John Taylor does, actually, know better than to enter unfamiliar alleyways he cannot see. It's just that, well, given that he'd taken down 12% of the city grid six hours ago (it's not his fault they were using his friend as a generator!), many powerful people were looking to take out their frustrations on him, and he was running out of places to run. He can probably handle most things in a random alleyway, right, he's John Taylor and lots of people even know that. 

This is not, actually, anything resembling the consequences John thought he was bringing down on himself. Given the sunlight, this must be mundane London, he assumes. Well, time to stay up here for awhile, he thinks. Given the crowd milling about, it's not likely he's going to be able to get away with just fading into the background, so it's time to act like he belongs. There's a body bag, and someone crying, so the obvious thing to do is:

"Hello, I'm John Taylor, private investigator sent to help, is there anything you'd like me to know?"

One of the people loading the body looks up, and manages by quick eye contact to nominate themself to talk to him. They step away from the cart, brushing their hands off on their pants.

"Hello Investigator Johntaylor. I'm Mediator Dhobrev. It's probably a good thing you're here — we[ex]* don't have much call for investigators, in Too Many Cows. You made quick time."

"I'm not really sure where to start, honestly. Jannami's partner and their wife found her in her office this morning, and called us[ex] at ..."

They pull out a phone, attached by velcro to their black top, and scroll through it for a moment.

"... 21:25. We[ex] got here just after 21:40, and spent a while photographing the scene and preparing Jannami's body for transport. Some of my colleagues are talking to Zoshter, the partner, and Sgila, the meta-wife, but I imagine you'll probably want to ask them your own questions."

*Translator's note: When John hears this word, it comes with the strangely certain association that Dhobrev means "we (excluding you)" specifically. Which is not so linguistically unusual given the context, but it is a bit odd.

Apparently this isn't London after all, but stranger things have happened. Good thing he never got around to selling that translation amulet. He'll worry about how to get back later, though; for now:

"Of course, just want to make sure I have the basics down before those conversations. Are there any suspects yet?"

Mediator Dhobrev shakes their head.

"No obvious ones. Both the partners are pretty clearly distraught. We[ex] haven't finished speaking with the neighbors, but Jannami was fairly well liked around these parts. There were two non-locally-registered vehicles recorded by the parking monitor last night, but that's not too unusual; they could just be folks passing through."

Their phone chirps, and they glance down at it.

"Gosh. Two emergency calls in the same day."

In the background, two other purple people pile into a petite vehicle and peel out down the street.

"Might be worth looking into those vehicles anyway, just in case. Is this second emergency another murder, something that could be connected, or should I stay here and interview the survivors?"

"No telling, yet. Someone hit the emergency alert combination on their phone, but wasn't alert enough to respond to the dispatcher."

They pull up the call information and scroll through it.

"Then there was a scuffling sound, a crash, and the call disconnected."

They look back up at John.

"I'm likely to be here for a while more — at least until the crime scene people are done — so I'll keep an eye on it and let you know if it's another fatality. And we[ex]'ve already got someone in the records office in Shining Sea City looking into the cars, so I can update you on that when we[in] hear back as well."

"Thank you. I'll go interview the survivors, then", John replies, taking that as a dismissal. Now he approaches the pair on the steps, and introduces himself.

"Hello, I'm John Taylor, private investigator. I know this is a very hard time for you, but if there's any information you could give me about the events..." trailing off into an expectant silence.

The person in the green robe sniffs, and wipes at their face.

"I don't even, I mean ..."

They take a deep breath.

"It was after dinner, the last time I saw her a-alive. Jani is a bit of a night owl, so it wasn't too unusual for her to stay up after Sgila and I went to bed. She was working in her office, I think. And then when I went to check on her this morning, she w-was just lying there ..."

Zoshter presses the terrycloth of their robe sleeve into their face for a moment.

"And I just don't know how it could have happened. I made sure that all the doors were locked before I went to bed, and I didn't hear anyone come in ..."

"Of course, it's not your fault," John rushes to reassure. "Thank you for telling me. Do you know of anybody who could have had any motive, no matter how slight?" he continues in a gentle tone of voice. 

They furrow their brow in concentration.

