Corellia: By A Thread

[L. Rufus Bailey]

Whoever they were, the man who had invented the hip flask was a genius; the man who had refined it into it's modern, easily-concealable form was even more so. Detective Bailey had his suspicions that both men were Corellian - if anyone was going to invent a drinking vessel designed purely for smuggling alcohol into inappropriate situations, it was bound to be a Corellian - but as per usual when such flights of idle curiosity struck him, he was a long way from a data terminal.

The flask and it's contents were purely medicinal, of course. Despite how suspicious Bailey's covert slug of brandy might seem to an outside observer, the Detective wasn't quite enough of a living cliché to be drunk on the job or wrestling with addiction. Rather, he was wrestling with something else entirely.

His breath hung in the air before him like mist. Coronet City was too damned cold at this time of night.

He heard the familiar deflating whine of repulsorlifts powering down, echoing off the grubby walls of the duracrete alleyway. While the sound had come as no surprise to Rufus - the slowly pulsing red and blue that reflected off just about everything had heralded the squad speeder's arrival a good few seconds before it had come into view - it apparently did manage to startle some more critter that had been rummaging through the refuse left abandoned along the alley walls, sending it scampering off into the darkness. For half a second, Bailey toyed with following; whatever plans the creature had, they were probably a damn sight more entertaining than what he had in store.

A familiar silhouette robbed him of any hopes for escape. The constant disgruntled scowl that Bailey's face always bore deepened involuntarily; he'd lost count of the myriad slights and annoyances that his partner had done to earn that knee-jerk reaction.

"Took y' sweet time," he grunted, his thoughts straying to the flask stowed back in his jacket, wondering if it would be as effective in staving off annoyance as it was against the cold.

[Cassus Wain]

"I was in the middle of shaving," Detective Wain replied shortly, looking around the alleyway. He didn't say that he had been looking over a datapad concerning the major murders of the past century and how they'd been solved while shaving.

Losing himself in the procedure and process of deduction was better than looking at the walls of his empty, shabby room anyway (technically it was three rooms, but he doubted that a doorless partition that blocked the fresher and sink in the corner from view actually constituted a separate room). He could feel his disgust and frustration slowly building every time he looked at anything in it.

He'd jumped at the chance to leave, whether it meant he'd get some sleep or not.

"So what are we looking at now?" he asked, sipping at his mug of caff.

[L. Rufus Bailey]

Rufus considered some quip about how shaving a bantha's ass and sticking a hat on it didn't make it look any less like a bantha's ass; but he decided against it, filing it away for later use. It would be a shame if he ever found himself needing a rapid-fire backhanded retort, only to find his verbal blaster pack completely dry.

"It's a weird one," Rufus answered, powering down the disgruntled part of his brain to leave only gruff and mildly acerbic behind. He jerked his head towards the nearest entrance and the gaping dimness that lay beyond, the door servos jammed open by the police issue keycard shoved into the lock. He led the way into what had probably been a fairly expensive and respectable apartment building when it had first been built fifty-odd years ago, but that had been addled by the ravages of a landlord too frugal to pay out for basic maintenance, or run the overhead lighting strips on anything above sixty percent.

"Uniforms ID'd the vic as Kiran Chandra, mid thirties; the registered leaseholder for our crime scene. They're still running background, but it seems he's a junior advocate at the Public Defender's Office. He was found by a concerned colleague after he didn't show up for work today. No sign of forced entry; no obvious signs of a struggle; victim was found hanging by his throat in the main living space. It's almost a text book open-and-shut suicide. Except, well -"

Rufus slowed his pace just in time to let Wain enter the apartment a few steps ahead of him, and to get a good angle on the reaction that swept across his partner's face. While Cassus may have been prepared for the sight of a corpse hanging suspended from the living room ceiling, he presumably wasn't prepared for the fact that instead of the typical rope, the victim had apparently opted for a length of chain plasma-welded to the ceiling, attached to a crude but effective durasteel slave collar. Nor, Rufus presumed, was Cassus expecting the victim's decidedly average physique to have been squeezed into a surprisingly ornate metal bikini ensemble which, if the angry slick of scarlet and associated blood pool on the carpet was anything to go by, had required an uncomfortable degree of do-it-yourself body modification to wear correctly.

Bailey took a step to recover the ground he'd conceded, dropping his voice low as he half-frowned in his partner's direction. "I don't know about you, but I think I'd have picked a different outfit if I was hanging around in my apartment."

[Cassus Wain]

Cassus Wain's first grimace at the sight of the crime scene segued seamlessly into another grimace at the pun his 'partner' threw out.

"That was horrible," he said, referencing both the manner of death and the manner of pun, and schooling his expression. He squinted, taking a step closer to the hanging body and leaning in to look at an etched inscription on the metallic top.

"There's a name on the... top," he said, pulling out a small datapad and a stylus. "'Booster Gold'."

He scribbled the name and stepped back, trying to keep from looking at the most obvious site of mutilation, and searching his mind for something he could tie into the name on the metal article of sex-wear.

"You've already requested surveillance footage," he asked in the form of a statement while finishing his transcription of the name.

[L. Rufus Bailey]

"Requested," Rufus concurred, with an irritated twitch of his eyebrows. "But in his infinite wisdom, the building manager only has dummy hole-imagers installed."

