“What if it wasn’t just an old beau?” Captain Olivia Fox crossed her arms, leaning against one of the narrow windows in her office. A nearby palm tree threw shade against her person, protecting her from the rising morning sun. “What if Cassia Grove was still seeing him? That might explain her strange monthly meetings. Invidia could be her lover. It would make sense with the threat in the X-letter, too. If she was being unfaithful to her husband, it would certainly make it easier for someone to blackmail her.”

Laith shook his head, supporting himself on the back of the chair in front of her desk. “PATET doesn’t recognize the man at all. Facial recognition brings up nothing. Unless it’s a long-distance relationship, I don’t think the man in the photograph was Grove’s lover.”

“PATET also doesn’t recognize the fingerprints on the murder weapon,” Captain Fox noted.

Laith had already considered what she was implying – the implication being that Invidia, the lover and blackmailer, was also the man who killed Grove in her home. Something felt amiss about that theory, though, and try as he might, Laith couldn’t quite put his finger on what it was that bothered him so much about this interpretation.

“If this Invidia person is in fact Cassia Grove’s ex-lover, it’s quite possible that he simply couldn’t let her go. Or couldn’t accept defeat or rejection or however it was that he saw it. Betrayal?” Fox mused, still lookout outside at the flat emerald lawns that characterized the towering plateau where the Official Quarter was located. “Maybe she broke it off, and that’s why they haven’t met in a few months. Maybe he didn’t like that, and he decided to kill her and her husband as a result.”

“It’s possible Cassia Grove had a lover,” Laith conceded, his fingers wrapped around the back of the chair. “It is true that her relationship with her husband seemed icy at best. You should see the messages between the two of them. You wouldn’t think they were a married couple. And, I suppose, in such a circumstance, both could have been seeing other people. Lockwood often stayed the night away from home.” When he got his hands on the contents of the man’s Slate, he intended to find out where it was that he would stay.

“But even if she had a lover, it doesn’t mean he was Invidia,” he continued. “The two could be separate. I’ve sent the photograph to the Novus Atlantis Police Department, and hopefully they will let us know who the man in the photograph with Cassia Grove was. But I agree that the possibility is certainly there. He could be the lover, the murderer, and Invidia, all wrapped in one. I’m more inclined towards the first two at the moment, given how PATET could not identify the man in the photograph. It certainly fits with the unidentifiable fingerprints.”

“So, what is it that’s bothering you so much about this theory?” the Captain asked, looking back at him with her trademark direct, challenging stare. “What is it that makes you hesitant?”

“Apart from the fact that we don’t have a shred of solid evidence, you mean?” Laith asked with a small smile. He pushed away from the chair and shrugged. “I don’t know. Cassia Grove doesn’t seem like the kind of person to have had a lover. I don’t know how faithful she was as a wife, but she certainly comes off as too much of a workaholic to be able to sustain an entire relationship with someone other than her husband. According to her assistant, she was almost always the last person out of the club at the end of the day. She wasn’t someone who had a lot of friends – or any friends at all, really. And meeting someone once a month for barely an hour in a restaurant also doesn’t inspire a romantic attachment. Sounds more like a regular business or club meeting to me. So when and where was she meeting this supposed lover? Were those brief meetings enough to sustain an entire relationship? I think it's hardly likely.”

“Alright, so let’s forget the lover angle for a moment and assume that Cassia Grove was faithful,” Fox said at last, considering his words. Laith wanted to point out that they had no solid evidence to point to any reason that would make them think otherwise. She might have had a bad relationship with her husband, but that didn't automatically mean she was looking elsewhere for a romantic attachment. “What else is there?”

“I think the man in the photograph is someone from her past,” Laith replied. “I think whatever it was that she was being blackmailed or threatened for, it was something that happened before she moved to Heliopolis. It probably does have something to do with the man in the picture, but I won’t know for certain until I get the records back from Novus Atlantis. I’m still waiting for them.”

Right on time, his Slate came to life with a notification alert, with two more coming right after:

Private Citizen Information Received

Surveillance Footage of Platano Maduro, 233 South, The Forest, Central Heliopolis

Aster Lockwood Slate Contents Available

“I’ve just got them,” Laith told his superior, placing in Slate in his back pocket. “I’ll go see what they can show me. I’ll update you when I have more information, Captain.”