"I don't — Oh! There was this weird money offer. She was going to switch primary writing groups, and someone anonymously offered her a bunch of money not to. But she turned it down because she felt uncomfortable staying in her current group. It doesn't make much sense for whoever it was to k-kill her, though."

"Murderers don't have to make sense, and any small piece of information can help find them. Thank you very much for your cooperation. May I have your permission to examine the scene?"

Meanwhile, he's thinking furiously. These people have clearly never heard of security before (locks, the green-robe person says, like that means anything when they're unspecified as to type or upgrades or what threats they're rated against), but apparently must not have much need if they're so shocked locks can be bypassed quietly (and also do not have stalls on street corners selling "Tricky Dicks's Invisible Cloaks*" and other sundries). Can he hope that the murderer will be as amateurish in covering their tracks as these people are in home security? Probably not, that'd count as a good thing happening today and he's already used up the one. 

Zoshter nods.

"Yes, of course. Her study is at the end of the hall, on the left, with the red door."

So he goes in the house to find the scene. He takes in the blood spatter and fallen chair with a glance before asking the technician "So, what have you found? Besides the obvious, I mean"

The presumable forensic technician gets up off her belly, where she was examining a depression in the carpet. She leans out of the door and flashes a few hand symbols at her colleague in the front asking whether this guy is supposed to be here. Apparently satisfied with the answer, she turns back to John and begins her explanation.

"Well, there were no unexpected fingerprints on the door handle or door itself. The window opens outward, but was latched when we arrived. The body fell on top of a handful of papers, but they're not dated precisely enough to get a timeline. The medics thought, based on her temperature, that she was probably killed around 53 or 55 last night. The murderer seems to have been wearing boots, probably about 43 (base 6, 27 base 10) centimeters, and didn't come far into the room — although they did enter far enough that they could have closed the door behind them. The blood spatter is in the wrong place to say whether they did or not. They also stood in such a way as to not get any on their boots," the technician summarizes.

"The boots stand out because none of the people who lived here wore them indoors. I think that I've recovered a sample of dirt from one of the prints."

She holds up a sealed evidence vial with a small amount of red, clay-like dust.

"But it's hard to be sure that it hasn't been contaminated. None of the furniture seems to have been moved, except for the chair, of course. Similarly, there is nothing obviously missing from the room — although, since we don't know exactly what was on her desk, that's also a guess. Her work terminal wasn't configured for audio recording, and saw the last command input at 53:22 last night, so that's a good guess for a more precise time of death, or at least when she was interrupted at work. The terminal doesn't have continuous biometrics, so the attacker might have been able to give it commands before it sealed. I didn't recover any fingerprints except her own from it. The terminal sealed itself at 53:42, so we know nobody was able to access it after that point."

She points at the blood spatter.

"The bullet went into the wall, but didn't overpenetrate. I dug that out a while ago, and sent it up to Shining Sea City for a ballistics report. That's still pending, of course. I'm not super familiar with guns, but I think this was probably a handgun, not a hunting gun. Probably one of the new minimal-smoke ones, because although I did pick up traces of gunpowder in the carpet, it was a really small amount. Too small for chemical analysis, and unlikely to have left any traces on the perpetrator. Let's see ... what else ..."

She glances around the room.

"Oh — the lights were on when she was found, I'm told."

John absorbs all this information. So the perpetrator was smart enough to wear gloves and avoid blood spatter, connected enough to acquire a "new minimal-smoke handgun" (whatever sort of connections those require, it would probably blow his cover to ask right now), but not paranoid enough to switch shoes... 27 cm shoe size might be a short man or a tall woman, if he was lucky, and probably that red clay is going to turn out to be common or just outside the house but it wouldn't do to ignore it, he'll have to take a walk about the surrounding landscape later. He doesn't know enough about computers or here to tell if "sealing itself" after 20 minutes is a standard procedure (everybody is happier if Cathy is the only one touching the damn things), but also doesn't know what to do about that in either case, so he'll let these guys take care of that. The light remaining on seems a little odd to him, but maybe the murderer was just impatient, or trying to avoid a neighbor seeing what time the light went out. That's the bother with clues, they could be anything, really. 