He shook his head quietly to himself. It was something that he couldn't quite fathom: that home owners and store owners somehow felt that the mere presence of something that looked like surveillance technology would be enough of a discouragement to protect them from crime. They thought it made them invulnerable: and when crime eventually did befall them, they blamed CorSec if the perpetrators were difficult to catch, rather than their own frugal idiocy.

If there was one thing that Rufus hated about this job more than any other, it was the fact that he wasn't allowed to beat the stupidity out of these people when he so frequently encountered them.

"There's a security scanner across the street that might have enough of an angle on the alley; we've subpoenaed the security logs from the keycard reader at the door; and we're canvassing the rest of the building - hopefully someone around here has a utility droid or something that might have picked up something helpful on their passive sensors."

Rufus frowned as he watched his partner's stylus brush an indecipherable scrawl across the datapad screen. He'd tried to read Cassus' notes before, but it was like some kind of unbreakable cypher. The only times Rufus had ever seen worse handwriting was the rare occasions where they were forced to investigate a medical professional.

"Booster Gold?" he echoed. "Think that's important, or are you just looking for new underwear tips?"

[Cassus Wain]

As Bailey outlined the non-evidence of the dummy-imaging system, the grey suited detective grimaced. Cheap bastards he was well acquainted with - his own building also had a fake imaging system, but only on the lower floors where the poorer residents lived. The upper floors, which were let out to upper middle to high income earners, all had real systems, and an exclusive speeder garage.

"Have you seen many of these before?" Cassus shot back, raising an eyebrow and glancing over at his erstwhile partner, pausing a moment before amending, "I mean in other places besides strip clubs."

He stepped back, allowing the holographer a complete view of the body.

"These things aren't common. At least, I'm guessing that brand name etched ones aren't all over the place. These are more popular in the Outer Rim - Hutt space, and some parts of the Corporate Sector. Let's find who sells them here and their clientele."

He scribbled that note underneath the name in one second, his hand jotting down the concepts in shorthand almost without his conscious guidance.

"Was he killed like this, or is the posturing post-mortem, do you think?"

[L. Rufus Bailey]

Rufus shrugged at his partner's question. "Hard to be sure in a situation like this. The discolouration in his lower extremities suggests that lividity set in while he was hanging; but unless he was lying around for an hour before they strung him up, there wouldn't really be a noticeable difference."

He crouched, squatting down on his haunches to study the victim's obvious physical trauma. A grimace formed on his features as the grizzly sight was brought to eye level. "This blood here -" he explained, gesturing appropriately, "Isn't much help either. The directionality suggests that gravity pulled the blood flow towards his feet... but if you string a dead guy up with a hole in his groin, the blood is going to pour out of there whether he's alive or dead."

He cast a glance over his shoulder. "This injury is bound to have sliced through a few arteries. We should get some ultraviolet floods in here - get forensics looking for signs of high velocity spatter. If we can pin down which room this guy's junk was cut off in, maybe it'll help narrow the field when we canvas the surrounding area for evidence. Are we looking for bedsheets, a throw rug, towels -"

Rufus trailed off, a frown of memory tugging at his brows. "I had an ex threaten to do this. The testectomy -" he quickly clarified, "Not the underwear part." He shook his head. "Never thought I'd see the day when someone followed through on a threat like that."

[Cassus Wain]

"Bound to happen sooner or later," Cassus said, turning to one of the junior officers standing right outside the door. After having the officer go and requisition some UV floods, he turned back to Bailey, and let out a gusty breath.

"Let's see if we can't find anything else, then," he said looking over the rest of the room and doors into the bedroom and refresher, "while we wait for those floods."

[L. Rufus Bailey]

"Since you're apparently our resident expert on fetish underwear choices," Rufus quipped with a grunt, easing himself stiffly back to standing. "I'll let you take the bedroom. I've got the 'fresher."

He advanced a few steps, dodging around an orderly from the Coroner's Office. Now that the investigating officer's had seen the body undisturbed and in situe, the medical examiners could swarm in like Fefze, snapping holoscans, ramming temperature probes into uncomfortable-to-watch body-parts, and generally scavenging up every last shred of evidence that eyesight and Detective's intuition hadn't already gathered.

A stray thought made him hesitate before he'd finished crossing the room. "This must be a first for you," he added; a parting shot before disappearing from view. "Going into the bedroom of some sleazy apartment with no intention of taking your clothes off, I mean."

[Cassus Wain]

"You're right, I haven't been to your mother's place since last week," Cassus shot back, his tone still all business. The door to the bedroom slid open, and he sniffed as he entered.

"At least he had some fun before the main event," he muttered to himself, looking around the mussed bedroom. The bed was unmade, and clothing was strewn about haphazardly, but no woman's clothing was to be found.

"Get in here and take some holos," he called over his shoulder, and watched as the young man (or woman, the hairstyle was a unisex one that was currently in vogue) snapped some holoscans from different angles of the room, which would later be put together to give a complete three dimensional image that could be rotated and serve as an exhibit in a court-room, should the case ever make it into one.

With the orderly's job done, Detective Wain went to the bed and pulled the sheets and coverlet down.

"Or maybe he didn't," the Corellian detective amended, noting the lack of stains in the fabric.