☀️ ☀️ ☀️

Novus Atlantis Police had given him everything he needed, with a request to be updated with any relevant information on the case. Laith figured it was less a request and more a demand, and the Heliopolis Police would have done so anyway, but he didn’t blame them for wanting to know where the case was at any point in time, and what was being done to bring justice to one of their own citizens. If the situation had been reversed, the same would be expected.

He decided to get started with the Private Citizen Information package that they had sent him, complete with every element he’d listed.

Profile: Cassia Grove

Name

Cassia Grove

Date of Birth

August 4, 2063

Place of Birth

Orichalcum District Hospital, Orichalcum, Novus Atlantis

Age

48

Sex

Female

Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

Blood Type

AB-

Current Occupation

Business Owner

(Nymphaeales Recreational Club, The Floats, Heliopolis)

Marital Status

Married

(Aster Lockwood)

Education

F.M. in Vertical Farming from the Agricultural University of Heliopolis

T.B. in Business Management from Novus Atlantis Business College

Address

No. 23, The Hills,

Southern Heliopolis,

Heliopolis

He read through her history with a quick eye, focusing on the more recent elements that might be of interest. According to the Novus Atlantian records, Cassia Grove traveled to Heliopolis in 2099 to study vertical farming, which was presumably where she met Aster Lockwood, since a quick foray into Lockwood’s own history revealed that he was at the same university at around the same time, studying the same subjects. Two years later, she returned to Novus Atlantis, where she began working at the Emerald Farm headquarters. In 2108, she and Aster were married in Novus Atlantis before returning to Heliopolis as a couple. Only a year later, she opened Nymphaeales.

“And two years later, she’s murdered,” Laith mumbled as he took in the details of her past. It was tragic, to think that everything came to an end as soon as she seemed to really be making something of herself and living her life. Her own club, a deep well of wealth, and the world at her fingertips. The ambitious and hard-working Cassia Grove probably never thought her life could end so abruptly, so suddenly.

Financially speaking, Cassia had lived comfortably in Novus Atlantis, but had always been on the edge of falling into a more precarious financial situation, given the amounts of money that went into her family’s legal fees. It seemed they had frequent conflicts with the authorities – he would learn more about that when he looked into their profiles and records. Apart from this, her financial trail was clean. She sometimes sent money back to her mother, and she sometimes had a habit of withdrawing large amounts of money despite not needing to – the Slate could take care of payments at almost all establishments, and cash payments were just as easily traced as payments made via the Slate – but these were all quite normal things.

And she was diabetic, which explained the medical monitor wrapped around her wrist - the same monitor that would eventually bring the emergecy medical response team to her home the afternoon of her murder. Evidently, her medical condition didn’t impact her life too much. She hadn’t had hospitalizations or any serious complications, though she checked in with her doctor every six months and sometimes adjusted her medications as a result. She had no other health issues or medical areas of interest.

He dove into her family and their own records. These weren’t as deeply detailed as her own were, but he suspected that was due to privacy laws. He wouldn’t be given more information unless he could prove that he needed it and it was relevant to the case. He doubted he would find anything by digging into her family, though. They were too far away and his gut told him that he was looking in the wrong place. Still, he decided to keep at it in hopes of finding something he could use.

She didn’t have many living relatives, apart from her mother and a first cousin. Patina Grove was a retired widow with a comfortable situation. She received her own pension and her late husband’s. Contact information for the woman was sparse, however, with only an old landline setup and an address. He wouldn’t be able to contact her via his Slate unless he did so via the Novus Atlantis Telecommunications Authority. He might try that later on, he reasoned as he moved on to Cassia’s cousin. Kalkos Mogador was the son of Patina Grove’s only brother, also deceased. He had the same address as Grove’s mother and was listed as both her emergency contact and caretaker.

