Connor and Lieutenant Anderson were ushered into the upscale apartment complex in the heart of Detroit via the delivery entrance at the back of the building. A necessary step as they realized the moment they arrived at the address of the murder. The front entrance was under siege by a small but steadily growing army of reporters with their camera drones hovering over the crowd, hoping to get good footage of investigation or, even better, the deceased himself.
When they arrived at the penthouse floor – it somehow was always the penthouse in such cases – they were greeted by a sergeant from a different district. The resolute police woman extended her hand to Hank and nodded to Connor.
“So, the victim seems to be Bertrand Hill, the owner of this humble dwelling,” she informed them, “Other than him, only his personal assistant android was in the apartment.”
She stopped at an opened sliding door that led into what looked like the living room.
Meanwhile, Connor had looked up the personal ID of Bertrand and found that he was a media tycoon with a questionable reputation, mildly put.
“Where is the android now?” Connor inquired, as he assumed they were called because there was some synthetic involvement in the death of the business man.
“Oh, yeah, it’s over there, but I don’t think it will be of much use. Sorry about that,” she gestured to the far side of the living room, “It was trying to flee as the building’s security guards arrived. Mr. Hill apparently had some medical condition where his heartrate was monitored by the building’s on-site doctor,” she shrugged and the look on her face said, ‘Whatever weird shit those rich people do, right?’
“I see,” the android detective said and made his way over to the human victim. Hill was a middle-aged man on the well-fed side of things. He was wearing casual attire, consisting of a dark t-shirt and short pants in a fake traditional Japanese hakama style, that, despite their tackiness, looked like they cost about a typical monthly rent plus a first-born’s soul.
At first glance, it was not clear was caused the man’s demise. The body seemed unharmed, there was no blood, no obvious wound, no signs of a struggle. Connor knelt and scanned it, picking up on slight discolorations of the man’s skin on the shins, lesions that would have blossomed into painful hematomas, had Hill lived. On the corner of the victim’s firmly closed mouth, he detected traces of drying saliva. Connor leaned closer to the man’s face and sampled the faint odor that still emanated from his lips.
The sergeant shot him a slightly disgusted look and turned to Hank, “Is he always so hands-on?”
Connor straightened up and looked around. He noticed a heavy-looking bar stool that appeared to have been pushed away from the bar counter of the kitchen that opened into the living room.
After analyzing the scene, Connor ran a simulation of how it all might have played out.
Hill was stumbling out of the kitchen, briefly holding onto the counter but his sense of balance was failing. He moved forward, bumping into the bar stool and hitting his shins hard. He seemed to have tried to cross the living room, possibly to get help, but didn’t make it far. He collapsed onto the floor and was unable to get up.
Connor got up and went over to where the android’s corpse lay behind a large, fuzzy couch. Several shots from the security guards’ pistols had ripped through its thirium heart.
After scanning it, Connor furrowed his brow and looked over to Hank, “Lieutenant Anderson, I’m afraid we cannot reactivate it here… it is too heavily damaged. We could try to access its memory at the police station. Meanwhile, I have a hypothesis about what may have happened to Mr. Hill.”