Right, she's looking for a reply. "Excellent report, thank you. While we wait for those reports to come in, I'm going to poke about outside, see if I can identify the perpetrator's direction of exit. Unless you guys have gotten there already?"

She shakes her head.

"No, we've been dealing with things in here. But Mediator Dhobrev has been keeping the neighbors out of the yard. I can see by how you avoided the boot prints that you're used to avoiding trampling evidence, but please do try and avoid mixing up the trail, if there is one. It's been pretty dry recently, so I'm not sure how much you'll see, but I wish you luck."

The back door, which is only a few feet away from the office, is a large glass door that lets out onto a small granite stoop. The door is closed, but when he goes to open it he might notice that it did not latch properly. On inspection, it looks as though the frame has swollen slightly, and therefore requires more than normal force to close all the way and latch. Scrapes on the lintel indicate that someone — presumably the inhabitants of the house — do regularly close it all the way.

"Of course" John replies before he sees himself out. 

It's interesting this door wasn't latched properly. Was this lock forgotten about by the green-robe-person, or opened later in the hubbub? Either way, he takes a moment to open the door, close it all the way, then open again, to see how loud those operations are and estimate if the victim could reasonably have heard this back door open (if it was the entrance the perpetrator used). He doesn't actually step onto the granite stoop, but instead grabs a monocle and a lens from his pocket, and kneels down to scan the granite stoop for any red clay, or anything else interesting. 

Opening the back door is loud enough to likely be audible from the office, but not from the bedroom. Closing the back door all the way produces a loud squeaking sound where the wood rubs that would probably be faintly audible throughout the house.

The granite step is most interesting. The boot prints in the office showed that the tread of the killer's boots had a chevron pattern, for grip. Faint marks of red clay show only one boot print — headed away from the house, to judge by the grip pattern. The edges of the footprint are too ill-defined to confirm it, though, on the hard stone of the stoop.

The grip pattern in conjunction with the not fully closed door is good enough for him to assume this is the killer's exit (he's still agnostic as to which entrance they used). So he will continue to not step on the granite, instead heading inside to tell that forensics lady about the new boot print for her to examine, then exiting himself out the front way (where people have already been) to cautiously circle around the back. He does look faintly ridiculous, as he's effectively doing a duck-walk right beside the house to make sure he isn't stomping on any unnoticed foot prints, but he's assuming these people are too professional to laugh at him. 

Indeed; even if people were not occasionally compelled to walk in unusual ways, everybody here has either had some amount of crime-scene training, or is too distraught to take much notice.

And, as it happens, his caution is well-placed: while the killer mostly kept to the clover, which has recovered with a certain springiness from any impressions, there are two places where footprints can be made out. At the front corner of the house, in the dirt near an ornamental bush, a set of tracks heads around the corner toward the front door. At the rear of the house, in the shade of the old oak tree where the clover is sparser, one set of tracks heads toward the house, and one set leads away. Their vector seems to indicate that the killer passed through the back yard of the neighboring house, and from there potentially to the street.

Before he can get a better look at the neighbor's yard, however, the community mediator that he spoke with earlier waves him down.

"An update on the second emergency call — I'm not sure how you guessed it, but it was a fatality," Mediator Dhobrev signs to him, to avoid having to shout across the yard. "A man was found poisoned by a syringe full of swimerwudnoicane. He managed to hit the distress signal on his phone, but then passed out and away before Emergency Services got there. There were signs that he had been in a struggle, but the team there is still going over everything."

John lets the translation amulet guide his hands in order to convey "I hoped I was wrong, but coincidences generally aren't." as he starts walking towards the Mediator. "I also found tracks; one set going into the front, one set entering the rear, and one set exiting out the neighbor's backyard. I can follow those tracks for maximum caution, but speed might be of the essence here, it might go better to assume the same person perpetrated both"

Dhobrev nods.

"Yes, that makes sense. I can delegate someone to follow up on the tracks now that we're more or less done with the stuff inside the house. Forensic Technician Angelad is being called over to the other scene — would you like to catch a ride with her?"

"Absolutely" John replies as he picks up speed and hurries over to catch said ride.