance across the sheet.
“Uh…” Daring started to say.
“Shhh!” Mortis urged, her eyes flicking between Daring and the sketchpad, tongue held between her teeth. “Don’t...move...a...muscle!”
Daring remained still as Mortis finished her sketch. With a flourish, the mare turned the sketchbook around to show her. “Ta-da!”
Daring blinked. The drawing before her was in impressive detail, right down to her feathers and the shadows beneath the brim of her helmet. “That’s great,” she said, nodding. “You really nailed the look of confusion on my face.” Does my nose really scrunch up like that?
“Thanks!” Mortis smiled, putting the sketchpad away. “It’s a little hobby of mine I like to indulge in during downtime. But you didn’t come down here to talk about art. Whatcha need?”
“Best Seller,” Daring asked. “Did he have his keys on him when he was brought in?”
Mortis tapped her chin in thought, then stood up and walked over to a filing cabinet. She opened up a drawer and flicked through the files within, plucking out a folder with her magic.
“Let’s see here,” she mused, studying the files within. “Personal contents...wallet, loose change...nope, no keys.”
Daring frowned and nodded. “Thanks. That tells me a lot.” She turned to go.
“Hold on a moment,” Mortis said. “If you’re interested in this hit and run, there must be something more here. I think you’d best let me give you the rundown of the autopsy.”
“I would also like to hear that, Doctor Mortis,” another voice said from the doorway. A tall donkey with silvery hair entered the room, dusting off the dark red suit and tie he wore. He peered at Daring and Mortis with small, squinty green eyes.
“Ah, I don’t think you two have met,” Mortis said. “Daring, this is Captain Hewn Oak. He took over Major Crimes after Cold Case became Chief.”
Oak smiled at Daring and stepped forward to shake hooves, the rosary necklace around his neck jingling as he moved. “It is an honor to finally meet the mare who brought down the heathen Silvertongue,” he announced, every syllable heavy with gravitas. “The wheels of Faust’s machinations might move so slowly that it is hard to perceive them, but their results are grand indeed.”
“Did you swallow an Apocrypha’s Testimony when you were a foal?” Daring asked, raising an eyebrow.
Oak laughed. “Well, it is what happens when you grow up with devoted Alicorn’s Witnesses,” he admitted. He turned back to Mortis. “Doctor, let us go through the last moments of Best Seller. The sooner we get this done, the sooner we can lay him to rest.”
“Right,” Mortis nodded. She trotted over to one of the freezers and unlocked it with a key she extracted from a pocket. She pulled the tray open to reveal a body covered with a sheet, which she pulled back to expose the remains of Best Seller.
The head was nearly unrecognizable: the skull had been deformed, pressed by the weight of the car passing over it, leaving the features warped and twisted like some macabre impressionist painting.
“Oh, I was there at the intial scene last week,” Mortis stated. “Try to imagine him before I cleaned him up!”
“And there goes my appetite,” Daring muttered.
“Anyway,” Mortis continued. “When I was called down to the scene, I was able to get some tire imprints off the ground and Detective Herring found some paint scrapings on a lamp post down the street. After I examined Mister Seller’s wounds, I was able to make a reconstruction of how the accident happened.”
Mortis lit up her horn and a miniature three-dimensional projection made of light appeared on the floor in front of the group. The image showed a street, with a miniature version of Best Seller walking down the sidewalk.
“It looks like he tripped and fell into the path of an oncoming truck,” Mortis stated. A miniature truck began to drive up the road. Best suddenly stumbled and fell into the truck’s path; he bounced off the hood and flew down the street, rolling as he hit the asphalt. The truck swerved as though to try to dodge around him, but instead ran over his skull, squashing it into the ground. Daring winced.
“The driver lost control for a moment and hit the lamp post down the street,” Mortis narrated as the truck weaved down the street, ricocheting off a lamp before turning the corner, leaving Best Seller’s body sprawled across the pavement. “Now, here’s the interesting part. Based on the injuries, I’d guess that the truck was moving steadily when it hit: pretty well under the speed limit, in fact. And what’s more…” She rewound the playback so that the truck moved in reverse back down the street to its starting position off to the side. “The tracks that I found showed that it was waiting in an alley when it started moving towards Best.”
“So it appears that this was not an accident,” Captain Oak commented. He squinted at a jagged red tear in the corpse’s side. “What about this stab wound here?”
“He got that at the same time that the truck hit him,” Mortis explained. “I can tell by the way it aligns with the damaged ribs. My guess is he got impaled on the hood ornament.” She gave the body a forlorn look. “If it’s any comfort, he died instantly after the truck ran over his head. If he felt anything, it wouldn’t have been for long.”
“Still not how I want to go out,” Daring commented.
