Part 10: Episode 10: Wandering Girl
Sorry this one was late but I got kind of sick and Canada socialized medicine does not pay for robots, superheroes, or princesses to cure you.This update covers:
Naomi Kimishima 3 - Wandering Girl(part 1 of 2)
Introduction
That pretty much sums it up. Our first orders of business are the recording and the body. Let's start with the recording.
John Doe? You're really going with that, Atlus?
Doe: All this juicy fat drips out when you take a bite… Mmm-MMM! Tasty! Ahehehehehe…! Huh? Sam ain't just a dog! He's my best friend in the whole world. You wanna know how I found that body? It's all thanks to Sam, y'know? We were walking down by the river when ol' Sam suddenly runs off. An' he comes back with a bone in his mouth! I took a better look, and damn if it ain't a lady's arm! Scared the hell out of me, y'know? So I went and called the cops. I ain't goin' near no dead body. That's just creepy, ahehehe…! Oh, hey, if she was missin', is there any reward for finding her? I mean, dead or alive, right?
Yeah, this one's a little odd.
Naomi: Little Guy, that man who found the corpse might be telling us one hell of a lie.
LG: What do you mean?
Naomi: He claims that he never saw the corpse, but there's something he said that he couldn't have known without seeing it.
Fairly easy to answer, especially given that this is a short recording. He said that it was a "lady's" arm. Honestly I think we're Encyclopedia Browning this guy a bit, but hey.
Naomi: He could only have known this if he saw the corpse himself and inferred the gender based on the articles of clothing.
Anyway we'll deal with that guy later. The next step is to examine the body.
LG: I have to tell you something about the corpse.
Naomi: I have it here… in a bag. Is this some kind of joke?
LG: Sorry. That was the most reliable way to get it to you. The skeleton had fallen apart. Let's work on putting it back together. I'll start on the body, so can you start restoring the skull?
Naomi: Alright.
You have to re-build the skull in four parts. This is pretty much busy work and I won't bore you with it. Skipping…
Naomi: The bone structure suggests that the victim is female. I might find something out if I have the FBI analyze it in detail.
Now, we have to actually examine this thing. There are three things to find on the skeleton, and two in the clothes.
Naomi: The legs of both femurs have been fractured. The femur is the hardest bone in the human body. It would have taken a massive amount of power to break both of them at once.
Not THIS again…
Naomi: I've never seen anything like this before. I'll need a more detailed look at it.
That does it for the skeleton. Onto the personal effects.
Naomi: That's odd, considering the victim was found near a river. There may be some exceptions, but you don't usually find cars driving in a river.
Naomi: That's because there's no apparent damage to the clothing. Could she have been hemorrhaging for some other reason?
Also in this screenshot: the necklace. You can see that it's broken.
Naomi: Is this stone agate? It's shattered in half. How much force would it take for this stone to break like this?
We're done with the preliminary investigation, and ready to chase the leads we've found.
Here we are, about to "analyze" the lie in John Doe's testimony.
LG: Why would he lie?
Naomi: One possible explanation is that he didn't want the authorities to know he had been at the scene.
LG: But finding a body isn't a crime. Why would he be trying to hide it.
Naomi: The most likely reason is that he tampered with the scene. He probably did something that would get him in trouble.
LG: I see. That would explain his behaviour.
Naomi: Go interrogate him again. Find out what he did.
LG: I'll make sure he doesn't hold anything back this time.
Let's also have Little Guy take a look at the weird bone discoloration we saw.
LG: There's no matches in our database here. I've never seen anything like this. Not even at… the place I used to work.
Naomi: Does that mean you don't know the first thing about it?
LG: I'm sorry, but that's correct.
So now we have an unknown pathological change. The next move is to compare the tire marks on the clothes with the fractured femurs. It's not hard to see the connection.
Naomi: The fractures match the tire marks on the clothes. That means the legs were run over. How, then, did she end up in the river?
I forgot until now, but we can have Little Guy take a look at the skeleton itself now.
Naomi: Little Guy, can you do me a favor and get a bone analysis?
LG: Of course. Is it to identify the body?
Naomi: Yes. Start with dental records.
It's good that one of them knows how to do his job. That's all we can do here for now.
LG: It seems that that a type of tick was found in the ground where the corpse was located. Depending on the season and environment, various insects are drawn to corpses. They normally leave once the body's been reduced to bone, but some ticks burrow underground and remain there for awhile afterwards.
Naomi: Of course, they'll leave eventually as well, but these can tell us how long the body was there.
LG: Amazing, doctor. I didn't think you'd know about that. The death was only about a month ago. That's not long, biologically speaking.
Naomi: True, that's rather fast for a corpse to be skeletonised.
LG: So, doctor… was the cause of death drowning, after all?
Naomi: No, there's a good possibility that it was something else. The damage to the skeleton is too severe. The skull was shattered into pieces and both femurs were broken. Even if animals had damaged to body, they wouldn't have done all that.
LG: There are no waterfalls, rapids, or records of floods, either. Nothing in the river itself could cause that kind of damage.
Naomi: Yes, but that's all we know for now. It's risky to assume anything beyond that. Little Guy, get approval from HQ. I'm heading out to the actual location.
LG: The river?
Naomi: No. She didn't die in the river.
