braymitch thornathy. (grever) wrote in emillion, @ 2014-04-14 22:30:00 |
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Entry tags: | !complete, !log, bram thornton, cormac hier |
he has a little black bag with him, and what's in it isn't certain.
Who: Cormac Hier & Bram Thornton
What: Autopsy and identification.
Where: A lab below the EKP offices.
When: Backdated to March 19th. After this, before this.
Rating: Some mention of death & gore.
Status: Complete!
He hadn’t received the call at some ungodly hour. That much, he could be thankful for, but he’d still it was quite early in the morning when someone distinctly not Siana shaped came to retrieve him. He stared at the messenger, quite annoyed and… frankly confused. No one had informed him of Siana was missing, although he did personally miss the wonderful sight of her backside. It would’ve been a nice way to start the morning. Unfortunately, it was some lanky kid whose face had seemed to just start clearing of acne. Cormac was highly displeased. Regardless, he’d followed the boy down to where they had held the body as evidence. He took his black bag, full of all the tools that were needed. He already had a small lab set up in the building just in case he needed to check for rogue agents in the blood amongst other things. He’d been working at the body for over an hour attempting to make sure he didn’t miss anything. He still had a bit to go, but he’d gotten quite a bit so far. While the mage tinkered with the ruined body on the table, the door behind him eventually opened. Bram’s gaze had crept to the clock on the wall upstairs, and decided popping down to the lab was in order. Their medical examiner was there and working diligently, a surly chemist they kept on-call to examine corpses and determine cause of death. The detective inspector cleared his throat, announcing his presence. His brow furrowed when he glanced at the unidentified remains, but he soon redirected his attention. “Morning, Hier,” Bram said. The men had worked together over the years; not intimately, but enough to develop a comfortable professional association. “Found anything yet?” Cormac had easily filed away all the obvious things on a memstone. He was holding it now as he spoke into it. He clearly enunciated his findings. The fingertips had been burned and so had the toes. There would be no identifying him that way. The man’s face was somewhat recognizable, but he ran a scan on the man’s dental records regardless. Believing a dead woman was his fiance for five years had made him extra cautious about more than one thing. He wasn’t going to make the same mistake twice. The voice that came up behind him didn’t prompt him to stop poking at the cadaver. A gloved hand held a glass stick he was using to stir the contents of a vial. He deactivated the memstone off as he watched the liquid contents to see if it would change color. There was nothing. “Nothing that you can’t already decipher by looking at him,” he answered Bram with a shrug. “This is all very straight forward. Still awaiting the results of the dental records, but other than that, very cut and dry.” He poked the chest. “His chest was definitely crushed. Blunt object, not hands,” he said pointing out the shape of the discoloration around the area. He also pulled out some pictures of the bruises on the man’s back from the strikes there as well. “The burns are post mortem. Whoever they hired was either lazy or stupid. Most likely both. Didn’t bother to wait and see if the fire would finish the job.” He wanted to smoke, but his hands were otherwise occupied. Something went ding! catching his attention. While Cormac bustled to the other side of the lab, his attention seeming to scatter across five different things at once, Bram leaned in to take a closer examination of the corpse. His stomach held steady against the sight; thirty years with the Knights of the Peace had exposed him to much worse and much better, and so the detective inspector hardly batted an eye at this particular cadaver. It was ugly, but not intolerable. Meanwhile, he mulled over what the chemist had found. Post-mortem burns: they were trying to hide something, then, but obviously hadn’t taken their time with it. The fact that the victim’s face was still partially recognisable (a memstone of his features ready to be sent out to most of the Aerodrome administration, searching for a name) spoke to that, as well as the unceremonious dumping of the body, leaving it where it had fallen. “It normally takes immense temperature to burn a body,” Bram noted. “Hundreds of degrees. They couldn’t have just dropped a match on him and hoped it would work; no chance in hell it’d ignite properly. No accelerants were used? Gasoline?” Cormac only frowned at the note that had been sent before turning back to Bram and his question. He would never insult the man and say that he was bad at his job. He had been at it far longer than Cormac had. Cormac had just enjoyed challenges and puzzles as where Bram had desired to enact justice where it was needed. “Well, it’s definitely him,” he said as he returned to Bram’s side. “Observant as always,” he said mostly to himself before diving into answering Bram’s line of questioning. “No accelerants. With how quickly the limbs are charred and the rest of him not so, I’d say this was the work of magic. There aren’t any foreign elements except for the traces of alcohol in the blood, but it’s in the blood not on the body. You also noted,” he said pointing out where the burning had stopped, “that it burned very hot, very fast, in very specific places. And that’s not how the gas would work. Not that hot that fast.” There was a beat before he followed up with a question of his own. “Was he a corsair?” He knew a lot of Bards… a lot of shady ass bards. Bram chewed over that information (killed by mages, then) while he answered. “Hard to tell, but it seems likely. We’re following a lead on a missing airship captain—might be our vic.” “Well,” Cormac pulled a paper out of the printer that had the dental records. “If his name is Kamon Leradine,” he said passing the sheet over, “then you’ve found him.” The dragoon’s jaw didn’t drop, but that familiar gleam lit up in his eyes: the fire of a case gaining momentum, a hound catching the scent. Bram took the paper and held it up to the light, his eyes rapidly scanning the orderly print-out: the name of the deceased at the top, the pale and ghostlike impressions of his teeth painted in negative. A fierce little surge of pleasure jerked in his chest. “Brilliant and helpful as always, Hier,” he said, pleased with the findings. “Thank you. Invoice us as usual, and let us know if you find anything more with the body tonight. I’ll be chasing down this name.” A nod of thanks and then the inspector left the examiner’s lab, leaving Cormac Hier to his experiments and his territory. So. Kamon Leradine. Who the hell killed you? Bram wondered, even as the door swung shut behind him. While the detective inspector might have gotten what he needed, but the mage stayed on. There were other things that took more time and he didn’t want to stop because on theory seemed to fit. There was a reason he was paid a lot. He was thorough. And by the end of the day, there would be a report to show just how thorough he’d been. |