“Do you have any leads on the truck?” Oak asked.
“It’s a Chevroneigh model truck, with white paint,” Mortis stated. “Detective Herring has Detective Rubber from Traffic running them down.”
“Excellent,” Captain Oak nodded. “Now, Daring, tell me what’s on your mind.”
“Here’s how I figure it,” Daring said. “Scarlet arranges for Best Seller to get run over, make it look like an accident. She probably pushed him in front of the truck. She steals his key, then hands it off to somepony else, who uses that to break into the Literature’s mansion during the funeral and steals the statues.”
“A sound theory,” Captain Oak nodded. “We shall bring Scarlet Letter in for further questioning regarding her possible involvement. As much political favor as she may curry, it is a well-known fact that the most treacherous snakes know how to disguise themselves amidst the flowers.”
Daring stared at him for a beat, then nodded slowly. “Right. I’m gonna check in with Phil.”
“Oh, wait!” Mortis interrupted. “I heard from Doctor Suunkii that Phil was doing some experiments for him. What’d you find out? Tell me, tell me, tell me!” she squealed, bouncing up and down like an excited schoolfilly.
“We’ll get back to you on that,” Daring said, exiting the morgue as quickly as she could without running. Is everypony in this city crazy?
She returned the laboratory, where Phillip was still bent over the microscope, occasionally looking up to consult a notebook and a geological map of the city. “What’d you find?”
“Soil from a riverbank, leaves from a trimmed hedge, and slate,” Phillip stated, pressing his eyes back to the scope. He frowned. “There’s something else here...feathers?” He used a set of tweezers to pluck a small white loose piece of fuzzy material from amidst the mud. “Stuck there in the mud,” he said. “They don’t look like any bird I recognize, and it’s too early for moulting season.”
“You have any idea where our friend went?” Daring asked.
“Yes,” Phillip said, tracing a line on the map that ran from the Literature’s mansion over a small creek and past an upper-class neighborhood to a hilly area. “The samples are enough to tell me which way they went. There might be more clues if we follow their trail.”
“That letter was sent by a mare,” Daring commented, her eyes panning over the trail that Phillip had traced. “If I were a young mare who was romantic enough to write in cursive on pink paper, I’d pick a nice place to meet regularly. Someplace like...here.” She pointed to a short hill marked Sugar Hope Hill. “It’s out of the way, but close enough to the surrounding houses that you could get back before anypony missed you, and it’s got this big maple tree at the top. Very romantic,” she added dryly.
“Aces,” Phillip nodded. “Let’s go take a butcher’s.”
Sugar Hope Hill did indeed have a large maple tree standing atop its crest, its budding leaves dancing and shivering in the light wind. The hill was covered in green grass and budding flowers, and one could see the rooftops of other houses over the surrounding treetops. With the sun setting and painting the western skies in reds and purples, it provided quite the romantic setting. Evidently, many ponies thought this, for the maple tree’s trunk was marred with carvings of initials and cutie marks inside of hearts.
Phillip slowly walked around the circumference of the hill, his eyes panning the ground in front of him. He scowled and shook his head. “Damn. There’s too many tracks here. I can’t get any good evidence.”
Daring frowned in thought, hovering over his head. She lifted off the ground a little and pulled out a set of field binoculars, pressing them to her eyes as she looked around. The feathers that Phillip had collected from the horseshoes flickered in her mind: small, pale gray bits of fluff, looking almost like they’d been pulled from a pillow. Yet she could swear that there were tinges of baby blue within the white.
“This place isn’t too far from the mansion,” she mused, mainly to herself as she scanned the surrounding area. “We walked here in about ten minutes.” Indeed, she turned to the south to see the main tower of the Literature’s mansion well within reach.
“So the girl’s probably not far off either,” Daring continued. She focused on a nearby house, a white two-story home that included a large, open porch with a pair of wind chimes dangling from the ceiling. Daring focused on the chimes, noting that each one had a small figurine dangling from the string. One was a skeletal griffon wielding a sword and a shield, the other a female griffon with a blindfold over her eyes and small bells hanging from her wrists and tail.
Those are charms to Kriga and Fantisera, the two main griffon gods, she thought. A griffon family lives there. Maybe...
Spotting movement up the road, Daring focused her binoculars on the griffon that was walking up the street towards the house. A small female with pale gray and blue downing, her green eyes downcast, her belly rounded from too little exercise. She was greeted at the door by a withered dark blue male griffon who appeared to bark at her. The younger griffon shook her head and pushed past him.
“I’ll be right back,” she called to Phillip, flying over to the house. She coasted over the trees and landed in the branches of an oak that sat in the backyard of the griffon’s house. Spotting the young griffon in the upper window, she focused her binoculars on her.