The most sensible location would be the point where the road passes over the water. That's the one place with access to the river where a she might have been hit by a car. This unlocks that location to search.
Naomi: They indicate that a car accident happened here.
That's exactly what we had expected, but there's also that object on the road.
Those two things are actually the only pieces of evidence to be found here. Well, there's also a medal challenge, but we'll get to that.
As always, starting with analysis. Little Guy knows a bit about the accident.
LG: Blue paint thought to have come from a vehicle was found in the area of the collision along the guardrail. We're investigating what kind of vehicle it's from, but that could take some time.
Naomi: Any other details?
LG: We can use the skid marks to determine how many tires the vehicle had. It seems the vehicle had two wheels on the front axel. Behind that were two more axels with two wheels on each side.
Naomi: That means there were ten tires total. Judging by the number and position of tires, it must have been
LG: I'll get in touch with the investigators about that.
We'll compare the broken necklace to the stone shard we found on the bridge, since there is an obvious connection there.
Naomi: The two shards fit perfectly. That clears something up: the victim was on the bridge. There's no conclusive evidence of how she died yet, but this may be a clue.
Now we'll switch back to the other line of logic and consider the blue truck's accident with the accident damage to the victim.
Naomi: There's no doubt that the victim was run over in this case. If the victim was killed in this accident, when did it take place?
This is the last type of question that we can be asked, requiring numerical responses. I already have the answer filled-in in this case.
Naomi: Right, the victim died one month ago. If they did die in the accident, it would have taken place one month ago as well.
Next I combined the necklace(evidence that she was on the bridge) with the accident damage.
Naomi: There's evidence that the victim had been on the bridge when the accident took place. There's also evidence of having been in a car accident on the victim's body and clothing. Taking those two facts into account, it's quite likely that the victim was in an accident at that place.
LG: Dr. Kimishima, we've identified who the body was.
Naomi: Great. Was there a hit in the dental records?
LG: It seems she was living with her parents 8 miles from where the accident took place.
Naomi: We're making progress. Has the family been notified.
LG: Yes, that's been done. There was something odd about it, though. The parents hadn't submitted a missing person's report, even though their daughter had been gone for a month.
Naomi: You must have had a happy childhood, Little Guy. Every family has its own problems.
LG: Well, we questioned them just in case. The interviews are on the recorder. Oh, and about the man who found the body: it looks like you were right. He tampered with the scene. We interrogated him again, and he's currently being detained. You can use the recorder to listen to that interview, as well.
We now have THREE more recordings to listen to. We'll move from left to right on them. First is the new interview with Mr. Doe.
Doe: I was just lookin' 'round for anything I might be able to sell. An' then we found that woman's, well… bones near the riverbed. Huh? Hell, I saw the underwear! It's not hard to tell the difference! Yeah, the necklace was cracked, so I took the earring. I looked around for awhile, but I only found one of 'em. And who's going to buy one earring? I can't even sell it. You can have it, worthless junk! Anyway, I called the cops after that. Thought I might pick myself up a sweet li'l reward. There, is gonna be a reward, right? Huh? "Obstruction of justice!?" Hell, findin' that body's brought me nothing but trouble. No cash, and now I'm getting sent to the can. Well, at least they feed you there!
Naomi: I see. He claimed that he hadn't seen the body to hide the fact that he stole one of her earrings. This man deserves a severe punishment.
We will discover that Naomi is not a nice or forgiving person. Anyway, next!
T. Cage: ...but I always knew something like this would happen to her one day. Yes, I expected it. That's why we didn't request a search or post a reward. I mean, sometime's a machine's just too broken to be repaired, isn't that right? What, this injury? I fell down while taking a walk. It's embarassing. Getting old is misery. Anyway, we'd like to go home as soon as we can. My wife isn't in the best of health. I have a bad back, too. It hurts more and more the longer I sit here.
Now, the mother. Her name is Alice Cage.
A. Cage: I suppose that I'd been expecting this to happen one day. My daughter... she was a kind girl, but ever since she dropped out of high school... well, she lost most of her friends, and was practically alone in the world. At some point, she started going out almost every night. Sometimes she didn't come home for an entire month. We thought that's what happened this time, too. Oh, this? I slipped on the stairs. My husband and I are both getting rather old.
Naomi: It seems the victim's relationship with her family wasn't going well.
LG: Did the parents' testimonies tell you anything else?
Naomi: Something bothered me more than what they said.
Naturally, it's the wounds on their faces. I'm not even positive what parts of the face the game accepts. I just aim at the eye for both the mother and the father, since the game asks for both.
Naomi: Both of them had signs of severe bruising.
LG: But they both said they'd gotten hurt by falling down.
Naomi: You're not paying attention. Take a closer look at both of them. They both have multiple injuries, but each injury is in a different state of healing. This means that they were hurt repeatedly. How many people do you know who fall down several times a week?
LG: You have a point, but why would they hide the cause of their injuries?
Naomi: I don't know yet, but there must be a reason.
Back to the computer for some more deducin'. That is, we'll fit everything together in part two.
Next time: The conclusion of the case.
Medal Challenge
This one is located in the sixth guard rail on the left side, for some reason. It's about diagnostics.
These ones are a bit harder than the previous, since I'm assuming most people don't have the entire periodic table memorized to that degree. Answers next time!