➽ dirty deeds (done dirt cheap)
After processing hundreds of useless snippets of ‘evidence’ retrieved by the rookie officers — embarrassingly, many of which were only their own fingerprints — your seniors are starting to believe there’s no chance of finding a real link between the common shoe footprints of all the thousands of visitors trampling through the forest per day and the case. Maybe they’re right. What is certain is that the SPD is inundated with work and overtime, and it seems that your seniors aren’t any different, dropping even only a portion of their work on your desk that afternoon with bags under their eyes to rival a panda. “Please can you run these images taken at the third crime scene? There’s a few footprints from around the vicinity that— I don’t know— Was it really necessary to take a photograph of something down the other end of the road in someone else’s front garden? I feel like they just want us to never sleep. Thanks, Sana. Feel free to run it all in whatever order you like.”
The station has been a madhouse ever since the first murder.
It’s lucky that Sana doesn’t mind perpetually living in her office--since that’s exactly what she’s been forced to do since this new killer made himself known and sent the SPD into a frenzy chasing his shadows. The forensics department is horribly overloaded with evidence to run. With so many rookie officers working the case, there’s easily triple the amount of samples to examine. Many are superfluous, more are contaminated.
Though she’s been spared the horror of sifting through the physical evidence retrieved from the scenes, she has more hours of security footage to review then there are hours in a week. She’s actually worried she’ll go cross eyed if she spends one more minute staring at fuzzy security feeds. The bottle of eye drops tucked next to her Pusheen plush on her desk has almost run empty.
The sight of her superior slipping into her office with a thumb drive in hand isn’t exactly a welcome sight. Still, he holds the promise of a distraction in his hand, and so Sana can’t help but perk hopefully as she turns her chair to face him. Even more work would be welcome if it can save her from reviewing security cams for just an hour.
“Of course! I’ll get right on it, sir,” she chirps, holding both hands out with palms up to accept the flash drive.
She waits only until the officer takes his leave from her office before spinning her chair to face her monitors, lips pulling into a gleeful smile as she makes quick work of plugging the drive into her usb port. With a few keystrokes she has her system begin encrypting the data contained on the drive. While her computer works on that, she dismisses the security feeds from her screen displays, minimizing the program so that she could return to it later.
Once the files are done encrypting, she pulls them up to begin to parse through them.
Her nose wrinkles when she finds herself staring at a photograph of a shoe print in the mud.
“Well I’d hardly call this an improvement,” she grumbles to herself, smile fading into something more akin to a pout as she scoots her chair closer and peers at the photos flicking rapidly across her screen. She finds picture after picture of footprints, intermixed with blurred streaks of light or a bright fingerprint covering the camera lens.
Clearly none of the rookie officers have left behind a career in photography.
“I do not get paid enough for this,” she muses, reaching blindly for her half-empty energy drink with one hand while she begins to type with the other. She’ll have to sort the images by type, but once she has that finished she can run them through a program that will handle the rest. It’s a tedious task. Still, it’s a welcome break from those security feeds.
Half an hour later, a dialogue box pops up on her center monitor, alerting her that a match has been found to one of the shoe prints. Eyes still on her screen, she pulls up a browser to do a search of the brand name. It a foreign brand that she doesn’t recognize.
And apparently an exclusive one.
Sitting straighter in her chair now that she’s found a foxhole to dig into, she pulls up the SPD’s information database on a third monitor, searching local sales records for matches to the shoe’s size and brand. Absently, she chews on her lower lip as she awaits the results. Her pulse is beating a little louder in her ears, the adrenaline of a hunt setting her on edge as she waits.
After so many days of nothing, she might finally have a lead.
The moment that the search results light up her screen, Sana begins rifling through the mountains of files on her desk in search of her rarely used desk phone. She finds it buried beneath a stack of police reports, the handset somehow disconnected from the base, but after the cord back in she’s met with a jarring dial tone when she lifts the receiver to her ear. With a grin, she quickly dials her superior’s extension and falls back into her seat.
“Lieutenant? It’s Sana,” she says in lieu of greeting, eyes turning back to the three names blinking cheerfully at her from her monitor, “I think I might have found something.”