The griffon paced around her room a few times, then sat down at a writing desk and pulled out a writing pad. A writing pad with pink paper, which she began to write upon with a purple pen.
Grinning, Daring flew back to Phillip. “Those feathers you found,” she said. “Might they belong to a griffon? A young female griffon who has a writing pad a lot like the one you found?”
Phillip’s eyes widened. “Yes, that’d make sense. And writing with claws looks a lot like hornwriting.”
“You took that from a front horseshoe, right?” Daring said. “He might’ve gotten those feathers when he hugged her.”
“You’re aces, Daring,” Phillip grinned. “See if you can get anything out of her.”
“Got it,” Daring nodded. She flew over to the house and landed on the porch. The charmed wind chimes rang quietly as if in greeting. She knocked at the door. The curtains in the door window parted and a dark brown eye glared at her.
“Hey,” she waved. “I’m with the police. We—”
“We don’t talk to ponies!” the griffon on the other side growled in a thick Griffonese accent, and the eye disappeared.
Daring frowned and pretended to retreat. As soon as she was sure she was out of sight, she banked around and landed in the oak tree again, watching the young griffon in the window. She was now sitting at her desk, holding her head in a claw despondently.
Daring pondered her options. Maybe she could just go up there and talk to her? But that might just scare her off, and it could get her in trouble with her parents. A better plan might be to try to talk to her while she was out doing something...but she hated the idea of having to wait. Maybe…
A flash of light in the corner of her eye grabbed her attention. She turned to see that Phillip was still standing at Sugar Hope Hill, flashing sunlight at her with his mirror to get her attention. She flew back over to him.
“Something’s happening at the Literature’s,” he said, pointing. Looking up, she could see a cruiser and a vaguely familiar bright red convertible parked in front of the mansion.
Snatching Phillip up in her forelegs, she rocketed towards the scene, eliciting a startled shout from her passenger. When they landed by the doors, they witnessed two officers leading Shoe Shine out of the house in hoofcuffs.
“I protest!” Shine declared, his face drawn and pale from shock. “On what grounds are you arresting me?”
“On the grounds of the jewels that you pawned,” another voice declared. A dark purple earth pony with silvery blue hair wearing a bright yellow suit and fedora approached, smirking and tossing the keys to his Pontifact convertible to himself.
“Night Waltz,” Daring Do growled. “What’re you doing here? Cold Case canned your ass.”
The former detective smirked at Daring. “There are other ways of serving this city,” he said coolly, brushing lint off his suit. “Actually, getting fired was a great opportunity for me to pursue my own career as a PI.” He plucked a small license out of his pocket and held it out. Phillip took it and glanced at it with a scowl.
“In any case,” Night Waltz continued, taking his license back, “I was hired by the Literatures to look into this case for them.” He glanced up at the doorway: Classic and Modern stood, their faces solemn as they watched their servant dragged away in hoofcuffs.
“I made some inquiries at a local pawnshop, and I happened to find some very interesting jewels that were dropped off by a blue earth pony,” Waltz said, pulling a bag out of his saddlebags. With his magic, he plucked a set of jewels from the bag. Amidst the gems were two eye-shaped jewels, one red and one orange.
“Are these the jewels from the statues that were stolen?” Waltz asked Modern Literature. She nodded silently.
Waltz smirked. “Officers, you know what to do,” he said, already turning back to his convertible.
“No, please!” Shoe Shine pleaded as the officers bundled him back into the cruiser. “It’s not true! I didn’t steal them!”
The car door slammed shut, silencing his cries. His desperate gaze fixed upon the Literatures, who only stared, eyes blank as the cruiser pulled away from the curb and headed back to the precinct. Night Waltz drove off, prompting the Literatures to close the door behind them. Daring and Phillip were left standing on the sidewalk, both silent and uncertain.
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Oh hell.
And that'd be a yes Daring, as it's probably starting to look that way.
Good chap.
I really admire you how much effort must go into writing a story like this and admittedly I can hardly stop myself from jumping to the next chapter while typing this out, but I just noticed something: Daring went to the morgue to view the body of Best Seller, for whom his parents already had had a funeral - in fact they said that they buried him. So, is this a continuity error or am I missing something?
9471250
...oh, bugger. I hadn't thought of that.
She had him exhumed. Yeah, I'll make a note for that correcting it. Thank you for pointing that out and I'm glad that you enjoy the story!
So, rather than sloppy mistakes by the criminals, this is a sub-plot.
I like this twist.
Let us also offer silent thanks to Faust that Mortis' first name isn't Rigor.
This brings us back to the problem of how the crime was commited...
What happened to Poucher's magical key after the last case?
Phil and Daring no it can't be Nightwalz that's right I'm back from the dead assholes!