The living relatives had clean records, as did Cassia. That wasn’t true of the deceased relatives, however. Orum Grove, Cassia’s father, had a sizable set of indictments, mainly to do with fraud and theft. Patina’s brother, Jebel Mogador, seemed to have been one of his accomplices, his own set of crimes almost mirroring that of Orum’s. There were a slew of deceased uncles, aunts, and even family friends, who carried criminal records of the same nature. None, however, had anything to do with murder. It seemed they were mostly con-men and thieves, and their crimes were mostly petty in nature, and they were not even in the vicinity of what Laith would call big-time crooks.

There was no PATET in Novus Atlantis. They had their own AI system that aided in the smooth operations of the city, but it did not have nearly enough access to the framework at large. The people voted against such a measure in order to maintain their privacy, but at the cost of constantly struggling with a crime rate that was difficult to keep down. It certainly didn’t help that Novus Atlantis wasn’t the tightly-controlled area that Heliopolis was, with strict border control working to keep the criminals in the Ruins outside their limits.

In that way, Novus Atlantis was a bit more old-fashioned. He’d never been there, but he’d watched documentaries about the place from the comfort of his apartment, and he’d learned quite a lot about their way of life. He’d even learned that the people of Novus Atlantis didn’t have a Slate equivalent. Things were kept separate, and he imagined that might make life a bit more complicated. They’d explained in the documentary that it was for security concerns, but Laith had reasoned that if they had something like PATET keeping their city safe and secure, they wouldn’t need to have such concerns at all. Still, privacy was a very important value to the Novus Atlantians, and to them, an interconnected world such as the one found in Heliopolis was the antithesis to privacy. Every step you took outside of your own home was monitored, every action watched.

Laith had never really minded that. It wasn’t as though he’d been doing anything wrong. Besides, PATET was not passively watching them in their homes or recording their private conversations through their Slates, as some conspirators had tried to claim a few years back. It was a good system, created with checks and balances. It was an ethically balanced system. Everyone was taught that in school, and Laith had seen no reason to suspect PATET’s capabilities and ethical conduct in all the years he had been alive.

Besides, he had to admit that PATET’s constant supervision and monitoring did have its advantages. For example, it made it quite easy for him to do his job when all of the information he could need was at his fingertips. Well – almost all of the information. He was still trying to figure out the whole fingerprints debacle. The whole thing didn't sit right with him, even if it was a glitch or an error. Especially if it was a glitch or an error. How many other errors did PATET make on a day to day basis? How could they be certain that they were arresting the right people if PATET made mistakes with identification? What if it glitched on any of the critical systems PATET took care of - like water and electricity?

Laith pushed the thought out of his mind for now. These were all valid questions, but he had a slightly more pressing matter to attend to: solving a murder.

“PATET, bring up the requested surveillance footage from Platano Maduro,” he said.

Almost immediately, the system presented him with a two lists of footage links – one list from the street outside the restaurant and another from inside the restaurant itself. Each link corresponded to the time that Cassia had on her agenda for the meetings, and every link was exactly one month apart – just like the meetings with Invidia had been. PATET had bookmarked every single meeting with Invidia, of which there had been seven in total. That meant that Invidia had begun blackmailing Cassia Grove about ten months prior to her murder. Laith could scroll back and forth as needed, but as soon as he clicked on a link, it would take him to that specific time at that specific date. He opened the first one and settled in to watch the footage carefully.

It took him about half an hour of watching the videos at high speed and scrolling back and forth to check the people who entered the restaurant at the designated time of Cassia's monthly meetings with Invidia to realize that there was something wrong. It might make sense for someone like Invidia to want to hide themselves, but Cassia herself wasn’t appearing on any of the videos – not outside the restaurant, and not inside, either. Could it have been possible that the meetings weren’t taking place at Platano Maduro? And, if so, where else could they have been taking place?

“PATET, search for Cassia Grove’s locations in the Forest at the dates and times listed in the footage request,” he ordered. “Focus on the vicinity of Platano Maduro. Use facial recognition to find her through public surveillance cameras,” he added, hoping that would make things a bit easier for him. PATET would need some time to do this, so Laith took a small break as he waited. He opened the news on his surface computer and leaned back in his chair, trying to relax his tense muscles and moving his head from side to side to stretch his neck.

But relaxing seemed out of the question today.

There, on the screen, he took in the headline for the top story of the day:

Woman Murdered in Hills Home, Killer Still at Large.